Wednesday, August 31, 2022

I just Love Blue Morning Glories. Do You too ?

 Posted by Wayne G. Barber  & Photos property of  Wayne G. Barber 

The common morning glory is a favorite of gardeners everywhere for good reason. The eye-catching vines are very low maintenance—they can be easily started from seed in early spring, and you don't need to prune or deadhead them as they grow.


 Have a trellis or other support in place wherever you plant your seeds and the vines will soon find the support and train themselves to grow on it.

'Heavenly Blue': A popular cultivar with large azure flowers and heart-shaped leaves

With regular watering, morning glories can start blooming by mid-summer, but many times they are slow to begin setting flowers, earning them the nickname "back to school vine." If you want to try and speed up the flowering time of morning glories you seed yourself, you can try sowing the seeds even earlier in the spring by scattering them on the frozen ground and even on snow.

You can start seed indoors about four to six weeks before your last frost date, but it's not necessary—morning glory does very well when direct-sown as well. If you prefer to plant your seeds straight into the ground, wait until the soil is able to be worked and has warmed to at least 64 degrees Fahrenheit.

Morning glory seeds have a very hard seed coat and germination will be faster with scarification. You can do this by rubbing the seeds between two pieces of coarse sandpaper for a few seconds and then soaking them overnight. You will notice they are a lot plumper in the morning and look ready to sprout.

I have learned the hard way to wait to plant my favorite Burpee Heavenly Blue until the maple trees have full leaves on them and this year I put a few old golden shiners baitfish that had expired about 6 inches below them for some great results in the worst drought conditions since 1965 in the Northeast Quiet Corner . Try some in your yard next year for some real nice color and our green humming birds love them too. 

Monday, August 29, 2022

Please Support your local Farms

 Posted by Wayne G.Barber 


Farms of all types are having a rough season — wells running dry, transport costs up to get to market, consumers who themselves have less in their wallets to spend on food. 

Corporate consolidation — that is, a few major companies gobbling up all they can of food production and distribution — is a pattern that repeats across the whole food system.  

I’ve painted this picture to some non-farmer friends who have replied with some form of, ‘yeah, true. But it’s hard for all small businesses.’ Which is absolutely correct, and we should investigate why being small in any sector is impossible right now. (You don’t have to dig too deep — corporate consolidation is ubiquitous.) But also, for two major reasons, farming is different, and we all need to care.

First: farmers aren’t just business owners. Farmers — particularly organic farmers — are ecosystem stewards. Organic dairy farms keep land open (organic regulations require cows to be on pasture), sequestering carbon, protecting biodiversity and filtering water. What happens if an un-conserved farm goes out of business? 

Look no further than the mini storage units recently plunked down in what had previously been a farm field up in the North East Quiet Corner.. Then think about that pattern repeated across the state: the ripples of box stores slapped onto any field that a farmer can’t afford to keep in production. Consider what this does to Connecticut's identity as a pastoral, beautiful place people wish to come visit and live. What it does to the rural community that the farm helped to sustain.

Think also of the environmental difference of a store versus a farm field. What happens to the rain that falls on that impermeable concrete parking pad and the soil underneath it. Consider the pollinators that used to find food for their journey in the hedgerows and the wildlife that came to the pond to drink. 

While on the surface this looks like an outcome of an economic crisis, it morphs into yet another small piece of kindling tossed onto the climate fire that grows hotter by the year. Or in the hopeful alternative: each small, organic farm that can remain viable protects a bucket of water for dousing climate chaos.

Second: farmers grow food, which, at the risk of stating the obvious, we all need to stay alive. Currently, you can go to a box store and buy food brought in from away. But we must not quickly forget the lessons we learned at the start of the pandemic about how utterly brittle massive food supply chains are. How it doesn’t take much to disrupt that food showing up stocked on our shelf. What will we eat when the next disruption happens if there is no local farmer who has been able to keep producing?

We cannot let short-term economic crises exacerbate longer-term climate chaos and food insecurity. Connecticut’s small and organic farmers feed us, help Connecticut thrive, and feed our chances of a habitable planet. Every way we as individuals, (if we are in the fortunate economic group who can) or we as a collective (through state policy and investment), can support organic, small farms in thriving is a step toward a livable future for us all

Source: This commentary is written by Grace Oedel, & Wayne G. Barber