George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

End of the Erica Era

November 12th, 2019

   For 30 years, Erica Shaffer was Highland Gardens, that small-but-homey neighborhood garden center along South 18^th St. in Lower Allen Twp.

Erica Shaffer in her garden.

   She was the face and voice of the business who answered bug and fertilizer questions, yakked about plants with loyal customers who were more like botanical brethren, and spoke to every garden club in the area.

   She’s the one who drew up those unique, hand-written plant signs that were sometimes blunt and sometimes funny but always filled with hands-on advice that only down-and-dirty gardeners come to know.

   And when it was time to order plants for the garden center? Erica was like a kid in charge of the candy store, filling every corner of Highland’s five acres with cutting-edge and delicious selections that box-store staff never even heard of.

   In case you didn’t hear, Erica resigned a few weeks ago.

   She’s not sick or anything, but Highland Gardens is in the process of an ownership change, and Erica didn’t quite see eye-to-eye on where things were headed.

   So she left her “natural habitat” late last month… for now planning to do private landscape designs, consulting, and personal gardening services. (If you’re interested in staying in touch, Erica has a new Facebook page, and she’ll be doing gardening services through Mother Nature Landscape and Lady Bug EarthCare.)

   She’s also a Reiki master with her own Wildly Crafted Woman website and will be offering sessions at The Wellness Collective across from the Cornerstone Coffeehouse in Camp Hill.

   Come spring, she plans to work several days a week at Black Landscape Center in Upper Allen Twp., where she’ll be making bows, decorating wreaths, and selling her “Gourmet Greens” cuttings this Christmas season.

   Erica carved out quite a reputation among local gardeners.

   Avid gardeners all seem to know her, and when they mention a special plant in their garden, they say they “got it from Erica,” not “got it at Highland Gardens.”

From Jungle to Almost-Landscape

November 5th, 2019

   In the last eight months, I’ve moved two dump truck loads of topsoil, 16 cubic yards of mulch, eight cubic yards of leaf compost, and at least 100 wheelbarrows of wood chips.

The front foundation before.

   I’ve lugged 400 wall stones and two tons of drainage stone up and down steps in five-gallon buckets, laid 100 feet of drainage pipe, and built 25 feet of retaining walls three blocks high.

   I’ve had four bouts of poison ivy, seven stitches after smashing my finger trying to sledgehammer a stake into rocky ground, a month-long swollen knee from overuse-related bursitis, and a constantly sore back from yanking 40-foot vines out of trees and assorted entrenched weed colonies off a huge, 25-foot-deep bank.

   Finally… finally, despite side challenges with deer and rain-fueled gushing waterfalls… the Pittsburgh property that my wife, Sue, and I moved into last winter has turned the corner from jungle to almost-landscape.

The front foundation by the first September.

   I’ve progressed from hacking down and clearing out into actually planting some things. The look is now passable, which is a big improvement over atrocious.

   I now no longer feel like George of the Jungle.

   I knew the place needed work, but I wasn’t figuring on chain-gang levels of labor.

   The main problem was that the previous owners had no interest in outdoor work. Neighbors said they seldom went outside in the last eight years, much less planted flowers or weeded.

   I heard that the borough even cited them for not cutting waist-high grass in the front yard.

   This was a big change of pace for me.

   I’d spent the last 35 years gardening on a level, third-of-an-acre yard in Hampden Twp.

   I improved that yard little by little over the years. Despite plants and garden beds everywhere, I had the work down to aging-friendly puttering.

   Everything grew in that compost-enriched soil.

Read more on why I miss my old soil

   Weeds had no chance to seed and spread in decades.

   It got to the point where I scarcely needed a trowel to plant.

   In Pittsburgh, I’ve been gardening through the clay and rock with a mattock, sledgehammer, and ibuprofen.

May I Suggest Knee Pads?

October 29th, 2019

   I knew it was going to be a tough job at my age moving eight cubic yards of mulch from my driveway up a 25-foot, 45-degree-angled bank in my new back yard.

Mulching this bank caused a case of prepatellar bursitis.

   I took my time, didn’t slip or fall, and got the job done by making about 160 trips up the hill over three days with five-gallon mulch buckets in each hand.

   So what went wrong this time? My right knee.

   I noticed the kneecap was a little sore the Saturday evening after finishing the job. I figured I probably bruised it on a rock or something.

   Three days of progressive swelling despite ice, rest, and copious ibuprofen landed me in yet another UPMC orthopedics office. The diagnosis: prepatellar bursitis.

   That’s a fancy way of saying I abused the padding (bursa) under the kneecap so much that it enflamed, leaked fluid, puffed up painfully, and made it almost impossible to walk.

   The ortho doc drained the knee with a rather large needle (which helped), but two days later, the whole leg was puffed up.

   A trip to urgent care generated a diagnosis of Lyme disease and a prescription for antibiotics. That didn’t turn out to be the case, but the antibiotics did fix what probably was the case — an infection in the leg related to the draining.

   Anyway, the swelling is almost gone, but I thought I’d mention my experience since prepatellar bursitis is something that apparently happens to gardeners more than “regular” people.

   It’s a common malady of anyone who kneels a lot… plumbers, roofers, carpet layers, coal miners, and gardeners, according to the OrthoInfo website. Runners and athletes who get whacked a lot in the knee also tend to get it.

   In my case, I didn’t do anything obviously or suddenly bad. There was no warning of impending trouble, no sudden stab of pain.

   The culprit was simply kneeling on the hard ground over and over again.

I’m No Lawn Nut, But…

October 22nd, 2019

   I’ve always thought that people lean too heavily on lawns, mainly because it’s the default choice when 1.) they can’t think of anything better to do with the space, or 2.) they’d rather not invest in the work and expense to do something else.

I didn’t think I’d ever be a riding-mower guy, but here I am.

   I have nothing against lawns, but unless we really want/need all of that green for play space or entertaining, there are better options (growing food, planting trees for shade, planting rain gardens to capture storm runoff, planting flowers for beauty and pollinators, etc.)

   That’s why the lawn in my Cumberland County yard served mainly as pathways through the garden beds.

   Now that my wife and I moved to the Pittsburgh area, we inherited an ocean of grass out front.

   We’re on a corner lot with the house atop a hill, so most of the lawn is on a slope. (Everything in Pittsburgh is on a slope… or cliff.)

   The magnitude of this space forced me and my rapidly aging legs to invest in a riding mower.

   That’s right. I’m now a lawn guy.

   If I were 35 or 40, I’d be digging up big chunks of the green to plant a Pittsburgh version of the Weigel Botanic Garden.

   It’d be glorious… curving beds of shrubs and massed perennials, specimen trees, maybe a rock garden, a collection of spring bulbs, pockets of annual flowers, roses, and a dwarf conifer garden to make my wife happy.

   Except for some trees and the dwarf conifer garden, that’s going to happen only in my imagination.

   One problem is that I went and got old. At 63 years and counting fast, I could probably manage to create everything (with help from Mr. Ibuprofen). But a big question mark is how long I’d be able to maintain it.

   A second problem is deer. The neighborhood’s four-legged, non-stop, eating machines would devour most plants as fast as I could plant them.

Read more on my new deer problem

   Other than a Kousa dogwood and a few scrubby shrubs around the front foundation, the only plant I inherited in the quarter-acre grassed front yard was a half-dead blue spruce, which I just had cut down.

Australia, New Zealand Trip Details Ready

October 15th, 2019

   If the Land Down Under is on your bucket list, you’ll have a chance next year to visit both Australia and New Zealand with fellow garden- and nature-lovers – including me.

Sydney’s skyline with its famous opera house.

   Lowee’s Group Tours, Collette Vacations, and I just finished details on a 17-day tour that’ll include gardens of those two countries, plus must-see highlights like the Great Barrier Reef, Sydney’s Opera House, New Zealand’s “Southern Alps,” and, of course, koalas, kangaroos, and penguins.

   The trip leaves Oct. 25, 2020, from Philadelphia and returns Nov. 10, 2020, from New Zealand.

   We’re going in the fall because that’s Australia’s spring, a time when we’ll catch the flowers and landscapes in peak form before the weather gets too hot.

   The trip price is $8,999 per person double (if you book before next April 29). That includes hotels, 24 meals, admissions, a tour manager, and all flights, both international and three that we’ll be taking during the trip.

   The “South Pacific Wonders” trip will be ready to book at the annual Travel Day that Lowee’s Group Tours and I are planning for Sat., Oct. 26, at 10 a.m. in the West Hanover Twp. Recreation Center, 628 Walnut Ave., Harrisburg. The West Hanover Rec Center is located just off Linglestown Road near Central Dauphin High School.

   We’ll have flyers at Travel Day with the full itineraries of our entire lineup of 2020 garden trips, and I’ll be doing a PowerPoint presentation showing you what all we’ll be seeing.

   It’s free, and you’re invited! Free refreshments will be served.

   You’ll have a shot at winning raffle prizes, including trip discounts and two of my gardening books. Register ahead of time, and you get an extra raffle ticket.

   If you haven’t registered yet, call Lowee’s Group Tours at 717-657-9658, email ckelly@lowees.com, or register online at Lowee’s website.