Succession plantings and paying attention to plants

I attended a most interesting symposium 'Speaking of Plants' this weekend at the NC Arboretum.  The draws for me were Fergus Garrett (Head Gardener and CEO at Great Dixter, an amazing garden in the south of England developed by Christopher Lloyd) and Carol Reese, an Extension Agent from Tennessee, who has an excellent reputation as a speaker. Neither disappointed.

Fergus Garrett was remarkable. An excellent plantsman and gardener, to be sure, he articulated a continuing vision for Great Dixter in a way that brought it to life, and his second talk about plant combinations and succession planting was excellent -- I wanted to sign up immediately for a week-long course at Great Dixter, and I'm not really a practitioner of intensive gardening.   But I loved his focus on plants and their characters;  pay attention to their foliage, not just their flowers, he said, and how they look throughout the season.

It was an great symposium (even if way too heavy on the lectures; as an adult learner (and consumer of such programs), and a program organizer for adult programs myself, I think a MAXIMUM of presentations is 3 per day, and that's stretching it, even if they're 45 minute presentation.

We had 4 the first day, and 3 the second -- all for an hour and 15 minutes, with time for questions only with the final speaker!  Yikes!

You've got to provide some balance: interaction with other participants, garden walks with the speakers, garden study tours --- anything to get your audience of keen gardeners outside and refreshed a bit, before diving back into presentations.

entrance to the upper parking lot at the NC Arboretum

The NC Arboretum is looking great.  I particularly admired this planting at the entrance to one of the parking lots.

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Succession plantings for vegetables

Those of us in warm climates have LONG gardening seasons, and fall vegetable gardens do wonderfully well, with the hardiest kales and cabbages overwintering for spring harvest. Often winter varieties of lettuce and spinach overwinter, too, providing a head start on late winter and early spring growth.

It's hard to imagine on a hot, humid August day, when parched plants are grateful for the hose.

My second round of squash and tomatoes are doing well, although the dry weather is encouraging powdery mildew on squash leaves.

Not surprisingly, the root-knot nematodes problems in the main vegetable garden weren't vanquished by the supposed predatory nematodes, but I did get quite a few squash and beans from early plantings before they went into decline (and show the definite knobby galls of root-knot nematodes on their roots).

But fall is not far away, and I'm thinking about the different varieties of kale, spinach, and lettuce (as well as beets, chard, and turnips) to sow in the coming weeks. And maybe I'll put in a round of fall edible flowers: calendula, borage, nasturtiums, and violas.

This time of the year is definitely trying for Southern gardeners. A friend who writes the weekly garden column in our main regional newspaper had a great piece today that describes our August gardening dilemmas. It's hot, it's humid, and we need to be out there early in the morning or in the evening. And those darn Asian mosquitoes that have invaded the Southeast in recent years are really annoying (they fly all day long and reproduce in a drop of water). So even those of us who never had mosquitoes before have these, making repellents (however nasty) an unfortunate necessity.

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