George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

I Miss My Soil

July 16th, 2019

   One thing Cristina Papson said she wished she had done before moving from Cumberland County to Florida was take a little of her garden soil with her.

My jar of Hampden Twp. soil.

   It would’ve been a memento… a tangible keepsake to remind her of the many pleasant hours spent beautifying her Hampden Twp. yard.

   Before my wife, Sue, and I moved to Pittsburgh in December, I took Cristina’s wish to heart.

   I scooped up a couple of handfuls of soil from my raised-bed vegetable gardens and put it in a small jelly canning jar, which now sits like a trophy on my office shelf.

   I spent more than 30 years building that stuff from typical lifeless “builder’s soil” into a root Heaven that’s black, rich, and crumbly.

   Practically everything grew well in it.

   It got to the point where I didn’t even need a shovel or trowel to plant. I could just pull open a hole with my hands and insert the eager plants, which if they were human, would probably be panting with excitement at this royal treatment.

   My new Pittsburgh soil is a world apart from the Hampden Twp. soil.

The Flowery City

July 9th, 2019

   I’m beginning to think that maybe the appreciation of flowers is inversely proportional to the lousiness of your winter weather.

Lurie Garden is a colorful meadow right in the heart of downtown Chicago.

   Boothbay, Maine, is pretty cold and icy over a long winter, but the little coast-line town has one of the nation’s best botanical gardens, the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.

     Buffalo, N.Y., is one of America’s snowiest cities – sometimes getting snow in May – but its citizens love to garden and stage the country’s biggest garden tour, the 400-garden Garden Walk Buffalo that happens at the end of each July.

   I’m just back from leading a tour to Chicago – well known for its piercingly cold winter winds – and that city has more publicly planted gardens, pots, and street-side planters than any other place I’ve been.

See my photo gallery of pictures of Chicago’s botanical beauty and gardens along the way

   Chicago is investing a lot of public dollars in beautifying itself.

   Plants and color are everywhere… rose gardens in parks, huge concrete planters in street medians, flower-pot gardens lining sidewalks, one of the nation’s best botanical gardens (the Chicago Botanic Garden), a huge vegetable garden on the roof of the city’s convention center (McCormick Place), and two of America’s best conservatories (Garfield Park and Lincoln Park).

   Most of it is funded or at least partly supported by tax dollars. In a lot of places, people would revolt at having their tax dollars spent on flowers, but we were told that the majority of Chicagoans consider it money well spent.

The Father of Master Gardeners

June 25th, 2019

   I can’t imagine the void we’d have in the gardening world if there were no such thing as Master Gardeners.

Master Gardener founder Dr. David Gibby

   These plant-loving, sharing-minded folks – mostly retirees – volunteer millions of hours nationwide each year answering gardening questions, teaching better ways to garden, and helping home gardeners solve their garden problems.

   It’s a huge and much needed service… and offered free.

   But there was a time not long ago when there were no Master Gardeners. If you had a garden question, you either looked it up in a book, hoped your neighbor knew the answer, or called the county Extension agent.

   Dr. David Gibby was one of those agents, now called Extension educators.

   Frustrated at being able to get back to only a fraction of the hundreds of weekly callers, Gibby came up with the idea of sort of “deputizing” a corps of avid gardeners who could help out with the workload.

   Despite resistance from the highers-up, he managed to recruit a team of what became the first Master Gardeners in 1973 in two counties of Washington state.

   The idea went viral. These days, all 50 U.S. states have Master Gardener programs attached to their land-grant universities (Penn State in Pennsylvania), totaling 95,000 Master Gardeners nationwide.

   Combined, they put in 5.5 million volunteer hours a year helping America produce better gardeners.

   The idea has since spread to Canada and overseas.

   Dr. Gibby is now 76 and dubbed the “father of Master Gardeners.”

   I heard his fascinating story when he reminisced at last week’s International Master Gardener Conference in Valley Forge.

Invasiveness Is in the Eye of the Beholder

June 18th, 2019

   So I was poking around the fabulous 2019 Chelsea Flower Show last month in London when I came across an educational display on invasive plants.

U.S. native columbine is considered to be invasive in the United Kingdom.

   The British are apparently having as alarming a time with that issue as we are.

   But what caught my eye most was what made the invasive list there. Among the familiar culprits of Japanese knotweed, houttuynia, and kudzu was a plant very common to our yards – columbine.

   This spring-blooming, U.S. native perennial apparently seeds around as well in England as in America. The difference is that seeding around when you’re not a native makes you an evil invader while seeding around on your home turf makes you a desirably virile choice.

   Interesting difference, eh? The same plant with the same characteristics and behavior can be “good” or “bad” depending on who’s doing the judging and where.

   American gardeners – like so many Brits – are on a big native-plant kick lately. Some of the more avid native-backers advocate that even cultivars of a native species aren’t worthy of being planted, not to mention making owners of non-native peonies and azaleas feel guilty.

   I like many U.S. native plants and think we should plant more of them. But being born in America doesn’t automatically make a plant superior.

Gardening with Axes and Sledgehammers

June 11th, 2019

   Back in my Cumberland County garden, I’d improved the soil so well over 30 years that I scarcely needed even a trowel to plant.

Trying to pound stakes into the ground with a smaller sledgehammer after whacking my finger with a bigger one.

   The ground was so loose I could open holes with my fingers.

   Not so in my new Pittsburgh “landscape.”

   The soil here is a dense, back-achingly heavy, poorly drained black goop, pock-marked with rocks.

   It doesn’t help that the previous owners never went outside, leading to barrel-sized clumps of seeded-in miscanthus grass everywhere, rampant seedlings of rose-of-sharon, and roots like I haven’t seen since watching the Jurassic Park film.

   I now find myself gardening not with trowels and rakes but with axes and sledgehammers.

   This is more battle than coddle, and my shed seems to be more an arsenal of weapons than a home for yard-crafting implements.

   Other than a lot of aches and muscle cramps, I’ve managed not to do any serious damage to myself or the property during renovation. This is, until I got to the point of attempting to install raised beds for a vegetable garden.

   I was trying to pound 2-by-2-inch stakes in the ground to secure my boards and keep them from warping, but they weren’t going into the rocky, dense goop very well.

   So I resorted to the new, long-handled, eight-pound sledgehammer that I had bought to drive metal sleeves into the ground for my deer-fence posts (another story of Pittsburgh adversity for another day).

   You can probably guess what happened. I somehow got my left index finger in the way of the business end of the hammer, and my finger came out the loser.