Cottage Garden: Growing Hollyhocks

June 8, 2021 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

Hollyhocks are tall, easy to grow, biennial flowers. They’re perfect for adding a colorful backdrop to garden beds and look excellent along fences. Hollyhocks are a mainstay in English and cottage-style gardens and are great for attracting bees.

As biennials, they don’t bloom their first year. They spend the first year growing attractive dark green rosettes of foliage and storing energy. In the second year, the tall stalks grow, and the hollyhocks bloom and produce seed. They typically bloom from around June until August.

These incredible flowers are native to Southwest and Central Asia. Their roots were often used in herbal medicine. The blooms are also edible and can be used to make tea.

At SESE, we offer two hollyhock varieties.

Black Hollyhocks

This dramatic heirloom is a show-stopper in any cottage garden and dates back to pre-1830. It features magnificent spikes of satiny blue-black single flowers that form the second year from first-year leafy 18 inch leaf rosettes.

Find seeds here.

Outhouse Hollyhocks

This mixed-color beauty was traditionally grown around outhouses. The spires of single pink, white, red, and burgundy flowers grow up to 9 feet tall and made perfect screens for outhouses. You didn’t have to ask where the bathroom was; you could just look for the hollyhocks!

Find seeds here.

Planting & Care

Hollyhocks can be grown with relative ease. They can be started indoors or direct sown. They germinate best when the soil temperature is around 60°F. Germination can take 14 to 21 days; you’ll have to be patient with these flowers!

Location

When planting out, select a location with well-drained soil and full sun. As tall plants with heavy flowers, Hollyhocks do best in areas sheltered from the wind. They thrive in fertile soil with a neutral pH.

Spacing

Hollyhocks are large, tall flowers, so proper spacing is crucial, plant them 12 to 24 inches apart. If they’re too crowded, hollyhocks are also susceptible to rust (Puccinia malvacearum), a fungal disease that typically begins on the lower leaves.

Watering

Watering your hollyhocks is most important when they’re germinating and newly planted. Keep them consistently moist during this time. After they’re established, hollyhocks are quite drought tolerant. Over-watering established plants can make them more prone to lodging and diseases.

Staking

Hollyhocks benefit from a bit of support and can be prone to lodging, especially in windy areas. Grow hollyhocks along a fence, trellis, or use stakes to keep flower stalks upright.

Should I Deadhead Hollyhocks?

As with many flowers, deadheading hollyhocks isn’t necessary, but it can encourage them to bloom more. However, deadheading hollyhocks means you will get fewer seeds. Many gardeners like to save seeds from hollyhocks and re-plant or let them self-sow. Allowing plants to self-sow or re-planting them yourself will ensure that you have some hollyhocks blooming each year.

Soil Care

Hollyhocks aren’t super heavy feeders, but you still need to take care of the soil, especially if you allow hollyhocks to keep re-seeding in the same bed. Adding a layer of compost each spring can help keep the soil healthy.

Hollyhocks are a fun, easy-to-grow flower great for adding lots of color and height to your garden. Following these tips can help you have success with them.

Garden Advice

Garden Water Management

June 3, 2021 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

Water may seem like one of the easiest elements of a garden to manage. Pulling out the sprinkler is undoubtedly easier than pulling weeds! Unfortunately, as many gardeners have discovered, water can cause a host of issues in the garden if you have too much or too little. Here are a few ways you can improve your garden to cope with water shortages and surpluses.

Too Much Water

Erosion Control

Many gardeners lucky enough to call the Appalachians home have to cope with less than flat garden plots. Even with a slight slope, erosion can be a significant cause for concern.

Erosion damages garden soil by washing away organic matter and essential nutrients. It’s also damaging to local watersheds. When excess soil nutrients end up in streams, lakes, and rivers, they can cause algal blooms, which harm fish and other aquatic life.

Swales & Terraces

For severe slopes or areas you know are prone to erosion, building contour swales or terraced beds may be worth the time and work invested.

You can create terraced beds with a variety of materials, including boards, logs, or rocks. You want to create a wall that is parallel with the slope. Then you can flatten the soil behind it by raking it against the wall. This method is a great way to be able to grow annual crops on hillsides.

Swales are essentially mounded beds with ditches behind them. Larger swales are typically built to follow the contour of a slope. Swales help prevent erosion and retain water. The water that collects in the ditch slowly seeps into the mound, providing moisture to plants over a longer period. You can learn more about building a swale of your own in our post, “Let’s Talk About Swales.”
Cover Crops

Another critical factor in preventing erosion is never leaving soil bare. Cover crops help prevent erosion because their roots help hold soil in place, and take up some moisture. Sow cover crops in pathways between beds, in areas not currently in production, and during the fall to keep your soil covered during the winter and spring. Learn more about which cover crops you should plant in this blog post.

Water-Logged Soils/Standing Water

Another issue common to the Southeastern US is heavy clay soils. These types of soils are prone to becoming water-logged during the spring rainy season. There are a few things so can do to combat this issue.

Add Organic Matter

Organic matter dramatically improves how your soil handles water. It soaks up water during rains and allows plants to access it slowly over time. The fastest way to add organic mater to your garden is to top dress your garden with several inches of well-aged compost.

You can also add organic matter by using cover crops and mulch. Natural mulches like straw, leaves, grass clippings, and wood chips slowly break down adding organic matter and nutrients to the soil.
Go No-Till

Like adding organic matter, reducing the amount you till helps improve drainage and allows plants to access moisture over a longer time. Ditching the tiller keeps soil structure intact and reduces compaction, a major problem with clay soils.
Raised Beds

If you struggle with wet spring soils, you might consider building raised beds. You can create raised beds from scrap lumber, logs, rocks, and other cheap or free materials. They drain well and warm up quickly in the spring, helping you to get an early start. Keep in mind they also dry out faster during the hot summer months.

Too Little Water

Water Efficiently

Not all watering schedules are created equal! Watering in the cooler early morning or evening helps decrease the amount of water you lose to evaporation. You can further reduce evaporation by using drip irrigation or soaker hoses.If you often forget to turn off your watering system, consider purchasing a timer which will shut it off automatically. Alternatively you can set a kitchen timer or timer on your phone to remind you.

Mulch

Mulch helps keep soil cool and moist, reducing evaporation. You can use many cheap or free materials as mulch including cover crop residue, grass clippings, straw, leaves, and wood chips.

Collect Rainwater

Rain Barrels

Rain barrels are an excellent asset for any backyard garden. You can add gutters to your home or garden shed and collect the water in a barrel to use for watering plants. Rain barrels don’t need to be fancy; cleaned trash barrels with holes drilled in the appropriate places will work if you don’t mind a DIY project.
Swales

As we mentioned above, you can also use contour swales to collect rainwater. The water fills the ditch behind the mound and slowly seeps into it, allowing plants to soak up the water over a longer time.

Choose Water-Wise Crops

If you have an area of your garden that is hard to water you may want to plant crops and flowers that don’t require much. These include native flowers like echinacea and food crops like flint and dent corns.

Whether you struggle with too much water or too little these strategies can help make your garden more productive. Proper water management is key to a healthy garden and a healthy local ecosystem.

Garden Advice

A Beginners Guide to Pollination

May 27, 2021 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

Gardeners often talk about the importance of bees and butterflies. While these pollinators are important, there are other aspects of pollination that are sometimes overlooked. Learning about the process of pollination can help gardeners produce more food and save seed successfully.

How Does Pollination Work?

Pollination occurs when the pollen, a powder containing male reproductive cells, is transferred from one flower’s anthers to another flower’s stigma. As plants can’t make this transfer themselves, they rely on outside forces to move the pollen. Pollination can occur in several ways.

Is Pollination Necessary?

Pollination is necessary for all plants to produce seed. Certain vegetables also require pollination to produce a yield. These include fruiting crops such as tomatoes, squash, beans, and corn. Root and leaf crops like beets and lettuce don’t require pollination to produce a yield but still need to be pollinated to produce seed.

Insect & Animal Pollination

When we think of pollinators, we typically think about bees and butterflies. In reality, various insects and animals pollinate plants, including moths, flies, wasps, birds, and even bats!

Pollination isn’t intentional on the part of the animals or insects. These creatures accidentally transfer pollen from one flower to another while harvesting pollen, nectar, or both.

Bees are considered some of the best pollinators of food crops. Their bodies are covered with bristly hairs which collect pollen electrostatically. The pollen rubs off on other flowers as they continue to collect it. Some native bees, like the Southeastern Blueberry Bee, also specialize in specific plants and do a better job at pollination than other species.

Wind & Water

Wind pollinated crops produce billions of super light pollen grains that are easily carried by the wind. They typically have feathery stigmas to help catch wind-borne pollen. These crops include most grains like corn, barley, wheat, and oats. Many nut trees are also wind-pollinated.

In our Corn Growing Guide, you may have noticed that it says to plant corn in blocks at least five rows wide for good pollination and well-filled ears. As corn by wind-pollinated, it has a much better chance of being pollinated in larger block plantings than if you plant a row or two.

You may occasionally notice insect pollinators visiting these crops. Bees and other insects may gather pollen but are generally ineffective at pollination.

Water pollination is rare but there are a few species of aquatic plants that rely on pollen transfer through water.

Human

Why would humans need to pollinate crops? Hand-pollination is typically done when natural pollination is either lacking or undesirable.

The most well-known example of hand pollination being necessary is vanilla. The vanilla orchid, which is native to Mexico, is pollinated by a specific species of wild bees. Vanilla crops grown in other locations such as Madagascar have to be hand-pollinated because natural pollinators don’t exist.

Natural pollination may be undesirable when breeding plants or avoiding cross-pollination. When trying to breed a new variety or create a specific hybrid, gardeners may rely on hand pollination. You can also use hand-pollination to keep plants from cross-pollinating if you don’t have the space to separate them the necessary distance. Bagging or covering and hand-pollinating flowers will keep your varieties pure.

Hand pollination is simple to do. You need to identify the flower’s anthers and use a cotton swab or small brush like a paintbrush to move pollen to another flower’s anthers.

Keeping these pollination facts in mind can help ensure your garden is a success.

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