Tag: coneflower

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Seed Savers Exchange



Gardens in front of the barn at Seed Savers Exchange



 Decorah, Iowa, is a beautiful town near the Minnesota border. Norwegians apparently settled the town, and their influence remains in the food and culture. After driving more than 100 miles north of Iowa City, where my family and I visited my sister, we arrived at Seed Savers Exchange, a seed purveyor.   Visit them at http://www.seedsavers.org/.  They specialize in selling heirloom seeds, and their goal is to help prevent the extinction of the seeds our great-grandparents grew. People used to save seeds of plants that did well in their gardens and pass them along to other people, and they developed varieties especially adapted to their gardens. With the advent of hybrid seed and the decline of gardening, many of these varieties have been lost. Seed Savers, along with other similar organizations, hopes to prevent further demise by growing and selling the seed.
Seed Savers Exchange is a nonprofit organization founded by Diane Ott Whealy and Kent Ott in 1975 with some seed her grandfather gave her that he brought from Bavaria to Iowa in the 1870s. Heritage Farm, where Seed Savers Exchange is headquartered, spreads for 890 acres and includes antique apples, fields of heirloom vegetables, and endangered cattle. The farmers at the Heritage Farm, as well as gardeners across the country, work together to preserve heirloom seeds by growing, sharing, and selling the seeds. Seed Savers Exchange donates seed to national and international seed vaults and preservation programs.  
Coneflowers
Unfortunately for me, we visited on a Sunday, when many of the buildings were closed, and we went there at the end of a very long day of driving and touring other places. Although my visit was brief, it was long enough to determine that the place is just as beautiful as the seed catalog and the website, http://www.seedsavers.org/,  depict it.
The soil is the rich, dark land of the Midwestern cornfields. I am perpetually envious of the richness of the soil and the abandon with which plants grow. My sister reminds me, though, that the weather is only pleasant less than half the year, and while I am at home, contentedly enjoying a 70-degree day in January and picking lettuce, the soil in which she might hope to grow lettuce is frozen solid and covered with snow.
But on that July day, the coneflowers grew in enormous clumps, as did the hollyhocks. Insects ravaged neither, and the colors in the petals were vibrant instead of faded by day after day of temperatures at or near 100, as my flowers are. Plants look like they do in pictures in magazines, instead of hot and tired.



Trial gardens at Seed Savers Exchange



In the vegetable garden, beans and tomatoes shared space with lettuce, potatoes, carrots, and beets. In Iowa, gardeners have only one season in which to grow their crop, and nature seems to cooperate to provide abundance in the short time. With the rich soil and extra hour of daylight gardens receive there, usually without the temperatures high enough to stop plant growth and fruit setting that we have regularly, plants grow and produce enough in the short season to sustain the gardener for the winter.
As I always do when I visit another garden, I left inspired to work harder in my garden. I cannot do anything about the heat, but I can continue to work on the soil so that my plants have a thicker layer of black loam in which to grow every year. I told my husband and sister I could just summer in Iowa, with a nice garden, and move back to SC when the snow falls. Then again, I would miss home and the sounds of our birds and insects. I guess I will stay where I am, and cope with my gardening challenges. At least I can garden nearly every day of the year here.
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To buy products from Seed Savers Exchange or to request a catalog, visit www.seedsavers.org or call (563) 382-5990.  If you have some seed you have passed down in your family and want to make sure it is preserved, or if you want to share it with others, they might be able to help.  In addition, if there is some variety of plant you remember from your grandmother’s garden but you cannot seem to find anymore, check their catalog for it.
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Suggestions for Plants That Like Our Heat

Summer is here, early, it seems, and any cool-weather plants I had not already replaced with heat-tolerant ones are unhappy. My peas are dead, and the broccoli that had not produced a crop is going to bolt to seed and skip forming a lovely head of broccoli. However, the weather is perfect for lima beans and okra, so get to work planting your garden.

In the flower garden, I’ve already replaced my pansies and cool-season plants with my favorite heat tolerant annuals. I water these a few times to get them comfortable in their new home, and then I ignore them the rest of the summer. They don’t even need deadheading. For sun, I use annual vinca, also called Madagascar periwinkle (see photo). It comes in shades of pink, white, and purple, and tolerates heat and drought. Deer don’t bother it. Do not confuse this with the evergreen vine called vinca; annual vinca is a bedding plant.

Annual Vinca

I also use Gomphrena globosa or gnome flower along the edges of my beds. It is available in pink, purple, and white, and blooms all summer with no care, and the cheerful yellow melapodium grows from last frost to first frost with no attention. I also use the sun tolerant annual begonia in borders and containers. For shade, impatiens bloom all summer with no attention from me.

When I planned my perennial garden, I consulted Jim Wilson’s book Bulletproof Flowers for the South and PJ Gartin’s book Some Like It Hot : Plants That Thrive in Hot and Humid Weather.  As the titles indicate, they list plants that don’t mind 97°F and 90% humidity. Some of the plants they endorse, and plants I use in my garden, include Achillea, or yarrow, a ferny-leaved 15-inch high plant with umbrella-shaped flowers. Coreopsis, which comes in shades of yellow and orange, smiles at the sun, and Butterfly bush blooms all summer and into the fall and attracts clouds of butterflies.

Sun-tolerant annual coleus provides interesting combinations of colors in its leaves, and coneflower, a native plant, provides long-lasting purple, pink, or white blooms. Daylilies are tough, as evidenced by their habit of continuing to grow and prosper in highway medians and in ditches where someone discarded them long ago. Most people that garden in the shade use hosta, and they combine nicely with impatiens and Japanese painted fern.

When I lived in Charleston, I loved the large Lantana bushes that grew around many homes. Unfortunately, lantana is not reliably cold hardy here, and the large bushes don’t usually develop, but the low-growing lantana will often survive the winter, loves the heat, and makes the bees and butterflies happy.

Scabiosa, also known as pincushion flower, comes in pink and purple and butterflies constantly cover it. It blooms in the very early spring and remains green throughout the winter. Deadheading it, or cutting off the dead blossoms, creates a flush of new blooms. In addition, I can’t forget my faithful salvias, veronicas, calaminthas, and catmints that continue blooming no matter how hot the weather.