Things Are Popping Up All Over

I delight in the profusion of Spring pop-ups, including favorites such as hellebores and the weird, sci-fi flowers of butterburr (Petasites japonica), but one of the most exciting seasonal appearances is that of my little pop-up greenhouse. I set it up in early April and before long it's stuffed with seedlings. And I've got lots of other stuff waking up in there-dormant elephants ears (Colocasia spp.), many slumbering salvias (mostly S. guaranitica 'Black and Blue'), bromeliads, cannas (love that C. 'Tropicanna'), and more.

My greenhouse, a 6x6x6 cube that goes up as easily as tent, will go back to the basement by mid-May, when danger of a frost will be a thing of the past (Yahoo!). In the meantime, it helps me get a head start on containers and prevents my seedlings, like this Stipa tenuissima, from getting too leggy. Young tomato plants like it inside too. On cold nights, I toss a blanket over the top of the greenhouse for extra insulation, then crank up the little electric heater inside. Those plants are happy as clams. And so am I.

A Cutting Edge Tool

When my friend Lynn Cavo gave me a Japanese landscape knife the other day, she knew I was going to like it. She just didn't know how much. Well, it's not often I happen across a tool that transforms the way I work in the garden, so I'm singing the praises of this simple rice farmers' tool, a wooden handle mounted to a 6-inch sawtooothed sickle blade. It's invaluable for cutting garden clean-up tasks down to size.

My fall clean up is fast and simple--I mow just about everything down with a weed whacker or electric hedge trimmer (and yes, I've severed countless extension cords with that device). But that doesn't work for everything. Hostas, for example. or Siberian iris, which have invariably flopped flat by the time I get around to whacking them. Anyway, the harvest knife makes very, very quick work of those stubborn plants. I grab a handful of green, swipe the knife across its base and presto-all done! It should also work well for harvesting veggies and all kinds of other jobs too. If there's a gardener on your Christmas shopping list, visit the link above and you're all done. I've got BLK725P, one of the ones with a red handle-which should help prevent me from losing it quite so frequently. They're cheap too--$10 or so. And be sure to get yourself one.