George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Giving Gardeners

December 8th, 2020

   It’s no secret there was a huge boom in vegetable gardening this year – whether it was because people were worried about the food supply or because they were stuck at home and looking for productive things to do.

Sean and Stacey McNicholl harvest produce from their Philadelphia-area GreenHorn Garden.
(Credit: Pa. Horticultural Society)

   The green industry estimates some 16 to 18 million new gardeners dug into the soil this pandemic year with the vast majority planting edibles.

   But not all of the produce that came out of those new gardens went to the gardeners themselves.

   Many gardeners – new and veteran – donated their tomatoes, peppers, cukes, zukes, and such to friends, neighbors, churches, food banks, and anyone else who could use it.

   One couple who gave in an enormous way was a young Philadelphia-area couple named Sean and Stacey McNicholl.

   These Upper Darby thirtysomethings used their urban-farm land and their greenhouse in a cemetery (once a stop on the Underground Railroad) to churn out more than 15,000 pounds of give-away produce.

   That amounted to nearly half of the 33,000 pounds of total produce that thousands of other gardeners donated through the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Harvest 2020 initiative.

   PHS announced that food-donation program in the spring as a way to encourage gardeners to help their Philadelphia neighbors in need.

   PHS, best known for running the Philadelphia Flower Show, wrote a piece about the McNicholls’ efforts at season’s end. I got PHS’s permission to share it with you.

   Here it is. May it inspire us all for next year:

What Gardeners Think about Gardening

December 1st, 2020

   The National Garden Bureau, the non-profit education and marketing organization that came into being during the original World War I “Victory Garden” surge, is celebrating its 100^th anniversary this year.

The National Garden Bureau surveyed nearly 2,000 gardeners and professionals to mark its century birthday.

   To mark the occasion, the group surveyed nearly 2,000 gardeners and green-industry professionals to get a feel for what’s on gardeners’ minds – and where those thoughts are headed.

   “Our main goal was to ask consumers about their vision of what their kids’ and grandchildren’s gardens will look like over the next 100 years,” said Diane Blazek, NGB’s executive director.

   The survey unearthed some interesting findings.

   A big one this year is just how much of a rebirth we’ve had in vegetable gardening.

   For years, this was a lost art. In my many yard visits doing redesign consults, I rarely saw vegetable gardens – often not even a single tomato plant among the azaleas, barberries, burning bushes, and big lawns.

   That’s been changing in recent years, largely fueled by younger, first-time gardeners.

   All of a sudden, edible gardening skyrocketed this spring as stuck-at-home people saw empty grocery shelves and figured that a pandemic year might be a good time to grow their own food.

   Many also were looking for ways to limit trips to grocery stores, and Blazek adds that “more people were cooking at home instead of going out, so they wanted their own fresh produce to try.”

   The Chester County-based Garden Media Group estimates that 16 million new gardeners took to the soil this year, primarily COVID-fueled food gardening.

   The main question now is whether this food-gardening trend will stick or whether we’ll all go back to buying everything at the store once COVID fades.

   “Many of those who had a good experience will keep at it,” Blazek believes. “Some who failed will keep trying, and others will give up. Overall, we’re saying that even if just 10 percent of the new gardeners keep gardening, it’s good for everyone.”

The 10 Worst Plant Names

November 24th, 2020

   Most plants have fairly pleasant names, such as love-in-a-mist, moonflower, glory-of-the-snow, and sweet william.

   Then there are those with such disgusting or beastly names – bladder fumitory (a poppy-family annual) comes to mind – that you wonder why anyone would plant them.

Stinking hellebore really doesn’t smell that bad.

   Here’s my list of 10 of the worst-named plants…

   1.) Stinking hellebore. Like so many bad-name plants, this semi-evergreen perennial flower really is a decent plant (so long as you don’t try to eat it… it’s poisonous).

   It’s related to the Lenten rose and produces hanging, bell-shaped purplish flowers early each spring.

   Weird thing is, it doesn’t blatantly stink. The name apparently came from what someone thought was an unpleasant smell when the leaves were crushed.

   2.) Joe Pye weed, butterfly weed, etc. Any plant with weed in its name is at a big disadvantage on the garden-center benches.

   Who wants to take a chance on something that sounds like kin to dandelion, kudzu, and poison ivy?

   Too bad because “Joe Pye flower” is an excellent, long-blooming native perennial, butterfly “flower” is the must-have plant of the monarch butterfly, and sneezeweed (a.k.a. Helen’s flower) is a colorful late-blooming perennial (not a weed) that isn’t any more sneeze-inducing than most any other flower.

The Best New Gardening Books of 2020

November 17th, 2020

   Books make ideal holiday gifts for gardeners since a.) there’s always something new to learn, and b.) there’s never a shortage of new titles.

“Chasing Eden” tells the story of Bucks County’s Hortulus Farm.

   2020 brought us four particularly good reads involving remarkable gardens and the gardeners who created them – and in two cases, special gardens left behind.

   Whether there’s a gardener on your gift list or you’re looking to advance your own dirty knowledge, here’s the lowdown on those four titles and four other new-for-2020 garden books that I’d recommend:

“Chasing Eden: Design Inspiration from the Gardens at Hortulus Farm”

By Jack Staub and Renny Reynolds (Timber Press, $25 hardcover)

   Hortulus Farm is a gem of a landscape featuring 24 trail-connected gardens on a 100-acre, 18^th-century one-time dairy farmstead in Bucks County.

   It was “on the edge of dereliction” when playwright and advertising executive Jack Staub and event-planner extraordinaire Renny Reynolds bought it in 1979 as a get-away from New York City stresses.

   Their book tells how they saw beauty lurking in the “rural detritus” and set about meticulously turning the land into their own private Eden.

   Each chapter of “Chasing Eden” revolves around a different design feature with the authors telling how they dealt with each and then offering thoughts and lists of do’s and don’ts to help readers work toward their own version of Eden.

   Superb photos by Rob Cardillo show the results at Hortulus.

   Sadly, Staub died just two weeks after the book came out in January.

“A Year at Brandywine Cottage” is David Culp’s new book.

“A Year at Brandywine Cottage”

By David L. Culp (Timber Press, $35 hardcover)

   Just west of Hortulus in Chester County, garden speaker and plantsman David Culp has spent the last 30 years creating a peaceful, two-acre get-away next to a Colonial-era cottage in the Brandywine Valley near Downingtown.

   Culp’s book, co-written with one-time Philadelphia Inquirer garden writer Denise Cowie and, like “Chasing Eden,” artfully photographed by Cardillo, is a print tour through the gardens as they change with the seasons.

   At Brandywine Cottage, Culp divides his gardening year into six seasons, not the traditional four. And he aims to get the most out of each.

   “A Year at Brandywine Cottage” uses the seasonal stories as a spring board for tips and insights into how we can all take our gardens to the next level, such as with cool plants worth trying, using your gardens as a resource for cut-flower bouquets, and ideas on mixing edibles in with the flowers.

   If you liked Culp’s popular 2012 book “The Layered Garden,” you’ll like this one, too.

Abnormal Is the New Normal

November 10th, 2020

   So here we are into the second week of November, and the temperatures are still pushing 70 degrees.

2020 was a year that killed plants from too much cold in May and then killed them from too much heat in July.

   Since much of the Harrisburg area just missed that brush with frost the last week of October, the annual flowers and summer vegetables are still chugging along at this historically late point of the season.

   It doesn’t surprise me.

   I also wouldn’t be surprised if the temperatures suddenly nosedived, threatening cold injury to plants that didn’t have a chance to go through their usual and necessary gradual slide into winter dormancy.

   In fact, nothing surprises me with our roller-coaster weather anymore.

   If anything, I’m surprised when we get “normal” weather – whatever that is anymore.

   It seems that abnormal has become the new normal.

   Consistency and modest weather changes are out. Erratic and extreme are in.

   Humans can adapt by retreating into the air-conditioning in summer and cranking up the furnace in winter. But plants are stuck out there to roll with the punches and try to survive extremes that their genetics haven’t prepared them for.

   About all we can do is give our plants the best conditions possible (good soil, water in droughts, adequate nutrition, etc.) – and then figure on replacing the “wimps” that can’t endure.

   Although these changes have been going on for years now, 2020 was a poster child for wacky weather.

Read George’s PennLive column on how the changing climate is affecting gardening

Read George’s PennLive column on 10 ways gardeners can adapt to the changing climate

   Harrisburg-area gardeners and plants endured a hot-cold-hot “sandwich” this season, featuring a very warm winter that fast-forwarded plant growth, then a spring chill that gave us our coldest May day ever, then our hottest summer ever.