Indian Pink (Spigelia marilandica)

Tubular Indian pink flowers are red on the outside, yellow within, and borne in upward-facing terminal clusters.

Of the summer native wildflowers, few are as reliable and pretty as the Indian pink. Mine are planted in the speckled sunlight beneath a large magnolia where they have survived and thrived for the past nine years. They bloom for only three weeks, but the hummingbird-luring flowers are worth it. The plants also gently self-sow, as one would expect from any woodland native worth planting.

Spigelia marilandica Description

The early days of summer find the woodland pinkroot ablaze with starry yellow-centered flowers that open from scarlet red buds. This garden-worthy herbaceous perennial is native to the open woodlands of the southeastern United States. It was traditionally used by Native Americans to treat intestinal worms because of the plant's alkaloid properties, so another common name is wormgrass.

The lance-shaped, rich green leaves are lightly glossy and held in opposite pairs along the stems. In the warmth of late spring, stem tips yield one-sided spikes of red buds. The buds opens show tubular, starry flowers that are red on the outside and primrose yellow within. Hummingbirds are lured to the blossoms. Seeds are formed in midsummer and typically germinate before fall frost.

Grow woodland pinkroot in moist, sandy, slightly acid soils with moderate drainage. Full to partial shade are tolerated, though plants tend to bloom best if provided at least 6 hours of sunlight per day. Plant this long-lived perennial in wooded gardens, along pond edges or in summer flower borders. To learn more, visit The Native Plant Information Network.

Growing Cucumbers

My first experience growing cucumbers was a fiasco. I failed to amend the soil properly, feed and water them enough early on, and then they developed a bad case of powdery mildew. My plants yielded only a few small fruits. That was about 20+ years ago. Since that unproductive season, I’ve mastered growing these  fast-growing annual vines – and you can, too! The great thing about cukes is once they’re happy, they produce like gangbusters! Before you know it, it’ll be time to break out the tzatziki and pickle recipes and find friends willing to take a few off your hands.

Cucumbers (Cucumis sativus) are frost-tender, warm-weather vegetables; which means they grow when days and nights are relatively warm and the sun is at its brightest. They tend to sprawl but can be trained to grow on a support to save space and make harvesting easier.

A simple cucumber trellis

The vines are lined with large, prickly, green leaves and produce two types of yellow, funnel-shaped flowers, male and female. The pollen-producing male flowers bloom first, followed by the fruit-producing female flowers. Female blooms are easily identified by their elongated, bulbous ovaries at the base, which are destined to become cucumbers. The flowers are pollinated by bees, so smile when these productive insects visit your plants, and refrain from using broad-spectrum, non-organic pesticides that will kill them. (Look out for the small, native squash bees that like to visit cucumber vines!)

Cucumber size, shape and color depend on the type of plant you grow. No matter what variety you choose, proper site selection and good soil preparation can make or break your cuke-growing success.

Lots of cucumber types exist. Americans are most familiar with slicing cucumbers, which tend to be large, broad, and thick skinned when mature and have tougher, bigger seeds. In contrast, thin-skinned Asian cucumbers are long, straight and small-seeded as are English types. Pickling cucumbers, which include gherkins, have a pleasing shape when young, dense flesh and are picked immature, when they are most crisp.

The unusual Lemon cucumbers are produced on heat-tolerant vines.

Several varieties are better adapted to hotter, drier growing conditions. These include lemon, or dosakai, cucumbers, which are almost completely round, yellow-skinned, and originate from India. Israeli Beit Alpha cucumbers are smaller, seedless (parthenocarpic), sweet-tasting, and well-adapted to dry climates. ‘Socrates’ is a larger Beit Alpha cultivar worth growing.  Another favorite, heat-tolerant “cucumber” is the curved, thin-skinned Armenian cucumber (Cucumis melo var. flexuosus), which is technically not a cucumber but a melon (Cucumis melo) variety.

Full sun is essential for good growth and fruit production, so choose a planting location that’s open and sunny. Deep, friable, well-drained soil high in organic matter yields the best crops. The best rule of thumb is to dig and work up the soil to a depth of a foot or more, then amend liberally with good compost. The more room your plants’ roots have to develop, the healthier the plants. If your garden is at a low topography, create raised berms to plant your cucumbers. (Generally, I start my seeds outdoors in 4-inch pots and plant them once they’ve reached 3 inches long and the threat of frost has past. Other home gardeners may opt to direct-sow the seeds following packet directions.)

Feeding and watering cucumber vines are simple tasks: Just apply good organic fertilizer (like Black Gold® Tomato & Vegetable Fertilizer) early in the season and make sure established vines get a deep application of water twice a week (by rain or hose). The next consideration is deciding whether or not to trellis your plants.

'Slice Master' is a classic American slicing cucumber.

Trellising has lots of advantages: It saves space, makes harvesting easier and encourages airflow, which discourages foliar diseases. Some standard trellis types are vertical ladder trellises, bentwood or teepee trellises. Trellis-grown cukes will be straighter than ground-grown. If you don’t mind your vines on the ground, be sure to pad the ground with hay or straw. This will keep your cucumbers clean and discourage rot, as well as keep weeds down. If you don’t have a lot of gardening space, you can grow dwarf cucumber varieties in large containers.

There are a few cucumber pests and diseases to be mindful of. Striped and spotted cucumber beetles are the worst of them. Both pests are elongated, around ¼ an inch long and have beaded antennae. Striped cucumber beetles have bands of yellow and black stripes, and the spotted ones are tannish-yellow and are typically marked with 12 black spots. Both chew on the leaves and vector a nasty bacterial wilt disease that can kill vines. The best means of defense is to use botanical insecticidal sprays like pyrethrum-based sprays, always carefully following label directions. Begin to spray when the plants are young, and refrain from spraying when bees are actively pollinating the flowers. Squash bugs are another common pest that can be eradicated using this method. Aside from bacterial wilt, powdery mildew is the second most common disease of cucumber vines. (The organic fungicide, GreenCure®, clears up powdery mildew fast and is safe to use.)

So, whether growing cucumbers for pickling or slicing, feel confident you can cultivate happy cucumbers this year. By fulfilling just a few smart steps, neo gardeners can avoid a first-time cucumber catastrophe and enjoy a cornucopia crop instead!

Christmas Tree Care

Christmas trees are like giant cut flowers, living a short but happy life before hitting the burn pile. It's what they are grown for, so there's no reason to feel too sorry for them. (Most don't take Hans Christian Andersen's story of The Little Fir Tree very seriously.)

The length of a tree's life in the house is contingent on good care--meaning regular food and water. Starting with a really fresh tree is also important. Tree choice can also hold some sway; firs are generally more resilient than most pines, and their needles are nicer to the touch. If you don't cover the bases, you'll quickly get a sad, crunchy specimen, and a festival of dry needles on the floor. Here are some tips to keeping your tree happier for longer:

1. Start with a really fresh tree. Cutting your own from a farm is the most fun and freshest.
2. Get a good tree stand able to hold ample water. The headache-free Krinner Stands work really well.
3. Dissolve in each gallon of tree water 1 1/2 cups corn syrup and 1/4 cup of lemon juice. This will feed the tree. Some also add 1/4 cup of bleach as a preservative.
4. Always make a fresh cut at the base of the tree with a sharp pruning saw before immersing it in the tree water.
5. Check the tree water regularly and make sure it does not go dry.

All Christmas trees eventually shrivel, but these steps will slow the process.

You don't have to toss your long-gone tree after the holidays either. Another option is to place it near a window in the yard and cover it with birdseed ornaments for wild winter birds. It's nice for the kids and hungry winter animals.

Leaf Power! Fallen Leaves Protect Plants & Make Amazing Compost

Fall leaves are underused. Most homeowners just rake and bag them away without a thought, but leaves are a sustainable source of superb mulch and compost. And when they sweep into fall gardens, they also create a vital protective layer that helps perennials, even tender perennials, overwinter.

So, why don't more people convert their leaves into mulch or compost? It's hard to say because it takes about the same amount of time and effort to prepare leaves for mulch as it does to bag them. Compost takes a bit more work but is well worth the effort.

Leaf Mulch

Called either leaf mold or mould, the perks of leaf mulch are many. It's lightweight, breaks down quickly, doesn't bind available nitrogen like bark mulch, it's attractive, and most importantly, it's free. It also provides long-term benefits. Once broken down it improves soil organic content, and worms, soil microbes, and other soil benefactors love it.

Don't rake away those fall leaves! Collect and use them.

Just a few things are needed to get leaves to the right consistency for mulch: a leaf blower/chopper, leaf piles that are suitably dry, and a place to pile the mulch over winter.

Begin by neatly raking dry leaves into stick-free piles. Prepare your leaf blower to chop leaves (the chopped leaves are usually stored in an easy-to-transport catch bag). Begin chopping the dry leaves and empty them into a designated pile spot. Leave them uncovered through winter. The leaves will break down a bit in the pile's interior making them darker and better-suited for mulch. In spring, use the mulch to dress beds as needed.

These chopped leaves collected in fall will convert to functional, attractive leaf mulch by spring.

Leaf Compost

Leaf compost is rich, fertile and provides the garden with much-needed organic matter. It's easy to make too. Simply prepare the leaves as you would leaf mulch, by raking piles and chopping them up with a leaf blower/chopper. (Chopping them hastens the composting process, but is not absolutely essential.) Then contain the leaves in a composter. Be sure your composter is large enough to accommodate your leaf mass. The pile needs to be at least 4 feet high and wide to generate enough internal heat to properly compost. Refrain from packing the leaves tightly, good aeration helps the composting process. I suggest building a two or three binned composter to house compost.

Turning chopped leaves into wondrously fertile compost takes a little more effort than leaf mulch. The piles must be kept moist, turned, and sometimes treated with supplemental nitrogen. Once the leaves are in the composter, wet them through from top to bottom. Water is needed for the leaves to break down properly. Available nitrogen is needed for organic material to breakdown, and leaves are low in nitrogen, so it is helpful to sprinkle in some high nitrogen fertilizer. Organic options, like Espoma Dried Blood Nitrogen, are available. Once leaves have been wetted and nitrogen added, give the pile a mix with a pitch fork.

After only a month or so, the pile should be hot in the center and breaking down into compost. Properly decomposing piles will shrink. Be sure to turn piles intermittently as aeration helps the process. Well-tended compost takes 4 to 8 months before it's ready to use. The final product should be dark, soil-like and crumbly.

Leaf Cover

In fall, when the leaves sweep into perennial beds, I leave them until spring. The beds don't look perfectly finished under these circumstances, but the overwintering success of the plants is much higher. The leaf layer protects the plants below from cold extremes. It even seems to protect susceptible plants from crown rot. This method has been so successful, that in my Zone 7 garden I’ve been able to get frost-tender Canna, and Dahlia tubers to overwinter for the past few years.

So use your leaves. They're easily turned into the good stuff, and otherwise they'll just get dumped into the local landfill.

Leaf mulch has a rustic, woodsy feel and breaks down quickly to improve the soil.

Dr. Gordon Frankie on Combating Bee Deserts

For my soon-to-be-released bee article appearing in The American Gardener magazine, I was fortunate to have interviewed the amazing Dr. Gordon Frankie, native bee expert extraordinaire and professor at Professor of Urban entomology at UC Berkley. His Urban Bee Lab website and new book California Bees & Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists fuel bee lovers with the knowledge and tools to create bee habitats at home and ultimately fight what he refers to as "bee deserts". These are bee-free areas created by poor local garden culture and bad planting choices, something gardeners can easily combat.

And flower power is necessary to preserve the huge natural, agricultural and economic benefits bees provide. According to Dr. Frankie, “Habitat destruction is harming our bees the most. Before development destroyed and fragmented our natural areas, there were fields and fields of wildflowers. Bee pastures were everywhere. Now almost all are gone. If gardeners don't recreate them at home, bees starve."

Frankie's awareness of bee deserts arose from his studies of bee populations in urban habitats. In his research, he found that bee density and diversity correlated to differences in garden culture and plantings among cities, resulting in either bee havens or desertous barrens. Extensive bee sampling trips across California showed stark differences in populations among major metropolitan regions.

“Not everyone likes bees, but when it comes to natives there is little to fear. Most are solitary and don’t or can’t sting. Stinging is for defending a hive. Bumbles can sting but rarely do. People often confuse aggressive, hive-forming, meat-eating yellow jackets and wasps with vegetarian bees. But don’t worry. Bringing flowers into your yard won’t invite these bad guys.”

— Dr. Gordon Frankie

For example, San Diego is a bee desert, according to Frankie. “We have conducted numerous sampling trips and find little in the way of bees there,” he told us. In contrast, Santa Cruz and Berkley have the richest diversity in bee species in the state of California. He attributes the difference in the regional plant culture of nurseries, landscapers and gardeners. Areas where landscapes have repeat plantings of the same simple, low-maintenance plants with low habitat value consistently show very low bee counts. In contrast, communities with diverse gardens and landscapes with lots of native blooming plants contain lots of diverse bees and other pollinators. 

“It’s truly a cultural problem,” says Frankie. “Lose the agapanthus and evergreens and choose high-value flowering plants instead!” This starts with what local nurseries stock. When they stock the good stuff, gardeners buy and plant it.

And bee plants tend to be as interesting and cool as the people that plant them. “Gardeners need to discover how beautiful and valuable native bee plants and bees are. It doesn't take much. In our area, a gardener created a 30 x 30 foot bee garden where we identified 68 species of bees!" Plant for bees, and they will come.

It also helps the local economy. Ultimately, all bees make us money and keep our natural areas healthy. They are responsible for pollinating many of the nation's crops. So, the need to create habitat for bees goes beyond crunchy granola "help the Earth" mantras, though these are generally valid and appreciated.

So, what should you plant? In another article, I created a running list of 10 excellent bee plants for the American East, where I live, which can be accessed here. Frankie also suggested several common garden flowers that bees go crazy for, like common cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus), sunflowers (Helianthus annuus), lavender (Lavandula spp.) and African Blue basil (Ocimum 'African Blue'). Then the trick is to provide a full season of bloom by planting good bee flowers for spring, summer, and fall, so they have a buffet throughout the growing season. Dr. Gordon Frankie suggests growing no less than 20 diverse bee flowers per garden.

Once you plant the right things you can start “bee watching”, suggests Frankie. Appreciation and inspiration starts with a better understanding of the bees themselves. You will be surprised how a few simple plantings will change your bee culture.