These herbs also make fantastic infused oils: rosemary. tarragon, parsley, chives, and cilantro.
Urban Gardening: Produce for Apartment Dwellers
If you have no space or time for a garden (or are plagued by critters eating your goodies before you get to them), try creating hanging vegetable baskets. According to experts, almost anything can be grown in a basket, but be sure to get compact-growing varieties of the vegetables you want. Buy fourteen-inch-diameter wire baskets (sixteen-inch for zucchini or watermelons). It’s best to grow one type of vegetable per basket, although a variety of lettuces or herbs will work well together.
Line baskets with sphagnum moss and fill with potting soil. Plant seedlings rather than seeds, and hang the baskets outdoors from patios or rafters where they will get at least four hours of afternoon sun. Avoid overwatering seedlings, but once they become established, be aware that you need to feed and water frequently; on the hottest days, they may even need to be watered twice a day! Once seedlings are three weeks old, fertilize every three weeks with an all-purpose soluble fertilizer, but never feed unless the soil is damp.
To be beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of nature.
—Richard Jefferies
Easy-Care Gardening
Too busy to care for a vegetable garden on your own or don’t have the room? Consider what one hundred thousand folks around the United States do—“buy” shares in someone’s large garden. All shareholders agree to pay a certain amount per year and in exchange get weekly baskets of produce. Depending on where you live, deliveries can be anywhere from twenty-two to fifty-two weeks per year.
Like most good ideas, this one has a name—Community-Supported Agriculture—and an organization, CSANA. According to CSANA, shares usually cost between three and six hundred dollars per year. (Many offer discounts for labor, since the work is shared, no one is overburdened, and there’s the added bonus of meeting fellow gardeners you might not otherwise know.) For more information about the six hundred farms that belong to CSANA, contact them at (413) 538-4374 or email to [email protected]. Their web address is http://www.umass.edu/umext/CSA.
I am not…certain that I want to be able to identify
all of the warblers. There is a charm sometimes
in not knowing who the singer is.
—Donald Culross Peattie
Remembering Lilacs
I suppose the garden behind my grandparents’ house was small, but to a four-year-old it seemed immense. The distance from the back door to the end of the yard was a journey from the safety of home, across an expanse of grass, around orderly flower beds, and finally to the marvelous wilderness of the tall, old lilac hedge. I discovered that a persistent push would let me enter a cool, green space under the branches of the lilacs. There I daily established my first household, presiding over tea parties for an odd assortment of stuffed animals and the patient family cat.
Now, nearly seven decades later, the heady scent of lilacs takes me back to that garden where I took those first ventures toward independence—though never out of sight of the familiar back door.
Unless the soul goes out to meet what we see
we do not see it; nothing do we see, not a beetle, not
a blade of grass.
—William Henry Hudson
House Blessing: Farmers’ Market Potpourri
Even if you don’t have a have a citrus orchard out back, you can still make your own home-freshening mix of potpourri. Even better, you can make lemonade, limeade, or orange juice, then slice up the remainder of the fruit. Lay the rind in slices on a big sheet pan and let them dry. Add dried rose petals, bunches of lilac, lavender, and rosemary, or mint for a wonderful, fresh scent. Tuck into muslin bags and tie up with a pretty and colorful ribbon, and you have a lovely all-occasion gift for housewarmings and holidays. Truly a blessing for any home.
The only conclusion I have ever reached is that I
love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
—Aldo Leopold
Butterfly Haven
If you want to increase the butterfly population in your yard, there’s a wide variety of flowers that will attract them, including common yarrow, New York aster, Shasta daisy, coreopsis, horsemint, lavender, rosemary, thyme, butterfly bush, shrubby cinquefoil, common garden petunia, verbena, pincushion flowers, cosmos, zinnia, globe amaranth, purple coneflower, sunflowers, lupine, and delphinium. In creating a butterfly-friendly place, consider that they also need a wind protection, a quiet place to lay eggs, and water to drink.
If you want to see a butterfly garden before you get started, many botanical societies have them. In Washington, DC, the Smithsonian just opened one adjacent to the National Museum of Natural History. Good guides include: The Butterfly Garden by Mathew Tekulsky (Harvard Common Press) and Butterfly Gardening by Xerces Society/Smithsonian Institution (Sierra Club Books)
Butterfly Bush
There are somewhere around a hundred species of Buddleia, commonly referred to as the butterfly bush. The colorful flowers, ranging from white to pink, orange, and purple, attract an assortment of butterflies, including commas, mourning cloaks, sulphurs, monarchs, and several species of swallowtail.
Milkweed
For those wanting to attract monarch butterflies to their gardens, nothing does the trick like planting milkweed, the host food plant for monarch caterpillars. Milkweed also attracts the viceroy, Baltimore checkerspot, mourning cloak, queen, great spangled fritillary, zabulon skipper, and question mark butterflies.
Parsley
A favorite among culinary herbs, parsley is a primary host food for the black swallowtail butterfly larva.
Alfalfa
Alfalfa is a host food for clouded yellow, orange sulphur, and Karner blue butterflies.
Fennel
Also known as sweet anise, fennel is another favorite host food for many swallowtail caterpillars.
Clover
Common white or red clover will attract a whole host of butterflies to your garden, including common checkered skippers, painted ladies, buckeyes, sulphurs, gray hairstreaks, sleepy orange, eastern tailed-blue, silver-spotted skipper, and variegated fritillary.
Verbena
Sulphurs and zebra longwings will be drawn to the nectar of most species of verbena.
Queen Anne’s Lace
Another beautiful and easy-to-grow flowering herb, Queen Anne’s lace is a host food for the anise swallowtail.
Daisy
Most varieties of daisy are favorite nectaring flowers for mourning cloak and queen butterflies. Daisies are also a host food for painted lady caterpillars.
Hollyhock
Alcea, commonly known as hollyhock, is a host food for painted lady,