Once upon a time, I found herb gardening a topic of mystique and mystery. Maybe it was the herb gardening books I found, with their illustrations of medieval knot gardens, and the cute little pots of culinary herbs grown on the wide, sunny windowsill of someone’s gourmet kitchen. Or maybe it was learning that many herbs prefer a Mediterranean climate with dry, rocky soil and lots of sunshine. How could I replicate that in Virginia? It may have been...
Mattey’s Garden is a hands-on learning garden at the Matthew Whaley Elementary School. And while the students were absent due to COVID-19, the garden continued to grow, including the weeds. Luckily, Louann Martin, who heads up this project for the James City County Williamsburg Master Gardener Association (JCCWMGA), assembled a team made up of the elementary school’s families and students as well as JCCW Master Gardeners. This team has been tending the garden with a watchful eye pruning, weeding, and...
A Special Needs Gardening Program! A collaboration between our Master Gardeners and Arc, the Arc of Abilities Day Support Program is for adults with special needs. The program teaches participants how to grow and use flowers, vegetables, and herbs that they cultivate in four large, raised beds year-round in the Williamsburg Botanical Garden’s Therapeutic Garden, and on rainy days in the Park’s Visitor’s Center. In a partnership that has lasted for more than five years, Master Gardeners meet with Arc...
Picnics with citronella candles, lemon scented furniture polish and sweet tea with lemons all recall happy childhood memories. Fragrance has a profound ability to create or shift a mood, to trigger memories and create new ones. Just as cinnamon evokes the holidays; crisp, cool lemon is a summertime fragrance. Most lemon scented plants thrive in warm climates. Lemon trees, Citrus limon, are hardy only to Zone 8. Originally native to Asia, they spread throughout the ancient world wherever the...
Did Santa bring you a potted plant for Christmas? Or maybe a neighbor dropped by with a beautiful potted something to spread a bit of good cheer your way? Or do you always linger at the rack of holiday plants and wonder which ones you might be able to keep alive for a few weeks this winter? December and January are a great time to shop for plants. And this week, especially, after Christmas, you’ll find some good values...
Did you notice bees and other insects feeding later than usual last year? And did you notice how many were out feeding on warm days last winter? Our roller coaster weather affects insects, birds and other animals. They may be out and about on warmish days in months when we don’t expect to see them. And, of course they are hungry! Increased activity translates into an increased need for calories. Providing winter forage for pollinators and birds presents gardeners...
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.
An older woman made her way slowly through the aisles of the garden center’s outdoor display area, leaning heavily on a cane. As I turned, hands loaded with small pots, she was behind me. She smiled and asked whether I had seen any bee balm on the display of herbs I’d been scanning. We began to chat, and it turned out that she wanted to attract hummingbirds to the balcony of her apartment. Someone had told her that hummingbirds...
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...