Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia
Over 40 Years of Growing Gardens and Gardeners
We’ve survived a long siege of fairly relentless heat this summer as July brought day after day of 90-degrees and higher, with humidity also pushing the limits. Some plants love the heat and are thriving, while others have passed the flowering bursts of spring and early summer and started setting seed or gone dormant.
Members of the 2015 Master Gardener training class and proctors supporting the class recently had the opportunity to hear a presentation by Smithsonian horticulturist James Gagliardi on herbaceous plant selection and usage. Those who were not able to attend the lecture can still benefit from his knowledge in a book to which he was a major contributor. Smithsonian Encyclopedia of Garden Plants for Every Location, a 2014 Dorling Kindersley publication, features information on over 3,000 plants.
During National Pollinator Week we challenged you to test your pollinator identification skills. Each day we featured a pollinator or two on our Facebook page with clues to the identity. This week we provide answers in three parts. Part 1 focuses on bees, wasps and flies.
As the days become longer and warmer, we crave lighter foods, and especially fresh, seasonal produce. This quick-and-easy way to use asparagus will impress and delight anyone you serve it to, even if it's just yourself.
We’ve edged into May, smack in the middle of spring. The delight we gardeners take in the arrival of the season has been tested this year. After the long cold winter, spring finally arrived about mid-April. And then it had second thoughts and retreated, only to turn the heat up to almost 80 for a day or two and then retreat again. Rain has fallen pretty regularly. So while we can’t quite trust the season (what’s new about that? “April is the cruelest month,” said the poet in 1922) and we struggle with its fickleness, still we rejoice. And then we take stock of what winter meant to our particular plots: What died, what lived, how is the seasonal progression going this year?
It's the time of year when Gardeners talk enthusiastically about “Spring Ephemerals,” using this term to describe native wildflowers, such as Virginia Bluebells, Trout Lily, Toothwort, Spring Beauty, Bloodroot, Trillium and Woodland Phlox. The word 'ephemeral' often means short-lived, but in the case of native plants, transitory is more accurate.
