We can consider winter as the ‘weekend’ of the gardening year, both the last month and the first months of the year when we can enjoy a much-needed rest from the regular routine. A period of rest and renewal restores energy to both the garden and the gardener. It allows us time for reflection on the successes and challenges of seasons past and an opportunity to plan and prepare for the seasons to come. If winter is the weekend,...
Growing our own plants from seeds opens up a wide horizon of choices never even imagined by those who depend on the big box stores for their starts each spring. There are many varieties of vegetables, herbs, flowers, and trees that have never been marketed in our area as seedlings. Even within a popular type of vegetable, like tomatoes, there are many delicious named cultivars, many of them heirloom, not in commercial production as seedlings. Malabar spinach, a vining...
What do you consider when choosing plants for your home and yard? We all have a checklist of criteria in the back of our minds. Our criteria are very personal to our own needs and situation. You may not purchase and plant as many plants as I do each year, but I’m sure that you enjoy the choosing and the planting just as much. We gardeners have been encouraged to plant more native plants for quite a...
What blooms through the snow in your yard? Many older homes in our neighborhood have established clumps of evergreen hellebores blooming from January through April or May. Suddenly, there are delicate pink and white petals emerging in the depths of winter. I asked a new friend about them soon after we moved to Williamsburg, and she generously gave me trays full of seedling plants when she thinned hers that spring. What a wonderful gift! The plants she gave to me...
“Leave it be.” Words I heard with some frequency growing up…. This simple bit of advice may be just the wisdom we need whether baking, navigating relationships, or preparing the garden for winter. “Leave it be” insists that we quiet our urge to interfere with natural processes. It asks us to step back and observe; to allow for a solution to unfold on its own. Some gardeners feel compelled to tidy up the leaves and sticks as they fall,...
For most of human history, families relied on gathering foods growing in their environment for some portion of their diet. And many of these delicious and nutritious foods grow on long-lived trees or shrubs, from persistent perennials, or from plants that readily self-seed. This very sustainable form of agriculture allows for food production with few inputs of water, fertilizer or labor, once the plants establish. Perhaps most importantly, there is minimal disturbance to the soil’s ecosystem.
A Black Swallowtail butterfly feeds on Verbena bonariensis . When planning your garden and buying plants, is your first consideration who, or what, might eat them? If you are planting fruit trees, tomato vines, or salad greens you’re likely planning to share the fruits of your labor and investment with family and friends. Some friends of mine garden in a community garden, where much of the produce raised is donated to our local FISH organization. But food crops aside, when...
The lady checking out in front of me at the garden center had two cute little pots of ‘polka dot plant,’ Hypoestes phyllostachya, and she had a single question for the clerk: “Will deer eat it?” For those of us living among free-roaming herds of deer, that is always the question! Do deer graze in your garden? It seems that ever-growing herds of deer continue moving into more and more areas across the United States. Even suburbs and small towns...
James City County-Williamsburg Master Gardeners conducted a survey of local residents in order to identify the shrubs, perennials, bulbs and annuals that are often or sometimes browsed by deer in this area, as well as those that usually are not. Among the participants of the survey were landscapers and other professionals, Master Gardeners, members of all local garden clubs, and other residents of neighborhoods where deer damage occurs. The lists below are based on the participants’ personal experiences while living...