With apologies to This Week in Baseball, “This Week In Gardening”:
- Weston Nurseries, Watering Guidelines
- Stark Bro’s, 4 Benefits of Thinning Fruit Trees
Category Archives: Flora and Fauna
California agriculture
Excellent article by Natasha Geiling, “California’s Drought Could Upend America’s Entire Food System“:
In 2014, some 500,000 acres of farmland lay fallow in California, costing the state’s agriculture industry $1.5 billion in revenue and 17,000 seasonal and part time jobs. Experts believe the total acreage of fallowed farmland could double in 2015 — and that news has people across the country thinking about food security.
“When you look at the California drought maps, it’s a scary thing,” Craig Chase, who leads the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture’s Marketing and Food Systems Initiative at Iowa State University, told ThinkProgress. “We’re all wondering where the food that we want to eat is going to come from. Is it going to come from another state inside the U.S.? Is it going to come from abroad? Or are we going to grow it ourselves? That’s the question that we need to start asking ourselves.”…
Plant reviews: Blanket flower and Lobed tickseed
Last fall I took some notes on what worked and what didn’t in the garden. My focus is native plants and cultivars. (My wife handles the vegetable garden.) My first two reviews follow below. (Musical accompaniment here.)
Two things that have done well and I’d plant more of: Gaillardia ‘Arizona Sun’ and Coreopsis auriculata ‘Nana’. Gaillardia (NB: not to be confused with giardia) is also known as blanket flower. I didn’t snap any pictures of ours so here’s one gleaned from the web:
We’ve had ours for probably three seasons now. It has a long bloom season – at least two months – and the blooms are long lasting – didn’t write it down but I’d say at least a couple weeks before individual blooms fade. I originally planted them in a partly sunny area but then transplanted them to full sun two (?) years ago. They’re happier in full sun than part sun. I know, they’re not New England natives but they are native to the U.S. and the bees seem to like them. That’s good enough for me.
2015 Mass Aggie Workshops
Email received yesterday:
The 2015 MassAggie Workshop Series line-up is now available.
This year’s topics include:
- Pruning Apple Trees
- Healthy Seeds
- Growing & Pruning Blueberries
- Growing & Pruning Raspberries and other Bramble Fruit
- Growing & Pruning Grapes
- Invasive Plants
- 100′ Fruiting Wall!
- Fruit Tree Pest Management
- Healthy Soils
- Native Pollinators
All workshops are hands-on and will give attendees a chance to practice new skills and/or take home something they can use in their own landscapes or gardens.
If you’re interested visit https://extension.umass.edu/fruitadvisor/mass-aggie-seminars for more information or to register.
Click here for a copy of the event flyer.
Dave Epstein and NEWFS, How to Select Trees and Shrubs at a Nursery
As part of his “Growing Wisdom” series Dave Epstein did a few episodes at New England Wild Flower Society’s Garden in the Woods. Here’s the third of three:
Dave Epstein and NEWFS, Native Pollinator Plants for Container Gardens
As part of his “Growing Wisdom” series Dave Epstein did a few episodes at New England Wild Flower Society’s Garden in the Woods. Here’s the second of three:
Three cheers for butterfly milkweed and mountain mint!
PS Garden in the Woods has a nice garden shop. You can probably obtain all three species mentioned in season. If you can’t, and you’re willing to do mail order, then I recommend Tripple Brook Farm. I’ve gotten a fair number of plants in our garden from them. Their prices are very reasonable and everything we’ve gotten from them has been very healthy. (You can stop in as well as do mail order. Once upon a time pre-kids my wife and I rented a van and drove out to pick up a 12′ sassafras tree. One of the owners was kind enough to give us brief tour of the grounds. They’ve got a nice set up.)
Dave Epstein and NEWFS, Edible Native Plants for the Shade
As part of his “Growing Wisdom” series Dave Epstein did a few episodes at New England Wild Flower Society’s Garden in the Woods. Here’s the first of three:
Invasive plants: “Know them. Don’t grow them.”
The New England Wild Flower Society puts out an excellent three-fold brochure on invasive plants common to this region. They list species and provide some background on why you should care:
Some non-native plant species become “overachievers,” thriving in their new habitats without the insects and diseases that would normally control their growth. Once established in natural areas, they outcompete native species and become a major threat to native habitats. Some invasive plants have escaped from our home gardens and public plantings into natural areas and cause profound environmental and economic damage. Each state has developed a list of problematic plants. [Ed.: See MA’s list of invasives and potential invasives here.] Some are even illegal to sell. Please learn about the species considered invasive in your area, generate a list of the invasives on your property, and create a plan for eliminating them.
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It also describes means of control. For invasives which are frequently found in suburban yards and gardens the brochure recommends some native alteratives, e.g., red maple to replace Norway maple, highbush blueberry to replace burning bush, blue flag iris to replace yellow flag iris, inkberry holly to replace privet hedge, and serviceberry to replace non-native bush honeysuckle.
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Get a pdf of the brochure here – Invasive Brochure
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Elizabeth Farnsworth, Is “New Conservation” Still Conservation?
- Become a member of the New England Wild Flower Society. (If for no other reason then because it’s free admission for you and your kids or guest at Garden in the Woods.)
- The Society puts out a magazine, Native Plant News. It’s good – one of the few magazines I usually read cover-to-cover.
An excerpt from Elizabeth Farnsworth’s essay, Is “New Conservation” Still Conservation?, in the Fall/Winter 2014 issue of Native Plant News:
Adherents of “New Conservation,” which is also called Environmental Modernism, understand that simply creating ecological preserves is not sufficient to protect biodiversity on this planet. Proponents acknowledge that with a global population exceeding seven billion people, humans have altered and continue to affect, in some way, almost every location on the globe. They recognize that humans have a need for natural resources. But they also see the natural world as highly resilient, able to withstand all manner of alterations and extinctions. therefore, they pursue conservation strategies that establish partnerships with large corporations and sanction natural resource extraction. Although this seems on the face of it like a reasonable position, New Conservation has stirred considerable controversy among the field’s leading conservation biologists. touched off in 2012 by an article authored by Peter Kareiva (chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy) and colleagues, titled “Conservation in the Anthropocene: Beyond Solitude and Fragility,” a lively debate continues to rage in the scientific and popular literature. [Ed.: Link added.]
New Conservation erects a straw man by portraying conservation scientists as naïvely focusing on protecting “pristine” wilderness and ignoring the need to work with many stakeholders to demonstrate the economic value of conservation. Adherents of this doctrine quote selectively from early texts by Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorn, Carson, Muir, and Abbey that plaintively decry the destruction of wilderness, and then claim that we continue to cling to unrealistic, idealistic concepts of nature. But although those eloquent writings spurred the nascent environmental movement, they are no longer the primary arguments used by today’s conservationists to justify land and species protection. Conservation scientists on the ground grapple daily with the hard realpolitik of a burgeoning human population, political destabilization, and economic inequality, and struggle to balance human needs and limitations with the fundamental imperative to protect and sustain biodiversity and ecosystem function.
New Conservationists posit that current conservation strategies have failed at protecting biodiversity because they disregard two facts: 1) nature is highly resilient, not fragile; and 2) appealing to human interests is central to ensuring enduring land and species protection. in fact, these ideas are not new. Conservation organizations have long realized both that humans are an essential part of nature and the conservation equation, and that, given world enough and time to recover from anthropogenic stress (and with some help from restoration efforts), degraded landscapes can provide functional habitats and supply important ecosystem services to humans and other organisms….
Save the North 40
The North 40 is a 46-acre woodlands in Wellesley, MA, that is in danger of being developed.
Our mission is to protect this priceless natural resource.
Follow the link above for additional info. (I don’t live in Wellesley but I support their cause.)
Related: The MA Dept. of Energy and Environmental Affairs page on Open Space, Recreation, and Conservation Resources.