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Experienced gardeners are well aware of this reality and have even come to enjoy the ephemeral nature of their outdoor spaces.
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To loosen your clay soil, grow the comfrey plant. Better yet, it'll entice bees and other pollinators to your yard. Used as a mulch, fertilizer, compost accelerator, pollinator attractor, and clay soil breaker, the comfrey plant is an invaluable addition to a garden. As long as you don’t live in the plant’s invasive range, you can gain a lot of benefit from planting it. The first comfrey shoots appear in spring. By June it has grown waist high with a multitude of pretty bell-shaped, pink to purple flowers, each one with a tiny bee’s bottom protruding from the end as they feast on the rich comfrey nectar. I let the bees feast for a few weeks before taking my first harvest, cutting the stalks at ground level and then roughly chopping to add a much-needed nitrogen boost to my cold, carbon-rich sleepy compost. Within a few weeks, new leaves have sprouted 12-15 inches long and are ready for harvesting to feed the now-hungry vegetable and fruit crops. Comfrey foliage is rich in potassium and trace minerals, magnesium, and calcium, perfect for tomatoes, peppers, and pumpkins. And so, the cycle begins for at least another two harvests. That’s at least three to four harvests per season. What’s not to love about comfrey? Comfrey is a hardy herbaceous perennial and a member of the borage family, Boraginaceae, which includes borage, forget-me-nots, echium, brunnera, and cerinthe. There are two main species of comfrey, Symphytum officinale, also known as common comfrey native to Europe and Asia, and Russian comfrey (Symphytum x uplandicum), a naturally occurring hybrid first discovered in Upland, Sweden in the 1800s. It has naturalized in parts of Canada. S. x uplandicum is a cross between common comfrey and Symphytum asperum, the blue-flowered rough or prickly comfrey originating in Russia. Common comfrey has been cultivated since ancient Greek and Roman times when it had medicinal use primarily as a poultice to heal broken bones, bruises, and other injuries, hence the common names knitbone, knitback, and bruisewort. Although similar in appearance and cultivation, there are some key differences between common and Russian comfrey. Common comfrey can reproduce via seed dispersal, making it invasive in certain parts of the world. Russian comfrey flowers are sterile, therefore propagation is through cuttings and division. Russian comfrey leaves are larger, producing higher yields. The first green shoots of comfrey emerge from your garden bed as basal growth from its crown in mid-spring. It quickly forms a large clump with leaves 12 to 15 inches long, lance-shaped, green, and roughly textured with lots of tiny prickly hairs that can be a skin irritant. As late spring ebbs away and the temperatures rise towards summer, thick branching flowering stalks push up from the crown with smaller leaves. Clusters of drooping tubular bell-shaped flowers appear, ranging in color from yellow, pink, purple, and blue, depending on the species. At full height, comfrey can reach three to four feet. Comfrey dies back naturally after flowering. The heavy stalks often collapse and are quickly replaced by new shoots. Cutting back the plant before it goes to flower will speed up the process of regrowth. Cold autumn temperatures initiate winter dormancy.
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Do you have an American beech tree on your land that you’d like to preserve and maintain for many years to come? Perhaps you’re thinking about transplanting a young, container-grown American beech somewhere near your home? These U.S. natives can become massive, living for hundreds of years if healthy. Plant biologist Emily Estep will tell you everything you need to know about the great American beech. The American beech tree is an iconic species in the eastern United States, native all the way up through Canada and down to the tip of Florida. These enormous perennials can grow up to 80 feet tall with branches surprisingly low on the trunk. Due to their size and the amount of shade provided by their leaves, you absolutely must have enough space before committing to this tree. Fortunately, this native beech is a fairly low-maintenance tree as long as it gets enough water. There’s not much you need to do for this perennial when it’s planted in the right spot in the right zone, and you may enjoy gathering its edible nuts in the fall. Like other species in the Fagus genus, there are a few detrimental diseases that find their way into these trees, so if you’re growing one, keep a sharp eye out. If you’re somewhere in the range of zones 3 through 9 and looking for a giant centerpiece tree, read on to learn more. The American beech is a large, deciduous tree. It is the only one out of 13 total beech species that is native to the United States, found growing naturally throughout the eastern third of the country. Large, open areas are the best locations to plant these trees due to their immense size. They produce edible beechnuts that ripen in the fall. This enormous tree can grow up to 80 feet tall with a trunk that may get up to three feet wide. It has smooth, gray bark, and its branches are relatively low. American beeches may live for up to 250 years. Note that growing other plants in the shade of this tree can be challenging, between the dense canopy of leaves and shallow roots that can monopolize the soil. American beech is native to the eastern United States and Canada, growing as south as northern Florida. This temperate region experiences seasonal weather, ranging from freezing, snowy winters to hot summers, especially in the southern tip of the range. Transplanting established American beeches is difficult because of their shallow root system and enormous size, but you can purchase container-grown options to transplant instead. You can also grow these trees from collected beechnuts.
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Magnolia trees are beloved by many gardeners for their fragrant blooms and dark leafy foliage. There are many different magnolia trees to choose from, so where do you start?Magnolia trees are prized for their elegant shape, their beautiful foliage, and their overall hardiness. But the real star of the show are their large, fragrant, and beautiful flowers that perfume the air with their redolent, lemony, sometimes musky and spicy, and all-around pleasing fragrance. With both evergreen and deciduous varieties, the variation of size, bloom formation and color and hardiness is far reaching. These beautiful trees are famous not only for their beautiful scent, but for their magnificent blooms, commonly flowering in whites, pinks and purples. The bloom is the state flower for both Mississippi and Louisiana. Adding a magnolia tree to your landscape takes time and planning. Ensuring your tree has proper care and maintenance will go a long way to help them achieve their full growth potential. Keep reading to learn about the many different types of magnolia trees, as well as everything you need to know about their maintenance and care.Deciduous magnolias should be planted when they are dormant, with bare branches. In warmer climates, this makes the best planting time late fall to early winter. In colder climates, they can be planted after the ground thaws in spring. Evergreen magnolias should typically be planted in the spring before they flower. Always try to plant when no flowers are present, as changing the environment will shorten the life of the blooms. Dig a hole that is 50% wider and just slightly less deep than the root ball. The upper most root should be slightly above the undisturbed soil, and about 25% above the ground if planting in soil that is clay heavy. Fill in the hole with the soil dug from the hole, but do not cover the top of the root ball. A bit of mulch is fine to cover the roots that are above the soil level. Water the tree in right after planting.In warm climates, newly planted magnolias should be watered deeply, 2-3 times per week, for 3-6 months, and then weekly for the remainder of the growing season. Watering is perfectly fine until they lose their leaves for the winter, if you have an irrigation system. In the case of evergreen magnolias, the growing season lasts through the summer. In cooler climate zones, reduce the initial watering to once or twice per week for the first several months. A thin layer of bark much, or thicker layer of pine needle mulch, is great for holding in moisture and protecting the tree’s shallow root system.
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As experienced fruit growers, we know all too well the importance of planning when it comes to avoiding depressing mistakes with your fruit trees. But even the most experienced growers can make mistakes, and we’ve made plenty! We’ve learned much of what we know the hard way. It’s equipped us very well to help home fruit growers (like you) avoid the same depressing mistakes. There’s no point everyone going through the same pain, so we’re very happy to share our mistakes here on the blog. It might help you skate through the rookie stage as painlessly as possible. Some of the worst mistakes we’ve made along the way happened before we had a robust picking calendar. Making the mistake of letting fruit fall to the ground One early occasion was particularly memorable. It was a beautiful summer day near the start of the picking season. We’d been busy with the cherry harvest, and were excited for the apricots to get started. We had a great crop that year, after a disastrous season the year before. One of the first apricots to ripen in our orchard is the delicious Poppicot variety. To be fair, we’d checked a couple of trees at the top of the row, and decided that they were at least a week from being ripe. What we didn’t do was walk to the bottom of the row to check the fruit there. If we had, we would have noticed a few ripe fruit already lying on the ground. A week later we went to pick, and our hearts sank as we saw a sea of ripe fruit lying on the ground, wasted and ruined. A fruit tree plan—what’s that? We realized that we had made two rookie mistakes. The first was that we didn’t have a Fruit Tree Action Plan or an accurate picking diary to remind us of when it was time to harvest. And the second was that we didn’t realise the impact that microclimate can have on fruit ripening (that is, trees can ripen unevenly, even when they are close together). Bottom line? Our lack of planning led to the waste of all the hard work, pruning, thinning, watering, and feeding that we’d done up to that point! Lesson learned: write an Action Plan including a picking calendar, folks! It’s an easy way to make sure you don’t miss out on the fruits of your labour. Learning the hard way why netting your fruit trees is always worth it When we first moved home to the orchard and started growing fruit, we didn’t have any nets at all to protect the fruit trees. We regularly lost fruit to birds and dreamed of being able to protect our precious crops. Then we got a great deal on a job lot of ex-winery netting. We snapped it up and imagined that our bird woes were over. Ah, such innocent, naive thoughts. The thing about bird netting is that it works really well – as long as you put it on early enough! (You also need to regularly care for your nets.)
Read MoreFind and share everyday cooking inspiration on Allrecipes. Discover recipes, cooks, and how-tos based on the food you love and the friends you follow.
We’re hot and spicy… literally!
Crispy oven baked tacos! Made with hard taco shells, ground beef, taco seasoning, cheese, pico de gallo, sour cream + avocado!
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Pico, corn, avocado, cilantro, lime wedges and the best carne asada EVER. Drizzled with cilantro lime vinaigrette. SO SO BOMB.
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