January in the Garden
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Seasons Greetings & Happy New Year from Birch Meadow!
How delighted we are to step into 2022 with hope, knowledge, understanding, and renewed energy.
Mother Nature continues to surprise us. Seventy degree days into January had bees breaking cluster and bringing in much-needed pollen from camellias, henbit, buttercups, and mahonia. – unheard of in our local bee community. This immediately followed by torrential downpours, flooding, 24 degrees, and snow. Will society ever fully wake up, I wonder?
We at Birch Meadow are paying attention and are committed to right relationship with one another, our clients, and the earth. We look forward to stepping into this exciting new year with you and continuing to make the world a more beautiful, bountiful, responsible, and peaceful place!
THINGS TO DO IN YOUR GARDEN IN JANUARY
• Here is a link for things that should have been done in December, just in case you are still catching up!
• Click here for Central NC Planting Calendar for Annual Vegetables, Fruits, and Herbs.
• Use wood ashes on your vegetable garden, bulb beds, and non-acid loving plants if the pH of the soil is below 6.0.
• Plant asparagus crowns this month when soil is dry enough to work.
• Prune grape vines.
• Prune broken and undesired limbs on your shade trees and remove “weed” or undesirable trees from your landscape while the ticks, snakes, and mosquitoes are giving us a break.
• Hardwood cuttings of many landscape plants like forsythia, flowering quince, crepe myrtle, juniper, spirea, and hydrangea can be taken this month.
• If perennials and bulbs have been pushed out of the ground by freezing/thawing weather, push them back underground and replace the mulch.
• For camellias, rake up fallen blooms to discourage camellia blossom blight.
• Sow seeds of larkspur, bachelor buttons, and poppies now.
• You can also start seeds indoors for coleus, alyssum, impatiens, verbena, geranium, and petunia.
• Plant hardy vegetables and other cool-season crops, such as lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, beets, carrots, radishes, turnips, spinach, peas, and cauliflower. Start seeds of warm-season vegetables indoors.
• Get plant beds or seed boxes ready for growing plants such as tomato, pepper, and eggplant. Have beds ready for planting in early February.
• Order your small fruit plants like strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries for a mid-March planting.
• Study your home landscape to see what additions or improvements can be made this spring.
• Continue to study your seed catalogs and order flower and vegetable seeds.
• Order fruit trees, if not done in Fall.
• Ensure that your garden is watered if it is getting less than 1 inch of rain per week.
A TREE THAT WAS ONCE THE SUBURBAN IDEAL HAS MORPHED INTO AN UNSTOPPABLE VILLAIN
By Rick Rojas for The New York Times
CLEMSON, S.C. — In the distance, beside a brick house in a tidy subdivision, the trees rose above a wooden fence, showing off all that had made the Bradford pear so alluring: They were towering and robust and, in the early spring, had white flowers that turned their limbs into perfect clouds of cotton.
But when David Coyle, a professor of forest health at Clemson University, pulled over in his pickup, he could see the monster those trees had spawned: a forbidding jungle that had consumed an open lot nearby, where the same white flowers were blooming uncontrollably in a thicket of tangled branches studded with thorns.
“When this tree gets growing somewhere, it does not take long to take over the whole thing,” said Coyle, an invasive species expert. “It just wipes everything out underneath it.”
Beginning in the 1960s, as suburbs sprouted across the South, clearing land for labyrinths of cul-de-sacs and two-car garages, Bradford pears were the trees of choice. They were easily available, could thrive in almost any soil and had an appealing shape with mahogany-red leaves that lingered deep into the fall and flowers that appeared early in the spring.
The trees’ popularity soared during a transformational time, as millions of Americans moved in pursuit of the comfort and order that suburban neighborhoods were designed to provide. “Few trees possess every desired attribute,” the gardening pages of The New York Times declared in 1964, “but the Bradford ornamental pear comes unusually close to the ideal.”
Yet for all that promise, the trees wound up an unwieldy menace, one that has vexed botanists, homeowners, farmers, conservationists, utility companies and government officials in a growing swath of the country across the East Coast and reaching into Texas and the Midwest.
In South Carolina, the fight has intensified. The state is in the process of barring the sale and trade of the trees, becoming the second to do so. Coyle, who tracks plants and insects that have intruded into South Carolina and tries to limit their damage, has organized “bounty” programs, in which people who bring in evidence of a slain tree get a native replacement in return.
THE SECRET LIFE OF TREES
By Radio Open Source
Henry David Thoreau founded our literature of trees, glorying in the Eastern White Pine as the “emblem of my life,” to stand for “the West, the wild.” His friend Emerson, one step closer, felt an “occult relation” between trees and himself. “They nod to me, and I to them,” he said. Now comes Richard Powers, novelist of science and astonishment, taking up that almost speaking connection “from the standpoint of the trees,” from the teeming crown of a giant Redwood, ever in motion, 200 feet or 20 stories above ground. In their own fight for survival, trees have their own way of knowing they’re key to our human hope of squeaking through the crash of species on a wounded planet Earth.
How quaint of Noah, it seems now, that when the world was ending the first time, he saved the animals, two by two, to regenerate the earth—but left the trees and plants to die. We begin to see the egotism of a species learning very late in the day how vanishing trees used to suck up the carbon and synthesize the oxygen that sustains us free-loaders on the life of trees. The decorated novelist Richard Powers is back with the trees’ side of a hard story.
Powers is the artist who keeps reinventing himself in difficult trades—brain science and modern musical composition before this. And now: The Overstory, about Trees: Lean into the trunk of a pine tree or an oak, a beech or an alder and listen, Rick Powers is telling us: if our minds were a little greener, we’d learn that trees created our soil and cycle our water, make the weather, build the air—and that the tree population we found on this planet is 95 percent gone. We are back in school with Richard Powers after a 5-year interval—this time in a living museum of trees from ancient times and all the world, the Arnold Arboretum in Boston.
WATCH “A WALK WITH RICHARD POWERS” - 3 MIN VIDEO
LISTEN TO “INTO THE WOODS WITH RICHARD POWERS” - 49 MIN PODCAST
MEET AN ECOLOGIST WHO WORKS FOR GOD (AND AGAINST LAWNS)
By Cara Buckley of the New York Times
If Bill Jacobs were a petty man, or a less religious one, he might look through the thicket of flowers, bushes and brambles that encircle his home and see enemies all around. For to the North, and to the South, and to the West and East and all points in between, stretch acres and acres of lawns.
Lawns that are mowed and edges trimmed with military precision. Lawns where leaves are banished with roaring machines and that are oftentimes doused with pesticides. Lawns that are fastidiously manicured by landscapers like Justin Camp, Mr. Jacobs’s neighbor next door, who maintains his own pristine blanket of green.
“It takes a special kind of person to do something like that,” Mr. Camp said, nodding to wooded wilds of his neighbor’s yard. “I mow lawns for a living, so it’s not my thing.”
Mr. Jacobs and his wife, Lynn Jacobs, don’t have a lawn to speak of, not counting the patch of grass out back over which Mr. Jacobs runs his old manual mower every now and then.
Their house is barely visible, obscured by a riot of flora that burst with colors — periwinkles, buttery yellows, whites, deep oranges, scarlets — from early spring through late fall. They grow assorted milkweeds, asters, elderberry, mountain mint, joe-pye weed, goldenrods, white snakeroot and ironweed. Most are native to the region, and virtually all serve the higher purpose of providing habitats and food to migrating birds and butterflies, moths, beetles, flies and bees.
Mr. Jacobs is an ecologist and a Catholic who believes that humans can fight climate change and help repair the world right where they live. While a number of urban dwellers and suburbanites also sow native plants to that end, Mr. Jacobs says people need something more: To reconnect with nature and experience the sort of spiritual transcendence he feels in a forest, or on a mountain, or amid the bounty of his own yard. It’s a feeling that, for him, is akin to feeling close to God.
“We need something greater than people,” said Mr. Jacobs, who worked at the Nature Conservancy for nine years before joining a nonprofit that tackles invasive species — plants, animals, and pathogens that squeeze out native varieties. “We need a calling outside of ourselves, to some sort of higher power, to something higher than ourselves to preserve life on earth.”
If you would like help tending your established garden or installing a new one, please let us know! Click here for Maintenance Policy & Pricing.
Enjoy plenty of armchair gardening in January!
The Birch Meadow Team
Mary Beth, Kelley, Barbara, Karla, Jared, Frankie, Kizzia, Jess, Kellli, Rachael & CommUnity Based Landscaping
919-224-9697