ROSES AND STRAWBERRIES AND — OH NO! — HONEYBERRIES

By Lee Reich | Published: June 10, 2021

Roses, Oh Yes

I bake really good bread, but “man can’t live by bread alone.” Sometimes, you’ve got to “stop to smell the roses.” Enough with the quotations! But back to the roses.

A love of roses has crept up on me over the years, due mostly to changes in kinds of roses available. Up until about 30 years ago, hybrid teas were pretty much the only roses on the block. These plants’ gangly stems are each capped by a vividly colored, fairly stiff, formal blossom whose petals wrap together into a pointy peak. You see where I’m going: hybrid teas are ugly, to me at least. 

Also available were grandiflora and floribunda roses. Grandifloras are like hybrid teas, except their stems end with clusters of a few, but smaller, blossoms. Floribunda roses have even larger flower clusters of even smaller flowers. Despite being bushes more full with flowers than hybrid teas, grandiflora …

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Free webinar today, WEEDLESS GARDENING

By Lee Reich | Published: June 6, 2021

“WEEDLESS GARDENING” webinar

Are you interested in having a weedless garden this season? Yes? Learn how at my upcoming WEEDLESS GARDENING webinar. The system I’ll describe does more that just deal with weeds. It also lets your garden use water more efficiently, conserves valuable soil organic matter, lets you plant earlier in spring, and does not disrupt beneficial fungi and other friendly soil organisms. Starting a new garden? Here’s the fastest way to get the soil prepared and plants growing.

I’ll cover all this, and more, in the WEEDLESS GARDENING webinar. The webinar is free, at 2 pm EST on Sunday, June 6, 2021.

This webinar is sponsored by Inniswood Garden Society. To register for this program, please visit: www.bit.ly/AnnualMtgRegister

GOD’S BEST BERRY?

By Lee Reich | Published: June 3, 2021

First Good-Tasting Berries of the Season

Strawberries, the aptly named variety Earliglow, are ripe, which means it’s time to start crawling for fruit. That’s one thing I don’t like about strawberries.

Strawberries, garden, vescana, and alpine

Another thing I don’t like about strawberries is that, although they’re perennial plants, a bed needs replanting after about 5 years. By then, viruses, fungal diseases, weeds, and just plain aging have finally taken their toll. The decline creeps up slowly so is not all that obvious. And no, you shouldn’t replant in the same spot where the now pest-ridden bed was, but in a new location. And don’t replant with rooted runners from those old plants, but with new, certified disease free plants.

Any bad feelings I had dissolved away as I tasted my first berry of the season. I almost agreed with Izaak Walton, in the 16th century, “Doubtless God could have made a …

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A BRIGHT FUTURE

By Lee Reich | Published: May 27, 2021

As Good As It Gets

You might think that writing about good weather would tempt the fates. I’ll thumb my nose at the fates and go ahead and write that this spring is the best spring, gardenwise, ever in all the decades since I’ve been gardening. The flowers have been more vibrant with color and, it seems, also in greater profusion. The air has been particularly fragrant, especially now with the intoxicating aroma of black locust blooms following closely on the heels of autumn olive’s sweet scent.

My fruit trees are most thankful for this spring’s beneficence. In all the years of growing fruit here on the farmden, never has the landscape been so brightened by snowballs of white blooms of plum and pear trees, pinkish blossoms of apples, and peaches’ pure pink blossoms.

The now-fallen petals are no cause for wistfulness, because those clusters of flowers have now morphed into clusters of …

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LAST WEEK OF 2021 PLANT SALE

By Lee Reich | Published: May 25, 2021

Lee Reich’s 13TH (?) ANNUAL PLANT SALE
(of mostly lesser grown but delectable fruits)

Because of covid, the sale is now online, with scheduled pickups here at the farmden in New Paltz, NY.

Limited quantities of plants are still available (September Sun female kiwiberry, various varieties of fig, Blue Sunset lowbush blueberry, and Pineapple Crush white alpine strawberry). All are truly delectable fruits on truly beautiful planats. So order soon.

To see plant list, order, pay, and — VERY IMPORTANT — schedule a pickup time (May 29-31 and June 2, 2021) when you order, go to https://leesannualplantsale.squarespace.com

GARDENING “HANDWORK”

By Lee Reich | Published: May 19, 2021

To Haul or Not to Haul

Hauling manure hardly seems to make sense these days, considering that lugging 500 pounds of horse manure gives plants about the same amount of food as a 50 pound bag of 10-10-10. And the latter for only about ten bucks!

Human manure piles, China, 1900

But whereas 10-10-10 supplies only food (and only three of the sixteen needed nutrients at that), manure has other benefits: it aerates the soil; it helps soil capture and cling to water; and it renders nutrients already in the soil more available to plants. Nutrients from synthetic fertilizers are used up or washed out of the soil by the end of a season, yet benefits from each application of manure last for years. Even ingredients of a concentrated organic fertilizer have little benefit as far as soil aeration and water retention are concerned.

Manure is a traditional way of feeding plants, …

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PLANT SALE NOW LIVE

By Lee Reich | Published: May 18, 2021

Lee Reich’s 13TH (?) ANNUAL PLANT SALE
(of mostly lesser grown but delectable fruits)

Because of covid, the sale is now online, with scheduled pickups here at the farmden in New Paltz, NY.

Note that there are limited quantities of al plants, each available to the first taker. So order soon.

To see plant list, order, pay, and — VERY IMPORTANT — schedule a pickup time (May 29-31 and June 2), go to https://leesannualplantsale.squarespace.com

MICHELANGELIC ASPIRATIONS

By Lee Reich | Published: May 12, 2021

I Start with the Easiest

I spent an hour or so today working on my sculptures. Yes, they were out in the garden. No, they were not stone renderings of fish spouting water into a pond or of ethereal females sprinkling the ground with flower petals. These sculptures are quite large and, as you might guess, the are green, with leaves. 

Some of the sculptures have been completed; some are works in progress. The easiest of these sculptures are nothing more than short hedges, one of boxwood and the the other of yew. Each makes a cozy enclosure, the yew for my front stoop and the boxwood for a bed of Smooth (Hills-of-Snow) hydrangea, a hop vine climbing a trellis, and a Sweet Autumn clematis climbing a brick wall.

With flat tops and nearly vertical sides, both hedges are quick and easy to prune. They both widen slightly from head to toe because, …

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CALLING ALL VOLUNTEERS

By Lee Reich | Published: May 5, 2021

A Returning Beauty

I have some of the nicest volunteers in my garden. Some of them have been people, many of them are plants, and one of my favorites – among the plants, that is – is columbine. Years ago, I planted some native columbines, those dainty plants whose orange and yellow flowers hover on thin stalks above their ferny foliage. Since being planted, these wildings self-seed – volunteer, that is — every year in various nooks and crannies around my yard, such as in the thin crevice of soil between my bluestone front path and the adjacent stone wall.
       
I once also planted cultivated columbines, the common McKana Giants, and their offspring have been volunteering around the yard as well. Flowers and foliage of these more cultivated sorts are similar to the natives, just bigger in all respects, which is not necessarily better. Or worse. Just different.

Colors of these larger columbines …

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MARKING SPRING’S ONWARD MARCH

By Lee Reich | Published: April 28, 2021

It’s spring, a time when a man’s thoughts turn to . . . flowers, of course. (At least this man’s thoughts, some of them, do.) Sure, I’ve been reveling in the colorful progression of blossoms beginning, this year, with cornelian cherry and hellebore on about the first day of spring, and moving on to forsythia, plum, Asian pear, flowering quince, European pear, cherry, and — probably by the time you read this — apple followed by shipova. All this is the flamboyance of spring.

This year, I’ve also been admiring a few of the more subtle flowers of spring.

MAPLE BEAUTIES, AND OTHERS

Some of the maples are now in bloom. Sugar maples (Acer saccharum) is perhaps the prettiest and most useful of the maples. Unfortunately, it’s also the least tolerant of compacted or wet soils, or a warming climate. The beauty of sugar maples lies not just in the leaves’ autumn show …

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