Garden Talks January 27, 2008

Hello again,

I spent some time listening to our good friend Paul Parent on the radio early this morning. I definitely recommend the Paul Parent Gardening Club as a great gardening resource. He can be heard weekly in the Portland area on Sunday mornings at 6 AM. Check out Paul's website at www.paulparent.com.

Paul made many good points this morning including:

January and February are the best months to have large trees in your yard pruned. These trees are largely dormant at this point; if you wait into the Spring the sap in the trees get running and open wounds and infection can result.

We take many questions from gardeners about why their lupine don't come back that well after terrific first years in the garden. Yet if you are riding along Maine roads in mid to late June you cannot help but see bountiful bunches of flowering lupine. Why can so many of us NOT grow lupine well (we give it wonderful soil, regular feedings and all types of favorable conditions)? Paul has put some thought to this and he came up with a wonderful idea. The summer grass that gets matted down in winter probably well protects the lupine plants in our Maine fields from the harsh winter weather. So for the last couple of years Paul has planted his lupine in his garden BUT in the middle of early season flowering perennials such as ground phlox or Candy Tuft (Iberis). Any good ground cover will do! And sure enough his lupine is prospering in his garden! I have a sunny sort of wild section in my yard that gets pretty grassy as the season progresses. I am going to try some lupine myself there.

Paul also had a guest on who spoke about a number of exciting perennials. This guest reminded us that coneflower (coneflower should be a staple in ANY of our perennial gardens) cut right from the garden makes a fragrant and long lasting cut flower in a vase. So let's remember this in the summer. Purple, orange, yellow and white coneflowers--one of my favorites make a GREAT flower for us to enjoy indoors!

Over and out for now!

Thanks for reading the Skillin's Garden Log!

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Mike Skillin
Skillin's Greenhouses
January 27, 2008