PRAYING MANTIS EGG CASES MAKES A GREAT HOLIDAY GIFT - BUY NOW Today is Small Business Saturday – probably the greatest day in America for small businesses like Harvesting History. We hope you will spend today visiting your local small businesses, supporting them with your purchases and doing the same for small businesses like Harvesting History who may only have products available online. Today’s newsletter will introduce you to some of the gifts for gardeners that we would really love to have ourselves and that are now available in our BRAND NEW website sections – Gardening Tools & Equipment, Beneficial Bugs and Gift Certificates. We will feature one product that we believe is the best children’s gift you could ever give and two of our favorite
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The Happy-Sad Story of the German Harvest Basket For the next 5 weeks, on Saturdays our newsletter will introduce you to someof the gifts for gardeners that we would really love to have ourselves and that are now available in our BRAND NEW website sections – Gardening Tools & Equipment, Beneficial Bugs and Gift Certificates. The first piece of gardening equipment that we are going to discuss may be our all-time favorite, but it is a bittersweet story so please read to the end. The German Harvest Basket with its wood spool handle is one of the most useful, and it will become one of the most beloved, garden tools you ever own – this is NO exaggeration. Like so many of the items we offer here at Harvesting
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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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Camassia Cusickii Buy Now for Fall Planting We have spent nearly 6 weeks discussing the bulbs of spring, and this will be our last newsletter on this subject for the 2018 season. I hope you have enjoyed some of these newsletters. I believe that the more you know about the stories behind these flowers, the more you will love and cherish them.With respect to planting these flower bulbs, the time hascome. In Hardiness Zones 1-4, you should be planting now. You have at most 2-3 weeks left. I n 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 Christmas holidays, but in Zones 8-9 you should refrigerate the bulbs for at least 8 weeks before planting . Whether
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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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