A Good Weekend

Over the weekend I visited Kane’s Flower World, a greenhouse and nursery in Middleton, Massachusetts. I needed to get a cactus to fill a space in one of my dish gardens, and my baby African violets were ready for dividing, so I needed some supplies.

I had started these violets from leaf cuttings. Last summer I ordered leaves from Lyndon Lyon Greenhouses, an African violet specialist. I got two leaves each of ten different cultivars, and stuck them in plastic pots of potting mix with extra perlite. Nearly all of the leaves produced a baby plant; some produced more than one.  

I divided some of them several months ago, planting the babies into one-inch clay pots. Huge mistake! The size and make-up of these pots mean they dry out very quickly. It has been nearly impossible to keep those violets watered. The majority of them died.

So I bought three-inch square plastic pots at Kane’s for the ones I was dividing this weekend. I also bought some vermiculite to mix into the potting soil, to help retain moisture. (I add perlite, too, to lighten the mix; violet roots have trouble moving through heavy soil.)

Now I have 14 baby violets in 14 plastic pots on a cookie sheet by the window. I had some pots and mix left over, so I started cuttings from a mature violet and a streptocarpus.

And, besides the cactus I needed to fill that space, I bought three more and made another dish garden. It was a good weekend!

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2/20/2007 4:49:05 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [7] 

A Field Trip in the City

“New England Grows,” an annual green industry trade show, took place this week in Boston. Landscapers, garden designers, nursery owners, arborists, groundskeepers, teachers, and other garden professionals come to this event to see the plants and equipment that will help them do their best work in the coming year. The show includes a series of lectures and demonstrations, too.

Liz and I had a chance to visit the show yesterday. It was a cold, windy walk from our office to the Convention Center, marked by a few wrong turns. But the sight I saw when we finally got there warmed me right up. (With help from the hot chocolate we managed to hunt down.) The front lobby looks down on the main exhibition floor, which, being covered with garden supply exhibits looked much like spring.

Besides admiring the exhibits of plants, pots, and tools, we sat in on a pest-management lecture given by Leanne Pundt of the University of Connecticut. The talk was geared toward industry people (naturally, that being the audience), who are trying to fight pests and diseases on a large scale. But I did pick up some tips to use in my own garden:

1. Learn the cultural requirements of my plants and meet them as best I can. Healthy plants are more able to fight pests and diseases.

2. “Scout” my garden regularly. Look for symptoms on plants, the pests themselves, and the activity of pests’ natural enemies. Inspect new plants as I get them.

3. Choose native plants, which are more likely to attract beneficial insects and the pests’ natural enemies.

From the slides I recognized that last summer some of my columbines (Aquilegia) had columbine leafminers. The columbines were some of my favorites of what I planted last spring. I have Aquilegia canadensis ‘Little Lanterns’, A. alpine ‘Alpine Blue’, and A. vulgaris plena ‘Rose Barlow’. I will follow Leanne’s advice to be sure to choose native columbines. (Of the three that I have so far, only A. canadensis is native, and I do think it was not affected by the miners, though I’m just going by memory. I have to keep better notes!)

Read Sara Begg's blog

2/9/2007 11:33:45 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]