Category: Edible Plants

Birds / boxwood / Carbon Garden / climate change / Conservation / Edible Plants / Evergreen Shrubs / Evergreen trees / Flowering Shrubs / Food Forest / Foraging / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Hedge / Hedgerow / Heirloom plants / Native Trees / Ornamental Shrubs / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

 Hedges and Hedgerows for a Healthier and More Peaceful Life, Part 1

  The Living Fence Gardening is the art of domesticating the wild, of creating living geometry within our landscapes.  Order, symmetry, lines, and boundaries please the eye and soothe the spirit.  We are inclined to organize and define our spaces by dividing them up into smaller pieces we can manage, to protect them within walls and behind gates.  We contain what is ours, setting aside sacred space, our own ‘paradise,’ from the wider world.  We exclude the unwanted wildness living...

Beneficial Insects / Birds / Carbon Garden / climate change / Climate Change / Conservation / Edible Plants / Flowering Shrubs / Garden Design / Garden Maintenance / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Heirloom plants / Invasive Plants / Larval Host Plants / Nuisance Plants / Ornamental Shrubs / Resource Protection / Soil Conservation / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

A History of Our War With Plants

  “I use only native plants, native to the planet Earth.  I am using indigenous plants; they are indigenous to this part of the universe.” Bill Mollison, Founder and Director of The Permaculture Institute     In the Beginning… Let’s begin with the obvious:  we live within an ever-changing ecosystem.  Europeans came to North America more than four centuries ago, cutting trees, planting fields, building homes and roads.  Native Americans also cut trees, built homes, planted fields, hunted, and lived...

Carbon Garden / Conservation / Edible Plants / Evergreen Shrubs / Flowering Shrubs / Food Forest / Foraging / Fragrant Plants / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Heirloom plants / Native Trees / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

A Tea Story: Past and Future

  The Long Story of Tea in America Have you ever wondered where your tea comes from?  Tea is one of those everyday things that we can always find at the grocery or convenience store.  You may remember that tea was imported to Boston in the Colonial era.  Maybe you also remember the story of how colonists, dressed as Native Americans, dumped the British East India Company’s cargo of tea into the Boston Harbor in December 1773 to protest unfairly...

edible ferns / Edible Plants / Ferns / Fiddleheads / Food Forest / Foraging / Garden Design / Garden Maintenance / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Heirloom plants / Native Plants / Poisonous Plants

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Can I Nibble the Fiddleheads?

Fiddleheads Perfect little green, tightly curled fiddleheads will soon push through the damp earth and begin to unfurl themselves into delicate fern fronds. They might look tasty, and you might wonder whether you can pluck one to nibble as you hike through the woods. Coastal Virginia hosts almost 30 native fern species, and fern-loving gardeners plant dozens more introduced species.  Quite honestly, unless you are a Pteridophile, or fern-o-phile, they probably look much the same.  You will find fiddleheads in...

Animal repellant products / Birds / Bulb Gardening / Citizen Science / Conservation / Edible Plants / Flowering Shrubs / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Heirloom plants / Herbs / Native Plants / Native Trees / Nuisance Plants / Poisonous Plants / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Plant Knowledge

  “Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?”  Dr. Carlos Castaneda     When a young graduate student in anthropology wanted to learn more about the medicinal uses of plants for his academic research in the early 1960s, so the legend goes, he sought out an old Mexican native, a brujero, known simply as don Juan, who lived in the Sonoran Desert.  Carlos asked to interview him about...

Birds / Carbon Garden / Conservation / Edible Plants / Evergreen trees / Food Forest / Fragrant Plants / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Heirloom plants / Historic Trees / Holiday Plants / Larval Host Plants / Native Trees / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Eastern Red Cedar: An Uncommonly Useful Tree

  If fragrance is the gate of memory, the spicy aroma of Eastern red cedar takes me back to childhood holidays.  My parents would load us in the car, about a week before Christmas, for a drive out to a friend’s farm where we could walk through the meadows in search of our Christmas tree.  After a lively debate about the trees we found, Dad would pull out an old handsaw and begin cutting the tree.  We would all help...

Carbon Garden / Edible Plants / Fragrant Plants / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Heirloom plants / Holiday Plants / Native Trees / Summer / Sustainable Gardening / Tree Care / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

The Regal Southern Magnolia

  The sweet fragrance of Magnolia flowers on a warm breeze announces summer in Virginia.  But that wasn’t the case 400 years ago, before European colonists began exploring for interesting tree species, transplanting them to new areas, and exporting them back to Europe.  The original native range of Magnolia grandiflora is only from the Carolinas south to Florida and westwards towards Texas along the Gulf Coast.  Our iconic Southern Magnolia trees aren’t indigenous in this region, but they have since...

Container Gardens / Edible Plants / Food Forest / Fragrant Plants / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Heirloom plants / Herbs / Propagation / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Landscaping With Herbs Part III: Annual, Biennial and Tender Perennial Herbs

Benefits of Garden Herbs Herbs attract hummingbirds and butterflies like few other plants.  It is worth planting a few herbs whether you plan to harvest and cook with them or not because they are tough, easy to grow, and beautiful.  They come with side benefits; their essential oils not only offer fragrance and flavor, but they also deter grazers.  If you have watched deer chew your roses and impatiens like deer candy, know that your herbs will survive their curiosity. ...

Edible Plants / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Native Plants / Native Trees / Vegetable Gardening

 by Judy Kinshaw-Ellis, Master Gardener, Class of 2015

BLACK HISTORY, HOW FREED SLAVES SURVIVED IN FREEDOM PARK

In 1803, 27-year-old William Ludwell Lee died and in his will freed his slaves. Less than ten years earlier, Lee had inherited nearly 8700 acres and property that included 54 enslaved people ages 16 and older, 11 children ages 12 to 16, and a few children who were 11 and younger. While there is no evidence that Lee freed any enslaved people during his lifetime, upon his death, his slaves were freed effective January 1 in the year following his...

Animal repellant products / Community Gardening / Compost / Deer / Edible Plants / Garden Design / Garden Maintenance / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Heirloom plants / Organic Vegetable Gardening / Raised Beds / Seeds / Spring

 by Elizabeth McCoy

The Real Magic- Starting With Seeds

  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...