George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Planting in a Pandemic

March 31st, 2020

   On the one hand, it’s a plus that this coronavirus pandemic comes at a time when the weather is warming because it allows us to get out in the yard instead of being cooped up in the house for weeks on end.

This is how Snavely’s Garden Corner in Chambersburg pivoted after the governor’s shutdown rules went into effect.

   On the other hand, it’s a minus that this coronavirus pandemic comes at a time when the weather is warming because it’s when we’d normally be out there buying and planting most of the year’s new plants.

   What a mess this isolating has been on so many fronts. But at least it’s better than the alternative of letting everybody mix uninhibited to wantonly spread a germ that could kill tens of thousands – or more.

   Plant nut that I am, I’m willing to delay or even scrap new plants if it helps flatten any curves or makes this surreal nightmare go away.

   Things certainly have been crazy and bizarre – for plant-sellers as well as would-be plant buyers.

   In an attempt to keep people at home, Gov. Wolf drew up a list of essential vs. non-essential businesses and ordered the non-essentials to shut down. That included garden centers and florists.

   I researched an article for PennLive.com and the Patriot-News – aiming to sort out the upshot for gardeners – and quickly realized that the shutdown rules allowed just about everybody to sell plants, except for the businesses that sell plants for a living.

   Lowe’s and Home Depot were allowed to keep their garden centers open because they were exempted as being an essential seller of potentially emergency home-repair items.

   Hardware stores that often sell young plant starts, onion sets, potting mix, seeds, and the like also got the green light for the same reason.

   Grocery stores that sell young plants, hanging baskets, potted flowers, and such were exempted because they needed to stay open to sell essential food.

   Walmart was allowed to keep its garden centers open because it was both a food store and a seller of necessary “general merchandise.”

   Even farm markets could stay open and keep selling plants because they got an exemption for selling produce.

   That left full-service garden centers like Ashcombe’s, Black Landscape Center, Highland Gardens, and Stauffers of Kissel Hill out of business.

Want a Garden Design?

March 21st, 2020

   My wife and I were going to visit our daughter in Amsterdam the next two weeks, but now that that’s off – along with my entire spring schedule of talks – I suddenly have time to do a few garden designs again.

Here’s a scale drawing with the colored option.

   After I retired from 18 years of Garden House-Calls home visits, I offered designs only for a couple of years in which people sent me dimensions and photos, and I sent them back a scale design and detailed plant list.

   If you’re thinking about redoing an area or digging a new bed or three, I’ll be happy to develop a planting plan.

   Your job is to get the measurements, snap a few photos, and fill out my three-page questionnaire on preferences and goals, and I’ll take it from there.

   You pay just for the drawing time, which is $50 an hour.

   I’ll give you an estimate up front based on the size and scope of the area to be drawn. To give you an idea, I can usually design a house-front in two-and-a-half to three hours, and the entire way around a house in five to six hours.

   In the end, you get a letter-coded design on graph paper along with a list of specific plants for each of the marked spots. I use graph paper with each box representing one foot. That makes it easy for you to just count the boxes and plant on the dots.

   The plant list includes sizes, specific cultivars (along with alternate options in most cases), and how many of each plant you’ll need.

   Additional options are available if you want them, such as:

   * Color-coding for your drawing: $25

   * Custom plant-care instructions for all plants on your drawing: $25

   * Copy of my “Yard-Care Survivor Manual” (24-page instruction manual for the yard): $8

   * Current copy of my detailed, 19-page “George’s Survivor Plants for Central Pa.” list, updated for 2020: $8

   * Signed copy of my “Pennsylvania Getting Started Garden Guide,” a 240-page Cool Springs Press book featuring the 170 best landscape plants for Pa. yards: $20

   * Signed copy of my “Pennsylvania Month-by-Month Gardening” book, a 240-page Cool Springs Press book that details how and when to care for your landscape, laid out in a month-by-month format: $20

   I’ll probably be doing these only for this spring and maybe into summer… until talks and trips are back to normal from the COVID-19 pandemic.

   If you’re interested in a drawing or have questions, give me a call at 717-737-8530 or email me at george@georgeweigel.net.

Joe’s Seed-Starting Tips

March 17th, 2020

   Joe Lamp’l, a.k.a. “Joe Gardener” and the host of PBS’s “Growing a Greener World,” is one America’s most trusted garden communicators because he’s such a practical guy who draws on what he’s learned from his own lifetime of hands-on gardening.

This is what Joe’s seed-starting experiment looked like.
(Credit: JoeGardener.com)

   Joe’s latest and maybe most prodigious effort yet is his attempt to figure out the best way that home gardeners can start their own plants from seeds.

   Seed-starting can be tricky if you don’t know some of the key “secrets.” It doesn’t help that much of the advice is a bit murky and sometimes conflicting.

   So Joe set out to see what really works by turning a 10-by-25-foot basement room at his Atlanta-area home into a seed-starting lab, crammed with 60 seed trays that had anywhere from 18 to 72 cells each.

   He bought all sorts of lights and grew the seedlings under 14 different lighting scenarios to see what difference that important factor makes.

   His findings are the genesis of a new $197 Master Seed-Starting course he’s offering through his Organic Gardening Academy.

   But Joe shared some of his seedy findings in an interview with Margaret Roach, the former editorial director for Martha Stewart’s magazines. The whole interview is on Roach’s “A Way to Garden” website, if you want to read or hear it.

   When it comes to lighting, Joe says ordinary workshop fluorescent light tubes (known as T12s) work reasonably well if you’re just growing seedlings for six weeks. One cool-light tube and one warm one in each unit improve the light spectrum.

   Joe says the higher-efficiency T5 fluorescent tubes and newer LED grow lights are markedly brighter. However, he found that biggest and brightest doesn’t always equate to best plant performance.

   “Just because a light is brighter doesn’t necessarily make it better,” he concluded.

What Became of Cypress Gardens?

March 10th, 2020

   Cypress Gardens in central Florida used to be one of America’s best-known public gardens and top tourist attractions.

Cypress Gardens still exists… it’s just now rolled into Florida’s Legoland theme park.

   Then it struggled through three decades of ownership changes, declining attendance, hurricanes, and the Disneyfication of the region, finally closing in 2009.

   A lot of people assume it’s been gone ever since with the space taken over by the Legoland Florida theme park.

   Although it’s a far cry from its 200-acre glory days of the late 1930s through 1960s, much of Cypress Gardens lives on as a part of Legoland near Winter Haven, Fla. And the 30 or so acres still in plants is a beautiful tropical garden, filled with winding paths through palm and cypress trees and lush beds of colorful tropical shrubs.

   I saw it earlier this winter for the first time since 1974, when the other two main attractions were the waterski shows and the “Southern belles” wearing their Civil War-era hoop dresses on the lawn by the Gardens’ signature gazebo.

   Legoland still runs a few ski shows a day on the park’s Lake Eloise with the once-famous human pyramids replaced by skiers dressed as Lego characters.

The wedding chapel gazebo is a signature feature. That’s a Lego Southern belle in front of it.

   The belles are gone altogether, save for one life-sized Lego belle stationed near the gazebo’s entrance.

   Cypress Gardens is billed as one of the lands within Legoland, alongside several ride areas, the ski-show theater, a water park, and a really impressive Miniature Land of famous places throughout the world built in scale size out of Lego bricks.

   There’s no extra charge for Cypress Gardens, but you have to buy a general admission ticket to get in the park to see it. You can’t just buy a gardens admission.

   The Gardens are roughly the size of Hershey Gardens and mostly naturalized tropical in appearance. They’re not really theme gardens, i.e. a rose garden, herb garden, or conifer garden.

   Instead, these gardens are mostly laid out in masses of nicely paired combinations, intended to stroll through rather than study as in a botanical garden.

Mediterranean Gardens for Pennsylvania

March 3rd, 2020

   This week’s 2020 Philadelphia Flower Show is showcasing plants and gardening of the Mediterranean – especially the gardens of southern France, Monaco, northwestern Italy, and a touch of Spain.

Here’s a classic Mediterranean-style garden, complete with stone and the Mediterranean signature plant, lavender.

   This is a colorful, fragrant, and highly textural form of gardening that I think a lot of Pennsylvanians would like… if we didn’t have that little problem of freezing winters to deal with.

   Mediterranean climates are distinctive for their year-round warm temperatures and very dry summers. So the look is different from what you see in warm but wetter tropical/subtropical regions such as Florida, the Caribbean, and parts of central America.

   Although we can’t do a real Mediterranean garden with olive and citrus trees, agaves, and arrow-like Italian cypresses, we can create Mediterranean-like gardens.

   Let’s have a look at some key features of the Mediterranean style and how we can shift gears a bit to make it happen here.