Horticulture & Environmental Reports

Monthly Horticulture and Environmental Reports

* This page contains information researched and provided by RDGC members.

These reports are added as they become available.

Hedera Helix - English Ivy

It can be an invasive and dangerous plant that could eventually compromise the health of other plants or buildings.

Muscari

Also known as grape hyacinth, muscari is one of the most prolific and easy-to-grow flowering bulbs.

Ponytail Palm

A graceful and long-lived houseplant that will add many years of beauty and charm to your home is the beaucarnea recurvata commonly known as the ponytail palm.

Reblooming Bearded Iris

Reblooming Bearded Iris? Who knew?

Yes, one of the most beautiful and colorful of Spring flowers, the Bearded Iris, can grace your garden with a second bloom season in the Summer or Fall, or even throughout our New Hampshire Seacoast Zone 6 growing season.

Kale - A Popular Vegetable Once Again
Kale is primarily used in casseroles, soups, or as a stand-alone vegetable. However, a few of the more adventurous can prepare themselves hardy and satisfying kale salad to include cannelloni beans, onions, and raisins with a dressing of olive oil and vinegar.

Planning Your Summer Garden
January ushers in a new year. It also brings seed catalogs that seem to reproduce in your mailbox. As soon as those eagerly awaited periodicals arrive most of us sit down, preferably with a steaming cup of hot coffee or tea, plan, and dream of succulent summer tomatoes, bushes of luscious lima beans, and tents of stringless green beans.

Wasted Food Has a HUGE Effect on the Environment!
It turns out that this is a very complex problem. I will only touch on enough of it to hopefully pique your interest/curiosity and you will delve more deeply into it on your own.

Bringing Your Non-Edible Plants Indoors for the Winter
November is normally a quiet time for gardeners. But is it? This year with the unusually warm weather, I, for one, was still bringing in my deck plants along with others which were still growing in the garden in early November. There are a few things to consider when bringing your summer plants into the house to live in quiet warmth and reduced sunlight during the Winter.

Disposable Face Masks and the Environment
With the outbreak of the COVID 19 global pandemic in early 2020, disposable face masks for other than first responders and health personnel were a scarce commodity. When wearing masks became necessary and eventually required in certain situations (almost anywhere indoors), mass production ensued and disposable masks became available.

The Tall and Beautiful Iris
The Iris is a beautiful flower that graces Seacoast gardens from the end of May until mid-June, an all too short period of time. The range of colors and shapes from the common variety to lovely large bearded type provides color and texture to the late Spring garden. However, even after the blooms have faded the fan like tall spikey leaves provide another dimension of form as well as light green sage color to the summer garden.

Topic: The Color Wheel Garden: Growing the Best Nutritional Varieties
Flavor and optimum health go hand in hand when growing a garden, knowing what varieties to choose for higher antioxidant qualities can influence what you plant. Color (deep purple, blue, orange, and red) vegetables and fruits contain the highest flavonoids, resveratrol, and anthocyanins.

Topic: Light Pollution
There’s form of pollution that isn’t always presented as a serious hazard, but in fact it may be having an increasingly adverse affect on our lives and the planet. It is light pollution.
We’ve been hearing more about how light in our bedrooms at night could be affecting our quality of sleep and our health. Excess lighting may be a silent threat to our health. It affects our circadian rhythms, which suppresses the hormone melatonin.

Topic: Sativus Crocus

Saffron is a delicious & colorful seasoning used in many dishes throughout the world. Spanish paella and Indian curry are just two examples. The bright red-orange threads you buy are actually the stigmas, or female portion, of the Saffron Crocus. It takes thousands of flowers to produce a commercially useful amount, which is why it is so expensive.

Topic: Save the Straw!

There is a new movement that has gone global and I want to share this information with you so you will be in the know. It’s called “Save the Straw” or “The Last Plastic Straw”. Yes, the straw, the ordinary simple drinking straw. What’s the big deal? It is small, often wrapped in flimsy paper, disposable, doesn’t cost much, they are found everywhere, restaurants, drive thru, bars, kids and adults use them. So innocuous, what could be bad about them, what harm can they do? Well, according to The Last Plastic Straw, 500 million straws are disposed of daily in the US, that is 175 billion a year filling landfills, littering our waterways and oceans.

Topic: How to Grow Shallots

Allium cepa ascalonicum, or shallot, is a common bulb used in French cuisine. Generally smaller in size than an onion, it is a milder version with a hint of garlic. Shallots are pretty pricey when buying them in the grocery store so growing your own makes economic sense.

Topic:The American Elm

The American Elm grew from Newfoundland Canada to Florida and west to the Rockies. The American elm was the most planted street tree in America and every city had their Main Street and parks lined with this tree. Millions of trees grew from the mid-1600’s to the mid 1900’s.

Rye Driftwood Garden Club

Announcement!