New garden phlox

One of the backbone plants in the perennial garden is the mid to late summer tall Phlox paniculata or tall garden Phlox. One of the newest varieties to get to your local garden centre is ‘Goldmine’. Aptly named because it will bring a rush of visitors to your garden with its bright magenta purple flowers held firmly above green and gold variegated leaves. Two older variegated forms, ‘Harlequin’ with its magenta blooms and cream yellow variegated leaves should be easily available while ‘Becky Towe’ with rose pink flowers over yellow and green leaves is equally desirable. The older variegated ‘Norah Leigh’ with its green and cream splashed leaves is an excellent foliage plant but those pale pink blooms wash out against the dramatic foliage. If you are looking for a shorter phlox, you might want to search out ‘Little Laura’. The stunning rich violet purple blooms with white eyes are wonderful accents to any brighter colour in your perennial garden. At twenty-four inches tall, this plant will also serve as the focal centerpiece in any large perennial container. Keeping with our female names and short plants, let me suggest ‘Juliet’ for your new plant list. Again, she’s twenty-four inches tall with compact growth but with the softest pink flowers you can imagine. With some mildew resistance built into the breeding, this is an excellent mid-summer bloomer for both garden and large container. And speaking of mildew resistant phlox, let me suggest you look for these three mildew-resistant stunning ladies of the midnight garden: ‘Miss Pepper’ is a soft-pink with rose eye growing to three feet tall while ‘Miss Elie’ is taller at forty inches and sports soft pink blossoms with a deep rose eye. Rounding out the misses is ‘Miss Kelly’ and her soft lilac blooms are edged in dainty white. Install these plants in the full sun in well-drained soils. They will take some late afternoon shade but you’ll get better disease control if they receive full early morning sun in a well-ventilated location to dry the leaves off early in the morning. Feed early in the fall with a shovel of compost.

Why i decided to plan my next years garden last fall

Every year spring comes and I get so excited to get outside and plant my garden. I can just taste those fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, and all the other wonderful produce that I will grow this summer. I stop at all the seed displays and see if there is anything new that I want to try and grow this year and take pleasure in my anticipation to dig in the dirt. I watch the weather and am careful not to plant to soon, I don't want my plants caught in a late spring freeze of course. Then the time comes when I just can't stand it any longer I head to the nursery to buy my plants. I of course get way too many of everything and then I patiently haul them outside every morning to get some sun and then bring them in each night until the big day arrives. I get my garden area all rototilled and ready and invest in some plant food to help my little darlings along after I get them planted. I've got my stakes and string ready to make neat little rows of carrots and radishes. I've got my wire cages ready to place over my tomatoes plants and am just itching to get started. Finally the day has arrived and I can plant my garden. I start out the morning with enthusiasm and get everything planted just so. It is a little more crowded than I would like because I seem to always try to fit too many plants and seeds into the area, but I tell myself it will all be worth it. All through June and July I lovingly cultivate my plants, weeding and watering with a vengeance. August comes and we are thoroughly enjoying all our fresh vegetables. But by then it is getting a little hot out and weeding isn't quite as fun anymore. Toward the middle of August I have vegetables coming out my ears and it is time to can and freeze all this freshness for winter. I start out with salsa and then move on to tomatoes and pickles. Then of course I need to get those strawberrys in the freezer. And I don't want the corn to get too mature before I get it into the freezer. After a week or two my kitchen is a wreck and I am tired of spending the last of my summer days inside. If I never see another tomato or ear of corn I will be extremely happy. Between getting ready for the new school year and freezing and canning all my great produce I am thoroughly exhausted. Plus it seems like with this heat watering my garden, let alone the lawn is a never ending chore. But of course we don't want anything to go to waste so I head down to get more canning supplies and keep at it. When it is all said and done I have way too much for my family to use so of course I give it away. You don't want those vegetables to go to waste you know. By this time I look out and my peaches and apples seem just right for picking and the process starts over with them. While I am working on my fruit of course the garden is still producing and even though I quit canning and freezing from there I can't let it go to waste so I make sure every morning and night I pick what is ripe and give it away to those that will surely appreciate it. Because by this time the thought of eating anything out of the garden is not very appealing, neither is cooking in my kitchen that has become a canning disaster area. Then the next big day that I can't seem to wait for, the big freeze. Finally my gardening job has ended. All I have to do now is get everything in the compost pile, re-rototill, and fertilize. As I look at my kitchen and see all the fruits, vegetables, pickles, and jellies ready for winter I am proud, but really really tired. I vow next year I will not take on so much. Last year I went ahead and planned my garden in October and made specific counts of just how much I was going to plant. I made counts of just how much I had frozen and canned to see just how much we would use in the coming year. I made little footnotes of my thoughts on the subject as well. Well spring is approaching, well kind of there is still snow on the ground, and I got out my garden plan and looked at all the produce my family still hasn't eaten and thought about how much of it I had given away this winter already and thought maybe I should follow this new garden plan as I started to unfold all my notes. I vaguely remember thinking Pace salsa is almost as good as my own, and who really can tell if the canned tomatoes came from the garden or not after they have been cooked. I don't know if I will be able to stick to this streamlined plan when my green thumb starts itching to grow things but I keep telling myself if we run out of salsa, jelly, corn, or tomatoes it won't be the end of the world. They are readily available at the grocery store and in the long run may cost less than me putting them up myself. I was totally convinced in October, kind of convinced now, but I am wondering come May if I will be able to stick to it. I have a feeling when the grass starts turning green, and the tulips show their colors all my best laid plans for a more relaxing late summer are going to go by the wayside. Oh well, I guess their could be worse addictions. I wonder is there such a thing as a 12 step program for those addicted to gardening in excess?

History of mulberry trees morus alba morus rubrum and morus nigra

Mulberry trees were well known in the ancient civilizations of the world. They were famous fruit trees, because of the delicious berry fruits that were abundantly produced by fast growing trees—loaded with huge green leaves that were eaten by livestock, along with the berries, and the leaves were used in the Orient to fatten silkworms for the silk trade. General Oglethorpe, in 1733, imported 500 white mulberry trees to Fort Frederica in Georgia to encourage silk production at the English colony of Georgia. William Bartram, the famous early American explorer and botanist, described his encounter with mulberry trees near Mobile, Alabama, in his book, Travels, in the year 1773. Prince’s Nursery in 1774 offered for sale 500 white mulberry trees, ‘Morus alba’ and 1000 black mulberry trees, ‘Morus nigra,’ at Flushing, New York. Documents show that America’s first President, George Washington, bought fruit from this nursery. Mulberry trees were planted in the landscape of President Thomas Jefferson 20 feet apart, and the fruit trees lined both sides of the road that extended around the house at Monticello, Virginia. The silk trade was extremely important in the ancient civilizations in exchanges of fabrics, rugs, etc. The caravans of camels that traveled the “Silk Road” from Turkey to China brought world civilizations in contact with many valuable products back and forth to be traded, one of the most desirable and important products was silk. The mulberry trees, ‘Morus alba,’ were most desirable for silk production and gradually were filtered from Oriental societies to European fields. Many of these mulberry trees are grown today in Turkey, from where the famous Turkish silk carpets are distributed throughout the world. Early Americans such as General Oglethorpe hoped to establish the silk industry in the American debtor colonies, but the project was destined for failure for many reasons. The mulberry trees are very fast growing fruit trees, and many farmers in the United States and other countries are hoping to profitably grow the trees for the production of human and livestock food. The wood of mulberry trees is very soft and is used for many purposes in many nations, but not extensively in the United States. The white mulberry, ‘Morus alba,’ with the extremely large crop production of these trees has been observed growing as a fruit tree in North Carolina according to researcher, Russell Smith, in Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture that: white mulberry trees planted by a farmer “who kept pigs and claimed that one-third their weight was due to the mulberries falling from the trees—about 625 pounds of pork to an acre on rather thin, sandy land with little care and no cultivation.” James A. Duke in Handbook of Energy Crops sees the mulberry fruit as a source of energy, “in South Korea on producing high yields of ethanol from mulberry trees.” Mulberry trees are considered to be a very important fruit tree in gardens of the Orient, Europe and the Mideast, and since new hybrid cultivars have been developed recently, the demand for these trees has surged in the U. S., where the grafted trees are rare, expensive and difficult to obtain. New cultivars are adaptable throughout the U. S. except Southern Florida, California and Arizona, and some trees offer stainless fruit, early bearing, rapid growth and delicious berry quality on berries that dangle from the stems, some tasting sweet as honey. These syrupy sweet mulberries are used in Ice Cream, jams, jellies, beverages, pies, and as stuffing mixtures for game birds. The fast growing mulberry tree can grow as much as 10ft in one year, and as a rule will bear a few berries the first year, some with the richness of sweet cherries. The berries ripen to a brilliant black color, or red, pink, or white and are delectably fragrantly sweet and about two inches long, like a cooling blend and taste of raspberry and strawberry. The mulberry is excellent for fresh eating and for cooking pies. Some mulberries when dead ripe are so soft that just picking them breaks the fragile skin, staining your fingers purple with juice. This means that as a commercial berry available from grocery shelves, forget it, but nevertheless: the mulberries only need to travel as far as your mouth. This choice mulberry fruit is practically seedless with a crisp, sweet flavor when eaten directly from the tree. Every child in your neighborhood will learn when the berries from this outstanding tree are ripening in early May. Most cultivars of hybrid mulberry trees are well adapted in most areas of the United States. The dessert quality berries are excellent and honey sweet for picking directly off the tree and contain high concentrations of fruity sugar that makes the berries useful to process for jams, jellies and pies. The mature height of mulberry trees is 30 feet. New grafted cultivars of mulberry trees are gaining lots of attention from the backyard gardener. Some of the recommended new cultivars of mulberry fruit trees are White Mulberry, ‘Morus alba’ ‘Whitey;’ Superberry Mulberry, ‘Morus nigra’ ‘Superberry;’ Black Beauty Mulberry, ‘Morus nigra’ ‘Black Beauty’ plant patent 4913; Pakistan Mulberry, ‘Morus rubra’ ‘Pakistan;’ Persian Mulberry, ‘Morus nigra’ ‘Shah;’ Bachuus Noir Mulberry, ‘Morus nigra’ ‘Bachuus Noir;’ and the Red Gelato Mulberry, ‘Morus rubrum’ ‘Red Gelato.’