It’s Still Just Dirt – The Tillsonburg News, September 2014
by Penny Esseltine

When Ken Brown came to talk to the Tillsonburg Horticultural Society he was right in the middle of harvesting amazing vegetables grown from seed at home in his 50 foot by 50 foot Zone 6 backyard garden on the North shore of Lake Erie. Ken has taken to growing vegetables vertically so that the yield keeps increasing in his limited, mind you quite large, amount of space. That’s what he came to tell us about. Ken says that growing all kinds of vegetables from seed each year probably costs less than the last pair of shoes he bought. “Growing from seed is all about variety and choice.”

Ken says sugar snap peas are the most wonderful vegetable in the world. “You can eat the whole thing.” He plants sweet peas with sugar snaps and soaks the peas overnight before he plants them. A free standing circular wire cage gives the peas a place to climb high on.

“Put things together that you wouldn’t necessarily think go together.” Ken says. “Beans and morning glories for example.” Try sinking an eight foot tall, four by four inch post in the centre of a 12 inch square frame on the ground. Run strings from the frame on the ground up to the top of the pole and the beans and vines will grow right up the strings.

“With a little encouragement you can train cucumbers to grow up an obelisk,” Ken says. “They will climb as high as eight feet and there will be no slug holes and no yellow spots on them.”

Similarly if you have a fence along the back of your garden you can lean two by twos on the fence and let melons grow up the two by twos. They’ll take up less space and again, no yellow spots or slug holes.

Continuing with the vertical gardening theme, you can grow squash up a lilac bush and it will use the branches as a natural support.

As well, Ken suggests gardeners get as much vegetation out there as you can so that the sun can’t get to the soil and therefore weeds won’t grow. Use lettuce as a filler all over the place. Broadcast beet and carrot seeds over the soil. No weeds will grow and you can constantly thin so more vegetables will come up.

Asparagus planted in the back of a bed becomes lovely asparagus fern in the back of the bed later in the season. Ken says if you plant asparagus once it will grow for 30 years. The first stalk up each year goes straight into his mouth.

Ken says potatoes are not part of the root system. They grow on lateral branches off the potato stem and that is why it’s important to hill the dirt up around the stem as the plant grows. Potatoes flower and the colour of the flower matches the colour of the potato. A 13” X 18” pot will grow 15 pounds of potatoes. Remember to water them daily after the middle of July and fertilize every second or third time you water.

If you’re wondering about Ken’s advice on growing tomatoes I’m going to suggest you look on line. It seems pretty complex. Something about trimming the plant to a single stem and getting that stem to grow up a rope. Visit www.gardening-enjoyed.com for more details.

Here are a few simpler things to wrap up.

• Brussels sprouts that have been frosted a few times are much sweeter. This should be the last crop you pick.
• Always have rhubarb. A nice tart rhubarb pie is the world’s best breakfast.
• A garlic plant needs six to eight inches of space all to itself. Plant individual cloves in the fall and harvest them the following August.
• How about Swiss chard and parsley growing together in a public garden in a town park? “Very pretty,” Ken says. He figures people walking by are slow to recognize these as edible greens.

Ken is enjoying his harvest now and looking forward to gardening again in January (when he starts studying seed catalogues) and in February (when he orders seeds). As he gets older Ken says, “Every year is the year I’m going to cut back.” It’s a hard thing to do. Although he works two to three hours in the garden each day it’s never work. It is pure pleasure.

Check out Ken’s Dallying in the Dirt weekly e-zine on line. And for more information about the Tillsonburg Horticultural Society visit tillsonburghorticultural.ca. We’ve had a few enquiries about how old you need to be to join the Horticultural Society. Perhaps because we meet in the Senior Centre Auditorium some think members need to be older adults. Not so. Anyone 18 years and up is welcome and very much encouraged to check us out. Again, visit tillsonburghorticultural.ca.

Tillsonburg Horticultural Society takes in Buffalo Garden Festival
It’s Still Just Dirt – August 2014, The Tillsonburg News
by Penny Esseltine

At the end of July, Tillsonburg Horticultural Society members crossed the Canada/U.S. border for an international bus tour taking in the Buffalo National Garden Festival (throughout the area) and Garden Walk Buffalo (370 gardens located in clusters within a three mile radius in the city). Our guide Sally Cunningham says, “We are real proud of what’s happened in this region. Twenty years ago 16 neighbours said let’s do a garden tour and now there are 370 gardens in Buffalo that are now seen by as many as 55,000 people in just one weekend of Garden Walk Buffalo.”

Our first Festival stop is Marcia Sully’s Hidden Gardens of Eden, in Eden, New York. Sally says this is one of the most respected gardens in the region. Marcia likes to under grow plants under plants, and many, many pots. Marcia says it takes her three hours each day just to water the pots. She has hypertufa (hand-made) pots as well as old fashioned tin washtubs, filled with hosta pots, and even birdbaths pot filled with as many as 12 different kinds of succulents.

For the hardier plants Marcia pulls pots in close to the house in the fall and tips them on their side so that water won’t accumulate too much. For the more tender plants in her garden she digs them up and takes them, bare-rooted in pans, all the way to her Florida winter home where she plants them in the garden there.

Tillsonburg Horticultural Society tour organizer Christine Nagy says that in the 15 years she’s been touring gardens this is the best she has seen. “The imagination and creativity is amazing.”

Smug Creek Gardens in Hamburg, New York is next. It’s home to King of the Hosta World Mike and Day Lily Queen Kathy. Mike tells us they have four gardens, all in virgin woodland, including four terraces up the hill with plants like day lilies, hydrangea and rudbeckia, a garden of small hostas (up to 12 inches tall) in rockery in the shade, a garden in a bog with raised beds to keep the roots out of the water, and a hosta glen. The deck too is a garden with more than 100 plants in pots. Thirteen acres in total and everything is labelled.

Thursday morning starts in a modest income area of central Buffalo where Garden Walk Buffalo began. On 16th Street Joe and Scott’s amazing place has every kind of coleus known to man. One hundred and fifty pots planted with annuals each year. Joe says, “It’s always evolving, something different every year, mostly coleus. I sprinkle Miracle Grow in the hole before I plant.”

Dom and Arlan’s home on Norwood Ave was built in 1890. For 25 years now they have been focussing on the gardens, doing it themselves. Don says it’s important to remember that, “If you don’t know what you are doing at least be neat.” There are two silver maples the same age as the house, statuary, potting benches, a fountain and strawberry plants between the steps to the enclosed patio. Lastly there’s a miniature Alpine garden with moving train and a running water wheel on the way out.

On Summer Street in the cottage district (small homes built in the 1800s) we see the space between the houses and the sidewalk and the sidewalk and the street filled with 6 foot high gardens with shrubs and perennials like menarda, cone flowers, flocks, and hollyhocks. Wood houses are painted yellow, orange, blue, and shades of green with pretty fences, lane ways and walkways through to backyards. There are trumpet vines laden with orange flowers and glorious hanging baskets.

Later we move to Lancaster Avenue with its Queen Anne, Italianate, and Victorian style homes. There are large relaxing, plant-filled front verandahs everywhere.

Picture day lilies filling the space between white picket fences and the sidewalk, huge angel wing begonias beside pathways and 12 foot tall dahlias in colours ranging from magenta, to orange, to maroon with white centres, and yellow with pink centres.

There are large potted coleus on three tiers of an elegant metal shelf, passion flowers blooming on garage walls and salmon coloured canna lilies hiding a backyard porch. We wonder, are the gardens on steroids? Sally says the gardens have never looked better. “Probably due to the ample rain and coolish weather.”

Further along sunflowers fill the space between the sidewalk and curb, black wooden window boxes hang from second storey windows with lush red begonias and beautiful trailing vines. At least eight different wind chimes sway in a mature maple tree, and 36 original birdhouses hang on a neighbour’s garage wall at the back of a garden.

Finally, in the side yard of an 1897 Dutch colonial revival home there’s a Harry Potter garden with children’s climbing apparatus and gardens filled with plants called mimbulus mibletonia, flaxseed, scurvy grass, wolfsbane, dittany and gillyweed.

Andrew Sprung writing in TheAtlantic.com says, “A Buffalo-style garden will have the patina of a well-used, customized space, often with complete disregard for garden design conventions. Buffalo gardeners take advantage of the sides of houses and fences by hanging artwork, sculptures, grates, mirrors, plants and more. In Buffalo, you’ll find small urban gardens that pack a big punch including cheerfully brash juxtapositions of colourful perennials and unique annuals, minimal or no lawns, and creative uses of found objects and architectural artifacts as sculpture.”

For information about Garden Walk Buffalo visit gardenwalkbuffalo.com. National Garden Festival information is available at nationalgardenfestival.com and for information about the Tillsonburg Horticultural Society visit tillsonburghorticultural.ca.

It’s Still Just Dirt – The Tillsonburg News,  July 23, 2014
by Penny Esseltine

Last month we talked about Refreshing the Tired Garden with information from Carlo Balistrieri, Head of Horticulture at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington. For July we’re continuing with this theme by talking to Tillsonburg Horticultural Society members about changes they’ve made in an effort to refresh their own tired garden spaces.

If you remember Carlo said gardens can tire in three ways – through the natural process of aging, from weather or cataclysmic events, and through neglect.

Natural Aging Process
I’ll start with the story of a 24 foot angel stone planter garden at the front of my porch. For almost 20 years 12 glossy green boxwood shrubs filled it up. Starting out at less than a foot tall, they grew to about four feet and were trimmed annually to maintain that height. Being glossy and green all year long is an especially nice characteristic of boxwood. This past winter claimed several. Glossy green changed to dry yellow. Seven small mugo pines now take their place. Fingers crossed that they will be slow growing and provide a lush front look for years.

Weather/Cataclysmic Event
Christine Nagy says weather had a part to play in changes in her garden this year. Due to the especially harsh winter she lost a number of plants including two butterfly bushes which she chose to replace with hydrangeas. Christine expects the hydrangea to be hardier than the butterfly bushes. As well she lost three roses and about half of a beautiful rose vine growing over an arbour that has always been a prolific bloomer (the rose vine, not the arbour). “I had to take the hedge clippers to the rose vine to clear the damaged parts. Amazingly it has come back better than ever after this especially hard pruning.”

Jan Torrell also lost butterfly bushes this past winter. “The extreme cold killed them for lots of people,” she says. “Plants that were exposed above the snow had trouble, whereas those that were covered with snow were okay.” Jan replaced her butterfly bushes with newer, hardier varieties.

This summer too Jan has replaced some of her oriental lilies with day lilies because of red lily beetles. “The beetles don’t eat day lilies,” she says.

Neglect
Judi Misener and her husband Bill moved to a new home in Courtland late in 2013. 2014 is the first growing season for them there. Judi says they took down 22 spruce trees on the one-and-a-half acre property that were substantially past their prime. In their stead they have planted blue spruce, a red oak, a willow, and two pawpaw trees. Pawpaw is a rare and endangered species native to the Carolinian Region. Judi says the once gorgeous property is largely just plain overgrown. She and Bill have thinned out plants and are now waiting to see what spaces remain to be filled. “We have a four-year plan,” Judi says. “In the first year we’re figuring out what is there and what we want to keep. In Year two we’ll be planting. Year three will be for seeing what takes hold and looks especially good, and when we get to year four it will quite likely be a time to reorganize again.” No tired garden on the horizon here.

Coming Up
In August we plan to continue with the refreshing the tired garden theme. Here’s an invitation to gardeners (horticultural members or not) to share your personal refreshing the tired garden stories through the column. If you prefer to ask for advice about how to solve a particular tired garden problem at your home we can answer questions too. Send your story or query to tillsonburghorticultural@live.ca.

The Tillsonburg Horticultural Society will launch its fall season of meetings on Tuesday, September 2 with guest speaker and gardening guru Ken Brown. If you’re looking to try something new this fall be assured that annual memberships at $15 are still available and membership benefits are outstanding. For information visit tillsonburghorticultural.ca.

Refreshing the Tired Garden
It’s Still Just Dirt – The Tillsonburg News, June 2014
by Penny Esseltine

Carlo Balistrieri is Head of Horticulture at the fabulous Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington and who better to tell us about refreshing the tired garden then someone who is responsible for 250 acres of cultivated gardens offering amazing garden experiences.

Carlo says, “Looking fresh at a familiar place is one of the hardest challenges of gardening.” Gardens tire through the natural process of aging, from weather or cataclysmic events, and through neglect, which Carlo says is the most common reason.

Gardens should include three layers, Carlo says. These include a tree layer, a shrub layer (the middle layer in the garden that anchors trees to the ground), and a herbaceous layer (ground area perennials and annuals, also bulbs, vegetables, and fruit). “The herbaceous layer is what most people consider when refreshing the garden but don’t forget the trees and shrubs.”

Carlo has a couple of tricks for assessing your garden.

Trick #1: Squint as an exercise when looking at your garden. Details will disappear and you’ll see forms, shapes and texture.

Trick #2: Take pictures, but not always in colour. Colour is a distraction. It pulls your eye all over and you don’t see structure and design.

Start with the easy stuff.

• Clear beds out, rake, never leave corpses. Carlo says some plants just deserve to die. Sometimes this is the best chance for improvement or refreshment in the garden. “People may, he says, “over estimate the value of what they have.”
• Edge. According to Carlo this is the great forgotten art of gardening. “Sharp, deep, clear edge gives dramatic demarcation. Things are in their place.”
• Prune. A lot of people are afraid to prune. Follow the four Ds – take out the dead, diseased, damaged and dishevelled. “Lift the skirts of conifers (3 to 4 rows) so you can see amazing bark and new garden space.”
• Pop a little colour in your garden. Plant containers in the garden. Plant annuals in your perennial garden. “Bulbs are the best bang for your buck,” Carlo says

As you continue to think, plan and assess what to do to refresh your tired garden, Carlo offers these tips.

• Do familiar things in new and refreshing ways.
• Art in the garden is the lowest maintenance way to refresh a garden.
• Plant in new combinations.
• Plant to extend the season. Crocus for early season interest. At RBG they plant 200,000 crocus and it’s a spectacle.
• “Some things are sacrosanct,” Carlo says. “Don’t fool with outstanding trees, drifts of minor bulbs, or huge established clumps of ferns, ancient or otherwise.”
• Limit your plant palette. Pick winners with long seasons of interest.
• Limit the number of hardscape materials. These include paths, walls, fences, gates, garden art and ornaments.
• Simplify.
• Garden for your lifestyle.
• Create an identity or theme.
• At the end of the day, do one little extra thing to improve the place.

For additional information about the Royal Botanical Gardens visit rbg.ca and for information about the Tillsonburg Horticultural Society visit tillsonburghorticultural.ca.

Let’s Get Planting
It’s Still Just Dirt – The Tillsonburg News, May 21, 2014
by Penny Esseltine

Historically, May 24 is the start of the safe time to plant all of your annuals outside in the garden. Annuals are a great addition to any garden. They add colour in all seasons from spring through to frost. And they really mix well with perennials and shrubs.

Among the wide variety of annuals available locally, impatiens have always been my favourite. These plants are sometimes upright, as tall as two feet, and sometimes low and sprawling but always with plenty of colour. Colours that include almost everything in the floral spectrum and some varieties are even bi-coloured. Best of all, they bloom well in shade.

However, in the past few years a fungus called impatiens downy mildew has wreaked havoc on these plants (both shade and double shade varieties) in Southwestern Ontario and lots of areas in the United States.  Matthew Fenn, manager or Tillsonburg Garden Gate on Simcoe Street says, “impatiens look beautiful while the weather is cooler but by mid-July, as temperatures climb, they just die. Within 48 hours the petals and leaves will fall off and you’re left with what looks like matchsticks.” Matthew says because of the downy mildew fungus they are not selling impatiens at Garden Gate this year. He says, “It’s not a service to be selling them right now.”

Impatiens downy mildew started here two to three years ago and had been sporadic, but by last summer it was affecting pretty much all impatiens plants. The spores can live for years in soil. They also travel in the air and spread between plants through the water on the leaves. Matthew says it doesn’t affect other varieties of plants. “Even New Guinea impatiens have been immune from downy mildew because they are grown from cuttings rather than from seeds.” You can still plant New Guinea impatiens in your garden in both part sun and shade.

Matthew says flower breeders are working now to develop a variety of impatiens that is resistant to downy mildew fungus. These breeders are mainly in Holland, as well as some parts of the United States like California, and South America. He says, “They will conduct trials in different parts of the world and once they have successfully bred an impatiens downy mildew resistant strain we will see impatiens in garden centres again. Right now we can’t do anything at the customer or garden centre level. But yes, impatiens will make a comeback.”

“In the past,” Matthew says, “people would buy several trays of impatiens at a time to plant in their gardens.” Altogether at Tillsonburg Garden Gate they would sell two to three thousand flats a season. “It was a good part of the bedding plant business. And not a day goes by,” says Matthew, “that people aren’t asking where the impatiens plants are this year.”

The #1 annual that Matthew recommends to replace impatiens this year is wax begonias. He says they put on a really good show colour wise, they like part sun to shade, and they take less water as well.

His #2 recommendation is petunias. He says, “They come in a multitude of colours and there are newer varieties such as wave petunias that don’t require as much deadheading.”

When I asked some Horticultural Society members what they would be planting instead of impatiens they agreed that begonias are a great choice. Some others on their list included fuchsia, caladium, coleus, and annual vinca.

Whether you’re planting window boxes, lining your sidewalk, or spicing up your perennial garden, make the most of annuals that are available this year. Annual plants complete their entire growing cycle (from seed, to flowers and back to seed) all in the course of a single growing season. That season is upon us. Let’s get planting!

The Tillsonburg Horticultural Society will meet next on Tuesday, June 3 at 7:30 p.m. in the Senior Centre Auditorium at the Community Centre. For more information visit tillsonburghorticultural.ca.