Category Archives: Composting

Spring Fever? Here’s An Intoxicating Cure

by Categorized: Composting, Crafts, Garden Design, Garden Ornaments, Gardening, Gardens, Horticulture, Landscape, Nature, Plants, Seasons, Vegetable Gardening, Wildlife Date:
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CTFlower&GardenShowCascade“After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air.”  — Willa Cather, “My Antonia”

If you’re yearning for the intoxicating fragrances that are the very breath of spring, “the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere” that Willa Cather so aptly described, there’s no need to feel discouraged by the mounds of snow that still abound.

The 34th annual Connecticut Flower and Garden Show opens Thursday and runs through Sunday at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford, and while the show is not the same as an actual spring day, it does offer a tantalizing preview of springtime to come, which is particularly welcome this time of this year.

Photo SwirlThe show covers nearly 3 acres and includes 18 professionally designed gardens that cover more than an acre. Yes, these gardens are indoors, but the sights and scents are so pleasing to one’s winter-weary senses.

Nancy DuBrule-Clemente of Natureworks in North Branford said her winter-battered spirits were completely turned around when she started setting up for the show earlier this week. “Huge witch hazel trees forced into perfect bloom, piles of mulch and sod, flowering plants absolutely everywhere — my soul was soothed and I came home singing a joyful song!”

CTFlower&GardenShowFlower&FireplaceThere are more than 300 booths with displays of flowers, plants, garden ornaments, bulbs and seeds, gardening books, patio furniture and more. If you can dig beneath the snow in your yard, bring along a half-cup of soil to the UConn Cooperative Extension’s booth for a free soil test.

I always love the eye-popping creativity of the Federated Garden Clubs of Connecticut’s Advanced Flower Show — more than 250 entries that could inspire you to new heights of artistry when arranging a few flowers of your own.

And through the show there will be more than 80 hours of seminars by horticultural, garden design and gardening experts, including:

Mar Jennings on “Creating Casual Luxury in Your Home and Garden”;

Garden photographer and author Ken Druse on “Making More Plants: Propagation” and on “Natural Companions”;

Garden author and photographer Amy Ziffer of Sherman, whose “Shady Lady’s Guide to Northeast Shade Gardening” is an invaluable guide, on “Shade Revealed”;

Roger Swain, former host of “The Victory Garden” on PBS and HGTV’s “People Places & Plants on “Vegetables That I Have Known and You Will Love”;

Bob Buettner, Connecticut Florist of the Year in 2010, on “Floral Arranging”;

Organic gardener, photographer and lecturer Karen Bussolini of South Kent on “40 Great Plants for Connecticut Gardens” and “Gardens in Winter.”

The list of seminar topics goes on and on — “Create and Enhance Wildlife Habitats in Your Surroundings,” “Rain Gardens,” “Daylilies,” “America’s Romance with the English CTFlower&GardenShowDaffodilsGarden,” “Composting and Soil Health,” “Water Gardening Basics,” “Working with Wetlands on Your Property,” “Disease Control in Home Vegetable Gardens,” and many more. For the complete seminar schedule and details about the presenters, Click Here.

The seminars are included in the price of admission, which is $16 for adults, $14 for seniors age 62 and over (Thursday and Friday only); $4 for children age 5 to 12, and free for children under age 5.

Hours are Thursday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Convention Center is at 100 Columbus Blvd.

For more information and details on parking, including free parking, Click Here.

DSC05134Photos courtesy of Connecticut Flower & Garden Show

 

 

 

 

Spring Is Just About Here

by Categorized: Composting, Do It Yourself, Elizabeth Park, Flowers And Floral Design, Garden Design, Garden Ornaments, Gardening, Gardens, Horticulture, Houseplants, Insects, Landscape Architecture, Plants, Seasons, Trees, Vegetable Gardening, Wildlife Date:
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MIO5X098_7873_9Forget about that pessimistic, unreliable groundhog. The surest sign that spring is just about here is the annual Connecticut Flower & Garden Show, which runs through Sunday at the Convention Center in Hartford.

After so much snow, the fragrance of flowers and mulch is intoxicating. Booth after booth — there are more than 300 — offer ideas and information for your “Backyard Paradise,” as this year’s show is titled. And there are numerous seminars from gardening experts.

Saturday hours are 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For details:www.ctflowershow.com.

The Federated Garden Clubs of Connecticut’s juried show also is inspirational, with designs that have rhythm, movement balance, intriguing textural contrasts and some playfulness.

2014-02-19 00.54.53This medley in chartreuse (right), including papyrus, carnations, hydrangea, spider mums, lily grass, bells of Ireland, variegated aspidistra, amaranthus and steel grass, is by Amber Pratt of the Garden Club of Kensington.2014-02-19 00.53.392014-02-19 00.57.11

 

 

 

 

Carolyn Bernard of the Garden Club of Madison (above left) plays around with the idea of apples and oranges in this whimsical tabletop display, which also includes Brussels sprouts, asparagus and spray roses.

 

The dynamic swirl of birds of paradise with monstera, apidistra and sabal palm (left) is by Barbara Deysson of the Shippan Point Garden Club.

 

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The artful drama of this design (right) by Cathy Ritch of the Long Hill Garden Club in Trumbull includes anthurium in and under water in a glass globe, accented with wire mesh and blue swirls.

 

 

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Duane Luster of the Country Gardeners of Glastonbury garden club combines heliconia with philodendron, bamboo, fasciated (fantail) willow and red maple (left).

 

 

ButterflyJuried flower show photos by Nancy Schoeffler

Rice paper butterfly from Magic Wings, a Massachusetts butterfly conservatory. Photo by John Woike | The Hartford Courant.

 

Food For Thought, And For The Earth

by Categorized: Composting, Ecology, Food, Gardening, Recycling, Sustainability Date:
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Food can get you thinking. So much goes into producing it. From the seed or plant or animal itself to the time and energy and planning and muscle to feed, water, cultivate, harvest, sort, cull, transport, market, stock, promote, sell and finally get that product home in our refrigerators — and then prepared in a meal.

All those valuable resources that go into producing food make me a passionate composter whenever there are peelings or leftover scraps on a plate.

But I’ve got a garden, and I love the idea of plowing those resource-rich extras back into the soil. Composting is a bit of a minor miracle. It doesn’t take much work, just some time.

Still, it’s not for everyone. Some people don’t garden. Others just don’t have room for a compost bin.

November 2013 153Communities like San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon, have city-wide curbside food scrap collection programs. The food waste is recycled into soil-enriching compost.

And in Connecticut, many food distributors, big supermarkets and other significant generators of food scraps are going to have to start recycling their scraps — if they aren’t already doing so — under a law going into effect at the New Year.

But what about the typical household?

Susannah Castle, who recently launched Blue Earth Compost, a residential food scrap pickup service in Hartford and West Hartford, says households are significant contributors of food waste to the waste stream. By some estimates, we throw out about 40 percent of the food we purchase.

Her new, hyper-local effort will help ensure that these resource-laden food scraps don’t go to waste but instead are used to nourish the soil and enhance our ecology.

“We can transform the state of our soil,” she says. “I’d love to see this community really develop a visionary mind-set toward becoming a zero-food-waste community – a community with spectacular soil, at least on the domestic scale. It’s a no-brainer.”

Click here for my complete story.

Photo of Susannah Castle by Nancy Schoeffler

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adventures In Composting

by Categorized: Composting, Ecology, Gardening, Insects, Sustainability Date:
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After a summer of hardly gardening at all because of an injured foot, I had such a pent-up desire to get back to the garden. The past few weeks have been spent catching up on chores — weeding, trimming and trying to restore a modicum of order after months of neglect.

allium moly white flower farmBut Sunday, I happily planted bulbs. The weather was balmy and I got them all in the ground. (Somewhat manic when I was still limping, I had accumulated a lot of them: tulips, daffodils, purple Allium ‘Globemaster,’ yellow Allium moly, crocuses, snowdrops, grape hyacinths and scilla campanula.)

At one point I started planting daffodils in an area where we had taken out two ailing hemlock trees. The soil there was pretty depleted and lifeless, so I thought I’d dip into our compost bin and enrich it a bit.

Tulips2We compost in two places: up the hill in a fairly casual heap that does a very slow breakdown, and in an efficient rolling bin we bought years ago at Smith and Hawken, when it still was in business. We keep the rolling composter closer to the house, which is particularly handy during snowy weather. Every spring it is filled with beautiful, rich compost.

On Sunday, though, I almost had a stroke when I started digging in the bin for some compost for the bulbs and noticed scores of pale gray, segmented insects.

larvae-wikipedia commonsMy immediate panicky thought was that I’d tossed in some diseased houseplant that contained a few of the torpedo-shaped grubs or whatever they were, and that they were multiplying and destructive and soon would take over like some backyard version of the insects in “The Matrix.”

At times like these, I thank the stars for the internet.

Turns out our compost bin was rich with black soldier fly larvae. And that’s a wonderful thing.

The larvae are apparently excellent composters. They soldier through decaying food waste, voraciously consuming it and turning it into rich food for the garden.

There’s even a Black Soldier Fly blog — blacksoldierflyblog.com — and at blacksoldierflyfarming.com I can buy 2,000-plus of the larvae for $29.95 (if I weren’t accidentally raising my own).

beneficial-51C-GCMGA14284-black_soldier_flyOn the Modern Homestead blog I learned that the larvae’s high level of feeding activity concentrates such considerable nutrients that the resulting black soldier fly — a wasp-waisted fly with smoky black wings, Hermetia illucens — hardly needs to feed at all. It won’t bite or sting or come buzzing around and isn’t a vector for diseases but mostly spends its time resting on leaves in the sunlight. A fly I could love! (Here’s a fascinating fact sheet.)

And a grub I could love. Watch the larvae go to town in this time-release video, “Black Soldier Fly Cucumber Festival”:

Anyway, what probably attracted them to our compost is that we throw in a lot of coffee grounds.

Tulips1I took a peek in the bin this morning, when temperatures were in the 20s. I hope the larvae were burrowed deep into the warm pile of stuff in there. I don’t know what will become of the larvae when it really freezes. While I’ve composted for years, I’ve never really dug into what actually was occurring as rotting food scraps were magically transformed into black gold. I’m talking with a West Hartford composting expert on Friday, so I’ll let you know what more I learn.

Meanwhile, maggots in my compost? I’m just lucky, I guess.

Photo of Allium moly, via White Flower Farm. Photo of tulips by Nancy Schoeffler. Photo of black soldier fly larvae by Dennis Kress, via Wikimedia Commons. Photo of black soldier fly, via Galveston County Master Gardener Association.  “Black Soldier Fly Cucumber Festival” video, via Black Soldier Fly blog. Photo of tulips by Nancy Schoeffler.

In The Garden With Margaret Roach: Worth Watching

by Categorized: Composting, Ecology, Garden Design, Gardening, Gardens, Insects, Nature, Weeds Date:
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Margaret-Roach-and-Joe-Lampl-photo-by-Carl-PenningtonGarden writer Margaret Roach whose invaluable blog, A Way To Garden, is one of my favorites, is featured this week in public TV’s “Growing a Greener World” with Joe Lamp’l. Here’s the link.

It’s a delight to “visit” her garden — the shoot was in August — and the episode is filled with insights, on everything from how she uses gold in the garden, why she painted her house olive and red, how she keeps weeds under control, garden design with your windows in mind and much more. Joe even talks about Margaret’s composting technique: She uses a wind row.

I had the great pleasure of interviewing Margaret a few years ago about the 365-day garden and her delight in the garden in winter. Here’s a link.

M_Roach_fall-foliage-DSC_3682LLPhoto courtesy of Margaret Roach, via “Growing A Greener World”

Margaret garden winterA century-old apple tree behind Margaret Roach‘s home in Copake Falls, N.Y. is outlined in snow. Photo courtesy of Margaret Roach.