First Crocuses, 2019

Spring is late this year! I'm a little surprised, because we didn't have an especially hard winter, although notably absent were the random warm days in January or late February. It was consistently winter-cold, nothing approximating a brief thaw.

Maybe that's why my crocuses are slow out of the gate! The popped their little green heads up about 3 weeks ago, but have made little progress since.

Come on, guys! We're all rootin for ya.

Pickers Cabins, Columbia Falls, Maine

It's nearly picking season in Downeast Maine. The pickers will come and live at the barrens in rustic little camps until the work is done.

 The barrens are a spare but beautiful landscape, upon which little will grow except blueberries, because below a very thin scrim of soil lies solid bedrock, scraped clean by glaciers. The blueberry foliage turns deep red in early August, and stays brilliant until the snow covers it. The town of Cherryfield - right next to Columbia Falls - got its name, oddly enough, from the red foliage of its blueberry barrens. My mother is from Cherryfield, and she worked in Wyman's food processing plant as a teenager, plucking sticks and rocks from a conveyor belt of blueberries. She hates when I tell people this, but she was crowned Maine Blueberry Queen of 1950! You probably love wild Maine blueberries - everybody does. They are a superfood, you know! These barrens are, in fact, wild; the blueberries were here before there were companies to cultivate them. They may have been here before there were any people to enjoy them! The pickers cabins in the photo above are the accommodations provided by the Passamaquoddy Wild Blue Berry Company. 

Ready for picking! July 2017

Berry Season: Homegrown is Alright with Me

A land baron I am not (or baroness, I guess.) I live on a double city lot. Nevertheless, my husband and I manage to grow quite a lot of food on our small parcel. This busy lady favors easy things to grow - tomatoes, hot peppers, pole beans - but by far the easiest, and my favorite, are raspberries.

They grow like the proverbial weeds - and sometimes they are the quite-literal weeds, as it's easier to grow them than it is to root them out where you don't want them. The don't even need to be weeded or watered. You just need a sunny-ish patch (I put mine on a difficult-to-mow western slope.) and to wait a year after they are planted, for the canes don't produce fruit their first year. I chose a variety that does all its fruiting early in the season, because once the tomatoes & beans start coming I can barely keep up with processing them, so I feared all-season raspberries would be wasted.

The fruit, of course, is amazing, but the leaves also make a nice tea, which is a gentle treatment for menstrual cramps or diarrhea. Less reliably, raspberry is said in lore to strengthen the bonds of marriage and ensure fidelity, and the bushes to protect a homestead against lost spirits. I can attest to this latter property - I have yet to see a ghost here!

Raspberries are delicious all by themselves. They are also yummy additions to cereal or salad; or here is a simple dessert preparation:

2 cups fresh raspberries, rinsed and drained
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup sour cream

In a mixing bowl, bruise the fruit lightly with a potato masher. Sprinkle the sugar on top, mix briefly then let sit for an hour. Add the sour cream, stir thoroughly, and spoon into bowls.  A summer dessert soup!

Tomato Pics - The Perfect Father's Day Tribute

It's sort of a running joke in my family - my Dad and his tomato plants. There are reels and reels of home movie footage of beautiful green growing fruit. He was so proud of his garden.

So, not for nothin', I grew up to be a gardener, and I sort of specialize in tomatoes. And this year I have blossoms already on some of my plants! In the middle of June.

Dad would be proud.

Dear Holland Bulb Company

Twelve years ago, I received a gift certificate for your catalog as a housewarming/engagement gift. I used that gift certificate to purchase 50 daffodil bulbs.
These bulbs, when they arrived turned out to be the rarely seen foliage daffodil! For 12 springs I watched for the round-tipped, verdant blades to peek above the soil, developing the slightest blush of maroon at their edges; simple, understated, and lovely. They would spring up , cover the slope with their grey-green abundance...and then die back. It was a ritual. Anyone can appreciate a bloom. It takes a real connoisseur to appreciate a foliage daffodil.


Daffodils are long-lived plants, and they naturalize and spread. I expected to enjoy my foliage daffodils for many years to come! But I notice this year something has happened; they seem to have been infected with a fungus of some kind! It's bright yellow, and ruffly...do you think it's related to those growths you see on trees? You know, Chicken of the Woods?

I will say this: though perhaps a bit gaudy compared with the sleek, sophisticated bare foliage we've enjoyed for the last dozen years, these fungal eruptions - if that's what they are - are not without appeal. I was wondering: if these pose no threat to the health of the plant, is there is some way I might encourage more of them? Not to devalue our foliage daffodil experience, but I find the bright cheery splash of color quite charming!
Any idea what it might be?

Very truly yours,

Lori Keenan Watts

First Crocuses, 2017

For 11 years now I have been marking the end of winter - the emotional if not the literal end - by watching for the day my crocuses poke their tender heads above ground. Ladies & gentlemen, that day was yesterday! In an amazing coincidence, yesterday was also the coldest day of the winter so far. at around 5°F. This wouldn't have been my choice, if I were them, but I trust that they know what they are doing.

I made sure to replace the blanket of dead leaves I pushed aside to get a peek.

The earliest I've seen crocuses come up in those 11 years was 2012, on February 29th. The latest was March 23. This year is a little on the early side, probably because we got a deep blanket of snow before the real cold came, and because last week was unusually warm.

Spring is coming now! There's no stopping this train.

A Walk in the Maine Woods

Now that spring is here - well, sort of - it’s a great time to go plant-spotting. There are well over 200 plant species on Maine’s rare, threatened and endangered list. Who knew, right? Some are so rare that there are estimated to be fewer than 5 individual plants in the entire state! Others are well-established in Maine but threatened globally. On your next outing, see if you can spot these plants from the list:


Showy Lady’s Slipper
Rarer than either the pink or yellow varieties, there are estimated to be between 20 and 100 Showy Lady’s slippers in Maine.





Spotted WintergreenSpotted Wintergreen grows in only 13 locations in the entire state, with fewer than 20 individual plants. Its southern Maine habitat has been reduced by de-velopment. In June white blooms on short stalks make it easier to spot.


Slender Blue Flag Iris
Slender Blue Flag likes both salt and freshwater marshes, and costal meadows. Though threatened in Maine - fewer than 20 plants are known to grow here - the population of Slender Blue Flag is believed to be globally secure.

A Tale of Two Coneflowers

Echinacea purpurea

I once thought I'd try to have a garden strictly of native plants. Yeah, I once thought a lot of things. I found it far too limiting given the vast variety of beauty available to the gardener, but one plant that has stayed with me from that period is Purple Coneflower. Funnily enough, I was mistaken; coneflower is native to North America, but not to Maine, where it migrated from the midwestern states.

Echinacea pallida

Did I say one plant? I meant two. Coneflower comes in two varieties. Echinacea pallida is a paler purple, and a taller, leggier plant; echinacea purpurea is a deeper pink-purple color, and more compact.

Both are bee-friendly plants, but let me suggest that you get your coneflowers from a neighbor who's dividing, or from a small garden center like Longfellow's. A recent study (.pdf) found that more than 50% of perennials sold at the large retailers like Lowe's and Home Depot had been treated with pesticides called neonicotinoids that make plants poisonous to bees! It's important to note that it was a small sample, and more study is needed; however, I err on the side of caution, since the bees are having a rough go as it is. If you transplant, get a good root ball, and get it in the ground - full sun if possible - as soon as you can.

Echinacea is thought by some to have medicinal properties, including boosting the immune system; this has yet to be proven, and collection of the roots for this purpose, along with habitat loss, has put echinacea on the endangered list in some states.

Coneflowers attract butterflies, and after the flowers pass, goldfinches will perch on the dried seedheads to feed. 

Luck Flower, Liver-Friend

In the untended places, chicory is blooming in Maine.

I name it a weed, but of course a weed is only a plant out of its proper place. (Grass, for example, is the most noxious weed in my perennial bed.) Chicory has been cultivated since antiquity for medicinal uses: it was said to be a "friend of the liver" by the Romans and later used to treat insomnia, eye inflammations, and "passions of the heart." A brew of mashed chicory and honey was used topically (and rather optimistically) to make breast round and firm.

Stuff like that always make me wonder: surely someone would have noticed when their breasts sagged no less as a result of smearing on some poultice. And then I think, "Oh, right, confirmation bias:" the same thing that accounts for continued belief in horoscopes and hauntings. (That, and it's more fun than rational thought...)

Chicory is also likely the Luck-Flower of German mythology, which allowed the bearer to cause mountains to open, in which there were always gold and treasures. The hapless fools in the tales always seem to forget or lose their luck-flower on the way out, but that's not chicory's fault. The plant was also believed to confer on the bearer invisibility, if a number of specific conditions were observed during its cutting.

If your liver needs a friend, or you heart contains passions that need healing, try Chicory leaves boiled for five minutes (to remove bitterness), and then sautéed like spinach, with chopped garlic.