amazing epimediums for your shade garden, plus: get ready for seed starting (my best practices)
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Hello ,
I will confess right off, I love epimediums, but apparently not as much as Karen Perkins, who boasts the largest selection of these choice perennial plants for sale in the United States. Though often thought of by gardeners as simply a tough groundcover for dry shade, epimediums are much more, Karen says.
Karen has since 2009 owned Garden Vision Epimediums, a small retail mail-order nursery located in rural central Massachusetts, and founded in 1997 by plant explorer and epimedium hybridizer Darrell Probst.
Learn about the range of sizes and uses, and flower and leaf forms and colors, and what other choice shade perennials play well with epimediums, too.
make this your best seed-starting year ever: all my top tips
I woke up a few mornings ago like a woman with a mission: to start my best crop of seedlings ever. So many things can adversely affect seeds sown indoors.
- too little light (maybe also too much);
- the intensity of the light source;
- temperature, and even day-night temperature difference;
- improper fertilizer use;
- leaving seedlings in “germination chamber” conditions (extra-warm and humid) too long, under that plastic dome or on that heat mat or both;
- the spacing between seedlings can affect the way they grow, too;
- …and the list goes on...
No, it’s not time here in Zone 5B to sow most things—yet—but it is time to study best practices, and set ourselves up right before the first seed hits potting soil. I reviewed and then updated my top two stories on seedling success, hoping they might help you, too:
hands-on seed learning: 3/23 'seedy saturday' (join us!)
This might just be my favorite event of the year–Seedy Saturday, at Turtle Tree Seed across “town” from me, in Copake, NY. The 9th annual event is March 23, and what’s not to love about a gang of pent-up gardeners sowing seeds madly together?
Learn to start seeds like a pro—both the timing, techniques, and aftercare—and go home with a flat full you sowed yourself, plus shop from 350 organic kinds with our personal help. Come on: Get out of the house and join us.
recap: an eye for great perennials, from wave
hill
In my quest for a wider plant palette and ideas on how to put plants together with a confident, bolder hand, I asked advice from Director of Horticulture Louis Bauer of Wave Hill, the renown garden in New York City long praised for its dramatic plantsmanship. How do Louis and his team find all these goodies and figure out how to use them so spectacularly?
We talked about advantages of growing from seed; about extra-cooperative little plants like certain sedges and Erigeron (fleabane) that can beautify even tough spots like at the roots of trees; about using pots to announce garden areas, and the signature plants of each of the distinct gardens at Wave Hill, too—like larkspur, to name one. Uh-oh, more beauties to covet!
have you been able to start the march chores yet?
I’m like the kid in the backseat on the way to the amusement park, with my one incessant question: “Are we there yet?” Intensifying light and the sounds of early March—yes, those are the first serious bird songs and woodpeckers are drumming too—will do that to a person. There is much to do in the garden in March, but not so fast:
Except in frost-free zones, there are really two March chores lists: one labeled, “If frozen…” and the other, “If thawed…”
I’ve got the short course to get your started—8 things I plan to do as soon as the slippery conditions relent here. And I’ve got the longer version, too.
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