Spring

This evening the old spring ritual of potting up perennials in the gloaming began. Garrison Kellier on the radio and potting mix under my nails, a time honored ritual. George swears he heard spring peepers at the pond the other day but I think he is dreaming on that one, although in one of the many puddles in the rain garden I did see big fat pollywogs. 

Looking at all of the green shoots emerging out of the pots in the greenhouses makes my soul sing. The miracle of barren roots turning into healthy plants and then sighing into flower gives new meaning to the phrase "love what you do" (plants do seem to love what they do, too). Our dear friends Hilda and Clara, who come every spring to pot up our plants have come and filled up a greenhouse with George's seedlings and cuttings. 

We have so much great stuff now! I can’t wait for the show to begin. Here is a small list...four different carexes with names like Red Rooster, Prairie Fire, Indian Summer, and Toffee Twist...bronze and copper and brass. Origanum ‘Kent Beauty’ which I love, love, love because of it’s pendulous pink to green hanging flowers; everyone notices this one in bloom. We will have Achillea ‘Saucy Seduction’ and Eupatorium ‘Chocolate” with names like that they have to be great. We will have strawberries and rhubarb this year and oh so much more. And you know with the advent of warmer weather this week maybe we will hear the peepers. Come on spring, we're ready.

Spring Update

It’s been the darndest weather this spring: Cool-misty, cool-rainy, cool-cloudy, and then really hot all in the same week. The plants in the greenhouses and in the gardens certainly recover faster than I do. There is also no denying how the weather has made everything lovely this year. The gardens have had enough rain, and the world looks green and lush.

We are doing well at the nursery this year; we had no idea what it would be like. I appreciate the love and support from friends and strangers alike. I guess we are becoming known for peddling beauty to everyone who stops by. Yesterday a young family came down the driveway in the late afternoon, I smiled and said hello and they said they were just looking. They gave the the display gardens the once over before getting back in their car and heading out the driveway. Thats what I want our place to be: a respite from all of the hustle and bustle of everyday life. I believe the people who make their way here feel that as well.

Finally, next week we are putting up a shade area attached to the retail greenhouse just for sitting and relaxing (something we all need to do more of). When the breeze blows through, it will be like heaven. The new sitting space will also afford a great view of the gardens, which are now showing off false indigo, golden spiderwort, and catmint, among others things. Come and join us and talk gardening anytime.

Happy Digging!

What's Ahead as the Weather Warms

Days are getting longer...sigh. I can say it for sure now: our gardens are receiving more light to warm up their sleeping hearts. Sure, I'm writing this during a cold snap, but I feel spring is really on the way and the days of intense cold are on the way out. Our first greenhouse is full of herb cuttings and all of George's perennials are raising their tiny heads above the soil of their birth. We are going to have all kinds of "new-for-us" plants this year, along with some of our old favorites in smaller amounts so we can offer more variety. I will pass on a few every time I write, either new or undiscovered by most gardeners.

One of my favorites from last year that we will have again is Digitalis purpurea heywoodii "Pink Champagne." If you were one of the lucky few who bought one last year I would love to see it this year, because we forgot to keep any for ourselves! Heywoodii has beautiful silver foliage with blush pink bells.

Lonicera sempervirens 'Major Wheeler'

A new one is Lonicera sempervirens 'Major Wheeler' (right) which flowers heavily from spring through fall. It's 3 - 8 feet tall with a 1 - 10 foot spread and has crimson-red trumpet-shaped flowers. The long flowering time makes this special, who wouldn't want something that flowers from spring to fall?

Another new plant for us is Aspen Sunflower (Helianthella quinquenervis). It is a clear yellow without a hint of orange or gold. As a member of the sunflower tribe, it is a great food source for birds in fall (I love natural bird food plants).

Moving on to our display gardens: last year we were establishing a grass and sedge garden and Geo's rain garden. The whole property will soon be one giant garden for everyone to enjoy. We want customers and friends to wander our home and take whatever ideas fit for themselves. One of the best parts of this place is how it keeps us in touch with our gardening community. We hope our reach goes beyond our 4 1/2 acres and our love of gardening reaches into your heart, too.

Happy Gardening!

The Peeper Frogs are Back

The wind is rattling the windows; spring is closing in.  Another way I can tell is that our greenhouses are full to bursting, with no where to put another plant.  We only have so many covered greenhouses or heaters to go in them.  Our friends Hilda and Clara, who come every year to help us "pot up," came in February and then again last week.  This time they brought another friend, Helen, who along with everyone else poked holes in pots filled with potting mix and filled them in with small plants.  At this time of the year they grow so fast, it is one of our spring miracles. 

We are going to have so many new plants this year.  I can't wait to see two new achilleas we have gotten (achillieas are also called "yarrows"). One is called "Apricot Delight" which is  apricot colors fading to soft peach, very fruity. The other is "Pomegranate" also fruity with a deep red coloring almost like, you guessed it, a pomegranate.  I couldn't resist them, achilleas are drought tolerant, beautiful, and low maintenance (OK: well-drained, full sun low maintenance).  We will also have the vibrant heuchera villosa hybrids "Caramel," "Christa," "Citronelle," and "Miracle" just to name a few. These are the colors of yellow-orange, rose-purple, and citron yellow, among others.

We have two tree paeonias this year: one is red and the other is wisteria blue.  If you've never seen a tree paeonia, it is an amazing little shrub with huge tissue-paper flowers.  I've heard that in China there is one that is a thousand years old.  People will just sit and contemplate it when it is in bloom.  They are definitely a long term plant. Well, I could go on and on about all the new plants, but I'm thinking you will just have to visit. Trav has posted our events and happening, and if I can manage a few more I will let you know. I love that the peeper frogs are enjoying these warm evenings.  I opened the window just so I could hear their serenade as I wrote this. Yes, it's spring.

Hurry Up and Wait

New Retail Space

Though our new retail space amazes me, I get a twinge every time I pass our old space with its sad remnants of all the years of flowering glory. My old established garden that went with it is also not getting as much eye traffic this year. It's just waiting up the hill...still looking beautiful.


Our new garden space is huge. We are planting a small area at a time. It reminds me of my hill garden 5 years ago. For new gardens to mature it just takes time. You can rush it some with bigger plants, but they can only be so big. Gardeners have to be patient to see the results of a mature garden. Luckily, patience is in a gardener's nature. We went to a good friend's garden this week to drop off a few things and tour her garden. I have seen it over the years, but this year it has all come together. In the dusk, it was glorious. It's a big garden; a joy to walk through and around, many vistas and levels. New plants go in all of the time, but because the garden is mature you don't notice that they're smaller. All it took was time.

Hibiscus

Lord knows the three years you have to wait for Baptisa to bloom from seed is forever, and the year for a hollyhock or foxglove is only slightly less hard to bear. We have so many different kinds of perennials and biennials in 3 ½" pots. At that size they are easy to put and establish well. You can have a great garden with interesting plants and it won't cost you an arm or even a leg: It just takes time. The funny thing is...the years fly by and the garden grows. Plants that have gotten too big (how did that happen?) are moved or divided or shared. One-year blends into the next and ta-da!, you have a mature garden.

Some great plants that will test your patience but are worth it:

• Alyssum 'Ball of Gold'
• Aquilegia Canadensis 'Nora Barlow', and from seed we collect ourselves a 'Morningside Deep Blue'
• Baptisia Australis
• Digitalis Mertonensis, p. 'Pam's choice', p. 'Snow Thimble', p. 'Apricot' (blooming in my garden for the first time after putting it in last year)
• Campanula Glomerata 'Surperba', poscharskyana, pers. 'Telham Beauty'
• Our native Hibiscus coccineus (above)
• All the poppies we sell in the small pots: 'Allegro', 'Brilliant', 'Royal Wedding,' 'Victoria Louise"

Time to get back to the greenhouse. Thanks for reading!

Planting the New Garden

One of the new greenhouses

We have a new planting project here at Morningside Farm: our new huge display bed. It stretches on forever around the new retail area. The back side of the garden is going to be a rain garden, which will help with erosion and runoff problems into our new pond and on down the pond chain to the river system and the Chesapeake Bay. I am savoring the idea of planting this garden. Our friends Jeff and Bill came and tilled the whole garden bed. It's beautiful just as it is, but of course an empty garden to a gardener is a battle cry. We will all work on it. I like to imagine it will be the wonder of the neighborhood, and it will certainly be the wonder of our nursery. As children at Christmas with sugarplums dancing in their heads, our heads are full of dancing perennials and annuals, maybe a few small trees and shrubs, a few pieces of iron work maybe, beautiful blooming containers over-spilling with summer lushness. I am going to do the containers now so they will be ready to add to the garden after mother's day.

Crab Apple

I was thinking of a seasonal Spring, Summer, and Fall garden starting with Spring at the big blue house and continuing around. The whole garden would be of interest all the time, with an emphasis on a particular season in a particular area. I haven't broached this with the men yet; I'm trying to get it straight in my own mind first. I plan on making a list of all sun blooming Spring perennials, a list of Summer perennials, and a list of late Summer/Fall perennials. I'll start with a list and veer off entirely by the end.

I would also like to have bays of annuals in the garden that stay the same every year, kind of like annual islands in the perennial bed, with their own area they can be planned as a garden within the garden every year. That's the end of my garden musings for now.

A small, funny string of tips about old-fashioned clothespins (the ones with a coil of wire between the pieces of wood):

• Use an indelible ball point pen to write on them, snap it onto the rim of a flower pot to identify the plant
• Put on opened packages of seeds to keep tightly closed or to separate different packages
• Flank a partly broken stem with pieces of wood and hold in place with the clothespin
• Hold the pages of a book open to free both hands
• Hold covers in place to shade a plant.
• The last part of the tip..."Keep in your basket of tools at all times"

That's it for me this week. I will let you know about our garden progress, or better yet, come visit.

The Freeze that Wasn't and Working in the Rain

Magnolias

Nature, gardening, and life are fickle. My own thoughts on the freeze that wasn't were dire. I took pictures of all the beautiful flowers that were going to be toast in the next few days with the thought that I would have before and after pictures for this blog. Well, that didn't work out; nature gave us a double scoop of chocolate-chocolate chip ice cream instead (you see how my mind works). No hard freeze, no dead blooms, no happy perennials cut down to the ground in a black mass. Nature winked at us, fooled us mere mortals, laughed at our panic. I think I did more damage trying to cover up one of my favorites (tree peonies) than the cold did, and I would have to say, nature is whatever it's going to be and that's something we, as gardeners, will always have to work around. 

One of the new greenhouses

On to something more predictable: how our new greenhouse space is coming. The second greenhouse ribs are up and one of the end walls is up and painted its robins egg blue. I love it, and soon it will be as comfortable to me as our old space was. It has been a flurry of excitement here at Morningside: people and friends coming and going, energy flowing from plants and people, soft music playing, the sound of the nail gun and skill saw. We are all helping each other with whatever we are doing. Each to our own tasks, which are all very different. Travis is finishing up the carpentry work and painting on the greenhouses, George and Billy are madly potting up the huge plugs George has grown, and me trying to pull a retail area together out of the chaos. We're moving the plants outside the greenhouses so we can pot up more plants, and I wonder when we will have time to plant up our new huge garden space that, at the moment, looks like a giant pile of dirt with a very pleasing sweep around the garden center area. When we get that planted it's going to be spectacular.

Daffodils

A few thoughts on your garden:

After the daffodils have bloomed don't tie the leaves up. Leave them to die back just as they are. It may not look as tidy, but it's so much better for the bulbs.

Remember on these rainy and post-rainy days: Don't work clay soil when it is wet, as clumps will form that can take a whole year to break down. If you decide to work in your garden anyway, stepping or kneeling on a board or stepping stone keeps the soil from becoming compacted. I try to stay out of the my garden for a few days after a rain except around the edges. Well folks that's it for now. I can hear little plant voices calling, "Mama come watch us grow...."

The First Day of Spring & the Small Details of Progress

New Retail Area Under Construction

I have come to realize that writing the Garden Blog is a lot like gardening: It has to be done every week. My son Travis gives me the nudge on the blog while weeds and bare spaces in my garden move me along there. We have so much to do this year that getting into the garden is a rare treat. Everyday I think I will get to dig up those wild onions in the peony border, grub out the running grass. A day later, the onions are taller the grass runs farther.Taking time to garden is a luxury. How can people think of it as work? I will admit, in the heat of summer when the weeds are having sway in the garden, it is a tiny bit difficult to muster up the energy to engage the enemy...but in the cool of a spring morning I still have delight in my gardening. The big garden has matured to the point where all kinds of birds and small creatures call it home. It affords them great cover from my cats, who garden with me but seem uninterested in the wildlife at that time of the morning. We're all happy just to be out in the garden in the cool morning air...but this is jumping ahead. This is spring and if I write really fast I may just get some of the dreaded onions out (my own pet peeve).

Peony

We have been having friends over for Sunday suppers the last few weeks. It is our social swan song for the season. Everyone wants to see the new pond and retail area. I get to see it with fresh eyes again. We were such innocents in regard to how we were going to set the whole thing up. Our way is to get it generally the way we want it and spend more time and energy fixing it later.  Right now, the new garden looks like a runway to me: too long and wide. We are going to change it, make it smaller with a curve around our new rain garden, (OK the rain garden we will develop as soon as we get our new main garden squared away and after we put up the next greenhouse to house the annuals for this year...are we really opening on April 7th?).

I thought I would pass along this recipe I found this week. It sounds really good and I get to use some of our fresh herbs (lucky me to have greenhouses full of them).

Strata with Goat Cheese, Tomatoes, and Herbs

• 1-tablespoon olive oil
• ½ pound stale country bread, sliced about ½-inch thick
• 2 large cloves garlic, 1 sliced in half, the other minced
• 1-pound fresh tomatoes (about 3 medium) sliced 1/3-inches thick
• 1/3 cup Gruyere cheese, grated
• 1/2 cup goat cheese, crumbled
• 1 tablespoon fresh rosemary, chopped
• 2 teaspoons fresh thyme
• 1-teaspoon kosher salt
• ½ teaspoon black pepper
• 4 large eggs
• 2 cups milk

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Oil a 2-quart baking or gratin dish, Rub the bread slices with garlic halves. Mix the minced garlic with the tomatoes, season with a pinch of salt and pepper, and set aside. Layer half the bread slices in the baking dish. Top with half the reserved tomatoes, half the cheeses, half the herbs and half the salt and pepper. Repeat the layers. Beat together the eggs and milk. Pour over the bread-tomato mixture. Place the dish on a baking sheet and bake for 40 or 50 minutes until puffed and browned. Serve hot or at room temperature.

That's all for this week! Time to get out in the garden and meet the first day of Spring!

In the Cold, Spring Heats Up

Sedum 'Autumn Fire'

Can you believe it? We have one of the new greenhouses up in the new retail area thanks to George, Travis, and our good friend and excellent helper Billy. I never believed it could happen so fast, but I look out our living room window, and there it is. A good thing too because we have run out of room in every greenhouse and need the new space for more plants that we are potting up everyday. Today Trav was working on herbs (thymes, loveage, garden sage, and many more) and I was potting up perennials (hypericum, chrysanthemum, sedum 'Autumn Fire'--at right). Everything is breaking dormancy and growing so fast. Now is the time when everyday is different in the greenhouse. Seedlings jump, cutting root so fast, it seems like the plants think spring is here, and I guess for us it is.

George and I are doing something we have not done in years, we are going to the Philadelphia Flower Show, and I can't wait. The theme this year is 'Legends of Ireland' and as someone who subconsciously always seems to make a garden that looks like it belongs somewhere on one of the British Isles, I will be in heaven. I expect to come back with a whole new outlook on Irish gardens. I will keep you posted; we now have lots of new gardens to work on, and I don't see why a part of one can't be a bit Irish.

I also wanted to say last week we got in a ton (for us) of terra cotta pots. Some we are going to paint, some we will lime wash, and some we will leave terra cotta. It's really beautiful stuff, big pots, medium pots, and small posts in lots of different shapes and sizes. Something for everyone.

Some of What's New at Morningside ...

Future retail area

While I was away visiting family in California, we started work on our new retail area. I say we, but it was actually a young man with a big machine. He came and changed the natural slope of our land into (what seems like to me) a very big, flat space where our new retail area will be. We also had him put in a real pond close to our rock-lined spring. The pond is filling directly from the spring, and with snow melt it is not taking the month the pond digger/land changer said it would take. In fact, it only taken about a week and a half so far. Now it is a small pond, but we are proud of it. It will be a beautiful addition to our display garden area.

On this new, graded area we will build two greenhouses and a much bigger retail area with plenty of room for parking; no more blind curve around a greenhouse. I have to say, I have no idea how all of this will happen by early April. We still have all of the seeding, potting up, and everything else we do every year to finish. It will look raw this year, but we hope that you can see the future in our new big display garden along with us. It looks huge at the moment (it is huge), but I bet we can plant it up very quickly.

Enchinacea

The greenhouses are also filling up. We will have all kinds of new Echinaceas, such as "Summer Sky," which is the first bicolor Echinacea. The huge 5-inch flowers are a light orange with a rose-colored halo and orange cone. It is prolific bloomer and highly fragrant. Another new one, "Harvest Moon (pictured left)," is a vigorous, fragrant earthy gold with a golden orange center cone. Some of our new Echinaceas are even fragrant! I can’t properly explain how show-stopping these new plants are. We will also have all of the great prairie Echinaceas such as "Magnus," with its large rose-pink petals and a coppery-brown cone, and "White Swan," with a white ray petal that flexes down away from the coppery-brown cone. I could go on and on...new retail area, lots of new plants, what could be better?

Pruning Artemesia

A few reminders before I head off to bed...now is the time to prune your buddleia, caryopteris, russian sage, and artemesia to within 6 inches of the ground. In late February, cut ornamental grasses to 6 inches also. Cut or mow (so much easier) liriope to 3 inches. Cut hydrangea arborescens to the ground and fertilize lightly. These hydrangeas, like Annabelle or Limelight (the ones with big white blooms in the summer), bloom on new wood. But be careful! Blue or pink hydrangeas (Macrophyllas) generally bloom on old wood and shouldn't be cutback until after they flower. Feed iris with bone meal and top with wood ashes. Circle herbs with lime, especially lavender. Okay, that’s it for now.