Sustainable Gardening Blog

God, I love mid-summer.  Now I can’t STAND doing manual labor in the heat, so my mid-summer jobs are keeping everything watered that needs it, and doing a bit of weeding.  Even the weeding I won’t do after about 8 a.m.

But walking through the garden in the morning, coffee mug in hand, visiting the daylilies to see what’s blooming today and snap off yesterday’s batch?   To me it’s one of the sweetest pleasures of gardening.

Here you see two of my favorites.  The reddish one with the spidery form is ‘Brave World’ and on the right is the two-tone pink ‘Rosy Returns.’  Both have been blooming like crazy for years now.

I know I once complained about daylilies as garden plants (cornstalk foliage, anyone?) and it’s true that over the years I’ve given most of mine away.  But I’ve kept my absolute favorites, like these beauties, and for about three weeks I’m totally in love with them.

A tipping point has clearly been crossed because all of a sudden the need for sustainable fishing practices is everywhere.  And not just at The Slow Cook,  which I read religiously, despite my lack of interest in cooking.  It’s also here, here and - oh, everywhere.

So I was primed to try the new Georgetown hot spot Hook, the first restaurant in D.C. that adheres strictly to sustainable fishing practices.  Chef Barton Seaver, called a "visionary" in this Washington Post review, visits all his suppliers to make sure they’re not using such widespread practices as overfishing, collection techniques that destroy habitat, or farming with the use of antibiotics.

So how do sustainable fish taste?  Like real food, the real meat of
creatures of the sea, but with a touch of Barton’s culinary magic.  I’m no food critic but yum!

Each customer receives a wallet-sized brochure outlining in detail the fish to avoid and the fish to eat with impunity, a brochure brought to us with the help of Patagonia and the Blue Ocean Institute.  (The brochure’s supposed to be on line here, but that link isn’t working at the moment.)  And Earth Echo International is also involved somehow and my dinner companion was their secretary-treasurer, the charming Jan Cousteau, whom I’d met at the DC opening of "The Green" on the Sundance Channel.

So that’s what I was doing at a "glam new watering hole" that’s "swimming with the young and pretty."  A little off my usual beat. 

Photo of Jan Cousteau and Chef Barton Seaver, taken with a camera whose flash wasn’t working at that particular moment.

Posted below is my GardenRant story about Takoma’s Big Art+Nature Event of the Week, worth a mention right here on Takoma Gardener.

Read the rest of this entry »

Could garden coaching be going mainstream?  Check out this story about us in today’s Times, on page 1 of their Escapes section.  I like that, the notion of escaping to the garden. 

Two months after I was first interviewed and long after I’d thought the editor had nixed the whole idea, the article appears and I get to meet some of my competition - coaches in New York and Seattle.  I’m hoping the publicity will turn others on to the idea of garden coaching, either to become one or hire one because MAN, is it ever needed.

On page 2 of the story I’m quoted as saying this about an old grape holly:  "You don’t like it.  It doesn’t look good there.  Take it out."  Tough love, folks.  That’s what coaches are for.

Now for a few behind-the-scenes thoughts.

• The status of that particular paper is such that the mere mention of being interviewed or photographed by the Times seems to fill people with awe and predictions of great things to come. (We’ll see about that.)
• The client with whom I was photographed and who is also quoted in the story is the charming Kay Meek of Silver Spring, MD.  I’d been asked to recommend a few "advanced gardeners" among my clients, and she totally fit the bill.  I’m only sorry the photo chosen doesn’t show more of her fabulous garden, which I showed in this post.
• The very nice photographer got us to do the damnest things - some very cheesy, almost cheek-to-cheek shots, some weird arms-folded shots - and I’m just glad the editor chose a photo that needs no ’splaining.  And if you mouse over it you’ll see it’s titled "Gardenwomen" which has a nice sisterhood feel to it.
• My brazen attempt to get my coaching site’s URL used resulted in a big no-show - and after I’d added a Coach Near You page and everything.  But I like the page; I like spreading the coaching thing because I’m seeing how much people can be helped by hiring an experienced gardener for even an hour or two. 

Photo by the very nice, very persuasive Jamie Rose for the New York Times.

Be it ever so humble, I recommend weigelas whenever people need big, fast-growing filler plants to create a sense of having a garden.  Make that to create a garden, especially for the low-maintenance crowd.  So in my recent video about Sustainable Gardening I stood in front of these weigelas while holding the brand-new one below, still potted, exclaiming that they only cost 15 bucks and don’t look like much now but "they grow fast and before you know  it, they’ll look like these," pointing to the 5- and 7-foot versions that were on my property when I bought it back in ‘85.

In their new home, against the porch foundation of a client, it’s easy to imagine how they’ll transform the space in a couple of years or so.

And here’s why they qualify as plants for sustainable gardens.  Besides their size and naturally nice form, they’re about as drought-tolerant as anything but actual succulents can be, mine being neglected regularly in droughts with no complaint.

But a confession.  For my first 18 years or so growing these plants their shape wasn’t so great - think top-heavy, lop-sided and just off - and I had no fricking idea how to prune them back into some semblance of a pleasing shape.  Until I finally took up the pruning challenge by attending any and all talks and demonstrations I could find on the subject and investing in a really good book on the subject (Pruning by McHoy).  And emboldened by actual experts telling me to do it, I lopped these babies back to the ground, I tell you.  Okay, to 6 inches from the ground, but close enough.  But that same season they came roaring back to half this size and now, a year later, one is back to its 7′ stature and the other will get there soon.

And NOW I know how to keep them looking their best - renewal pruning.  OMIGOD, it’s gotta be the least amount of work for the biggest pay-off of any gardening task at all.  It just amounts to removing two or three of the oldest and/or tallest stems back to the ground every year.  It’s weird and counter-intuitive to remove the tallest stems, so the gardener feels particularly smart doing it because she knows it works like a charm.  I treat most of my viburnums this way, too.

And on the right is another lovely weigela, a shorter one called ‘White Knight," which isn’t white but a very pale pink.  The only pruning this has required so far is a little limbing up to keep it off the groundcover. 

Weiglas are definitely NOT hot-hot in 2007; they’re shrubs from our grandmothers’ gardens.  And they won’t thrill the plant collector, nosiree.  But you couldn’t ask for a greater contribution to the overall beauty of a garden. 

And it was love at first sight, though lust may be more accurate.

So I turned to three sources and learned some very encouraging things about Baptisia australis, common name Blue False Indigo.

From Tracy DiSabato-Aust:  It’s slow to establish but becomes a tough, drought-tolerant and low-maintenance plant.

Graham Rice writes, "The flowers are followed by persistent 2-inch swollen pods that
turn black as they mature; the seeds inside rattle when ripe."  Very cool - a plant that keeps changing while staying beautiful even after the flowers are gone.

Then Cutler and Ellis suggest we "cut the spikes of inflated blue-black seedpods midsummer for dried arrangements or leave them to add winter interest in the garden."  This seedpod thing just keeps getting better.  And they agree it’s drought-tolerant and has no known disease or pest problems.

And guess what - all baptisias are native to the Eastern U.S., so it’s a welcome addition to my list of native plants that are great garden plants.  The only tricky part is that "slow to establish," which tests our patience, and we hate that.  And its deep taproot really doesn’t react well to being moved.  I happen to have a little story about that.

I knew it had a taproot and I really, really intended to plant mine and leave them alone but see, I made a small gardening error.  I planted them just in front of a nice mass of asters, which stood at about an inch at the time.  But by the time those asters bloomed they weighed down and totally smothered those poor baptisias - or so it appeared.  But no, those babies popped right back up this spring.  For their success they were yanked up and moved, however, because that mass of asters wasn’t going anywhere.  But I handled them carefully, watered religiously, and even chopped off half the foliage, which seemed to do the trick because they look pretty happy again.  I apologized to them, too, so that probably helped.

THE DETAILS
It grows to as large as 5 feet tall and wide, though the cultivar ‘Purple Smoke’ that I bought won’t get larger than 3′.  Its May or June flowers last 2 to 4 weeks.  Hardy in Zones 3-9.  It takes full or partial sun, and seems adaptable to various soils.  As for care, Tracy recommends cutting back by 1/3 after flowering.  Man, that’s a tiny bit of maintenance for such a gorgeous plant.

Photo taken at Green Springs Garden.