It pains me to see customers spending hundreds of dollars on new plants and simultaneously refusing to spend a few more on a bag or two of compost and a box of starter fertilizer. These two items are not unnecessary “add-ons” that the retailer is just trying to add to the sale, they are critical components of a successful transplanting process - or as I like to refer to them as “plant insurance”. Unless you have phenomenal soil, you should always add compost and starter fertilizers when you are planting new plants. Here is why…
Before I launch into my diatribe on the glories of annuals, I probably should make sure everyone understands the difference between annuals and perennials… Annuals are plants that grow, bloom, set seed, and die all in one season. Perennials, on the other hand, grow, bloom, set seed, go dormant, and then return the following season twice as big. Where as annuals will bloom all summer long, perennials, for the most part, only bloom for 5 to 6 weeks….
April is a floriferous month to be sure, but along with all those glorious rhodies, tulips, daffodils, flowering cherries and magnolias, there is also an amazing array of new foliage emerging from both evergreen plants as well as deciduous ones. Personally, I find these foliar displays just as exciting as the floral ones….
Over my lifetime as a horticulturist, I have found myself enamored with different genera of plants to the point that I have gone out of my way to collect as many variations of the same genus, simply because I thought they were “really cool”. The genus “Bergenia” is a typical example and for me it all started when I was quite young…
April and May are high season for enjoying the gorgeous blooms of rhododendrons. They come in many colors and sizes, and for the most part, are easy to grow. While some varieties bloom as early as February, and a few others hold off until June, this is the time when the bulk of them come into their glory…
It was exactly 18 years ago, on April 1, 2004, when I was sitting at my computer straining my brain to come up with a timely subject upon which to pontificate. It occurred to me that my column was going to appear exactly on the first of April - a day that traditionally has been set aside for enjoying a practical joke or two…
Something special happened in the garden this last week. We experienced the vernal equinox, a time when we receive exactly 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night… Once we hit this spot, when our day lengths start to exceed our night lengths, we can expect to experience magical things happening in the garden…
Over the last two years, during this gawd-awful pandemic, garden centers have seen a huge increase in sales of vegetable growing supplies. A lot of people either got into veggie gardening for the first time or simply upped their game due to the extra time they had on their hands, with nowhere to go. For me personally…
Okay, this title is probably a bit more dramatic than it needs to be. The truth is, that while I lost a ton of new plants from last year’s plantings, both from the record heatwave in the summer and the colder-than-usual winter, I probably planted too many in the first place and would have thinned out several of them anyway. Just the same, I think I would have preferred that I made those decisions and not Mother Nature. So much for the illusion that we are in control of our gardens…
The Golfing Gardener
Trevor Cameron
I thought it might be fun to kick off the new year in style with some gardening resolutions, a practice that may both motivate us and help to maximize our gardening potential. It goes without saying that there are many ways any of us can improve in our lives, community, relationships and even workplace. Setting goals is always useful (year around for that matter), but it seems like at the New Year holiday, resolutions large and small take center stage. I will skip the topics of…