Slow Food City's Edge - Spring Garden Events!

Would you like to learn more about Organic Gardening in small spaces? How about apple grafting techniques? Or learn how to prepare and preserve what you grow at home? Slow Food City’s Edge is a local chapter of Slow Food, an international organization with members worldwide who celebrate local and seasonal food traditions, support sustainable agriculture, and embrace the pleasures of eating good food.


Slow Food City’s Edge is a local chapter that is sponsoring two new events in March and April.  If you have the time, check them out.  There's plenty to learn and it's a fun group. 

“Apple Grafting Workshop” will take place at Cantigny in Wheaton on March 20 at 1:00 PM. Presented by Oriana Krajewski, expert orchardist, member of the Midwest Fruit Explorers and a market fruit grower who specializes in Asian Pears. Oriana will explain how to graft the wood of Pixie Crunch (scion wood) while it's dormant onto the root stock of a dwarf tree or a small tree. The graft will have time to knit together before the growing season starts. Cost: $45.00 Price includes admission to the workshop and the Pixie Crunch tree. Attendees will have access to additional trees for grafting at a nominal fee.

(Thanks to Cameron Cross via his father-in-law Cliff Whall for this cool photo.  Cameron grew these beauties, which are so artfully arranged on the family's kitchen counter in the south of France.  Tomatoes galore!)

“Let's Grow at Home” is presented by Vicki Nowicki landscape designer at Liberty Gardens in Downers Grove on Sunday, April 30 from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM. Vicki will give a hands-on blueprint for organic vegetable gardening in her own garden in Downers Grove where she and her husband Ron have gardened in for 30 years. Cost is $15. Find more on these programs here.

-- Nina A. Koziol http://www.thisgardencooks.com/

Thoughts on Bugs, Birds and the Benefits of Native Plants

I often wondered why the hordes of Japanese beetles that mobbed the ornamental grasses, roses, basil and other plants in our garden often went unnoticed by the chickadees, wrens and other birds that are regular visitors.  When those beetles launched themselves from the ground one warm day in June--in an event that was somewhat like the old TV thriller, The Twilight Zone, I was certain that the birds would feast on them just like they do on cicadas.  Wrong.

Doug Tallamy explains why that's not going to happen any time soon in his book, Bringing Nature Home.  Japanese beetles didn't evolve with chickadees or wrens.  But the beetles did evolve with the weeping Asiatic cherry that I planted in the front border.  Each year, the leaves looked like Swiss cheese come July, absolutely decimated by these voracious little monsters.  And so the cherry came out and was replaced with a native witch hazel.

Tallamy's book is a call for planting more natives in suburban gardens.  Plants that support native insect populations, which in turn support the birds and other creatures that rely on them as part of the food chain.  His book is a great read for any gardener.  You need not plant your entire yard with natives.  But my goal this year is to have at least one third of our acre dedicated to paw paw trees, sweet gum, Joe Pye weed and others that will bring in butterflies, moths, bees and other beneficial insects.  Check out his book...it's a good read for spring.  

Thoughts about Spring

“Spring is the inspiration, fall the expiration. Both seasons have their equinoxes, both their filmy, hazy air, their ruddy forest tints, their cold rains, their drenching fogs, their mystic moons; both have the same solar light and warmth, the same rays of the sun; yet, after all, how different the feelings they inspire! One is morning, the other the evening; one is youth, the other is age.” -- American Naturalist John Burroughs, 1876