MARGARET ROACH A WAY TO GARDEN

A Way to Garden with Margaret Roach: Joan Maloof on Forests I’ve been adventuring deep into the forest, with what feels like a fresh sensibility – a new set of eyes, I guess you could say. Thanks to the collaborative effort by photographer Robert Llewellyn, and environmental scientist Joan Maloof. Their new book is called “The Living Forest: A Visual Journey into the Heart of the Woods.” Coauthor Joan Maloof is founder of The Old Growth Forest Network, aimed to preserve, protect and promote the country’s few remaining stands of old growth forest, and she’s a professor emeritus at Salisbury University in Maryland. She joins me to talk about trees. ​

A Way to Garden with Margaret Roach: Ali Stafford on Favorite Cookbooks Sorry to spoil the surprise, but if you’re on my holiday shopping list, you’re getting a cookbook. Besides gardening, home cooking is one of the only things in this increasingly dizzy world that I feel as if I can control, and I’m soothed and sustained trying new flavors and expanding my repertory with the help of cookbooks. I asked cookbook author and former restaurant sous chef Alexandra Stafford to help guide us. Ali’s first cookbook, “Bread Toast Crumbs,” was published this year. Besides also creating her own recipe filled website, Alexandra’s Kitchen (at Alexandra Cooks dot com), she’s a weekly columnist on weeknight dinners for Food 52 dot com, where part of the way she serves up such a diversity of fresh ideas is to constantly survey the culinary world in books and online.

A Way To Garden With Margaret Roach-Ken Druse Though many of you may share my disbelief at the fact that it’s already well into November, that hasn’t slowed the pace of your Urgent Garden Questions on Facebook and in the comments on awaytogarden.com. No matter the month, we gardeners apparently still have plants on our minds, and readers asked about topics from which lawn fertilizer to use, to how to tackle an overgrown vegetable garden at cleanup time, to getting started with an urban balcony or rooftop garden. Helping me answer, as he does each month, is my friend and longtime garden writer and photographer, Ken Druse of Ken Druse dot com, author of “The New Shade Garden” and “Making More Plants” and many other favorite garden books. 

Organic rose care, with scott arboretum’s adam glas

A Way to Garden with Margaret Roach: Murphy Westwood on Emerald Ash Borer All too many headlines in the science section lately speak of trees in trouble, of various forest pests and other pressures that are imperiling these precious living resources. From Dr. Murphy Westwood of Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, I got a status update on some of the most talked-about issues, including emerald ash borer and also whether we gardeners and homeowners can play any role in shifting the balance of things toward the positive column. Westwood directs the Global Tree Conservation Program at the arboretum, which strives to save threatened trees from extinction through collaborations with botanical gardens and universities, and others in China, Europe, and Mexico, as well as throughout the U.S. She has a particular interest in oaks, which we also talked about in our interview. Murphy Westwood

A Way To Garden-April 29, 2013 Unusual Backyard Fruit with Lee Reich Apple trees— the fruit everyone thinks they want in their backyards—aren’t easy to grow East of the Rockies, as those who have tried probably noticed when they produced blemished fruit (or required multiple pest-defeating tactics on a strict schedule). And if you’re keeping track, apples aren’t native. Fruit expert Lee Reich offers up two unusual but delicious American native fruit-tree beauties that require little more than to be planted. In print or the latest public-radio podcast, how to grow pawpaws (top photo) and persimmons to perfection. Lee’s tips for growing pawpaw or American persimmon couldn’t make it sound more appealing, or simple: “Plant it, water it, and keep weeds and deer away for a couple of years, and then do nothing,” he says. No fancy pruning (like those apples crave), no particular pests–and a big, juicy harvest. Lee Reich  

A Way To Garden With Margaret Roach-Ali Stafford on Ideas for Soup I don’t know about you, but I am thinking soup. Soup for lunch and for dinner, too, with the extra portions from each big homemade batch laid into the freezer for a future cold day. Ali Stafford of Alexandra Cooks dot com, and author of “Bread, Toast, Crumbs”–one of my favorite cookbooks of the last year–and I compared notes and offer inspiration for those of us staring a ‘Butternut’ squash in the face, maybe, or even just a can of paste tomatoes, or a bag of onions, and wanting to mix things up a bit from the same-old, same-old soup recipes. Besides ideas for flavor combinations, we’ve assembled loads of links to specific recipes for soups ranging from winter squash to lentil, onion to tomato, root vegetables and even garlic

A Way To Garden With Margaret Roach-A Saner Approach to Fall Cleanup, with The Habitat Network’s Rhiannon Crain When we say, “fall garden clean-up,” just how clean do we mean? A slightly tongue-in-cheek campaign called “The Pledge to Be a Lazy Gardener,” from the Habitat Network, asks us to think about that in a whole different way than what you might find in the how-to section of ornamental-horticulture books. Backstory: The Habitat Network collaboration between Cornell Lab of Ornithology and The Nature Conservancy, empowered by a mapping program called YardMap, provides a suite of tools that helps you map, and then manage, your own home landscape ecologically, to be a better habitat style gardener. The information in the maps you create in this citizen-science project helps researchers learn about wildlife interactions in residential landscapes, and more. We asked Dr. Rhiannon Crain, The Habitat Network project manager, to talk about rethinking fall clean-up from an ecological point of view.

A Way To Garden With Margaret Roach October 16 -Noah Strycker on Birding Without Borders IN ONE VERY ACTION-PACKED YEAR of more than a hundred thousand miles of global travel, Noah Strycker saw 6,042 species of birds, which represents 58.3 percent of the world’s avian diversity. Yes, one man in one year. Many of you probably enjoy watching birds, but what prompts a person to set out to pursue a big year, as it’s called in the world of extreme birding? And what, besides a possible record, do they potentially gain in the process?   Noah Strycker is a 31-year-old writer, photographer, and bird man based in Oregon. Noah welcomes correspondence at noah.strycker@gmail.com

A Way To Garden With Margaret Roach-Jane Perrone on crazy houseplants From 2008 to this summer, Jane Perrone was gardening editor for “The Guardian” newspaper in the U.K, where she lives with her husband, who is forced to compete for Jane’s attentions with a lot of insistent, needy houseplants. Which is our subject—not the husband but the houseplants, that is. We talked specifically about Jane’s new-ish podcast called “On The Ledge” with its sometime motto, “Saving your houseplants from certain death since February 2017.” I’m having fun listening in to each episode and I’m glad Jane made time to speak, just as we officially kick off houseplant season, to talk about trendy “it” houseplants, the real tips for controlling fungus gnats, and more.

A Way To Garden With Margaret Roach-Ken Druse Overwintering Plants Q and A (Overtime Edition) The mad stash: overwintering tender plants, a Q&A with Ken Druse  

ASK MARTA MCDOWELL what she’s harvesting in her garden this fall, and here’s the kind of answer you might elicit: “I’m off to pick the overflow crop of ground cherries that I planted, because of a letter that Ma Ingalls wrote to her daughter. Ground cherry preserves anyone?” Well, the Ma Ingalls in that reply is none other than the mother of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the beloved “Little House” books. So why does Marta McDowell, a gardener and landscape designer in contemporary New Jersey, take her cues about what crops to grow from the vintage correspondence of others? Apparently, that’s a side effect of delving into their backstory deeply enough to write “The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Frontier Landscapes that Inspired the Little House Books,” which McDowell has just published.

WHY CELEBRATE NATIVE PLANTS? Nurseryman and naturalist Andy Brand offers many reasons, including this one: butterflies. As manager of Broken Arrow rare-plant nursery and founder of the Connecticut Butterfly Society, Andy has intimate insights into whether native species, in particular, really work—as in, work for pollinators, birds and other species in a particular habitat.