Mad Gardeners• Native Gardening
• Planting for Pollinators
• Key to Identifying New England Plants
• Flora Conservanda - online guide
• Invasive Species & Invasive Species Management
• Identify Weed In Your Garden
• Weed Prevention
• Guidelines for Disposal of Terrestrial Invasive Plants
• What We Did For (Tomato) Love
• NOFA Farm and Food Guide 2013
• Forgotten Foods in the Home Landscape
• USDA Organic Resource Guide 2012
• Rain Garden—free Smart Phone App
• Barking up the Right Tree by Kathy Diemer
• Design Crutches by Kathleen Nelson
• Design & Planning
• Understanding Gardening Zones
• Growing a Straw Bale Garden
• UMass Extension Landscape. Nursery and Urban Forestry Programs
• The UMass Landscape Message
• Gardening with Physical Limitations
• The Informed Gardener - podcasts
MAD GARDENER KATHY NELSON discusses the highly invasive Mile-A-Minute vine with Anne Raver in The New York Times. Read HERE.
The Native Plant Center in Valhalla provided us with this article from The National Gardener, written by Darrin Duling, director of The NPC. To read please follow this link: GoingNativeinYourGarden
When planting your garden, refer to THIS CHART to ensure a steady flow of pollinating bees into your garden during the year. Dr. Tristram Seidler presented this year-round feeding chart during his presentation on bees at The New England Wild Flower Society's 2011 Annual Meeting.
The New England Wild Flower Society offers this Go Botany simple key for plant identification. Go HERE and follow the groups for information.
After 15 years of research, the new Flora Conservanda is available online by clicking HERE. Written from a regional perspective, Flora Conservanda: New England 2012 is the New England Plant Conservation Program (NEPCoP) list of plants in need of conservation. The list contains plants growing in New England that are globally, regionally and locally rare. It also lists plants that are considered historic to New England (though they may exist elsewhere in the US or world) and plants whose status in the region is yet undetermined but are believed to be rare. More research is needed to properly categorize these latter species.
• A Field Guide for the Identification of Invasive Plants in Southern Forests: Field Guide
• A Management Guide for Invasive Plants in Southern Forests: Management Guide
Weeds in the UMass Weed Herbarium can be viewed by common name, scientific name or plant family. Images and notes to aid in identification are revealed by clicking on the weed name. Visit umassweeds.org
From "How to Eradicate Invasive Plants" by Teri Dunn Chase, published by Timber Press - Since it generally is easier to prevent a problem than to solve one, you might want to consider ways to keep weeds from infiltrating your property rather than wait until an infestation occurs and then look for ways to eliminate it. Yes, weeds are resourceful and have seemingly unlimited ways of moving from place to place, but you can do something about them long before you learn the name of the enemy weed. Click HERE to read "9 Ways to Keep Out Invaders"
From the College of Agriculture and Natural Rescources comes this comprehensive guide for the disposal of invasives. Click HERE to download the guide.
Photo by Scott Tully
What We Did for (Tomato) Love...or, The Charge of the Night Light Brigade...or, How Spencer's Gifts Saved the Farm, while we're at it. This story has so many angles I don't even know where to begin...but let's vote for my observant crew, who came back from twining the tomatoes, middle of last week, to tell me there were some hornworms eating the plants. Not having actually walked down one of our tomato rows in a few days, I was minimally concerned. We always get hornworms, we spend some time picking them off, we get a half-dozen or so per session, and life goes on. But when I got around to making a patrol a day or two later, Suddenly The Mood Turned Ugly. I found over a hundred worms one afternoon, another 100 the next, and saw evidence of 100s more in the form of highly decimated plants. To continue reading please click HERE.
Discover local food near you. Click HERE for the 2013 CT NOFA Farm and Food Guide.
David Buchanan, author of Taste, Memory, and speaker at our 2013 "Making an Entrance" symposium, provided us with the following links he feels would be of interest to anyone interested in this topic:
• Profile of David Buchanan
• David's website OriginsFruit
• Chelsea Green David's publisher has all sorts of related gardening and heritage food books
USDA Organic Resource Guide 2012 / Your Guide to Organic and Organic-Related USDA Programs is available online by clicking HERE.
This app, from CT NEMO (Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officers) is aimed at homeowners, landscape professionals, municipal staff and others interested in properly installing one or more rain gardens. The app includes a searchable plant database and tools that help site, size and install your rain garden properly. Download the app HERE
When hunting for a deciduous tree that will look smashing year 'round and not give you a lick of trouble, here are a few of my favorite decadently barked zone 5 hardies to consider....Click here to read the full article. Also, please visit Kathy Diemer's blog at A Garden for All.
I'm not a natural designer, but have found a few simple tricks that help me make placement decisions. These are all for after you've analyzed light, shade, tree roots, critters, moisture, drainage, soil type, view etc. Click HERE to read the full article.
Walter Cudnohufsky spoke on design environments at the MG symposium in March 2011, and has graciously provided us with his design principles manuscript. Contact the webmaster for more information.
Gardeners may benefit from knowing which hardiness zone new plants prefer. View Understanding Zones HERE —courtesy Janis Kieft, Board of Directors, National Garden Bureau
From the New York Times, published 3.20.2013 - Do you have had dirt? No dirt? Is the earth in your garden actually a sidewalk? Has a soil-testing lab ever suggested that your gardening outfit should be a hazmat suit? Do you have a weed problem (and not that kind of weed problem)? One last question: Are you ready to learn about a transformative garden technology that could change your life —for less than $100? No? I wasn't sold either when I first heard about a peculiar food-growing method called straw-bale gardening. Like me, you might have missed the Facebook page, "Learn to Grow a Straw Bale Garden," which has registered an unlikely 21,000 "likes." What you '11 soon learn there is that a straw-bale garden is a garden that has been grown in a straw bale. Really. Click HERE to read the full NY Times article by Michael Tortorello. back to top
UMass Extension has announced its completely redesigned and revised web site. Click HERE to learn more about its Nursery and Urban Forestry Program.
UMass Extension helps landscape, nursery and urban forestry professionals identify pests in the landscape, monitor their development, plan management strategies and create site-specific records for future management. Each LANDSCAPE MESSAGE includes valuable information from sites throughout Massachusetts: growing degree day accumulation, soil temperature, precipitation amounts, and plant phenology. Detailed reports on the status of insects, diseases, and weeds of interest to landscape and turf managers are also featured in each edition. Click here to view the weekly UMass Landscape Message.
Let's face it, gardeners age. Or, are afflicted with illnesses that can make gardening more difficult and less enjoyable. However, thanks to creative and inventive minds, there are now a wide variety of excellent tools and techniques to take some of the aches and pains out of gardening. Click HERE to visit Ohio State University Extension’s page on challenges, techniques, and technologies.
The Informed Gardener is a series of audio podcasts intended to educate and inform urban gardeners on a broad variety of topics—including addressing some misconceptions borne of “old wisdom” that can sometimes be more hearsay and conjecture than scientific fact. Listen to archives HERE
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