What was I thinking, picking on dumb, generic gardening advice for the colder zones only? There’s plenty of boring, meaningless fall gardening advice across all the zones, heck, even across oceans. A few choice bits: From North Carolina— Clean out your vegetable garden of overgrown and harvested plants; clean out the weeds while you’re at [...]
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Posted by
Elizabeth Licata on September 24, 2008 at 10:00 am This post has 17 responses.
My un-mums: flowers and foliage that last me though October Never an avid gardening column reader at the best of times, in the fall, I give them a wide berth. It’s not just because the advice is often the type of banal “duh” stuff that I would assume very...
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Posted by
Elizabeth Licata on September 20, 2008 at 5:00 am This post has 14 responses.
A week ago, I took my kids to the Washington County Fair in my beloved Washington County, NY and was once again completely puzzled by it. Half of it is heavenly: shed after shed of prize-winning farm animals, most of them raised by children. If you catch it right,...
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Posted by
Michele Owens on September 2, 2008 at 5:24 am This post has 16 responses.
Yes, the answer is roses. Contey advises Knock Out Roses, for their easy maintenance and evocative name. Contey also likes the Jackson grill and the hori, a Japanese utility knife that you can also use to plant pansies.
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Posted by
Elizabeth Licata on August 24, 2008 at 12:00 pm This post has 25 responses.
Here’s the biggest tome to hit my doorstep in recent months. A 1108-page paperback, Allan Armitage’s third edition of Herbaceous Perennial Plants promises to differ from the last version of it (published in 1997) thusly: Hundreds of new cultivars that weren’t in existence in 1997 * Dozens of new...
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Posted by
Elizabeth Licata on August 13, 2008 at 3:42 am This post has 8 responses.
Picture me last week, relaxing at the beach in North Carolina, swimming daily, using SPF 40 under a tent, trying not to mix the margaritas much before 5 p.m.—but fie! Our nicely-appointed cottage is cursed with blazing wi-fi internet access and all three couples have misguidedly brought their laptops...
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Posted by
Elizabeth Licata on July 14, 2008 at 9:00 am This post has 27 responses.
Straight from the movie’s website - the synopsis: The fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles is the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have...
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Posted by
Susan Harris on June 24, 2008 at 9:05 am This post has 11 responses.
Well, they tried. Editors and researchers at the Paper of Record compiled gardening resources and that's a good thing, but look what they included: Lots of sites that are article mills and nothing more. That's easily determined by the lack of author bio, or even the identification of who's...
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Posted by
Susan Harris on June 17, 2008 at 12:48 pm This post has 7 responses.
CHOOSE GREEN In our chat Durham he told me his goal is to choose articles that are unbiased. Great! And how organic will the advice be? Well, the articles will take a "balanced approach." Now if that means the traditional Extension Service practice of presenting synthetics and organics as...
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Posted by
Susan Harris on June 17, 2008 at 3:22 am This post has 9 responses.
Review by the Quintessence Book Club, reported by Susan THE BOOKAnimal, Vegetable, Miracle is Barbara Kingsolver’s story of her family’s one-year experiment in eating food they grow themselves in Virginia, supplemented by the local farmers and only a few nonlocal items like coffee. It’s also her passionate plea for...
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Posted by
Susan Harris on June 7, 2008 at 1:49 pm This post has 21 responses.
by SusanAn event it truly was – the Washington premiere of the critically acclaimed documentary about topiary artist Pearl Fryar of Bishopville, South Carolina. Brought to us by the nonprofit neighborhood-saved Avalon Theater, which tried to raise enough money to bring Fryar himself here for the premiere but that...
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Posted by
Susan Harris on May 27, 2008 at 4:38 am This post has 8 responses.
My favorite garden writer by a million miles is Henry Mitchell, who had a gardening column in the Washington Post for 20 years, until he died in 1993, and whose columns were collected in a series of books, the best of which, in my opinion, is The Essential Earthman. ...
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Posted by
Michele Owens on April 16, 2008 at 5:07 pm This post has Comments Off.
The truth is we don’t have to stir our compost pile every day. Compost will happen in a crack in the sidewalk. It will happen in a plastic bag. It will happen in a trash can. It will happen under the old oak tree in a far corner of...
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Posted by
Susan Harris on April 8, 2008 at 4:12 am This post has 3 responses.
This just in from a Better Homes & Gardens editor who spoke at a recent media gathering: The hard-working folks at BH&G’s parent company Meredith (slogan: We Inspire. She Makes It Happen) have re-branded their editorial staff as Content Strategists. Whenever a piece of content (commodities that were themselves...
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Posted by
Amy Stewart on April 7, 2008 at 5:51 am This post has 24 responses.
by SusanLinda Chalker-Scott, university researcher and educator, not to mention editor of Master Gardener magazine, has compiled the best of her famous "Horticultural Myths" columns into a book, The Informed Gardener. The back cover asks: Are native plants the best choice for sustainable landscaping? Are organic products better or...
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Posted by
Susan Harris on April 5, 2008 at 3:41 am This post has 4 responses.
Wow. It feels like the last National Garden Month just ended! Like, today. But here we are on the brink of April 1, and according to this here press release, the National Garden Bureau (a non-profit run by representatives of the seed industry with the goal of ‘disseminating accurate...
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Posted by
Amy Stewart on March 31, 2008 at 5:30 am This post has 6 responses.
by SusanI was recently asked what’s up with the phrase "bored with perfect magazine gardens" in our Manifesto, and it got me thinking. Honestly, my biggest gripe with gardening magazines isn’t the perfection of the gardens they show us or even the sometimes tedious writing. No, for me it’s...
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Posted by
Susan Harris on March 28, 2008 at 1:29 pm This post has 8 responses.
by SusanJust when we need them the most, gardenwriters and publishers are hard at work showing us the plants we’ll be relying on increasingly in the age of global weirding known as climate change. You know, with not just longer droughts but rain, when it comes at all, being...
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Posted by
Susan Harris on March 28, 2008 at 5:35 am This post has 15 responses.
Sure, I’ve been known to pick on the New York Times-owned megasite About.com, but I’m happy to report the very good news that they’ve chosen Colleen Vanderlinden of In the Garden Online as their organic gardening expert. Congratulations, Colleen – you deserve it – and kudos to the folks...
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Posted by
Susan Harris on March 22, 2008 at 4:39 am This post has 6 responses.
by SusanThe DC Environmental Film Festival offers oodles of films to choose from – but just try getting a ticket for any of them. Lucky for me, my super-organized friend Kathy Jentz acquired press passes for the sold-out world premier of the Rachel Carson biopic Sense of Wonder, written...
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Posted by
Susan Harris on March 16, 2008 at 3:07 pm This post has 7 responses.
