Sustainable Gardening for a Healthy Planet
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I just learned about the Plant and Seed Finder from Mother Earth News. It’s a Google-based search tool for 150+ online plant and seed catalogs–simply type in the specific name of the plant or seed you’re looking for and you can quickly find all the different online suppliers. Very handy indeed this time of year.
Happy spring!
I’m in North Carolina visiting family, so please excuse these short posts. More regular blogging by the end of March.
Whenever I put the word “porn” on my blog I get lots of hits. I need all the help I can get, so as a sort of follow-up to my post on the science behind variegated leaves, here’s some variegated leaf porn from Roger Williams Park Botanical Conservancy in Providence.
Variegation is when plant foliage, stems, or flowers have more than one color. It’s most often found in leaves. The most common leaf variegation colors are white, cream and yellow, but there are many others, including pinks and purples.
Cats can also be variegated, but I’ll leave that phenomena for the pet bloggers to explain.
I’ve been reading a bit lately about butterflies and how to attract them to your yard and garden. It’s important to plant flowers whose nectar attract butterflies, but don’t forget the larvae (caterpillars). Many butterfly (and moth) caterpillars only eat specific plants. The best known example is the monarch butterfly caterpillar, which eats only the sap from Asclepias species, or milkweeds, including butterfly weed (A. tuberosa) and swamp milkweed (A. incarnata).
(Author’s note: At this point let me acknowledge that it is a cheap ploy on my part to publish butterfly photos with this post. I should be posting caterpillar photos, but really….who wants to see those.)
Remember how I was making fun of the amaryllis’s puny leaves? Look at them now that the blooms are gone….which, by the way, was kind of depressing to watch. As Curt put it, the flowers were really beautiful but they died a horrible death.
Now, however, I feel like the amaryllis is in its second incarnation. A little more boring, perhaps, than when it was in all its finery, but still inspiring as winter ever so s-l-o-o-o-o-w-l-y creeps to a close.
