‘Redina’ red leaf lettuce bolts in the heat of summer, setting flowers and then seed to save.
Along with juicy-ugly tomatoes, fresh herbs, and those peppers that made the best hot sauce, gardeners should harvest the seeds from their most prized plants of the growing season. In my Bronx community garden plot, one basil plant is reserved for setting seed, while the others are for eating with Arthur Avenue smoked mozzarella and in-season heirloom tomatoes.
Saving seeds carries on the work of our ancestors, who selected plant varieties using excellent foresight—and their taste buds. An ancient practice dating back to the Stone Age, the first saved seeds were part and parcel in man’s transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer. As plants began to be domesticated, varieties were selected for their flavor, beauty, resilience, and abundance.
Spring gallops at such a steady pace, I barely have a chance to pause and soak in the sights before the vernal onslaught has passed me by. I often like to capture these colorful, ephemeral moments in writing.
This year, one of my favorite fleeting moments was the eastern redbud ‘Pauline Lily’. The redbuds stay in bloom for several weeks from April into May, lighting up the woodland understory with their cheerful color.
While the majority of the eastern redbuds produce an abundance of pea-like flowers that are either the characteristic purple-pink color or the occasional pure white variety, ‘Pauline Lily’ has demure ballerina-pink blooms. The buds start off as salmon-pink and open to a divine pale cream. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the flowers are edible and they can be plucked off of the tree (your own tree, of course) and tossed into a salad or frozen in an ice cube tray to add a festive touch to your drinks.
Some people are born to garden. Some people are born to teach. And some people have a knack for both.
Marlene Lyons, a 2012 Gardening Certificate graduate, is a gardening educator for kindergarten through fifth grades at Western Connecticut Academy of International Studies, a magnet school in Danbury. Her students actively tend their school garden and are involved in planting, pruning, harvesting and composting. Lyons encounters teachable moments regularly.
“The kids enjoy having their hands in the soil,” she said. “Initially, many of the kids will treat the garden soil like sand on a beach, smoothing it and patting it down.”
She explains to her class that soil actually does its best work, and plants like it better, when it’s not packed down tightly.
The flowers are beginning to bloom, the bees are finding their way back into the garden, and the grass is greening up again. Spring is on its way back! And kids everywhere are ready to spend more time outside. So come to the Garden for the return of The Culinary Kids Food Festival on April 14! Turn planting season into family fun during this week-long celebration of our favorite treats and where they come from. Fill up your Festival Passport at the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden with recipes, hands-on activities, and plenty of music and tastings. There will be a daily cooking demonstration at 1 p.m. each day throughout the festival, featuring kid-friendly recipes and tasty samples.
Our spate of presentations from international gardening savants continued in February with British landscape architect Kim Wilkie, who joined us for the second of our annual Winter Lectures. At face value he may seem mild-mannered, but make no mistake: Wilkie loves to play in the mud. He shifts massive amounts of soil to sculpt the landscape in a very literal fashion.
Wilkie began his discussion by explaining how he infuses his contemporary ideas with historical perspectives. One source of inspiration is Mother Nature. He paid tribute to the powerful influence of ice and water, and the role of erosion in shaping the landscape. After this long, punishing winter, most of us will remember ice and water as a combined nuisance, reflecting on the piles of snow that buried our cars and blocked sidewalks. Wilkie, however, had a much more romanticized view of nature, presenting images of graceful contours carved into the land by winding rivers and glacial erosion.
In his quintessentially British Oxbridge manner, Wilkie related the fascinating chronology of both the military and spiritual tradition of moving massive amounts of earth to create man-made fortifications and construct sites for burial, solace, and worship. His slides carried us back in history with a sublime visual tour of this Northern European landscape custom.
For the beauty queen in all of us, there was Color Me Beautiful, a guide that helped you develop your own color personality, providing tips that range from makeup to clothes to camouflaging your figure. In the garden, however, Color Me Tomatoes are the up and coming trend.
I’m still trawling this year’s catalogs in search of delightful new tomatoes hitting the market. In the New York area, I generally plant tomatoes outside one to two weeks after the last frost, which ranges from April 21 to May 7 depending on whom you ask. This means your tomatoes will be planted outside during either the second or third week of May if you are conservative, or the end of April and into the first week of May if you are bold.
Finally, it’s just about March, and we can stop dreaming about gardening and actually get going! Whether you’re a novice to the gardening game or a dyed-in-the-wool green thumb, pre-season education and preparation can go a long way. That’s where the NYBG’s Spring Adult Education classes come into play.
Here are my top picks for classes that will help make 2014 your best gardening season ever. I’ll be back next month with April picks, so be sure to keep an eye on Plant Talk for upcoming courses and workshops that you won’t want to miss!
Last week I began a discussion of some of the drivers and dynamics behind gardening trends, and I continue here with some of the trends that David Culp, author and Vice President of Sales at Sunny Border Nursery in Kensington, Connecticut, covered in a lecture during Plant-O-Rama. We have been following many of these trends for the past several years, and will continue to do so for some time.
While the enthusiasm for vegetable gardening waned slightly in the past year, it has grown in such magnitude over the past few years, and with such glamor and entrepreneurial attitude, that we can hardly call it a slip. Vegetables have always captured the hearts of homeowners due to their overall ease and impressive, family-pleasing results. The boom has been propelled even further by growing awareness and a trend towards fitness, general health, and a cooking fad that’s been boosted by the support of major television networks.
Along the same lines of thought is the “organic revolution.” Wait… haven’t we seen that one before, like in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s…? Let’s face it: we seem to be stuck in a perpetual industrial, chemical, and technological cycle where we proceed to destroy the environment and then recoil, implementing new, safer measures (which are often just old measures rehashed for the modern day). Organics is not only trendy these days, but an important part of branding, a potent money-maker, and hopefully an area where people “put their money where their mouth is.” Credibility over commercialism in this arena is always preferred.
Winter is a wonderful time not only to peruse catalogs and feast our eyes on new introductions, but to spend the quieter moments searching out our favorite venues for congregating with like-minded people.
I have several conference and lecture series that I attend to liven up my mind and shake off the winter cold. Of them, one local favorite is the Metro Hort Group’sPlant-O-Rama, which takes place every year on the last Tuesday in January. Metro Hort is an association of horticultural professionals in the New York City tri-state area, and this annual conference is hosted every year in Brooklyn and made available to everyone at an affordable price.
This year the main speaker was David Culp, author and Vice President of Sales at the well-known Sunny Border Nursery in Kensington, Connecticut. Culp spoke on new directions being taken in horticulture, looking both backwards and forwards along the timeline of plantsmanship with an eye toward gardening trends. I came away with some new insights intro drivers and dynamics behind those trends. What struck me most is that there’s a two-way process between the consumer and the supplier; consumers are critical in driving demands and creating trends, but the industry—the producers—often has the upper hand, and uses it to effect its own ends.
Last weekend I spent my Saturday and Sunday in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory teaching water lilies. We have two pools located in the side courtyards of the Conservatory. The pool on the right contains hardy water lilies while the pool on the left contains tropical water lilies. These pools mirror the structure inside the Conservatory, where the temperate houses are on the right and the tropical houses are located on the left.
The concrete pools are surrounded by glazed bricks, and the interior mechanics are made up of more bricks and cinderblocks used to elevate the water lily containers. A pump oxygenates the water and maintains a slight circulation to help deter mosquitoes, while the koi join in to help keep the water features bug free.
Water lilies prefer their pots to be wide rather than deep to accommodate maximum growth. Containers specifically designed for water lilies are generally 12-20 inches in diameter and 8-10 inches deep, as the size of the pot can have an influence on the size of the water lily. A smaller pot will restrict the growth of the water lily (in small pond situations this might be an asset) and a larger pot will give it more space to grow.
