Dear Friends,

  

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Johnny's chard sprouted

In New England, many vegetables do well with a head start in a greenhouse.   Shortly after the flower show was over, the first flats of vegetables were sown, including the brightly colored Swiss Chards for our "Grow the Rainbow" bed. In just one week, the seedlings are up and you can already see some of the different colors the chard will show in our garden.

Massachusetts Horticultural Society's exhibit, Eden on the Charles, highlighted two love stories that took place at Mass Hort's Elm Bank Estate in Dover, MA,  illustrating the show theme of "Romance in the Garden". The exhibit's design depicts the courtship of Ray and Betty Frost canoeing down the Charles River at Elm Bank and stopping for a picnic along the shore. Descendants and family of Mr. & Mrs. Frost attended the show on Saturday, March 15 to see the exhibit that honored the Frosts.

 

Ray Frost's father, Henry, was superintendent of the Elm Bank Estate 1935-1938, and was also an avid flower show exhibitor. Ray and his sister Betty (pictured in the white sweater) lived in the Superintendent's Cottage at Elm Bank.

 

The Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University (HNRCA) is a 14 story research facility on the Tufts, Boston campus in Chinatown. For more than 30 years, 60 scientists and nearly 200 staff, working in 18 thematic labs, (obesity, cancer, neuroscience, vision, bone etc.) have been analyzing how the foods we eat and the exercise we do/don't get help or hurt us as we get older.   

 

Mass Hort's Garden to Table program has been incredibly lucky to have found such an amazing partner.  Working together to create the vegetable garden in the lobby of the HNRCA's downtown office building has been a truly enriching experience, and it has produced 8 impressive harvests in just 5 months, with all yields going to the St. Francis Day Shelter in downtown Boston.

 

Victoria Taylor - Founder and President Victoria Gourmet, Inc

To date we have harvested the following from the indoor garden:

185 bunches of beet greens

350 radishes

283 Turnips

256 heads of tatsoi

12 bags of kale

8 bags of mint

 

Making excellent use of the building's extensive window frontage has been a great way to get the public passively involved in nutrition and horticulture (in the dead of Boston winter no less).

 

Our recent Talk and Taste lecture featured Victoria Taylor, president of Victoria Gourmet, which is one of our Garden to Table sponsors, and Dr. Moshen Meydani, who has published extensively on the health effects and benefits of turmeric and black pepper. We learned how easy it is to grow turmeric and enjoyed a fantastic demonstration on how to cook with it.

Dr. Moshen Meydani, Lab Director and Senioe Scientist HNRCA Vascular Biology Lab

If you haven't had a chance to see the garden, please stop by the next time you are in Boston. Our next Talk and Taste will be held on Wednesday, June 4th, from 6-8:30, at the HNRCA, 711 Washington St. in Boston and will feature Dr. Jose Ordovas speaking on Mediterranean cooking.

  

Read more about the program

 

 

 

by Betty Sanders

www.BettyOnGardening.com

 

 

It's raining, it's pouring outside my window as this is written. With the ground already soggy from melting snow, it may be many days before you can safely walk on lawns or garden beds. Walking across soggy ground compacts the soil and may damage plant roots, so don't do it. Wait to begin any work until lawns are solid underfoot and flower or vegetable garden soil crumbles (like chocolate cake) when gently squeezed in your hand.  

 

When you can get around the lawn without damaging

Wait and see if Daphne made it through the winter

the soil, don't fertilize! Your grass is a perennial, most weeds are annuals, so fertilizing now gives the weeds a good start. The time to fertilize is in the fall when the weeds are not growing and the grass will build up strength for the following year. In fact, many weeds will begin growing while the grass is still dormant. That makes it easy to pull or dig then out now when they stand out against the lawn.

 

If your lawn did not look good last year, get a soil test and find out what it really needs. No matter what the ads say, adding fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides to the lawn is not the way to a healthy, green lawn. Consider overseeding a thin lawn later this month.

 

When your lawn is no longer soggy, it will need a good raking with a spring rake (the kind with flexible tines) to remove the winter accumulation of small branches, leaves that have blown in, and the dead grass or weeds that come up easily. This raking also serves to also stand up the grass matted down by snow cover, telling it spring has arrived.

Lawn leaves cleanup

As they break ground, put a small circle of organic fertilizer (or a thicker circle of compost) around your spring bulbs and perennials. Fertilizing them this month will feed them this summer and help ensure another bright spring next year.

 

Prune back fall blooming hydrangeas and clematis, butterfly bush and roses. Prune forsythia as soon as they finish blooming. Don't be too quick to prune off browned branches on evergreens. Give them time: they may recover and green up again. Any broken or damaged branches should be removed as soon as possible.   Look for rodent damage on trees and shrubs. Hidden by the snow and looking for food, they may have gnawed off bark and even into the living tissue of the tree. A few bites won't seriously injure a tree or bush, but if it has been girdled half or more of the way around, it may not survive. Put a reminder in your calendar for November to put tree guards around the bottom two to three feet of young trees. Or, spray trees and shrubs monthly throughout the winter with deer and rabbit repellents.

 

On a day when the temperatures will be above 40 degrees for several hours, spray fruit trees, hollies and arborvitae with horticultural oil which smothers the eggs of many pest insects.  

 

Vegetable gardens also need to dry out before you begin planting. This is one advantage of raised beds that dry out and warm up faster in the spring than do conventional gardens. As soon as the soil is dry and workable, it will be time to get in the peas, spinach, lettuce, kale, cabbage and many oriental greens. Toward the end of the month, plant beets, carrots, parsnips, potatoes and swiss chard.

 

Annuals at the nurseries may look appealing, but use common sense. With the exception of some cold-hardy plants like pansies and osteospermum, leave them behind. We will still have more than a few freezing nights. No matter how wonderful it would be to have petunias and geraniums and marigolds, or get a head start with tomatoes, save your money and leave them on the nursery tables until the danger of frost has passed.

 

It is, however, a great time to plant many trees and shrubs, giving them a chance to begin establishing their roots before the hot weather of summer strikes. Take a look at any notes you made last year, and get to those nurseries to purchase the plants you want or need to add more beauty to your property.

 

If, as T.S. Eliot wrote, April is the cruelest month, then the first half of April is, hands down, the rottenest fifteen days of the year. It is spring, or at least the calendar says it's spring. The days are lengthening and we've turned the clocks ahead. I've put away my heaviest winter coat.

What I'm not doing is gardening. The lawn squishes if I walk on it. There is still a three-foot-high bank of snow and ice along the driveway. The soil temperature is 35 degrees and the ground is frozen two inches down. It may be spring somewhere, but certainly not in New England.

Unable to plant anything, I am reduced to poring over the mound of gardening catalogs that arrive in a daily avalanche. I suspect the people who write these catalogs realize how desperate we are because the items for sale on these pages are unlike what you'll find at your favorite nursery or garden center. For example:

• How about a lifelike, 37-inch-long coyote decoy made of resin? According to one catalog in front of me, it unfolds and sets up in seconds, then assumes a realistic shape that changes position in the breeze. It even has a furry tail. It's designed to repel Canada geese, rabbits, skunks and ducks and is only $64.99 plus shipping. Unfortunately, as the accompanying newspaper photo attests, the decoy seems not to faze the chick inches from its bared teeth.
• Or, how about a pickup wizard? You've seen them on tennis courts: gizmos with a wire mesh that you plunk down on tennis balls. Well, someone has adapted the principle to nuts, fruits, pine cones and other stuff that collects on your lawn. You roll it around

  Pickup Wizard

  outdoors and watch the cage fill up with nature's detritus. There's one size for acorns and hickory nuts for $52.99 and another for apples and walnuts in their husks for $61.99. I don't have a lot of apples on my lawn, but I do have some branches that came down over the winter.
• Do you have a problem with unwanted felines in your flower beds? Well, for $59.99 you can get a motion-activated device that emits a sudden burst of ultrasonic sound that startles cats and teaches them to stay away. It covers an area of about 280 square feet which, if I remember my algebra correctly, means an interloper has to come within 9.4 feet of the sensor. For another ten dollars, though, you can get a motion-activated sprinkler that releases a blast of cold water at intruders, and it promises to be effective out to 35 feet. The catalog photo shows a dog running away in fear, though most of the canines of my acquaintance would think such a device was the most wonderful thing humans had ever invented.
• Are you expecting an urgent email while you garden? Do you feel the desire to Instagram while you weed? Are you unable to leave Angry Birds alone long

  Touchscreen Gloves

  enough to deadhead? Then you need a very specific set of gloves; one that has a special texture that allows you to use a touchscreen device without taking off your gloves. Amazingly, the gloves are just $6.99. Ummm, when I garden, my gloves are generally encrusted in dirt or mud, which tend to leave smear marks on anything I touch.
• Then there are the gardening implements that are useful, but at a price that seems to defy logic. For example, how much is a fold-away potting bench worth? The purpose of such a bench is to facilitate putting plants and dirt into pots (and vice-versa). Betty puts together 50-plus containers each year by throwing a sheet of leftover plywood over our garden cart. Cost: zero. But what if the bench has been crafted from a salvaged German biergarten table? And what if it further uses reclaimed wood for eco-friendliness? Including shipping, would you pay a nickel short of $760? That's the asking price.
• In my humble opinion, the prize for the most dubious gardening device may go to a portable electric leaf shredder. It weighs 17 pounds and is powered by an electric motor. You pour in leaves at the top and a string trimmer inside a plastic tub chops up the leaves which can then be bagged or spread as mulch. It is not that I have anything against shredding leaves and using them as mulch; each fall we cover our perennial beds with finely-chopped leaves which make both a great winter mulch and a spring soil enrichment. My astonishment is that someone would pay $209.99 for a device that performs exactly the same task - and without the raking - as a bagging lawnmower.

Neal's latest mystery, "A Murder at the Flower Show" is now available in book stores and at Amazon.com in print and Kindle editions.