Garden Rant

Rant on the Road: Baltimore, CT, and NY

It's spring and I'm back on tour for the paperback of Flower Confidential.  If you're in Baltimore, CT, or NY, I hope you'll stop by and say hey.

Friday, April 4 12-1
Discussion & Booksigning
Walters Art Museum Art in Bloom
Baltimore, MD

Tuesday, April 15, 7 pm
Discussion & Booksigning
RJ Julia Booksellers
Madison, CT

Wednesday, April 16, 7 pm
Discussion & Booksigning
Horticultural Society of New York
New York, NY

Thursday, April 17, 7:30 p.m.
Discussion & Booksigning
EARTH NIGHT, Flowers and Food for Thought
Rye High School Performing Arts Center
Milton Road
Rye, NY

Is It National Garden Month Already?

Wow.  It feels like the last National Garden Month just ended!  Like, today.

But here we are on the brink of April 1, and according to this here press release, the National Garden Bureau (a non-profit run by representatives of the seed industry with the goal of 'disseminating accurate information about gardening') and the National Gardening Association (a non-profit with a more diverse group of horticultural types on its board; its aim is to provide 'plant-based education') have teamed up to celebrate National Garden Month.

There's a festival in Manhattan's Union Square called NYC Grows, sponsored by Target, Lowes, Scotts, and others, which is described on the National Garden Month website as an event that will (I'm not making this up) "provide opportunities for national, regional, and local companies to demonstrate their social responsibility to, and create brand awareness among, consumers interested in making their lives more 'green.'"

Create brand awareness.  That's the actual, stated, right-there-on-the-website goal of this event.

And it seems to be the only real, official event of National Garden Month.  Other than that, we are encouraged to troll the website for Easy Garden Tips, search an online calendar for garden shows or 'educational programs' in our area, and generally celebrate the 'endearing and enduring love of nurturing plants.'

So get out there, folks!  Enjoy National Garden Month while you can! 'Cause it's going to be over in..uh... a month!  Oh, and don't forget about that brand awareness.  You're gonna need that.

Rule Britannia

There’s no escaping the gardening mother ship. English gardeners have made their influence felt everywhere. We read their books, we try to grow their favorite plants (which often fail here), and we visit their masterpieces. A lush and gracious reminder of the British urge to plant and landscape remains in the form of the Taormina public gardens, located right next to the hotel where we stayed.

Lady Florence Trevelyan (1852-1907, shown above) was a distant relative of Queen Victoria and spent much of her youth at Balmoral, where she and Victoria would discuss their shared interests in birds and botany (here are the two, below).

However, Trevelyan fell prey to the notorious charms of the future Edward VII, who was already married. This sort of thing never went over well with Victoria, so Trevelyan was asked to leave England in 1879. She settled in Taormina, where there was already a community of British aristocrats, married Salvatore Cacciola, a wealthy professor, built a villa, and, with the help of 40 Sicilian farmers, created the gardens. They were left to the town in her will.

If these gardens were not situated high above the bay with a view of Isola Bella and Etna, maybe they wouldn’t be so special. But they would still be distinctive, largely because of several structures, somewhat inspired by Asian architecture, scattered about.

I wasn’t able to climb into them, but they may have been intended by Trevelyan for bird-watching. There are lovely walkways bordered by olive trees, some neatly clipped shrubbery designs, bulbs, and plenty of tropicals. The gardens are on 3 different levels, which also adds to their charms. There’s also a weird rock array and, even stranger, some odd remnants of WWII, including a two-man submarine/torpedo that the Germans used. They’d have to stay in it long enough to send it on its way and then the pilots/drivers (?) would ditch.

One doubts if vintage armaments are exactly the kind of focal point Lady Florence would have wanted; what you see above is more like it. But kids love the little torpedo. It is kind of cute.

Breaking our hearts and coming back for more

Last summer, I followed a long thread (41 comments) on Cold Climate Gardening discussing the attributes (or lack thereof) of the Endless Summer hydrangea. This cultivar is supposed to bloom continuously on new wood, thus enabling gardeners in colder zones to enjoy macrophylla blooms on a hardier plant.

Bah, humbug, said many of the CCG commenters, speaking of 1-2 measly blooms per season, bushes barely making it to 6 inches above ground, muddy coloring, and other horrors. Yet, this is a plant that has been hyped to high heaven and still is: “a range from Florida to Zone 4!,” “amazing prospects,” “Flowers virtually all season long!”

A couple days ago, I came across some verbiage for another new-and-improved hydrangea, “Blushing Bride:” As the 'Blushing Bride' continues to grow, it is continuously forming buds that will flower all season long. Prompt removal of the faded blooms will encourage new growth and even more new blooms. (Who promptly removes hydrangea blooms?)

How gullible do they think we are (you might ask)? Sadly, the horticultural marketing world has every reason to believe that gardeners are right up there with buyers of wrinkle cream and diet pills in America’s vast kingdom of suckers. Look at all the roses, especially hybrid teas, that bloom continuously, are strongly scented, and disease resistant. Then there are the first-year-bloom wisterias. Then there are all the full-sun plants marked for “partial shade.” (That’s my personal sucker cue.) Like the hydrangea, the promises are endless and free of any consequences. After all, who’s to say what might happen in any given yard with any given conditions, no matter how incredible.

I’m jilted every season by at least one plant if not many. Most recently, the culprits have been a brugmansia (never did anything), 3 veronicas (disappeared), and 3 rudbeckia maximas (don’t remember seeing them a few weeks after after I planted them). It’s easy (if horrible and scary), to check the mail order ones beccause I save the confirmation emails; plus, they’re the most hype-laden. This is why I grow so many annuals; they’re much easier to track and you learn your lesson in one season.

Though will we ever learn? Gardeners are easy to fleece.

Mother Nature Is Easy

The current issue of NewScientist has a fascinating interview with Chris Reij, who studies natural resource management in Africa.  (Sorry, the site is subscription-only.) In Niger, he's seeing farmers fight the desertification brought on by climate change--and the creeping Sahara--with the most low-tech of solutions: They're allowing trees to grow up on their land.

They're defying the rules of modern agriculture, which demand treeless fields, and also bad policy that has long made trees government property, giving the farmers every incentive to chop them down and sell them for firewood. And since the trees provide food for their livestock, they've now got a manure source to improve the soil and make it that much less likely to dry up and blow away.

This story makes me think that Mother Nature is amazingly cooperative, and it takes a really towering arrogance to screw up a relationship with her.

Buddy, Can You Spare A Cypripedium?

Just a few days ago, I settled into bed snugly with Fortune magazine, thinking that I'd really enjoy the Q&A with economist Paul Krugman, whose New York Times column I generally like.

Did I enjoy it?  No.  In fact, I enjoyed it so little that I couldn't sleep afterwards, something my bedtime reading hasn't done to me since I was in the fourth grade and reading those hair-raising Alfred Hitchcock stories under the covers with a flashlight.

What did Krugman tell me?  That house prices still have a long way to fall, that the Fed could cut interest rates to zero and it still might not nudge this economy upwards, that Japan went ten years without a recovery, and that America is in really new territory here when it comes to the sources of economic pain:

It seems to me like every few weeks there's another $300 billion market I've never heard of that has just collapsed. And there's credit cards, auto loans - I don't know what's next. But it's clear we're going to have a commercial real estate crash not too far short of the severity of the housing crash.

I thrashed about for two full hours after turning the lights off, worrying away at the important questions: whether I really needed six dwarf cherry trees at $32.95 apiece, and how on earth I was going to do without the pair of iron Monet arches I was thinking of ordering from Smith & Hawken.

"Quick and easy" concrete leaf castings? You're kidding, right?

by Susan
I was recently asked what's up with the phrase "bored with perfect magazine gardens" in our Manifesto, and it got me thinking.  Honestly, my biggest gripe with gardening magazines isn't the perfection of the gardens they show us or even the sometimes tedious writing.  No, for me it's their insistence on cheerleading for every new plant, product and technique.  Plants seem to always perform well, suspiciously well.  And everything's "quick and easy."

The latest case in point is the step-by-step spread in the new Fine Gardening about concrete leaf castings.  Here's what I agree with: that they're a "lovely and inexpensive way to enhance your garden with an imprint from the foliage found in it."  What they decidedly are NOT, at least for me, is "quick and easy" or "virtually foolproof".

Now, I'm no art teacher like the author, just your average dabbler in the garden and toolshed.  But I've made at least 150 of these things, testing a variety of ingredients and methods, and I've produced more than a fool's share of castings that break, and an even larger number that just look like crap.  Not to mention the ones that can't be hung on a wall because the hook I inserted didn't work, or I just forgot to use it at the right time.

But here's why so many of them look like crap, including the finished casting shown in the article.  It's because when the concrete goes beyond the outside edge of the leaf the result doesn't look NEARLY as nice as when it's piled carefully along the edge of the leaf - with just the right consistency, mind you, so it doesn't ooze over the edge.  Still, the extra bits need to be filed off - at the exact right time in the curing process.  It's all pretty challenging and time-consuming, but worth it, I think, for the look you see here.  See, I also encourage people to try leaf castings, but not because they're "quick and easy."

So if you read the four pages of instructions in Fine Gardening and wonder why it looks so damn complicated, you're not alone.  It's not just you; the project IS complicated.

MORE CONCRETE PROJECTS
Something else that isn't "quick and easy" is making hypertufa pots.  No way.  Attend a workshop, sure, but doing it at home is a serious undertaking.

But a project that really IS quick and easy and fun for practically any age is the making of concrete pavers using cake pans.  It still requires supervision by adults, and the fun little doodads inserted into the wet cement may or may not stay in the pavers, and who knows how long the thing will last, but who cares?  Everyone loves them.

Review: Hardy Succulents

by Susan
Just when we need them the most, gardenwriters and publishers are hard at work showing us the plants we'll be relying on increasingly in the age of global weirding known as climate change.  You know, with not just longer droughts but rain, when it comes at all, being dumped on us in worsening downpours. Gardening is getting trickier and we need help!

So along come writer Gwen Kelaidis to educate us and photographer Saxon Holt to inspire us with droolable photos of Hardy Succulents, which will help spread these super-drought-tolerant plants to zones that experience freezing winters.  Kelaidis has grown these babies in New York, Wisconsin and Colorado, so I believe her when she says they'll survive the half-hearted winters of Maryland.

SEDUMS - LOVE 'EM, GOT 'EM
Sedums are the soil-and-exposure-tolerant species that's already become commonplace, at least the taller 'Autumn Joy' and its cousins 'Matrona' and 'Neon'.  Yep, got 'em, and recommend them all the time as among the most sustainable perennials in the world for almost any situation.  I even have a big ole' collection in pots on my deck, and they take total neglect quite happily.  But here's what I just learned from Kelaidis - there are sedums that prefer shade.  Gotta check into that.

ICE PLANTS - WANT 'EM
This book also explained for me why I don't often see see ice plants grown here in the Mid-Atlantic - they balk at clay and need a rock garden-type medium to grow in, like sand and gravel.  And I found this interesting - that although they come from tropical South Africa, ice plants have retained their residual hardiness from back in the era before the continents drifted apart, when Africa was farther north.  See, I didn't even know that South Africa is tropical, and continent-shifting always gets my attention.

CACTUS - YOU CAN HAVE 'EM
True desert plants look ridiculous here in the East  - to my eyes.  Same goes for yuccas, which are grown around here.  But hey, to each their own and if you like them, you'll have Kelaidis to thank for expanding your options.

BOTTOM LINE
I LOVE this gorgeous, inspiring, info-packed book for gardening in the Age of Climate Change and highly recommend it.  The practical advice even includes which plants are affordable in which situations and design ideas that take cost into consideration (thank you!).  It's clear that the author actually grows these plants herself, including 200+ varieties of what she lovingly calls "semps". (The nickname alone makes me want some Sempervivums.)

About the photographs, we've praised Saxon Holt before and this new collection will only enhance his reputation as an outstanding garden photographer.  He e-mailed to say they were taken at "Ed Snodgrass's green roofs in Maryland, Stonecrop in New York, Peckerwood in Texas, and at Tony Avent's Plant Delights, among many other private gardens." 

NIT-PICKING
Now comes the part where the review lives up to the blog name.

• Kelaidis says that succulent ground covers do well on steep slopes, but how does that square with the warning in Covering Ground (also published by Storey and reviewed here) that creeping sedums don't have long enough roots to prevent erosion on hillsides?  I care because I'm trying to replace lawn with creeping sedum on a hillside myself.
• On the subject of staking sedums, why not just follow the sound advice of Tracy DiSabato-Aust and hack 'em back?  Kelaidis does suggest buying nondrooping varieties instead, which is also a good idea.
• Language.  Are hens and chicks really "beguiling"?  And do sedums "enchant the eye"?  Maybe so.  And the language I prefer - describing my favorites as "awesome" or "cool" - admittedly isn't exactly literary and may explain why I'm writing online and not in glossy books. (Ironically, the author does use the bizarre word "coolth".)
• The dog-lover in me wanted to insert this important point about agaves - they're dangerous!  Seriously, dogs have been known to lose an eye to those spikes, and they can certainly hurt toddlers, too.  Cats I don't worry about; they're much too smart to crash into spiky-looking plants at full speed.

WE NEED 'EM
The important point is that some succulents are hardy as far north as Zone 3, for crissakes, so with increasing pressures on our dwindling water supplies, now's the time to give them a try.  I bet the Washington Post's Adrian Higgins would agree, because this week he wrote this piece about the effects of last year's drought on our plants.  It's part of a twofer, with his companion piece "A Word to the Water-Wise: Start Tilling" explaining how to prepare our "soil" for these super-drought-tolerant plants, listing local demonstration gardens, and more.  Time to get ready for the Great Drought of 2008.

Photos (c) Saxon Holt, from Hardy Succulents by Gwen Moore Kelaidis.

No Comment.

Spotted at the Garden Show: The Botaniwipe

How I envy the parents of small children.  No, it's not because they get to experience the greatest love of all, or the joy of seeing the world through a youngster's curious eyes, or the cozy satisfaction of knowing that the family line will be unbroken.

It's the butt wipes.

I mean, how awesome would it be to always have a plastic box of oily little wipes in a bag on your shoulder? Just think of the messes you could clean up.  The grime you could remove. The clean, shiny surfaces you would create.

If only there were butt wipes for my plants!  Yes, that's what I need!  My plants, who are like children in so many ways, except that I don't let them in the house, I don't give them anything to drink or eat all summer, and I cut their heads off in the fall--except for that, I really do love them so much that I find myself wishing that I could wipe their butts as if they were the children I never had.

And look!  Now I can! These people are mind-readers! How did they know?

Botani Wipes.  My life is complete.

Just drink it

Some house offerings (probably from an Etna winery) we had at a tiny pizzeria high in the hills above Taormina.

Sticking to the “Sicily only” section of the (many, many) winelists in Taormina was no problem. More and more of the wineries on the island are avoiding international grapes and overoaked methodologies to focus on the best of the native (give or take two thousand years) Sicilian varieties: nero d’avola, nerello macalese, inzolia, and cattaratto, to name just a few. These are tangy, citrusy whites and deep, earthy, somewhat acidic and often cherry-dominated reds. They’re great food wines. I also tried out the almond wine made by a few different producers there; it’s yummy, sherry-colored and sweet (most people really like sweet wine, though they pretend they don’t). Sure, there are Sicilian wineries making some great cabernets and chardonnays, but I didn’t bother. Which works well in Sicily.

But imagine if I was presented with a native grape section at any restaurant in America, featuring wines made from vitis labrusca grapes such as Concord, Niagara, Norton, and Catawba. Grape juice, fine. Wine? I don’t think so. Though a lot of wineries in America are using these grapes with perfectly acceptable results, most of us are thanking heaven for such pioneers as Dr. Konstantin Frank in New York and Wendt and Gallo in California, who focused on the great vitis vinifera varietals.

When it comes to wine, native can mean a lot (in Sicily) or nothing (in Buffalo).

Conquered once more

Poor Sicily. As if the Phoenicians, Saracens, Spaniards, Greeks, Roman, and Normans weren’t enough, our stay in Taormina (from which we just returned last night) made it very clear that plants from other parts of the world are not just encroaching on native species here: they’re a characteristic part of the landscape.

Take opuntia (prickly pear cactus), which grows by the roadsides, in the fields, on the lower slopes of Etna, and everywhere else it can fulfill its minimal needs. I’m not sure when the plant was introduced, but it has certainly been embraced: in pots, gardens, and as rampant roadside weeds. They use it in folk remedies and make a liquor from it (among many delicious fruit liquors Sicily specializes in—even more than Campania).

I came to see native wildflowers—which I did see—but I didn’t expect to see this much opuntia and agave. Perhaps a slightly more welcome invasive was the wisteria, in bloom everywhere.

Well, for that matter, olive and lemon trees came from somewhere else too, though it is hard to imagine this place without them. Especially when they’re as big as your head:

Does it matter? Well, with a place that has seen so much human history, I guess I’m looking for some measure of authenticity, some sense that what’s there has always been there. What that is in Sicily might not always be the specific plants, but it would be the almost constant evoking of dichotomies like lush/barren and poor/extravagant at every bend in the road. It may not be a native landscape but it says Sicily—to me, and I suspect many others.

Next up: native grapes. No need to prevaricate there.

Stop the Mulch Madness!

This just arrived in my Inbox from Mother Earth News and I'm happy to pass it along:

"This week Mother Jones magazine released the article Mulch Madness about Atchafalaya Basinkeeper Dean Wilson’s efforts to stop the illegal and unsustainable cutting of cypress for cheap mulch. Right now the cypress mulch industry is destroying wetlands that protect coastal LouIsiana from hurricanes. The article is online at:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/03/louisianas-mulch-madness.html

"Waterkeeper has been working with Dean and organizations across the Gulf Coast to save our cypress forests. We’ve made great progress. In June 2007, more than 200 Louisiana sities, universities, churches and other organizations have pledged to stop using cypress mulch.  Month later, Wal-Mart and Lowes announced they would stop or limit buying and selling cypress mulch from Louisiana.

"This is a great start but the threat remains. We have a long way to go to stop the mulching of the nation’s coastal wetland forests.  Our gardeners hold the key. We believe that gardeners must know the truth about cypress mulch, and will stop using cypress mulch when presented with the facts.

"Again, thank you for your help spreading the word."

Edible Landscapes (and Ed) on Chow.com

Check out this article on the food website Chow, all about growing food in the front yard.  I was interviewed for the story and got a tiny little mention and a link but the interviewee I suggested to Chow - our friend Ed Bruske - made MUCH better copy and ran away with the whole story, photos and all! 

Well, it couldn't be helped because when the reporter asked me about neighborhood reaction to my modest little veggie garden and I had nothing interesting to report, I knew she HAD to talk to a real urban farmer like Ed.  Some of his neighbors have posted such vicious and personal attacks in anonymous comments on his blog that it's a wonder he hasn't turned it all back to lawn.  Which I suppose is their goal, but they don't know Ed.

The "Mouse and Trowels", and the Power of Awards

by Susan

Remember last year when Colleen first announced the Mouse and Trowel Awards to honor online gardening and we all knew instantly it was a great idea?  Then almost 500 of us voted and the happy winners got to put little badges on their sites and blogs and call their endeavors "award-winning".  And the whole enterprise brought attention to our community.  In a fit of pompous proclamation worthy of cable TV, I called Colleen "blogosphere-changing," something I just assumed must be true and see no evidence to the contrary so that settles it.  Anyway, online gardeners are indebted to her for going to a LOT of trouble not in hopes of winning awards herself but just to promote good garden writing on the Web.

2008
Well, it's that season again.  Bloggers are asking their readers to nominate them, because who doesn't want to be nominated?  Lord knows WE do, so we humbly suggest you give us a nod.  And don't forget our individual blogs if they've amused or enlightened you over the past year.   Here's the link to the nomination form.

BLOG CATEGORIES
There are lots of cool blog categories to choose from again this year and even 2 new ones:

• Best New Blog, a category many of us lobbied for and I can't wait to see the nominees.
• Blog Post of the Year, which is a bit more challenging but the results will surely be worth it.  I'm more of a skimmer than a reader elsewhere on the Web but here on the Rant I read every word so I'll be nominating: Michele's "The Commencement Speech No One's Invited Me to Deliver",  Amy's "Confessions of a Fake Memorist," and Elizabeth's "Welcome to my Nightmare".

WEBSITE CATEGORIES
Beyond the blogosphere, the categories are pretty discouraging.  There's no Best New Website category, and these three categories from last year have been discontinued: Best Informational Gardening Site, Best Plant/Seed Source, and Best Gardening Magazine Site. Seems that there was low participation by us voters, and there's a perception that they don't fit in with the other awards.  So gardening websites are down to Best Forum and Website of the Year.

Bummer! See, I get excited about promoting good gardening information websites, making it easier for the public to FIND them.  Instead of the crawlers that steal from us all.  Instead of the income-dominated sites that have more ads than content.  Instead of the corporate sites that are filled with products we're supposed to buy.  And instead of sites that require payment in order to read them.  A few of us webmaster types interested in offering high-quality alternatives to all the crap online have banded together to help Googlers find the content-oriented sites, but we're few and far between.  Whole regions of online gardening information are still missing.

So readers, how about voting for that little band of webmasters as a way to encourage others to start content-oriented sites, too?  By nominating Regional Garden Gurus you nominate all of us and more to come, plus all the other good sites we link to.  (Of course you're invited to peruse our individual sites for possible nominations, too.) "Website of the Year" sounds awfully grand and we thought we had a better shot at "Best New Website" - but enough whining from me.  Start nominating right here.

GARDEN WRITERS ASSOCIATION AWARDS
Of course we're HOPING that the blogging community rallies this year and goes nuts nominating sites for the two remaining website categories so that the website Mousies make a comeback next year but just in case, I did a little lobbying of the GWA Awards Committee on behalf of the electronic world.  You may remember they have zillions of categories for writing, editing and photography in PRINT, and scant mention of "electronic" efforts, a category that includes everything on the Web, plus DVDs, podcasts and television.  Well, I recently ran into the Washington Post's Scott Aker - he's the guy responsible for these awards - and asked if new categories would be created, at least one for each unique medium that falls into that supercategory, and his response was superdiscouraging.  Oh well.  Their entrance fees would inhibit participation by most of us anyway.  (GWA awards are a fundraiser for the association.)  Here are their 2007 winners.

So bloggers, until something else comes along, it's up to us to encourage and reward websites in our chosen niche, so let's go for it.

The Dirt Chronicles

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll writes about everything, and today 'everything' just happens to be gardening.  Buying dirt and ripping out the front yard, to be specific.  Two of our favorite activities.  Check it out here.

Get Outta The Yard!

The Wall Street Journal has a fun piece today about invasive bamboo and a slide show that includes other invasives, too. (Sorry, the link won't work if you're not a subscriber.)

I have personal experience with two of the invasives in the slide show:

Garlic mustard, which blooms so fiendishly early that I'm always busy in the vegetable garden when it needs to be yanked.  It also continues blooming, as the Journal mentions, even after you pull it out of the ground, and it blooms when it's just a few inches high, so it's absurdly prolific.  At least it's yankable, unlike

Purple loosestrife, which laughs at Round-Up and being cut back before flowering and whose roots are so strong that I'm unable to remove them even with a pick-ax and lots of martial-arts-like shouting and grunting.  I'm completely stumped by the loosestrife around my pond and have reconciled myself to a color scheme that takes it into account.

I Heart My Electric Chipper Shredder

10:30 a.m.  The McCullough  Electric Garden Chipper with pile of brush to be conquered.  It's a bad photo--sorry about that--but this pile is 2-3 feet tall and maybe 10 feet long. Blackberry bramble, smallish branches, that sort of thing.  Been accumulating all winter.

1:30 p.m.  Pile of brush--gone.  Compost pile--hot and yummy.  The brush pile shredded down to three tubs' worth of compost--maybe 9 cubic feet in all. That represents about half of my newly-turned compost pile. The rest of the pile is chicken manure (thanks, girls!) and a little green waste.

I've had this electric chipper-shredder for several years now.  I pull it out two or three times a year when I have a pile of reasonably dry garden waste to shred.  If it's too green or wet, it will clog the blades.  If the branches are more than about a half-inch in diameter, they won't go through the hopper.  It's great for someone like me who doesn't have big trees to prune, but has lots of flowering perennials that need to be whacked back.

It's an expensive toy for generating mulch--I could buy three cubic feet of really good stuff for under ten bucks, so why spend hours outside shredding my own?--but it's more fun than paying somebody to haul off my otherwise un-compostable green stuff. 

Best of all:  it's electric.  The GardenRant World Headquarters was recently contacted by a certain manufacturer of gas-powered garden tools, and although we found it hard to resist their offer of free tools in exchange for an honest review, none of us wanted a gas-powered anything.  Is it a chick thing? An environmental thing?  A safety thing?  All of the above, probably.  All I know is this:  I don't have to pour gasoline into anything else I own to make it run (other than the car), so why should I need gas for my garden tools?  It's also incredibly safe, Fargo-wise.  As far as I can tell, it would be impossible to get your fingers anywhere near the blades even if you wanted to.

If you're considering getting one, a few thoughts:

1.  You'll probably only use it a few times a year.  If I had a lot of gardening friends in the neighborhood, I might have talked to them about pooling our money and sharing the shredder.

2.  If I had lots of big branches to deal with every year, I would probably be better off renting a big ol'  gas-powered thing a couple times a year, maybe with some neighbors, and just having a giant shred party.

3.  The assembly instructions are worse than useless. I get emails all the time from complete strangers begging for help.  The photo on the left should answer the burning question you will have when you get to a certain point in the assembly process. (click to enlarge)

4.  And finally--if you do buy one, try one of the links below and see if they give you either free shipping or a discount (whichever you'd rather have.)

Free Shipping!

Gardener's Supply Company - 15% off orders of $25 or more!

Meanwhile, I'm done chipping for another season!

Another swag report

As Amy has noted, the Garden Rant bloggers have become increasingly inundated by unsolicited offers from various companies that make garden-related stuff. (I’m sure you all remember the Sloggers.)

We try to ignore a lot of this. But sometimes it’s hard to resist, as pure as we’d like to be. We do promise to be totally honest about the stuff we do get—maybe our comments on certain products might even help our fellow consumers.

So far, I have received the following:

This scary thing arrived on our doorstep a few weeks ago. It has been unwrapped, assembled and now resides in the basement, until good weather. Reeling in shock that this is my first composter? Well, keep in mind that I have a small, urban space, totally devoted to decorative gardening, and largely covered in pavement. Also, there have been comments made by the other household member, who holds exaggerated views on what composting will look and smell like if allowed to take place. He was also taken aback by the size of this equipment, remarking “When you’re feeding it make sure not to put your hand too close to the opening. You don’t want it to get a taste for human flesh.”

But after promising that there would be no unpleasant sights or smells, and that nobody would even suspect the composter was present, I have the go-ahead to try this out. Maybe there are some beginning compost-makers out there who will benefit from my newbie experience. Stay tuned!

BTW, I'm with Amy on nixing anything gas-powered. But I will be trying out some small, electric-powered devices, which I'll be posting about.

About.com's gardening coverage just got a lot better

Sure, I've been known to pick on the New York Times-owned megasite About.com, but I'm happy to report the very good news that they've chosen Colleen Vanderlinden of In the Garden Online as their organic gardening expert.  Congratulations, Colleen - you deserve it - and kudos to the folks at About for A, recognizing that organic gardening needs to be covered and B, having the good sense to choose Colleen.  We can all sleep soundly, knowing that SHE won't be touting the wisdom of Jerry Baker.