‘we saw the man go up in space today’

Available from Thompson & Morgan

You don’t have to be a Starbucks aficionado to know Americans are obsessed with coffee. They love it so much that it’s the most popular beverage in the country, with consumption being at a two-decade high, according to the National Coffee Data Trends report.

No other plant native to South Carolina has such fragrant and beautiful spring blooms and stunning fall color as the witch-alders. Fothergilla was named after Dr. John Fothergill, an English physician and gardener who funded the travels of John Bartram through the Carolinas in the 1700’s. These beautiful shrubs have been planted in both American and English gardens for over 200 years, including gardens of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, is a popular celebration in the United States, due to the number of Americans, 10.5%, with Irish heritage. One million Irish emigrated to North America, Australia, or other parts of Great Britain in the mid-1800s because of the potato disease now known as late blight. Late blight, caused by the water mold, Phytophthora infestans, destroyed the Irish potato crops in 1845 through 1849 and caused the Irish Potato Famine. Another one million people died from hunger or disease.

Do you have a favorite insect? One of mine is a praying mantid. All mantids are excellent hunters and get their name from their prayer-like hunting pose. They sit and wait for their meal to get within striking distance and grab the prey by the neck. Even though mantids are considered beneficial predatory insects, they are generalist predators, meaning they can be indiscriminate when it comes to prey and are known to eat butterflies, bees, frogs, and hummingbirds. Sometimes, the male is eaten by the female during or after the mating process.

Start a new holiday tradition with your family this year by making orange pomander balls. They can be hung on your Christmas tree as ornaments, attached to garlands, or used in a holiday centerpiece with live greenery. These delicious-smelling, clove-studded oranges will fill your home with a festive spicy fragrance.

Headspace is the unfilled space between the food in a jar and the lid of a jar. General canning headspace recommendations from the United States Department of Agriculture are as follows:  Leave ¼ inch headspace for jams and jellies; leave ½ inch for tomatoes, fruits, and pickles that will receive a boiling water bath process; leave 1-inch headspace for most low acid foods that will be pressure canned. Some vegetables and meats require 1¼ to 1½ inches of headspace.

Quick backstory: You may remember Charley, co-author of my most-used field guide “Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates,” from our recent interview about galls and leaf mines, two of his specialties.(I’m giving away two more copies; enter by commenting in the form way down at the bottom of this page, after reading the entry details in the tinted box just before that. The book can help you to know what you are seeing when you look closer, too—kind of like always having Charley by your side.)When that story ran, Charley had noticed a photo I used to accompany it–of a squiggly “leaf mine” I’d observed in my Asian-native big-leaved perennial called Petasites. He’d wondered if it was caused by the insect that feeds in a few different genera in the tribe Senecioneae (including some native American botanical cousins of Petasites).  Why don’t you come try to find out, I’d suggested—and while you’re here, why don’t we have a

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

Northern (also called upland, or inland) sea oats is native to Eastern North America, says the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, specifically “from PA south to n. FL, west as far as s. IL, e. KS, and central TX,” and into northern Mexico. It’s easy to grow, and some birds enjoy its seeds, as do small mammals. Me, too.Chasmanthium likes a semi-shady to shady spot where the soil is moist, and it can even take poor drainage. This is a low-maintenance plant suited to that hardest of spots–a shady slope—because sea oats forms strong, widening clumps, and also reseeds (some gardeners in certain locations say it does t

I actually have no certain diagnosis; so many of these issues look somewhat alike, unless you are a plant pathologist, and so far I only have a relative few affected leaves. I nevertheless love Cornell’s diagnostic tool, a photo-driven system arranged by plant part (leaves, stem, fruit).What I do not seem to have, thankfully, is the late blight that’s been the source of the most dramatic headlines, and of a thorough story by Adrian Higgins of The Washington Post, late last week. This dramatic outbreak has also prompted warning bulletins from Cornell and other extension services. My plants have none of its characteristic early sign: dark stem lesions.This is the affliction (affecting tomatoes and potatoes) that caused the 1840s Irish Potato Famine, and it has never been recorded this early in the United States, apparently, nor this extensive

These non-native “ladybugs,” introduced by the Department of Agriculture to help combat certain agricultural pests, have made themselves right at home in America—and in my house, too. In fall, the south-facing side of the exterior can be teeming with patches of them, as they look for places to tuck into and overwinter. The USDA imported lady beetles from Japan as early as 1916 as a beneficial insect, to gobble up unwanted pests on forest and orchard trees, but it was probably later releases, in the late 1970s and early 80s in the Southeast, that took hold. Today, multicolored Asian lady beetles have made themselves completely at home around the United States, easily adapting to regions as diverse as Louisiana, Oregon, and mine in New York State.