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Dear (Contact First Name),
Finally March is here, and Spring is in full swing. Just in time for spring, we have a new and improved website with a homepage that will be changing seasonally, check out Merrideth, Milton and Matt as this season's Gnomes, it's hilarious! Also, be sure to check out our "Spring Speaker Series", with great speakers under the big oak right here at The Great Outdoors.
This month, our own Jill LaVigne has a story on growing beans, and once again, we are highlighting one of our great customer's gardens. If you love citrus, avacados and other unusual fruit, you'll enjoy seeing what he has done. I've tried some of his citrus, it was amazing! Sweet, easy to peel and so tasty! Let us know if you know of a garden that would be a good fit for us to write about. Send us pictures if you can, too!
Hope all is well and Happy Gardening!
Thanks so much for your patronage. We truly do love our customers!
Tom Tinguely
President |
by Jill LaVigne
March may be the busiest month in the vegetable garden. It is when you plant peppers, cucumbers, squash, corn, eggplant, beans, and of course the star of the garden, tomatoes. Before planting you might want to sketch out the layout of your garden. And if you had a vegetable garden there last year, consider it's layout too. You might want to switch which vegetable goes where. For example this year I am planting tomatoes where last years beans where and beans were the potatoes where. This is my backyard version of crop rotation. Remember that tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and potatoes are all in the same family, so there is no point in rotating them with each other. Beans are a great vegetable to add to your garden rotation because they are nitrogen fixers. Beans have rhizobia bacteria living in nodules on the roots that convert nitrogen in the air (which is in your tilled or aerated soil) into nitrates that can then be used by other plants. If you have a fairly new garden plot you may want to coat the bean seeds with an inoculant first to insure they have plenty of the beneficial bacteria. Read more...
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 Our featured Gardener of the Month is our friend, Alan Hendrickson.
The front yard landscape of the Hendrickson house does what it is supposed to do: it frames and accentuates a beautiful, stately home. Holly shrubs and other evergreens, neatly clipped, add necessary and tasteful swaths of greenery, gracefully blending forest with architecture. But as functional and attractive as the front yard is, it is not why I'm here.
Alan Hendrickson is a thinking man, an engineer to be exact, and his backyard retreat is a thinking man's garden. From a design perspective, it makes sense throughout, leading the visitor from one divided outdoor room to the next, each with its own feel and function. The first "room" is the patio, a comfortable space that stretches nearly one half the length of the house. On the far end is a large fireplace of stucco and a complete outdoor kitchen, making the patio both a place to relax and a place to dine. The entire patio/kitchen area is backed by a retaining wall which, along with a narrow perennial border, separates the patio from an upper lawn of perfectly grown 'Pallisades' Zoysia grass. Stairs connect the two spaces, and a 'Champanelle' grape arbor spans the entry into the lawn. The lawn itself is plenty large for the family's two boys, Brice and Reed, to play football or soccer, and the surrounding mixed perennial border allows plenty of hiding places for the occasional super hero or even a passing ninja. At the north end of the lawn is a low hedge of boxwood, broken only by an entry into the vegetable garden, a carefully tended patch of raised rows of veggies and arbors of kiwi vines and grapes. At the back of the vegetable garden is a mini conservatory, a classy little greenhouse Allan uses to overwinter his tropicals and get an early start on seasonal vegetable seedlings.
To describe this garden as functional would be a bit of an understatement, and nothing speaks to that function more than Alan's collection of fruit trees. He seems to be first and foremost a collector of citrus, both in pots and planted in the ground. There are grapefruits, lemons, kumquats, satsumas, and Alan's favorite, a Ponkan mandarin. I have to admit the first kumquat I ever tasted was plucked from a Meiwa tree in this garden, with special instructions from Alan to pick only the shiniest fruits, as they are the ripest and sweetest. Read more... |
Spring Speaker Series
selected daytimes and evenings under the Oaks at The Great Outdoors
MARCH
 March 14th
10:00 am "Who's Afraid of the Big Bamboo?" Merrideth Jiles, TGO
March 21st
7:00 pm "Life on the Dry Side: From Mexico to China, Gardening Without Tap Water" Dr. David Creech, SFA Mast Arboretum
March 28th
10:00 am "Mixing It Up With Dave: Container Patio Gardening at its Best!" Dave Mix, Pacific Home and Garden
APRIL
April 4th
10:00 am"Practical Sustainability for Everyday People" Jenny Nazak, Austin Permaculture Guild
April 11th
7:00 pm "Tough as Nails: Great Bulbs and Great Stories From the Bulb Hunter" Chris Weisinger, Owner, Southern Bulb Company
April 18th Earth Day!
10:00 am "Super Compost" Patrick Van Haren
April 25th
7:00 pm "Staghorn Ferns" Laura Joseph, President, Austin Area Garden Council
MAY
May 2nd Art Under the Oaks
May 9th
7:00 pm "Tough, Sustainable, Perennial: Great Plants for Central Texas" Dr. Bill Welch, Author Perennial Garden Color, Texas A&M University
May 23rd
7:00 pm "Everything But the Kitchen Sink: Annuals and Perennials for the Condo Garden" Dawn Stover, SFA Mast Arboretum | |
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We hope you are enjoying our monthly newsletter, if there is a topic you'd like to see us write about, please let us know. We are your locally owned, independent Austin business and we thank you for your patronage!
Sincerely,
Tom Tinguely
The Great Outdoors |
 2730 S Congress Ave
Austin, Texas 78704
512-448-2992
www.gonursery.com
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| Offer Expires: April 30, 2009 |
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