The Judas Tree

The blooms come early and long before the leaves mature. The Judas Tree is said to be the tree from which Judas Iscariot hanged himself. Naturally, a tree of such elegance and delicate beauty would be renamed. In Pennsylvania, it is called the Eastern Redbud. It send out roots to propagate. It's stunning to see a whole hillside covered with Redbud in the early spring...

Native flowering Dogwood blooms seem to float...

Once established, the native Dogwood sets deep roots but is inclined to travel..... While between the woodpile and a forsythia in its waning days, a bleeding heart begins its wary entrance...

Spring is about Hope

Gardening: Succession Planting

Even the Wall Street Journal is getting into the gardening act. A couple days ago , the WSJ featured an article about suburban homeowners tearing up their green lawns to establish gardens. Can’t blame them—it’s tough to eat grass. With the rising price of food, gardening makes more sense now than ever. Yet, the WSJ article told of neighbors who complained of having to look at brown earth rather than green grass. What about those hungry people who complain of having too look at vast expanses of inedible green lawns? No mention of that.

I’m working on a small garden now and I’m remembering the problems we had last year when everything matured at mostly the same time. I managed to can a large number of hot peppers but not much else. I gave as much away as I could but some was wasted. This year, I am planning to engage in “succession planting” whereby you schedule maturation in a more orderly fashion.

I planted some tomato varieties by looking at the maturation dates. “Early girl” tomatoes are just that….expected to mature in about 60 to 65 days. There are other varieties which take longer to mature so you can plant some of each type.
With early vegetables like peas, lettuce, spinach, radishes and others, you can plant in short beds with planting intervals scheduled every two weeks until the weather gets too warm. Be sure to rotate what you plant and to rip up all the old vegetables the minute they begin to bolt.

Spring Garden Strategies

It's early spring. The water is rushing into the gorge and spewing from the waterfall down below. Yet, there is a degree of uncertainty about it all as the days go from frigid to warm and back again. We're behind with the indoor seedbeds and I'm looking at the high prices for hothouse plants in Wal-marts, Lowe's, Home Depot and the various local gardeners. The high prices are caused, in part, by the rising energy costs for transport, storage, and even for greenhouse production. It would have been a good year to get plants from seeds and I'm hoping it's not too late.

My obsession for the past three years has been Provence Lavender. Obsession comes from not being able to obtain any. So I bought some seeds this year and put them in a seed box. The minute I do that they pop up in the stores for $3.00 a plant. They are healthy plants. The pent-up lavender emotion of three years compelled me to splurge. Long before the flowers show, lavender has a wonderful, pungent smell that wafts in the air and clings to your fingers.

We've decided to expand the garden farther out into the law area behind the house. That involved skimming the topsoil grass off with the loader and moving it to a bare spot alongside the house. We quarreled about the kind of deer fence we'd put up, settling on something thin and unassuming.

We had a trillium at our old house and now we didn't so we planted a package of trillium seed in the shade beside the foundation. Ditto, the snakeskin orchid. I have no clue about either one, and these do not always flower in the first year.