Category Archives: Garden Seasons

Sharon Garden Club Flyer for September Garden Medley event

Sharon Garden Club Fall Fair – Save the Date – Sept 9

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Hints of fall are in the air, and the Sharon Garden Club is celebrating on September 9th with our September Garden Medley fundraiser. Join us from 11-4 to explore the learning and fun at our two locations :

  • a horticultural guided garden tour (70 Maskwonicut Street, Sharon)
  • a Standard Flower Show (62 Bullard Street, Sharon)
  • an elegant boxed lunch in the garden (70 Maskwonicut Street, Sharon)
  • a garden shoppe (70 Maskwonicut Street, Sharon)
  • live folk music (70 Maskwonicut Street, Sharon)
  • artists at work (70 Maskwonicut Street, Sharon)
  • unique raffle items (70 Maskwonicut Street, Sharon)

TICKETS are $30 in advance, $35 the day of the event. Get tickets from me (617-327-9254 or carol@garden-911.com) or lizsiem@comcast.net.

You’ll probably find me in a stall at the barn at 70 Maskwonicut Street, the stall converted into an art exhibit for pollinator-friendly plants and a jail for nasty butterfly-killing invasive ones. WANTED: native pollinator plants, alive; WANTED: dead invasive plants.

 

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Sunstreaked Solstice in a Sharon Rose Garden

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Sharon MA garden roses with streaks of sunlight

Day’s final rays of sun glint onto apothecary roses at the Sharon, MA home of an organic gardening client.

I love to garden until after sunset and well into dusk. That magic hour of dusky sky and light turns flowers and bugs and leaves and all things natural into a magnet for me. Like the way snow changes the way everything looks, the fast fading sky changes each bud and leaf and petal, minute by minute. And the biting bugs? I make sure I’m their least appealing option so I can stay out in the night’s coming as late as I can…and I can already detect day lengths shortening even as the days become warmer.

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Miss Twiggy Aces RI Certified Horticulturist Exam

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Rhus typhina winter twig with bud in leaf scar

Winter bud inset in a leaf scar of Rhus typhina, staghorn sumac in Sharon, MA. It looks like the face of a lion, which is how I remembered it for my RI Certified Horticulturist exam. [Photo Copyright 2017 Carol Lundeen].

Miss Twiggy.  That’s what my wife has been calling me  lately.  Our dining room table has practically been crawling with the winter twigs of trees, shrubs, and vines: messy, shedding, needle-dropping deciduous and evergreen winter twigs.  I’ve been studying them for six weeks for my RI Certified Horticulturist exam.  Why?  I’m a nature girl, and I love looking at things up close.

Did you have any idea that a winter twig could be so adorable as the one shown above?  Me neither.  Until Dr. Susan Gordon taught me how to notice and appreciate the diversity of these things.  I want to get so I can tell the winter twig of a glossy false buckthorn from a black cherry as easily as a dalmation from a beagle.  I aced both the written and ID portions of my exam Monday night.  I’m certifiably certified, so happy there’s so much more to learn, so thankful to everyone who’s helped me, and I can’t wait for the new gardening season!

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How to Keep Your Garden Plants Alive in Winter in a Drought

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MA drought map showing more than one third of the state in extreme drought condition

MA drought map updated December 13, 2016.  The area in red, about one third of the state, is in an Extreme Drought condition.

What do you do keep your drought-stressed plants alive this winter?  It’s hard to put a Band-Aid on drought-stressed plants, but here are some things you can do:

  • KEEP WATERING UNTIL THE GROUND FREEZES IN THE FALL/EARLY WINTER.  Check with your city or town to see if even now, in late December, there’s a current watering ban.  Especially with new plantings, and also with drought-stressed ones, you generally want to give them the equivalent of one inch of water per week all the way until the ground freezes.  If time or water is limited, focus on watering your most valuable plants, such as trees and shrubs.
  • IMPROVE YOUR SOIL.  On your lawn for instance, just 1/4 inch of compost every fall makes a huge difference in the resilience of your turf plants.  For your planting beds, pull back the mulch, spread 1/2 inch of compost or leaf mold,  scratch it into the soil surface, and put the mulch back in place.  This will increase the soil’s ability to hold moisture and make nutrients more available to the roots of your plants.  Think in terms of feeding your soil (the soil food web), not feeding your plants.
  • MULCH.  It’s not to late to apply 2-3 inches of mulch to all areas of exposed soil.  Do not let mulch come in contact with the trunks of your trees and shrubs, where it transitions into the root.  This area is called the root flare and should never be covered.  If you see a mulch volcano around the base of a tree, the mulch is suffocating the tree, which stresses it, makes it vulnerable to pests and pathogens, and puts the tree on a path of decline.  About the best mulch of all is fallen leaves that you’ve chopped up with your lawn mower and spread on your beds.  Speaking of chopped leaves, you can also pile them up, adding water to create a water film on most of the leaf surface area, and let them sit for a year or two.  The result, called leaf mold, is another source of organic matter that will make your plants sing.
  • PLANT NATIVES.  Many people picture native plants as being weedy and leggy.  In fact, native plants are best adapted to not only survive, but thrive in the existing environmental conditions.  Test your soil and know how much sun your planting site gets.  Then, it’s easy to select plants that should do quite well with minimum inputs, once established.

For more info about the drought status in MA, visit http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Home/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?MA

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Easton Town Offices plantings maturing fast

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Native grass little bluestem at the Easton Town Offices. I included it in the design for it's drought tolerance and wild look.

Little bluestem is a native plant I featured in the design at the Easton Town Offices flagpole island bed, created in conjunction with the Easton Garden Club’s Landscape Design Challenge. The bluestems’ red colorization increases with the cooling days of autumn, and it holds its horticultural interest until spring, all wild and tangled in the wind and weather.

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Fall magic at Roger Williams Park Botanical Center Display Garden

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Butterfly weed seed rests on Joe Pye weed at Roger Williams Park Botanical Center Display Garden.

Butterfly weed seed rests on Joe pye weed at Roger Williams Park Botanical Center Display Garden.

There’s magic in the air again this fall, as silky puffs burst out of butterfly weed follicles like bright white fireworks bursting out of a purse, each carrying what looks like an aged miniature copper penny that is actually a seed about to take flight.

I had the pleasure of volunteering with the URI Master Gardeners at Roger Williams Park Botanical Center Display Garden yesterday, weeding and edging beds (aka bed maintenance) just in time to spiff up for this weekend’s plant sale, URI Master Gardeners soil testing and info kiosk event, and the Botanical Center Conservancy Photography Contest Exhibition.

Even though I garden practically every day, I was in awe at the early fall colors in the Display Garden.  Blooming plumes on grasses push back and forth in the wind, contrasted against stands of perennials, some in full bloom and full of pollinators, others done blooming but still beautiful with their fall-colored crayon foliage and seeds about to drop.

Native butterfly weed follicles burst open at Roger Williams Park Botanical Center Display Garden

Native butterfly weed follicles burst open at Roger Williams Park Botanical Center Display Garden

Big milkweed bug nymphs on Asclepias tuberosa, butterfly weed

Nymphs of big milkweed bugs, Oncopeltus fasciatus, on butterfly weed follicles at Roger Williams Park Botanical Center Display Garden

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Garden-911: March Showers Bring March Flowers

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Garden-911 pollinator garden; fritillary butterfly on Echinacae flower.

Native plants attract native pollinators. This spangled fritillary butterfly lingered quite a while on this pink Echinacae in my front yard butterfly garden last fall.

75 degrees today in North Easton, and I’m soaked with spring fever, even now, after dark.  Tree frogs are croaking it up, salamanders getting ready for a big night tomorrow (I hope), and I got to spread leaf mold on a clients’ heirloom perennial garden today.  Hurray!

Leaf mold is about the best medicine ever for improving soil health, but let’s not leave out compost.  Leaf mold is decayed leaves, preferably chopped with a mower or shredder, that have been watered to dampness (like a wrung out sponge), piled up, and left to sit a good while to be broken down by members of the tiny microbes and insects society.  You know it’s about ready to use when you can no longer recognize the leaves as leaves and it’s all nice and fluffy.  A bit about using compost as a soil amendment later.

I’ll be spreading leaf mold on my own garden tomorrow.  It sounds gross, I know, but soon enough the Echinaca plant pictured in the photo will be again attracting fritillary butterflies and hummingbirds to my front yard, in part thanks to the natural magic that happens from feeding soil with leaf mold.

I love spring fever, and we have a nice steady rain coming tomorrow, so drink it in!

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Warm Winter Wishes from Carol’s Garden

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Carol's home garden ornaments in snow

A dusting of snow on Carol’s garden ornaments

I love winter.  I love how snow scrunches under my boots, the hint of wood smoke,  going out my backdoor directly into the Easton woods, making fresh snowshoe tracks.  I love how the trees and shrubs and perennials and annuals know what to do: looking dead but being very much alive, including the seeds, and how they all know what to do in the spring as the cold recedes.

Please join me in celebrating this season of rest and renewal!

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