The Great Tomato Celebration with White Flower Farm is back! They're bringing over 50 varieties of tomatoes with them, and Barbara Pierson, Manager at White Flower Farm, will be speaking at 9am & 11am. How do you choose which tomatoes to plant in your garden? Barb will explain How to Grow, Select and Enjoy Tomatoes, covering tomato terminology, variety attributes and top tips for growing and supporting your plants. 

 

The Plantmobile helped kick off the summer event series at Gertrude Howes Park in Roxbury on May 3rd. Staff and volunteers from Mass Hort and Massachusetts Master Gardeners Association helped children plant seeds to start their own vegetable and flower gardens. 

 

It's that time of year again!

 

Whether your shopping for a trusted favorite or a new variety, or you want to stroll display gardens for inspiration, remember that your Mass Hort membership card is valuable and will save you money! 

 

Show your membership card and save 10% off your purchase at participating garden centers and gain free or discounted admission to nearly 300 botanical gardens listed in the links below. 

 

Save 10% with your Mass Hort Membership card!

 

Click here for a listing of participating nurseries & garden centers

 

 

 

Click here for a listing of participating gardens through the American Horticultural Society's 

 

The Signature of All Things

By Elizabeth Gilbert

New York: Viking 2013

 

 

The explosion of interest in botany in the early nineteenth century was fueled by global travel and trade, as well as scientific curiosity about plants. European entrepreneurs sought plants unfamiliar in the west, eager to discover useful commodities and economic opportunities. The growth of the all natural sciences - geology, horticulture, botany, ornithology - combined to support a growing body of knowledge of cultivation and plant reproduction.

 

The Signature of All Things is a fast paced work of fiction whose two main characters represent the extremes of both endeavors - the economic and the scientific.  A poor son of an English orchard man is driven to make a fortune using his botanical knowledge, and a woman with a highly methodical intellect and intense curiosity thirsts to learn as much as possible of the wonders of botany. As father and daughter, they provide the framework for this entertaining book.

 

A very young Henry Whittaker, son of the orchardist for Kew Gardens' owner Joseph Banks, is sent to find plants on Captain Cook's fateful last journey aboard the Resolution. As reward for surviving the journey and returning with many new specimens, Banks sends Henry to Peru in search of the Chinchona tree, the source of quinine.  Spurned by Banks, who refuses to admit him to the Royal Horticultural Society upon his return, Henry settles in Philadelphia and proceeds to amass a fortune in quinine, a much sought after commodity. Gilbert's depiction of this cranky character, eventually the wealthiest man in Philadelphia, ultimately creates a figure of empathy.

 

Henry's only daughter, Alma, inherits his zeal for botany, but without Henry's insecurities, much less need for a fortune, she turns her considerable intellect towards solving botanical mysteries of plant reproduction, smitten especially by mosses.  Her life story is the centerpiece of this novel.

 

Gilbert gracefully imparts her extensive research into this very engrossing historical novel. 

 

 

This month we installed a cranberry bed in the Garden To Table Vegetable Garden.

 

And we didn't have to put in a bog to do it!

 

Many people who grew up in eastern Massachusetts may remember seeing cranberry bogs at harvest time in the fall, with beautiful red berries floating on top of the water. But what we forget is that cranberries don't need a "wet bog" to grow in; the bogs are only flooded for jobs like harvest or wintering.

Cranberries can be grown at home, and we wanted to show that to visitors to the garden. They do need the kind of soil conditions that you would find in natural bogs: lots of peat and sand, and acidic soil. Since we have raised beds, it was easy to convert one of our beds to the correct growing conditions by removing soil and replacing it with peat moss, coarse sand, and specific nutrients.

 

Thanks to the generous support of Johnny's Selected Seeds, we were able to get a dozen cranberry plants for our new bed.   These plants are several years old and should bear a crop this year.  We double checked the instructions on bed preparation (Johnny's sends complete instructions with each cranberry plant order), and, then, planted them in the prepared bed, loosening the root balls and planting them a little deeper than the height in the container.  Cranberries do like to be well watered, so we'll be installing a drip irrigation line for them and checking them carefully during this first year.

 

It's still early in the garden season, but the cranberry bed is already drawing a lot of attention from visitors, and many of them are surprised to learn that they could do this themselves.  Cranberries can even be grown in containers!  We're very pleased to have such an interesting new crop that increases our educational offerings, brings year round interest to the garden, and lets us add a fall fruit to send to our food pantries. 

     

At 10:45, Sarah Cole, the House's Museum Educator will help us appreciate the Woodland estate by giving us a landscape tour of the grounds.  The tour will be followed by light refreshments.

     

At 11:30, small groups may take self-guided tours of the historically furnished house and learn about its significance during some of the major events of American history. 

     

Ample street parking is available on Waverly Avenue and Kenrick Street, where you won't be able to miss the authentically painted bright green house.  On either street, you should park on the house side.

    

The cost of this uniquely interesting event is $10.00.  You may pre-register online or pay at the door on June 12.  In either case, staff from both organizations will welcome you to an enjoyable occasion.  If you have questions, contact Maureen Horn, Mass Hort librarian at 617-933-4912 or Mhorn@Masshort.org.

 

by Betty Sanders

www.BettyOnGardening.com

 

 

After spring bulbs pass their bloom, allow foliage to yellow and 'ripen' before being removed.  It's important because the foliage is responsible for passing the nutrients down into the bulb that will allow it to produce a new flower next year.  Hide the foliage by growing perennials and annuals around it.  When the foliage turns is dead - likely by July - you can safely cut it at ground level, secure in the knowledge that your favorite spring bulbs will return in 2015.

 

If you notice areas where you wish there were more bulbs, make note of them now in your garden journal and mark the areas with brightly colored golf tees.  Even if other plants grow up around the tees, they should still be there in the fall to show you where to plant for next year's display.

While we are all anxious to put the long winter and cold spring behind us, keep in mind that a few cold nights can stunt tender annuals for the season, and a night with temperatures in the low thirties can kill them.  So if you have purchased marigolds, geraniums or petunias, watch the thermometer and cover any tender annuals nightly until the danger of frost is past.

 

Plant growers are saying there is still no cure for impatiens blight.  New Guinea impatiens seem to be unaffected, but regular impatiens have no resistance and will be killed. Some nurseries are offering expanded varieties of other shade lovers such as wax begonias, colorful coleus and torenia.

In the vegetable garden, your cold weather crops should be in the ground now and well underway.  Keep a check on soil (not air!) temperature before planting beans, carrots and beets (60°), squash, cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes (70°).  Don't even think of planting eggplant or melons until June when the soil and air are both warm enough (80°).  Your garden will be more bountiful for starting it at the right time. 

Protect against insects

Floating row cover can provides two benefits in the vegetable garden.  First, it is a physical barrier against enemies such as bean beetles and flea beetles (that attack kale, oriental vegetables, tomatoes, eggplant and more).  Secondly once installed it can also provide several degrees of protection from cool night time temperatures.  It's not enough protection to plant tomatoes yet, but it may let you "cheat" by a week or more.

 

Lawns are starting to green up naturally now as the grass recovers from winter.  Mowing your lawn at three inches allows the grass to shade out weeds by depriving their seeds of sunlight.  Leaving your grass clippings behind adds nitrogen and other necessary nutrients to the soil without creating thatch.

 

Resist the temptation to feed it repeatedly and find out what your lawn really needs with an accurate and low cost soil test from soiltest@umass.edu.  Healthy lawns need a large population of beneficial insects, bacteria and microbes to make nutrients available to the roots.  Lawn insecticides indiscriminately kill these good guys along with the bad so reconsider annual applications of "insect control".

 

You can read more hints at www.BettyOnGardening.com

 

 

A neighbor took down a Norway maple last week.  Norway maples, for those who do not carefully follow environmental issues, is one of worst trees ever foisted on New Englanders.  For much of the second half of the 20^th century it was a 'developer's tree'; a fast growing specimen that could go from a 'whip' to a thirty-foot behemoth in under ten years.  And it was a maple!  And Norwegian!

Acer platanoides may be - however technically - a maple, although its native range runs more to Bulgaria and Russia than Scandanavia.  The 'Norway' name was appended to the tree in the 1950s to class it up a bit.  Norway maples are variously described as a 'weed' tree, a 'rat' tree, and 'trash', and all for good reasons.  It has an unbelievably dense root system that chokes out anything around it.  It is a voracious consumer of water.  Its limbs can come crashing down for no particular reason other than to annoy you and put a dent in your car.  And don't ever think about tapping it for maple syrup.  The sugar content is virtually non-existent and the sap is milky.

The sale of Norway maples is illegal in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and other northeastern states rightly consider it invasive.  Unfortunately, those trees planted before the ban went into place can remain.  We took down the two Acer platanoides that were on our property (planted by the developer, naturally) years ago.  Betty gnashes her teeth as we drive down our street where half a dozen specimens remain.

But the sound of a chipper caught our attention and so I walked up the street to find a landscaper feeding the last limbs into the maw of a large, noisy machine.

"Only thing a tree like that is good for," I said, watching the chips fly into the back of a dump truck.

The landscaper nodded his agreement.  "I take out a couple of dozen of these every spring," he said.  "Good riddance."

Then came the fateful question.  "Got any plans for the chips?" I asked.

He shook his head.  "Take 'em back to the lot, I guess."

"I'll take them," I said, trying to sound like I did this three or four times a day.  "I live just up the street."  I threw my thumb over my shoulder.

The landscaper squinted at me.  "Fifteen minutes," he said.  "But you got to take the logs, too."

I knew better than to bargain further.  I was about to get ten cubic yards of wood chips for free.  Of course, I was doing the landscaper a favor: most places where landscaping debris can be 'tipped' want a fee for doing so.  Perhaps these would have 'gone back to the yard'.  But his readiness to give them to me indicates they were headed for a landfill.

At this point we need to back up a few minutes and a few paragraphs to the point where I said that the sound of a chipper caught "our" attention.  That statement is true.  Both Betty and I heard it.  But, left to my own devices, I would have ignored the sound until it went away.  You see, getting a load of chips or mulch or anything like that means hard work lies ahead.  It isn't that I avoid difficult projects; I just don't go out of my way to start them.

Wood chips path

But when we heard the chipper, it was Betty who said, "Why don't you go up and see if it's something we could use?"

These are the things we do for love.  We go bargain for ten cubic yards of wood chips knowing that we will be the one who actually moves them.  And then down Motrin by the handful.

 

Fifteen minutes later the dump truck rumbled down the cul-de-sac and I waved in into an area just outside of our driveway.  It was, in fact, six yards of chips and four cubic yards of logs.  I smiled as the truck pulled away.  It was one of those 'bargains with a curveball':  mulch I could use but logs that will need to age two to three years before they're useful.

A border

It took just three days to disperse the chips.  I loaded them into wheelbarrows and carts and dumped them around the woodland edges and paths on our property where Betty directed.  There, she spread them several inches thick to hold down weeds and define borders.  In the process I re-awakened arm and back muscles that that taken the winter off (except for shoveling snow).  The morning after my first day (seventeen loads) I was so sore I could hardly stand.  The morning after the second day (twenty-five loads), I took a couple of Motrin and shrugged it off.  At the third day (ten loads plus moving and stacking two dozen logs), I enjoyed a glass of Scotch.

I sometime think we fear getting into projects more than we ache from doing them.  In the next week or so, we'll need to order up ten-plus cubic yards of brown mulch for our multiple beds.  Before I took on the wood chip project, I had been dreading ordering the mulch.  It was a subject I simply would not bring up.  Now, with my arms starting to get back into shape, it has moved into the realm of 'not a big deal'.

It's so much not a big deal that, today, I casually asked Betty how soon we were likely to order the mulch and how many yards it would likely take.

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