George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Best tomato and Hershey Gardens free

August 31st, 2010

   Two interesting tidbits this week…

Franklin County Master Gardeners' Tomato Tasting Day.

   First, Franklin County Master Gardeners held their 9^th annual Tomato Tasting Day last week at the Extension office in Chambersburg.

   This is a neat event that tries to settle the age-old gardener debate of which tomato really tastes the best.

   Extension’s Steve Bogash grows the tomatoes at Penn State trial gardens in Lancaster and Franklin counties, then MGs slice and dice the letter-coded tomatoes for whomever wants to show up and try them.

   This year, 162 folks taste-tested and scored two dozen varieties. And the winner was… once again, ‘Sun Gold.’

   ‘Sun Gold’ is an orangish cherry-type tomato that’s slightly smaller than a Ping-Pong ball. It’s won this contest before and is a high scorer in most competitions it’s entered in.

   ‘Sun Gold’ is extremely sweet, but its main downfall is that it’s thin-skinned and prone to cracking, which is why it isn’t a supermarket staple.

   That’s the advantage of growing your own, though. Storage, shippability and shelf life don’t matter when you can pick your bounty and eat it before it ever even makes it to the kitchen.

   Personally, I’m partial to ‘Sweet 100’ and ‘Christmas Grapes’ as cherry/grape types.

   The second best scorer was a ‘Sun Gold’ cousin called ‘Sun Gold Select II.’

   Third-best was ‘Black Cherry,’ a dusky deep-burgundy cherry type, followed by ‘Jazzy’ (don’t know that one) and ‘Red Brandy Master’ (a new offshoot of the popular heirloom ‘Brandywine’).

   The top five scorers for best looks were ‘Brandy Boy’, ‘Jazzy,’ ‘Sun Gold Select II,’ ‘Sun Gold’ and ‘Aviuri.’

   Most of the tested varieties are available to home gardeners through seed catalogs and in plant form at garden centers. If you’re a tomato nut, check out the Totally Tomatoes catalog at www.totallytomato.com. Also see Tomato Growers Supply at www.tomatogrowers.com and Johnny’s Selected Seeds at www.johnnyseeds.com.

   More details on the Tomato Tasting Day are online at the Franklin County Master Gardeners blog at http://franklincountymgs.blogspot.com/2010/08/and-winners-are.html.

What some of the annuals display looks like at Hershey Gardens.

   The second item of interest is that Hershey Gardens is holding its annual Gardenfest day on Sunday, Sept. 12, from 9 to 5 p.m.

   This is a day when the 23-acre botanical showplace opens its gates to everyone for free. So if you haven’t seen Hershey Gardens lately (or, horrors, ever), this would be a good time to check it out.

   The Gardens are most famous for their roses, but I actually like the annuals display at least as well. You’ll also find a lot of cutting-edge plants throughout the 23 acres so you can see what they look like in a real-life setting before buying for yourself.

   Sept. 12 is the last day the Butterfly House will be open for the 2010 season. It houses 20 North American species in an action-packed 1-acre Children’s Garden that’s as much fun for plant geeks as kids (and especially for kids who are going to grow up to become plant geeks).

   Gardenfest also features garden-information booths, music, games and a variety of family entertainment.

   More information is at www.hersheygardens.org.

Three garden trips for fall

August 24th, 2010

   Ever been to Old Westbury Gardens and Planting Fields Arboretum on Long Island, New York?

   Interested in seeing Longwood Gardens behind the scenes?

   How about a visit to Colonial Williamsburg’s Christmas-time Grand Illumination with a gardening twist?

Old Westbury's lily pond.

   Those are the three destinations where I’ll be leading garden-themed trips this fall through Lowee’s Group Tours of Harrisburg.

   The Long Island trip is an overnighter on Sept. 24-25 that’ll feature a pair of superb estate gardens that few Harrisburgers have seen.

   Old Westbury is the turn-of-the-20^th-century home of the Phipps family and has 200 acres of gardens, woods and lawn. The formal gardens are meticulous (not to mention the ornate ironworks), but also superb are the water features, the rose garden and especially the place’s walled-in garden.

   Planting Fields is even bigger — more than 400 acres, about half of which is devoted to woodland trails. But the cultivated areas include a landscaped swimming pool, a 5-acre garden of species arranged in order of their names, a dahlia garden, a dwarf conifer collection and lots of heaths and heathers that are actually living (unlike in our heat and clay).

   This trip also includes stops at artist Robert Dash’s unique Madoo Conservancy gardens and Landcraft Environments — an elaborate home garden you might’ve seen on Martha Stewart’s shows.

   The Longwood trip is an Oct. 15 day trip that’ll take us behind the scenes into Longwood’s production greenhouses, where we’ll see their trial plants, how they store bulbs and other little secrets into how these world-class gardeners perform their magic.

   We’ll also have a private cooking demo by Longwood chef Joe Labombarda, a gourmet lunch, a walking tour with Longwood senior gardeners and time to explore on your own.

   “A Green Williamsburg Christmas” is a 5-day holiday vacation timed to see Colonial Williamsburg lit up and decorated in Christmas splendor.

   But we’ll also take a guided walking tour focusing on the plant decorations, go to a decoration workshop, get the inside scoop from and a personalized tour with Colonial Williamsburg garden historians and hear a Christmas concert on the glass harmonica — a rare and beautiful instrument invented by — who else — Benjamin Franklin.

   This trip includes a variety of Colonial-tavern meals and a stop at Richmond’s way underrated Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden on the way home (one of my top 10 best public gardens of all time).

   The Long Island trip is $339 per person, the Longwood trip is $149, and the Williamsburg trip is $599.

   As always, I’ll be talking gardening and answering all your gardening questions on the bus. My wife, Sue, will be your “mom” on each trip.

   To sign up, call Lowee’s at 657-9658, email ckelly@lowees.com or visit Lowee’s web site at www.lowees.com.

It’s not natural, but…

August 19th, 2010

   I’ve always been fascinated by bonsai, that combination of art, horticulture and contortion that somehow manages to grow shrunken trees in little pots.

George yakking to the plant geeks at the Bonsai Club Picnic.

   It’s unnatural and seemingly impossible. To me, it’s hard enough to get regular plants to grow in regular soil, much less in those skinny little pots. So bonsai fascinates me, but not to the point of actually doing it. I can’t bring myself to sacrifice the poor, innocent plants I know I’d kill.

   What kind of people DO bonsai? Well, I spent an afternoon with about 50 of them last weekend at the Susquehanna Bonsai Club’s annual picnic at George Gracey’s house in New Cumberland.

   They’re actually fun and reasonably normal people… OK, at one point one of the members put a potted mistletoe fern on top of his head and drew a near kiss from one of the club founders, whose name and Linglestown bonsai studio I won’t mention. But other than that, the oddest common trait seemed to be incurable plant-geekism.

   The ringleader of the bunch is Gracey, who’s now 87 and still a character. If you picture a bonsai-ist as a quietly focused, monk-like, white-robed Oriental fellow, this does not describe George even remotely.

   I interviewed him once for a Patriot-News garden column, and I remember him telling me that he was attracted to bonsai because he “likes to grow stuff.”

   He also said bonsai took more work than pet care and that “anyone that does bonsai and says he’s never killed a plant is a liar.”

   Every year, Gracey invites the whole club over to his fenced-in New Cumberland back yard for some pulled pork, a program (which was me this year) and an auction, which seemed to be somewhat of a mass reshuffling of everyone’s plant cuttings, excess bonsai pots and bonsai magazine collections.

   Dozens of George’s bonsai specimens ringed the fence – mini forests in pots, solo foot-tall trees that looked to be ancient and several conifers pruned to simulate being windswept.

   Very interesting. And definitely not as easy as George and crew make it seem.

   I also found out that some bonsai clubbers actually have healthy, living mountain laurels growing in their yards. Very few people manage to pull that off. Despite being our official state flower, mountain laurels are notoriously hard to cultivate in home gardens. They really don’t appreciate clay, subsoil, alkaline foundations, 99-degree heat in the full sun and the many other abuses typical to suburban midstate gardening.

   It adds up, though. If you can grow an elm tree in your kitchen in 1 inch of gravel, you can probably figure out how to keep a shrub alive in the back yard.

   If you’d like to test the bonsai waters, the Susquehanna Bonsai Club meets monthly at Nature’s Way Nursery, 1451 Pleasant Hill Road near Linglestown. Nature’s Way is the epicenter for all things bonsai around here, what with classes, supplies, speakers, plants, etc. For info on either/all, call 545-4555, email natureswaybonsai@comcast.net or visit www.natureswaybonsai.com.

   To read the column I wrote about George Gracey, click here.

   And to read a piece on bonsai-ing I wrote after spending some time with Jim Doyle at one of his Nature’s Way classes, click here.

National Fame for Local Garden

August 16th, 2010

   You know you’ve earned your gardening wings when a Better Homes and Gardens publication features your landscape.

A stunning grass and sedum combo in Kathy Engle's Shippensburg yard.

   Take a look in this month’s issue of Country Gardens magazine — on newsstands now — and you’ll see the half-acre landscape of Kathy and Don Engle of Southhampton Twp., just outside of Shippensburg.

   Country Gardens editors waded through entries for the magazine’s garden-award competition and picked the Engle gardens as one of their featured gardens for 2010.

   Garden photographer Rob Cardillo photographed the gardens last fall, and author and contributing writer Nancy Ondra interviewed Nancy Engle for the article.

   The yard’s mixed borders and island beds contain 400 types of trees, shrubs and perennials.

   Nancy is the head gardener and chief designer. Don is more the structure-builder, compost-hauler, bed-tiller and golfer.

   “Twenty-two years ago we built our home on what was once a cornfield,” says Nancy. “The topsoil was about 3 inches deep, under which was clay and limestone fill.”

   Truckloads of compost later, the Engles had their first 8-by-25-foot bed.

   In the early years, the yard was primarily a playground for the Engle girls and their neighborhood friends — swingset, pool, sandbox, etc.

   But as so often happens when gardeners lurk, lawn space shrunk little by little, and garden beds began appearing everywhere.

   “My husband has been amazing,” says Nancy. “He built the garden house and arbor for me… and he golfed. I would ask him to rototill a new garden for me. He would say, ‘No more gardens,’ and head out the door to golf. I would head into the garage for my shovel and dig a new garden. I haven’t dug any new gardens recently, but mysteriously they have gotten larger.”

   Strange how that happens.

Some of the Engles' flower borders.

   Gardeners also will relate to how Nancy is constantly moving plants around. She says she’s been doing that since she was little and prone to transplanting her dad’s plants more to her liking.

   “What’s funny is that as soon as they were done with the photo shoot, I got out my shovel and started moving things around,” says Engle.

   Just goes to prove that when you’re an obsessed gardener, even perfection isn’t perfect.

   Congratulations on making the big-time, Nancy!