Dirt

My blog has moved!

2006-06-23T15:19:00.000-07:00

And I hope that everyone will take a minute to update their bookmarks, because I am finally making the inevitable move from Blogger to TypePad. I'm also rolling all three of my blogs (Dirt, Humboldt Hens, and Worms of Endearment) into one, and in addition to writing about the garden, the chickens, and the worms, I'll also be writing about the book tour and lots of other topics related to my new book, Flower Confidential. My new blog home is here:

http://blog.amystewart.com/

And last, but certainly not least, you'll find me over at GardenRant a few times a week. We're having a lot of fun, so come join us.

Welcome, San Francisco Chronicle Readers!

2006-06-17T10:15:00.000-07:00

If you're coming here to check out the blogs you read about in the San Francisco Chronicle, welcome. Settle in; have a look around.

I'm blogging regularly on a new group blog, GardenRant. You can find out more about the inspiration for this blog here.

And if you're interested in starting a garden blog of your own, you might want to read Don't Get Dirt in the Keyboard, and Other Blogging Tips for Gardeners.

Enjoy!

In Praise of Small Magazines

2006-06-16T12:07:00.000-07:00

When I saw Sign of the Shovel's post about her husband's new book, I realized that it was about time for me to employ a little crass commercialism in support of my own spouse's venture.

Scott has been the half-owner and editor of Fine Books & Collections for four years now. He started the magazine for the same reason most people start a magazine: The magazine he wanted to read didn't exist, so he decided to create it himself. Believe it or not, FB&C is the only true, full-color, glossy magazine in the US devoted to the world of rare books. There's probably a dozen magazines out there about dogs, but if you're interested in old books, or just about anything unusual and interesting on paper, FB&C is it.

Having watched the running of a magazine, day in and day out, for four years now (Scott runs the entire editorial division out of our house, working with a network of freelancers and designers by e-mail and phone), I can tell you that it's a labor of love. I also know that most people don't realize how much one individual subscription (especially one that renews every year!) means to a small or medium-sized magazine. It's not just the money; it's also the thought that someone out there cares enough about the subject to want it delivered to their house every month or two. I remember FB&C's first direct mail campaign, and how excited I was to go to the post office and see that someone in Anchorage, Alaska or Petosky, Michigan had sent in a check just because we'd sent them a brochure bragging about a magazine that, at that point, didn't even exist yet.

If you are a book lover, or if you know a book lover, or if you just want to buy a subscription for your local library, FB&C will happily take your 25 bucks. (I can almost guarantee you that your online subscription will soon be followed by a cry of, "Hey, Amy! One of your blog readers just subscribed!")

And if FB&C isn't for you, I hope that you'll stop and think about the great little or not-so-little magazines that you pick up from time to time but don't subscribe to. I bet their subscriptions cost less than a pizza and are much better for you.

There's something wonderful about magazines: the feel of the paper, the photographs, the great writing, the ease with which you can read them in the bathtub or on the bus...not to mention the heart and soul behind them.

No matter how much time I spend online, I'll always be a magazine junkie. I long ago stopped counting the number of magazines coming into this house every month. A stack of yet-to-be-read magazines on the nightstand is a little luxury that I couldn't live without. What about you?

Garden Rant Takes Over the World

2006-06-12T20:57:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I started talking with Susan Harris of Takoma Gardener and Michele Owens of Sign of the Shovel about a modest little idea we had to stage a horticultural revolt. We were tired of what the mainstream gardening media has to offer--warmed-over garden tips, repurposed press releases about the ten thousandth new coleus on the market, dull little essays about the wonders of spring--and we were convinced that bloggers could overthrow the gardening establishment in the way that they are transforming coverage of politics and current affairs. (Witness the success of the YearlyKos convention. Not that I want to be the DailyKos of gardening. I'd much rather be the Gawker of gardening. But one thing at a time.)

Like all good revolutionaries, we began by writing a manifesto. You can read the whole thing on our site, but I'll touch on a few of my favorite points here:

--We are convinced that gardening MATTERS. Get us out of the Lifestyle section and as far away from home decorating as possible. We're talking about how we interact with the plant kingdom, not how to choose a throw pillow. This shit is important!

--We are flabbergasted at the idea of "no maintenance" gardens. If I have to read one more magazine article about Easy Container Gardens in 10 Minutes or Less, I may actually go bury MYSELF in the perennial border. Gardening is something you DO. It's not something you buy and arrange around the exterior of your home in between fluffing the aforementioned throw pillows.

--We are delighted by people with a passion for plants. Show some excitement! Have an opinion! Fall in love! Get mad! If you're bored, put your pen down and go outside. Just don't bore us, too.

Are you with me? All right, then. Follow me over to Garden Rant, where I'll be blogging a couple times a week. We've uploaded some of our previous posts from our own blogs to help set the tone, but it's all new stuff from here on. Some of my favorite new features include:

Ask Dr. Bleedingheart--horticultural advice for the lovelorn. Send in your melodramas today.
I Don't Have a Garden, But I Watch One On TV--reviews of garden television and Internet garden videos. (We'll cover podcasts and radio too, so if it's good, send it our way.)
Taking Your Gardening Dollar--product reviews, rip-offs, and vicarious horticultural shopping experiences.
You! We're looking for guest bloggers, so if you have something brilliant to say, we hope you'll consider saying it on Garden Rant first. Come rant with us!

Holy Bat Shit, Lady Hillingdon!

2006-06-11T18:14:00.000-07:00

Well folks, this is it. This is as good as it gets. The garden is at its absolute peak right now. There are some late summer salvias that are not in bloom yet, but apart from that, everything is out of control, including--in the background, against the fence--a yellow 'Lady Hillingdon' rose that has gone completely mad. She's normally a well-behaved, reserved old lady, but this year she just went wild. I attribute it to the bat guano pellets I fed her a few weeks ago.

I'm not much of a rose person, but 'Lady Hillingdon' was here when I moved in, and I'm learning how to get along with her. The canes are a beautiful burgundy, quite dramatic next to the creamy yellow blooms. Not much scent and they don't last long as a cut flower, but this is one of those lovely sprawly, shrubby roses that doesn't like to be cut back too much. Fortunately, that works out pretty well with my approach to pruning.

The Future of Heronswood

2006-06-11T11:27:00.000-07:00

Anne Raver, writing about Heronswood in the New York Times, has a bit more to say about the future of the gardens themselves.

"Mr. Ball said Heronswood's gardens-- 5 1/2 acres of the garden, as distinct from the business Burpee is moving, will not be depleted even as the best specimens are taken for propagation and testing. 'I would like to find some kind of buyer who would keep it open to the public,' Mr. Ball said. He pictures a 'high-end retirement community, with nice condos' built around the gardens on the 15-acre Heronswood property.

Mr. Hinkley agreed that the gardens should be preserved, but only if they have a purpose beyond nostalgia, such as serving as an educational resource. Otherwise, he said, 'I would much rather see the garden euthanized immediately than to see it decline over several years.' "

Agreed, Dan. High-end retirement community? Nice condos? I shudder to think what the landscaping contractor hired by the homeowners association would do to those gardens. If it must be sold and developed into condos, at least let the local plant geeks come and dig up the good stuff first.

Abruptly, an End Comes for a Garden Shangri-La - New York Times

The Opinionated Multitasker

2006-06-11T10:41:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the Houston Chronicle for choosing Dirt as its favorite opinionated garden blog, and to the Sacramento Bee for...uh...choosing Dirt as its favorite opinionated garden blog.

Green Space: Best Gardening Blogs (and what I've learned from them)

The SacBee says: "A fascinating and informative blog from Amy Stewart, a popular speaker and writer who lives in Eureka. You may have read or heard about her books, which include, "The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms" and "From the Ground Up: The Story of My First Garden." Both are exceptional books about gardening and nature.

Her blog is unabashedly opinionated and often on current events. Stewart, the consummate multitasker, also has posted links to her chicken blog and her worm blog."

Nursery Too Interesting, Catalog Too Smart, Must Be Closed Down

2006-06-01T10:30:00.000-07:00

If you haven't been to Heronswood Nursery in Kingston, WA, it's too damn late. The owner, Dan Hinkley, sold it to Burpee, and they have--yep, you guessed it--shut 'er down.

Brilliant plantsman Dan Hinkley, who continued to run the nursery after he sold it, was horrified to show up and learn that Burpee had shut it down with no notice. He told the Seattle Times: "The hardest thing for me to swallow right now is that this is what people feared would happen," he said. "It was my decision to sell to a large corporate nursery, and it was not a decision that was made lightly, but I made it, so ultimately I am the person to blame."

It's not clear what will happen next. There's talk of keeping the online business open, but relocating the plants to the East Coast. Burpee hopes to find a buyer who will appreciate, rather than pave over, the gorgeous display gardens filled with Hinkley's treasures from around the world. But given Burpee's matter-of-fact focus on profits, I wouldn't be surprised if paving over it turned out to be a fine option, too.

What galls me the most is Burpee's blatant East Coast-centric-ness about this deal. In a Kitsap Sun article, Burpee president George Ball bashes the plant selection for being too well-suited to the Pacific Northwest. "The vast collection of plants, while they were terrific for people in the Pacific Northwest, they weren't good for people in places like Iowa and Pennsylvania," said Ball.

Really? So, let me make sure I understand this. You buy a nursery located in Washington State that specializes in plants that do well on the West Coast, and then you're surprised that those plants won't grow in Pennsylvania.

He goes on to make this astonishing statement: "When we purchased this six years ago," he said, "we were anxious to make it a profitable company that would be fulfilling our ambition to serve a national audience of gardeners, which is predominantly on the East Coast."

Huh. A national audience...predominantly on the East Coast...Because California is...uh...the world's sixth largest economy, and the populations of California, Oregon, and Washington exceed those of New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire combined. Add to that our year-round growing climate, throw in--oh, I don't know--Canada--and I can see how you'd have a hard time selling us plants.

So instead, Ball is considering taking the plants "back to its Pennsylvania research and production facilities to work on adapting them to other climates less genial than the Pacific Northwest." Ah yes, just imagine the new, glorious, Burpeefied American landscape, populated with reliable year-round bloomers that are perfectly adapted to zones 1-11. I'll never again have the awful burden of traveling to another part of the country and coming across a plant I haven't seen before. Why, it's on page 11 of the Burpee catalog, and yes, it will do just fine in--where is that you live again? Well, no matter--it will grow there, too!

Ball goes on to take a more inclusive approach to insulting gardeners by insisting on dumbing down Hinkley's fine catalog. The Kitsap Sun reports that: "Both Hinkley and Ball indicated that there have been differences over Hersonswood's catalogue, revamped this year with only 250 plants offered and full of bright, colorful pictures like most standard offerings from giant retailers. Hinkley called it a dumbing down that talked down to Heronswood's core customer base. Ball said the old one read like a textbook."

That's right, folks. Burpee knows what you want. Bright, shiny catalog pages filled with ruby red tomatoes and happy little annuals that will grow in any climate. Good, because that's what you're getting.

I close with this sadly prophetic little snippet from Heronswood's February 2006 newsletter. If only George Ball would read his own textbook.

"We humans have an irresistible, sometimes inexplicable, compulsion to “enhance” whatever nature gives us, whether we’re breeding beefier livestock, more abundant crops, or larger flowers. In the garden, you need only survey the hybrid peonies, daylilies, and hostas available today—in a bewildering array of unlikely colors, outlandish sizes, and splashy patterns—to see how very different our altered ornamental plants can be from their wild ancestors. Of course, some of the more bizarre results of selective breeding also make it clear why many gardeners are eager to rediscover the simple elegance of original, unrefined species. "

Read on:

Seattle PI: World-famous Heronswood Nursery closes

Heronswood Nursery

More expletives from the blogosphere here, here, here, and here. Watch out, they're a little upset. Let Burpee know how you feel here.

Want to support Dan Hinkley in his new, post-nursery life? (He signed a non-compete clause, so there will be no new nursery for a few years.) Buy one of his books from a Pacific Northwest independent bookseller.

The Garden, Part Two

2006-05-31T12:35:00.000-07:00

The chickens are also making inroads into the side garden (and here's Bess in the path). I had intended for this to be an all-culinary garden, with artichokes, sage, apples, rosemary, edible flowers, other herbs, but inevitably, that definition got stretched, first to include other salvias that are related to culinary sage but not necessarily something you'd use to flavor your stuffing, and then to include anything that I felt like planting.

The best news about this garden is that the chickens have practically eliminated the snail population. Clematis, dahlias, and lilies have all sprung from the ground this spring after years of getting mowed down by snails.

Chicken-friendly plants

2006-05-30T19:12:00.000-07:00

Here's the back yard looking yummy, as it does this time of year. This is the north side of the house, which means that even though it's an open, unshaded space, the house tends to cast a long shadow most of the year. The back, around the chicken coop, is really the only place that gets full sun all day.

I'm moving plants around a lot to accommodate the chickens these days. I want low-growing plants so that I can look out the back window and see the chickens and the coop. There's no point growing food because the chickens would just eat it. So flowers it is, and creeping, crawling flowers work best because they're not bothered by the girls' scratching and digging. Hardy geraniums are doing well, as are yarrow and lady's mantle. Rose campion, calendula, cerinthe, borage, and love-in-a-mist are prolific self-sowers, so at least some of their seeds survive the scratching and pecking.

What else? A few low-growing salvia, some centranthus, maybe a few heurchera. Half is perpetually in damp shade (near the house), and half in full sun and whatever water I think to give it, which may not be much. It's kind of a jumble, but the chickens and I like it.

Cybergardening in the Sacramento Bee

2006-05-30T11:33:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the Sacramento Bee for this story on the digital gardening world. I'd like to second their nomination of Annie's Annuals as the best nursery website--it's useful as a reference source and as a place to find plants.

News - Dan Vierria: Online gardening is almost as good as the real thing - sacbee.com

Thanks for all your good garden blogging advice

2006-05-26T15:43:00.000-07:00

I updated the post (below), put a link on the sidebar, and I think it's done. Feel free to keep commenting, however.

Don't Get Dirt in the Keyboard, and Other Blogging Tips for Gardeners

2006-05-24T09:23:00.000-07:00

What is a blog?
A blog (short for "weblog") is a website that follows a very specific diary format, with the most recent post on top and everything else below it in chronological order. You don't need any special skills to make or post to a blog--it's as easy as writing an e-mail. People tend to blog on specific subjects, like politics or cooking or gardening, but some people just use a blog to keep an online diary of their everyday life.

How do I find gardening blogs?
Check out the list of links to gardening blogs on the right to get started. Most bloggers link to other blogs, so the easiest way to discover garden blogs is to read a few and follow the links. Garden Voices provides a good round-up of garden blogs, and you can find another great list here. You can also go to Technorati or Blogger Search to search for blogs that interest you.

Once you find garden blogs you like, you can subscribe to their syndication feeds and have them automatically downloaded to a reader, which may be easier than going from blog to blog every day. Here is some basic information on site feeds and readers to get you started.

Why keep a gardening blog?
Some people create a gardening blog as a way to keep track of what's going on in their garden. You can post photographs and plant lists, record your triumphs and failures, and look back over time to see what worked and what didn't.

Some people want to share their gardens with a few friends and family members (posting pictures online is a good alternative to e-mailing them out to everyone), or maybe even connect with other gardeners around the world.

Some people are looking for a way to reach a larger audience with their garden writing or photography. I probably fall into this group. I'm a garden writer, and my blog is an extension of the magazine and newspaper writing I do, and the books I write.

What makes a garden blog successful?
That depends on your definition of success. If you're just looking for a place to keep track of what's going on in your garden, all you have to do is post notes and pictures and you've succeeded! If you're trying to attract a readership, here are some ideas (and please check out the comments to this post for even more ideas):

Read other people's blogs and post comments. Blogging is an interactive sport.
Respond to what other people are writing about on their blogs (or in the news) by writing a post about it on your blog. Be sure to include a link to the blog or website that started it all. Blogging is also very democratic and generous; give credit to your sources!
Post as often as possible. The more you post, the more people will read your blog.
Keep your posts short. Break your prose up into short paragraphs.
Include lots of pictures--the best garden blogs are full of eye candy! And be sure to include the names of the plants whenever you can.
Tell us about your projects. Show us how you built your raised beds. Let us see how your tomato crop is coming along. Post a picture of the bug that's eating your echium and let us see if we can identify it. Show us what your garden looks like, month in and month out, even when the weather's awful and the flower beds look like crap. We've had enough of perfect magazine gardens--let's see some real gardens!
Include links. Make a blogroll of your fellow garden bloggers, link to your favorite seed catalogs, and point your readers to other interested resources on the web.
Even if you do figure out how to make your blog play music, please resist the urge. Most bloggers I've talked to hate going to a blog and having music blare out at them.
Loosen up! Blogging is, by nature, lively and opinionated. Informal. Off-the-cuff. Uncensored. Nobody wants to read a list of tips on how to prune roses. That information is available everywhere. Tell us something we don't already know! Don't get freaked out if someone disagrees with what you write--it's all in good fun. By all means, have a sense of humor!

How do I get started?

First, choose a blogging platform or service. I've had experience with Blogger, RadioUserLand, WordPress, MovableType, and TypePad. There are pros and cons to each, but here's my advice:

If you want a blog that's free and very easy to use, go with Blogger. It's owned by Google and those people know how to make user-friendly software. They also have great customer service--when I send off a question, I get a real answer, written by a real person, within 24 hours. You'll have a blog up and running in about five minutes, I swear. Many of the people who posted comments also liked WordPress, which is also free. I think it's a little complex for first-time users who don't want to learn any HTML or fancy tricks, but hey, why not try both?

A couple Blogger tips: First, as you're getting registered for the first time, don't spend a lot of time choosing a template. For some reason, there are many more template choices available once you're already up and running. So just pick any template to get started, then change it by clicking on the Template tab once you're set up. Also, take advantage of Google's other great blog tools that will make Blogger even easier to use, such as their Picasa photo software, their Blog This button on the Google Toolbar, and their tool for subscribing to other blogs, Google Reader. You don't have to have ads on your blog, but if you want to try to make a few bucks, Blogger includes a way to put Adsense ads on your site.

Downsides to Blogger: No way to categorize your posts by subject and have a list of those subjects in the sidebar. No easy way to build a list of links (sometimes called a Blogroll). Then again, what do you want for free? Try Blogrolling for your blogroll, and be sure to check out their BlogRollIt button for your toolbar. You'll need a little help with editing HTML to add something like Blogrolling to your blog, but it's pretty basic stuff.

If you want a blog with more flexibility, more tools, and more power, and you don't mind spending $5 per month, go with Typepad. It's still very easy to use, and you don't need to know any HTML, but you'll get categories, blogroll/lists, and other whiz-bang features that Blogger doesn't offer. They make it easy to set up your own domain name, and if you do want to tinker with the HTML a bit, just upgrade to the Pro version at $15/mo.

Once you're set up, trick out your browser toolbar with some of the buttons I mentioned above to make blogging quick and easy. Writing a blog post should not be a chore; it should be as quick and simple as writing an e-mail.

Try not to get dirt in the keyboard, and enjoy your cyber-botanic experience!

Earth Plugs

2006-05-21T21:41:00.000-07:00

So my mom gave me these sweet little Fiestaware-colored flower pots. Nice, huh? But what to do with them? They're almost too nice to go outside, and I don't really have any little houseplants I could put in them. What a dilemma!

Then I was at the nursery and I saw these Earth Plugs from Down to Earth. (Dude, if you have not been to their nursery in Eugene, you have totally got to go. Just trust me on this one.)

The idea with the Earth Plugs is that they are made of spongy composted tree bark and impregnated with beneficial microbes, so that you can just stick a cutting (or seed) in the little pre-cut hole and water. And they come in a nice ziploc bag, so if you don't need all 25 at once, you can save the rest for later.

So I thought--well, this is perfect! I've been wanting to take cuttings of some of my favorite salvias, but if I just have them sitting in pots outdoors, I'll forget to water them and they'll die. But if I were to cram, say, four of these plugs into each of my cute little pots, I could set them on my desk in front of a south-facing window, water them daily, obsess over them hourly, and maybe actually have some successful cuttings for once.

Brilliant! Thanks, Mom!

and for those of you keeping score, the salvia are: the fabulous hot pink/ magenta buchananii, the outrageous fuzzy red confertiflora, the 'Limelight' mexicana, and an officinalis--the regular culinary sage--with some kind of magical properties. This thing is easily four feet wide, blooms its ass off all summer, and just never wears out. I've never seen anything like it. I've bought more in the past, hoping to reproduce the look elsewhere in my garden, but no dice. It's just this one plant. So I'm making more.

You can get most of those salvias at Digging Dog, by the way. Go shopping! It's spring!

Sweet William, sweet Eleanor

2006-05-20T21:34:00.000-07:00

That's my hen Eleanor in the foreground, and the sweet William I planted last year in the background. Now, I know that this stuff is a biannual, but the plants I bought last year were so big that I thought surely they were in their second year and would bloom soon. That's reasonable, isn't it?

No, apparently not. I suspect that no matter how big or how mature a sweet William is when you buy it, it will not bloom until you have stood by, tapping your foot, looking at your watch, for a full year.

Why blog?

2006-05-19T09:52:00.000-07:00

A good discussion going on here and here about why people keep gardening blogs. It all got started when Gardening While Intoxicated (and by the way--love her, love her blog, love the whole intoxicated gardening concept) said that she finds that GardenWeb's reblog, Garden Voices, "contains a confusing and daunting amount of material, so I'm glad so many are able to sift through it. It’s mainly a lot of people showing off their gardens."

So the question is--what is a garden blog all about? Most people who have responded to these posts agree that what started out as a place to record the happenings in their garden evolved to something more--a bit of a showcase, a way to get to know other gardeners, a way to mouth off.

And the fact is that we gardeners do have quite a bit to say. Michael Pollan wrote this week on his NYT blog (I won't even bother going to get the link because you have to be a subscriber to read it, but if you're in TimesSelect you'll find it) that food writers aren't taken seriously. Well, he had a bit more to say about it than that, but you get the idea. If you write about food, he suggested, you're Not a Real Journalist.

To which I reply: HA! Are you kidding me? When Pollan moved from garden to food writing, he took a MAJOR step up the journalistic food chain. Look at any major newspaper in the US, and you'll see a big fat food section, a big fat travel section, and, in the case of the San Francisco Chronicle, a truly fine and fascinating WINE section once a week! These people are having fun, they're turning up interesting stories, they're spouting off opinions, they're getting outraged letters from readers, and they're doing serious journalism!

But where are the garden writers? We're in a little corner of what used to be called the women's section of the paper. Now it's the Home or Lifestyle section. Yep, that's us, right next to the advice columns and the little stories about how a scented candle can light up any room.

Sheesh. Get on a plane or put a bite of food in your mouth, and that's news. But go outside and put your hands in the dirt? Fluff.

Dude, Where's My Lawn?

2006-05-19T09:37:00.000-07:00

People, I said to rip our YOUR lawn, not your neighbor's lawn! Isn't anyone paying attention?

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > State -- Thief steal Adelanto homeowner's front yard:

"Witnesses told the homeowner they saw the thief taking the sod, plants and irrigation system to a residence on Tara Lane"

Certified Flowers

2006-05-18T09:39:00.000-07:00

Great posts in the comments section in response to my Times piece on socially and envirnmentally responsible flowers. I've heard from a few people in the industry who want me to remember that there are many farms doing the right thing, and many certification programs besides VeriFlora.

You'll see when my book comes out that I did write about farms that were doing a great job and certified by many international organizations. Many countries have their own eco-label program for flowers, and there are farms in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere that are certified through more than one of these programs.

However, from a US consumer's standpoint, it's not very helpful to know about, for instance, the FLP program, which certifies flowers sold in Germany. We can't ask for flowers with the FLP label here. There might be flowers sold in the US that were grown on an FLP-certified farm, but a consumer has no way of knowing that when he or she is buying flowers.

VeriFlora is attempting to actually label flowers sold in the US, regardless of where they were grown, so that consumers can make a choice about "eco-friendly" flowers. The next step is for consumers to actually ask for and buy those flowers. That's what I'm hoping to encourage.

I hope that, in the long run, all of these certification programs can come together and agree on one standard. It would be much easier for consumers if there was just one standard that worked worldwide, instead of this hodgepodge of different standards that farms must try to meet for different markets.

I think that many of us want to do the right thing. We want to buy dolphin-safe tuna and fair trade coffee. Just make it easy for us, and we'll do it.

Satellite Dishes as Garden Art

2006-05-17T09:18:00.000-07:00

American in Bloom is an organization dedicated to gardening up the American landscape; they hold contests and give awards to cities that have done the best job. One of their judges, Evelyn Alemanni, wrote in their newsletter about the innovative use of satellite dishes in the garden. They work as fountains, planters, and surprisingly elegant gazebo roofs. Beats the hell out of using them to watch TV, eh?

Even Crack Addicts Have Mothers, and Other Hazards of Urban Gardening

2006-05-15T12:30:00.000-07:00

According to this Washington Post report, the plant thieves are out in droves on Mother's Day, looking for that perfect potted azalea for Mom. Urban gardeners are warned to wait until after Mother's Day to festoon their porches with hanging plants, and to consider something thorny, like a rose.

Or how about a plant stake with a sign that reads, "Didn't your mother teach you not to steal?"

Last-Minute Gifts -- at a Steal

Today's New York Times

2006-05-14T12:29:00.000-07:00

Check out my op-ed piece in today's New York Times. You'll be hearing more from me in the months to come about my new book, Flower Confidential, but this will give you a preview.

The garden industry blogs!

2006-05-11T18:15:00.000-07:00

Greenhouse Grower magazine is now hosting several blogs about the horticulture industry. Right on, y'all! Welcome to the blogosphere! I'm thrilled to hear growers talking. Your customers are talking too--are you listening?

Now, a few quick blog tips:

1. Allow comments. Come on, let's chat! It's sort of a basic blog concept that people will read your posts and comment on them. Well, that's OK--I'll just comment here.

2. Use hyperlinks to link to the websites you talk about, rather than spelling out the address on screen. See that little button with a picture of the world and a chain link? That's so you can insert a hyperlink. Linking to other sites and blogs is also a really great part of blogging. Just a tip.

3. Site feeds, blogroll...oh, never mind. This is really a great start.

What you guys are doing right is that you are TALKING about your business in a really interesting and uncensored way! Now, that's what blogs are all about, baby! From the Greenhouse Grower blog on the annual Pack Trials, (that's where they see all the new plants of the season) we learn about:

Gardening for Dummies at Wal-Mart.

That's right. You can get your very own Dummy plants at America's favorite big box retailer.

There is so much wrong with this, starting with the notion that anybody would get excited about gardening by buying a plant designed for Dummies, but will I let this news discourage me? Will I sit in the corner and rock back and forth all day? No. I'll read bravely on. First we learn that:

"This Wal-Mart is just six months old, has a supermarket and a place for family haircuts, along with McDonald’s. But the difference is you can now order your burgers in the checkout line at Wal-Mart and walk over and pick them up."

Oh, that dark little quiet corner is looking so attractive right now, but no, I must keep going. We learn that " I was disappointed to see the products displayed like the rest of plants in the store...Marigolds were in the plastic terracotta colored ones and impatiens were in the gray ones for shade. The garden center was tidy and well-maintained...Product was fresh. But I still feel Wal-Mart missed an opportunity to really differentiate with this exclusive program."

Well, I don't think Wal-Mart's missing much. Y'all keep selling dummy plants and Big Macs, and I'll go crawl under my desk.

And this about a new electric blue viola: "I will confess that when I saw ‘Blueberry Thrill,’ I screamed like a groupie because I was so taken by surprise. Kind of silly, but this is how female consumers react to cool plants. "

Yeah, those silly female customers! You're all silly girls! Try to contain yourselves, will you?

And a big HIGH FIVE to Laurie Scullin's Rants & Raves. Hey, anybody who wants to rant and rave about the horticulture industry is all right by me. Scullin weighs in on the debate over whether the industry is growing or shrinking (see, we talk about whether gardening is on the decline as an activity, and the industry talks about whether it's shrinking as a business) and he points out that most data comes from surveys, which could have all kinds of flaws, but draws this conclusion:

"All this makes my head hurt - and while I remain skeptical that it's as gloomy as some pundits suggest - we are all faced with a market at least in flux - and at worst shrinking a bunch. SO - I think the answer to this ponder is:

1) Look again at your product offering - do you have products and services that fit for today - not 1980’s - but 2006.

2) CAN you turn a shifting population into cash? - What product/service do you have for aging boomers? How about the growing Hispanic market with their different color pallet and holidays? What about the Gen X and Y kids and their different lifestyle needs?

3) Are we selling plants or decorator products (running debate with many) - and if we are selling decorator products are we staying up on those trends? "

Ah, those Latinos and their pallets. That's OK--the spell-checker can't do everything.

Anyway, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE that growers and industry insiders are talking about this stuff online! And Laurie, if you want the opinion of this Gen-Xer--pleeeeze don't sell me a Decorator Product, and don't come near me with that Gardening for Dummies shit.

Sell me a plant, that fascinating, gorgeous, ever-changing, mysterious object of lust. Sell me dozens of them. I can't resist them. I'm ready to buy--what have you got for sale?

Gardening as a National Pasttime: The Kids Are All Right

2006-05-11T16:37:00.000-07:00

What does this Oriental poppy have to do with this week's debate over the life and death of gardening as our nation's favorite hobby?

Nothing. But it's pretty, and it's blooming in my garden right now.

Great comments from everybody on this issue. Two things worth discussing in more detail:

1. Do we need to undertake some kind of national campaign to get kids more interested in gardening? (This is where we haul out all the standard advice about planting a little garden in the schoolyard and making it part of their life science lessons, and also about planting radish seeds because at least they'll sprout quickly and keep the children interested, and don't forget about the trellis covered in bean vines that the little darlings can hide inside.)

To all that, I say: No. Forget it. Who cares? If a kid wants to play in the garden or plant a flower or dig a hole, she will. Gardening is, as many people pointed out in the comments, a sport for the settled and the patient. You need a little land of your own, and you also need to be able to think more than five minutes into the future. I didn't have either of those things until I was about 25. Some people don't get there until they're 35. So what?

2. If fewer people are gardening, is their housing situation to blame? The thinking goes that these non-gardeners either don't have a place with a yard, or if they do, it has been planted with that abomination known as a contractor's garden. Pile on the fill dirt, toss some Osmocote in a hole, plant a spindly little flowering cherry tree in the ground, stake it to within an inch of its life, and lay some sod around it. Then the homeowners association comes along and regulates it. Want to condemn some pansies to death by planting them in the terrible soil around that sapling? Not if it doesn't match the neighborhood color scheme, buddy.

I agree that brand new, plastic, planned communities with gardens planted by contractors and homeowners associations to regulate your every dig are horrible. I wish I could just say, "Well, a real gardener wouldn't live in one of those places. He would simply find someplace else to live, someplace more conducive to gardening." But we all know how impossible that can be, especially with the price of housing in hot markets like California.

So what do I think should be done? Well, nothing. I don't think that gardening is on the decline, and I'm not sure that fixing the problem would be top on my list of national priorities anyway. I would, however, like to propose a Horticultural Freedom Act that would prohibit any restrictions on what people can grow in their own gardens. Homeowners associations, go back to fighting over where people can park their cars or when they can fly a flag in front of their house. Leave us gardeners alone. Harumph.

More about the decline of gardening

2006-05-08T08:18:00.000-07:00

Oh, for crying out loud. Rocky Mountain News is on about it too. This story is also filled with vague, unsubstantiated claims.

It begins, believe it or not, with this earth-shattering observation: "Once upon a time, people worked in their gardens and yards..." and continues, "Unfortunately, the act of garden piddling is losing ground, so to speak, to our busier lifestyles..." without citing so much as a survey of a handful of first-name-only sources as proof. ("Jane, an accountant, said...")

The story goes on to claim that, "Current trends indicate" that we don't have time to garden anymore, and that "Specifically, careers, children, the Internet and a new generation spending less time outdoors than ever before are cited as the main reasons. "

Cited by whom? We'll never know. Because nothing to do with gardening is ever considered real news, it appears that no real editor took a look at this story before it ran. If they had, surely they would have required--what? Data? Sources? A point?

The story moves breathlessly onto a discussion of the "trends" brought about by this unheralded demographic shift. In just a few short paragraphs, the author manages to drag out every tired garden cliche I'd like to never hear about again, including:

Puchased gardens
Hired labor (this is often called 'do-it-for-me' as opposed to 'do-it-yourself')
Outdoor rooms, including kitchens, fire pits, seating areas and water features
Privacy
Instant gratification
Goof-proof plants
High impact
Low maintenance
Interesting foliage, flowers and color

and ends with this stunner: "All said, the drive for more bulletproof plants with a specific purpose benefits all of us, no matter what type of gardener. "

OK! Let me make sure I've got this.

1. People aren't gardening anymore

2. The result has been an alarming increase in the employment of professional gardeners, the purchase of "outdoor room"furniture and equipment, and a whole host of new plants bred to meet the demands of the market.

Yep, folks, it sounds like we've got a crisis on our hands.

Rocky Mountain News: Home & garden

Reports of Gardening's Death Greatly Exaggerated

2006-05-07T11:39:00.000-07:00

Nothing irritates me more than these stories about how gardening as a leisure activity is on its way out. In this week's San Francisco Chronicle, John Hershey writes:

"Are you aware of the impending demographic crisis facing our country? ...In a recent poll, the number of Americans who list gardening as one of their favorite leisure activities plunged from 15 percent in 1995 to 6 percent. "

This leads to all sorts of hand-wringing over the cause of this terrible decline and what on earth we might do about it. Hershey's not the only one talking about this; the gardening industry overall is quite worked up about it, with frequent articles in trade magazines agonizing over the problem. (Meanwhile, the American Nursery and Landscape Association reports on USDA statistics that show that sales of plants have grown steadily over the last two decades and are increasing by $500 million per year.)

But first, let's look at the poll numbers. Although Hershey does not cite the poll, I assume he is talking about the Harris Poll, which surveys Americans about their leisure activities once a year or so. The most recent data available comes from 2004, and it does point out that only 6% of Americans rank gardening as one of their top two or three pasttimes. But this is not a frightening plunge from 15% ten years ago, as Hershey reports. In fact, in 1995 only 9% of Americans ranked gardening in their top two or three activities, and then that number rose to 15% in 1999 before beginning to drop.

Hershey suggests several reasons for this decline, and a careful look at the numbers disproves all of them.

1. "People have less free time." Nope. According to the poll, Americans worked 51 hours a week in 1996, and 50 hours a week now.

2. "Fresh vegetables are now widely available in supermarkets." Huh? So in 1999, when 15% of Americans chose gardening as one of their favorite activities, they did so because they couldn't get fresh vegetables at the supermarket? Ah yes, the poor dirt farmers of 1999, having to grub for cabbages and carrots in their backyards.

3. And here he warms up to his real point: "The aging of the gardening population. As inconceivable as it sounds, it is possible some young people may actually think gardening is not cool." Again--the gardening population aged so much in five years that they are dropping like flies and no one is replacing them? Really? Let's remember that the oldest Baby Boomers are just turning 60 this year. I don't know about y'all, but my over-sixty mom is doing more gardening than I am right now. If anything, I'd expect to see an increase in gardening as Baby Boomers slip the bonds of their cubicles.

So what really explains the decrease in the percentage of Americans who list gardening as one of their favorite activites? (and remember, this does not mean that there is less gardening going on. It just means that, when asked, and without being provided a stock list of answers to choose from, only six percent thought to mention gardening.)

Well, there are three activities on the list that have jumped several percentage points since the poll began in 1995. Reading is up 7 percentage points. Spending time with family and kids is up 8 percentge points. And computer activities are up 5 points.

More to the point, however, is the fact that many activities are less popular than gardening, including:

Travel--4%

Golf--4%

Cooking--2% (Eating out also scores 2%)

Animals/pets/dogs--1%

But somehow, you don't see the travel, golf, cooking, or pet industries wringing their hands over the paltry two or four percent of Americans who would choose these activities over all others. In fact, I see vibrant, exciting, well-written and enthusiastically read sections in every major American newspaper devoted to travel and cooking. Marley & Me, a book about a man and his dog, remains, inexplicably, at the top of bestseller lists nationwide, and don't get me started on the number of magazines devoted to dogs (there are at least two devoted just to Manhattan dogs) and the number of elegant little pet stores and doggy bakeries springing up around the country.

As for golf? Well, those people seem to be doing just fine.

(Oh, and sex didn't even make the list, but the pornography industry seems to be getting by somehow. Perhaps those numbers are included in the "spending time with family" or "computer activities" categories. Drinking also didn't make the list, although I'd take a dry martini over "TV Watching" any day. In spite of the apparent lack of interest in drinking as a leisure activity, bars all over the country are not, in fact, dropping like flies.)

I didn't even get around to my main gripe about this story, which is the silly notion that "we" (whoever "we" are) need to Take Action to Get Our Youth Intersted in Gardening. More on that tomorrow.

Meanwhile, what are your two or three favorite leisure activies? Mine, in no particular order:

Gardening (which includes spending time with chickens)
Travel
Too close to call: Sex; drinking very cold cocktails with interesting people in dimly-lit bars; spending time in bookstores; art (viewing, buying, making); being very angry at the Bush administration; and the requisite books and films, of course.

Word to the young: Gardening is wicked enjoyable and way cool / Root cause of pastime's decline? Kids are just not interested