|
|
By Hilda, on August 8th, 2011
 I’ve been seeing a lot of articles and blog posts about canning lately; it seems like the economy is inspiring people to preserve some of the harvest for later. One of the more interesting things I’ve seen is this post in Facebook notes, called Mock Pineapple—Bring on the Zucchini! It seems that, if you have more zucchini than you can use or give away, you can preserve it, for use as a pineapple substitute later.
Did you have trouble processing that last sentence? Well, I can understand why! In general, I’m not a fan of facsimile food – my palate is apparently too refined to accept a soy substitute for chicken (or anything else). But this recipe intrigued me. Basically, it calls for shredded or cubed zucchini to be simmered with pineapple juice, and then preserved in canning jars. Strangely enough, it also calls for pineapple extract for extra flavoring. Here’s what the author of this post says about the recipe:
 And it does taste just like pineapple. You can bake it in bread, put it on yogurt, on pizza, or even eat it right out of the jar. With this recipe you will never complain what to do with all that extra again. Bring on the zucchini!
The comments on this post were also interesting. One commenter said she had tried this, and that the texture was different from real pineapple, so it was only suitable for baking. Another noted that with all the ingredients, it probably wasn’t much cheaper than buying cans of pineapple for cooking or baking – so really, it’s more about using up all your produce than about saving money.
Other canning-related tidbits I’ve found on the Internet recently:
- On Ethel’s Blog, this post called The Humble Mason Jar is an entertaining essay on all the uses for canning jars.
- On Attainable Sustainable, a lesson on the Anatomy of Canning Jar. The beauty of it is that all brands of jars use standard lids, so it’s easy to recycle glass jars indefinitely and just replace the tops.
- Also from Attainable Sustainable, a very useful tip about Classico spaghetti sauce and other products that come in jars you can reuse for canning, because standard lids can be used to seal them.
And finally, a group called Canning Across America is declaring that Saturday, August 13 is Can It Forward Day, and is sponsoring live, how-to canning demos that will stream on the Internet at www.FreshPreserving.com. Viewers will be able to ask questions and post comments in real time. There’s also a “Can-a-Rama” — a week of home canning parties nationwide from August 14th to 20th.
By Hilda, on July 22nd, 2011
 A cucumber vine reaches for the sky on natural lattice panels Among vegetable gardeners who have limited growing space, tomatoes definitely seem to be a favorite crop – you can find room for a tomato plant or two just about anywhere, even if you have to tuck it into a flower bed or grow it in a container on a sunny terrace.
But what about veggies that like to sprawl out over a large area, like cucumbers? Look up the spacing requirements for them, and you’ll find a single cucumber plant can spread out over 12 to 20 square feet when grown in traditional rows.
One way to make better use of space and maximize yields is to grow vertically – that is, to let your vining plants expand upward instead of outward, by supporting them on a raised structure. It’s a perfect solution for anyone growing in containers, raised beds, or other small plots of land (like a narrow side yard).
The best and easiest candidates for vertical growing are beans, cucumbers, and all kinds of summer squash (like zucchini and the common yellow crookneck varieties).
Winter squash varieties (acorn, butternut, Hubbard) can also be grown vertically, but you’ll have to find a way to support the heavy fruits as they ripen. The same goes for pumpkins and melons — these extra-large fruits can present their own challenges when they don’t have a spot on the ground to rest on.
There are other benefits to vertical growing as well. When plants are raised off the ground, leaves are less susceptible to slug damage. Since foliage dries off faster after a rain, fungal problems are reduced. And, your vertically-grown plants may have more leaf surface area exposed to the sun, resulting in better growth.
The most important way to ensure success with vertical growing is this: Know the difference between vining and bush varieties of the same crop – not all varieties have been bred to grow upward!
Some specific tips to keep in mind for climbing vegetables:
- Beans. There is a huge difference between bush beans and pole beans. Bush beans are relatively short, self-supporting plants that don’t climb. They have been bred specifically for commercial farmers; their lower height makes harvesting by machine easier. Pole beans, however, can climb to ten feet or more – and the added height means you can harvest twice as many beans, from the same amount of space.
 Pole beans grow on a simple, home-made support
- Cucumbers. Choose seeds or seedlings carefully, and don’t end up with a “bush”variety. While bush varieties are still sprawling plants, they’re not really climbers. Instead, they put out vines that radiate only three feet out from the plant’s center – meaning they require only 9 square feet of space, about a third of what a vining cucumber needs when grown flat. In this way they’re considered “space-saving” types. But choose a vining cucumber variety to grow vertically, and you can grow one to two plants in just one square foot of space. For more specific tips on growing cucumbers vertically, see BluestoneGarden’s post on Urban Organic Gardener.
- Zucchini and crookneck squash. There are a few heirloom varieties of zucchini and other kinds of summer squash that are prolific, vining climbers. Most types, however, tend to be sprawling, bushy plants that want to grow flat but can be coaxed into growing vertically with a little bit of effort (you’ll have to tie the stems to your trellis). Just be sure to avoid those that are labeled as “space-spacing” varieties; they’ve been bred specifically to grow horizontally. And if you don’t have immediate success growing summer squash vertically, try a different variety next year, till you find one that works for you.
 Zucchini fruit and flower
In general, you’ll need plant supports of at least six to eight feet tall for cucumbers and squash; taller for pole beans. It’s best to start out with your growing structure already in place, and then set out plants at its base – you’re less likely to damage roots this way than if you try to anchor a support into place once the plants are already established and growing.
As you experiment with vertical growing, you can create your own plant supports from materials you have on hand — dowels, bamboo poles, wire, twine, etc. You can also grow vertically on a chain link fence, or on a trellis mounted to the side of a shed or garage. If you have an arch or arbor framing a walkway or gate, consider using it to support scarlet runner beans, which are both edible and decorative, with their bright red flowers. And if you’d rather purchase your growing supports, there’s a wide range of functional and decorative products on the market. For very narrow spaces (against a fence, in planter boxes, etc.), a fan trellis allows you to grow straight up and flat. In raised beds or large containers, a tall obelisk is both functional and decorative.
By Hilda, on June 19th, 2011
We have a new product that we love so much, we were especially happy to find it was going to be featured in the June/July issue of Natural Home & Garden magazine, in the annual “Top 50 Products” issue!
The product is the M-brace, a corner brace that can be used in sets to build a raised garden bed of any size in just minutes. We not only love the ease and functionality of this product, but we absolutely adore the fact that it turns the common raised bed into garden art, with whimsical cut-out designs.
With M-Brace, you use only four steel corner braces – no hardware is needed. Simply decide on the dimensions of your raised bed, and have your lumber cut to size. The inside of each brace has a raised channel where you slide your cut-to-size lumber to form the four sides of the bed. This system allows you to customize your raised beds to any site and any size, up to 12 feet on each side.
You can use M-Brace with any 2″ lumber (2×4, 2×6, 2×10, etc.) The width of the boards you choose determines the depth of your bed. For example, using three 2×4s will give you a depth of 10.5 inches.
To find out more about the M-Brace, and to see all the laser-cut designs (available in two finishes) visit our retail store at www.bluestonegarden.com!
By Hilda, on June 8th, 2011
For the most part I’m very tolerant of all the world’s creatures, but I really hate slugs. I don’t think I could stand to look at their disgusting sliminess even if they were benign, harmless creatures. But the fact they can wipe out a flat of seedlings overnight – after I’ve spent a month or two nurturing the tiny plants – makes them an especially despicable enemy.
Recently a group of my friends had an impromptu discussion on Facebook, regarding organic methods of slug control. I have to admit, I never had much luck with some of the home remedies that have been touted for generations – like beer, for example. I kept shallow pans of beer embedded in my garden soil all spring one year, and don’t think I ever found a single drowned slug in them.
But several gardeners I know suggested an organic product called Sluggo, which is said to be completely safe to pets and wildlife when used as directed. Its active ingredient is iron phosphate, which occurs naturally in the soil and works differently from chemical poisons. Here’s what the manufacturer’s website says:
Sluggo is attractive to slugs and snails, luring them from their hiding places and plants. Ingestion, even in small amounts, will cause them to cease feeding. This physiological effect of the bait gives immediate protection to the plants, even though the slugs and snails may remain in the area. After eating the bait, the slugs and snails cease feeding, become less mobile and begin to die within three to six days. Dead slugs and snails may not be visible as they often crawl away to secluded places to die. Plant protection will be observed in the decrease in plant damage.
Using coffee grounds in the garden is another folk remedy that now actually seems to have a little science behind it, according to this study reported in Science News.
And of course, there’s always hand-to-hand combat. Hand-picking was my dad’s slug control method of choice. He’d go out at dawn (although the Extension Service at Oregon State University recommends two hours after sunset), scoop up the slimy vermin with a plastic spoon, and drop them into a Mason jar filled with salt water. This actually worked pretty well – it seems like there is a finite number of these pests around, and by reducing their numbers early in the season you can help your plants survive the onslaught.
By Hilda, on May 25th, 2011
 While I was growing up, the lady who lived next door to us grew raspberries in the back of her small city yard. We were often invited over to pick what we wanted, and those berries always seemed like an essential part of summer. After our elderly neighbor died, a young family bought her house, and one of the first things they did was to get rid of the raspberries — to their mind, those berry bushes were just an unsightly, thorny thicket that took valuable play-space away from their children.
Berries like raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries are known as “bramble” fruits because of their tendency to colonize into tangled thickets. For the home grower, however, raspberries are more easily managed and will produce more fruit if they’re grown in rows against some sort of support, usually a simple structure of posts with a few rows of heavy gauge wired stretched in between. The technique is often called “trellising.”
The first step toward managing raspberries on a trellis system is understanding a few basic facts about how raspberries grow:
- Though the roots of the bushes are perennial, each stem — called a cane — is biennial, meaning it completes its fruiting cycle over a two-year period.
- As new canes emerge from the ground in spring, these first year canes are called primocanes. Remember that these will grow taller and leaf out, but will not bear fruit during their first season.
- With a trellising system, you’ll allow the primocanes to grow freely during the summer. They’ll naturally arch away from the trellis structure behind them.
- At the end of this first growing season (anytime from fall through late winter or early spring), you’ll tie these canes to the trellis. When they leaf out again in spring, they’ll be second year canes, of floricanes. These are the ones that will now flower and produce berries. Because they’re tied upright to the trellis, you can easily distinguish them from the new primocanes that emerge.
- Once you’ve harvested the berries from the second year canes and their fruiting season is over, you’ll cut them off at the base — they will not fruit again.
- Then tie the remaining canes, the primocanes that have yet to bear fruit, to the trellis and let the cycle continue.
The Agricultural Extension Service of the University of Tennessee has an excellent publication that describes the process in more detail, with diagrams. You can download it for free.
By Hilda, on May 8th, 2011
I took this photo one year ago, on Mother’s Day weekend. I was visiting friends in Fancy Gap, Virginia, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway, and found myself being called upon to identify a few varieties of wildflowers that had sprung up in my hostess’ yard. And while I had never seen one of these in person before, I knew immediately what it was — the pink lady’s slipper orchid, increasingly rare and very much endangered.
This lady’s slipper is sometimes called moccasin flower, for the shape of its pouch-like lower petal. In Latin, it goes by Cypridedium acaule. And it’s endangered for one simple reason — it’s extremely picky about its habitat, requiring extremely acid soil and very specific conditions.
If you come across one of these in the woods, enjoy it and take photos, but never try to move it. No matter how carefully you try to transplant pink lady’s slipper, you will almost certainly kill this delicate wildflower in the process.
Here’s why: the lady’s slipper has a symbiotic relationship with an organism known as mycelium that exists in the soil. (Mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus, and consists of a mass of branching, thread-like filaments.) Without it, the lady’s slipper plant can’t extract nutrients from the soil. It’s nearly impossible to cultivate this plant at home, so it’s best to let it do its own thing in its natural habitat.
By Hilda, on April 22nd, 2011
It’s easy to run into problems when you’re trying to identify a plant using a common name, rather than its Latin designation. Here’s one such dilemma: just about any shrub at all with big, round, fluffy, white flowers can ostensibly be called a “snowball bush.”
At one time, I had a snowball bush of my own. Like many snowball bushes, it belonged to the viburnum genus – and its proper name (Viburnum plicatum var. tomentosum ‘Kern’s Pink’) was quite a mouthful. Even its common name — pink snowball viburnum — was problematic though, because the round blossoms opened to snowy white, not the suggested pink hue. (Though the unopened buds may have had a faint rosy blush to them.) The shrub had actually been given to me by a nursery manager who was desperately trying to eliminate ‘Kern’s Pink’ from his stock, because he was tired of customers trying to return the bushes when they failed to produce pink flowers.
Recently I was taking pictures of this absolutely gigantic snowball bush in my neighborhood, when the shrub’s owner came out of the house to chat. The photo is below — it’s pretty impressive, isn’t it?
While I had assumed that this 20-foot tower of snowy blossoms was also a viburnum, she informed me it was a pee-gee hydrangea (Hydrangea paniculata), planted by her dad more than 30 years ago. And while I listened politely, this didn’t seem right to me – it was far too early in the year for hydrangeas to be blooming, for one thing.
So I did a little investigating on the Internet and talked to a friend who’s an expert at plant identification. The pee-gee hydrangea, wouldn’t you know it, is also sometimes called a snowball bush – it’s very similar to the large, blue mophead hydrangeas that you see everywhere in June, but with creamy white blooms.
The towering snowball bush in my neighborhood, however, was almost certainly Viburnum macrocephalum, the Chinese snowball bush. It’s the only one of the white-flowered wonders with the ubiquitous “snowball” moniker that is likely to reach a height of 20 feet. The flowers themselves are also huge, starting out lime-green before they turn to white. Unlike many other types of viburnums, they have no scent at all – and they’re sterile, so you won’t get the brilliant red berries that viburnums are known for either. It hardy matters, though, when the spring display is this spectacular. 
By Hilda, on April 5th, 2011
 Photo: Wikimedia Commons “I was sorry because I had no loropetalum, and then I met a man who had no snowdrop.”
With tongue in cheek, the famed garden columnist Henry Mitchell wrote these words three decades ago, and I had to smile when I read them recently in an anthology of his work. The only loropetalum that gardeners knew way back then was the original species – Loropetalum chinense, sometimes known as the Chinese fringe flower, a rather nondescript evergreen shrub that wasn’t especially popular.
But things things have changed since then!
If the great man were alive today, I bet he’d trade his snowdrops in a heartbeat to get his hands on one of the modern loropetalum cultivars pictured here. The hybridizers and nurserymen have really done their magic. Today, bright flowers, burgundy foliage, and a graceful, arching habit combine to give loropetalum year-round appeal.
It was back in the early 1990s when these pink-flowered selections made their debut, and I can still remember when they first hit the garden centers. They’re usually classified as Loropetalum chinense var. rubrum, and they are currently seen absolutely everywhere where winters are relatively mild (they are hardy as far north as zone 6).
 Photo: Terry DelValle, University of Florida extension service
In early spring, usually March, loropetalum will be in its full glory. The hot pink flowers are like little tassels, made up of delicate, fringe-like petals. The show starts slowly, as just a few blossoms open at a time, but by the time the shrub reaches its peak, it can rival an azalea in full bloom. Altogether you can expect three weeks of flowers from loropetalum. At one time, I happened to underplant one of mine with a creeping veronica (Veronica peduncularis ‘Georgia Blue’) and it was a happy accident to find that the two bloom at exactly the same time. The brilliant, cobalt blue veronica combined with the fuchsia tassels of the loropetalum is probably the most spectacular plant combination I’ve ever seen – and it was especially gorgeous where loropetalum’s branches would arch down low toward the ground, so the colors could really mingle. I wish I had a picture of it, but I don’t.
More than any other flowering shrub I can think of, loropetalum has year-round appeal. After they bloom, most of these new cultivars put out reddish-colored new growth that can actually look like flowers from a distance. This new foliage eventually matures to a dark olive or purplish green that makes a nice backdrop for your summer perennials. When cool weather arrives in fall, the foliage deepens again, to a deep burgundy shade – and because it’s evergreen, it makes a nice focal point in the winter garden. During warm spells in December and January, the shrubs will even surprise you by throwing out a few colorful, sporadic blossoms – just a little taste of what’s to come again in the spring.
All things considered, you just can’t go wrong with loropetalum. It fits in everywhere and no matter what the season, as my next-door neighbor puts it, “it just always looks good.”
By Hilda, on March 16th, 2011
I was taking a walk around the neighborhood recently when I caught the sweetest scent imaginable. I knew immediately what it was — a wonderful, early blooming shrub known as winter daphne (Daphne odora) — and began looking around to see which yard it was blooming in. There was actually a large cluster of perhaps five shrubs growing close together, which explained why the scent was so strong. Later, I went back with my camera to get these photos.
 If you look closely, you can barely make out that there are two slightly different varieties of daphne growing here. See how the shrub in the left forefront has variegated leaves? That’s a cultivar known as ‘Aureo-marginata’ and the cream-colored leaf margins bring a little bit of light to shady places. (The shrub directly to the right of it has plain green leaves.)
 The buds are a bright rosy red, while the waxy flowers open to a pale blush pink.
 Daphne likes a semi-shady spot and slightly acid soil. It has a reputation as a finicky grower, and the shrubs will sometimes last just a few years after planting. This is a Southern favorite, growing only in zones 7 to 9.
 I found these shrubs growing in a large front yard, down by the street — but I recommend planting them near your front door, or at least where you’ll pass them on the way to mailbox. You’ll want to enjoy the sweet smell for the short time it lasts!
By Hilda, on March 3rd, 2011
I inherited a front yard full of daffodils when I bought my house, and their numbers have been increasingly slowly for the past two decade. This year, the display seemed especially spectacular. There were so many yellow jonquils out front that I decided to cut some and bring them inside. The resulting display is below; there are somewhere around 40 daffodils in this vase, and it was a lush and cheerful bouquet for my office.
 Photo: H. Brucker
But maybe you don’t have hundreds of flowering bulbs in your yard — maybe you just have a handful. You can still cut a few to bring inside, and even a tiny arrangement can make an impact. I recently received a packet of ideas from the Netherlands Flower Bulb Information Center, including suggestions for displaying cut bulbs indoors. Here’s a few that I really liked — simple and elegant!
.
This is really clever! If you look at the little “vases,” you’ll see they’re just empty plastic pill bottles, like you might buy vitamins or aspirin in. They’ve been loosely wrapped with what appears to be strips of felt, but I think ribbon would have been prettier.
The flowers are regular hyacinths, but I could see this on an even smaller scale with little bulbs like snowdrops or grape hyacinths as well. The twigs look like they were freshly cut from a flowering shrub (forsythia, perhaps?) and nothing says springtime like those swelling buds!
.
.
.
.
.
.
These double daffodils, with their stems bound together, give an effect almost like topiary.
This picture, before I cropped it, showed one these arrangements at each place setting on a dinner table. But it would be simple to make just one, for a nightstand, bathroom vanity, or breakfast bar.
.
.
.
.
 .
.
.
.
When you float a single flower in a pretty, antique teacup, each blossom becomes a whole bouquet. The pink flower is a popular double tulip called ‘Angelique’ and the apricot blossom is actually a ruffly narcissus named ‘My Story’ — the extra petals in each of these give an effect similar to floating a rose or camellia in a shallow bowl.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Hyacinths, some greenery, and sprigs of unopened buds in a crystal water glass. I think it’s the mixture of blues and purples here that really makes this simple arrangement pop.
.
.
.
.
.
All photos courtesy of the Netherlands Flower Bulb Information Center, unless otherwise noted.
|
About
The Author
Hilda Brucker
 Hilda combines her
love of gardening
and passion for writing
in her blog entries.
|
