I have tried to grow several Pelargonium varieties this year and been pleasantly surprised at the various forms and colours I have succeeded in producing.
21.07.2023 - 22:32 / awaytogarden.com
I HATE PAYING a couple of dollars for a bunch of organic parsley in winter (or chives, or cilantro, or sage, or…). As summer starts to heat up and wind down each year, I start freezing them—not a perfect substitute for fresh, perhaps, but very good, and economical. How to freeze herbs for winter use (or anytime).3 ways to freeze herbs:as pesto (using oil as the base, sometimes with extra ingredients); as ice cubes (whole or chopped, pressed into trays and covered in a tiny bit of water, or blended with just enough water to then make a cube); or stuffed tightly into freezer bags (or into small freezer jars like 4-ounce Ball jars). freeze herbs as pesto, flavored or plainGET OUT YOUR FOOD PROCESSOR and get creative. You can simply puree virtually any green herb (from chives to parsley, basil, oregano, cilantro, arugula, sage, and even garlic scapes when in season) in an olive-oil base. Some cooks add garlic and/or nuts and grated cheese now; some think the mixture doesn’t store as well with the extra ingredients. Freeze the thick mixture as cubes, knocked out into doubled freezer bags with all the air expressed. More onmaking herb pestos.
freeze herbs as ice cubesTHIS METHOD MIGHT BE preferable when an oil base doesn’t suit, such as for lemon balm or other mints (or with other green herbs that might be used in a non-olive oil recipe later). Easy: wash herbs, pat dry and remove from stems. Chop if needed, or simply press into ice cube trays and drizzle a little water over to fill, so a cube will form when frozen. You can also process the herbs with a little water as the base, as in the oil version above, and then make cubes. When ready, pop cubes out into freezer bags.
freezing rosemary, thyme or baySOME HERBS ARE EASIEST to
I have tried to grow several Pelargonium varieties this year and been pleasantly surprised at the various forms and colours I have succeeded in producing.
A bit of light relief for a dark corner! Spreads well but easliy controlled like butter (take a knife too it..
There’s a spot beside my patio where Nicotiana and annual poppies like to propagate–don’t ask me why–and I’ve learned to let them do so, above, until they’re just big enough to move around where I want them. (This means we each get our way half the time, I guess you could say.) In the driveway gravel, wonderful sedums like ‘Matrona’ sow all the time, and I’m happy to have the freebies to add to the garden.If the colony of volunteers is in the right place but just too thickly sown, I edit (with repeated pinches of my fingers, removing enough to allow the survivors good spacing). If the colony isn’t where I want it at all, I scoop up trowelfuls (above, with Nicotiana) and move them, above, or sometimes even individual young plants.This is my system with not just the poppies and flowering tobacco, but with tall verbena (Verbena bonariensis), and would be with Nigella and larkspur and other things I no longer grow (though who knows why?).I know, I should neaten up my act–how messy to let the dill grow 6 inches high before weedi
Since the book “Planting in a Post-Wild World” came out in 2015, co-authored by Claudia West with Thomas Rainer, I’ve been gradually studying their ideas and starting to have some light bulbs go off, on how to be inspired to put plants together in the ways that nature does, in layered communities.Claudia joined me on the July 17, 2017 edition of my public-radio show and podcast to about some of the practical, tactical aspects of plant community-inspired designs that we can app
I have been known to plant spinach in my mittens, actually, as late as Thanksgiving, and again as early as March if the raised beds have drained out and the soil is workable. Seeds sown from September until the ground freezes up, then topped with a floating row cover, will offer a real headstart of a harvest in the North in April, when much
Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney’s 2010 book is full of photos of all the oddball things you see outside (if you stop long enough to notice!): egg cases and cocoons and all kinds of webs; folded and curled-up leaves as if something’s hidden inside (it is!); and all manner of bumps, lumps, notches, and holes in foliage, bark, you name it. Even tiny previously unexplained pattern in the sand…and soil…a.k.a. tracks and signs of insects.“I’ve always been interested in everything around me,” says Charley, whose Master’s degree is from the University of Vermont’s field naturalist program. “Then someone gave me a digital camera right after I graduated from college, so I started paying closer attention to the little things. And then I started wishing I had a field guide to tell me what all these signs left by insects and other invertebrates were—but it just didn’t seem to exist.”Charley and Noah took it upon themselves to create that guide, in “Tracks and Sign of Insect
Adam and I talked about not just the Japanese types, but also other garden-sized maples for adding interest in every season and garden situation–in pots or the high shade of woodland gardens, to full-sun locations.my maple q&a with adam wheelerQ. When I was at Broken Arrow recently, there were many choice things to look at—but I kept noticing the maples you offer, particularly. How many do you grow?A. In the collection at the nursery, I suspect we have 150 or 200 different maples, and really that’s the tip of the iceberg with this genus.Q. There are a lot of native A
I was fighting the cues: wanting to get on with cutting miles of clean edges between turf and beds despite sodden soil (answer: don’t!) or rake some grassy areas that are still plastered with leafy, twiggy winter detritus but likewise still soft. Again: no can do, without pulling up the lawn.As much as I want to make it all “just so” in time for Open Day next weekend—maybe I can’t.The orientalis hybrid hellebores (Helleborus x orientalis) know about
Ten size-XL paw prints adorned the back porch; on the front welcome mat was deposited some apparently undesirable reject from the compost pile–not tasty enough, I guess. Feeding the birds? Not me, at least not right now. Project Feeder Watch, a bird-counting program with Cornell Lab of Ornithology that I look forward to each year (as you can read here), starts Saturday, but I think I’ll skip a week or two before I put out any more feeders. Extra-warm weather has at least one of the local bears on an extended feeding frenzy; the birds will have to be patient. After all, look what happened to the iron pole holding up the one feeder I
TIME FOR A LITTLE NON-PLANT MOMENT, captured in a quick jumble of other-than-botanical snapshots from around the garden lately.
The guy up top (a green frog, Rana clamitans) spent most of the season tucked into a big pot of Oxalis vulcanicola by the bigger frogpond out back, soaking up the rays and waiting for unsuspecting insects to pass his way. The male green frog who made his summer home my above-ground seasonal water gardens–two big troughs I fill with water by my kitchen door, like this–considered a nearby bromeliad (in this case a Vriesea) to be his digs, when he wasn’t at poolside. (Some years little tree frogs have tucked the
I COULDN’T RESIST (which is, of course, why Snoop Dogg made the video, right?–to get all of us “gardeners” into the fold, or at least to his upcoming concert in Cardiff, Wales). I would bet my garden harvest that this is the first video to combine Brassica napobrassica, the giant rutabaga (the British call them “swedes”), with Cannabis sativa, which Snoop Dogg calls “vegetation”–as in “I do vegetation myself, and I want to know your secret.” Whose secret does Snoop want? That of Welshman Ian Neale, whose prize-winning “swede” was 85.5 pounds–and awaits confirmation as a world record.