George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Two Tips for Top Flowers

May 24th, 2016

Jack Barnwell, the plantsman and landscape designer behind many of the gorgeous gardens on Michigan’s Mackinac Island, offers two tips for milking the most out of summer annual flowers – superior varieties and a lot of feeding.

Jack Barnwell talking annuals to our tour group.

If your flower gardens peter out by mid-season or just never measure up to what you see in public gardens, those two factors likely explain it.

Barnwell and his crew plant annuals by the tractor-trailer load and need to get them up to speed right off the bat for the tourists who flood the island for a hectic 3-month season.

You won’t find them using any seed-grown marigolds or the kind of cheapo petunia 6-packs that Grandma grew.

Barnwell has found that breeders have come up with new varieties in the last 10 to 20 years that are light years ahead of what people used to grow. He leans heavily on the Proven Winners line that come mostly in singular 4-inch pots that sell for $3 to $5 per plant.

Yeah, that’s more than you’ll pay for those 4- and 6-packs at the grocery stores and box stores. But if you’ve ever grown those side-by-side with the good stuff, you’ll see the difference.

“Spend the money,” Jack told the tour group I took on a jaunt through great gardens of Michigan last week. “They perform so much better.”

I agree. Check out 10 annuals that I like best in a post I wrote on Top 10 Annual Flowers. And while you’re at it, see the 10 that I don’t care for in a post on Bottom 10 Annual Flowers.

One way to hold down cost while maximizing performance is to use your superior annuals in pots. You’ll need just a few of them there to get big impact – especially when you use large and showy pots in key areas.

Annuals in hanging baskets and window boxes also give you the most return for your flower dollar.

Or plant patches of annuals in mixed gardens of perennials, grasses and shrubs as opposed to planting large bands of annuals.

That’s the strategy Jack uses in most of the Mackinac gardens. Annuals are a part of the gardens of “cottagey” perennials, hydrangeas and colorful-leaved plants – adding summer-long color to bridge the gap between the perennials’ shorter bloom times and creating a lushness that some call the “Mackinac Island look.”

Thanks, Garden Clubbers

May 16th, 2016

I’ve always had a lot of respect and appreciation for garden clubs, those grass-roots (flower-roots?) groups of mostly women who share my love of plants and effort to encourage people to get their hands dirty.

Penn-Cumberland garden clubber Francesca McNichol showing Harrisburg school kids the joy of gardening.

That’s why I was particularly flattered last week in Michigan when National Garden Clubs Inc. gave me the highest national achievement honor it bestows on a non-member – a 2016 Award of Excellence.

NGC President Sandra Robinson said the award goes to “exceptional individuals, organizations or institutions that foster the joy of gardening through environmental and civic responsibility, conservation and community beautification.”

Wow. I didn’t see that one coming. I found out after the fact that the honor secretly germinated with Karen Schwarzbauer, Joyce Wallen and the West Shore’s Penn Cumberland Garden Club. Thanks, ladies! I’m more than honored.

Although I’m not in a garden club, I’ve probably been to more garden-club meetings than a lot of garden clubbers – usually as a guest speaker.

I think I’ve done talks at every club in the region – sometimes multiple times. My college baseball buddies would shake their heads wondering what happened if they saw me these days in a room full of 50 or 60 ladies chatting about begonias.

Garden clubs often take on newsworthy community and educational projects, so I’ve written about many of them over the years, like the rain gardens that area clubbers built at the Harrisburg Area Civic Garden Center building near Linglestown and the spiffy community garden the Penn Cumberland Garden Club manages at Ames True Temper in Hampden Twp.

I remember well the first contact I made into the garden-club world back in the 1990s when I was a green-horn garden writer.

I was full-time with the Patriot-News at the time, and the paper was looking for reader-involvement ideas. I suggested a garden contest.

Fight Cancer with Your Garden

May 10th, 2016

That title is not as preposterous as it might sound.

Fresh food but also a way to prevent cancer?

Pretty much everyone agrees that fresh vegetables are generally healthy, but a food-science researcher at Penn State University says that whole fruits, vegetables and grains might pose one of our best cancer-fighting hopes.

Dr. Jairam Vanamala is a Penn State professor and faculty member at Penn State Hershey Cancer Institute.

He’s concerned about a projected 57 percent worldwide increase in new cancer cases in the next 20 years and doubts that we’re likely to find any single “silver bullet” cure.

Instead, he thinks we’re much better off looking for ways to protect against and prevent cancer before tumors ever get started.

Vanamala believes the most promising weapon is the food we harvest from our farms and gardens.

“Accumulating evidence suggests that a diet high in plant-based foods is preventive of a variety of chronic diseases, including cancer,” he says.

Produce is apparently loaded with all sorts of bioactive compounds – polyphenols, glucosinolates, carotenoids and such – that Vanamala says have been shown to suppress tumor growth.

Researchers have been attempting to isolate those compounds and trial them in cancer studies. But to date, most haven’t been very successful.

Vanamala believes that’s because it’s not any single compound that can slam the door on cancer but the “synergy” from the complex mix of compounds in our edible plants.

What Blooms When in Central Pennsylvania

May 7th, 2016

   One way to have a succession of landscape color throughout the growing season is to pick bulbs, perennials and flowering shrubs that bloom at different points in the season.

It takes some blooming knowledge and planning to have the garden look good all season.

   As the flowers of one fades, another picks up the slack and keeps the symphony going even beyond fall frost.

    The key to making it work is knowing what peaks when.

    Although each season’s weather can make a couple of weeks’ difference one way or the other, here’s a list of what typically peaks during which months in south-central Pennsylvania to help you with your spring-planting plans:

March

   * Bulbs: Crocuses, early daffodils, Iris reticulata, snowdrops, winter aconite. 

   * Perennials: Lenten rose (Helleborus).

   * Trees/Shrubs: Cornelian cherry dogwood, forsythia, Oregon grape holly, spicebush, star magnolia, sweetbox, witch hazel.

April

   * Bulbs: Crocuses, daffodils, Dutch hyacinths, early tulips, glory-of-the-snow, grape hyacinths, Grecian windflowers (Anemone), fritillaria, Siberian squill, spring snowflakes (Leucojum), striped squill (Puschkinia).

   * Perennials:  Barrenwort, bergenia, bleeding heart, bloodroot, brunnera, columbine, creeping phlox, euphorbia, foamflowers, lamium, Lenten rose, myrtle (Vinca minor), primrose, pulmonaria, rock cress,Virginia bluebells. 

The Best Garden-Idea Place

May 3rd, 2016

One of the best ways to get ideas for your own yard is to see what others have done.

An interesting garden treehouse that’s one of the cool landscapes on Garden Walk Buffalo.

Sometimes you’ll run into an area that’s so right that it’s worth “borrowing” directly. Other times, you’ll be inspired to try something similar or to boil together a melting pot of inspirations from other yards into your own original.

Whichever of those works, the best place I’ve ever seen for getting garden ideas is Garden Walk Buffalo.

Buffalo – yes, that Canada-bordering New York city better known for its snow than snowbushes – is home to America’s biggest garden tour.

Every last weekend of July, residents of seven Buffalo city neighborhoods open their gardens to oglers – at no charge, too.

This year, a record 416 gardens are on the tour. There’s no way you’ll come close to seeing even a quarter of them.

These are all ordinary gardeners doing some pretty out-of-the-ordinary things in their mostly small spaces. You won’t find mansions tended by garden staffs or other elaborate settings that yield no bearing on anything you might try at home.

What you will find are all sorts of homes and garden styles and idea-triggering features such as eclectic home-made garden art, off-the-wall containers (and many on the wall), espaliered fruits, tree houses, bird houses, bird baths, koi ponds, fence murals, one-of-a-kind garden gates, quaint potting sheds, and the only bowling ball totem pole I’ve ever seen.