Hollow Garden

Hamamelis x intermedia 'Diane'

February is the month for garden seminars and I attended two last week that were top notch.

Douglas Tallamy, Prof. of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the U. of Delaware, spoke at the venerable Piedmont Landscape Assn.’s annual gathering in Charlottesville. He blew away the  650+ audience (ensconced in the splendor of the ornate Paramount Theatre) with his message of conserving the insect-bird-mammal chain that sustains us all. Spontaneous standing O at 10:30 in the morning.

Bottom line: plant oaks. At the top of his list, they sustain 534 different kinds of butterfly larvae. His beautiful photos of caterpillars alone were worth the price of admission.

I am avidly looking for his Bringing Nature Home (2007) which my friend, Hans, who tends the presidential gardens at RIT, says changed his life.

Three days later I encountered Eliot Coleman at UVA. Spritely author of Four Season Harvest and spouse of garden writer Barbara Damrosch, he spoke to a rapt audience of students and local gardener/foodies who soaked up his message of sustainable use of the land.

There is a yearning out there for making peace with this world.

Let us all blunder on.

Beech Watch Begins 2/16/11

The view from the front porch to the potting shed is much improved without last year’s ice shelf and our soil looks better, too. There’s so much you can do when you don’t have to slog through 2 feet of snow.

Wood Ash

Over the winter we’ve  distributed old wood stove ashes (let them sit at least a week in a fireproof tub – no sparks!) on the vegetable garden, perennial beds and shrub borders. Our native clay will always be acidic because of the granite bedrock on this side of the mountain, unlike the limestone that underlays the Shenandoah Valley to the west.

Sweet or Sour?

Of course if you’re growing azaleas and rhododendrons and lots of wildflowers, they like their native soil just fine and but many of the old-fashioned ornamentals – like lilac, boxwood, bearded iris and herbs – prefer a non-acidic soil above 6.5 ph (7 is neutral and above that is “sweet” or alkaline). When I saw that moss was creeping into a bed of transplanted peonies and iris, I knew the wood ashes would be just the ticket.

From tree to firewood to heat for the house, to ash to organic potash to feed the soil and new roots – that’s a good closed cycle we try to repeat as much as possible here in the hollow.

We’ve spent the first weeks of ought eleven clearing brush and thanking God for the dry weather, so different from the claustrophobic ice-cave of last year’s Snowpocalypse. Severe times make us grateful for what we have. This winter storms have sped up the coast leaving us high and dry in our little Blue Ridge hollow. A good time to attack the old fence line along the road that’s finally rotted into a mass of honeysuckle, spindly posts and bits of wire. When things are bare down to the bone, it’s a good time to do some clearing.