New York Renovator

Unbelievable.

ORISKANY, N.Y. (WKTV) – There’s a disease that’s hitting tomato plants across the northeast and it may have found its way to your own garden here in Central New York.

Officials out in Oriskany from the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Oneida County say the big box retail stores in our area : Walmart, K-Mart, Home Depot and Lowes all had the same supplier of tomato plants, a company from the south. That company had plants tainted with the disease called “late blight,” a fast spreading disease that will kill your plant and any plants near it.

Will someone please tell me why ALL the major Big Box stores get their tomato plants from the SAME SUPPLIER for the entire Northeast?! Stupid! Sheesh, now even our plant suppliers are consolidated! Ugh!!

My tomatoes had vicious blight last year– I am sure they had the blight before I bought them, because as soon as I got them into the ground, they turned brown and died. (I’d bought them from WalMart. I’ll never do that again. I think WalMart is getting too big for its britches, selling everything under the sun. Next thing you know, they’ll be doing piano lessons). So this year, I got the tomatoes from Lowes. I don’t know why I even buy the plants- tomatoes grow so easily from seed. I’d composted some tomatoes in my large compost pile a year or two ago, and added the compost to my garden. I guess the seeds didn’t compost, because that year I had dozens of little tomato plants growing in the garden beds everywhere. From now on, I’m just going to grow from seed.

If you have bought tomato plants from these stores, Miller says “really keep an eye on them and look for any kind of pale greening, wet soaked areas on the leaf tips and especially if they have started to turn brown and dispose of them as we have talked about.” Miller says the proper method is to put the diseased plant in a dark colored plastic bag, put that plastic bag in another dark plastic bag and leave that in the sun in order to kill the spores. Once that is done, you are ok to put that with your other yard waster to be taken away.

If you want more information, check out the Cornell Cooperative Extension site.

Also called the Red-Hot Poker Plant, the Torch Lily is a pretty nifty addition to my garden. They originate from South Africa and Madagascar. I bought some rhizome-type bulbs on a fluke several years ago, from a catalog store. These perennial plants are hardy to Zone 5 (I am in Zone 4). They are heat- and drought-tolerant (but need water during their growing time), and require full sun.

These had a rather shaky first year, but after that, they have been incredible, easy-care plants. My plants get a lot of abuse, too. My property is situated in a marshy area of the town (there’s a muddy, murky, burgeoning swamp in the neighbor’s back yard); my land rests at the bottom of a very steep hill, and rests in one of the lowest spots in the area. We get a lot of water. As a matter of fact, we are convinced that there is a powerful stream or creek that flows beneath the surface of our land. When digging post holes, we reach water at two feet. Plus, the topography of our land changes dramatically every year. There’s SOMETHING going on under our turf, that’s for sure.

Well, my Torch Lilies are planted in a small strip of soil between the house foundation and the driveway– an area of about 3 feet wide. The ice from the eaves crashes down in that section all winter long, and the plow mows the snowbanks right there, too. Plus, there’s the salt and dirt and movement that attacks any plant next to a driveway. The Torch Lilies continue to shine.

I do not fertilize them, I don’t deadhead them after blooming, I don’t do anything to them! The soil they call home is graveley and not very nutritious, either. But they bloom every year. I love these things!

The Torch Lily grows to about 3 or 4 feet high. They have lots of sword-shaped leaves. The shoots pop up sometime in early June, looking a little like light-green Grape Hyacinths (but much taller and larger). After about a week or two, they burst in color of yellows, oranges, and a dash of light red at the tops. My Torch Lilies always get comments from my visitors– these are quite showy and are rather rare for an Upstate New York cottage garden, I suppose.

Eventually I plan to move these to a larger, more showy part of my garden, but the Torch Lilies seem so happy here right now. I’ve read that they don’t like being disturbed (which is why they took a year or two to establish), so divide them sparingly.

I just love this garden. I’ve been slowly adding to it for the past few years.

It’s been a soggy spring and start to summer, so I’ve had to work on it between raindrops this year. It’s a perennial garden with many native shrubs. I always plant vegetation that is native to the area (because I just hate babying plants). I’ve got Mugo pine shrubs, a Dwarf Alberta Spruce, some lilacs, blue Rose of Sharon, Scotch Rose, Bridal Wreath Spirea, Potentilla, Arbor Vitea, Mock Rose, White Azalea, and purple Butterfly Bushes for shrubs. For plants, I have Echinacea (Purple Coneflower), Rudbeckia (Black-Eyed Susan), Hostas, Day lilies, Gerbera Daisy, Stargazer Lilies, Tulips, Stella D’oro lilies, purple Bearded Iris, purple Salvia, Purple Chrysanthemums, Blue Anemone, Pink Turtleheads, Pink Monarda (Bee Balm), Daisies, and Astible. And then I have Periwinkle and English Ivy for ground cover. For filler, I add a few annuals like Impatiens and Petunias, but that’s all the annuals I do.

I have plans to eventually fill this entire side of the yard as a cottage garden, with native shrubs and perennials. It’s so easy care that it’s ridiculous. I send the kids out to weed it about 3-4 times a year– but once the ground cover really kicks in, we’ll weed less. The real benefit is not having to mow this section of the yard. And it looks lovely! Eventually, the lilacs and the Rose of Sharon will grow taller than the arbor, creating a green passageway down the side yard. Mmmmm.

After we bought the house, we replaced only a few things: the roof, a front door, some windows, a new oven, and remodeled the Entry Hall. I have also been through the entire house and re-painted all walls and trim. But that is really all we have done. I am in the process of parging the basement walls, and I painted the concrete floor in the basement last autumn. But raising the kids, busy schedules, and etc have kept us from really doing what we’d like to do with the place all at once.

So, in the meantime, I gardened.

As with the house, the large yard was left untended for a long period of time. It has been a constant battle to reclaim and domesticate the flora and fauna here. Everything we try to do has seemed like such a struggle, from the wild deer that chew up all my shrubs to the neighbor’s grandkids playing “lumberjack” with my new young spruce trees to the massive run-off flooding we have here. It has been a huge fight just to cultivate the land.

Below are few pictures of some things we have done.

Early on, we built a fence to hedge in the front yard. Apparently, our property was a favorite place for snowmobilers and motorcyclers to rip up the lawn by driving in circles around the trees.

Here is our youngest, working on his PHD (post-hole digger).

This is my vegetable garden. I am very proud of it. The deer and rabbits love it, too.

Last July’s big flood wiped out half of my vegetables. I am glad I got a shot of them before they were swept away.

Gardens are beautiful. I never thought I’d be a gardening “nut,” but there is something so satisfying about sowing a plant and watching it grow to become something beautiful and beneficial. Below is a picture of my sunflowers that grew to be 10 feet tall.

I have planted flowers beds (mostly low-care perennials) in small areas around the yard. Because new beds require so much weeding at first, they are still in the process of looking good. I built this arbor and my husband and I secured it to the ground. I also laid a stone pathway with the numerous rocks I have around the yard. Eventually I will redo the walkway with Quikrete’s concrete mold.

Gardening has been a terrific, if exhausting, outlet for me. For the kids, too.

One has so many backyard garden options these days. There are backyard playsets that can turn your back yard into an excellent play area for the children. Getting a pergola can turn it into an admirable piece of architecture. One can also get decks if his nature is more adventure loving. There are a lot of garden variety designs out there, a different one for everyone.