Ask Paula: Ask a master gardener any gardening question each week
GardenJot is all about everyday gardeners offering their neighbors useful and easy to follow tips about growing successfully in their specific microclimate. So much of gardening is specific to that narrow contour in the valley or the place point in the county where the wind always seems to die down. As more gardeners join and put their gardens on the map across the world, that community of neighborhood gardeners is being created to answer those geographic-specific questions. And for those universal questions, we’ve recruited an expert who we think can help answer the toughest ones.
Paula is a certified master gardener (a title awarded to her by the University of California), and is also a certified consulting rosarian (certified by the American Rose Society). She is active in volunteering for her master gardening club, her local dahlia society and her local rose society. She has too many trophies and honors to count, the latest being “Best in Show” for cut flowers at her local county fair (the winning flower was a rare midnight calla lily). Her garden has been featured in the Home and Garden publication Perennials, in the local press and on countless garden tours. She is also an acclaimed tomato grower (who organizes her county’s tomato sale each year) and she grows a variety of fruit and vegetables, including pomegranates, cinderella pumpkins, strawberries, broccoli, lettuce and herbs. She is in the process of trying to overturn her city’s “no chicken” ordinance so she can raise her own egg-laying hens. An early proponent of green living, she has used her kitchen scraps to make her own “black gold” compost for years and is the proud owner of her very own active worm farm.
All this keeps her pretty busy, but she would be happy to answer a question a week from GardenJot users. To submit your questions, either visit her garden profile and send her a message directly. Alternatively, you can leave them in the comments section of this post, send an email to askpaula at gardenjot dot com or hit us up on Twitter @gardenjot.
Salsa Victory Garden at the Marin County Fair
We attended the Marin County Fair yesterday mostly to see the calla lily that won my mom her Best in Show award for the cut flower category. All of the flowers entered were beautiful. The lily on the right is the winner. The yellow one on the left is beautiful but not the winner so we weren’t sure what it was doing there:
One of the common refrains among the visitors was that so many of the same people had won so many of the awards. One locally famous grower from Novato is a dominant award winning rose grower who cleaned up the Marin Rose Society competition earlier this year. She had a nice showing at the fair too. The idea behind GardenJot is to encourage all gardeners to grow what they want and enter the most beautiful ones and be recognized for their work and passion. You don’t have to be a Master Gardener to do it.
Speaking of the Master Gardeners, they had a refreshingly shady booth in the agricultural area of the fair. Surrounded by pigs, horses, llamas and other livestock, the Marin Master Gardeners offered classes and exhibits displaying plants that can be grown successfully in different gardens across Marin County. Here are a few pictures:
Philadelphia’s gardens featured in the New York Times
Friday’s story in The New York Times featuring some of Philadelphia’s most beautiful gardens struck me because of the claim locals make that the city has the country’s largest concentration of public gardens. I have no way of validating that contention or not. Greater Philadelphia Gardens features 28 public gardens and it doesn’t matter if that’s more or less than the number of public gardens in other American cities. What’s interesting is that Philadelphia has such a long history of public gardens and retains its position as one of the great American cities for public gardens.
The author takes the reader on a tour of four of the most prominent ones including Bartram’s Garden, the country’s oldest existing botanic garden, founded in 1728. There is also a wonderful slide show. I’ve included a picture of one of the photos below. If you want to see a map of the 28 gardens, you can visit the GPG website for a static one or explore GardenJot’s page of world gardens to see an interactive version.
Poppies in Bartram's Garden
How English Gardens Were Forever Changed by an American Gardener
Everyone is aware how fanatical the English are about gardening. According to this article in the Wall Street Journal:
The British are obsessed with gardening. Each year they spend almost $6 billion on their gardens, close to what the country spent last year on military operations in Afganistan and Iraq. Ten-year waiting lists to rent a tiny plot in inner-city community gardens are not unusual…
Wow! I, like many, prefer the natural and informal style of English gardens to the formal gardens elsewhere in Europe (Versailles, Lake Como villas, etc). According to Andrea Wulf, however, it was an American farmer named John Bartam who was responsible for transforming English horticulture from the formal, topiary based gardening style still found elsewhere in Europe. John Bartum, a close friend of Benjamin Franklin, was put into touch with Franklin’s good British friend Peter Collinson, a plant collector and a seed exchange began - one that lasted 40 years. Bartum travelled what was then the colonies, sending hundreds of seeds to Collinson.
But what few people know is that the English landscape garden has its roots in America. The colonies’ flowering trees, flowering shrubs and glossy evergreens gave English gardeners in the 18th century the “living pencils” to draw the landscapes we adore so much today.”
Fascinating article and part of Wulf’s book “The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession“.
Americans Cut Back, Plant Vegetable Gardens
According to a survey by the Pew Institute, 80% of Americans have cut back their spending. One way 21% of Americans plan to save money is by planting a vegetable garden.
Here’s a good primer if you are looking to plant your own vegetable garden.
Tomato Seedling Sale
My mother-in-law is a certified Master Gardener, a title gained by being accredited through a year-long course. Each year she helps raise money for her local chapter of Master Gardeners by chairing and organizing a tomato festival, selling dozens of varieties of organic tomato seedlings. This year, it was a two-day event and they sold out of all seedlings both days. Most popular were the heirloom tomato varieties - some sold out in minutes. Until I attended the event I had no idea how popular tomatoes are and how excited people get about them. I mean, I love a Caprese salad and all, but who knew Early Girl tomato seedlings would cause people to line up in the early morning hours on a Sunday?
27 varieties in all were sold, and there were some great demonstrations by volunteers on how to grow the seedlings organically. Below are some photos of the event.
Varieties of Seedlings for Sale
Next Generation of Tomato Growers
The Real Grey Gardens
Just watched the fascinating HBO movie “Grey Gardens” about the strange mother/daughter duo, related to Jackie O, who lived in squalor on a decrepit East Hampton estate. At one time the gardens were among the most elaborate in the country, until the decline in fortune of the Bouvier Beales. Apparently they have been restored to their former glory by the current owners, who purchased the home from “Little Edie”, the daughter, after her mother passed away.
But one person intimately involved with the property is unlikely to be known to even the most hard-core Grey Gardens buff. For 23 years, Victoria Fensterer, an artist who designed and maintains the current gardens, has worked year round to preserve something of the wild spirit of the Beales’ Grey Gardens, on grounds that can nevertheless be navigated. “It is so lush, it’s on the edge of becoming decadent,” said Eden Rafshoon, a retired interior designer who has visited the Bradlees every summer for the last decade. “It’s extremely romantic, it’s very fragrant, and it’s extremely sensuous. It’s full of secret garden rooms and mystery.”
Mission accomplished. The photos that go with the article are beautiful, although I think my favorite is the one circa 1900 which shows what the original gardens looked like. Very romantic, almost ruin-like.
Food Gardens are the New Black
As I live in a second story walk-up apartment, my current regret is that I don’t have the space to plant a food garden. I grew up planting and growing veggies as a kid (cucumbers, tomatoes, squash and corn) in our backyard plot. It was fun (although not always a success) and I fell in love with the idea all over again after reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle. We have an herb garden on our fire escape in containers (as well as strawberries), but it’s not the same. I would like to look into getting a community plot within city’s community garden program.
And so this post from Skippy’s Vegetable Garden blog was of particular interest to me.
Our plot selection procedure is very low tech. After an intro talk for new gardeners to review rules and such, we walk around in groups, back and forth, and the coordinator points out available plots. Lots of discussion about plot pros and cons. Everyone picks in the order their application was received. A bit of a commotion, because all the enthusiastic gardeners want to pick first. “I’m SURE I was higher on the list”…. OMG.
It’s in another city, but cool to see how the selection works.
Gardens and Their Impact on Us
Gardening seems to connect everyone with nature. No matter where you are, could be Manhattan or outside of a gas station, if you see a patch of flowers, chances are you will feel a sort of camaraderie with the natural world.
After taking a peek at this link, you’ll see gardens and wildlife mixing harmoniously. On this blog post are photos of: deer strolling among flowers; a fawn standing by a pond; a raccoon exploring a birdfeeder that is overgrown with moss; a rabbit cautiously approaching a pretty bed. All of these images embody nature and the wild. These are things that when we see them take us out of man’s world and bring us back to nature.
GardenJot’s first blog post
This is the first GardenJot blog post. I’ve been using Twitter to get my bearings in recent month and start to introduce GardenJot to the world but so much is happening now that 140 characters may not be enough. There will be more to say in the coming weeks but for now, I hope it suffices to write that I’m happy you’re here and I hope you’ll find the service useful.