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 »

“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 »

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 »

“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 »

Of the other erigerons the best-known Is probably the pinky- mauve Quakeress, and her white counterpart. There is also Pink Pearl which is less exuberant, Mrs Beale, azureus, speciocus, Moerheim Beauty, Beauty of Hale and many others. E. Mesa Grande is a great stand-by as she will bloom till November, getting deeper in colour as the season advances. To keep up a generous succession of bloom it pays to cut off the flower stalks near the ground, instead of just snipping off the dead flowers. E. Darkest of All is a lovely newcomer in deep violet, with a greeny-yellow eye, but not quite so lavish with its second thoughts as some of the others. Nor is the salmon, E. B. Ladhams, a regular second bloomer, although one occasionally finds a late flower or two. The rock erigeron, E. glaucus, shares the long season habit with its sisters, and is a useful plant when a wall or rock garden pocket calls for something bold and substantial.

Of all the flowers I know I think penstemons fulfil my requirements as well as any. For some reason they had the reputation of being not quite hardy, but I think they have outgrown that libel. You may, lose them if you savagely cut them down early in the winter, but if this rite is delayed till all danger of frost is over there is no likelihood of trouble. I agree it is very difficult to restrain one’s itching secateurs when the sun shines and the ragged brown leaves defile the landscape, but it is worth the sacrifice. Read the rest of this entry »