This week on America’s Home Grown Veggie Show I am interviewing author Jean Ann Van Krevelen about her new book Grocery Gardening. The book goes through most of the common fruit, vegetable and herbs that you would pick up at the supermarket and tells you how to grow, cook and preserve them. This may seem like 3 books in one, and in some ways it is.
For instance, each item such as chives, has four entry points divided into tabs: There is planting/growing; varieties;produce selection (for those who cannot grow these things)/harvest; and preserving. There is not a tab for recipes but there are lots of recipes in the book too. One extra for today’s modern household is the nutritional information.
I think this is the first book that takes the shopper’s point of view when talking about growing. Too often gardeners get carried away with growing new things and are confident about how to grow them. The standard garden book though does not tell you when to actually harvest the melon or tomato or green bean. This book does that and does it in a very clear way.
This Saturday – March 13th Jean Ann will be giving away a signed copy of her book, so please listen in to America’s Home Grown Veggie Show at 10am, on www.radiosandysprings.com. Join us on Facebook at americashomegrownveggies to hear about other books, tools and seeds that we give away to lucky listeners every week.
The consensus is that the Atlanta area is botanically 2 weeks behind the normal for blooms this year. In many ways that is a positive because the early blooms do get zapped by frost so this gentle, cool spring is keeping things in check. On the other hand most folks are rather sick of cool weather, westerly fronts blasting us with icy winds, and the constant little snow mix. These little daffodils were hiding underneath a patch of fragrant winter honeysuckle that has been in bloom for the last month or so. It was a definate sign that spring has to be soon and warmer weather will really be just around the corner.
One of the few advantages of the snow was that Barrington Hall’s remnant daffodil hedge did show up slightly better this week! The hedge was mentioned by George camp in a letter about 1850 ish, (”The jonquil hedge is in full bloom’) but he forgot to tell us where the hedge was, and we are now eyeing every peak of daffodils just in case they are ‘the one’. This line though is favorite to be the line he mentioned. It was first noticed about 3 yrs ago but got mown down by landscape crews before I could mark it. I think this year there are a few green stems that are thickening indicating that we may get a bloom and my daffodil lady, Sara Van Beck, will be able to identify and perhaps even date the line.
This is my next ‘must have’ shrub and I do know where to find it. The edgeworthia is an open shrub that seems to be quite small and not unlike a callicarpa in form. The flowers though are quite something. We are all familiar with witch hazels that bloom in winter, and the casual but lovely winter honeysuckle but this character has only just come onto my radar. The yellow flowers are stunning in late winter and far more substantial than the wispy witch hazel. Where it has been,beside the local botanical garden, I don’t know but officially it survives to zone 8 – we are 7b, so maybe Atlanta Botanic Garden is just into 8. Looks like one of those borderline things that I will have to baby along and prove that it can almost live in zone 7 (..b) ish.
This has been an interesting week. A garden club requested my knot garden talk. This is one of my favorite talks that sadly, rarely gets requested. We do a quick romp through medieval English history and gardens.
I have always had problem with the term ‘open’ and ‘closed’ knots. There are several definitions that I have heard over the years, but non were verifiable. So I went to the most respected source I know – Robin Whalley, who wrote a terrific book on Knot Gardens. Turns out the he doesn’t mention the terms in his book because he has not had a source that actually defines the phrase. My earliest reference (Alice Morse Earle, 1901) quotes Parkinson; Whalley had Crisp (1925) who wanders around the subject a little and defines the terms using Markham without actually giving the part that Markham actually says ‘a closed knot is…’. This had let Whalley to wonder if Crisp had invented the term. Clearly that is not so, so the learned gentleman is heading back to the books of Markham and Parkinson to see who says what when.
Last weekend I went to the Southeastern Flower Show in Atlanta – I even joined the Southeastern Horticultural Society after meaning to for several months!
The show was a great place to meet great landscape designers and innovative products. I hope that some will come onto the radio with me over the next few months.
Here are a couple of interesting images:
To the left is a Rabbit in the garden – this cute set up was very popular with kids of all ages!
On the right: This set up uses a kind of hydroponic growing mechanism but the source of water comes from the fish tank below. The theory being that the fish water is enriched with nutirents, and that is sufficient for the plants. I forgot to ask if/what they feed the fish.
A Rabbit in the Garden The Fish/Grow System
I took a little tour around the garden today. We had another round of all day rain and cool temperatures. Everything is looking soggy but the lavender has definately suffered. The rosemary is not looking much better though. It will take a month or more before I really know whether the rosemary is going to make it, but I think the lavender will be yanked out when I
get a dry day. Even the weather man is complaining – “its so cold and wet out there, you just can’t get warm”! Still we have a ‘nice warmup’ next week – 52 degrees and sunshine for all of one day.
Last year I planted the cool weather vegetables way too late. I was still in northern thinking maybe, but planting cabbage in April led to whitefly by mid May. Not a very successful year cabbage-wise. So this year I am starting just a few seeds – no I do not need 10 seeds per cell and 600 little cabbage plants vying for survival! Just one seed per cell and if it doesn’t germinate then I will sow another one. After just a few days they are up and running.Now comes the really tricky part of getting them enough light. I am tempted to sit them outside in the rain rather than leave them near this sunny window (which will not see sun today).
My seeds sitting in a sunny window
There is something about the first flower in the garden that is special. It gives just a hint of what is to come in the next few months. The crocus seem to be nowhere one day and in bloom the next. They brave dark cloudy days, deluges of early spring storms, not to mention icy mixes that occur early in the year.
Regardless they are a pleasant sight when they bloom.
The first week in the new year is something that I have always enjoyed. It is a great time to go into the garden and start planning. It seems like the latter part of the year is a wind down in the garden, but once the new year has started the planning can begin again. It starts though with getting a jump on spring color by bringing in a few branches of forsythia or other early blooming shrub to force inside. This year I have a few forsythia and some winter honeysuckle which has already come into fragrant bloom after just a day or two inside.
Tags: garden plans, winter honysuckle
Well it had to happen – a real winter finally hit the south and my almost zone 7b turned coat on me and let me know otherwise.
The problems with knowing that something is too tender for your area, is that when you see it marketed or sold in a local nursery, you give it the benefit of the doubt. You have a string of mild winters and you become convinced that this tender thing can indeed survive in your cool 7b. The we get a run of 4 days in the teens overnight.One night would be possible but 4 no way. Technically zone 7b should go down to single digits but everyone forgets that and even zone 8a should be able to do low teens, but the plants know otherwise. My tender hardy banana is looking distinctly dead from cold. Inside the circles of stem there were little ice crystals.
I was truly in denial of the zoneand probably paid for it. The good news will be that if they survive – hey they can be called ‘hardy’.