Author: Henry Homeyer

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The spring flower shows are always a contrast to the cold, icy days of winter. Bright flowers, garden paraphernalia and numerous workshops make these events fun, for both beginner and expert. Here are this year’s offerings.

The first show of the season is a specialty show: orchids. The New Hampshire Orchid Society is holding its annual get-together Friday, Feb. 10, to Sunday, Feb. 12, at the Courtyard Marriott in Nashua. This is the show for orchid lovers. There will be vendors of orchids from Ecuador, Taiwan and the U.S. Members of the Society will bring their orchids to compete and to strut their stuff. Admission is just $10, or $8 for seniors.

Next up is the Connecticut Flower and Garden Show Feb. 23 to Feb. 26. This is a mammoth show with more than 3 acres of displays. As always, it is being held at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford, Connecticut. Tickets are $20 at the door, or $17 in advance. Kids 5 to 12 are $5.

One of the greatest things about this show is the educational seminars. Here are a few workshops that interest me: “Good Bug, Bad Bug, Benign Bug.” This is great for anyone who tends to squish any bug in the garden even though most are not a problem. I assume there will be slides of insects we should recognize but probably don’t. Then there is one on organic lawn care, and another called “Shady Characters.” I know garden writer Ellen Ecker Ogden of Vermont will do a nice slide presentation and talk about kitchen garden design and how to make your veggies look artful. She always does.

One of my favorite shows is always the Vermont Flower Show. It will take place this year March 3 to March 5 at the Champlain Valley Expo Center in Essex Junction, Vermont. The theme this year is “Out of Hibernation! Spring Comes to the 100-Acre Wood,”a tribute to Winnie-the-Pooh.

The main garden display is always a collaborative effort by members of the Vermont Nursery and Landscape Association. For three and a half days members of VNLA will work together to create a 15,000-square-foot display using their own and donated materials. Other shows tend to have displays by professionals that are competing with each other, but not in Vermont — they work together.

There will be more than 100 vendors and 35 workshops to attend over the three days of the event. In the past I have purchased seeds, seed potatoes, bulbs, books and garden tools. Tickets are $25, or $20 for seniors. Kids are $7.

The Vermont show is a child-friendly event with a craft room open all day. Go online to see the schedule of events for kids — there will be a magician, marionettes and music. Be sure to attend this year — it only occurs every other year.

A bit farther afield there is the Philadelphia Flower Show. Last year they held it outdoors in May due to Covid concerns, but this year they are back inside the Pennsylvania Convention Center in downtown Philly March 4 to March 12. According to their publicity, “The PHS Philadelphia Flower Show is both the nation’s largest and the world’s longest-running horticultural event, featuring stunning displays by premier floral and landscape designers from around the globe. Started in 1829 by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, the Show introduces diverse and sustainable plant varieties and garden and design concepts. In addition to acres of garden displays, the Flower Show hosts esteemed competitions in horticulture and artistic floral arranging, gardening presentations and demonstrations, and special events.”

I’ve been to the Philly show a couple of times and I am always amazed by the sheer size and diversity of the displays, vendors and workshops. It is best to go mid-week when crowds are smaller, and take two days, if you can, to see it all. Tickets are $43.50 for adults and $20 for kids.

A show I have yet to attend is the Capital Region Flower and Garden Show in Troy, New York, which will be held again this year at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy from March 24 to March 26. According to their website, there will be 160 vendors and exhibitors and eight to 10 workshops each day.

Then in May there is the New Hampshire Farm, Garden and Forest Expo being held this year at the Deerfield Fairgrounds on May 5 and May 6. It is now in its 40th year and is the least commercial of all the shows. It is focused on sharing information.

Finally May 23 to May 27 there is the Chelsea Flower Show of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) in London, England. I’ve been, and it was well worth the trip. It’s held outdoors and is truly wonderful.

If you plan to go to Chelsea, join the RHS to get better access times and pricing. Members get a discount of over $10 per day, but prices still range from $89 to $46 depending on the day of the week. British women tend to dress up for this show and wear big colorful hats. The first two days are for members only, so it should be a bit less crowded.

The spring flower shows are fun — and we deserve that after a long New England winter.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Look for old favorites and new varieties

We gardeners love our home-grown vegetables. As John Denver sang long ago, “Only two things that money can’t buy and that’s true love and homegrown tomatoes.” And why do they taste so good? We can grow tomatoes that don’t have to conform to commercial requirements of size, shape, color and transportability. Our soils generally are rich in compost or manure and host a wide range of minerals and microorganisms that enhance the flavors of our vegetables. And of course we eat them fresh from the garden.

We can taste five flavors: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. These flavors were important to our evolution as they told early humans what was safe to eat and what to avoid. The fifth flavor was not named until the last century: Umami signals available protein in meat, eggs, milk and beans. It is not as easily described or identified as the other four, but it is sometimes described as the flavor of contentment.

So how can we recognize the complex flavors of a good stew, and aged cheese or a bowl of exquisite ice cream? Our noses can recognize many thousands of distinct scents, and our noses and tongues work together to create tastes. Good chefs recognize this, and many farmers do, too. I recently read a book that contains interviews with fine organic farmers who treasure their soil and what it imparts to the scents and flavors of the food they grow.

That book, by Michael Ableman, is Fields of Plenty: A Farmer’s Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It. Ableman, an experienced author and organic farmer in British Columbia, spent three months traveling around the States in a 15-year-old VW van. He went with his 23-year-old son back in 2004. They camped out, ate local food and met with organic farmers, some of whom were growing food for the best restaurants in America.

There is much to love about this book: Ableman is a skilled writer and storyteller, he is a talented photographer, and he is adventurous and inquisitive. Not only that, he included recipes from many of the farmers, and they all sound delicious — and mostly vegetarian.

Each of these farmers he wrote about had a unique approach to farming. One let weeds grow rampant. Another had fields that were weed-free and managed with “precision, control, formal science and discovery.” But all ate their own food, fresh from the field — or in the field. And each interview gave me something to think about, and perhaps to apply to my garden.

One of the most startling interviews was with Bob Cannard in Sonoma, California. Raised on a farm, Bob went to agriculture school but dropped out and started his own farm. When starting out, Bob grappled with this question: Why are natural places naturally healthy, while the fields and orchards of commercial agriculture are a continual battleground with weeds, insects and diseases?

His approach to farming was to try to mimic nature — weeds and all. He believed that plants that struggle to survive would develop more complex flavors — a belief later adopted by some wine makers. He believed that a monoculture — acres of the same crop — encouraged insect pests to arrive and necessitate insecticides. He succeeded as a farmer, selling vegetables to Chez Panisse and other high-end restaurants in San Francisco.

I was fascinated to read the section on Strafford Organic Creamery in Vermont. Earl Ransom has a small herd of Guernsey cows and bottles their milk in glass bottles and makes fabulous ice cream, which I know and love. Ransom believes that he gets wonderful flavors by letting his cows graze in pastures with a variety of grasses, wildflowers and weeds. Diversity in the field creates better milk, and the fat in milk absorbs flavor.

The book provides the names of many varieties of vegetables that are exceptional. Organic farmers Gene and Eileen Thiel of Joseph, Oregon, specialized in potatoes and particularly like LaRatte, Yagana and Sante. Sante, he said, is like a Yukon Gold, but bigger. Yukon Gold also got high marks, as did Ranger Russets and Yellow Finn. They avoid losing his crop to blights, in part, by growing lots of different kinds of potatoes — as did the Incas, where potatoes came from. Of course there is no guarantee that a potato that does well in Oregon will do well for you.

Ableman, a farmer for decades, mentions some of his own favorite vegetable varieties. For sweet peppers he likes Ariane, Red Lipstick (I want to grow it, if just for that name) and Corno di Toro. Then there is the Charentais melon, about which he waxes poetic.

Of beans, varieties mentioned as excellent include Valentine and Sophia flageolet shell beans, Maine Yellow Eye, Vermont Cranberry and Red Streaked Borlotto. According to the book, thin-skinned dry beans are easier on the digestive system: “the skins harbor the chemistry that causes digestive problems.”

It’s time for all of us to be studying seed catalogs and seed websites to pick the vegetables we’ll grow this year. I’ll be referring to Ableman’s book for new varieties, but also going back to my old favorites.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Use winter to make your plans

It’s gray and chilly outside, but I have a fire in the new woodstove that warms the house and pleases me as I look through its glass window. I’ve been in the same house since 1970, so I’ve had plenty of time to plan and execute projects. I’d like to share with you some of my memories of those efforts in hopes that some of you will be inspired to take on similar projects of your own.

The biggest projects I did were in the 1980s after returning from my time with the Peace Corps in Africa. My house came with just an acre when I bought it, but I had been able to buy another acre or two while away, and I wanted to utilize it well for gardens. My home was built as a butter factory in 1888 on a hillside. The land dropped off sharply to a field alongside a little stream and some woods.

My first project was to terrace off the hillside behind the house and make a gently sloping access for wheelbarrows, people and dogs to the field where I planned to grow vegetables and flowers. I wanted to terrace off part of the hillside so that I could have drier soil for growing fruit trees — fruit trees hate wet feet!

I was 36 years old when I returned from Africa and had plenty of energy but limited cash reserves, so I did almost all the work myself. I found a local fellow who sold me 13 dump truck loads of topsoil. He looked at the site and told me he couldn’t drive to the far end of the potential terrace with soil, so he dumped it all in one place and I had to move it with a wheelbarrow! The area for fruit trees was 10 to 20 feet wide and 80 feet long, but that did not daunt me at all.

After creating a nice flat place for apple trees and a gentle road 10 feet wide built to the lower field, I constructed an 80-foot-long stone retaining wall. I had plenty of stones on the property so I went about harvesting them using a borrowed “stone boat.” It was a wooden sled on runners about 3 feet wide and 6 feet long.

I had a chain attached to the front runners of the stone boat so I could pull it with my riding lawn mower (I’ve never thought I needed a tractor). I rolled or flipped big stones end to end until I got them out of the woods to the stone boat and dragged them away. A neighbor also let me have some large rounded stones from a fallen-down stone wall.

I built the wall before the days of the internet and endless YouTube videos, so I asked friends what to do. Drainage is important, they all said: dig out below the site for the wall and put small stones there and behind the wall. Unfortunately, instead of buying crushed stone, I bought pea stone — small round pebbles. Big mistake. Round stones act a bit like ball bearings, allowing stones to move and tumble as the winter frost lifts them. Over the years I have had to repair and rebuild the wall many times. But it still pleases me even though it is not a perfect wall.

The back field had grown up in willows, alders and brambles over the years I was away. I used a brush hook, a simple hand tool with a curved sharp blade, to cut them down. Then, with a cheap used riding lawn mower, I mowed the land to keep things from growing back, and I dug out roots where I could.

The next year I had a farmer with a moldboard plow on his tractor come and plow the area I wanted for a large vegetable garden. This type of plow digs up the soil about 8 inches deep and flips it over, burying all the grasses and weeds. That mostly killed them, and allowed me to start growing vegetables.

I also bought several truckloads of aged manure from a farmer and worked it into the soil with an old potato hoe — a five-tined tool like a rake, but with 2-inch spaces between the 8-inch teeth. Each year for a decade, at least, I worked in a truckload of old manure, increasing soil fertility and improving tilth.

I like having stonework, arbors and sculpture in the garden. Over the years I’ve made plenty of bentwood arbors for the entrance to the vegetable garden. Since neither of the “rot-resistant” trees (cedar and locust) grows here, I used maple saplings that were plentiful but only lasted three or four years. I placed them 4 feet apart and bent the tops together over the walkway, and wired them together. I wired on one-inch branches to make places for decoration and for vines to grab onto.

Later, I decided to use cedar fence posts to make garden structures. Cedar posts are available locally and last for many years. I have one 10-foot-diameter hexagon that I built to support grapes and wisteria vines that only now, after more than 20 years, is falling apart. I plan to extract the vines from the structure this summer and rebuild the whole thing.

Big projects are fun to take on, but at age 76 I am not looking for more of them. I plan to build some more raised beds for vegetables this year — they are great as one need not bend over so far to plant, weed and harvest. I also find that they have fewer weeds and grasses than in-ground beds, where many weeds just creep into the beds from adjacent areas. Even an 8-inch-tall wood bed will prevent that from happening.

I don’t see myself ever giving up on gardening so long as I can still get around. Yes, I may eliminate some high-maintenance plants and substitute shrubs, perhaps. But I started young and hope to garden till the day I die. Winter is the time to plan, so think of your own projects now, too, and tell me what they are if you wish. I’m always interested.

Featured photo: This vine structure is now old and falling down, ready for replacement. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Whatever happens, keep planting and learning

At the end of the year I always like to take a little time to reflect on what worked well in the garden — and what didn’t. This year I also called some gardening friends — some experienced, some less so — to ask what they had learned.

I’ll go first. In 2021 I planted some bare-root oaks I bought from the State of New Hampshire and planted them for a client in an open meadow in what had previously been a lawn. Most did well last year and really took off this year. Based on that success, I planted even more this year in part because I could get unusual trees not available locally — northern pecan, hardy persimmon, pawpaw and more. We’ll see how they do next year.

Bare-root trees are usually the thickness of a pencil and have a foot or so of root with 18 to 24 inches of bare trunk. Although I found a grower in Vermont willing to sell them to me, most growers sell them to nurseries that pot them up and sell them in a year or two. But if you go online you can find growers who will ship bare-root trees and shrubs in the spring. They are easy to ship — no soil is included — and are less expensive than trees that have been tended and watered for a couple of years.

The downside is that bare root trees are generally only sold when dormant, and need to be planted soon after arrival. Some growers keep big coolers full of bare-root material, but you still need to get them in the ground soon after you get them. Look for them now and order what you want for spring delivery.

A friend bought a house in southern New Hampshire and had her first vegetable garden this year. She was surprised and delighted that there was no blight on her tomatoes. This did not surprise me at all. The fungus that blights so many tomatoes lives in the soil, and in a new location it rarely shows up until Year 2.

She also reported that some of her new raised beds were placed on ground so hard that she couldn’t even get a shovel in it. The wood beds were 8 inches tall but didn’t drain well, and none of her root crops did well. In the spring she is going to dig out the soil, remove the beds, and put 2 inches of coarse sand on the ground. Then she will replace the wood-sided beds and soil, and hope for the best. I predict that will solve the problem, particularly if she adds lots of compost to the soil in the beds.

Another friend was reminded this year that if a perennial is not “happy” where it is planted, you should move it! She said she had divided some phlox and, lacking a good spot for it all, put some in a place that was too shady for it. So she dug it up and moved it to a better place late in the season. Almost anything can be moved; just do it on a cool cloudy or rainy day. Even peonies can be moved if you are careful.

Another friend said that he learned to use hydrogen peroxide as a preventive for fungus on grapes. He bought some industrial-strength peroxide (30 percent concentration) and diluted it (10 parts water to one part peroxide). He then filled his big sprayer to apply it. He sprayed after pollination but before the grapes had appeared. Unlike chemical sprays, he says, it just breaks down to water and oxygen.

Another friend moved to Vermont from New York and has been working to maintain and personalize the large flower gardens that came with the house. She has learned to focus on one area at a time. She also said she has learned that it is important to act on your own ideas, even if you have inherited wonderful gardens. I agree. For example I learned that I love flowers called burnets (Sanguisorba spp.) and I collect them.

Burnets bloom in mid to late summer and come in size from miniature (6 inches tall) to huge (6 feet tall) and do best in sun with moist soil. Each year I add a few. My most recent addition is a S. hakusanensis called Lilac squirrel. I think of it as “the pink squirrel” as its blossoms are fuzzy and much like a squirrel’s tail, though much smaller. Mine are pink, not lilac in color. Not common in most garden centers, it is available from Digging Dog Nursery in California.

So yes, we all learn new techniques, try new plants and do our best to be good gardeners. All my best to you for the year ahead.

Featured photo: ‘Lilac Squirrel’ Sanguisorba blossoms are delightful to touch and see. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Put on a hoodie and shake off the snow

We recently got hit by a big winter storm that dropped at least 15 inches of heavy, wet snow. It clung to branches, breaking some and bending others to near their breaking points. If you suffer the same sometime this winter, here are some things you might consider to help your woody plants.

First, the best thing to do is be proactive. Even before the storm had finished I went outside and started shaking branches to get snow off them. Wear a hoodie! Snow can go right down your neck if you don’t. For shrubs and small trees, you can shake the central stem, and it will clear the snow from the entire plant. For larger trees, you will need to shake individual branches.

A good tool for clearing snow is a bamboo pole, the longer and thicker the better. Some hardware stores and feed-and-grain stores will have them. I used one to knock snow off branches I couldn’t reach.

So what can you do to repair cracked and broken branches? Generally, nothing. Take a sharp saw or loppers and remove the branch back to its point of origin — the main trunk or a large branch. But don’t cut flush to the trunk if you can avoid it. And never leave a stub as it will have to rot back to the branch collar to heal.

The tree heals itself at what is called the branch collar. The branch collar is a swollen area at the base of each branch. If you cut that off flush to the trunk, it will be harder to heal and take longer. Often the branch collar has ridges or rings around it, and you should leave them in place.

Two winters ago we had a big snowstorm and my small leatherwood shrub (Dirca palustris) split up the middle. The break was not complete: There was still an attachment point for both halves of the shrub. I didn’t notice the damage for a few days, but when I did, I decided to try to repair it.

Grafting is a well-known but difficult skill whereby a skilled person can add a branch to a living tree. This is most often done with fruit trees, allowing orchardists to add other varieties of apple on a tree. I have an apple with three different flavors of apple because it had other varieties grafted to the original tree. Truth be known, the tree came like that. I’ve taken classes in grafting and tried to do it, but have never succeeded. It’s an art.

But back to my little leatherwood tree. Because it was still hinged at the bottom of the break, I moved it back together and used some stretchy green plastic tape to wrap the two halves together. I wound it tightly, and lo and behold, it worked! I removed the tape (which is usually used for tying flower stems to stakes to keep them from breaking in the rain) after two or three months. Now, two years later, the shrub shows no signs of ever being damaged, other than a little scar tissue.

What else did the storm do? It almost flattened a small grove of willow trees I had planted 20 years ago. They are a variety of Salix integra called Hakuro Nishiki. Very popular, these willows have tri-colored leaves (green, white and for part of the summer pink) and are fast-growing. There is nothing I can do for them. They are bent over and weighed down by snow, but should recover once the snow melts in a week or two. And if they don’t spring back up? I will lop off the bent stems and let them re-grow. It’s difficult to kill a willow, and they should have been shortened long ago.

The storm also knocked down a large tree on our property, a wild black cherry (Prunus serotina). The black cherry doesn’t produce cherries we can eat, but birds eat them. The fruit is just a third of an inch across with a pit. Not much food for anybody, really. The blossoms are not important, either, but it is a good plant for pollinators, one of the keystone species.

The tree we lost had a diameter of 14 inches at its base and stood over 67 feet tall — I measured it after it fell. It was not one I had planted, but a bird probably dropped a seed in our woods. I will count the growth rings when it gets cut up for firewood. Where it grew is a good example of where not to plant a tree.

So what was wrong with our tree? Most trees do not have tap roots going down deep into the soil. Two feet is probably average. But they spread widely. I was told in a horticulture class to think of a tree as a wine glass sitting on a dinner plate. The plate represents the root system, the wine glass the trunk and branches.

But ours was growing right next to a rock ledge that was actually showing above ground. The roots could not grow that way, so all the roots were on just three sides. The wind came from the fourth side, and with the snow load, it blew over. So if you plant trees, be mindful of bedrock and ledge. Keep away from them. You can use a steel rod or crowbar to poke the soil to find ledge before planting.

Although I will miss that big tree, I try to never mourn a plant that dies. After all, it provides me a chance to plant something else there. My best wishes to you all for the holidays.

Featured photo: Cut back a broken branch to the branch collar. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Pruned trees for outside, cut branches for inside

Normally at this time of year I can go out to the stream behind my house and pick stems of a shrub called winterberry (Ilex verticillata) to use in vases and on my wreath. It is generally loaded with small red berries that persist until mid-winter when hungry birds eat them, or they just plain fall off.

Winterberry is a great decorative shrub in winter that prefers wet feet but will grow in ordinary garden soil too. It is dioecious, meaning that it requires male and female plants — usually one male will take care of all the females. This year I didn’t get many of those bright red berries I like so much for decoration, and I have heard from other gardeners that they had few, too.

This prompted me to walk around my property looking at my woody shrubs to see what might substitute for winterberries. I didn’t find any berries at all. But I did cut some red-twigged dogwood (Cornus sericea) to use in a vase, and some budded branches of a Merrill magnolia (Magnolia x loebneri).

The magnolia buds are a bit like pussywillows on steroids: an inch long and very fuzzy. I have some in a vase on the table, and they look very good, and will for many weeks ahead. I’ve done this before, and will occasionally get a few buds to open into white flowers. I cut some greenery to go with them, a few stems of white pine. Hemlock would look good instead, but doesn’t hold needles well indoors.

It struck me that winter can be pretty bleak for people who don’t have nice-looking winter shrubs and trees. Judicious pruning can transform a messy tree full of small branches going every which way into sculpture. I recently helped a client prune a 50-year-old Japanese maple into sculpture that will keep it looking great for several years — with only a few minor pruning cuts each year.

When pruning, I ask myself, what will this little branch, currently the thickness of a finger, look like when it is the thickness of an arm — or a leg. If it is growing sideways toward a walkway, it must come off. Going through the middle of the tree? Remove it! The maple I pruned had many small dead branches that had been choked out because bigger branches had blocked off the sun, effectively starving them.

Bark is important. I like plants that have exfoliating bark, which means bark that is shaggy and peeling off — thus showing more than one color. My Seven Sons Flower Tree (Heptacodium miconioides) is one of those. In addition to the nice bark it offers me a display of small white flowers each fall. White birch (Betula papyrifera) and river birch (Betula nigra) are others with interesting bark. In fact all the birches have handsome bark.

I’ve been growing a paperbark maple (Acer griseum) for about 20 years. It has lovely shaggy reddish-brown bark that is very handsome. It is a very slow-growing tree, at least in this climate. It is listed as a Zone 5 plant (good to minus 20 F) but mine has survived colder temperatures. It looks great in winter.

One of my favorites — but one I do not grow — is sycamore (Platanus occidentalis), which I knew growing up in Connecticut but is rare in New Hampshire where I live. It reminds me of the English plane tree, so common in Europe. The bark peels off in big swaths, showing light gray-green in some areas, dark brown in others. It is just barely hardy to Zone 4, and prefers to grow in river bottoms, but will grow in drier soils, too.

Of the bigger trees, I like American beech (Fagus sylvatica) for its smooth gray bark. Unfortunately, beeches are prone to a fungal disease that mars the bark and eventually kills the tree.

That same smooth bark is a prominent feature of a shrub known variously as shad bush, serviceberry and Saskatoon bush. All belong to the genus Amelanchierbut bear different species names. Most are multi-stemmed bushes that get no more than 10 feet tall, though I have a wild one more than twice that height. Their blossoms are similar to apple blossoms. They do well in partial sun, often growing and blooming on roadsides.

Apple trees, particularly crabapples, can look great in winter. Some crabs hold onto their fruit throughout much of the winter, some drop their fruit in fall and many provide fruit for the birds to eat (that disappears before winter is done). Ask at the nursery when you buy a crabapple if the birds like the fruit. The form and bark of a well-pruned apple or crabapple is gorgeous to my eye.

So if your landscape has little to offer you in winter, plan on adding some winter interest come planting time. And if your trees and shrubs are drab, think about adding some strings of little winter lights to brighten them up, at least at night.

Featured photo: Merrill magnolia buds look like pussywillows all winter long, and bloom in late April. Photo by Henry Homeyer.