Free Newsletter: Join Thoughtful Gardeners in Reading Cultivating the Inner Gardener

The gardening season unofficially launched in the Northeast this week, with temps predicted to swell to near 70º on Saturday. The (really hot) sunshine has brought out the best of my very early bloomers: Snowdrops, purple hybrid and yellow species crocus, Winter Aconite, Christmas Rose, and Lenten Rose. I was surprised to also see some of the Hydrangea leaf buds bursting out of their brown, scaly shells, as well as early growth from Wood Hyacinth. Before we know it, our spring gardens will be three steps ahead of us as usual.

With cabin fever behind us and spring fever before us, you may want to take a few moments to think about what internal fulfillment your garden can give back to you this growing season, beyond the mere enjoyment of the garden’s physical beauty.

I’ve written about how to approach this before at http://loisdevries.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Transformational%20Power%20of%20Gardening and http://cultivatingtheinnergardener.blogspot.com .

At the end of this month, I’ll be instituting a monthly newsletter, Cultivating the Inner Gardener, for gardening enthusiasts who want to learn how to garden from the inside out and experience the transformational power of gardening. I’d love for you to subscribe and join me in turning this new adventure into a global movement to reconnect people to the Earth through gardening.

To sign up, just look for the “Join Yahoo Groups” icon in the sidebar, fill in your e-mail address, and click “Join Now.” This is a double opt-in subscription that ensures that only those people who want the newsletter will get it.

Popular posts from this blog

Detention Basins: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Image
In our area, stormwater sewers that serve housing developments and some businesses empty into the dreaded detention (or retention, or infiltration) basin, a visually hideous engineered method of holding large volumes of water until it can safely disperse to groundwater, natural streams, ponds, etc. (top photo). These are generally grass monocultures or rip rap which, if not properly maintained become weedy, overgrown maintenance nightmares. Suffice it to say that anyone who can get away with not maintaining one will continue to not maintain it. Frequently, the town ends up owning and maintaining such basins, meaning that all the taxpayers pay. When grass is used as the only groundcover and pesticides and fertilizers are applied, they can contaminate the runoff. Regular mowing of the basins is difficult because of the steep sides and wet floor. This maintenance adds contaminants to the watercourse, as well. Grass basins also attract undesirable wildlife, such as Canada Geese, which ...
Keep reading

Please Garden Responsibly. Because What You Spray in Your Garden Doesn’t Stay in Your Garden

Image
American Lady caterpillar on licorice plant. Photo: Courtesy Missouri Botanical Garden Scores of their silky tents covered the licorice plant in the container on my porch. Inside the tents, something was gobbling up the leaves faster than I could pick them off. The plant must have been infested when I bought it. As I reached for my organic insecticide, I thought, “Wait, you don’t know what kind of caterpillars these are!” I recalled an article on pest management by a friend who cautioned: “Sometimes, the best treatment is no treatment at all.” It took the better part of the afternoon for me to identify the miniature mowing machines. In the meantime, half of them had started dropping from their perches and wriggling off into the underbrush. I hoped I had made the right decision. The licorice plant was devastated. But then I noticed that the caterpillars had not eaten the leaves all the way down to the stem. Possibly, secondary buds could sprout and still provide a silvery...
Keep reading

Musings on the Relativity of Time and The Arithmetic of Overpopulation

Image
I celebrated my birthday recently. Beyond a certain age, birthdays become a double-edged sword. You’re glad you made it to the next one, but realize that there are far fewer years ahead of you than behind you. The list of absent friends grows ever longer. Colleagues grow grey; everyone else looks like they just graduated from middle school. I used to console myself by calculating that I still had at least 2 5 more years to go, which made the end point seem very far off. But, now that would mean I’d live to an unrealistically old age, a concept supported by neither family history nor actuarial tables. I’m reminded of Einstein’s summary of his Theory of Relativity: "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour." I guess I’ve been having too much fun. But that can’t go on forever. My immortality would not be good for the planet. It’s not sustainable. At the same time that medical advances have...
Keep reading