SAGE - A GARDEN BEAUTY

Purple Sage and Curly Parsley at the Denver Botanic Garden

Tri-color Sage in my Greenwich garden

The holiday feast would not be complete without a turkey and stuffing flavored with sage. If you have it growing in your garden you can rely on it to be available for the chef because it can be harvested over a long season.

As fall mellows and then chills, many garden plants become tattered and straggly tempting the gardener wielding clippers to make the garden tidy. There are leafy herbs that defy this trend and show their glory even through frost and light snow.  Lavender, rosemary, silver horehound, thyme and sage all put on a fine display until a heavy freeze or deeper snow.

One delicious and durable member of this group is Salvia officinalis.  The most common varieties have gray green leaves with a matte textured surface. However, I find the purple, gold and tricolor leafed sage plants impart color while also adding their traditional flavor in cooking. 

Late in October my husband, Jay, and I spent a happy week in Denver with our daughter and her family.  The Denver Botanic Gardens, a lustrous jewel in Cheesman Park has plentiful herbs in formal and informal plantings.  Sages seem to love the high dry climate.  They are more fragrant there than in my Connecticut yard.  The difference is most likely due to the intense sunlight in Colorado and Long Island Sound’s summer humidity. My yard has lots of shady areas and fewer hours of hot sun.

PINE NEEDLES - Free and Easy Garden Mulch

Eastern White Pine - Pinus strobus

Newly fallen pine needles

Each fall pine needles drop. 

This year there is an abundance probably due to the drought that Connecticut and Massachusetts are suffering. One of the best ways to protect plants from drought conditions is to cover the soil  around your plants with mulch. Pine needles make an excellent mulch.  The water passes directly through and the resin content of the pine needles makes the mulch dry on the top deterring plant diseases.  And if you look around your neighborhood there could be plenty, just for the taking. 

Before the dinosaurs 50% of the earth's plants were conifers. Then plants (and trees) with flowers arrived 140 million years ago and became the dominant success story, reducing conifers to only 15% of the earth’s plants today. So if you are considering adding trees to your landscape consider conifers to keep plant diversity in your neighborhood.

The pine trees pictured here are along the edge of a parking lot owned by my town.  The ground crew will soon blow them into the parking lot and take them away to a landfill.  This is unfortunate.  If they were left in place they would feed and enrich the soil, save some labor, eliminate the noisy use of leafblowers and save space in the local landfill.

Last week I saw that the parking lot and grass were covered with pine needles.  I put some bags, boxes, baskets and my rake in my car for a quick stop to harvest this wealth of free clean organic mulch.  I used some immediately around leeks and garlic that will stay in the vegetable garden until I am ready to harvest, even if that is next season. The remainder is stashed away in my garden shed until spring.

It is important to look carefully at the area around the pine needles.  I did and saw some poison ivy growing at the bottom of the boundary fence, a recognition insuring that I will not rake up leaves that will make me itch. 

If you miss the fall pine needle gathering, the trees may drop again in the spring, but it will be much less.