Burpee Festival 2015

I just got back from Burpee Fest 2015–and it was awesome. I was invited as part of a group of garden writers, photographers, and chefs who toured Burpee’s historic Fordhook Farm, in Doyleston, PA.

One of the highlights of the visit was getting to sample Burpee’s fresh fruits and veggies. George Ball, Burpee’s owner and CEO, told us about a new eggplant, ‘Meatball,’ that’s coming out in 2016. (You heard it here first–it’s not even on their website yet.) He says it’s going to revolutionize the way we eat, because it’s a delicious, nutritious substitute for meats.

After the tour, we sat down to a lunch prepared with foods harvested from the farm. Take a look at my plate, below, and you’ll see ‘Meatball’ made into a meatloaf/meatball dish topped with marinara sauce. I will definitely make this at home, once I get my hands on the seeds.

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The other delish foods on my plate were fresh from Burpee’s organic gardens, too. You’ll see stuffed yellow peppers, sliced orange tomatoes, and a tasty relish made with purple onions. Later, we snacked on slices of cold watermelon, cantaloupe, and the biggest, sweetest blackberries I’ve ever eaten.

That afternoon, we had time to roam around Burpee’s flower gardens. Check out these rudbeckias:

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Butterflies and bees floated around Burpee’s “Happiness Garden” (the bees didn’t bother us at all. They were too busy enjoying the flowers.) Bees and other pollinators are disappearing at an alarming rate, putting our food supply in jeopardy and upsetting the delicate environmental balance. To help reverse this scary trend, Burpee partnered with the White House to give away over a million packets of butterfly and bee-friendly seeds. You can help spread the buzz, too, by planting flowers like the ones below:

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Zinnias

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Coneflowers

And of course, a butterfly garden needs butterfly bushes.

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Butterfly Bush

Moving along to the kitchen garden at Fordhook, here’s a sneak-peek of a new tomato that Burpee hasn’t named yet. Watch for it in 2016, too.

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Don’t forget to order your seeds for next spring early, as soon as seed catalogs start arriving in the mail. Popular varieties sell out fast!

Lynn

Bloomerang – A New Lilac for the South

Did you catch the pun in the title of this post? If you didn’t, go back and take another look. (It’s okay. I’ll wait right here.)

See it now?

There’s a new, re-blooming lilac on the market, but it’s not called ‘Boomerang’ – it’s ‘BLOOM-erang.’ Cute, yes?

I’m really excited about this plant, because lilacs typically don’t perform well in the South. It’s not that our weather is too hot; the problem is that we don’t get a long-enough period of winter chill for lilacs.

Jim, one of the plant-gurus at a home and garden store I frequent, showed me the plants last weekend, and he’s excited, too. These babies are supposed to bloom in spring and fall, giving us lilac-starved Southern gardeners a double dose of beautiful blossoms.

(Actually, Jim told me that ‘Bloomerang’ has been out for about 3 years now, but there are finally enough plants on the market to get to our area. So if you’re a Southerner gardener and you want one fo these, don’t hesitate–they’re probably going to sell out fast, once word gets around.)

Meanwhile, Jim tells me that the blueberry bushes are flying out of his store, too, at the rate of about 20 plants a week. Blueberries, he said, are great to grow, because you don’t just get the fruit. You also get pretty flowers in the springtime, and reddish foliage on the bushes in fall. Also, birds are attracted to the berries, in case you’re more interested in wildlife than picking.

I scooped up some bargains on pansies last weekend, so if you’re in the market for inexpensive color, be sure to check around at area garden centers. Pansies start to get leggy and floppy once warm weather arrives, and the way things are going, that won’t be long. But for the next couple of months, discounted pansies are a good buy and add beauty to porches and decks. Right now, I’m enjoying a basket of yellow pansies hanging in my back yard. They’re like a splash of sunshine against the bare, brown landscape.

Can’t wait till spring…it’s coming!

How to Grow Camellias (Even If You Mistake Them for Roses)

 

The first time I ever saw a camellia in someone’s garden, I thought I’d stumbled across a rose with unusual leaves. But once I started reading about these beautiful flowers, I realized I wasn’t the only one who’d made that mistake.

A German botanist named Engelbert Kaempfer is credited for writing one of the earliest descriptions of camellias. When he discovered them growing in Nagasaki in the 1690s, he called them  Japanese roses’. A half-century later, in 1745, English author and naturalist George Edwards published a book of birds he’d drawn in various natural settings. One of them, Edwards wrote, was perched on the branch of what he called a “Chinese rose,” a plant we now know as a Camellia japonica.

Although it’s only February, the camellias in my Douglasville garden are blooming, and if you’re in the South, maybe you’re already seeing yours open, too.  Depending on the variety, camellias bloom from now until May in Georgia, and some will flower more than once.

Although some camellia blooms look as lush and heavily petaled as roses, they’re not related. They’re members of the Theaceae, or tea, family, and they’re native to Japan and China. These evergreen plants have become very popular in the Southeast., where most of us value them as ornamentals for our garden, but the leaves of some species are still widely used in Asia for tea.

If you’d like to add camellias to your garden, you can transplant potted plants in the spring. A partly shaded spot, with moist, well-drained soil, is ideal. If your soil stays too wet, try growing them in raised beds, about 10 to 12 inches higher than ground level. Camellias love acidic soil, too, so try planting them under tall pine trees. Dogwoods and azaleas make great companion plants.

Give your camellias a good start by cultivating the soil 8 to 10 inches deep. Dig holes that are two to three times the width of the root ball, but no deeper than the root ball. Remove any sticks or rocks as you back-fill the hole, and press the dirt firmly around the plant’s roots. Water thoroughly to eliminate air pockets.

Some experts say that you don’t need to add organic matter to the back-fill, but you can add 2 or 3 bags of compost if you’re gardening in a low area. Just mix the compost with your soil to create a mound, to help keep the camellia’s shallow roots from standing in water. Finish by adding about 3 inches of mulch, such as pine straw or pine bark, to help prevent weeds.

Camellias aren’t heavy feeders, and while specialty fertilizers are available, an 8-8-8 or 10-10-10 formula is usually fine Apply a tablespoon of fertilizer per foot of plant height in spring, summer, and fall until the camellia is well-established. Then you can feed the same amount, but twice a year, in spring and summer. Water weekly the first year after transplanting.

As the years go by, remember that because camellias have shallow roots, they can succumb to drought quickly, so water as often as the soil around your plant feels dry.

After the flowers are finished, camellias can be pruned to remove dead wood and allow light and air into the plant’s interior. For all their beauty, these plants are susceptible to various diseases and pests, including mites, scale, die-back, and sooty mold. But don’t let that scare you away. Proper cultivation—that is, keeping the garden clean, and removing old leaf litter– goes a long way towards success.

Need more info? Click here for an article from the University of Georgia College of Agriculture: http://www.ugaextension.com/thomas/anr/documents/Camellias_B813.pdf

To learn more about camellias, check out the American Camellia Society’s list of publications at: http://www.camellias-acs.com/

Spring at Epcot

Just got back from Epcot’s 2010 International Flower and Garden Festival in Orlando–wow!  I was invited to speak at their “Great American Gardeners” series, and in between my talks (the weekend of March 19-22), I kept running outside to check out the flowers.

Epcot is always beautifully landscaped, but coming from the gray, cloudy weather we’ve had here in Georgia, where it’s raining and chilly, and going outside under the blue Florida skies to “oooh” and “aaahh” over the pansies and impatiens and Gerbera daises and roses–well, it was just incredible. Really a lift to my spirit after the long winter.  It also made me want to fly home and head straight to the garden center, but it’s still too early here–gotta wait at least until mid-April to be sure we’re past the possibility of a late frost.

Here are some of the pix we made during our trip.  One of them shows me on the speakers’ stage, surrounded by a few of the many heirloom plants the Disney horticulturists grew for me, just for my presentations.  The Disney/Epcot crew was great, by the way–nice, friendly folks with awesomely green thumbs!

I’ll post a few more pictures over the next few days.  And check back, and I’ll share some info a gardener named Greg told me about an heirloom watermelon.  It’s called ‘Scaly Bark,’ and while I’d never heard of it before, I want to try it now (in spite of its strange name).

Okay for now..enjoy the pictures!

This big green guy is positioned near– what else?  The butterfly gardens and exhibit!

You probably recognize Tinkerbell, part of the Disney gardening magic.
Finally–for now–here’s wha I’m calling my Mouscar – that’s “mouse” + “Oscar”.  I couldn’t be more proud if I’d actually won the golden Oscar in Hollywood.  The Epcot gardeners gave him to me at the conclusion of the event.  Isn’t he cute?

Glass Gardens


It’s cold and rainy here today, and since there’s nothing in my garden to look at, I dug up some pictures I made a couple of years ago at the Missouri Botanical Garden, in St. Louis. This is a pathway into the garden (I visited when it was raining there, too.)

I happened to visit the garden during a display of Chihuly’s work. Dan Chihuly is a fantastic glass artist, in case you haven’t heard of him. Some of his pieces are surrealistic, but all of them are beautiful and colorful. For example, the picture below looks like giant onions, but these are actually huge glass orbs floating in the reflecting pond at the MBG.

Here’s a Chihuly “flower” that looks like it belongs in a tropical rain forest, but it has an other-worldly feel, too:

These are neon-green mushrooms—or maybe more flowers–“sprouting” from a bed of green foliage:

Maybe I’ll buy a gazing globe or some kind of glass ornament for my garden, too. They’re really bright and colorful, especially in the rain.