This Small Alabama Landscape Lives Large

We can employ many tricks to grow more fruit in less space. One key strategy that is very useful to understand is growing fruits as cordons in small spaces.

Most items that are an integral part of our daily routine are made of plastics. Plastic is an incredibly versatile and durable material, which is why it is so popular today. Furniture, containers, appliances, packaging, and even synthetic clothing can lead to the release of tiny plastics called microplastics into our environment and water systems.

I’ve made it clear in this blog that Winter is my least favorite season. Therefore, I always seek winter-blooming flowers to raise my spirits. However, before the yellow-flowered daffodils bloom to give me hope that Spring is coming, I rely on the soft-textured drooping gold threadlike leaves of golden threadleaf sawara cypress (Chamaecyparis pisifera ‘Filifera Aurea’).

Having successfully got five streptocarpus through the winter and into bloom I am a little more hopeful of my prowess with them, but will feel more confident once I have got them through a second winter too – and may even be tempted to add one or two more! The fern behind them is a couple of plantlets lifted from the saucer under a pot of sarracenia,  kept topped up with water and seemingly an ideal breeding ground for ferns – the asplenium is understandable as there is a lot of it in the garden but I don’t know what this fern is or where the spores have come from.

With surprisingly timed summer flowers, hot fall foliage and handsome, peeling bark to recommend it, Stewartia pseudocamellia (top) is a treasure. It grows happily even in part-shade, and reaches about 25 feet here. Read its profile. Perhaps the smallest tree I grow (maybe 5 feet tall and 9 feet across at present) is an oddball weeping Kousa dogwood, Cornus kousa ‘Lustgarten Weeping,’ which stirred some controversy at A Way to Garden when I almost sent it packing last spring, after years of non-love for it. I relented, and made it a proper home of its own, as you said you desired.

What is your favorite glimpse of the American landscape, the one you could stare and stare out into? Does it include water or sky, or a sea of something else? Maybe you’ll be spending part of the holiday weekend in sight of it.

The Latin specific epithet, or species name, of the Stewartia I grow is pseudocamellia, which roughly means it disguises itself as a camellia when in bloom (a nod to the look of its lovely and plentiful white June-into-July flowers, and the fact they are very distant relatives in the Tea Family).But this Stewartia, from Japan, which gets to maybe 25 feet or so in a Northeast garden setting and is happy in part shade or sun, isn’t content to offer up just nice flowers for the privilege of living with you. It gives you peeling, lovely bark all season long (below), and hot fall color, too,

MELISSA CLARK IS ONE OF US. The prolific cookbook author and “The New York Times” food columnist has a homegrown Dahlia (her young daughter); knows a rutabaga from a turnip (so many people don’t!), and is intrepid in harvesting year-round farm-and-garden gleanings—if not in her own backyard, then in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza Farmers’ Market, where she has been a year-round customer for years, come hell or ice age. With her latest, “Cook This Now,” the hard part will be figuring out which of 120 recipes to start with. Win one of two copies I’ve bought to share—and get her recipe for Carroty Mac and Cheese right now.

FROM THE HOW TIME FLIES DEPARTMENT: It has been three months this week since I started weekly radio podcasts with my friends Marshall and Jill down the road at local NPR affiliate Robin Hood Radio. How can this be? But it’s true: the 13th and 14th weekly installments of the A Way to Garden podcast–June 28th’s about making a bird-friendly garden, and July 5th’s on my favorite garden-sized trees–are ready for harvest.

As I told all the visitors, frogs have a pretty straight-forward system of social order, especially in mating season. Come the hot weather, the males dress up in their courting outfits (turning yellow underneath) and also start talking incessantly, trying to call in a female. But only one male in a particular bit of turf (er, surf?) can win the hearts of the ladies, and a dominant male is soon established.Turns out the winning Mr. Bigstuff can’t keep up with all the girls sometimes, though, so a so-called “satellite male” (a.k.a. Lucky Number 2) gets the excess. Meaning the also-ran in this race is still a winner–but none of the other boys succeed with the chicks. Unlucky Number 3 and those even less vocally appealing are losers, at least this season.The big ha

First, the BirdNote backstory: In 2002, the then-executive director of Seattle Audubon heard a short public-radio show called StarDate. “We could do that with birds,” she thought. In 2005 the idea became a two-minute, seven-day-a-week public-radio “interstitial” (short program) that recently caught my ear. I asked BirdNote to help answer the recent questions you had asked me. (In case you missed installment Number 1, we tackled: How do birds make themselves at home—even in winter? Week 2 was about birds on the move: the miracle of hummingbird migration, and on flying in formation.)Parts of Ellen’s answers below are in 2-minute audio clips to stream (all in the green links–or you can read the transcripts at those links if you prefer). Here we go:mobbing the bigger guysQ. A lot of us have witnessed, and wondered about, much-smaller birds bravely chasing big raptors overhead, and also small songbirds who seem to mob owls. What’s up with these Davids chasing Goliaths in the

AN ARTICLE about soil solarization for weed control, the practice of covering beds or fields with plastic to keep down unwanted plants, caught my attention in the summer of 2018. It was published on the Cooperative Extension’s online home called eXtension.org and was written by University of Maine doctoral candidate, and she was my guest that winter on my radio show and podcast.