As a passionate gardener, I am always very interested in learning how I can improve my gardens.
This past spring, I travelled to Marysville, Ohio, to visit the Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, the world’s largest marketer of branded consumer lawn and garden products. The Scotts Company was founded in 1868 by O.M. Scott as a premium seed company for the United States agricultural industry. In 1995, the company celebrated a significant milestone when Scotts, the leading lawn care brand, merged with Miracle-Gro, the leading gardening brand, creating the Scotts Miracle-Gro Company. During my day-long visit, I was happy to meet the Research and Development and Brand teams, and to hear about and provide insights on key strategies and new innovations they are developing.
Here are some photos.
The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company headquarters is still located in Marysville, Ohio where O.M. Scott began selling seed. He sold weed-free seed to local farmers and then expanded to selling seed to homeowners after the turn of the century.
All administrative departments have been located on this campus along Scottslawn Road since 1982.
The day’s visit included several presentations. The Miracle-Gro team discussed ways that would make better use of the benefits of organic raw materials like earthworm castings, biochar, bone meal, and poultry litter. One of their goals is to help refresh old depleted soil leftover in raised bed gardens.
These Miracle-Gro samples show a variety of the different raw materials. Many of them act as natural fertilizers and soil amendments which improve soil structure, enhance nutrient availability, and boost plant health and productivity.
Miracle-Gro already adds quality base ingredients to their soil mixes.
Here, Bonnie Plants shares trial work they are conducting on compact plant varieties to help shape the future of fruit and vegetable specimens so that consumers can grow even more successfully in small spaces.
The Lawns team shares their new brand, O.M. Scott & Sons, which features a product line-up of natural grass food and grass seeds, including alternatives seeds like clover. All of the products are safe for use around people and pets, contain no added official ingredients or pesticides, and are packaged in a curbside recyclable paper bag.
These products begin feeding the lawn as soon as it is applied and then continue to feed for up to 10-weeks.
It was nice to see up close how passionate the Scotts Miracle-Gro teams are to creating more innovative and user-friendly products for the home gardener.
Next, I showed photos of my farm and gardens – and how beautiful they have grown because of my nutrient-rich soil and use of Miracle-Gro Plant Food. This is a photo of my Stewartia garden. It is a perennial bed located behind the house where my daughter and grandchildren stay when they visit.
The space used to be planted with rows and rows of ferns and lilies. Now the garden is filled with beautiful Stewartia trees and lush, green shade-loving specimens including Epimediums, Syneilesis, Polygonatum, Astilboides and so much more.
I also have a variety of Japanese maples in this garden that add superlative color and texture.
This slide is of my Summer House Garden, a formal sunken garden I designed and created shortly after moving to the property.
It is a kind of “room” walled by a tall hedge of boxwood. The focal point is the great old ginkgo tree at the back of the space that is original to the farm. Over time, I’ve planted American and English boxwood, smaller ginkgo trees, smoke bushes, Siberian weeping pea shrubs, peonies, hostas, lilies, Leucojum, and others.
And of course, I showed my half-acre vegetable garden where I’ve used lots of wonderful Scotts Miracle-Gro Organic soil. This garden, which is now in its third growing season, is already planted with many wonderful crops – tomatoes, brassicas, artichokes, fava beans, celery, carrots, sweet and hot peppers, peas, all sorts of herbs, etc.
Here is this year’s kale bed – so lush and green.
And here is the long center bed where I grow lots of peas – one section for shelling peas, which need to be removed from their pods before eating, and another for edible pods, which can be eaten whole, such as our snap peas.
We all enjoyed the informative day with the scientists and brand managers at Scotts Miracle-Gro learning about their organic solutions to everyone’s gardening problems. I’m looking forward to implementing what I learned back at my farm. For more information, fo to the Scotts Miracle-Gro web site.
Totally transforming an existing garden bed is a good way to revitalize an outdoor space.
The two garden beds in front of my main greenhouse were once home to my currant bushes. Six years ago, I moved the berries and created more formal gardens with hostas and white lilies. Recently, I decided the beds would be perfect for displaying my new Martha Stewart Hybrid Tea Roses. I wanted them to be planted in a grid pattern alternating each rose with boxwood. In the center of each bed, I planted four tall conical boxwood. I know these gardens will grow so beautifully in the coming years.
Here are some photos.
How would you display a rose named after you? These are blooming Martha Stewart Hybrid Tea Roses, bred by Meilland, a six-generation family-owned rose-growing business, and launched in North America through Star Roses and Plants. I knew these would look excellent in front of my main greenhouse at my farm.
My new rose has large pink blooms, dark green foliage, and a most wonderful and sweet fragrance. Plus, each five inch bloom has more than 100 petals.
These garden beds in front of my glass greenhouse are already bordered by European hornbeam hedges and boxwood shrubs. Last fall, the beds were also cleared, tilled and fed before any work was started to redo them.
In the center of each bed, I planted four Buxus microphylla ‘John Baldwin’ from nearby Select Horticulture in Pound Ridge, New York. ‘John Baldwin’ is grown for its broad, conical habit. New foliage starts with a blue tint which slowly fades to blue-green.
I always encourage my gardeners and outdoor grounds crew to measure everything. Here is Phurba marking the true center of each bed.
Next, holes are dug out for each of the four boxwood.
Each hole should be at least two to three times as wide and as deep as the height of the boxwood root ball.
Then, each boxwood is carefully placed into the hole and backfilled. Notice, all the protective wrapping from the root ball is removed and discarded. I like to take everything off whenever i plant, so there is nothing obstructing the roots. The soil is also properly fed with Miracle-Gro.
Not long ago, I instructed my head gardener, Ryan McCallister, to measure a new grid pattern for my new rose bed design. Ryan and Matthew measure from the center of the boxwood.
I wanted to alternate the roses and small boxwood shrubs, one in each square of the grid. The boxwood were nurtured here from bare-root cuttings.
Bright colored landscape twine is used to mark the pattern.
Ryan meticulously measures each square to be three feet by three feet.
The rose plants are selected, counted, and brought to the planting site. I think they will all look so wonderful growing in these beds.
The leaves of the rose are described as “pinnate” – meaning there is a central rib and then leaflets off to each side, with one terminal leaflet. Rose leaves can have anywhere from two to 13 leaflets.
Then more digging… When planting, make sure the hole is slightly wider but equal in depth to the rose’s root ball. This will generally be about 15 to 18 inches deep by 18 to 24 inches wide.
The boxwood and roses are placed into the holes for me to see before planting. Each hole is also fed with Miracle-Gro.
And then planting can start. Buxus is a genus of about 70 species in the family Buxaceae. Common names include box or boxwood. Boxwood is native to western and southern Europe, southwest, southern and eastern Asia, Africa, Madagascar, northernmost South America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. One boxwood…
… and then one rose. Matthew places the rose into the designated hole and checks to see that it is at the same level as it was in the pot. He makes sure the top of the root ball is about an inch above the edge of the hole before he backfills. He also looks to see that the plant is straight and the best side faces front.
Here is the garden all planted. When planting roses, depending on the variety, they need at least two to five feet in between plantings. These are spaced perfectly.
The roses and boxwood shrubs will grow beautifully together. I am looking forward to watching them mature.
Here’s the garden on the other side. I will be sure to share more photos as the plants become established and bloom again. Happy gardening.
As the owner of many gardens, groves, and allées, I am constantly looking at all the trees, making sure they are in good condition.
Pruning is one of the biggest and most important gardening chores. Not only does pruning improve the overall health of the plants, it also prevents disease, and encourages better growth. When assessing my trees, I also think about general appearance as well as safety. Last week, I noticed the allée of lindens that grows in two horse pastures needed some attention. The lower branches had grown so much, my horses could not walk under them for shade. I asked Pete Sherpa from my outdoor grounds crew to "limb up" the trees, meaning remove all the lowest branches to allow for more clearance and air circulation.
Here are some photos, enjoy.
Lindens, Tilia, are medium to large sized shade trees that are easy to maintain and attractive in any landscape. I have two linden tree allées. One outside my stable and this one which runs from the old corn crib all the way down to the chicken coops.
Notice the lowest branches. They are very low to the ground and need trimming to control its shape and to allow for better air circulation through the center of the specimen. I also like to prune the branches so anyone on foot, on horseback, or my horses themselves, could pass through easily. This low branch work is called limbing up or crown raising.
I extended this allée in 2017 all the way down to the chicken coops. These trees are developing so nicely and are pruned every couple of years. Pete focuses on the lower branches only, but cuts off any dead, damaged, diseased, or crisscrossing branches.
Pete uses his hand tree saw carefully cutting from the bottom most branches up.
It is important to always use sharp tools whenever pruning so that the cuts are clean. Dull tools are difficult to use and could even damage the tree. A straight, clean-cut promotes quick healing of the wound and reduces stress on the specimen.
And new cuts are always made outside the branch collar at a 45 to 60 degree angle to the branch bark ridge.
I instructed Pete to make sure there was about 13 and a half feet of clearance under the trees. He uses the back of the Polaris off-road vehicle to safely cut what he cannot reach from the ground.
For small branches, Pete is able to use his sharp bypass Okatsune pruners.
As branches are taken down, they’re gathered and placed into tidy piles, so they can be cleaned up easily and quickly. After the job is done the crew will chip the branches and use the wood chips as top dressing in another area of the farm. Everything is always reused, repurposed or recycled when possible.
Once cut, there is still lots of shade, but the area is more accessible for my tall Friesians. There is light and air circulating through the allée, and one can see more clearly underneath the trees.
Pasang, my resident tree expert, comes by to help gather all the branches. My crew always works in teams, so there is always help for every project.
The branches are manually picked up and placed into the tractor’s loader bucket.
The branches are then carefully dropped into the back of my dump truck and taken to the back compost yard where they will await chipping.
Regular and thorough pruning will also give the branches more room to grow. When mature, lindens reach 50 to 80 feet in height with a spread of 35 to 50 feet. Its growth rate is about 13 to 24 inches a year.
This entire process takes a couple of days to do properly by hand, but it is all worth the efforts to have well-manicured, healthy trees.
And here are two of my handsome boys. I am sure they will appreciate the job well done.
I also like the branch cutoff areas to be colored, so they are not visible. Notice, the cut in this photo. A little dark spray paint disguises the new cut until it ages and turns gray on its own.
Remember, this is what it looked like before – overcrowded branches too low for my horses.
And this is how they look after – much better.
Linden trees typically live 50 to 150 years – maybe even longer with good, consistent care.
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