More colorful than a wind sock.
Wind gloves and wind socks will flutter and keep birds from your ripe strawberries.
The fluttering ribbons will keep the birds from my strawberry hanging basket.
This is a cute project that kids can make in a single project meeting. What mother wouldn’t love this as a Mother’s day gift ?
This was a cute 4-H project at the fair. I asked the 4-H’er to make one for me.
I like this combo of two Proven Winners annuals. For some reason, I was blessed with five pots of this coleus, aligator green foliage with a creamy-yellow tear drop center; and three Golidilocks Rocks™ – Bidens Ferulifolia
ColorBlaze® Alligator Tears™ Solenostemon scutellarioides Coleus is growing in three different place in the garden. I am attracted to the multi color coleus in reds and greens, so Alligator Tears had to win me over, and it did.
It requires less trimming to maintain it’s thick, full shape than most coleus.
This was one of the easiest, to care for containers on my patio. In fact, I have a pair of these containers. One container with two coleus and one Bidens, and another with one coleus and two Bidens.
Golidilocks Rocks™ – Bidens Ferulifolia is loaded with bright yellow blooms and has bloomed continously all summer. It has grown in containers with little care or attention. Goldilocks is a great choice for containers, withstood our record-breaking heat and has blended into a delightful container combination. This self cleaning trait – meaning no deadheading necessary – is another reason to include Golidilocks Rocks™ in container garden combinations.
Aligator Tears
Only two coleus in the concrete planter, they looked kind of lonely when they were first planted. Out by the mail boxes, these Aligator Tears recieved no pruning or cutting back. They did not set seed until mid August. They nicely fill the container and kept a good shape. Imagine how well they would do with pinching back, generous water and fertilzer.
These plants were sent to me for trial and evaluation. Thanks to Proven Winners for the opportunity to grow the newest most exciting plants. For plant combinations and container ideas, go to Proven Winners.
Comments Off on Alligator Tears and Goldilocks Rocks
Posted in My Gardens, My Homeplace, Product reviews
Tagged Alligator Tears, Bidens Ferulifolia, coleus, ColorBlaze, Golidilocks Rocks, Proven Winners, Solenostemon scutellarioides Coleus
Superbells Coralberry Punch color Calibrachoa from Proven Winners. And Ball Horticulture Coleua “redhead”
Coralberry Punch Calibrachoa is a Superbells® Proven Winners Calibrachoa hybrid paired with Coleus Redhead a Ball Exclusive and a Simply Beautiful® selection. These two plants seem to bring out the best of red in each other. Colors do not fade and they are very drought tolerant.
Most coleus need regular pinching or pruning to keep it’s bushy shape, but I rarely trimmed or fed this combo. The Coleus Redhead, is a Ball Exclusive. It’s hard to find a fade resitant coleus this color. I will look for the Redhead next spring and add it to my hanging baskets or containers.
Calibrachoas are a new type of plant that looks like a dwarf Petunia. These little flowers bloomed all summer, the containers are in full sun, and got irreglar watering. Great container choice for this drought tolerant plant that showed no sign of disease or insect damage.
Look for more varieties of this fade resitant full sun bloomer at Proven Winners. There are some great color combinations on Proven Winners site.
Comments Off on Calibrachoa and Coleus
Posted in My Gardens, My Homeplace, Oh Grow Up!
Tagged Calibrachoa, coleus, container gardens, Proven Winners. Superbels, Redhead. Coralberry Punch
Patsy Bell Hobson is a garden writer and a travel writer. For her, it’s a great day when she can combine the two things she enjoys most: gardening and traveling. Visit her personal blog at http://patsybell.com/ and read her travel writings at http://www.examiner.com/x-1948-Ozarks-Travel-Examiner.
Chard is becoming a favorite summer green for home gardeners. It’s beautiful! And, long after the cool season, when greens such as spinach have faded from my Zone 6 garden, chard is the one that steadily produces fresh greens for my favorite salads.
Make tomato and swiss chard soup this summer.
Photo by Robyn Lee/Courtesy Flickr
Grow and Cook with Swiss Chard
Swiss chard ‘Bright Lights’ was honored as an All-America Selections (AAS) winner in 1998. When buying herb and vegetable seeds, I look for seeds that are AAS winners, which are selected based on their superior performance. AAS winners will also grow most anywhere in North America. The All-America Selections® logo tells me that I can grow this plant easily from seed.
Swiss chard, or chard, is a beet that is usually selected for its leaf production, not for its root formation. Plant chard seeds a week or two before your favorite salad greens, such as spinach, bolt. When you pull up these greens your chard seedlings will be well on their way. Also, by the time tomatoes are ripe and ready, lettuce will be long gone from your garden. Instead, grow young chard leaves as a lettuce substitute. I use it in the summer’s best sandwich: the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, or the BLT.
Many cooks remove chard’s colorful stems, which can be yellow, gold, orange, pink, red or white, and cook them separately before adding greens to the mix. (The stems take longer to cook.) Cut off the outer leaves 1 1/2 inches above the ground when they are young and tender, which is when they are about 8 to 10 inches tall. Larger leaves can be cooked and used as you would use spinach. If you like spinach, you will like this hardy and more earthy-flavored relative.
Fill your garden with Swiss chard whereever you find an empty space. It grows well in containers and is pretty enough to grow in a flower bed. Swiss chard is loaded with vitamins A, C, and contain vitamin B, calcium, iron and phosphorus. Like most greens, chard is very low in calories. And unlike most vegetables, it has a slightly higher sodium content than most leafy greens.
Seed Packet Giveaway!
Burpee has generously agreed to give away three seed packets of Swiss chard ‘Bright Lights’ to my Herb Companion readers. Winners will be selected at random. Details below.
• Post a comment below: Share your experience with Swiss chard. Do you currently grow this plant? What would you like to use it for?
Posted in Herb Everything, Herbs in the garden
Tagged All American Selections, Burpee, Chard, Giveaway, Patsy Bell Hobson, Tips
Patsy Bell Hobson is a garden writer and a travel writer. For her, it’s a great day when she can combine the two things she enjoys most: gardening and traveling. Visit her personal blog at http://patsybell.com and read her travel writings at Ozarks Travel Examiner.
Best known for pickling, dill (Anethum graveolens) is also a good herb for succession planting. If making dill pickles is on your Summer To-Do List, try this variety: dill ‘Dukat’. This variety, which is bred in Denmark, has finely cut leaves that stay fresh longer than other varieties.
Hanging herb garden hung by the window to grow in Brooklyn.
Photo by Dory Komfeld/Courtesy Flickr
I like this newer variety of dill. It is pretty enough to plant in a sunny flower garden and it’s more compact than taller, older varieties. This is one of the few herbs that I enjoy to use both the ferny leaves and the seeds. Those beautiful lacey leaves are often referred to as dill weed. After this member of the carrot family has bloomed and set seed, cut it and hang it upside down in a paper bag to collect seed.
While the black swallowtail butterfly is a caterpillar, it feeds on dill.
Photo by Ken Pomerance/Courtesy Flickr
I suggest that you start this plant from seed—it has a long tap root, which means that transplanting it will have limited success. Plant a few seeds every two weeks to extend your season of fresh dill and to grow more than you need to share with local butterflies. Grateful butterflies will enjoy finding this smaller, more compact variety in your garden and caterpillars will appreciate its ready supply. It’s a well known fact that dill (as well as parsley and fennel) will attract butterflies to your garden.
To preserve, freeze your dill plant by cutting the branches into sections short enough to fit into heavy plastic freezer bags. Do not chop the leaves into bits until it is ready to use. This will brighten the fragrance and flavor when you use it in any recipe. Dill will keep in the freezer for about six months.
Use dill and garlic to make homemade pickles.
Photo by Sarah Reid
Use dill for more than pickles and dilly beans. Try a little dill in a favorite biscuit recipe. If you are serving pre-made biscuits, brush a little dill-infused butter on them. Also, I couldn’t make potato salad without dill weed.
This dill seed is easy to find. I bought my seeds at Renee’s Garden, Burpee and Nichols Garden Nursery online catalogs; several other companies also sell dill seed. But if you don’t want to find them on your own, enter my garden giveaway!
Comments Off on It’s dill pickle season
Posted in Herb Everything, Herbs in the garden, Herbs in the kitchen
Tagged Burpee, Dill, Giveaway, Nichols Garden Nursery, Patsy Bell Hobson, Renees Garden
Patsy Bell Hobson is a garden writer and a travel writer. For her, it’s a great day when she can combine the two things she enjoys most: gardening and traveling. Visit her personal blog at and read her travel writings.
In my Zone 6 garden there are always three kinds of tomatoes: a paste tomato for sauces, a cherry tomato, because these small tomatoes are always the first to ripen (and later, when the big tomatoes are producing, these small ones will be dried), and a big, meaty tomato for eating fresh (and for bragging rights). I love tomatoes and when I saw Tomatoes Garlic Basil (St. Lynn’s Press, 2010), I judged the book by its cover. It is beautiful. Eventually, I was tempted to open the paperback tribute to the garden and kitchen’s favorite produce and I’m glad that I did. The book only gets better!
Tomatoes, garlic and basil are the holy trinity of the vegetable garden.
Doug Oster’s Tomatoes Garlic Basil is a love letter about our favorite home garden produce. If you are one of the millions of backyard gardeners who grow tomatoes, this book is for you. Tomatoes are the star of the show. And, just like most gardens, basil and garlic have strong supporting roles in the book that magnify the magic of home grown tomatoes.
The book will not overwhelm you with soil science and plant genetics. It will give you some good advice about soil preparation and plant selection. The pleasure of reading this book grows as Oster offers us many choices with these three simple garden staples.
Like most gardeners, Oster is generous in sharing his experience and recipes. If you are new to gardening, try the simple combination of these three plants. He also encourages people who do not have garden space and shares some planting options. Each chapter begins with a garden or food quote that ties into the chapter. In Chapter 2, I was inspired by “Summer Celebrations” and looked forward to incorporating some of his ideas as I create new traditions for my own family. And by the time you get to the great advice in Chapter 9, which is about soil preparation and weed control, Oster will feel like an old neighbor
Oster is still on the big adventure of trying some different tomato plants every year as well as growing his favorites. It’s a good idea and you will never run out of tomato varieties to try. After reading this book you will be able to speak about basil and garlic as well as tomatoes with any home gardener.
This book would make a great gift for either a new or experienced gardener, as well as for the recipients of your produce bounty. (I recommend you buy the print version to enjoy the artful photographs.) The only difficult part is deciding whether to put this book with my cookbooks or on the shelf with the gardening books. I decided to take the book into the kitchen and try the recipes with my own fresh tomatoes, garlic and basil.
I enjoyed the humorous and serious gardening stories and there are plenty of artsy photographs throughout the book. I will definitely put Doug’s recipes and gardening tips to use this summer.
Cherry tomatoes are heavy producers.
Book Details
• Tomatoes Garlic Basil: The Simple Pleasures of Growing and Cooking Your Garden’s Most Versatile Veggies by Doug Oster
• Paperback: 272 pages.
• Publisher: St. Lynn’s Press; 1st edition, ISBN-10: 0981961517 and ISBN-13: 978-0981961514
• See Doug Oster’s Blog at http://www.dougoster.com/books/ to read “My favorite story from Tomatoes Garlic Basil.”
Comments Off on Book Review: Tomatoes Garlic Basil
Posted in Herbs in the garden, Herbs in the kitchen, My Gardens, Product reviews, Recipes
Frozen fruit will thaw by dessert time. photo by Roboppy
Little berries are sweet and would be tasty frozen treat. photo: PBH
First, this is not my idea. I came upon this tidbit watching late night/early morning TV. Frozen Fruit
Ingredients
1 quart strawberries, de-stemmed
1 (3 pound) block dry ice
Directions
Wash strawberries and place in a paper towel-lined colander. Cover with another paper towel and place in the refrigerator for 4 hours.
French strawberries grown in a hanging basket photo:PBH
Comments Off on Rock Solid Strawberry
Posted in My Gardens
Tagged Frozen Fruit, Fruit, Red, Springtime, Strawberry
Yes, there are lots of day lilies and cone flowers.
Day Lilies are bright and cheerful and at their best in June.
Everything in the garden is green and healthy. Later in the summer, plants get dusty and wilted or chewed and burned up by bugs and heat. There are lots of day lilies and cone flowers in full bloom. The roses haven’t been attacked by the Japanese beetles yet.
Cone flowers ablaze, different varieties bloom at different times, extending the season
Before I share my flowers, I wanted to show you this unobtrusive drip irrigation system for all 12 of the hanging baskets. Most of these plants are annuals and trial plants that are fun varieties new to me.
a thin black tube carries the water overhead
Raddish flowers
Spring raddishes hung on till the summer heat, then bolted, bloomed and are setting seed. With all the beautiful flowers, sometimes it’s easy to overlook the little blooms in the herb and vegetable garden. I’m focusing on edible blooms and vegetable flowers this Bloom Day.
Raddish seed pods look like little bean pods.
Herbs are at their best now and growing fast. Many, like this lilac colored geranium are edible. Add the petals to a garden salad or, garnish a dessert plate with these little flowers.
I vowed to keep the zucchini in control this year. Harvesting squash blossoms, to stuff and fry is a tasty way to keep this beautiful vegetable from over populating the kitchen counter. Harvest these baby squash for grilling.
enjoy fried squash blossoms or grill baby zukes.
Nepeta, or catmint, is a member of the mint family.
Catmint (Nepeta), is a member of the mint family. It is easy to grow, has few pests or problems and attracts loads of pollinators to the garden. A few of these petit little blooms sprinkled on top of a dessert or a salad would be festive.
Carbon tomato plant is loaded with yellow blooms.
Growing fast, and delicate blooming while little fingerlings are growing in the ground.
onion flowers add a very mild, touch of onion flavor.
Onion flowers add just a hint of onion to poppy seed dressing, potato salad, rice wine vinegar or herb butter.
This rose was just begging to be photographed before the Japanese beetles invade.
And finally, these Jackson and Perkins roses just begged to be photographed before the Japanese beetles arrive. And, really it’s nice to end on a rosy note.
Thank you for visiting, please come again.
Comments Off on Garden Bloggers Bloom Day June 2010
Posted in Herbs in the garden, Herbs in the kitchen, My Gardens
Tagged catmint, coneflowers, food garden, Herbs, Nepeta, onion seed., radish
Keep a plastic knife in your garden tool box.
picnic plastic knives open bags fast
It will open those weighty bags of potting soil or top soil faster than most pricey garden gadgets.
Keep one of these handy.
A plastic picnic knife makesa great garden tool.
My frugal gardening suggestion is recycle plastic forks, spoons and knives as plant markers and plastic bag openers.
You will probably use plastic flatware at a picnic this summer and most of it will go into the trash.
recycle pastic flatware from picnics and "to go" food.
They aren’t frugal if you buy them especially for this purpose , but if you happen to use plastic ware this summer, recycling for garden use will keep just one more thing out of the landfill.
Ripe berries are sweet as candy
Wild Strawberries and Alpine Strawberries are hardy, disease resistant and perfect for a low border or edging plant. They are also a great ground cover. Some folks include them in grass-free lawns. I’ve tried a couple of times to start wild strawberries from seed and failed. When I had the opportunity to start new gardens in a new home, I went a little overboard with these tiny berries.
Sweet fruits are grown from seed
I ordered “Mignonette” French strawberry seed from Renee’s Garden Seed and had great success using the AeroGarden. The plants, once started, are easy to grow. They are compact perennial Alpine strawberry plants producing sweet, pointed fruits from early spring to the last frost.
I notice that Renee’s has an article about these itty bitty berries on her web page. This is where I got the idea to use these strawberries as an edging plant. Renee’s is a reliable and prompt source to order seed. May or June is not too late to start plants from seed (and you will get prompt seed delivery here.)
That same year, I bought a Fragaria vesca “Ruege” plug pack of 12 plants from Richter’s. These sweet and tangy berries are just a little smaller in size of the wild ones on compact, runnerless plants but they do multiply and should be thinned every few years. Bears fruit from May til frost. Richter’s has the best selection of culinary and medicinal herb plants that I have found.
Both plants have multiplied rapidly.This spring, they started blooming in March. A late freeze only slows them down but they soon begin setting bloom again.
I think that those monster sized rugged and tasteless berries at the grocery store turned me away from normal strawberries. The tiny Alpine fruits taste like strawberry candy in comparison.
Tiny white blooms continue all summer
The first year, it was a contest to see who would get to eat these mini delicacies, me or the birds. There are so many of them and the season is so long, that now the birds and I have agreed to share the abundant harvest.
A third variety of strawberry grows in my gardens. French‘Mara des Bois’ from White Flower Farm.
‘Mara des Bois’ lives in hanging baskets on the patio and are just starting to produce this year. Last summer I had one or two berries and a winged predator or possibly my beloved ate the rest. There were not a lot of berries because the plants were busy trying to escape their confinement by sending runners over the edges of the hanging baskets. The berries are twice the size of the Alpine berries, but that still means a very small berry compared to what we find at the grocery. These hardy little plants over wintered in a hanging basket sitting on the patio all winter.
Fraises des bois is a French word for strawberries of the woods. The strawberries are also known by other names including: Fragaria vesca, Alpine Strawberry, Wild Strawberry, Woodland Strawberry, American Strawberry, European Strawberry, fraises des bois, and fraisier des bois. Call them what you will, these itty bitty berries a too fragile for transport. The little ones fetch premium prices at the market.
The tiny berries are beautiful garnish on a desert plate. It is said that tea made from the leaves will stimulate the appetite. They grow as an evergreen edging along the sidewalk in the potager, making for easy picking as I walk by.
Try balsamic vinegar with strawberries
