When it comes to windowboxes, the more-is-better philosophy rings true. More is indeed better!
One of Nate's extra-long windowboxes, which are 9'8" long, divided by three inserts of galvanized sheet metal.
Nate and Stacy chose a harmonious blend of colors.
These two boxes hold annual vines, which are growing the trellises that we created with Garden Grids.
My friend Nate, a landscaper, can often be heard saying something like this: "Well, if three plants are good, a dozen is even better, right?" So it's not suprising to me that he has a windowbox on his house that's almost 10 feet long. Oh yeah, there are two of them.
The antique wooden boxes, decorated with an elegant scroll pattern, were found in an old barn behind his house. With a little repair and some paint, the boxes were perfect for his yellow farmhouse. One box is mounted beneath a pair of windows on the back side of the house, looking as if it were custom made. The other fits perfectly along the back-porch railing.
Every year, he and his wife, Stacy, come up with a new combination of annuals for the boxes. This year, they chose a harmonious blend of blues and purples, featuring blue anagallis, angelonia, pentas and a couple types of verbena. At planting time, they mix slow-release fertilizer into fresh potting soil. To keep it flowering through the season, they feed every two weeks or so with water-soluble fertilizer.
In designing such a long windowbox, it helps to repeat a theme, using a limited number of plants, as Nate and Stacy have done. The harmonious colors ensure continuity instead of chaos. A box with too many colors and shapes might overpower the graceful lines of the antique windowbox.
"Spacing the plants is the trick," Nate says. "We wanted a good rhythm but didn't want to repeat a pattern. So, the order of the plants isn't identical, and some are positioned slightly off-center. This technique, which we have only tried this year, gives it a shabby-chic feel. You can tell there is something to it, but it isn't all Church Lady."
Here at Gardener's Supply, we created an extra-long box with two of our 39" Self-Watering Windowboxes. We used them to line each side of a large arch that leads to our display gardens. Because the arch is quite grand, we needed something that could fit the scale, and the windowboxes, because they are modular, work perfectly.
I’m often asked, “What’s the worst pest in your garden?” No doubt, it's the black flies. After cultivating this plot of land for 20-plus years and coping with potato, asparagus and Japanese beetles, deer, voles, chipmunks, slugs, snails, and every known borer, caterpillar, and curculio in the Northeast, I’ve concluded that none of these are the ultimate garden wrecker.
Swarms of biting black flies dampen my gardening enthusiasm from mid-May to September frost.
I’m often asked, “What’s the worst pest in your garden?” After cultivating this plot of land for 20+ years and coping with potato, asparagus and Japanese beetles, deer, voles, chipmunks, slugs, snails, and every known borer, caterpillar, and curculio in the Northeast, I’ve concluded that none of these are the ultimate garden wrecker.
The worst pest in my garden attacks the gardener, not the garden. Black flies, AKA gnats or buffalo gnats, ruin my gardening season. They breed in the stream that borders our property and emerge in mid-May, looking for blood. These tiny insects swarm around my head and shoulders and crawl through my hair, into my socks and sleeves. When they bite, they inject a toxin that causes swelling, redness, and intense itching for days.
I’ve spent years feeling guilty and lazy about the pots of perennials and shrubs left out behind the house all summer, waiting to be planted. My weeded spring gardens start to look like neglected lots by July. I’ve finally concluded that it’s not indolence after all; it’s the black flies. For nearly four months, I simply can’t be outside in my yard for more than 10 to 15 minutes without an onslaught of swarming, biting insects around my head. That’s hardly enough time to deadhead a rose, pull a few weeds, or plant a perennial.
Black flies require cool, fresh, moving water in which to breed. They’re most prevalent in areas with brushy growth and forested stream banks. Some black fly species only breed in the spring and hang around for a month or so. Unfortunately, some species hatch repeatedly all summer long. That’s the type that breeds in our brook, so we’ve got ’em right through September unless there’s an early frost. A rainy forecast increases their ferocity, so this year has been especially tough.
Recently, I learned that Bacillus thuringiensis ‘Israelenis’, the active ingredient in Mosquito Control Rings, also kills black fly larvae. Researchers recommend adding the dunks to the streams in early spring soon after the ice melts. I’m going to give it a try next spring. To keep them from floating away downstream, I’ll tie them in a mesh bag and attach it near the culvert that flows out of our neighbor’s pond. I’ve got nothing to lose and a whole gardening season to gain!
When unexpected seedlings appear in the garden, it's a sign that nature is trying to work in concert with the gardener.
Volunteer seedlings add unexpected delight. Here a clump of foxgloves thrives while a morning glory vine begins its ascent.
As gardeners, we are often reminded that we are not in charge. Despite our best efforts, nature conspires against us: bad weather, diseases, nasty bugs and furry vegetarians (a.k.a. woodchucks). What works perfectly in 2009 can fail in 2010.
But the other side of this is when nature works with us, reavealing perfect blooms or indescribable color. For example, look at the volunteer seedlings that appear in the garden: foxgloves, lupine, columbine, borage, morning glories, verbena, snapdragons, cosmos and cleome. Sure, the gardener plays a role as editor, thinning out the tiny plants. But the seedlings appear where they will; the gardener is not in charge.
When you have self-sowers in the garden, learn to recognize the seedlings and to let them grow. In most cases, these are vigorous plants that will probably bloom the same season. All you have to do is thin out the seedlings, fertilize them and let them grow.
Along the patio, last year's foxglove did not come back. However, it did leave a legacy in these healthy seedlings.
Some of my favorite volunteers are foxgloves, especially the cultivar called Foxy. It's known for blooming the first year from seed, though traditional foxgloves are biennials. You can sometimes find Foxy sold with the perennials, sometimes with the annuals. I've had good luck getting nice drifts by allowing some of the faded flowers to form seedpods and drop the tiny seed. In spring and early summer, it's important to weed carefully, looking for the distinctive foxglove seedlings. In some years, the original plants return, but not always. The volunteers are your "insurance" in the event of a harsh winter.
My favorite volunteers:
Verbena bonairensis: Clusters of tiny purple flowers seem to float on the breeze, held on their long stems.
Nicotiana: There are many varieties, but I'm especially fond of Nicotiana langsdorfii, which has green flowers that dangle from long stems.
Morning glories: What's not to like?
Scot's thistle (Onopordum acanthium): A huge, dramatic and bizarre biennial that always stands out.
Lupine: If they deign to grow in your garden, consider yourself lucky. In fact, you can tell people that you're special.
Clary sage (Salvia viridis): The first year that I planted this as seedlings and the results were kind of ho-hum. In subsequent years, however, the volunteers have been beautiful.
Datura: Give it some room and the late-summer show of white trumpets is spectacular.
With hundreds of varieties and an elegant range of hues, hostas are a plant collector’s dream. They demand little care and solve the “what grows in the shade” problem, too.
Mass plantings of hosta create a flowing pattern of color on a shady slope.
Use bold hosta with large foliage as specimens in colorful containers.
Miniature hostas make perfect specimens for trough gardens and tiny landscapes.
Our retail store in Williston, VT, currently offers about 35 hosta cultivars—more than any other perennial species in the nursery. That’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of species and thousands of available cultivars that make hostas a plant collector’s dream. They demand little care and solve the “what grows in the shade” problem, too. It’s little wonder that they’ve hovered around the top of the most-popular-perennial chart for years!
Fantastic foliage is the key to the hosta’s success. Leaves range from teaspoon- to serving-platter-size in a wild array of shapes and textures. In shades from bright emerald green to dusky blue-gray to cream, many cultivars feature borders, centers and splashes of pure white to gold. Although the flowers are usually a secondary consideration, they are no less impressive. White to violet and purple, bell-shaped flowers bloom on tall, slender stalks in early to late summer, depending on the species. Some are even fragrant.
With so many to choose from, picking a hosta or two for your own garden can be daunting. Here’s what I look for to help narrow the choices:
Mature plant size. Miniature hostas grow only 8-10” tall and less than 12-15” wide, making them ideal for small landscapes, containers, foreground and garden edging. At 3’ tall and up to 6’ wide, the largest hostas create dramatic landscape accents. Plant these in large groups for a low-maintenance, ground-covering solution or to cover up unsightly wellheads and other landscape features.
Leaf size, shape and texture. Rounded, heart-shaped, cupped, strappy. Teaspoon to platter size. Smooth, wavy, puckered, corrugated. Glossy, glaucous or matte. The potentially infinite combinations of foliage characteristics keep hosta breeders in business and collectors always clamoring for more. Foliage thickness or substance is a particularly important feature, especially in areas with slug and snail problems. I can tell you from experience that these pests cause much less damage to cultivars with thick leaves!
Leaf color and pattern. Hosta foliage ranges through all the possible shades of green, and includes white and yellow. Emerald green to chartreuse to gray-blue green, crisp white to cream to golden. Red is showing up on the flower stems of some newer cultivars, such as Cherry Berry, and I’m sure it won’t be long before we see red on the foliage, too.
Hostas are fun to use in garden design. I like to pair cultivars with similar colors, but opposite patterns. Guacamole has large gold-centered leaves with blue-green edges, for example, which looks great next to Ivory Coast’s cream-edged, gray-green foliage. Patriot and Dancing in the Rain make a good bright-green and white combo. To tie different areas of a landscape together, I use hosta cultivars with similar colors and patterns, but in different sizes or leaf shapes. White- and gold-leafed cultivars brighten shady spots and nearly glow in the dark!
Although known as a shade-loving plant, hostas prefer some filtered and morning sun. Some cultivars, especially yellow-leaved cultivars and those with patterned foliage, need at least a couple of hours of full sun to look their best. All prefer humus-rich, well-drained, moist soil.
Slug control products are flying off the shelves as gardeners desperately seek ways to protect their hostas, strawberries and lettuce from these slimy and voracious pests.
Snails and slugs leave slimy trails and holes in foliage, flower buds, and fruit as they feed.
It’s been a wet summer in the Northeast and nearly every day we seem to have rain in the forecast. The National Weather Service reports that Burlington, VT, has received 2 inches more rain than average since June 1. Campers and the beach crowd are singing the blues, but slugs and snails are grooving to “Happy Days Are Here Again!”
Slug and snail control products are flying off the shelves as our local gardeners desperately seek ways to protect their hostas, strawberries and lettuce from these slimy and voracious pests. The old homemade beer-in-a-saucer trick works for small gardens and infestations, but this year’s epic attacks call for large-scale defense. In my garden, I’ve been using Sluggo, an iron phosphate slug bait. I've been using it for years, and it works well. This year Sluggo Plus, an improved version that contains spinosad became available and is getting rave reviews. Spinosad, the new ingredient, is a natural pesticide that targets leaf-eating insects, which makes it effective against earwigs and cutworms. Diatomaceous earth, sprinkled around susceptible plants, also takes care of crawling insects and slugs.
Fungal diseases that spread in water droplets and wet soil are prevalent this summer, too. Every day, customers arrive at our store’s service desk with plastic bags of spotted leaves and blackened stems for identification and advice. Powdery mildew and leaf spots on roses, phlox, monarda, irises, barberry, dogwood, squash, hydrangea, fruit trees and other ornamental and fruit plants are big complaints. We keep plenty of natural Serenade and Earth-tone 3-in-1 Disease Control in stock!
In poorly drained soils, root rot is taking a toll and there’s no easy cure for it. Once the plants show the yellowing, wilting, leaf-dropping symptoms, they’re probably doomed. I’m grateful that most of my gardens are in raised beds and planters that drain readily. My lawn, on the other hand, has pools of standing water this July, a situation we usually don’t see after the spring rains abate.
Today is sunny and tomorrow looks good, too. Could it be a long-awaited weather trend? My soggy gardens certainly hope so!
What's it like to have more than 50 delphiniums in bloom in your garden? Sweet. Follow the story of a new kind of delphinium, from seed to bloom in 15 months.
Slide Show: New Millennium delphiniums, from seed to bloom. Click on the images to see captions or go to full-screen mode.
A little over a year ago, I wrote about my intentions to start some delphinium seeds that I'd ordered from Dowdeswell's Delphiniums in New Zealand. Terry Dowdeswell has bred a new and more vigorous strain of delphiniums, which he christened New Millennium. This new strain of plants first became available in the U.S. market in 2008, but only a few of the varieties are available — and at a dear price.
New Millennium delphiniums growing in raised beds at Sue's house.
So my gardening friend Sue and I decided to grow our own. She'd pay for the seeds and I'd start the seedlings in my greenhouse. In April 2008, I sowed the four little packets of seeds in 4x6 flats. To my surprise, nearly every seed germinated!
About a month later the plants were ready to be moved into 6-packs. At this point I also moved them out of the house (where they'd been growing under lights) and into the greenhouse, where they stayed for another month or so.
By late June, the plants were starting to get crowded in the 6-packs. At that point, my partner in this delphinium project took home her half of the plants. This left me with about 80 seedlings, which I transplanted from the 6-packs into 4„ pots.
The 6-packs Sue took home were planted directly into her garden. But in my own garden, there wasn't an inch of free space available. Nothing to do but wait until fall when crops started coming out of the vegetable garden. It was around this time that it began to dawn on me that I would never have room for a dozen delphiniums — much less 80!
By late last fall, I made a space in the vegetable garden where the plants could winter over. All 80 plants were transferred from their pots into the garden. In early December, they got covered with a 10- to 12-inch layer of straw for insulation from our zone 4 winter.
This spring, once the ground had thawed, I moved about 30 of the plants into my cutting garden. Another dozen went into the back of my long perennial border (of course I first had to make room for them by removing 10 gigantic clumps of Siberian iris). The rest of the delphiniums were potted up into 1- or 2-gallon pots and went home with various friends.
Now it's early July and my New Millennium delphiniums are 15 months old. They're beginning to bloom for the first time and they look fantastic.
But here's something interesting: The plants that stayed at my house are half the size of the ones that went to Sue's. I suppose this could be just a difference in the color of our thumbs. But it could also be a discovery that young delphinium plants ought to be transplanted into the garden as soon as possible. Keeping them in small pots for the summer arrested their development and delayed flower production for a full season.
So what's it like to have 60 or 70 delphiniums in your garden? Sue tells me that they've cost her many sleepless nights. When it rains or the wind begins to blow, she lies in bed fretting about whether she has staked the plants well enough, or if she should maybe go out there with an umbrella to protect them. Her intricate support system of wood and rebar stakes, sections of reinforcing wire held horizontally, and lots of twine will hopefully help them to withstand the inevitable late-summer thunderstorm.
Neither of us can quite believe how lucky we are to have such an extravagance of flowers in our gardens. However fleeting this experience may be, we did it. We grew some beautiful delphiniums from seed and got to see them bloom in our gardens.
I love looking at people's front gardens. Unlike the back garden, the front yard is the "public" garden, and it says a lot about the gardener. Tres, one of my coworkers, has created a remarkable city garden.
Tres and the fence she built from "pickets" thinned from the forest.
I love looking at people's front gardens. Unlike the back garden, the front yard is the "public" garden, and it says a lot about the gardener.
Tres, one of my coworkers, has created a remarkable city garden that begins right where the sidewalk ends. She's built a whimsical fence that she made with hardwood poles from Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, a heavily forested part of the state. "My husband and I were looking at fences online and we really liked the old garden fences that are built out of the small trees that get cut when the surrounding forests get thinned. My sister lives in the Northeast Kingdom and has much forest to thin. Se we made a trip up there and cut many poles and built the panels ourselves. I love having a interesting fence and a unexpected garden here in the city."
The narrow strip of land between Tres' house and the sidewalk — no more than 6 feet wide — was once occupied by a decrepit porch. "Originally, it seemed like the porch just needed a facelift, but when we started to do the work last summer, we realized the whole thing needed to be replaced — or it needed to come off."
In the end, they decided to lose the porch, but they gained more garden space on their small lot. When they moved in, there was little more than a driveway and lawn. In just a few seasons, Tres has filled the yard with several raised beds, adding a few more each year. At the back is a chicken coop, home to some hens.
"I am a planner and we have big plans for our little piece of ground. I am always trying to improve upon what we have already done."
Tres' fence really stands out on her street.
Chickens are part of the scene in the backyard.
Each year, Tres adds a few more raised beds to grow vegetables and flowers.
Our nursery manager explains why plants die — and how to avoid it. The first consideration is location. For plants to thrive, they must be planted in a site that meets their needs. Some trees and shrubs are more tolerant of a range of conditions while others are quite specific.
Why did it die? This aralia is a zone 4 plant that got planted in a zone 3 garden — too cold.
Nursery, please, nursery. DPR at customer service. That distressing call for a DPR (dead plant return) comes through my two-way radio several times a day in spring and early summer.
With anticipation and hope, someone spent hard-earned cash for a tree or shrub and took the time and energy to plant it. Now the customer is back, wondering what went wrong. We ask customers a series of questions to find the source of the problem. The answers generally lead to one of several reasons for the demise of the plants.
Location, location, location. In our cold-winter climate, newly planted evergreen trees and shrubs need some protection from the frigid western winds and drying afternoon sun. Until their roots have grown wide and deep, these trees and shrubs can’t take up enough water after the ground freezes to replenish the moisture lost to sun and wind. By spring, the foliage is brown and the stems may be dead or dying. Planting sensitive shrubs on the eastern or northern side of a building, wrapping them in burlap, or spraying with an anti-dessicant helps protect them.
In too deep. Planting depth is critical to plant success. Digging the planting hole too deep is probably the most common — and most easily preventable — mistake we see. The root flare, which is the place where the stem or trunk meets the roots, must be planted at or evenly slightly above ground level. Roots need oxygen and they’ll smother if planted too far below the surface. The root flare isn’t always at the soil surface in the container or root ball in the nursery, so it’s important to find it and adjust the hole depth before setting the plant in the ground.
The mulch is piled too high around this tree's trunk.
Smothered in mulch. Mulch is great for retaining soil moisture and keeping weeds under control. But too much of a good thing can be bad for the plants it’s meant to protect. Mulch should be pulled from the base of plants. In most cases, an inch or two of depth is sufficent. Thick mulch piled up around the trunk is the equivalent of planting too deep.
Newly planted shrubs need plenty of water, and it needs to be applied slowly, so it percolates to the root zone. Devices like this Watering Ring make it easier.
Water assistance. Newly planted trees and shrubs need lots of water during the first season because they usually have more leafy growth than their developing root systems can easily support. Even a small shrub may need a gallon of water a day to keep the soil moist around its roots. Larger trees can use 10 gallons or more daily. To make watering easier, consider using watering rings or soaker hoses, which ensure the kind of slow, even watering that new trees and shrubs need.
Environmental stress. Road salt, poorly drained soil, too much sun/shade, mechanical damage, and lack of hardiness also take a toll. Our nursery sells plants that are hardy to USDA Zone 5, but many of our customers live in colder Zones 4 and 3. We do our best to educate customers, but every year we see dead hybrid tea roses and butterfly bushes coming back from the coldest mountain regions of Vermont.
Preventing DPRs is one of our most important jobs when we work with customers. We work hard to help match the customers’ desires with the best plants for their site and growing conditions, and send them home with complete instructions. Next spring, we hope to see them come back with reports of success!
Think you don't have space for a vegetable garden? Think again.
Karen shows that you can grow what you eat, even if there's no space for a garden at home.
If you drive around the employee parking lot at our Burlington, VT, offices, you'll notice a potted pepper, placed on the pavement, just behind a gold car. It's there Monday through Friday, basking in the sun, always behind the same car.
Ask around and you'll find out that the plant belongs to Karen, who works in our customer contact center. She doesn't have a suitable place for a vegetable garden at home, but she's found a way to garden anyway. Her garden commutes with her each day, safe in the back seat of her car.
Knowing that peppers love sun and heat, and that there's usually plenty of that in the parking lot here at Gardener's Supply, Karen bought a pepper plant and a bright green pot. The pot is light enough for her to lift, and can be nested inside another pot for the commute. When she arrives for work, she takes the pot out of the back seat and places it behind her car, where it spends the next 8 hours basking in the sun. As the only plant in Karen's garden, it gets lots of attention — and is already setting fruit.
So, if you think you don't have space for a garden, think again.
Another example of asphalt gardening: This raised bed sits on the parking lot in front of our Burlington store. So far, the harvest has been bountiful.
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