It’s that time of the year again: time to figure out good gifts for Uncle Albert and your sister Sadie. If they’re gardeners, gifts are easy to pick. There are plenty of items that cost from $5 to $300, and generally, one size fits all. Let’s look at some things I have used and like.
After giving a talk at the Milford, NH Garden Club recently, I bought some gardening gloves that were being sold as a fund raiser. These cost me just $5, and have already earned their keep. These are nitrile gloves made by the Atlas Glove Company. They have a waterproof palm and a stretchy, breathable fabric back. I have big hands, and the x-large size was perfect. Mine are black with silver palms, but the smaller sizes come in a variety of colors.
I don’t generally wear gloves when gardening, as most are too thick – and I like the feel of the soil – but in cold weather I do wear them. These are thin enough that I can go easily in my pants pocket and pull out my pocket knife, or feel a tender weed. The nitrile glove is the Atlas 370B series. I’ve also used a thicker Atlas glove with a natural rubber palm, the 300 series. These are both available at most gardening centers.
Does your loved one start plants by seed? Gift cards at garden centers or seed companies are nice. I get my seeds from several places: the Hudson Valley Seed Library, Johnny’s Selected Seeds, High Mowing Seeds, Renees Garden and a young company in New York State, Fruition Seeds. All have wonderful selections.
One of my favorite additions to my garden this year was a “VegTrug” from Gardener’s Supply Co. (www.gardeners.com, Item#8586918). This is a stained cedar planting box on legs, about 6 feet long and 32 inches wide that retails for $279, with free shipping. It is V-shaped in cross section with the deepest portion 16 inches deep – deep enough for potatoes or tomatoes. It stands 32 inches tall, so no bending is needed to weed or to pick.
In my VegTrug I grew one patio tomato and pretty much every kind of herb: basil, dill, marjoram, thyme, sage, purple sage, chives, oregano and parsley. I even had a nasturtium cascading over one end.
One reason I loved my VegTrug was the convenience: it allowed me to have herbs near the house in a spot not otherwise suitable for growing. And the plants grew well, although in the heat of the summer they dried out more quickly than my garden near the stream, so I watered pretty much every sunny day. It uses 380 liters of soil mix, so I made my own, a 50-50 mix of peat moss and compost. The bottom is slotted for drainage, but it comes with a woven liner to prevent soil from washing away.
Every gardener needs a good weeding tool, and every year I recommend the CobraHead Weeder, because I believe it is the best weeding tool available. This tool has a single tine that is curved like the shape of a rising Cobra. I use it to tease out grass roots, to get under large weeds (so I can loosen the soil below them and pull from both top and bottom of the weed at the same time), and for preparing soil to plant. Now it seems a part of my right hand (though it is right-left neutral). At under $25 locally or from the manufacturer (a family business found at www.CobraHead.com), this tool is tough, strong, and made in the USA.
Every year I try to learn more about growing healthy plants. This year I paid $50 to join the Bionutrient Food Association (http://bionutrient.org/), and would like to suggest giving a membership as a nice present. One of the goals of the non-profit is to educate members about how to grow food that is nutrient-rich.
Much commercial agriculture depends on adding just 3 minerals to the soil (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) and basically ignoring the other nutrients that plants – and humans – need to be healthy. Growing vegetables year after year removes micronutrients from the soil that need to be replaced. The BFA offers information and workshops that I believe will help me to grow better food and stay healthy.
Weeds are the bane of many gardeners. One way to minimize their presence is to weed daily, mulch, or to put down weed mats. A Vermont company, Garden Mats (https://gardenmats.com) produces heavy-duty woven mats with pre-cut holes in a variety of patterns for different vegetables. I’ve used them – and re-used them. They keep down weeds, hold in some moisture, but also breathe and let rain penetrate. They are 4 feet wide and come in lengths of 6, 12 and 18-feet for a cost of $11 to $31. They are definitely a labor-saver, and they claim the mats increase yields 10% to 20%, too. I like them, and also the fact that it is a small, family-owned business.
The last item for this year’s list is a lovely pair of stainless-steel garden shears for cutting flowers, herbs, and for use in the kitchen. Made in England, these shears are elegant as well as sturdy, and are said to be designed for small hands. Sold by Gardeners Supply (Item#8593404), they retail for $60 and come in a handsome gift box.
Santa, if you’re listening, I have everything I need. So you can just volunteer to come work in my garden next summer. I know it’s the off-season for you, and we both need to lose some weight, anyhow. We can pull weeds and eat cukes.
Read Henry’s blog at https://dailyuv.com/gardeningg
I garden for many reasons. I want to grow my own chemical-free food, to have an excuse to be outside a few hours every day, and to have flowers on my table most of the year. Right now I have just 2 out of 3. A good batting average for a ball player – better than David Ortiz, for example – but not good enough for me. I want to hit one thousand. I need color and beauty in my house all year.
I almost always have a pair of pruners in my car, so when driving past an uninhabited swampy area recently I stopped to pick some winterberries. These red berries are the fruits of our native holly, Ilex verticillata. Unlike the evergreen varieties with shiny green leaves, winterberry drops its leaves in the fall, but clings to the red berries displayed on the female bushes.
Winterberry is dioecious, meaning that there are male and female bushes, and (remember that lecture you got ever so long ago about the birds and bees?) only the females produce fruit. And only if there are males present. If you buy winterberry plants, a good nursery will be sure to sell you a male to go along with your females. One male for 5 females is adequate.
Winterberry is a very satisfactory garden plant. It prefers moist soil and will grow in standing water – though I have seen it succeed in ordinary garden locations, though not in dry, sandy places. It does best in acidic soil, with a pH of 4.5 to 6.5, so add some sulfur to the planting hole. It produces the most berries in full sun. Soil rich in organic matter is a plus.
It is very cold hardy, surviving temperatures to minus 40 degrees (Zone 3). It is a moderate-sized shrub, rarely getting much more than 6 to 8 feet tall and 4 feet wide. I’m not sure why I haven’t planted much of it, as it brightens the winter landscape with its bright berries standing in contrast to the snow. Next year I will plant some more. Remind me!
Of my outdoor flowering plants, only witchhazel (Hamamelis virginiana) is still in bloom. Its yellow flowers have strap-like curly petals that remind me ever so slightly of yellow spiders dancing on the branches. The flowers are, theoretically, fragrant, but I have never noticed such.
Witchhazel will bloom in sun or shade and prefers moist soil. It has an open, branching habit. It is native to our area, and I first met it in the fall, hiking through a woods; I was intrigued to find something blooming after leaf drop, and looked it up. I have two that I planted, and after 10 years they are about 10 feet tall – but somewhat wispy. They are considered small trees or large shrubs and will grow up to 20 feet tall, but can be kept smaller with pruning.
My fallback position for color on the table is to visit my local florist on a regular basis for cut flowers. For 10 to 15 dollars I can get a nice arrangement of flowers that will last up to two weeks. Ask for flowers that will last a long time in an arrangement. Chrysanthemums are great, as are alstroemeria and carnations; lisianthus, spray roses, statice and monkey paws last well, too.
Each fall I also purchase an orchid. Orchids are thought by some as fussy or temperamental, but if you treat them right, they will bloom for months – and even come back and bloom the following year (though that is tougher). The most common orchids sold are Phalaenopsis orchids. Twenty years ago they were dreadfully expensive, but growers in Holland and Taiwan now produce them by cloning – producing hundreds of thousands of them for sale in big box stores.
Phalaenopsis orchids like bright light, but no direct sunshine. They do not do well with cold temperatures, but home temperatures are generally fine – even though they come from greenhouses with temperatures in the 80’s. Don’t place them near radiators, woodstoves or doors to the outside. And never let the roots sit in water!
When buying an orchid try to find one that not only has pleasing colors, but also has plenty of buds. The stems will blossom from bottom to top, but usually you will only get blossoms from existing buds. I have cut back flower stems part way to the base after blooming, and gotten side shoots that blossomed, but that is rare.
Because you can buy a Phalaenopsis orchid for $10 to $15, some people just toss them out after blooming. Not me. I keep them, watering once a week until summer, when I bring them outdoors onto my shady deck. They come in pots with no drainage holes and would drown and die if I left them in those pots, but I lift out the inner pot which is just a stiff plastic mesh, which allows rain to moisten the roots but not rot them.
This year I have 2 Phalaenopsis orchids that I bought last year, and one has started a flower stem. It hasn’t yet started forming buds and I know I will never get it to bloom as magnificently as it did when I bought it. Still, it will add some color in a couple of months – and it cost me nothing this year.
Most Americans waste money on unnecessary items from time to time. Me? I’d rather waste a little money on house plants and cut flowers than most other things.
Read Henry’s blog at https://dailyuv.com/
All right, I’ve managed to clean up my vegetable gardens and rake the lawn. I’ve gotten most of my flower beds cut back, weeded, and raked. So can I relax and watch football? NO, not yet. Smug though I may be for doing all that, there is still work to do. Trees and shrubs need attention now.
Let’s start with the deer. You know what trees and shrubs deer will eat. What can we do to protect those tasty treats? I’ve had good luck with a garlic repellent, one called, “Deer and Rabbit Repellent” made by Plant Pro-Tec. These are little cylinders (3 inches by half an inch) with a clothes pin type attachment that can clip onto branches.
Each package of 25 comes with a small tool to puncture the garlic oil storage compartments when you are ready to use them. They are rated for use by organic gardeners, and relatively inexpensive. I’ve used them on shrubs previously eaten by deer, and never lost a bud. They should be available at your local garden center or on-line at www.plantprotec.com.
Voles can be lethal to young fruit trees. Two years ago we had very deep snow and many gardeners lost fruit trees to voles – they girdled the trees, chewing off the bark and cambium layer, which eventually killed the trees. The deep snow allowed the voles to stay hidden from owls and hawks, allowing them to greatly increase in number.
To prevent that from happening, you can physically keep the voles away with fine-mesh screening called quarter-inch hardware cloth. It comes in 18- and 24-inch rolls, and I recommend the wider roll. A single layer of mesh screen around the base of the tree will keep the voles a bay. Remove the wire next spring to keep it from getting swallowed up by the bark as the tree grows (that would take a few years, but I’ve seen it happen).
Also available are plastic tubes slit up the side, allowing you to open the slit and slide the tube around young trees to protect them from rodents. These are generally 2 inches in diameter and 24 inches long. If your young tree has branches in its lower 2 feet of trunk, you will have to prune off those lower branches. But that is good anyway. And voles shouldn’t bother trees that are more than 2 inches in diameter anyway – their bark is thick enough to deter the rodents.
What about tender young shrubs? Will they survive the winter and bloom in the spring? Some gardeners like to wrap shrubs in burlap to protect them from cold winter winds. The winds can desiccate buds, preventing them from blooming. In 2015 I planted a kousa dogwood which is marginally hardy here. Last spring I only got a couple of blossoms – even though there had been more buds.
So this fall I wrapped my dogwood with a synthetic fabric designed to keep the cold wind from damaging buds, but allowing it to breathe. The material came in 12-foot by 5-foot pieces, and was sold as a “Bush Jacket”. I was given some of this material some years ago and hadn’t used it. An internet search told me that Gardener’s Supply is one source for it, and they don’t have it as sheets, but as bags or “jackets” that fit over small, medium or large shrubs.
An advantage of wrapping shrubs with either non-woven polypropylene fabric or burlap is that will also keep deer from eating your shrubs.
On a nice sunny Sunday I worked on my blueberries, too. I weeded them, digging up the sod that had grown right up to the base of each plant. I created a space free of grass and weeds about 18 to 24 inches all around the bushes. Blueberries have fine roots near the surface, so I was careful not to dig deeply with my weeding tool. I found that once I got started I could peel back the sod in big pieces with my hands. I will sprinkle some agricultural sulfur over the soil, and then put down a 3-inch layer of ground branches I got from an arborist.
The sulfur helps to keep the soil pH very acidic, which will promote good fruit production. Next year’s fruit buds are already set, so applying sulfur this year will not affect next year’s production. But in following years the sulfur will be a big help.
My apple trees did not produce much this year – there was a hard frost in April when the buds were getting ready to open. Additionally, the year before had been extraordinarily fruit-productive and trees tend to alternate between good years and bad. But this fall the fruit spurs are loaded with flower buds for next spring.
I picked or cut off any dead fruit still attached to the trees. Often diseased fruit will dry up and stay on the tree, and I don’t want any fungal spores to infect next year’s crop. I used a pole pruner to cut or knock off dead fruit. Finally, I raked under the trees to collect rotten fruit or infected leaves. I put all that on my burn pile that is awaiting snow for an opportunity to burn it.
You could also prune your fruit trees now, or in the late winter or early spring. But that’s an article for another day.
Read Henry’s twice-weekly blog at https://dailyuv.com/
Each year about now I suddenly realize that I should have already finished putting my garden to bed. This year I had a good excuse: I’d gone to France to hike, and was away for 3 weeks. But in other years my excuse has been the weather, or finishing a book that I was writing. You get it … I can be a bit of a procrastinator. Most of us are. But if you haven’t finished cleaning up your gardens yet, now is the time to get to work. Winter is just around the corner.
First, and most important to me, is to clean up the vegetable garden and get rid of weeds. I mulch heavily with newspapers and mulch hay, but there are still weeds present. Last week I raked off any newspapers my hungry earthworms had not eaten, and the rotting mulch hay on top. Then I dug out my weeds and lugged them away. Because of the mulch, weeding was not too time-consuming.
I did have some deep rooted weeds, mainly dock (Rumex spp.). The roots of this weed can easily go a foot deep in the first year. So I couldn’t just pull them, even with my favorite weeding tool in hand, the CobraHead weeder. They are a job for a garden fork. I push down on it with my foot, and the four tines go down a foot in the soil. I pull back, and it loosens the soil and lifts the roots a little. Then I am able to tug it out, roots and all. Later I will cover the beds with chopped leaves.
A buddy of mine called recently from Maine asking what to do with the leaves in their flower beds. Should he rake them out now or in the spring? I know a gardener who rakes all her leaves out onto the lawn, runs them over with the lawn mower, bags them up while nice and dry, and then stores them on the barn until spring. She cuts all her perennials down in the fall, too. Then, once the plants have all appeared in the spring, she mulches with the same leaves that were there in the fall.
That method works fine and the added organic matter from all those chopped leaves have built up her soil beautifully over the years. The chopped leaves hold in moisture and keep down weeds. But it’s a lot of work.
My approach is the Lazy-Boy way. I leave the leaves in place now – and in the spring, too, unless they are choking out small plants or covering something special. As a matter of aesthetics, if you don’t like the look of leaves, rake them up. Otherwise, leave them be and they will break down over time.
I will try to cut down most flowers before the snow flies. I leave some things with seeds for birds, sunflowers and black-eyed susans, for example. Instead of using hand pruners, I use a special serrated “root knife” that, unfortunately, is no longer commercially available. When I lose the last of my root knives, I’ll just use a steak knife – or find another manufacturer of the root knife, which has a nice curve to it. Why a knife? Cutting down hundreds of stems is tiring on the hands if using pruners.
You could also use a string trimmer or even a lawn mower to cut everything down. I have one long flower bed that I call my “Darwin bed”. It is full of tall flowers that can compete with the weeds – and each other. Asters, goldenrod, Joe-Pye weed, tall phlox, turtlehead and more compete for space. If a plant doesn’t survive, something else will fill up the space. In the fall I usually just run over it with my riding lawn mower, making it neat and tidy for a few minutes in the spring.
Another fall task involves improving the soil. I recently had my soil tested by Logan Labs (www.loganlabs.com). Their basic test gives a lot of information: pH, percentage of organic matter, mineral contents, trace mineral levels and more. As a member of the Bionutrient Food Association (http://bionurient.org), I was able to get recommended levels of minerals and trace minerals for top quality production, and what (and how much) to add. Of course, each state offers soil testing through their Cooperative Extension service.
My soil is excellent, but needs a little tweaking. Boron, for example, is a little low, as are my potassium levels. I will make some additions this fall so that the added minerals can be incorporated into the soil over the fall, winter and spring. Green sand, a bagged supplement, is a good source of potassium.
The key to any soil addition is to remember that if adding a little is good, adding more is NOT. Even useful additions to the soil need to be done in carefully measured quantities. I will mix the minerals I add to the soil with a measured amount of compost, making it easier to distribute small quantities over my garden. So, for example, I need to add half a pound of calcium borate per 1,000 square feet of garden space – or about a pound for my 1,700 feet of vegetable garden. By mixing it in with compost I can distribute that better.
My blueberries – and yours – need a little agricultural sulfur added every year to keep the soil acidity good for them. Blueberries produce much better if the soil is very acidic – around 4.5 to 5.0. My recent soil test showed that in my garden beds the soil is 6.6, or just slightly acidic and perfect for vegetables. So I add sulfur each year to the blueberries to keep it acidic enough to produce well.
If I have the time (and the right weather) I will also weed around my blueberry bushes before adding sulfur. Blueberries have fibrous roots near the surface, so I’ll need to be careful. After weeding and adding sulfur I will mulch heavily with chipped branches to keep down the weeds.
There is lots more to do, of course, so I better stop writing and head outside to the garden while the weather is nice.
Read Henry’s garden blog at https://dailyuv.com/