cattle-panel diy projects, with joe lamp’l: trellises, cages, planting grids and more

Everyone loves falafel—it’s a year-round staple, and the frozen options at Trader Joe’s make it incredibly easy to prepare. But today, you should probably rid your freezer shelves of any Trader Joe’s falafel: In the company’s third food recall this week, on July 28 Trader Joe’s recalled its fan-favorite Fully Cooked Falafel after being informed by the supplier that rocks were found in the food.

M AY IS MADNESS. I have already said that in the monthly chores column. But it’s madness otherwise, too: garden tours to prep for; workshops I’m giving with friends; a garden contest I’m judging (as in, free prizes!); a sister in the news to brag about…and oh, I need your help with the Urgent Garden Question Forums here, too.

I PROMISED I WOULDN’T ADD EVEN AN EXTRA TRIP TO THE CURB WITH THE TRASH to my schedule, with all the mowing I have to do, but (big surprise) I layered on a couple of events, and I want to make sure you know about them, in case you are in the Hudson Valley/Berkshires vicinity this summer. Another container-gardening class, a 365-day garden lecture with an extra focus on water gardening and the frogboys, and a tour here in August (that last one you already might know about). Details, details:Sunday July 12, Containing Exuberance, container-gardening workshop, with Bob Hyland at Loomis Creek Nursery, near Hudson, New York, 11 AM to 1 PM, $5.

I spoke about some notable natives with my friend Andy Brand of Broken Arrow Nursery, with whom I often hosting half-day workshops in my Hudson Valley, New York, garden, when we focus on upping the beneficial wildlife quotient in your own backyard with better plants and better practices. Andy has been one of the experts I’ve pestered for ideas as I’ve been doing that in my own garden in recent years to good effect.Andy is manager of Connecticut-based Broken Arrow, and he’s a serious amateur naturalist, and founder of the Connecticut state butterfly association. (That’s a photo by Andy of a red-banded hairstreak on a Clethra blossom, top of page.) Learn where many familia

Full lecture and class descriptions below, along with ticket ordering for succulent events:11 am lecture: ‘succulent love’PRACTICALLY carefree, with low water needs and available in amazing forms in nuanced colors that mix and match beautifully…that’s why succulents have been the rage in horticulture in recent years.In this visually rich talk, longtime collector, nursery owner and garden designer Katherine Tracey will share some of her favorite ways of using both hardy and tender succulents in Northeastern gardens, including using them as ingredients in mixed planters, vertical gardens and lately as the subject of long-lasting cut material for

Its native range, says the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, is New York and southern Ontario to Wisconsin, and northeast Iowa to Maryland, also appearing in the mountains from Georgia to Tennessee.  Depending whom you ask, twinleaf is hardy in Zone 4 or 5 to 7 or 8.The New England Wildflower Society’s Garden in the Woods, in Framingham, Massachusetts, was the first place I saw it in profusion, though it is apparently not technically a

‘THE SMALLEST NPR STATION in the nation,” Robin Hood Radio, just got bigger, which is good news for them and also for my garden podcast, which we began doing together each Monday morning around 8:30 in March 2010. The station, headquartered in nearby Sharon, Connecticut, has expanded to reach about 150,000 residents, up from 40,000 previously, by adding a signal from the frequency at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

This history of beelining, the other way to connect to honey bees besides keeping hives, is the subject of the book called “Following the Wild Bees: The Craft and Science of Bee Hunting,” by Cornell University biologist Thomas Seeley, just released in paperback edition. Tom, Horace White Professor in Biology in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell, has been passionately interested in honey bees since high school, eventually doing his doctoral thesis on them, and his ongoing scientific work has primarily focused on understanding the phenomenon of swarm intelligence with the help of these incredible animals.Learn about how a hive works, with its female-dominated order, about how and why Tom beelines to locate wild hives. And maybe most astonishingly listen about what he calls our “shared uniqueness” with the honey bees–what characteristic we share with

Dr. Elizabeth Andress, is a Professor and Extension Food Safety Specialist at the University of Georgia, and oversees my go-to reference website about all matters of putting up food sanely and safely: It’s called The National Center for Home Food Preservation. We hope to inspire you to plant extra and make this the year you enjoy the fruits of your garden labors all through the offseason–whether canned or dried or frozen. Read along as you listen to the Feb. 27, 2107 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).getting ready to preserve the harvest

QUICK, BEFORE THE FROST gets hold of the ground for good, do it: Take a soil test, to send off to the lab. Host Joe Lamp’l of the award-winning public television program “Growing a Greener World” says this simple practice is a foundational tactic of garden success, and shares other insights into building and maintaining healthy garden soil.

I’m feeling daring, so I specifically called Timothy Tilghman, a former colleague at Martha Stewart Living, who is now horticulturist at the much-heralded Untermyer Park and Gardens in Yonkers, New York, just minutes north of New York City. The property has quickly become a destination for gardeners, a getaway where visitors are wowed by bold, contemporary plantings—including ones in containers—in a dramatic, historic setting.A century ago, in 1915, Samuel Untermyer hired William Welles Bosworth, an Ecole des Beaux Arts-trained architect and landscape designer who designed Kykuit for the Rockefellers, to create the “greatest gardens in the world.” Soon after, they began exe

Yes, you’ve seen these and many more examples of bird behavior–but do you know what any of it means? Do you know not just the what, but also the why behind those actions?I’m a longtime amateur birder and can ID a good number of species, but until I started taking online webinars and other courses with Cornell Lab of Ornithology maybe five years ago, I didn’t realize that my powers of observ