Garden Literature goes Up in Smoke

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Dear friends,just as there is no hiding the fact that Professor Roush is a rose nut, there is also no suspense to the revelation that I aman entrenchedbibliophile. My love of printed and bound material stretches far back into mychildhood,tothat happy time when I was stillan only child and had to find ways to occupy myself. While burdenednow with middle-age, a sister, a wife, and children, I continue to feel comforted with the feel of paper and printed letters, the smell of new ink and glue. I aspire to become the last person on the planet to purchase a Kindle or Nook.

Mylongworship of books and growing interest ingardening has, for the past twenty years or so, connected in that genre weknow as garden literature. I have discovered natural gardening with Sara Stein, delighted in the philosophical ramblings of Michael Pollan, grown older with Sydney Eddison,and grumbled with Henry Mitchell. Iveplotted spousal demise with Amy Stewart and searched for old roses with Thomas Christopher.

All that, I fear, is disappearing.Literally, it seems to be going to pot. Marijuana, Mary Jane, reefer, and cannabis. Call it what you want, I was shocked, visiting alarge nationalbook chain, to realize thatwhat was previouslyeight shelves of fascinating garden literature is nowfour shelves, two of them composed entirelyof books about growing, marketing, or self-medicating with marijuana. I counted 87 different books on pot cultivation, withsuch imaginative titlesasMarijuana 101,Organic Marijuana,Everything Marijuana, and theMarijuana Garden Saver.TheBig Book of Budsis not about roses.Only one even looked mildly interesting to meSuper Charged: How Outlaws, Hippies and Scientists Reinvented Marijuana,probably because it was more scienceand history-oriented rather than ahow-to-grow-to-get-high-at-home manual. I didnt buy it for fear someone mightsee it laying around.

Can the drive for all these new booksabout marijuana really be sales-based? I dont see theseon the bookshelves of friends, sitting on tables of garage sales, or promoted in bestseller lists. Perhaps the gray-haired members of my daylily club areonly pretending to grow hemerocallis in my presence, butpass the potatobong when Im not around. Somehow, somewhere, are the same clueless editors and booksellers just surmising that these are what the public wants? The same editors that contract good writers to produce lame and repetitious books of landscaping dumbed down for the homeowner, orto write the 200thtome cautioning against over-watering houseplants (which currentlycomprise the other two gardening shelves in the store)? Would Scotts, Bayer, and other companies grow richer if they forgot about lawn care and rose chemicals and concentrated their marketing on hydroponic fertilizer and gro-lamps aimedto entice that little extra buzz out ofhemp?

Dont answer that last question. It was rhetorical, not a suggestion for improvement.

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Quick! Drink This Before All The Tomatoes Are Gone!

I dont know what its like in your neck of the woods, but around these parts we still have a few good tomatoes left at the farmers market. So thats what Im calling this drinkThe Farmers Market. Hurry up and make a batch while you still can.

The Farmers Market

2 oz vodka per guest (thats a minimumyou know that, right? Im drinking Square One Organic Vodka, made from rye.)

A whole bunch of really amazing tomatoes

Sliced fresh peppers, mild or hot (a safe bet might be mild with one fresh jalapeno thrown in there)

Cucumbers, peeled

Celery

Basil or cilantro

Tonic water (get the good stuff like Q Tonic or Fever Tree)

Save a few of the more attractive vegetative ingredients for garnishes. Take the rest and cut them up and put them in a big measuring cup or pitcher. Pour the vodka on top. Thoroughly mash everything with a muddler or wooden spoon. Let it sit around for a few hours while you get on the phone and round up some party guests, or sweep the porch, or feed the chickens, or whatever else needs doing.

Fill small Mason jars, short tumblers, or tall, skinny Collins glasses with ice. Strain the vodka mixture into each glass, top with tonic water, and garnish with whatever looks pretty. Happy Wednesday, yall!

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Lots of Gardening at the Green Festival

Its Green Festival time in DC (and for LA and SF) and I stopped by to see whats going on in the gardening world and was pleased to find more garden-related vendors than usual. (Though among speakers, not so much.)

First, I discovered some local gardening coaches at Love and Carrots. Its all edibles, and their services include design, installation, and maintenance, in addition to coaching. At their terrific website I found an inspiring portfolio and bios of the people involved. Im a big fan of bios, especially when they move beyond the marketing lingo to reveal trust-building tidbits, like that the founder of Love and Carrots shares her passion for growing food by spending her winters farming and teaching agricultural classes at an orphanage in Guatemala. That alone makes me want to hire her.

I was already a fan of EarthBox, so noticing them here with Oxfam made me stop to ask whats up with that? Turns out they partner with Oxfam and the U.N. to support and promote World Food Day October 16 a day of educating about world hunger, healthy eating and horticulture. Molly Philbin, Earthboxs education director and blurry in my photo here, is passionate about all that.

Another favorite vendor of mine and the source of my free pass to the show is Paul Kelly, the publishing guru behind St. Lynns Press. Click here to find out why Im such a fan.

Heres an innovative new service that may just succeed. The designer behind GOasis creates temporary gardens for events here in this event-filled city. Her website looks promising but isnt populated yet with actual information.

Yes, bees made an appearance.

Also, worms.

And I have no photo to show you, but Air Lawn Care was here, selling their quiet, less polluting mow-and-blow service, with the full range of landscaping services coming soon. As a hater of leaf-blowers, I wish them great success!

Also tabling at the event was Washington Gardener Magazine. Editor Kathy Jentz also gave a DIY talk during the event.

I love the idea behind RazarSharp small, all-electric appliances for small gardens. So far, theyre selling compact chipper-shredders, slim-profile rain collectors (not reallybarrels, on the right in both the photos above), a lawn mower, and an edger that can also be used to mow small gardens, as we see being demonstrating in the photo right above. (Website tip for Razarsharp: ditch the stock photos of people and beef up the About info to include who you are. Green buyers want real people they can trust. See Love and Carrots.)

George Washington Us landscape design program was here, as well as local supplier AquaBarrel, whos a big attender of these shows. Red Dragon flame weeders eliminate the need for herbicides and for bending over. Here I recommend them for weeding green roofs, as green roof plant supplier Ed Snodgrass does and demonstrates in that link.

Compost Cab is a new idea on the scene a company that will supply you with compost bins for kitchen waste (no meat, of course), pick it up every week, and deliver some of it back to you as compost. For only $32 a month! Seriously, Im surprised and impressed that people are spending that kind of money to avoid sending their potato peelings to the landfill. And at a street festival in the Maryland burbs I discovered a local competitor who charges even more $43.50 a month. Amazing.

Lastly, the biggest presence at the green festival by FAR was Ford Motor Company. For real! They had electric and hybrid cars we could take for a spin around town, and agricultural-looking displays like this one showing that car doors can be made out of plants, and lots of hip young people telling us whats up with all this. And whats up is - well, I cant tell you. Though the hip young spokesdude was willing to talk my ear off, my parking meter was just about out of time, so I asked for take-home literature. Sorry! So is it on your website, I ask? You bet! Well, its a big honking website and I couldnt find a word about sustainability or bio doors or the other info in their display. So Ford, keep up the good work but next time, could you print up some info for the festival-goers?

Thats the end of my green-gardening tour. Any new products or services catching your eye lately?

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UK gardeners: No peat for you!

Peat bog in Scotland (Shutterstock)

If you love your garden, you really cant just abstain.

Thats what the delightfully named Brit celeb gardener Bob Flowerdew says about a life without peat moss. As reported in the New York Times yesterday, the public, private, and industrial use of peat in Great Britain could completely disappear by 2030. The government is acting according to the advice of a task force of experts, whoalong with environmentalists worldwidefeel that peat bogs are too important as habitat and carbon storage to be emptied out for the sake of potting media and soil additives. The task force issued a long andoccasionallystrangely worded reportthat could probably be boiled down to this 4-word excerpt: Sustainability is not easy.

And Id have to agree. But not because of any need for peat moss, at least as far as my gardening requirements are concerned. I, like most home gardeners, can get along without peat moss just fine. The larger horticulture industry is another matter, as the task force admits. It proposes a lengthy step-by-step phase-out (this is the one with the 2030 target) that includes funding the research and development of sustainable growing media.

What I like about all this is how seriously the Brits are treating the issue. The task force included every possible element of the hort industry (not just wild-eyed environmentalists). There were nurseries, flower growers, food growers, andof coursegrowing media producers, such as our friends at Scotts Miracle-Gro, and others.

Despite all the careful deliberation, and despite the 29-page report, however, the British reaction was tumultuous enough to warrant a front-page news story over here. Is there really no other media capable of nurturing seeds and hard-to-grow plants? Hard to believe.

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Vegetables Should Taste Good!

The New York Times ran a piece this week about the results of federal legislation mandating healthier school lunches beginning this year. Because of Puritanical restrictions on fat and salt, the healthy food has no flavor and many kids are just rejecting it.

Monica Eng of the Chicago Tribune has also done fantastic reporting about the insanity that is lunch in the Chicago Public Schools. (Eng is everything a food writer should beactually expending shoe leather talking to the cafeteria lunch ladies and the students.) Chicago regulations prohibit adding any salt to vegetables, when, of course, as the story I linked to points out, the vast majority of salt in our diet comes from processed foods, not from a pinch of salt added to something made from scratch. There is an additional irony in that the Chicago approach to healthy eating occurs in schools that generally lack kitchens that allow for the preparation of fresh foods. Its all reheat-only.

So the kids throw their lunches out or eat out of vending machines. Talk about counterproductive!

If you want kids to eat vegetables, heres a hint: They should taste good.

Our experience at the Lake Avenue Elementary School Garden Project is entirely different. We not only garden with the kids, we cook with themand seriously! For example, faced with the worlds most beautiful green cabbage in early September and hot weather that suggested it would soon rot and be eaten by slugs, we made pierogi with itnamely, smoked pork and cabbage pierogi, as well as potato, ricotta and cheddar pierogi. We grew the potatoes, too.

This was the opposite of a low-fat, low-sodium meal. Serious amounts of sour cream, pork fat, and butter. But it was delicious! And a lot of kids who never particularly liked cabbage before now like cabbage.

In fact, we find that the kids in our increasingly popular club will eat almost ANYTHING they grow and cook. And I am including beets and bitter eggplants. My partner Carol Maxwell and I always make sure that the recipe is delicious. We are both food people without any fear of bacon fat or cream, olive oil or sea salt, and she is truly a kick-ass cook who expands my horizons as well as the kids.

But the truth is also that the vegetables that come out of our garden are so delicious in themselves, that the kids will eat them without prodding.

My feeling is that until you have tasted locally grown or homegrown vegetables, you have never tasted a vegetable. So healthier school lunches made with tired sad produce shipped all the way from California, or frozen or canned vegetables, are probably not enticing.

Look, institutional cooking is hard. I understand that. But many of us live in places surrounded by superb local farmers. I would bet that if you tapped that resource, as my school district does, and gave the Food Service people wider creative latitudeand kitchens they could cook inhealthier eating would move out of the realm of theory and policy and into kids lives.

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The Great Potting Soil Debate

For the last several years Ive written a series of articles for Garden Chic magazine (a business magazine for owners of independent garden centers) in which I call up owners of independent garden centers and ask them a whole bunch of questions about how they promote organic gardening. As the owner of a retail business myself, Ive always found these conversations to be fascinating. It doesnt matter whether youre selling used books or new plantssome things about retail just never change.

One thing that always amazes me about these interviews is how fanatical people can get about potting soil. These garden center owners really sweat the decision over what potting soil to carrythey run side-by-side trials, they survey their customers, they scope out the competition. Most of them seem to have one brand that they absolutely swear by, and a couple others that they carry to please the non-believers.

Ive never been much of a container gardener myself (What? You want a drink of water? Get it yourselfIm busy!) but this year I remade part of my garden and turned it into a really cool hangout space that is all about the containers. (Ill show you pictures soon.) And guess what? Suddenly, potting soil became a BIG issue in my life.

Im a big believer in shopping locally, and luckily, the FoxFarm Soil & Fertilizer Company is located right here in town. They make a super-ultra premium potting soil called Ocean Forest, and a more affordable version called Happy Frog. Both have all kinds of good stuff added, like worm castings, bat guano, fish and crab meal, etc. etc. So I used a little of both in this new garden Ive been working on.

What about you? Is there a potting soil you absolutely insist on using? And if so, whyis it because its cheap, convenient, or just really awesome? Is money any object in the quest for the perfect bag of black stuff?

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The Gardens of San Miguel

Theres one garden in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico thats known to residents and visitors alike and its El Jardin right in the center of the Colonial city. Whats interesting and even iconic about this city park is the way the trees are pruned into always-perfect flat spheres. Here you see them behind Miss San Miguel in the recent Independence Day Parade. (On my visit I was disabused of the notion that Cinco de Mayo is Mexican Independence Day apparently thats only celebrated in the States. South of the border, September 16 is the day.)

To see the trees from above, click here. Very cool!

In an upscale part of this upscale town I found some dramatic plantings adorning shops.

As in so much of the world, the beautiful private gardens here are behind walls. Frustrating! But I got to see a few private gardens, like the interior courtyard of my sisters home, shown below.

From her hillside home I could see down into some pretty nice gardens, shown above and below.

These last photos hint at the splendor of the three villas where my nieces wedding took place, and most of the guests stayed. Though theyre humbly called casas, these 5-million-dollar estates are anything but. Theyre owned by Houston oil families.

To see what this high-altitude part of central Mexico might have looked like before it was developed, check my photos of its mostly-indigenous botanic garden.

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Sunflower sutra

There is a climactic scene in the charming if strange independent movie Elvis & Anabelle. The lead male character, Elvis, a budding mortician, is about to commit suicide when he notices out his window that a field of sunflowers has magically burst into bloom outside his window. The sight revives his spirits, he makes one last effort to win back his love, and all ends well, pretty much.

Phytoremediation is one of the reasons sunflowers dominate in the Urban Habitat Project, a demonstration garden that is meant to revive some neglected and abused acres surrounding Buffalos Art Deco Central Terminal, a former train station that is gradually being brought back to productive use.

The sunflowers are joined by native perennials, fruiting trees and shrubs, bathouses, a wetland area, and other elements designed to provide habitat for birds, bees, and butterflies. Now a Registered Monarch Way station and a designated Bat and Pollinator Conservation Site, the area has long been hosting turkeys, foxes, weasels, blue herons, and, of course, deer. The UHP is the brainchild of local landscaper Dave Majewski, who intends to beautify a blighted section of Buffalo as well as educate the public and city officials that unmowed and natural does not mean hazard, dangerous, and eyesore. This is definitely the type of planting thatwere it to appear in the front yard of a middle-class suburban or urban (depending on neighborhood)might raise a neighborly outcry.

I enjoy the sunflowers and the whole planting. I am not even close to suicidal but walking through this site on a late September afternoon did revive my spirits.

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Adoptive Mothers on the Job

After much struggle, I have succeeded in getting some chicks into my coop. I picked up a box from the hatchery yesterday at the post office and was able to quietly, over the course of a few hours, stick 26 bantam chicks under the hot butts of two broody hens.

While one chick arrived weak and didnt make it, the rest seem to be doing well. The broody hens are extremely maternal, ready to peck anybody who tries to bother their chicks. My three other adult hens Ive shut into the coopI dont want any babies falling the three feet from the opening to the ground. They seem merely mesmerized by whats occurring.

I think hens really know their business when it comes to rearing the young.

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