Treasures from the Vegetable Garden

There are treasures from the garden. Here I have two Black Beauty eggplant, three Candy onions and two carrots that are two different varieties of three that I planted this year. Don't ask me what varieties because I remember not.

The rest of the onions will come out of the garden when I find a mesh bag to put them in.

One of the eggplant and the carrots are destined for the cooking pot this week. The onions, well, they really need that mesh bag and a cool dark place such as a root cellar. I have just the spot for them.

Let the feasting begin.

First and Foremost

First and Foremost, 2010, Frank A. Benardella.

For a number of years I've been attending the "Mid-Winters" rose convention put on by the Penn-Jersey District Rose Society. There I had the opportunity to meet and get to know Frank Benardella. A lovely man, avid rose breeder, active and a pleasure to be around. He passed away this past February.

When I realized I wanted two more miniatures, I looked at the varieties that I didn't have and decided on the very last one Frank had put into production before his death. First and Foremost is turning into a very lovely, strong, active rose reminding me of him. I'm very pleased with this rose so far. How it takes my winters will tell me how strong this little rose really is. I have two of these, one on each side of a stepping platform from the garden to the patio.

Oh, if you're wondering about the cage. Bratley, my dog, seems to have issues with the stepping platform and runs through the bed to get on the patio. The cage is around the tiny, baby roses to keep him from crushing them. Once they're established and have some size, the cages will come off.

I find the cages help for a number of reasons, mostly animals. I use the cages to keep rabbits and mice away from very young trees that still have green trunks. Especially over the winter, rabbits and mice will chew on the trunks of saplings, hence killing them. Larger scarfs or wraps around the trunks of larger trees will help keep bucks from rubbing on them, again killing the trees. Once the saplings have the thick bark on their trunks the rabbits and mice will let them be, while the deer seem to like the trees between the rabbit and the "mature" stages. At least this has been my experience.

I do have to admit to really liking First and Foremost. I think it is a very lovely rose.

The Chaste Tree (Vitex)

My husband mentioned just the other day that he wanted to enlarge the front corner bed to include a nice Autumn Blaze maple that is in the area. I just stared at him as he told me his plans.

Always in July the Chaste trees bloom. A very lovely shrub type tree that we generally keep as shrubs here. They are a large draw of pollinators as well as people, who stop along the road to view these lovely trees and often ask about them. The blooms will last only a few weeks, but in that time, they are covered with bees, wasps, hummingbirds, butterflies and all sorts of pollinators.

Getting back to my Husband and his ideas; as you can see, the Chaste tree in the picture is getting quite large and is planted far to close to the spruce behind it. I've been asking him for years to transplant the chaste trees and a variegated Japanese willow further into the garden, about ½ way between the spruce and the Autumn Flame maple. He always bulked at that saying it would make the bed far to large and the amount of mulch it would take to keep it nice would be great and at great expense. He didn't see what I saw and now he does. Of course, the three trees (shrubs) to be moved are far to large for him to handle now.

I'm not sure what we're going to do about these trees (shrubs) yet. There are three of them. Two chaste trees and one variegated Japanese willow. By moving them into the garden more, they will have more room to get large without crowding each other or the spruce and maple trees. They will fill in the entire corner of the garden, yet still be protected from the West winds in the winter.

I would still want to keep them as shrubs because they do want heavy pruning to keep up a good flower production and to keep them as trees with nice sized trunks, it might be to hard to keep them pruned at the top. Also I don't want them to big because the site calls for a more scrubby tree or shrub as they are now.

I will have to check with the local nurseries and see if they have the vitex (chaste trees) readily available. I might have to have these removed because of their size and replant new ones where I want them. That would be to bad because these are really beautiful show stoppers.

The only drawback to these plants are the long winter sleep. In my zone 6B garden, they are usually the first to lose their leaves and the very last to push them out in the spring. Often (and for the first two years anyway), I had to refrain from digging them out in the spring thinking they were dead. They don't push their leaves until the very end of May to the 1st of June. Yet, once they start, they don't waste a moment. My chaste trees are 7 years old, planted from a 2 gallon pot in the spring of 2003.

I will check the local nurseries to find out how readily available these plants are before I have these three removed. I want all three and if I have to I'll check into how much it would cost to have them transplanted by a professional who is licensed to do this kind of large shrub/tree transplanting. It might be too costly though.

I've included a link to Dave's Garden - a website that is an extensive database of plants. Here he describes the chaste tree as well as has reviews from folks who have them in their gardens, where to purchase them, etc.

http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/showimage/39966/