Growing Rose of Sharon

Patty, my gardening buddy and neighbor, emailed to let me know that the beautiful Rose of Sharon plant I'm enjoying so much wasn't only from her - our mutual friend Joan gave her the original plant, which Patty added to her garden, and then Patty gave me an offspring. So it's like our little circle of friends and neighbors is connected by these beautiful plants!

I was so inspired that I sat down and researched the Rose of Sharon, then wrote a new article about it today for Hub Pages. One thing I forgot to put into the article is that Rose of Sharon is the national flower of South Korea.  It was also one of the first plants written about - over 1,400 years ago, in ancient Chinese texts!  Simply amazing.

Anyway, please enjoy the article. Click the link to read it:  How to Grow the Rose of Sharon.

Pollinators at Work in the Morning Glory Vine

On Monday mornings, I usually take my camera into the garden and take photographs for articles I plan to write during the week. We got just about 5 inches of rain last week from a strong thunderstorm and the outer rim of Hurricane Irene, and the flowers just love it. I noticed that the morning glory vine growing over the trellis at the garden entrance looked particularly lovely, so I stepped closer to get some closeup photos of the various hued flowers. It was then that I noticed that some of the flowers were bouncing up and down, but there was no wind. As I watched, this little bee backed out of the deep throat of the flower. He was so coated with pollen that he was nearly indistinguishable from the white throat of the flower. Bees have always been a symbol of industry and hard work, and watching this guy move from flower to flower, diving in headfirst, then wiggling his bulbous butt as he backed out of the flower made me laugh. He never rested, though. He kept moving from flower to flower no matter how much pollen stuck to his abdomen.  I tried to capture my new pollinator friend at work in these photos.  Can you spot him?

New Blooms in the Flower Garden-Rose of Sharon Bush

Today's flowers are courtesy of my friend, Patty. Two years ago she gave me a little seedling she'd transplanted from her garden - a Rose of Sharon. I've never grown Rose of Sharon before and had no idea what to expect. We planted it at the back of the flower garden, near my climbing rose. That area of the garden gets partial sun, partial shade, and the soil isn't great, but Patty assured me that Rose of Sharon bushes are tough plants and can tolerate a wide variety of conditions. So we planted and waited.

This morning I was rewarded by the first pink blossom on the Rose of Sharon. I like it because it reminds me of the hibiscus growing in the butterfly garden, which is another favorite plant. And for good reason: technically, this particular Rose of Sharon is called Hibiscus syriacus, and the two are related.

According to Plant Care Guides from the National Gardening Association, Rose of Sharon grow as high as 8 to 12 feet tall, so my little 2 ft plant will grow to be a giant if all goes well. Rose of Sharon are very easy care and flower abundantly in late summer and early fall, the perfect time in my garden when most other plants are finished flowering.  Plant Care Guides states that Rose of Sharon produces flowers on new wood, so pruning  in early spring is a must. I'll just give this one a little gentle pruning to encourage flowers. I don't want to cut it back too much and damage it.  There are plenty of buds on it this year, and I am looking forward to more of the display from my new Rose of Sharon bush.

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Thank you to those who sent me kind messages via social media regarding our string of amazing events last week. I told my sister Mary yesterday, "Every day held a new challenge, but I am hopeful that I will get a nice, boring peaceful week!"  Hurricane Irene gave us a great deal of wind and rain, mostly rain, and fortunately the power remained on.  We are still experiencing a few minor aftershocks from last Tuesday's 5.9 magnitude earthquake but nothing major. Thank you to all for your good wishes.

Hurricane Preparations for the Garden

The trellis view before the wind moved my morning glories.

I can't quite recall a more adventure-filled week. I listed the events somewhere else today: Monday, business setbacks; Tuesday, 5.9 earthquake; Wednesday, aftershocks that woke us all up at 1 am; Thursday, on my return from an all-day business meeting, violent thunderstorm tossed a tree in front of the train on the tracks, causing quite the delay; Friday, we prep for Hurricane Irene.  I am really hoping for a boring, peaceful, totally nothing to report week!

Yesterday's thunderstorms brought wind gusts of over 60 mph to our farm, giving me a taste of what the hurricane might bring. The rain gauge reported 3 1/2 inches of rain - in under two hours!  On top of that, some plants were absolutely flattened by the rain.  My morning glory vines are growing thickly along the top of the trellis, and the wind lifted up a big mat of vines and pulled it right off.

If you live in an area prone to hurricanes or affected by hurricanes, you may want to read my latest essay for Main Line Gardening:  Hurricane Preparations for the Garden.

Gardening with Children

Did you garden alongside your mom or dad when you were little? How did you first become interested in gardening?

These past two weekends, I had the rare experience of having a small child in the home, my 7 year old nephew. His parents do not garden. They live in a modest suburban home with a lawn and a shrub or too and lots of concrete sidewalks, walkway and patio...nature just doesn't interest them. I don't understand that, because it feels like throughout my entire life, I've loved nature. I remember as a child marveling at the clouds and jumping into piles of leaves on the lawn in the autumn when my older brothers raked them up. I remember my mom teaching me the names of the birds sitting on the telephone wires as she pushed my stroller along - wait! That's the answer, isn't it?

It's our moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas and all the other grownups in our lives who either taught us to love the world around us or ignore it and focus on the ephemeral. My mom gave me a sense of curiosity about nature, and my dad's love of science and his amateur science experiments, like the time he tried to grow ferns on a brick from spores he picked from a fern growing in the backyard, instilled a healthy curiosity in my mind and heart as a child.

My dad gardened, my grandma gardened, and my next door neighbor gardened; gardening was as natural to me as breathing. Knowing the names of trees and shrubs, flowers and birds, insects and everything in between was deemed important in my household.  Knowing the name of the current hot rock band or whatever else was 'hip' was deemed unimportant.

So many kids today are growing up completely oblivious to nature. It's not just city kids. City kids can be very keen on nature too. I remember walking through Central Park on a bright summer's day when I worked near Lincoln Center and watching children playing near a pond. They were pointing at the ducks and feeding them bread and they were loving every minute of it. There were little gardens in Manhattan too sandwiched in alleyways between buildings, community gardens made from whatever space was available.  There's nature in the middle of the city, too.

My nephew doesn't live near anyone who gardens, and his parents don't really care about gardening. They mow their lawn and that's it.  Their neighborhood is like that; we've visited them several times, and I don't remember anyone planting flowers at all.

When we took everyone out to the vegetable garden to show them what was growing, my nephew grew excited for the first time during his visit. "Look mom! Peppers!" he shouted, running to point at the peppers.  He clapped his hands in delight.  We let him pull a carrot and he accidentally pulled two. As soon as he got into the house, he wanted to scrub the carrot and eat it.  He ate two raw carrots right there standing at the sink! Can you imagine if you said, "Honey, would you like a raw carrots?" He'd probably demand potato chips. Yet you let him pull his own vegetables, and he was so excited to taste the carrot.

He tasted beets for the first time too. He didn't know what a beet was, and he pulled one for me.  He marveled at the pretty purple color. I happened to have some leftover ones in the fridge already cooked in a Harvard sauce, which is sweet and sour, and we gave him one to taste cold.  "Good?" my husband asked. "Good!" he declared around a purple mouthful.

Every garden bed he peered into he squealed with excitement. "Strawberries! Tomatoes! What's this?" pointing at the Swiss Chard - "And that?"

We couldn't get him interested in the hummingbirds at the feeder, or even the deer tip toeing across the yard at dusk, but vegetables he got excited about.  And that's a good thing. Showing a child where his food comes from, teaching him that it is okay to leave bugs alone and that some bugs are good, and teaching him to compost - which he got the hang of very quickly, knowing what to put into the kitchen compost bucket and what not to - gave me a good sense of having passed along a bit of wisdom, along with one scrubbed carrot in his lunch sack to take with him in the car.  It was like I got to pass along a bit of my grandma, a bit of my dad, a bit of Mr Hoffman, and a bit of the joy I feel for my garden, too.

Summer Is Winding Down

Summer is winding down here at Seven Oaks...a few days ago, we walked on the High Bridge Trail and noticed red leaves on the sumacs. Today, looking out my office window, I see some of the underbrush trees already turning shades of gold and red. This morning while I sat on the front porch with Shadow, I needed a sweater.  First time since April.

Shadow's nemesis - the beeping, belching yellow school buses - are back on the road during her early morning walk. In Prospect, new deliveries of donated furniture are starting to show up at the fire house in anticipation of the fall auction, another sign that fall is here.

I'm canning peppers, freezing tomatoes, and readying the garden beds for the fall crops of vegetables. The flowers are at their peak, and I'm noticing second flowering on some of the spring bloomers, the dianthus and a stray pansy or two.

Last year, I felt like summer rushed by all too fast. I worked too many hours and didn't take time to enjoy any time off. This year, I don't want summer to end. Each morning, the light seems more gentle, and each evening darkness falls too soon.

We have a few more weeks of summer yet to come, but I feel like already it is winding down. How about you? How do you tell the seasons in your garden?

Unexpected Surprises

Sometimes you have things all planned out, and an unexpected surprise delights you.  The other day, I was busily working away when my Internet connection went down. Now, I work from home as a freelance writer, editor and marketing consultant, and I rely upon my Internet connection for the majority of my work. When it stops, often I must stop, too.  After half an hour of fruitless clicking the little antenna icon on my computer tray, I gave up and grabbed my camera. I figured I could take my week's worth of pictures out in the garden. I write about herbs and gardening a lot, and try to take many of the pictures myself, so at least once a week you can find me outside snapping images at dawn or dusk to capture what I need.

The sky was a brilliant blue with puffy, fleecy clouds, and I realized that many of the sunflowers growing along the south side of the house had bent under the weight of their flower heads. By standing underneath, I could snap the sunflower and the blue sky, and crop out the window screens and side of the house. So I started snapping away.

When I loaded the pictures onto the computer, I burst out laughing.  There, putting along, was a big fat bumble bee, and my camera not only captured him in mid-flight heading to the sunflower...it captured his journey away,  probably annoyed with me for disturbing his snack!

I love it. It reminded me that sometimes unexpected surprises are the best ones of all.

See my friend leaving (lower right corner?) Bee zooms away

A Full Pantry of Fresh Organic Vegetables

Let me see a show of hands. (Peering out at my reading audience...).

How many people feel a great sense of satisfaction when the pantry is full of fresh, home-grown organic vegetables? When you see rows of canning jars neatly lined up and labeled, or a freezer full of labeled bags of fresh produce? A kitchen table groaning under the weight of garden produce?

Isn't it a great feeling to know where your food is coming from?

Not everyone agrees with me. I've met people who think it's stupid to grow your own food. They think, "Why would I want to do that when I can just run to the supermarket and buy whatever I want when I want it?"

They have a point. Right now we are picking pounds of tomatoes a day, peppers, eggplants...and some green beans.  The onions and potatoes are harvested, dried and stored in the cool dark basement. I've got 16 pints of canned beets and another two dozen or more beets still in the garden. Today I'm stopping off to buy some freezer containers for carrots because I have a huge garden bed full of them, and I plan to plant more seeds today to try to get another crop in this fall.

I've been eating tomato sandwiches and tomato salads for lunch every day, followed by squash and eggplant at dinner.  So I can see their point.

Yet I still feel quite a sense of accomplishment when I walk into the kitchen and see my giant metal chef's mixing bowl, pictured here, filled with vegetables.  I actually have two big bowls now on the kitchen counter filled with organic vegetables from the garden. In the pantry, the current tally is 16 pints of pickled beets, 8 half pints of dill pickles, and 6 pints of pickled peppers. Today I will add more peppers to the mix, since they don't freeze well for me. In the basement, I have over 30 pounds of potatoes stored, enough onions for the winter, and garlic from the crop almost two years ago, plus sweet potatoes leftover and still keeping nicely from last fall's harvest.

Last year, I calculated that the sweet potatoes alone saved me a bundle of money. I spent $16 on the sweet potato "slips" or plants and the harvest was well over 70-80 pounds of sweet potatoes; at $1 a pound, the very cheapest you'll find them, that's still considerable savings.  This year, the potatoes alone are making me sit up and notice the money-saving benefits.  I spent $2.50 on the seed potatoes and got a bag of Yukon Gold seed potatoes from our friends, Mel and Joan. I have about 30 pounds of potatoes now stored in the basement. How much would that cost me? Well right now potatoes are going for $5.99 for a 10 pound sack. You can do the math...

Beets are $1 a can, and a can is less than a pint.  My 16 pints of pickled beets are probably worth $16 - $32, yet I spent $1.79 on the seed package.

So there you have it.  Oh and another benefit? The other day I was wearing a sleeveless top for the first time in years. It was really hot and I was wearing a tank top and shorts. I was sitting in the living room reading a book, and the television screen was off. It caught my reflection and I realized that I had actually developed some muscles in my arms! I have definition in my upper arms now thanks to lifting, digging, pushing a wheelbarrow and a lawn mower and carrying those heavy pails of gravel.  I have also lost a little weight since May, thanks to the extra walks I have been taking as well as all the gardening. Oh, and those tomatoes for lunch every day!

Truly, can you beat gardening? The benefits are amazing.  And every time I walk into my kitchen and see the fresh vegetables, I feel all happy inside.

Second Vegetable Planting

Did you know you can grow a second harvest of many vegetables? I just learned about this and am excited to plant beans again and make use of the now-empty garden space where the potatoes, lettuce, and beets used to be.  After dinner tonight, I plan to head out into the vegetable garden and dig through the remaining dirt in the potato beds to find any remaining Yukon golds. They are so delicious and tender that we have been enjoying the fingerling potatoes for many meals. I'm not a fan of eating potato skins, but when they're grown 100% organic and I know exactly what is in the soil, I even ate the skins and boy were they good. I plan to plant more Dutch brown and Jacob's Cattle heirloom beans. I've been collecting the seeds, but the yield is disappointing. I was too tentative in my planting this spring. After planting way too many green beans in 2009, I was hesitant to plant more than half a bed of each, but honestly when you're growing heirloom beans to dry and use the seeds, it's a different thing altogether. Green beans have to blanched, frozen and/or canned (if I had a pressure canner, which I don't); heirloom beans are solar dried and shelled, and that's it.

Now according to the Cooperative Extension sheet I printed out last night, my fall veggie should go in around August 20th.  I'll probably push that planting off a few more days, but I've already got turnip, Brussels sprouts and broccoli seeds waiting.  Maybe I will have better luck this year and not have to fight the worms and moths for them - wouldn't it be nice to have that last harvest, crisped by the frost, just in time for Thanksgiving?

Please enjoy my latest article today for Main Line Gardening, written on this very topic and with more instructions on how you can get a second harvest from the garden.

Read: Vegetable Gardening-Second Planting.

Gardening as Meditation

Have you ever looked up from your weeding to realize that an hour flew by in a quiet, gentle peace, like water flowing in a quiet stream?

Or you're pruning a shrub, and the breeze nuzzles your hair while birds sing, and you breathe the scent of a thousand flowers in the evening air, and you realize in your heart that this is peace?

Last night, we went on our usual 2-3 mile walk with Shadow, then returned home. It was a sticky evening, humid and warm, but there was nothing I wanted to watch on television and I'm tired of news programs. So I said to John, "I'm going outside to putter for a bit - I won't be long." I slipped on my gardening gloves and Shadow and I retreated to the flower garden. I had four large pots of perennials started from seed this spring that needed to be transplanted, columbine and penstemmon, and a pot of Dusty Millers my father in law had bought for me. Trowel in hand, I carried my pots to the garden, dug in the soft soil, and gently patted the flowers into their new homes.

Of course as I wandered among the flower beds, weeds demanded to be pulled, and so I used each empty plastic pot as a weed receptacle. Soon, I had weeded the pathways - yes, despite the landscape fabric, sand, gravel and stones, a few weeds do manage to sprout and must be pulled before they spread. Ditto for the various grasses, which always seem to prefer the flower beds to the lawn areas where we want them to grow.

As I puttered and pulled, patted and pruned, dusk descended on the garden. Birds sang quietly in the woods behind my back and the breeze stirred my perspiration-dampened hair. I looked up to a spectacular sky of blues and indigo shot with veins of pure ocher and gold; sunset.

During our walk, many worries and fears crowded my mind. I tend to be a worry wart. As a child,  I'd lay in bed at night and worry that I hadn't done all my homework or that I wouldn't hit the ball during gym class baseball games. I was a bundle of anxiety before I had a real reasons to be anxious. 

I'm like that now. I worry about everything. My mind can go in about a zillion fearful directions to the point where I feel paralyzed. No amount of logic helps. I've heard that fear is "False Evidence Appearing Real" and that's me to a T; false evidence appears real, and I worry.

So you can image how my evening walk went. I walked and talked with my husband, and we had fun playing with Shadow, and every time a bit of quiet came into the walk, my worrying mind started in again.

Yet as I picked my head up from the garden, my gloves caked with good red Virginia clay and a bucket of weeds by my feet, I realized that for the first time all day, my mind was quiet.  No worries chattered and poked at my subconscious; all was quiet, peace, serenity. My mind was tranquil, my spirit serene.

People go to great lengths to create meditation gardens, and they are lovely places for the spirit. But I find that gardening is meditation. It is better than anything I can take to sooth my spirit, it is more prayer for me than anything else. Gardening is my meditation, my serenity.  A simple evening of weeding resets my worry buttons like nothing else until this morning I rise secure, ready to face the challenges of the day, the spirit of lingering peace offering rest.

Update on Ann's Bloomerang Lilac

The Bloomerang Lilac in our front landscape

I've written about my Bloomerang lilac, a gift (well, purchased through a gift certificate from White Flower farms for my birthday a few years ago) from my sister Ann.  At my old house in Floral Park, my dad had planted a beautiful holly next to the front door; my Aunt Betty had given it to my parents as a house warming present in 1960 when they bought their house. I love that tradition, and so when Ann gave me the gift certificate, I purchased the Bloomerang lilac and planted it in roughly the same spot at my new home in Virginia; slightly to the left of my front steps and in the front of the house.

It's August 2nd, and going up to 97 degrees today, and still the lilac blooms on! This picture was taken today. We've had great rains over the past two weeks - 3 inches one week, 2 inches this weekend - and as long as it gets plenty of water, it does indeed produce new waves of blossoms. The Bloomerang lilac truly lives up to its name, like a boomerang returning again and again with new waves of blossoms. Best of all, the dwarf size makes it a good addition in front of my porch; it won't tower over the railing and block the garden views.

My (New) Home Town

This weekend, I had company staying with me. I got a chance to show off my new home town.  We hiked the High Bridge Trail and enjoyed gorgeous country vistas thanks to two inches of rain on top of three inches last week. The fields are emerald green, the wildflowers blooming. We saw Passion Flower and wild Rose of Sharon growing along the trail, as well as many beautiful butterflies. I hope you enjoy  glimpse of my new home town...and why I moved from New York City to rural Virginia....

View from High Bridge Trail, Virginia