GGClub - From Grass to Gardens - Flowers part one - by Janet Lembke

I am loving From Grass to Gardens and there are so many wonderful gardening tips that I want it available to all, so am entering it on this blog. Following are quotes from Janet Lembke, maybe slightly paraphrased, and my comments, too. Please hit reply and add your own comments.

I love what Janet says about her garden - It is my goal - the gaudier the better. Sedum pink clashes with cayenne red and marigold orange. Flowers and vegetables mixed together.

Daylilies
These are her favorite. Name means "Beauties of a day." I have eaten almost every part of the day lily (stuffed blossoms, base of greens in a salad, dead blooms in soups & stews. Janet says when she was a child, her friends and she would pick all the flowers and suck the nectar from the base - just like honeysuckle. I did not know this about the plant. The Chinese (where they originated) said the buds, made into a powder, are good to ease pain and grief. They grazed cattle on daylilies. If seedpods form at the base of the flower, cut them off (I have never done that).

MARIGOLDS
Again, I am just noting things Janet says that are new to me or prompt me to think other thoughts for you. Aster family (marigold is one) are a New World plant found by the Portuguese in 1500s. Several are native to the US Southwest and grown wild. Pot marigold (calendula officinalis) is european, but its name, Marigold was given to the Nw World flowers that went from Brazil to India to Europe and back to the Americas. Gerard reported a boy who had swollen lips and mouth after eating marigolds and a cat whose lips became swollen before it died and mice have been reported dying after eating it. "Contrary to Gerard, the petals may be eaten without fear". The roots do release a compound that kills root bug that kill tomato roots, which is why so many plant them as companion crops. One Burpee marigold is called Nema-gone.

This year they grew well from seeds in one of my deck boxes. I will try their seeds next year.

zinnia
I get to pick these from my CSA, Calvert's gift farm - all summer long. One year they did well for me. "All you need to do is broadcast the seeds." It was originally a drab weed that the Aztecs called eye-sore. Linnaeus named it after a professor of medicine, Johann Zinn, who had grown the plant from seeds sent from Mexico. "The ugly duckling became a swan after hybridizing.

Its odor repels pests. It loves sun.

GGClub - From Grass to Gardens by Janet Lembke - Edible plants

I am loving From Grass to Gardens and there are so many wonderful gardening tips that I want it available to all, so am entering it on this blog. Following are quotes from Janet Lembke, maybe slightly paraphrased.

Pg 65
RED BUD BLOSSOMS are sugar sweet. John Lawson (1709) - "the Red-Bud-Tree bears a purple Lark-Heel, and is the best Sallad, of any Flower I ever saw. It is ripe in April and May."

GGClub - From Grass to Gardens - Herbs

I am loving From Grass to Gardens and there are so many wonderful gardening tips that I want it available to all, so am entering it on this blog. Following are quotes from Janet Lembke, maybe slightly paraphrased, and my comments, too. Please hit reply and add your own comments.

BIRDS HELP THE GARDEN pg 62+
Put your bird feeder in the middle of your garder and the seeds strewn by the birds (and squirrels) will sprout and you'll have lovely volunteer flowers in your garden. Place a bird house near your vegetable patch to be serenaded by the music while you pick the beans.

HERBS pg 71 +

Harvest your herbs in the spring, for the oils are stronger before flowering.

Put on cardboard or (me - plastic) racks flowers come on, put in a car sitting out in the sun and the herbs will dry in 2 days (and I bet the car smells great).

John Gerard (1500s), an English botanist, published a list in the Herball of the 1,000 plants in his garden in 1597 with copious notes on medicinal uses of the plants. His 1633 revision was published in 1975 in the US.

OREGANO
Be sure to get the greek oregano - Origanum vulgare hirtum or O. heracleoticum. MInt family.

SAGE
Mint family. Does not dry well so she chops and freezes it. (I find it dries fine)

HERB BUTTER - mix oregano, thyme, basil, savory and sage to a stick of butter to slather on bread and baked.

WINTER SAVORY SUMMER SAVORY
Mint family (Lamiaceae). Winter is perinneal. Bohnenkraut -"bean plant" is the german name because it reduces the flatulence of beans. Clip it back in fall. Late spring - dig up spreading roots, pot and give as gifts.

ROSEMARY
Mint again - are all herbs mints???
Friendship and remembrance. Power over forces of evil. Heat rosemary over hot coals for the scent. Sugared flowers "comfort the heart, and make it merry". Used as firewood in Germany.
Creeping as well as bush. I like the idea of creeping rosemary. Found wild in CA< OR, NC, SC and Pureto Rico.

THYME
Mint, too. Was used to smoke stinging insects out of a house. Dried flowers used to repel insects that infect linen.

BASIL
mint. "Kings Herb" - Ocimum basilicum. In France, a pot of basil set on a balcony signaled that she wanted a suitor. Loves SUN and rich soil. (When I get a lot from the CSA at Calver't Gift Farm, I chop it in the food processor and pack it firmly in small jars with a covering of oil and vinegar and freeze it."

CARROT FAMILY
Dill, parsley, cilantro. Leaves of cilantro you know for the tangy flavor. If you wait for the seeds, they are coriander seeds redolent of oranges.

BORAGE
good companion for strawberries.

LAVENDER
And we finish with more mint family. Latin means to wash.

CHIVES
Finally, not a mint! Lily family.

TARRAGON
"Little dragon sacred to the goddess Artemis" is the meaning of Artemisia drancunculus.
Aster family (sunflower and marigold). Does not grow well from seed - use cuttings.

GGClub - From Grass to Gardens - Not Thanking

I am loving From Grass to Gardens and there are so many wonderful gardening tips that I want it available to all, so am entering it on this blog. Following are quotes from Janet Lembke, maybe slightly paraphrased, and my comments, too. Please hit reply and add your own comments.


This was a very interesting section about NOT THANKING people for things. Love to hear people's comments on this.

pg 58 plus
A friend of her mother's gifted her cuttings and Janet tried to thank her but the friend stopped her, saying "Don't say it. Never thank anyone who gives you plants. It blights them."

From an article from 1800s in North Carolina - "Never thank anyone who gives you seed; if you do, they will never do any good."

Italy - Not thank for lighting a cigarette.

Fairies should not be thanked or they will rage (house elves in Harry Potter).

Karen Baldwin, professor of folklore at East Carolina U - Traditional healers is not to be thanked - it vitiates the cure, annihilates its power. Not thanking is traditional int he South. Healing done through me, not by me, so the gods are to be thanked, not me. Janet often digs up plants from neighbor's weed patches to rescue them, and Karen says this is an honored tradition. Helping yourself to a cutting is perfectly acceptable, for a plant grown from a stolen cutting is said to root better than if it is given, but digging up is not so ok.

GUNPOWDER GARDEN CLUB Notes from Lembke Book - From Grass to Gardens

I am loving From Grass to Gardens and there are so many wonderful gardening tips that I want it available to all, so am entering it on this blog. Following are quotes from Janet Lembke, maybe slightly paraphrased, and my comments, too. Please hit reply and add your own comments.

Pg 39 +
What you take from the earth may be returned to increase its fertility. (Yea for compost.)
She has a great story of trying, incorrectly, red wiggler worms for inside composting.

The poet Virgil writes: pg 33 ++
Perhaps I should also sing what careful cultivation adorns rich gardens and the rose-beds of twice blooming Paestum, and how endives rejoice in the streams that they drink and the green banks, in their celery, and how the cucumber sprawling through the grass swells into a paunch. Nor should I be silent about the late-blooming narcissus or the flexible twigs of acanthus, pale ivy, and shore -loving myrtle. Unless you purse the weeds with a relentless hoe, scare off the birds with shouthing, remove the shade from over-shadowed farmland with a pruning hook, and call down rain with prayers, in van, alas, you'll stare at someone else's heaps of grain and relieve your own hunger by shaking oak trees int he woods. ..then diverts rivulets of running water to his crops and, when the soil dries up, its sprouted grain burnt, in summer's heat - behold! - brings water from the ridge through irrigation channels? Falling, it rushes down the smooth stones with a hoarse white noise and restores the thirsty soil with its bubbling jet.

LAWNS
pg 18+++ is about Lawns. While I do have a lawn, it is not fertilized, nor seeded, nor pesticided. It is mown by gas, so that is a point down for the Chesapeake Bay.
Where does the idea of Lawn come from? To sell Lawn Mowers. To play ball on. naturalist David Quammen, in "Rethinking the Lawn", ...lans were dreamed up by the Communists to keep suburban youngsters in America from giving their energies to tasks more thrilling than mowing.
(A friend of mine said they must have a lawn for their dogs to use.) Turfgrass (redundant) was coined in the twentieth century by the industry. Lawn in 300 years old. Originally the word meant untilled ground, a glade n the woods, or a pasture. The current usage appeared in 1733 in the Gardener's Dictionary "A great plain in a park or a spacious plain adjoining tto a noble seat..."

It developed as a firm rejection of the continental gardens (planned by the architect to be extensions of the building with rooms and geometric symmetry) by the British. William Kent, an English painter and architect decided to relax the continental formality. In 1734, he created a parklike garden of great irregularity - meandering brook, curving paths, trees and shrubs left in thier natural shapes, and, not least, lots of grass.

Then Lancelot "Capability" Brown came up with the convept of a natural landscape that would blur the boundaries of garden and park. Trees set alone or in small clusters, bodies of water and grass in vast sweeps. He changed the formal versailles style of Blenheim Palace grounds in the mid 1700s to this park/lawn setting. Only for the rich, though, because Lawn had to be cut men wielding scythes. Blenheim needed a crew of 50 men with very sharp scythes to cut the grass, then lawn women had to remove the cuttings. Expensive.

Then Edwin Budding invented the push mower in 1830.

Shortly after the Civil War, front lawns became the rage, proclaiming that the owners were successfuly in the middle class.

No turf grasses are native.

Golf was a large factor behind the transformation of grat expanses of shaggy landscape into neatly trimmed greensward.

1996 estimate - 48 million acres is in grass (2.3 billion acres total in US). Why so much? Historian Virginia Scott Jenkins says it is advertising, mass marketing, democratization of golf, the influence of popular magazines, 2 world wars, development of major lawn industry. Virginia spent 2.5 billion dollars in 1998 just on the equipement needed to maintain turf. In 2003 the DIY US cost was 10.4 Billion dollars. 84 millioin households. 78% did lawn care. Average of 1,267 per family. (let's see - mine is less than $400).

Value of grass by James B. Bears and Janet's additions:
1. Dissipates heat and noise better than asphalt - But roar of the mower, gardens will lessen noise too.
2. Beauty - But she likes gardens better
3. No hidey holes for ground hogs, skunks, cottontails (ticks), deer food.
4. Sequesters carbon - so does gardens.
5. Recreational surface.
6. Prevents soil erosion - better done by native things.

Then Janet sys she exterminates grass because Lawn is as sterile to my vision as a cityscape. Only one color. No biodiversity. War against nature.