The Old Farmer's Almanac: June Gardening Tips

• Any bedding plants you find for sale can safely be planted outdoors in beds, boxes, or containers.


• If you long for a hanging basket filled with blossoms, compare prices on different-size plants. It may be more economical to buy several small plants and combine them yourself rather than pay for one large plant.


• Starting this month, keep hanging plants such as fuchsias well watered and out of direct sun, or their leaves will burn.


• Mulch around trees to create a safe zone where your mower won't go. Nicking a tree trunk can seriously damage even a well-established tree.


• Mow your lawn according to the needs of the grass, not the calendar. Grass thickens and provides better cover when regularly clipped at the proper height.


• Prune rhododendrons after they flower. On young and old plants, snap off spent flower stalks by bending them over until they break away from their stems.

For more gardening tips, go to our Gardening Pages.

Courtesy of The Old Farmer’s Almanac® Dublin, NH www.almanac.com.

The Old Farmer's Almanac: Calender

Full Strawberry Moon (June 11)
The Algonquin tribes knew this Moon as a time to gather ripening strawberries.

Flag Day (June 14)

What we know fondly as the "Stars and Stripes" was adopted by the Continental Congress as the official American flag on June 14, 1777, in the midst of the Revolutionary War. Colonial troops fought under many different flags with various symbols and slogans -- rattlesnakes, pine trees, eagles, "Don't Tread on Me," "Liberty or Death," and "Conquer or Die," to name a few. The first flag had 13 stars on a blue field and 13 alternating red and white stripes for the 13 original colonies. Now there are 50 stars, one for each state in the Union, but the 13 stripes remain. Flag Day was first celebrated in 1877, on the flag's 100th birthday.

Read about some Do's and Don'ts for the U.S. flag.

Father's Day (June 18)

Like Mother's Day, Father's Day has a modern origin. The idea came to Mrs. John Dodd as she listened to a Mother's Day sermon in 1910. Her father, William Smart, had raised his children alone on his Washington farm after his wife died giving birth to their sixth child. Mrs. Dodd proposed to the Spokane Ministerial Association and the YMCA that they celebrate a "father's day" on June 5, her father's birthday. The idea received strong support, but the good ministers of Spokane asked that the day be changed to give them extra time to prepare sermons on the unexplored subject of fathers. The first Father's Day was observed on June 19, 1910, in Spokane, and soon other towns had their own celebrations. In spite of widespread support, Father's Day did not become a permanent national holiday until 1972, when President Richard Nixon signed a law declaring that it be celebrated annually on the third Sunday in June.

Send an Almanac E-card to Dad to celebrate this special day.

Courtesy of The Old Farmer’s Almanac® Dublin, NH www.almanac.com.

Gardening Book Reviews

BOOKS ON GARDENING make fine friends for those with a green thumb -- but who has time to sort through the hundreds of titles on the shelves? The editors of the Gardener's Companion have carefully culled the finest volumes for reading or reference and offer brief reviews. On days when you just can't get outside, why not curl up with one of the following books and plan what you'll do next in your garden?

• Advice For Beginners
• Bulbs
• Cook's Gardens
• Crafts
• Flowers
• Gardeners
• Garden Tours
• Herbs
• Landscape/Design
• Nature
• Shrubs/Trees

Courtesy of The Old Farmer’s Almanac® Dublin, NH www.almanac.com.

Fountain Planting

• Don't let peripheral plantings compete with the house for emphasis -- the eye is to be drawn to the house. Borders are incidental to the central focal point of the landscape, which is the house.
• Frame and mass at the edges, to leave the center of the place open. Keep the largest plantings off to the side.
• Avoid scatter -- no flower beds in the middle of lawns, no brilliantly colored plants without a background of green foliage to set them off.
• Make flowers incidental, to supply color and finish. The lawn and the mass plantings are the main pieces of the plan. Flower sparingly.
• Consider position carefully. Far more important than the right choice of plant is its correct position with reference to other plants and to structures.

Courtesy of The Old Farmer’s Almanac® Dublin, NH www.almanac.com.

Organics: Not Just a Product-for-Product Swap

After my recent tip on the skyrocketing costs of synthetic fertilizers, many of you contacted me to say you would switch to organic gardening if you only knew how. Many folks want to know what products to purchase to replace the toxic chemicals they've been using for much of their gardening lives.

On one hand, the answers are far from simple. Organic gardening can take years, even a lifetime, to master. Eliot Coleman from Harborside, Maine, probably the best organic gardener I know, says he still learns new things every gardening season.

On the other hand, organic gardening is simple to understand if you remember one thing: The soil is alive and your gardening practices should do everything possible to nurture that life.

Last week, I traveled to Long Island to a Soil Food Web laboratory run by soil scientist Paul Wagner. We spent an evening over a microscope looking at side-by-side samples of soil treated with pesticides and synthetic fertilizer vs. soil that has been tended organically. The differences were stunning. The natural soil was teeming with activity from healthy microorganisms of all shapes and sizes. The chemical soil looked like a dead zone, with only a few microorganisms that are known to cause damage to plants.

"When you begin to understand these differences and then you see the results you can get in your lawn and garden with organics, you wonder why we ever started using chemicals in the first place," said Wagner, who looks at soil samples day in and day out.

The next issue of People, Places & Plants will showcase some of the photography from that trip, along with information about brewing your own compost tea, which is emerging as one of the keys to a successful transition to a natural garden.

In the meantime, here are a few tenets of organic gardening to remember:

SWITCHING to organic gardening is not a product-for-product swap from chemical gardening.

ORGANIC gardening strives to obtain a balance with nature, rather than overriding nature.

USING compost is the cornerstone to any organic program.

PURCHASE compost in bulk when possible, from as local a source as possible.

REMEMBER that large numbers of weeds and pests are indicators that either the soil is poor, or that you're trying to grow the wrong plant in that soil.

ANY GARDENING should begin with a soil test, either from your state Cooperative Extension Service or a private soil lab such as the Soil Food Web laboratory run by Paul Wagner.

CHECK OUT the numerous resources for education, such as www.melna.org or www.rodaleinstitute.org. For video tips specific to organic lawn care, you can now visit www.safelawns.org.

Be sure to let us know what you think after viewing the video. Send me an email at
Paul Tukey at paul@ppplants.com.

-Paul Tukey: May 22, 2006.