Inside The New York Botanical Garden
Gardening Tips
Posted in Gardening Tips on October 4 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
Years ago, I returned home to Massachusetts after living in England for 10 years and drove around my old neighborhood with a friend. I commented on a pretty purple flower I saw growing in a wetland area. When I asked her what it was, she cringed and told me it was purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria, pictured. Photo by Wikipedia user Meggar). At first I thought her reaction was severe until, continuing our drive, I realized it had taken over many wetland areas. Where were the native cattails (Typha), the sedges (Carex), and the swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) that I had grown up with?
Ecosystems are by definition complex, and the lives of their inhabitants are interconnected. When an ecosystem is thrown out of balance by an invasive intruder, more than the flora suffers.
Insects, birds, amphibians, and mammals all depend on the native flora for food, shelter, and nesting sites and materials. An area stripped of its native vegetation creates a sterile environment that is no longer inhabitable to many creatures.
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Posted in Gardening Tips on September 27 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
For the past two weeks I have written about the invasive Japanese stilt grass: describing it, exploring its life cycle, and giving tips on how to remove it.
Like most big problems, this annual grass will not go away easily. Repeated treatments are needed and the area needs to be maintained to discourage the plant’s growth. While this may sound daunting, it is reassuring to know that all you have to do is follow some simple and healthy gardening practices to slow down the return of stilt grass.
Most invasive plants are opportunists—colonizing areas that have been disturbed. So whenever you pull out any invasive plant, the first line of defense is to tamp down the disturbed soil (gently firming it with your feet).
If you are not replanting the area, the next course of action is to apply a thick layer of mulch over the surface. This will inhibit the germination of weed seeds uncovered in the soil disturbance and will provide a protective layer to prevent any introduced seeds from settling the area.
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Posted in Gardening Tips on September 20 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
This past summer I attended a workshop given by NOFA Organic Land Care on the organic management of invasive plants in the landscape. I want to share some of the information I learned, especially as it relates to Japanese stilt grass (Microstegium vimineum), which I wrote about last week.
Since Japanese stilt grass is an annual grass, the primary goal is to prevent it from producing seeds. Let’s look at how to work with its life cycle in order to get rid of it.
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Posted in Gardening Tips on September 13 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
As I was walking into work recently, I bumped into Scott Mori, the Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany at the Garden. I mentioned to him that I had just attended a wonderful workshop given by NOFA Organic Land Care on the organic management of invasive plants in the landscape.
Scott mentioned that the biggest nuisance in his northern Westchester neighborhood is Japanese stilt grass (Microstegium vimineum). Approximately seven years ago he noticed a few plants along the roadside, several years latter the plants had formed a continuous band along each side of many of the roads, and today this pest is abundant in the woodland understory in his neighborhood. In addition, lawns are now also being invaded by this aggressive pest.
Japanese stilt grass is an annual grass indigenous to Japan, Korea, China, and India. It grows 2–3 feet tall and has a dense sprawling habit that gives it the capacity to smoother its neighbors. During the summer it colonizes an area by spreading along the ground via adventitious roots, which form from the nodes on its gangly stems.
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Posted in Gardening Tips on September 7 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
At this productive time of year, borrow some of the beauty from the garden and from nature to adorn your dinner table. Look around your garden as well as farmers markets to see what interesting flowers and herbs are available to fill a vase. Ornamental grasses and interesting foliage from woody plants will add wonderful touches to your arrangements as well.
Recently I was at the Union Square Farmers Market perusing the vendors and admiring the kaleidoscope of cut flowers. I saw for sale bundles of sages, from culinary sage (Salvia officinalis) with its pungent, soft, fuzzy, silvery foliage to the ubiquitous mealy cup sage (Salvia farinacea ‘Victoria’). Silver is a great color to add to bouquets since it picks up light and creates drama. Gray intensifies other colors, making them glow. I love the combination of silver with red and orange. The intense blue of the Victoria sage is another good companion for autumnal colors providing wonderful contrast.
In my own garden I grow a beautiful and bountiful sage that is sometimes referred to as hummingbird, Texas, or scarlet sage, (Salvia coccinea). It also makes a nice cut flower. I often grow ‘Lady in Red’, ‘Coral Nymph’, or ‘Snow Nymph’. This ornamental sage produces an abundance of wispy spires of flowers up to the first frost.
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Posted in Gardening Tips on August 31 2010, by Plant Talk
Written by Burpee Home Gardens Team. Burpee Home Gardens is a Supporting Sponsor of The Edible Garden.
How did your vegetable garden do this year? We’re sure you have numerous anecdotes about how much your garden yielded and how tasty the vegetables were. You can probably communicate about which pests visited, how the weather affected your plants, etc. That’s great! Gardeners love to share all their gardening stories with others.
Now. How did your vegetable garden do this year compared to two years ago? If that question is not so easy to answer, what you need is a gardening journal. This is a handwritten notebook or computer-based document that can be your go-to gardening resource. It’s your chance to record all of the great (and not so great) things that happened this planting season: From the number of plants you put in the ground and the various vegetable varieties you tried, to your weekly/daily maintenance of each plant and how they ultimately performed. Keeping track of this type of information helps make you a better, more prepared gardener when next season rolls around.
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Posted in Gardening Tips on August 30 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
Lee Reich, author of The Pruning Book, an authoritative and accessible account of pruning techniques, gets part of his passion for pruning from his insatiable curiosity about and his desire to grow every type of fruit possible in the Northeast.
I was visiting his garden up in New Paltz in July and spent the day wandering through carefully caged and guarded blueberries (against the birds, not me) and arbors of grapes and hardy kiwis (Actinidia).The garden overflowed with fruit in all shapes and sizes ranging from alpine strawberries (Fragaria vesca) in containers and Nanking cherries (Prunus tomentosa) lining the driveway to medlars (Mespilus germanica) and cornelian cherries (Cornus mas) spotted around the garden.
One of the most breathtaking sites was his allée of pawpaws (Asimina triloba). They are small- to medium-size trees that grow to about 25 feet in height, with large, lush tropical foliage that is reminiscent of an avocado.
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Posted in Gardening Tips on August 23 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
When I grow vegetables, I count on a wide array of cooking magazines and celebrity chef’s to challenge and stretch my imagination so that I can find creative ways to prepare my bounty.
The other day I was flipping through a cooking magazine featuring Greek cuisine. I perused the magazine with interest, since one of our Celebrity Chef Kitchen Gardens for The Edible Garden was created by Chef Michael Psilakis, owner of Kefi and author of How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking. (He will present a cooking demonstration at the Conservatory Kitchen on October 16 as part of Fall Finale Weekend.)
Michael’s garden bed is filled with dandelion greens, grapevines, arugula, mint, dill, tomatoes, artichokes, and eggplants. His culinary style is a sophisticated Greek modern fusion that seamlessly combines fish or meat with vegetables, spices, and herbs.
The magazine’s stuffed eggplant recipe (from another Greek chef) caught my interest. Eggplants stuffed with lamb, tomatoes, Parmesan cheese, onion and garlic, seasoned with cinnamon, oregano, cloves and nutmeg. Yum. That’s delicious, culturally complex, comfort food if you ask me.
Eggplants are a favorite of mine in the vegetable garden. A staple of the warm season crops (those planted after the last frost date), eggplants love the heat, and I generally wait until June 1 to set my transplants into warm soil.
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Posted in Gardening Tips on August 16 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
Those of you who have visited the Garden this year will have noticed the large containers of brilliant blue agapanthus or African lily that decorate the entrance to the Garden Cafe. (The cultivar we are growing this year is ‘Storm Cloud’.)
Agapanthus is hardy from zones 7 or 8 to zone 10. Some of the many species are evergreen, others deciduous; the deciduous species tend to be hardier and benefit from a heavy winter mulch.
The good news for those of you living outside the hardiness zones is that agapanthus love to grow in a pot and don’t mind crowded quarters. In this part of the country, the easiest thing to do in winter is to store the container of agapanthus in a cool basement or garage, and keep the plants from drying out.
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Posted in Gardening Tips on August 9 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
While it is edifying to talk about ways to reduce the need for supplemental irrigation as I did last week in my blog post that explored drought-tolerant plants, it is all water under the bridge if the beautiful xeric garden that is planted isn’t properly maintained.
Here are some tips to get you going in the right direction. Many of the suggestions are common sense, but I am generally so anxious to get the plants in the ground and to watch them start growing, that I often need these reminders myself.
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Years ago, I returned home to Massachusetts after living in England for 10 years and drove around my old neighborhood with a friend. I commented on a pretty purple flower I saw growing in a wetland area. When I asked her what it was, she cringed and told me it was purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria, pictured. Photo by Wikipedia user Meggar). At first I thought her reaction was severe until, continuing our drive, I realized it had taken over many wetland areas. Where were the native cattails (Typha), the sedges (Carex), and the swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) that I had grown up with?
