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plans for stashing tender plants; easy skins-on applesauce to can or freeze
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Hello ,
It is not time quite yet here for what I call the mad stash, storing those non-hardy plants for the winter that we wish to keep alive for another year of service. But it is time to make some plans to do just that.
Marianne Willburn, author of “Tropical Plants and How to Love Them” and a serious mad stasher, is here to help us puzzle out what goes where for best results. Even how to make our houseplants happiest all winter (like the ones at her place, above). We’ve both been stashing many kinds of investment plants over many years, with wins
and losses along the way. So we wanted to compare notes to help you fine-tune your strategic plans for adapting spots in the house, cellar, garage, wherever, to improve your overwintering results with tender treasures. Plus: Enter to win a copy of the book. easiest skins-on applesauce to can or freeze My family calls it "pink 'po sauce," with the
“po” representing the last syllable of the word “apple,” the way my beloved niece pronounced it when she was small. One fall weekend, as I hurtled by to give a lecture out their way, I met my brother-in-law at Exit 9 off I-90 to deliver the first load of Pink ‘Po Sauce (aka easy skins-on pink
applesauce) that started life on my century-old trees. Sigh of relief: 11 quarts and 5 pints moved from my freezer to theirs. Another day that year, my friend Katrina filled the back of her car with my apples, heading home to cook them up, and many neighbors have been the recipients of boxes of apples, apples and more apples, too. It’s applesauce time, and here’s how that goes. recap: coping with invasive jumping worms The question “What do I do about the Asian jumping worms that are destroying my soil?” has outpaced what was the most common thing I was asked, year in and year out, for decades—the relatively simple challenge of “How do I prune my hydrangea?" Now
gardeners from an ever-widening area of the country are voicing this far more troubling worry about an invasive species that seems to be on a mission of Manifest Destiny. The invasive worms are now present in at least 38 states and several Canadian provinces. Ecologist Brad Herrick from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, has been studying jumping worms for a decade and is here to share the latest insights. Brad is the ecologist and research program manager at the
UW-Madison Arboretum, where the staff first noticed their destructive handiwork in 2013. He explained what tactics and products researchers have explored to try to limit the spread, and how they work, and whether we should keep mulching and improving our soil as we always have despite their presence, and more... and we also talked about how he's coping. freezing herbs for offseason use I hate paying a couple of dollars for a bunch
of organic parsley in winter (or chives, or cilantro, or sage, or…). As summer starts to wind down each year, I start freezing them—not a perfect substitute for fresh, perhaps, but very good, and economical. How to freeze herbs for winter use (or
anytime). |
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