Veggies – Page 3 – Ellis Hollow

2008 Year in review (Part 1)

The obligatory (and hopefully entertaining) look back …

January

Not much happening in the garden, so it was a good time to think about ordering seeds and plants (unfortunately, they’re more than 5 cents a pack these days, unlike these old packs) and sharing stories about the great bowling ball accident of 2003.

castor bean seed packet

While there were no blooms (or scans), there was surprisingly much to photograph on a very warm January garden bloogers bloom day.

February

February is for forcing.

And time to fiddle around with PhotoShopping that month’s bloom day scans and chase away the merry blues with Manu Chao.

bloom day scan feb

Had a sunset picture grace a CD cover.

Read and reviewed Tulipomania. Added my two cents (and a ton of pictures) to the Garden Bloggersâ€™ Design Workshop â€“ Color in the Garden edition.

March

I love March, if only for its excitement. There are the forced bulbs in flower …

The first of the spring ephemerals …

Then back to winter, hell and high water.

By Easter, plenty of signs that spring is on it’s way …

Iris

Then more snow. There’s a reason they’re called snowdrops, you know.

April

Speaking of snowdrops, April brought the open house at snowdrop collector Hitch Lyman’s garden.

And the spring ephemeral peak at my place. Crocus …

Puschkinia.

Hyper-spring also brings scilla …

… and erythronium.

And by the end of the month, a bazillion daffodils, these at Nina Bassuk and Peter Trowbridge’s annual open house.

May

Spring continues full bore. Purple primrose …

Thalia daffs …

Sakuraso primrose …

…an iris from Marcia’s garden …

… and many more in this bloom day scan.

In the world of art, Quilter Lisa Ellis used one of my canna images for this work of art …

… Cornell students built this Turfwork! project …

… and Durand Van Doran built this fabulous floral gate — roots and all — in Minns Garden outside the building where I work.

And we are reminded that there’s nothing new under the sun.

June

Some theme posts in June, because there’s so much to cover you’ve got to do some lumping. One on openings …

,,, another on chartreusey stuff …

… too many blooms on bloom day to fit onto one scan …

… actual bloom day pictures to go with the scans …

… East Digitalistan …

… and decent images of aruncus (finally!) …

… summer songs …

Mussolini was a-shavin’ whistlin’ tarantella,
Stalin was keeping eye on barbeque.
When their fish line bell started to jingle,
Mussolini caught a-nothinâ€™, Stalin caught two.

On the art front, Cornell graduation turf art …

I tried to push back on the bland reporting on leaf casts in the garden media, and reported on the infamous Memorial Day jello contest.

As we head into the second half of the year, these alliums in Minns Garden outside the building where I work are all ready for 4th of July fireworks.

Part 2 starts here …

McDonalds’ lettuce billboard

McDonalds delivers its fresh salads message in Chicago by actually growing lettuce on a billboard. Even treehugger.com thinks it’s a worthy ad effort.

YouTube of the project:

Marcia’s garden revisited

One of my first posts (Aug. 2005) was about the garden of my friend and coworker Marcia. She needed some environmental portraits shot for a feature about her on another website, so I stopped by for a quick visit a week ago. I couldn’t help but wander around and shoot some more pix after the portraits were done.

While some trees have been removed to let in some light and many small details have changed, the bones are mostly the same. From this angle (above, from a second-story window), it’s a well-designed flower garden with a vegetable garden in back separated by a fence. The new bed on the right was inspired by an article in a recent issue of Garden Design about a Charleston, S.C., garden (see “Southern Classic,” May 2008, image on page 39) that features a lawn area ‘pinched’ by beds at the far end to create some separation between different areas.

From the opposite angle (above), you can see the second face of Marcia’s layout: A functional veggie garden with some funky ornamentation.

This small water garden also provides some separation between the flowers and the food. You need to walk around it to get to the entrance arch.

This column provides a focus in the round bed in the center of the veggie garden, as well as being the anchoring lighthouse at the far end the garden’s axis.

One thing Marcia and I share it the love of the blue bottles …

…and funky ornamentation. (I’m thinking Les Quatres Vents only smaller.)

A closer view of the left border from above.

This nearly black iris came from a small iris farm nearby that went out of business last year. The rhizomes were free for the digging, but not labeled. (I got several buckets too.) Adds to the surprises in the garden this spring, waiting to see what the new irises are going to look like when they bloom.

I don’t know the name of this iris. But it seems like it’s everywhere. I’ve got some that are identical or very similar that came with the last house that I lived in.

Rhodie flowers starting to pop.

Shameless Sunday plugs

Three shameless plugs this morning:

Introduction to Botanical Illustration online course. (Full disclosure: I work with the instructor as part of my day job in the Department of Horticulture at Cornell University.) If you’ve ever wanted to become proficient at illustrating what you see in your garden, this 6-week online course will teach you the basics of rendering plants in pencil and ink.

The instructor, my friend and co-worker Marcia Eames Sheavly, is an accomplished artist who also teaches our popular Art of Horticulture course, recently featured by Julie over at The Human Flower Project.

The syllabus:

Observation of Art in Nature
The Use of Line in Drawing
The Use of Shape and Space in Drawing
Depicting Perspective and Foreshortening in Illustration
Using Light to Add Dimension to Botanical Illustrations
Composition and a Creative Approach to Drawing

There are still a few spots open. But act quickly: The course starts January 21.

Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners website. (Full disclosure: I work on this website as part of my day job in the Department of Horticulture at Cornell University.) When you’re poring over veggie seed catalogs this winter, stop by this site where you’ll find descriptions and seed sources for more than 5,600 varieties.

You can also read more than 3,400 ratings and reviews from fellow gardeners to help you find out which varieties perform best in your garden.

The site has really grown since we launched it in 2004. We’ve got a lot of ideas to develop the site even more. But what we really need now is more passionate vegetable gardeners contributing reviews of their favorite varieties — as well as those that didn’t work out so well in their setting. So if you know some passionate veggie gardeners, please pass this along to them.

Seneca Hill Perennials. No full disclosure needed here. Well, the proprietor of this nursery, Ellen Hornig, is a member of our local Adirondack Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society (I’m a board member and editor/webmaster for the group) and she’s as nice as she can be.

Why am I plugging Seneca Hills? This year is Ellen’s last print catalog. She’s all online from here on out. To echo a quote from her catalog that Graham over at Transatlantic Planstman noted:

Global warming forces us to examine our resource use, and this is one arena in which it can be cut. We will be redesigning the website somewhat to compensate for the lack of a catalog, including addingâ€¦ an archive wherein inactive entries can be kept for reference purposes.

As I look at the foot-tall stack of catalogs on the corner of my desk — most of which will only get a quick flip-through — I know Ellen is right. Sure, there’s something about going to the mailbox and seeing that there are two or three new catalogs in there. But that is increasingly becoming a luxury we can’t afford.

Buying locally as much as possible can also help us reduce our collective carbon footprints. But in the case of plants, I also like supporting folks like Ellen who are good at identifying plants (exotic and native) that perform well where I live.

Sure, she has more reliable snow cover than I do. (I think I read recently that Oswego has averaged about 140 inches of mostly Lake Effect snow over the past decade or so.) But I know that I can find some great plants in her catalog that will do well here and that I won’t find anywhere else.

So, know any other hidden-gem nurseries that folks in your neck of the woods should know about? Plug them in the comments.

Old seeds?

Carol over at May Dreams Gardens found some seed packets dating back to 1886 when she was going through her seeds the other day. I didn’t see any ‘packed for’ dates on these, but I suspect they’re older.

old seed packet

(I always thought ‘Australian Brown’ was a table wine.)

old seed packet

And this is what I’ll be using to fertilize the veggies this year:

old seed packet

As you may have guessed, these are actually vintage seed packets from my friend Marcia’s collection. I’ve still got a few packets left from my Y2K purchases, but Carol’s 1986 packs beat me by more than a decade.