Cold Climate Gardening

Our nasty, hot sticky weather–high 90s for days and days on end, coupled with so much humidity the hill across the street was covered in a white haze–has finally broken. Quite dramatically. Now we’ve been getting days where the warmest it gets is into the low 60s. There was no transition at all; it is as though someone has just flipped a switch.

I thought it might make some of my hot weather loving plants pout, but so far I haven’t seen any sign of it. My tomatoes are not only blooming, some of them have green tomatoes the size of golf balls on them!! This is the best I’ve ever done with tomatoes so far. I had potted them …

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One thing the internet has done for gardeners is made us all more aware of the conditions others garden in. To see the photos of narcissus and cosmos growing in warmer climates when for me it is the dead of winter continues to astound me. A couple of weeks ago, this post on an eclectic garden kind of took me aback. At the time, my area had just come out of a very dry May and was in the midst of an unseemly June heat wave. I found the fact that the eclectic gardener can normally expect only 1.21″ of rain in May just as astounding as narcissus in December. The average rainfall in May in my area is 3.55″, and we are glad to get every bit of it. This May, however, a mere 0.75″ fell to the ground. The lack of precipitation, coupled with cooler than average temperatures (we had a few nights in the low 20s F.) slowed our spring quite a bit. I think both my mock-orange and some of lilacs had poor bloom because of those hard freezes.

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Mr. Hinsley, the publisher of the Malvaceae Info site that I mentioned in my previous post, emailed me concerning the meaning of Bibor Felho, and addressed himself to other statements in my blog entry that I didn’t bring up in the email. He is better at search engine use than I am. He searched on bibor and felho individually, something that I neglected to do. He discovered that the words were quite common on Hungarian websites, so he looked them up on a Hungarian-English online dictionary and came up with ‘Purple Cloud.’ He notes, “Felho is correctly spelt, in Hungarian, with an accent on the o. (I think the accent is a double acute accent, also known as …

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I would be the first to admit that I’m behind on my garden blog reading. So it was only today, when I was supposed to be doing something much more necessary on the computer, that I discovered Does Your Garden Overwhelm You? Try this! It figures a maturing gardener would have such words of wisdom. I myself have long held (in regards to gardening) “if it’s not fun, don’t do it!” but I was never smart enough (or was it well-to-do enough) to hire someone to do the “hateful” chores so I had more time to garden. I just didn’t do the chores and my house looks it. Oh, well. My favorite tip from this post: “I never hired …

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Laurie of Prairie Tide and I have a similar opinion of gardening books:

To learn more about gardening, I’m hungry for good gardening books. I bring home stacks of books from the library, and whenever I visit a bookstore, I browse past the garden section to see what’s new. I crave garden books with good writing, detailed directions, and passion. Garden writing, though, can pretty bland. I’m amazed how many books out there offer the same tired advice.

Consequently, when she called
The Literary Garden a garden …

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Greengirl: First-time gardener and jade plant killer is a web designer for a Minnesota newspaper. She has started a blog associated with said newspaper asking for gardening advice. She’s already gotten over a hundred comments from advice givers, some of whom are writing back to exchange information with other commenters. I had a lot of fun reading the comments, especially the one from her mother, which started out, “How come you never tell me when you get published?” Check it out, and give your own advice!

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