Greetings Harvesting History Friends and Neighbors! The 2019 New Year begins in 3 days and with it the start of the 2019 gardening season, but we are getting a jump start on the season with our first newsletter of the 2019 season today. This season our newsletters will focus on three types of gardeners: • Traditional Heirloom Gardeners, • Teachers Who Inspire Children to Become Gardeners and • Container Gardeners This newsletter’s topic is PEAS, one of the oldest, most beloved fruits of all time. Peas probably originated in Eastern Europe or Central Asia and are among the oldest of the cultivated crops and one of the most important to civilization. It is thought that mankind began to cultivate plants and seeds around 10,000 BC and archaeologists have found evidence
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It is time to stop with the advocating for our commercial products and to return to what we do best with our newsletters – teaching you about your horticultural heritage and motivating you to grow some heirlooms in your garden. With that in mind, we conclude this Christmas holiday with one of the greatest horticultural stories of the Christmas season. The Poinsettia Story Of all the flowers and herbs associated with the celebration of Christmas, the poinsettia is considered the quintessential Christmas flower. The poinsettia and the amaryllis are the only New World plants that have come to be a part of the Christmas holiday. The legend of the poinsettia is that one Christmas Eve, a little Mexican girl –child of a very poor family – was crying
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November Flowers-Seeds That Should Be Planted In November Mid-Atlantic Wildflower Mix Buy Now for Fall Planting Throughout the year, I spend most of my time, when I am away from Harvesting History, speaking to and with Master Gardeners and the members of America’s Garden Clubs and Historical Societies. One of the most pervasive and perplexing topics that I encounter is the difficulty many accomplished gardeners have with growing certain flowers from seeds. Some of our most beautiful flowers pose real challenges, but these challenges can be easily overcome if these flowers are planted in November. Today’s newsletter is going to discuss many of the flowers that do best when planted in November or even as late as December. Planting flower seed in November/December is really easy. It is just
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3 of the Spring’s Most Historic Flowers Hyacinthoides Non-scripta – The English Bluebell Buy Now for Fall Planting We will be finishing the “Bulb Newsletters” in the next 2 weeks because you may be tiring of the subject, but we wouldn’t be Harvesting History if we didn’t persist in trying to teach you about the finer points of heirloom gardening and this includes reminding you of when things absolutely must be done. With respect to planting these flower bulbs, the time has come. In Hardiness Zones 1-4, you should be planting now. You have at most 2-3 weeks left. In Hardiness Zones 5-7, you can start now and you have until the beginning of January. In Hardiness Zones 8-9, you can start planting in mid-November and continue through the
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Species Tulip - Acuminata Buy Now for Fall Planting! This is the third installment in a series about a remarkable class of tulips known as the Species Tulips. If you are archiving these newsletters the other two installments occurred on 9-8-2018 and 9-22-2018. For those of you who have deer, squirrels, bunnies, chipmunks and other critters that like to decimate the spring garden before it even sprouts, there are actually many bulbs that are critter resistant, in fact, there are tulips that are critter resistant. These tulips are known as Species Tulips. These are the original wild tulips collected from Persia, the Caucasus, Africa, Southern Europe, etc. Even today, wild species are still being discovered and cultivated for commercial sale. Understand, that after these wild species are collected and
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> Grape Hyacinths Buy Now for Fall Planting! Without fail, whenever any of us venture into a Walmart, we are greeted by a kindly, gently smiling, usually older face that welcomes us into Walmart USA. The key words in this past sentence, as they apply to Grape Hyacinths, are WITHOUT FAIL, GREETED, GENTLY SMILING and OLDER for these words or their synonyms best describe the family of bulbs known scientifically as Muscari. Muscaris are some of the most beloved flowers of spring. Without fail, they can be counted on to pop their often true blue heads out of the ground shortly after the snowdrops have faded. They are some of the most famous of Spring’s greeters, and no one can pass by a drift of these curiously shaped beauties
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The 2018 Garlic Harvest: The Largest and Best Tasting Varieties 2018 Creole Garlic, Burgundy Buy Now for Fall Planting! Harvesting History spends a lot of time with our customers sharing stories with them at Harvest Festivals and Flower Shows, horticulture lectures, answering questions from emails and other social media platforms and speaking with many on the phone. At this time of year, we are usually sharing with them the best of the annual garlic harvest. In the past, we have only shared this information in one-on-one situations, so our friends and customers who live far away or who do not attend functions where we exhibit were never privy to this information. This year we have decided to write a brief newsletter commenting on what we have seen and tasted now that
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Forcing bulbs is a process by which you trick spring flowering bulbs into blooming in the middle of winter. Forcing bulbs is an ancient tradition practiced by Europeans since the late 17th century. Anna Pavord, in her landmark book, Bulb, wrote, “Keen plantsmen soon discovered that it was possible to force hyacinths into bloom earlier than Nature intended. Nehemiah Grew, secretary of the Royal Society (Britain) and a pioneer in the painstaking business of finding out how plants are made, had already in 1682 observed that the hyacinth’s flower buds were formed in the bulb the previous season and that it might be possible to tickle them into bloom ‘by keeping the Plants warm, and thereby enticing the young lurking Flowers to come abroad.’ We need to
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N. Bulbocodium Conspicuous Golden Bells BUY NOW FOR FALL PLANTING All you have to do is whisper the word, narcissus, and visions of meadows of sunshine yellow flowers come to mind. In today’s world, with critters like deer, chipmunks, rabbits, squirrels, moles and voles feasting on many of our spring blooming bulbs, the narcissus has become the most popular spring garden flower because most critters avoid these bulbs. Narcissus is the name given to a vast family of plants. Jonquils are included in that family, and daffodils are a common name for narcissus. Narcissus are part of the Amaryllis family and are native to many parts of our planet, but not North and South America. All of the narcissus grown in the United States were brought here from
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