Virginia is for Lovers….err…Gardeners! (Part 1)

I am sure it is for the former, but since I am single :-(, I thought it best to focus on the beauty of the gardens.

During my recent trip to the Richmond area of Virginia, I got to visit Monticello (there will be more posts from that visit soon), however my other aim for traveling to Virginia was to see the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens.

I absolutely LOVE our Franklin Park Conservatory, but I am always excited to travel to other cities and patronize their botanical gardens to learn and see more.

Founded in 1984, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden is located on 80 acres just outside the downtown area. A public place for the display and scientific study of plants, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden is one of only two independent public botanical gardens in Virginia and has the designation of a state botanical garden.

This will also be a multi post article since there was sooooo much to see. One of the places I made a point to focus on during my visit was the “Healing Garden”. All of my readers know my interest in natural medicine and the healing power of both vegetables, fruits as well as herbs and other plants.

The Healing Garden reflects one of the fundamental uses of plants - for medicine and healing. Upon walking the main promenade from the visitors center to the glass conservatory, to the left you will find a small garden whose size and symmetry recall medieval cloister gardens. It is designed as a place for spiritual healing through contemplation, meditation and reflection. To the right, the elliptical beds accentuated with an oversized granite mortar and pestle reflect the medicinal significance of plants. This garden style is inspired from the1545 Renaissance Garden in Padua, Italy.

I spent quite a bit of time reading the placards for each of the areas and of course picked up some tips on plants I have and those I want to acquire for my home pharmacy.

If you are in the Richmond area, it is a marvelous place to spend the day...for more information check out their website at http://www.lewisginter.org/

Happy Gardening!

Discovering the Genius of Thomas Jefferson (Part 4): Bringing Inspiration Home

I knew when I visited Monticello that I would be inspired, but I never thought it would be so directly. Many of you know from a recent blog post that I am planning a round garden bed to go in my back yard as an attempt to add vegetable planting space to the garden (my needs and desires have outgrown the space of the original potager). I have been struggling with the design to make it round and the right size and what to surround it with. Originally I thought about making individual quadrants and having an ornament in the center, but after visiting Monticello, I have revised those plans.

The pictures show a perfectly sized round bed surrounded by bricks sunk in the early longwise and with a bit of mortar in between. I was immediately struck by the design and have decided to emulate it in my own garden. I will put a couple of stepping stones in the garden to allow me to maneuver and weed the garden.

The only thing I am going to change is the color of the brick, it is perfectly appropriate to have the red brick at Monticello, but my garden and back yard are primarily flagstone so I thought red brick would not look good, so I shopped around and finally found a brick color that will match the flagstone! I am going to pick it up this weekend and hopefully start on this bed in a few weeks to get ready for planting fall crops in August!

Happy Gardening!

Discovering The Genius of Thomas Jefferson (Part Three), Where's the Water?

Monticello is a wealth of information and ideas for the amateur and professional botanist and gardener and sustainability nerd (that pretty much sums me up).

One of the questions I had before visiting the “mountain” was how the crops were watered? I know Virginia has an average amount of rainfall, but that is not adequate to keep the kind of garden that Jefferson maintained properly irrigated or the trees for that matter, particularly at the top of a small mountain. I questioned how the crops were kept alive, the household water supply maintained, etc.

Water is available pretty much everywhere but on Monticello. At the north base of the mountain there lies a small stream where water could have had to be drawn, brought up to the house and stored, there is also an ice house on the property (more about that in another post) where run off from melting ice and snow could be harvested for small amounts of water and finally there are springs on neighboring Mt. Alto that Jefferson had planned on tapping and transporting via aqueduct to the Monticello but never accomplished in his lifetime; so how was the water collected for the plants?

Jefferson engineered a system of rainwater collection that collected water from the house roofs as well as the expansive north and south promenade porches. He designed and installed four cisterns to collect that rainwater, each over 3,200 gallons to supply water for irrigation as well as cooking, bathing and other uses…the idea of “the grid” hadn’t even been invented yet, so this was definitely living off of it!

Happy Gardening!

Discovering The Genius of Thomas Jefferson (Part Two), Creating Microclimates

One of the interesting things I learned on my garden research trip to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home in Virginia is how the 18th and 19th century amateur botanist and gentleman gardener managed the climate and seasons on his mountaintop home and still managed to grow some incredible specimens of warm area crops such as artichokes, certain grapes and other fruits.

While most of Virginia resides firmly in the USDA hardiness zone 7a today which has a shorter winter and a warmer summer; 200 years ago there was a much colder climate in the area of Monticello and particularly at the elevation of this “little mountain”. The trick, I was to learn, was the fact that he created the garden plateau as well as the trellised gardens below. By creating the plateau, he created a space for the sun’s warmth and light to hit the plants all day long (positioning the plateau from east to West). He enhanced the climate of the lower gardens by taking the large rocks and stones from the excavation of the upper plateau to create a rock wall to hold back the plateaued earth. The rocks absorb the heat from the sun and reflect that heat to the grape arbors and fruit trees below. This was way ahead of the time that Jefferson lived, particularly in the new United States. While microclimates have always existed and were definitely exploited by primitive agricultural societies, this knowledge was lost during the world's rush to industrialize.

Creating micro-climates in our gardens doesn’t have to take an army of workers (thank goodness), you can add medium to large rocks in certain beds like I have in my herb garden. You can also locate the beds specifically to capture surrounding heat (near a house or other large structure, in full sun, in part shade, etc.). By creating climates, you can grow certain plants that may not be specifically designed for your hardiness zone.

To learn what your zone is and what plants do best in it and the surrounding zones, visit http://www.usna.usda.gov/Hardzone/ushzmap.html

Happy Gardening!

Discovering The Genius of Thomas Jefferson

I have always been an admirer of Thomas Jefferson. As a founding father and third President of the United States, the history book version was always painted as a patriotic leader; but his life as a gentleman farmer and gardener is what finally lured me to visit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in Virginia. But what I discovered on my visit there was more than I had hoped.

For my first blog post I am going to talk about, what else? Vegetable gardening!

The Monticello kitchen garden was created by enslaved people on his plantation by carving out the side of the mountain the plantation resides on. The garden plateau or shelf is 80 feet wide and 1,000 feet long and is supported by a massive stone wall built from stones excavated during the carving of the shelf.

The garden served as a laboratory where Jefferson planted 330 varieties of more than 70 species of vegetables. Only some of this produce was actually used by the plantation and much of the produce consumed by the residents of Monticello was either from the surrounding farmland or purchased from the enslaved people on the plantation from their own gardens for extra money.

The garden also includes a fruitery and vineyard that is planted in smaller terraced steps below the kitchen garden.

As you can see by the pictures of the garden, it is a massive undertaking that was maintained in small part by Jefferson himself and mostly by a select group of skilled enslaved gardeners.

I took hundreds of pictures of plants, garden structures, etc. on this trip, I will be learning lessons from Monticello for years!

Happy Gardening!

Holy Hail Damage Batman

So I came home from my fantastic trip to Virginia to find extensive hail damage in the garden :-( some of the plants did not survive which did not make me very happy, but many others did and will hopefully survive without issue. Only time will tell. The weather so far this year has not been favorable to the gardener and or farmer...I hope the rest of the season is kinder!

Happy Gardening!

Crazy Ideas

The garden is just sailing along, things are growing, maturing and being harvested (the lettuce and carrots have sustained me for a month!) The beets are being harvested this week for what I hope is a good week or two of delish beet salads! Other than weeding and watering, there is not a whole lot of new activity in the garden to report, so I can enjoy the space and live in it.

Well when that happens, I start to get crazy ideas. I was sitting on the patio this past weekend enjoying a cup of coffee and reading an interesting book on Urban Homesteading ( more on that in future posts) and really committed to creating my pantry and root cellar this summer. Well to do that I also would have to have more crops to put in and up in the cellar. That lead to the thought of needing more growing space for vegetables which lead to a discussion (in my head) of aesthetics. The way the balance of my back yard is shaped, adding more rectangle beds would look very awkward and I believe a garden has to be both beautiful and functional so my mind drifted to different shapes.

The space available for garden beds is pretty much square so I thought of my dining room and how my round dining room table is absolutely perfect in the square space of the room and then it hit me! Design a circular shaped garden in the middle of the space! Above is my rendering of the new bed.

In my excitement, I want to build this bed right now...however, the practical person says we are heading into the height of summer, I would not be able to plant until fall after double tilling and ammending the clay soil and then I might not eek out much of a growing season or harvest, so the plan is to do more measuring and drawing and plotting of what exactly this bed is going to look like, how big it is and how much I can plant in it and build the bed in the late part of the summer and into autumn so it can be ready for spring planting...I will keep you up to date!

Happy Gardening!