Container Herb Gardens from Greenleaf Nursery Company, NC

Rummaging around on the Facebook Page of Greenleaf NC I found some lovely Container Herb Gardens that they have made up. Find them in your favorite retail garden center. The one at left contains Flat Parsley, Chives and is called their "Mashed Potato Blend". 

Although I think outdoors-in-the-ground is best when growing herbs, not everyone has the luxury of a garden area. The majority of herbs need full sun and high light intensity, excellent drainage and a sweet soil on the alkaline side. Several herbs will fit quite nicely into the smallest scrap of ground. But if you wish to grow some fragrant and culinary herbs thrive in planter boxes or containers, keep in mind a few simple rules.

Herbs need excellent drainage in containers or in the ground, so for planters choose a potting mix labeled for cactus, or add sharp river sand or extra Perlite to the potting soil to allow water to drain quickly. Make sure plants are watered regularly – sparingly at first, then more thoroughly as the plants become established and fill the pots. It’s standard practice to water well so that the water comes through the drainage hole at the bottom, but afterward never let them sit in water; simply empty the saucers after a few minutes. The old fashioned tip of first adding an inch or two of pot shards or pebbles at the bottom of the pot is no longer approved, as research has shown it merely shortens the water column inside the container and keeps the soil soggier. Finally, individual pots can dry out quickly; larger containers that hold several favorite herbs at once is the way to go.

Because many of the fragrant and culinary herbs evolved in the Mediterranean or Near East, they prefer an alkaline soil, achieved by adding some pulverized lime to the potting mix before potting up. This is especially true if the soil-less potting mix has a peat moss base, which is naturally very acidic.

Finally, here’s hoping you have a south-facing deck or balcony. Full sun is best, and herbs become pale green, weak and spindly when someone attempts to grow them indoors. Even grown under fixtures having four, high wattage, fluorescent Grow-Lights, herbs grown indoors can’t compare with outdoor-grown ones.

Keep container grown herbs in a sheltered, sunny place, and if a hard freeze is expected, lug them indoors overnight. When harvesting, snip a leaf or two all the way to the base, rather than shearing the tops of several leaves. Add to Thanksgiving stuffing or salad for a taste of summertime. 

The container on the right (above) is called the "Turkey Herb Blend" containing Tri-colored Sage, Tuscan Blue Upright Rosemary and Creeping Thyme, recommended for a healthful main course, while the third photo bottom left is the "Stuffing Herb Blend" planted with Italian Parsely, Creeping Thyme and Sage, best used to season the stuffing for a memorable Thanksgiving menu. Next spring, remove the herbs from the container and plant in the garden for continued enjoyment. 

Photos courtesy of the Greenleaf Nursery Facebook Page.  http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000437466869

Top 10 Reasons to Plant Trees

An old recommendation that has always stuck with me says, "Plant acorns on 40 foot centers." This graphically contrasts the size of a small seedling with the depth and breadth of a mature oak. When a 

shade tree is planted, it is for future generations to enjoy.. Most people like trees and relate to them on a personal level, so here are some reasons to plant a tree this fall-- and when you think of some more, go 

ahead and add them in the comment section!

1. Trees increase property values by softening harsh outlines of buildings, screening unsightly views and providing brilliant fall color. Slow-growing, small ornamental trees are intrinsically valuable. Trees add beauty and grace to any community setting, making life more enjoyable, peaceful, relaxing. Trees offer a rich inheritance for future generations. 

2. Trees reduce air conditioning utility bills for cooling during summer heat an average of 33% percent  through their shade and respiration, providing natural "low-tech" cooling. This reduces the need to build  additional dams, power plants, and nuclear generators.  Deciduous trees provide passive solar  temperature regulation, providing shade in summer, but offering light during winter.  3. Tree shelters and windbreaks reduce heating bills in winter, increase snow entrapment, wind reduction  and wildlife habitat. Living snow fences hold snow away from roads, keeping roads open and reducing  road maintenance costs. Tree shelters for wildlife habitat and livestock reduce weight loss during cold  winter months and provide shade for moderating summer heat, along with significantly increasing crop yields  compared to fields with no windbreaks. Windbreaks create a more favorable micro-climate for cropland  by reducing wind and heat stress on the crop, while preventing topsoil loss and reducing soil moisture losses. 4. After leaves drop to the ground in autumn and are raked, they provide excellent mulch for flowerbeds and gardens, as well as exercise for people raking them. 5. Trees provide nutmeats (pecans, walnuts, hickory, hazelnuts), fruit (peach, apple, plum, persimmon), berries for jams and jellies (chokecherry, buffaloberry), and maple syrup, and pharmaceutical  products (for example, Taxol from Taxus or Yew trees in the Pacific NW has been successful in fighting breast, ovarian and lung cancer.  6. Trees help reduce stress in the workplace, increase the speed of recovery of hospital patients and instill community pride.   7. Forests provide summer and winter range for migratory birds.   8. Trees reduce soil erosion and water pollution, help recharge ground water and sustain streamflow. Forests  provide watersheds for lakes and ponds.

9. Fast growing trees provide fuelwood for stoves and fireplaces by establishing a continuous supply of  energy plantations, while managed forests provide pulpwood, lumber, plywood, veneer and other wood  products on a sustained yield basis.

10. Trees alleviate the “Greenhouse Effect” by absorbing carbon. A single tree absorbs about 13 pounds of CO2 per year, and one acre of new forest sequesters around  2.5 tons of carbon annually. Planting 100 million trees in the U.S. would reduce the amount of carbon by an estimated 18 million tons per year.  

So why wouldn't you pick out a tree and plant it this autumn? 

SOURCES: Kim Coder UGA Extension, Glenn Roloff USDA Forest Service;  http://www.treelink.org/

Quick Note: Growing Hot Peppers in the Kitchen Garden

Now that the season is drawing to a close, I've decided I love the look of red fruit pods on pepper plants in the kitchen garden. There’s a website called Ring of Fire that links 500 pepper-oriented websites together. http://www.ringoffire.net/ and you can find anything on peppers (and much you never thought of) there. 



As for me, I planted a couple of unlabeled hot pepper plants last spring and they did well in the high light intensity abundant in Atlanta. They went along fine until our heat wave (most of the summer) and the night temperatures got so high that they prevented fruit set, just as it did with their “cousins,” tomatoes. Then my uneven watering, exacerbated by our extended drought, caused misshapen peppers, and also made them hotter, but they still looked pretty and bright. 



Although I don’t ever plan to grow peppers indoors, Richard K posted some great stats that apply to outdoor growing that he ‘found in a book on Annums’. You can find them as a comment on this blog from last year:  http://www.thehotpepper.com/topic/10532-tips-for-growing-peppers-indoors/

No Fruit Set (assuming flowers haven’t dropped or been aborted):
Temperatures lower  than 60.8F or greater than 89.6F

Flower Drop:
Nighttime temperatures greater than 75.2F

Best Fruit Set:
Day and Night temperatures between  60.8F and 69.8F

Pollen Germination:
Optimal temps between 68F and 77F
Pollen is harmed at temperatures above 86F
Pollen is sterile if temps are above 86F 15 days prior to anthesis (before bloom) 

Lately I’ve take the first baby steps experimenting in the kitchen. I’ve added slivers of red pepper to the leftovers of homemade chicken soup, with favorable comments from 2/3 of my family.  I added a little more ground cayenne powder for additional zing in my cheese straw recipe. And I now order 2-pepper dishes at our favorite Thai restaurant; enough to make my eyes water and my nose run. Yum. 

Late Breaking Addition:
In India, chili-pepper stems are used as the source for yogurt cultures! Wow! 

Helter Skelter;Plant a Perennial Flower Bed with Random Leftovers

There is a hawk screaming in the distance as I smilingly contemplate the robust increase in the number of species I’ve added, just by installing a little flower bed. Basically it went from one species (overgrown Liriope) to twenty+ not counting the seeds scattered to grow at will. All but 3 plants were dug from my old garden and shoe-horned into a small flower bed about 6 feet deep by 18 feet long that slopes down across the front of the house, so the drainage is wonderful. 

As it rounds a corner, the flower bed narrows considerably, but still has room for some hot sun-loving perennials on the south side of the house. 

After the Liriope was dug and bushels of it were discarded, I amended the Georgia red clay with compost and Nature’s Helper so now it’s pretty easy to dig. This flower bed gets direct morning sun and no sun at all past noon, so it is ideal for almost every perennial and azaleas too. Hope there is enough sun for the Storybook Roses I’m trying out. 

The majority of plants were planted 12 days ago; not yet time to see what will make it and what will not. Since this is Zone 7 in Atlanta, there will be plenty of time for the transplants to root in the summer-warmed soil before cold weather and hard frosts arrive. 

Here is a list of the plants I’ve included, all of them odds and ends from moving except for purchase of one pot each of Parsley, Foxgloves and English Thyme. The list is arranged according to location, with tall, medium and short plants.

Background plants

George Tabor and a second Azalea (mystery)

Swamp Sunflowers

Gold Euonymous

Amsonia hubrichtii native bluestar flower,  2011 Perennial of the Year

Digitalis 'Excelsior Hybrids'

Middle Plants

3 Storybook Roses 'Little Women' pink

Helleborus x orientalis 'Deep Purple"

Shasta Daisies

Pink daisy Mums

Daylily 'Colonel Scarborough' early yellow

Lungwort, Pulmonaria longifolia

Lemon balm

Late yellow Mums

Foreground Plants

Creeping golden lemon thyme

Upright English thyme

Japanese Roof Iris, white

Japanese Roof Iris, lavender

Spearmint

Lamb’s Ears

Parsley

Seeds

Rudbeckia triloba

Ironweed

Zinnias

 iPhone photos by gardengeri

Can you see the tiny seedling parsley? I bought a pot of young parsley and separated them and planted each long tap root in moist soil, taking care to keep everything moist and shady. Transplanting parsley is a 50/50 proposition. <<>> Let me know how you "walk on the edge" in your garden.

Shopping for a Japanese Maple Tree in Glorious Fall Color

The free, 8-foot tall, 4-in caliper Japanese maple that my friend arranged to have transplanted to her  garden held on through a year of drought, but finally gave up the good fight during the brutal heat and drought of this recently past August/September.  So I was asked to come along to offer some advice as she set out to purchase a replacement.

She is an incredibly talented interior designer/decorator, an expert with color, scale, form, symmetry and all of the elements of design, and I was lucky to be on the receiving end of her expertise on the room arrangement at our home. Her attention-to-detail extends both inside and outside-- for example, although she calls it “pink”, her house is actually a rosy-terracotta brick that goes very nicely with the purple Loropetalum and other burgundy-leafed plants she has chosen. Her annuals are mainly pink flowered to dress up three beds around the front door.

 So tasked with the idea of finding the perfect Acer palmatum cultivar, first I suggested that we page through my book on Japanese Maples (J.D. Vertrees, second Edition), which helped her decide she did not want a red-leafed tree, nor a dissectum, and she wanted it upright rather than pendulous so she could plant underneath it. 

Then I suggested she accept a Coral Bark maple that I had growing in a huge tub on the patio as a gift, but she hesitated to take it, mainly because it was “already too big”. This narrowed down our search: we needed to look for a maple that reaches only 6 to 10 feet in height.

Next we set out for the nursery. She decided that the huge nursery with the big selection favored by commercial landscapers use was too far away after all, and so we settled for a nearby garden center. Most amateur gardeners look no further than the nearest nursery for their plants. These retailers offer a wide variety of sizes of the most popular plants, and the customer can pick exactly the specimen (s)he feels would look best on his/her property. And some of the nursery employees are knowledgeable about which plants do best in the local area. The main difficulty with local nurseries is often a lack of choice because they tend to stick to the tried-and-true, but that seemed OK for this trip.

After first looking at their huge, pricy maples we found the area with 3-, 5- and up to 15-gallon trees, and what do you know? She immediately chose a red, dissected-leaf, weeping variety known as Burgundy Lace because its leaves looked good. Then we almost settled for a Viridis, another cut-leaf, weeping variety but this time green.  We were two for two on the “unacceptable: weeping dissectum types.  

As we kept looking, my friend was surprised when I examined some root systems by pulling the trees out of their containers and rejecting several with circling brown roots.  I pointed out unnaturally bent trunks and crossing branches, and soon she began to see past the leaves to the overall form and we were on our way. I suggested we did not have to buy a tree right that minute, but could shop other garden centers for a different selection, but “plant lust” was heavy on her.   

Luckily we stumbled across several young Japanese maple trees with an upright habit, and two-toned leaves, smaller and more reasonably priced.  Happy to find some vigorous white roots on one particularly graceful specimen, the label said ‘Tiger Rose’; too new to be in the second edition. Described as pink leaves in spring and gracefully intermediate habit with upright branches and trailing twigs, it was beginning to look like we were close. 

I assured her that a little marginal leaf scorch on a container-grown tree wasn’t that unusual for mid- October, and instead we should look past the leaves to the structure of the limbs and the graceful shape of the tree. Plus the price was lower because it was a smaller tree. Such a deal, she was convinced! After adding some silvery and maroon Heucheras, broad-leaved Dusty Millers and vigorously growing Autumn Ferns, we loaded the plants into her SUV, where she will plant and water them to success.    

Last two photos 'Tiger Rose'

Top 10 Steps for Soil Amendments and Bed Prep

"Fall is for planting", and the best garden preparation known is to provide a deep, enriched root run for newly transplanted plants to get a good start.  

1. Rake off duff

Typically there is a layer of dried grass, leaves and sticks that is best raked off and composted

2. Take soil samples and do a soil test

Samples are small amounts of soil taken from several locations throughout the bed, then mixed together and tested for pH and nutrient levels. Try a kit or send to the cooperative extension service. 

3. Dig out dead plants, old roots, weeds, rocks, sticks and so forth. Cobalt blue bottles, maybe. Old or dead shrubs, roots, rocks, weeds and so forth are best removed from the planting bed

4. Turn soil over leaving big chunks

Your garden spade should break through compacted soil and turn big clods

5. Top dress with compost, Nature’s Helper, Mushroom Compost, Mr. Natural, finely ground pine bark, or dampened peat moss, plus gypsum or pulverized, dolomitic lime according if your soil test  feedback calls for it

You can’t go wrong with adding organic matter: clay soils are lightened while sandy soils hold more water and loams are enriched. Add 2 or 3 inches on top of the cleaned bed. Other possibilities include blood meal, cottonseed meal, triple superphosphate, symbiotic mychorriza, well-rotted manure, well-rotted woodchips and so forth

6. Fork organic material and amendments  into soil

My spading fork prevents me from lifting soil that is too heavy

7. Water in

If you have a few hours, water in the amendments and let everything settle

8. Rake smooth

A steel rake lends a calming influence on a prepared bed. The soil should now look just like a chocolate cake. Resist rolling in it.

9. Set out plants, then plant into prepared bed

Spread out roots of container-grown plants and plant level with the top of the soil or slightly higher

10. Mulch with organic mulch

I use pine straw or ground pine bark, but pecan hulls, salt hay, compost or whatever common mulching materials are available will help protect the bed and insulate the root systems. Water thoroughly once planted. 

Photo 2 shows a bed prepared between a house, a Nandina and a border of Liriope.and spread with Nature's Helper. 

Silver Sage, Salvia argentea in the Garden

I’ve been gardening in Atlanta for quite some time, carrying on a love affair with herbs and many folks know me as the herb lady. However my garden and plant interests are wide-ranging. Back around 1985 or -88 or so, I was a card-carrying member of the Royal Horticultural Society in Great Britain and therefore eligible for their seed exchange program. I poured over their list and carefully selected the limited number of seeds I was allowed to import. 

One of them was Silver Sage, Salvia argentea. None of my gardening circle of friends had ever heard of this plant, though it sounded lovely, like a lamb’s ears on steroids with big, wide, ribbed, wavy leaves frosted with long silver hairs and panicles of white Menthaceae-style flowers. Would it grow in Atlanta? It would certainly be exclusive!

Salvia argentea in flower, above. 

Later that winter my seed packets arrived in the mail and the Salvia argentea packet had five seeds in it. It was quite a production; I sowed them carefully, putting them under fluorescent grow-lights in my light garden, and 4 of them germinated! After potting up and hardening off  I shared one precious plant with my closest gardening buddy, and planted the remaining three in my Silver Garden, where they grew and thrived for three or four years. Short-lived like many salvia in Atlanta, they remained a beautiful memory. 

                                                                                                  Silver Sage top left, above

Fast forward twenty years, and perhaps you can imagine my astonishment when I saw a plant table in my local big box store loaded with millions of Silver Sage! And for $1.98 each! Although spring might be a better time to plant them here, it was amazing to see these formerly exclusive ta-ta plants available en masse, and a delight that everyone could plant these beautiful plants and enjoy them in their gardens.  

Garden Debut® speeds up this process, collapsing time as it helps its consortium of growers to get their superior and enhanced new plant hybrids and selections to the gardening public more quickly. The hummingbird on the Garden Debut® logo recently changed from hot pink to chartreuse, and look for black pots with white printing in your local garden centers this fall and next spring.  

gardengeri's photos: of her silver garden 20 years ago and of the table of Silver Sage yesterday.