Category — Catalogue/book/website reviews

It’s time to plant seeds. For those of us in mild-winter climates fall is the best time to plant cool-weather annuals. For those of us in any climate, it can also be an ideal time to plant perennial seeds (they often have cooling or cooling/warming requirements which are naturally met by  overwinter germination. Why not have nature do the work instead of fiddling with stratification and the rest?). And it’s a good time to plant wildflower seeds (after all, when does nature do it?).

So I was already tuned into seed when I got my fall letter from the miso company I patronize*, and found an article by Christian Elwell about planting seeds in a way that’s designed to strengthen plant/human communion.

The article describes a Siberian healer (real or imagined), Anastasia, who says that one of the big problems in plant/human communication is that plants no longer know whom they are serving.

Think about it: we grow huge monocrops of plants, plants which are often untouched by human hands, and which get attention only from machines. Our culture thinks of plants sheerly in terms of production.

But every gardener knows that there is far more to plants than that. We know that plants satisfy our souls in some way we may not be able to describe but would be devastated without. Gardeners also tend to be more aware than other human beings that we need plants: for the air we breathe, for the food we eat, the places we live in, the clothes we wear, the medicines we take, and for that valuable soul-sustenance.

What we might not quite be aware of is that plants may also need us. And not just for our CO2.

Humans and plants have been working together for thousands of years. But in the last several decades, humans have been separating themselves from plants more and more. According to Anastasia, plants need the feedback of our being. They need their souls fed by us. When we withdraw our personalities and attention, plants suffer.

One way to heal this lack is to plant seeds imbued with our consciousness. Anastasia recommends a three-part method for doing this. The first step is putting the seeds to be planted under the tongue for nine minutes, to infuse them with the invisible but tangible messages of our bodies.

The second step is to put the seeds in our palms, and breathe on them. Breath has holy meaning in many cultures; in ours, the word “inspire” means to take in breath or spirit. And by the way, seeds breathe, too. Just very very slowly. But that’s how they manage to keep viable for years (sometimes centuries, or even millenia).

The final step to conscious seed-planting is to  stand barefoot on the ground where we will be planting the seeds, and hold them  to the sky.

If we are planting a large crop (Elwell plants rice), we can just do this with a few of the seeds; they will communicate the messages we’ve given them to the other seeds.

Sound whacky? Maybe. But to me, it sounds like some of the less formal rituals I like to do when I plant, and it sounds worth trying.

Gardening and wandering in the woods has led me to a clear understanding: plants are sentient beings. In fact, I’ll come out of the closet and admit that for me, everything is sentient: I’m an animist. Working on that assumption can completely change your life. In fact, working on that assumption might be just the change our fast-moving produce-produce-produce culture needs so badly.

So, even if you think treating seeds this way is crazy, why not try an experiment, if only to prove that it doesn’t work?  Plant some seeds without this attention and some with it. See if you notice a difference in the growing plants, the flowering, and the harvest.  Or yourself.

* If you haven’t tried it, South River miso is an entirely different experience than other misos.They make the miso in wooden tubs over wood fires, doing everything the traditional way. At first I wondered why their miso was so much more expensive than others. Then I tried it, and all was revealed: it was the difference between a bottle of table red and a bottle of fine vintage wine. (And no, they aren’t paying me to say this: it’s unsolicited enthusiasm.)

Charlotte at The Galloping Gardener   was kind enough to give me a MeMe award – which gives me the opportunity to write up some of my favorite blogs. The Galloping Gardener will reward you with spectacular photos of gardens from around the world, and some of the people who live near them.

Of course the problem with naming seven blogs is that there are so many to choose from. If I’ve named your blog, please don’t feel obliged to accept the award; not everybody has the time or inclination to fit a post about blogs, with all that linking, into their blogging schedule. Just know I really like your blog! And if I haven’t named your blog, it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it; it just means that my memory is only so good and this list is only seven blogs long, and I read –and enjoy- a lot more than seven blogs.

If you do want to accept the MeMe award, it works like this: link back to the person who gave you the award, reveal seven things about yourself, choose seven other blogs that you want to nominate, and post a link to them. Then let each of your choices know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog. Finally, let the tagger know when your post is up (glad I revisited Charlotte’s site, I’d forgotten that one!).

Seven things about me:

I go barefoot whenever possible

A friend once said that a city penthouse would be hell for me. True. At least after about two weeks to a month of theater, concerts, nightclub music, opera, bookstores, libraries, botanical gardens, museums,  and restaurants…maybe it wouldn’t be such a nightmare, after all.

Dark chocolate is the only real chocolate – a precept I live by.

I read everything, including product labels.

I love the dark.

I leap into any living water I can possibly manage, including some that’s near freezing.

My ideal spots combine woods and ocean.

And now for the real meat of this article, the blogs:

Whenever I need guidance and inspiration on foliage, I go to Northern Shade. She always has some new combination to tweak my fancy. Plus, she’s my go-to for campanulas, a genus I love.

Lost in the Landscape  looks at the details, whether it’s sidewalk plantings, Luther Burbank’s farm, or a book on low-water gardening. I like getting the full story, plus there are gorgeous artistic photos, to bring out even more detail.

Another waterwise gardener with interesting design ideas is Steve Snedeker , who is my go-to guy for all things stone.

Barbee at The Garden at Crocker Croft  has years of garden wisdom, lore, and experience to offer. “I suspect the day I have to stop gardening is the day I start dying.” Barbee, I know you’ve had enough of the MeMe thing, but I just wanted you to know I appreciate you.

Susan Morrison (aka garden-chick) gets into really green gardening on her Blue Planet Garden Blog “Plant right; water less; garden more.” She’s also a landscaper with design ideas.

Frances at Fairegarden  ranges from lyrical to laugh-provoking, with beautiful photos to point up the narrative of her extremely diverse garden (I get a lot of plant lust when I read her blog).

I love keeping up  with Chandramouli’s Indian garden at In Art Lies My Heart .   He’s an inveterate experimenter, and you can tell he really loves Plantville, and his human family, too.

If I get another award like this one, it will give me an opportunity to name seven other blogs just as deserving. As for comments: how about letting me know what some of your favorite blogs are? You don’t have to name seven; one or two will do.

I was intrigued by hyperlocavore when I found it on Twitter. The short version (that’s all you get on Twitter) was that this site helps you find gardening partners in your area, so you can share your yards or dig up your lawns and grow food locally.

A lot of people in my area are involved in the slow and local food movements; in fact, a lot of people in my area moved here in the earlier “grow your own” era, and some of the ones who are still moving here have the same sentiments.

While this site is definitely in favor of “grow your own”, the vision is a lot bigger than that. I checked out some of the videos to get the flavor of what was on offer here.

One of the videos, “Transition Towns”, caught my attention.The video might benefit from a little editing. Peak oil philosophy is not a riveting opening for most. But I kept going, and found original and inspiring thinking about how gardens might be a part of  dealing with an oil-based culture that is running out of oil, and choking from the bad effects of oil dependency. That’s what Transition Towns are all about, according to Rob Hopkins, the movement founder.

“We could do nothing, let this unfold as a series of lurching crises, or we could do something…there’s no  reason why a world with less oil couldn’t be preferable to where we are now,” says Rob Hopkins “We really need to re-discover what was actually good about the life before cheap oil.”

So they set about doing it – what else? – locally. In Totnes, Devon, UK, Transition Town enthusiasts began mining their own resources; old people, with their memories from the time before cheap oil  came in and really started to change things.

One thing you notice when you start interviewing, says  Hopkins, is “how resilient people were in those days, how everybody had skills they could turn their hand to. Dig for Victory – Victory Gardens I think it was called in the U.S.  – that was possible because everyone knew how to garden. They hadn’t been to gardening college, they knew it by osmosis. Nowadays, if you said, ‘here’s a spade, dig a hole,’ you’d have lots of people who could design a hole, you’d have lots of people who could quantity survey the hole, inspect the hole up for you, put the hole-digging out to tender, and they could insure the hole-digging process against public indemnity,  but actually there’d be very few people who could actually dig: so we’ve moved away from being a practical, hands-on society.”

Transition Towns is no pie-in-the-sky idealist movement; their idea is to find workable community solutions – solutions that are, in fact, much more workable than the ones we use now.

“The idea is to look to draw what was good  about  those times before cheap oil, not to romanticize it. We try to apply the best of the old and the best of the new, but it’s really about getting people to ask the right questions. We don’t claim to come in with all the answers.”

What they’re looking for is a way to replace common misconceptions with common sense. “If you look at all the plans the government draw up, town planning, it’s based on the assumption that oil prices will always remain cheap, the move away from the household economy will continue.” Hopkins points out that we really have no basis for those assumptions, and so we make bad decisions based on shaky foundations. In the U.S., such decisions have allowed us to become a sedentary, obese, depressed people, whose food travels long distances, and is often highly processed and without nutritional value.

For  Hopkins and the Transition Town movers, one of the first obvious good decisions is to produce food locally. The old model puts “good economy” as the enemy of “sustainability”. The Transition Town movement seem to be saying that we need to work together, locally, toward a richer and more sustainable economy. Which only makes sense. If we mortgage the future, how good is our economy, anyway? Any gardener knows that if you deplete the soil, you’re going to have to pay somewhere down the line.

But I think the most inspiring part of the Transition Town movement is the concept that we don’t have to wait for Big Experts to Solve the Problem for us. “Rather than breezing in with lots of experts who design everything for everybody, it’s a question of unleashing the genius of the community around you.”

(To read more about local food gardening, visit http://hyperlocavore.ning.com/)

Do any of you  feel mushrooms don’t belong in a garden? Read any book or catalogue by Paul Stamets, and you’ll learn that mushrooms are already in your garden, in the form of mycorrhizae in the soil.

The word ‘mycorrhizal’ means root fungus (mykes is Greek for fungus, and rhiza is Greek for root). Mycorrhizae are the prefruiting stage of certain kinds of mushrooms: tiny, threadlike webs networking their way through every healthy soil, an enormous microscopic (I always wanted to use those two in a sentence together) network which protects plants from disease and allows them to send nutrients and water to each other, according to need. The Fungi Perfecti catalogue says that plants connected to this network also take up several hundreds or thousands of times more water and nutrients than they do without mycorrhizae. (Fungi Perfecti is the business side of  Stamets’s mushroom venture, and helps fund an incredible range of research and teaching.)

All over the world, underground networks of mycorrhizae keep life afloat. Forests are dependent on thriving mycorrhizae. Without them, we have no healthy plant communities. Without healthy plants, we have no air to breathe and no food to eat. So these microscopic beings  are very important parts of our lives. We may have to broaden our views of organic life to fully understand the world of fungi, which is also our world. **

Unfortunately, industrial land-clearing and farming methods kill off these invisible, vital members of our plant communities. The best thing would be to think about better ways to do our clearing and farming, so we preserve our local blends and varieties of mycorrhizae.  But meanwhile, we can start remediation in our gardens, by buying jars or packets of powdered mycorrhizae blends, and mixing them into our soil, starting a new network.  Or we can get fertilizers with mycorrhizae in them, which is how I got my own introduction to what mycorrhizae can do in a garden.  Suddenly my container plants looked fuller, greener, happier, and they seemed to take stress better, too. I’ve grown invisible fungus ever since.

But Stamets doesn’t just want us to have microscopic underground mushrooms. He’s also a missionary of big mushrooms in gardens. We can naturalize medicinal and edible mushrooms in woodland gardens, and grow edible mushrooms in with our vegetables: Garden Oyster mushrooms (Hypsizygus ulmarius) unlock nutrients from organic debris to feed underlying plants -and they’re reportedly delicious to eat. (I buy another species of oyster mushroom to cook with, and they have a lovely mild flavor and tender texture.) We can also grow mushrooms as a crop, establishing a morel patch (it can take a few years), or growing King Stropharia (Stropharia rugos-annulata), a mushroom that thrives in a huge range of temperatures on waste products like sawdust and wood chips, and fruits delicious mushrooms as big as five pounds.

Growing mushrooms in our gardens is a huge innovation in mushroom culture, which often requires painstaking and esoteric methods to work. A local mushroom grower once told me that he had to imitate thunderstorms in his mushroom growing area, so his mushrooms would fruit. Other typical mushroom-culture equipment includes sterile growing rooms, agar cultures, and matching the right growing media and techniques to each mushroom variety.

Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms goes deep into the strange cultures of the mushroom world, and it is here that we find out some of King Stropharia’s weird, secretive habits. King Stropharia mushrooms are bountiful, beautiful, and delicious, Stamets starts off, giving a few informal recipes to show he really enjoys them, and isn’t just talking theoretically. But he also reveals a deeper layer of the generous stropharia personality: eating them for more than two or three days in a row suppresses the enzymes we use to digest them.

For those who don’t understand how this might be a problem, Stamets offers a cautionary tale. A friend of his became enchanted by the mushrooms, once they were introduced: he grew them, ate them frequently, made new recipes for them. At last he culminated his love by throwing a huge summer garden party for King Stropharia, so that all of his friends would know the mushroom he honored with his love. He indulged that love privately also, eating the mushrooms as he cooked; by the time of the party, he had been partaking of King Stropharia for three days. While his other guests enjoyed the succulent fungus, he became violently ill. “To this day, he now views King Stropharia (and me) with great suspicion,”  Stamets concludes. (pg. 338)

The mushroom at the top of this post was growing in the woods near my house.  It’s probably edible, but all I could figure out is that it’s some kind of bolete, narrowing  it down to a few thousand choices. It’s certainly past its prime, as you can tell by looking at the yellowing drying spongy bit (my mushroom botany is pretty primitive) underneath the cap.

I have been on a few local mushroom hunts, but I don’t trust myself to identify more than a few varieties. I don’t play around with mushrooms. It could be deadly, or at least really sickening. My hope is that by going on more hunts and hanging out with mushroom hunters, I’ll build my mushroom vocabulary. Another way I hope to improve my mushroom knowledge is by cultivating them. That way, I can be sure of the variety, and learn more about the different forms of each mushroom.  I’ve already ordered some plugs and a kit of different mushrooms. I’ll be reporting more later.

*My title is derived from the title of one of Eleanor Cameron’s whimsical 1950s science fiction books,  The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, available through Fungi Perfecti. Her books are supposed to be juvenile fiction, but they’re  fun for older juveniles, too.

**For an impassioned and thorough explanation of the mycorrhizal network, take a look at the Las Pilatas Nursery site.

Reading my latest catalogue – for a plant lover inclined to be distracted, this time of year has many perils – I discovered, yet again, something new and amazing: hardy date palms. From Russia.

For me, catalogue reading is something akin to a pleasurable meditation with a sacred text. Each entry conjures a slightly different vision of Paradise. I read them over and over, moving my lips to the holy words, making notes in the margins like a Talmudic scholar, probing the deeper meanings. To drag me away from catalogue-reading is to pull me out of Eden.

So when I say that hardy date palms were a revelation to me, you know what it means.

Of course I have seen palms in odd enough places that I knew some were kind of hardy. By kind of, I mean that they tend to look scruffy and discontented, but they persist. There are two palms in my area which live in this kind of half-world: one is protected by an old church wall and courtyard; the other is in a hot spot in a hot microclimate. I’m not good on palms, so I don’t know what type they are: short and stubby, with a few tattered brown-edged leaves, is the best description I can give. No matter how warm or protected the spot, my zone 8 climate (with occasional dips well below freezing) has not been my idea of the place for palms.

When it’s cold, it’s pleasant to dream about a tropical (or at least semi-tropical) paradise. My Western Garden Book showed me that palms are a many-genused  family; Phoenix, the genus date palms are in, has several other species. All palms like shade when they’re young. Considering their natural habitats, this makes sense; bigger trees and shrubs would shade them as seedlings in the wild.  Palms of every variety are used as garden plants, potted plants, and specimens, as far north as Edinburgh, southern Russia, and the Pacific Northwest.

One Green World, whose catalogue gave me the vision of my hardy date palm, is located in Oregon: their palm tree section is headed by a picture of a very healthy-looking Windmill Palm growing in a nearby town. They’ve had a long-term association with breeding programs in the former Soviet Union, resulting in some unusual offerings in fruits and other edibles. (They also have an edible lily from China: the roots are used like water chestnuts.) The eight hardy palms they offer are from the town of Sochi, Russia, where they have naturalized.

Sadly, the date palm they offer does not bear edible fruit (this is often the case with borderline plants), but it is hardy to 12 degrees F (-11 C), which means it would just squeak by in a cold spell in my climate. (It’s a little disconcerting to think that my area has the same climate as southern Russia, but never mind.)

The Jelly Palm, Butia capitata, is a  slow-growing South American tree which “produces long spikes of attractive white flowers followed by juicy, tasty yellowish-orange fruit which ca be eaten fresh and is used to make tasty jams and jellies.” For those who have never had them (I’m sorry), fresh dates are about the same color. I don’t know if the flavor of Jelly Palm fruits is similar, but it’s tempting to try. It’s self-fertile and hardy to 15 degrees F (-9 C), which would make it a possibility…

Here’s one gateway to paradise. Ask yourself : “Where would palm trees fit in my garden?” If you garden in a temperate zone, it brings on Rousseau-like* absinthian surrealistic visions. If you’re in the tropics, it may lead to thoughts of working with the natural landscape, which gets pretty surreal itself, when you think about it deeply. In either case, you’re envisioning a new kind of garden, a place where plants of many cultures meet happily; a place where miracles happen: a Paradise.

*Henri, not Jean-Jacques.