Paperwhites The 2018 Rutgers Bulb Lectures Saturday, October 27. 2018, I will be delivering 2 lectures on fall planted bulbs at Rutgers Gardens in New Brunswick, NJ. These lectures are open to the public for a fee of $50 per lecture. More information is available at the following link: http://rutgersgardens.rutgers.edu/fallclasses.html Species Tulip - Biflora This morning lecture will discuss flower bulbs that should be planted in the fall and will take place from 10 - 12 noon as follows: The Bulbs of Spring An In-depth Lecture on the Rare, Magnificent Spring Blooming Flowers Whose Bulbs Must Be Planted in Autumn It’s fall, time to think SPRING!! This is a detailed lecture designed to introduce/remind you of the bulbs, besides tulips, daffodils and crocus, that can populate your garden with beautiful blossoms and feed the newly
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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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There are very few North American Native spring flowering bulbs. I know of only 5: Erythronium tuolumnense, Camassia cusicki, Camassia quamash, Allium cernuum and Allium amplectens. These five bulbs are rarely found in the gardens of Americans even though they represent our bulb heritage. Erythronium tuolumnense BUY NOW FOR FALL PLANTING Erythronium tuolumnense, AKA The Dogtooth Violet, is native to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Central California where it grows in the pine and evergreen oak woods at an elevation of 1650 feet. Its name comes from the place where it was first found – Tuolumne County, California. The plant is hardy from Hardiness Zones 3-9. Each plant has green leaves that are slightly crinkled at the edges and a flower stem that produces as many as
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SPECIES TULIP - SYLVERSTRIS IN BUD 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 nurtured through professional cultivation, they often change dramatically. They can become taller, their blossoms can become larger, and their colors may be more vivid. That is OK, because even if you found them
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Basket of Shallots Many of our winter hardy vegetables – onion and elephant garlic sets, parsnips, salsify, etc. - can be planted in both the spring or the fall, but to be really successful with shallots, you should try to plant them in the fall. Shallots are sold as sets, but unlike onion sets where each ‘set’ is a baby onion and will produce a single mature onion, a shallot ‘set’ can be a nearly mature single shallot and this shallot will produce 4-6 mature shallots. From a single sack of 6 shallots you should expect to get 25-40 shallots. Shallot Sets BUY NOW FOR FALL PLANTING Shallots benefit greatly from being planted in soil that has been amended with Rock Phosphate and Potash. You can dust the
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THE MARBLED PURPLE STRIPE GARLIC - PSKEM Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About GARLIC!! On Tuesday, July 24, 2018, we began a newsletter series on garlic which will span 8 newsletters in total, and by the end of this series you will have learned all you ever wanted to know (and then some) about garlic. For those of you who are about to click on the Unsubscribe Button, please don’t! The reason we are dedicating so much writing to garlic is that it can be grown almost anywhere in the US, it is easy, dependable and fascinating to grow, and it is one of the healthiest vegetables you can consume. In grocery stores and health food markets, you can only find a few different kinds of
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