The extreme case of the lazy gardener might be the college professor who planted his entire vegetable patch in spring and never looked at it again until it was time to harvest. He overplanted and just let the whole business go weedy. He got enough food for the family out of the enterprise, and that was all he was after in the first place.

Most of us aren’t that lazy. We take pride in order and control. The specter of carefully planned and planted crops being choked by weeds makes us shiver. We dream of lush crops and flamboyant flowers with few weeds, but we’d like to be able to reach that goal without accepting slavery. So we compromise and let a few weeds grow, or take a different tack and smother them with mulch. Read the rest of this entry »

The queen of mulch was Ruth Stout, author of How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back. She maintained a year- round hay mulch at least eight inches deep in her Connecticut vegetable garden. In her fifty-by-fifty-foot plot, she used twenty-five bales a year. She never turned the soil, sowed a cover crop, hoed, weeded, watered, or built a compost pile. She just mulched, making compost on the spot, for as the bottom layer of mulch decomposed, it added rich organic matter to the soil — a continuing process. Ruth didn’t bother with manures, but used cottonseed meal or soy bean meal for added nitrogen. She sprinkled it on top of the mulch in winter, at a rate of five pounds to one hundred square feet, so that snow and rain carried it down through the hay by planting time. To plant, she pulled aside the mulch and sowed the seed. Read the rest of this entry »

A Line of Defense

“The woodchuck got to me. He ate EVERYTHING — an entire row of beans in one night. I couldn’t feed him and me, too.”

If you’re in a country place where the woodchuck and rabbit populations are high, you need a fence. Invest some time and effort to construct one that’s burrow-proof. Do it in fall, while the memory of crops unsavored (because the varmint got there first) still stings. Read the rest of this entry »

The family cat prowling the garden will control its population of chipmunks, mice, and young rabbits.

Cut plastic gallon milk jugs in half lengthwise. Punch a hole in the bottom to let out rain. Set ripening melons in these contraptions. They help prevent rot and keep mice and shrews from nibbling on the melons.

Are rodents feasting on your tulip bulbs? Plant daffodils instead. Their bulbs are bitter, so mice and chipmunks won’t eat them.

If you’re determined to have tulips, interplant with Frittilaria imperialis bulbs. The two- to three-foot tall plants have pendulous red, orange, or yellow blooms. They exude a skunk-like odor that repels rodents and moles. Read the rest of this entry »

A successful landscape needs a garden style which appeals to you, and this is often linked to the house design. It can also be influenced by the kind of plants you like, or by your garden site and its climate.

Garden styles

There is a variety of garden styles, from formal to cottage garden, each with its own atmosphere and character. A predominantly natural or wild garden might look best in the country, or, alternatively, it could turn a town garden into a green oasis and bird sanctuary. A Mediterranean courtyard style would suit a small garden or echo Spanish-style architecture. You may like a formal garden for its symmetry, or an oriental garden for its serenity. Read the rest of this entry »

Lima beans need warm soil. Pre-sprout seeds before planting to reduce chances of their rotting in the garden. Start them in deep flats in vermiculite or perlite. Limas are “iffy” in the North. One year we had a super crop of sweet, tender beans. The next two years August was wet and cold and the pods never filled, so we reluctantly decided not to give them garden space. Read the rest of this entry »

Soak seeds of beets, Swiss chard, and peas for fifteen or twenty minutes before planting. Soak parsley, New Zealand spinach, and celery seed overnight to hasten germination.

Make multiple plantings of lettuce. “I make nine plantings of lettuce each season,” says a Vermont gardener. “Sometimes I scrape snow away to plant the first batch.” He plants only a couple of feet of each variety at a time. “I don’t try to salvage overmature lettuce,” he declares. “I turn it under and plant some more.” Read the rest of this entry »

For your perennial vegetables and fruits, pick a spot separate from or on the edge of (second best) the main vegetable garden. The easiest way to get a bed started is to stake it out the season before you plant. Cover existing sod with a thick layer of newspapers, magazines, or cardboard. A friend of mine declares that covering sod is the best use she’s found for cast-off issues of the Congressional Record. “They’re so thick nothing will grow through them,” she says. So they don’t blow away, pile something on top —hay, wood chips, sawdust, branches, whatever. By spring, the sod will have decomposed and added green manure to the soil without a struggle. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you water frequently? Leave a section of hose laid out down the center of the garden. Drive double stakes of wood at intervals to keep the hose from decimating the vegetables as you pull it back and forth.

Double stakes protect garden from hose

Another gardener, who has several small vegetable plots, drives a stake at the corner of each bed to protect plants while he drags the hose around. Read the rest of this entry »

The extreme case of the lazy gardener might be the college professor who planted his entire vegetable patch in spring and never looked at it again until it was time to harvest. He overplanted and just let the whole business go weedy. He got enough food for the family out of the enterprise, and that was all he was after in the first place.

Most of us aren’t that lazy. We take pride in order and control. The specter of carefully planned and planted crops being choked by weeds makes us shiver. Read the rest of this entry »

I maintained a year- round hay mulch at least eight inches deep in her Connecticut vegetable garden. In her fifty-by-fifty-foot plot, I used twenty-five bales a year. I never turned the soil, sowed a cover crop, hoed, weeded, watered, or built a compost pile. I just mulched, making compost on the spot, for as the bottom layer of mulch decomposed, it added rich organic matter to the soil— a continuing process. Ruth didn’t bother with manures, but used cottonseed meal or soy bean meal for added nitrogen. I sprinkled it on top of the mulch in winter, at a rate of five pounds to one hundred square feet, so that snow and rain carried it down through the hay by planting time. To plant, I pulled aside the mulch and sowed the seed. Read the rest of this entry »

“Black plastic has freed me from hours of weeding. I never used to finish that chore,” explains a Massachusetts gardener. “I resisted black plastic because it looks so awful, but we put dirt along the edges and scatter some on top, and that helps. We use three‑foot-wide rolls in our entire vegetable garden. We plant a row, lay the plastic, anchor the edges with dirt, plant another row, and so on. The weeding always had hung over me. Now I just hand-weed in the row itself, and we have more time to canoe or play tennis.” Read the rest of this entry »

The family cat prowling the garden will control its population of chipmunks, mice, and young rabbits.

Cut plastic gallon milk jugs in half lengthwise. Punch a hole in the bottom to let out rain. Set ripening melons in these contraptions. They help prevent rot and keep mice and shrews from nibbling on the melons.

Are rodents feasting on your tulip bulbs? Plant daffodils instead. Their bulbs are bitter, so mice and chipmunks won’t eat them. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s where the proverbial ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Once the woodchuck has chomped off your beans at ground level, the raccoon has stripped and devoured every ear of corn, and the cucumber beetles have decimated emerging seedlings, you may as well throw up your hands in surrender and hightail it to the nearest farmer’s market with wallet in hand. Read the rest of this entry »

Pine Origins

There are many different types of pine tree. Pinus sylvestris, one of the varieties used to produce essential oil, grows widely throughout Europe and the USSR, the main distillation centres being in Austria and the USSR.

Pine Essential oil

Steam distillation of pine needles produces a colourless oil with a strong odour reminiscent of balsam.

Pine Most common uses

Powerful antiseptic for the respiratory tract in cases of colds, influenza, pneumonia, asthma, sinusitis, bronchitis and laryngitis Read the rest of this entry »

Geranium Origins

Of the 700 different varieties of geranium, around seven are used to produce essential oils. The most exquisitely scented essential oil is Geranium Bourbon, which is obtained from Reunion, an island in the Indian Ocean that produces half the world’s total supply, and Algeria.

Geranium Essential oil

Steam distillation of the leaves and stems, gathered before flowering, produces a yellowish green to brown oil with a powerful aroma. It is a joyful, mentally uplifting oil and a great favourite. Its perfume makes it a valuable addition to many therapeutic but otherwise unattractively scented oils. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Gamble and Plant early

There’s more moisture in the soil in early spring than any other time of the year. As soon as you can work the soil and prepare seedbeds, gamble some seeds and plant some early crops. Push ahead your plantings of corn and potatoes, too. These crops take lots of water, and the more growth they can put on before dry weather, the better it is for you.

2. Don’t Fertilize too much early in the year

You’d be amazed at how few roots will develop in over- fertilized soils. Plants can get all the food they need close to the surface with just a small root system. So they don’t bother to go down deep. When a dry spell occurs, look out! They suffer quickly, you wind up watering them every day. It’s better for your crops if they have to work for their food and water. Let them develop far-reaching root systems which penetrate deep in the soil before you give them big helpings of plant food. Read the rest of this entry »

Composting is one of the most important things we gardeners can do. A good compost pile recycles vegetable scraps and other wastes from the garden and yard. We can “harvest” some free fertilizer for the garden, save money, and lessen our need for outside fertilizers. Composting also helps the community because it reduces the amount of garbage other people have to deal with. One of my dreams is to see every household in a town with a compost pile. Read the rest of this entry »

Dodder is perhaps one of the most interesting of the total parasites. It starts its existence normally, the seed germinating and producing a club-shaped taproot which fixes the plant in the soil. The shoot then begins growing, not straight up as is usual in seedlings, but with a circular movement. As soon as it touches a support it encircles it. If, however, the stem fails to find a suitable plant nearby, it is not rigid enough to grow upright and falls back to the ground. Read the rest of this entry »

The land surface of our planet provides a remarkably wide range of climatic conditions, and all but the most inhospitable habitats have been colonized by plants. Where plants are established, insects and animals can follow and the greatest diversity of life of all kinds is to be found in the most ideal climates. Read the rest of this entry »