Planters Punchlines
Men’s Garden Club of Wethersfield
June 2012
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ANNUAL PICNIC - Monday June 25th, 5:30 -8:00 p.m. at the house of President Tony Sanders, 281 Garden St., in Wethersfield.
Wives, dates, potential members are cordially invited.
The club will supply hot dogs, hamburgers, etc., beer, wine and soda.
You are asked to please bring an appetizer, salad or side dish if your name comes alphabetically between Sey Adil and Charlie Officer – a dessert if you are between John Oldham and Rick Willard. Please bring your own lawn chairs.
Please call Tony ASAP @ (860) 529-3257 to let him know how many people and what you are bringing.
A brief business meeting will be held before we dine to elect the 2012-13 club officers and to discuss possible July/August activities.
The following Slate of Officers for 2012-13 was proposed at the May meeting:
President: Tony Sanders
Vice Pres.: John Swingen
Secretary: Fred Odell
Treasurer: Richard Prentice
Don’t forget – Help Maintain the Weston Rose Garden Saturdays @ 8:00 am: Fellowship, witty conversation, public service and a modicum of exercise.
Compostable Matter
By Jim Meehan
The hollyhocks, seeds of which we imported four years ago from our daughter-in-law’s garden in Santa Fe New Mexico, are hopscotching their way around our property. Like Patty Hearst, they have changed from “abductees” to “volunteers”. Fortunately for us, unlike Tania the Terrorist, they are not brandishing weapons – although I am more than a little worried about their future plans.
Let me explain.
Our yard has a long history of vegetative volunteerism. Our first vegetable garden was planted on Memorial Day weekend of 1977 and contained, among other things, some cherry tomato plants – Sweet 100s I believe. They grew and produced, if not their eponymous amount, then certainly enough to keep us fed during our daily sojourns into the plot and its adjacent area. (Marsha and I never, ever, bring the bite-sized red fruits into our house; they are always devoured in situ while warm and at their juiciest.)
The next year we planted three more and got, in return, five or six plants – a trio of new ones and a pair of spontaneous spinoffs from the prior year. And so it has gone. This year we only planted one because actually three are enough for the two of us.
Early in the history of this same piece of cultivated land my in-laws secretly planted some amaranth that was growing (I do not know why) in their own vegetable plot. It is a tall herb with a feathery maroon flower and a thick stalk that sometimes requires the use of a pruning saw to take down. Like the aforementioned hollyhocks and cherry tomatoes it has consistently regenerated itself year after year after year….
The latter two crops have thus far limited their travels to different areas within their original garden. To me this is a good thing. I have a hard enough time managing and maintaining the stuff that grows where I put it, without having to deal with a piece of greenery that is looking to find its own place in the sun.
A few years ago that bed was converted from from 100% vegetable to a 90/10 perennials/tomatoes mix. The hollyhocks made their east coast debut as one of the new perpetual crops. Up until this season they also had stayed within their boundary. But this year they are definitely expanding their range – already advancing into the front yard.
Former garden club member Dario Bollacasa recently sent me this photo that he says are some of our hollyhocks growing in the backyard of his and Susan’s new house in Boise, Idaho. Marsha and I must have given them seeds.
The alternative is just too scary to contemplate.
Do Toad Houses Really Work?
http://homemadefertilizers.blogspot.com
?
Most gardeners want toads in their garden since they eat bugs. Many gardeners have had mixed results with 'toad houses' attracting and making homes for toads in their gardens.
What is a Toad House?
A toad house is often a porcelain or terra cotta dome with a small opening.
Do Toad Houses work?
The overwhelming consensus is no, most toad houses do not attract or keep toads or frogs in your garden. The reasons why these do not work will help you generate an effective plan to bring and keep toads in your garden.
Most toad houses only have one opening. There are a lot of animals that appreciate small dark places and the toad is one of them. However, many gardeners believe that toads will only make a home in a small area with a 'back door'. There are currently very few toad house models on the market with more than one opening.
Other animals like toad houses too. If a mouse, spider or wasp makes a home from your toad house first, then that's that. Frogs aren't typically going to run another animal from its home and get comfy.
How Can I Get Toads in my Garden?
The best way to get toads in your garden is to try it yourself. Create dark, damp areas around the garden that have the characteristics of a fallen, hollow log. Make sure there are two small openings and use a more natural, unpainted substance. Some gardeners find success by simply smashing an old terra cotta planter in two pieces, ensuring there are ample openings at either end.
Good luck making a simple toad house on your own!
HOW AND WHY
DOES OVERWATERING KILL PLANTS?
http://gardenofeaden.blogspot.com
The biggest problem with recognising plants that have been over-watered is the confusion brought on by the symptoms they display. The trouble is that when plants are stressed in this way they normally show identical symptoms to those that have been stressed through under-watering, i.e leaf curling, stem drooping and leaf drop etc. Although at first this may seem to make no sense at all, the reasons behind this is actually quite straightforward - and it's all to do with air!
If you look at the roots of a plant you can easily spot the main body of the root which is used to transport water and nutrients to the rest of the plant. Then if you look a little closer, you should also be able to see extremely fine, hair like roots, and these are the parts that are most important here. Each of these tiny root hairs is in fact a single modified plant cell, and as with all plant (and animal) cells they need oxygen to metabolise. This is also the same for the cells found in the human body which is why we have a need to regularly breath air (oxygen) into our lungs. That way it can be absorbed into our blood where a dynamic vascular system transports the highly oxygenated blood around our bodies. It also moves poorly oxygenated blood back to our lungs where the gaseous by-product carbon dioxide is expelled harmlessly from our bodies.
The root hairs receive their available oxygen from tiny air pockets that exist in the surrounding soil, and although in their normal environment they may become filled with water from periodic rainfall, this excess of water will normally drain away allowing new air pockets to form. It's only when the water doesn't drain away through floodings or constant heavy rainfall, that problems then occur within the root environment.
By denying an adequate supply of oxygen to the root hairs, these specialised cells are unable to metabolise and although they will be able to tolerate these conditions for a short while, continued exposure to over-watering will cause them to eventually die. The trouble is that all plants need a reasonable supply of water for transpiration (breathing), to maintain temperature so that they don't overheat, and to remain turgid and upright.
As mentioned previously, plants need these specialised root hairs for their uptake of nutrients and water. If enough of these specialised root hairs die then the plant will be unable to take up enough water to ensure its survival, and of course, will begin to dry out internally showing the characteristic dessication symptoms often mistaken for drought. The point is this, even though there is more than enough water in the root environment, if the root hairs have died through 'suffocation' then the plant is no longer able to access the water to replace that which is used through its normal regulatory functions. The irony here is that the plant now enters a phase of stress due to internal drought and by trying to reduce water loss through leaf curling or drooping it exhibits the same symptoms as though it was suffering from a lack of water in the root environment. Unfortunately when people are unaware of this they will see the plant wilting and give it yet more water compounding the problem and causing further root death.
The only way to avoid this is to check the soil first before watering. You can buy various gadgets for this, use you finger or by judging the weight of the pot and comparing the weight of the pot and compost to what you know is wet or dry. You will find that the greatest cause of death among pot grown plants is in fact over-watering. It is also the easiest one to avoid.
Elizabethan Garden Q and A
http://www.folger.edu
What is the meaning of the pansy flower, called "love-in-idleness" in Shakespeare?
The pansy of Shakespeare's day was probably closer to what we call "johnny-jump-ups" than to the large, velvety flowers that grace our gardens, which were developed in the nineteenth century.
The small pansy-like bloom, also known as "heartsease" or "love-in-idleness," was cultivated throughout Europe in the sixteenth century for medicinal purposes. Under the name of Herbal Trinitatis or Trinity Herb, it was used to treat heart ailments as well as a host of other maladies, including pleurisy, skin diseases, convulsions, epilepsy and fits, childhood ague, and falling sickness. Culpeper, a seventeenth-century medical writer, adds,
"A strong decoction of syrup of the herb and flower is an excellent cure for the venereal disease."
In Hamlet, Ophelia evokes the French derivation of the name—"pensées" or "thoughts"—when she says, "and there is pansies, that's for thoughts."
Did gardeners in Shakespeare's time grow the same kinds of plants we do today and use them in similar ways?
Commonly known fruits, vegetables, and herbs were used in ways that would not surprise a contemporary cook, but they were also put to household uses that might today involve a trip to the pharmacy or hardware store. For example, the catalog for the Folger exhibition The Housewife's Rich Cabinet: Remedies, Recipes, & Helpful Hints explains how dill-seed was used to cure hiccups, lettuce to prevent drunkenness, and oregano to prevent an ant infestation. Herbs were used to scent clothing and sweeten breath, and to treat ailments from toothaches to the plague.
Radishes were especially useful. When applied to the soles of the feet with vinegar and salt, they were thought to draw out melancholic vapors. A liquor made from salted radishes could be used to get rid of unsightly warts: "
Anoint your warts 3 or 4 times in a day (the oftener the better), and in 5 or 6 days they will consume away."
Another tipster recommended them as an effective way to eliminate snakes:
"Strike them with a large radish, and one stroke kills them."
That same source suggested a vegetarian solution for driving out moles:
"Take a head or two of garlic, onion, or leek, and put it into their holes, and they'll run out as if amazed."
Why Garden?
By Paul McKenzie, special to HGTV.com
Most people separate work and play into separate boxes — 8-to-5 in the cubicle, weekday evenings watching sitcoms or carting the kids to ballet rehearsal, and weekends of golf or waterskiing.
Not so the gardener. Digging holes and pulling weeds could hardly be called recreation. But gardening doesn't fit so neatly into the work box either. Although at day's end you're left with sore muscles and more weeds to pull, you also find that your soul has been nourished and your spirit rejuvenated.
Gardening is the most popular hobby, but the term seems pitifully inadequate. What term could be applied to a pursuit that takes so much of you and yet gives so much back? Gardening is an avocation, a passion, a calling. It's getting out of the car after a long day and a longer commute, feet sore, brain frazzled, body drained, and finding you can't wait to drag hose, tend tomatoes and transplant zinnias.
In the hierarchy of all things important, gardening is very near the top.
It's important because you pass along the awe to the youngsters in your life. Together you plant radish and carrot seeds and you get as excited as they do when the seedlings poke out of the ground — not to mention that kids who grow radishes and carrots are more likely to eat them.
Gardening, they say, keeps you young, although I haven't seen any scientific data on the subject. Staying young is important to me and I'm guessing gardening is less painful than some of the Beverly Hills methods (though perhaps nearly as costly). I've known a fair number of elder gardeners and noticed in them a certain nimbleness of step, a bit less stiffness in knee and hip. The elder gardener may pull fewer weeds and find their shrubbery has swallowed large chunks of yard, but they walk through the garden with a grace that only a lifetime among bees and butterflies can give.
Gardening is important for the economy since only a gardener would spend $75 on a single hosta or daylily, and to do so with no regrets. Only a gardener would spend winter evenings reading plant descriptions in garden catalogs, believing every word.
It’s important because it teaches you humility when the $75 hosta is devoured by voles (a small vegetarian rodent with expensive tastes), or the prized rose bush decimated by Japanese beetles. It also teaches the joy of nurturing, the delightful responsibility of caring for a seedling that depends on you for light, water, life.
It gives you an excuse to wear silly hats that keep the sun off your neck and hang out with other gardeners who will covet your silly hats.
It's important because when your gardening days are finally done, some young couple will come along and rediscover your long-neglected garden. As they are cutting back the overgrown shrubbery they will encounter some fragrant treasure that you sowed so many years ago. That treasure will spark in them something that they will pass along to their own children.
In a world where conflict and strife seem to surround us, gardeners create a space where peace and beauty reign. In a time of rampant selfishness, gardeners set the example of selflessness. For it's impossible to garden only for yourself. The colors and textures you splash upon the ground are soaked up by all the birds, butterflies and passersby in your neighborhood.
But mostly, it's important to be a good steward of a small patch of earth and to know that you are one among millions who are helping to heal a wounded planet, one garden at a time.
Horti-Culture Corner
The Narcissist in the Garden
By Anne Higins
Every tulip an accolade
Every weed a reproach
Every rabbit a personal greeting
Every groundhog flinging brick bits and powder a deliberate attack
I dreamed the Hollyhocks
grew tall as trees,
proliferating on an inner wall of my house.
Bishops weed I was betrayed into planting
which now aggressively threatens
The pink feathers of the astilbe, mine – all mine!
A Gardener's Lament
by Roy Blount, Jr.
by Roy Blount, Jr.
gardenandgun.com
Can plants live up to the hype?
Harvest time is upon us, and we are stuck with what we have sown. In the garden catalogues and on their little tags and stickers, plants always sound so exciting—breath of Satan, sheepsizzle, giggling Leon, undulatiens, Celtic trousers, Eurasian blanc-mange, pixies’ cabbage, mysticium. So exciting, and so eager to please.
“In either mixed shade and sun or mixed sun and shade, in crumbly loam or clay base, in the doldrums or hurricane season, the Howdy Madame tomato yields plump vivid scarlet fruit the size of the average baby’s head and tasting, in fact, rather like a fresh-washed baby’s head smells, from July till hard frost. Just pray for light showers every night in June, and Madame will take it from there. She and Mother Nature, after all, knew each other in high school.”
So why, in the event, do these tomatoes look like the wages of sin? Wrinkled, yellowish-blackish, oozy, and covered with—okay, maybe those aren’t carbuncles, but who would ever want to venture close enough to find out? “
A traditional favorite of the Norwegian royal family, St. Orson’s hump will flourish in marsh, gravel, or carpet sweepings, and presides with equal gravity over garden path or dining room table.”
Oh, and it breeds fire ants.
“Ladysbane, so-dubbed in Victorian England by dint of its blossoms’ ever-so-slight fragrance of chewing tobacco, more than makes up for any olfactory surprise by blanketing that slope you don’t want to mow anymore with a veritable slope-blanket of color.”
If you count brown as a color. And ever since the ladysbane started coming up, the cats refuse to go outdoors. They stay under the bed in the guest room. You have to shove their litterbox under there with them. And whenever anyone comes into that bedroom who has walked anywhere near the ladysbane, the cats hiss and yowl and roll around among the dust bunnies until that person takes another shower.
“If you think your teenagers love to tweet, wait till you hear the way songbirds respond to a patch of ruffled purple who-shot-john. You will share your feathery friends’ manifest delight from May to September, whether the weather turns wet or dry. And do you know? It appears that the who-shot-john loves the birds right back.” That’s all well and good, except that the birds that come to the who-shot-john are birds that are not in any of the bird books. Birds whose colors derive from some other spectrum. And the birds fight over the who-shot-john. Savagely. To the death sometimes. Deep into the night.
“When the first English-speaking settlers arrived in what is now West Texas, they were so entranced by the frothy sprays of off-white that hid the rocks they rushed to stub their toes upon (but just at first!), they called that delicate stone-hugging perennial olordylordia. If you have rocks, why dig them up? Veil them with this hardy survivor of pioneer days—and don’t worry, the olordylordia will find soil, somewhere. Just toss the seeds and sit back.”
Yes. The seeds. And the frothy phase. And then, after the froth, olordylordia sends out gangly stalks bearing sentient-looking pods that burst all at once to scatter dense clouds of seeds all over your property and your neighbors’ and your neighbors’ neighbors’, and pretty soon all those neighbors are pounding on your door yelling about how, after enduring a thirty-year epidemic of olordylordia, they had just about got it stamped out at last and here you are loosing another plague of olordylordia upon the whole vicinity and what are you going to do about it?
Or maybe plants do things for you that they don’t for me, and don’t do things to you that they do to me. Maybe your plumbers’ balm came out looking exactly like the pictures in the catalogue, and when squeezed its leaves do in fact yield a nice-smelling ointment-like stuff that soothes scraped knuckles and in a pinch may be used as grout. Maybe “sweet Bessemer” did not turn out, in your case, to be a typographical error, and does smell sweet, not sweaty. Maybe your Helvetian periculosa didn’t go all ingrown and threaten the basement. Maybe I just have a lurid thumb.
But tell me this: Is it the breeze that’s making those throttleberries press up against my window screen here—pressing, pressing, harder, harder—or their own volition?
GMG's Friday Find: A Swiss Army Garden Knife?
Another great tool to make your gardening chores a little easier
http://blog.gardenmediagroup.com
Today's find was found in Good Housekeeping magazine (May 2012 Issue.) It was part of their Total Time Savers suggestions (which you should all take a look at) and I just knew it had to be our Friday Find! Leonard Deluxe Stainless Steel Soil Knife – This is the product description directly from their website [www.gardenersedge.com/product.aspx?p=4752]:
Based upon many customer suggestions and professional feedback, we created our deluxe soil knife, the next evolution. This deluxe stainless steel soil knife is also made in Maniago, Italy and also backed by our "no questions asked" LIFETIME WARRANTY, but it's even better!
Use it to: divide plants, plant bulbs, flowers and herbs, dig out weeds, remove rocks, cut through roots, plant in pots, clean out cracks, cut twine and ties, and for so much more!
New features include:
Larger Diameter Hook Opening: Hangs neatly on your peg rack for a tidy shed or work bench.
Thumb-Rest Handle: A thumb rest at the base, a wider safety guard, and a more comfortable grip for all-day digging, and so you can push into the soil with more control.
Twine Cutting Notch: Cut twine and plant ties as you go, without having to switch tools.
Depth Markings on Blade: Inch markings on the Swedish stainless steel blade will ensure your plants and bulbs are planted at just the right depth.
Extended Dual Cut Serrated Edge: Now an even sharper and longer cutting stroke and sharper serrations for easier cutting of roots and swift division of perennials and grasses.
Don't think that these improvements mean we've skimped anywhere else: this deluxe soil knife is still manufactured from the highest quality, rust-resistant Swedish stainless steel as the classic. The blade is engineered to withstand over 300 lbs of pressure, for a lifetime of use. The 6-inch stainless steel blade has a tapered slicing edge, plus a sharp, deeply serrated side made for fast root cutting.
Comfortable one-piece molded composite handle offers a more rounded grip and molded thumb rest. Blade is 1.75 inches wide, 11.75 inches overall length. Sheath sold separately. Ship wt .5 lbs. Cost: $19.99
