You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato Steeple

By Kyle McKean

Following the trend to “grow your own” coupled with a desire to provide my family with fresh, organic produce, a few years ago we designed and built a vegetable garden.  Because my husband is a builder and he approaches everything with a blueprint and his tool bag, we couldn’t have had just a few simple beds and tomato cages.  What could have been a simple weekend project quickly turned into a couple months of work.  After clearing a 24’ x 36’ space at the back of our property, my husband insisted we fence everything in, build six 6’ x 6’ raised “box” style beds and install irrigation.  I gave him a hard time because I thought this was overkill and I was anxious to transplant the tiny seedlings I had started and nurtured over the winter.

That summer when we experienced many 100°+ days and went through a drought, I was so thankful not to have to add watering to my long list of chores.  Not only did we run irrigation into the center of each bed…

Irrigation system

…but we connected the whole system to a three-zone timer!  With a little programming, I had one less thing to worry about knowing that each zone would be perfectly watered before 6 a.m.

After a few years of learning as we go, we pause just before planting time to make any changes or adjustments.  Last year, when my husband suggested building a “tomato steeple” I thought he had lost his mind!  Surely this too would need to be sketched out and would take forever to build.  Not even sure I understood what a “tomato steeple” was, I went along with it despite being worried that we didn’t have enough time to construct such a quirky sounding structure.  As it turns out, a “tomato steeple” is a great idea and it looks pretty cool too.

The tomato steeple!

If you plant cherry tomatoes right along the edge of the wire fencing, they will grow up and hang through the mesh making for a tasty treat that is right at your fingertips.

My tomatoes are just getting started along the fence.

Another view of my tomato plants.

We’ll have lots of tomatoes this year!

As with many things in life, tending to a vegetable garden has proved to be a valuable earning experience.  Some of the more notable things I’ve learned are:

1. I don’t have the time or energy to start seeds inside (even though I devised what I thought was a pretty cool set up where my seed trays balanced on top of cookie cooling racks, which sat on top of our radiators).
2. You’ll always have more zucchini than you know what to do with.
3. Zucchini is a very versatile ingredient.  See item #2 above.
4. Tomatoes grow three times bigger than you expect
5. Mint should be grown in a container.  Always.
6. As much as it pains me to admit it, sometimes my husband is right about certain things.  Sometimes.
7. At the end of a long hard day, sipping a fresh mojito while taking in all the scents and sounds of the garden makes everything good again.

Strawberries are on the way!

I’m looking forward to watching the garden grow this year especially now that I have a daughter to share it with.  I can’t wait for her to taste her first strawberry and smell the fresh herbs.  I long for the taste of garlic-laden pesto, spicy arugula and juicy cantaloupe.   Wait.  That gives me an idea.  I wonder if we have room for a “cantaloupe coupola”?!

A Trip to Arkansas

By Steve Hutton

Last week I joined my Conard-Pyle colleague and fellow blogger, Kyle McKean, for a couple of days with P. Allen Smith at an event in Little Rock.  Twenty-four garden bloggers from around the country got together to tour some local gardens and to spend one day visiting Allen’s stunning Garden Home Retreat.  Kyle and I were there to talk about Conard-Pyle’s rose introduction program, focusing on our 80-year relationship with the storied French rose breeding firm, Meilland International.

P. Allen Smith’s rose garden.

Kyle and I first saw Allen’s two acre rose garden about a year ago, as the first roses were being planted.  At that time, the garden’s bones were in place — beds laid out and hedged with boxwood, garden structures and gates in place, pleached oaks surrounding the entire garden.

What a difference a year makes!  All beds were fully planted and the roses had just finished their first flush of bloom.  Outside the garden and on a slope leading down to it a large bed was being prepared in which masses of Drift® Roses and companion plants would soon be installed.  Inside the garden a wide range of shrubs, perennials and annuals were integrated in a painterly way with several dozen different varieties of roses.  I told the guest bloggers that in my view Allen had succeeded in creating a model rose garden–one in which roses were less than 50 percent of the plants in the design.  For me, this is a key factor in any successful rose garden.  Roses are plants, not museum pieces, and are at their most striking when they are creatively combined with other types and colors of plants, not set off by themselves as if they had no fit companions.

In addition to a superb garden on a majestic hillside overlooking the Arkansas River, the choice of rose varieties made its own statement.  Allen’s focus at The Garden Home Retreat is on sustainable living, and we helped him select varieties that would not need chemical sprays in order to thrive.  The “modern” portion of the rose palette (Allen wanted to emphasize three centuries of roses in America) was therefore comprised of varieties of the Knock Out® and Drift® families of roses, as well as disease resistant traditional roses from Meilland International (the breeders of the Drift® series) and Bill Radler (breeder of the Knock Out ® series).

Our day at The Garden Home Retreat was a warm one, but when the sun went down we ended it the perfect way–with locally-sourced ingredients given a southern accent and transformed into a very special meal.

Being Social in the Garden

By Kajsa Haracz

What’s better than hanging out in the garden with your friends? That is exactly what Steve, Kyle and I were doing at the Garden2Blog event at P. Allen Smith’s Moss Mountain Farm in the hills of Arkansas in early May.

A lovely porch at P. Allen Smith’s garden home retreat.

We were joined by a group of lively bloggers and sponsor friends. In record heat (already 90 degrees at 9 a.m.), we shared our passion for roses in Allen’s rose garden.

P. Allen Smith leads the bloggers on a tour.

But being social in the garden is about more than a day of fun with your friends. The relationships we build in social media need to be nurtured and cared for, much like a new plant. Therefore, I was excited to introduce Steve and Kyle to some of our online friends, including Dee Nash, Bren Haas, Shirley Bovshow, and Susan Cohan. Conversations centered on new roses, rose care and stories of success and beauty.

The Garden2Blog event was a celebration of being social, and how it can go beyond your iPhone and computer screen. It was about friends sharing their passion for gardening.

Steve Hutton talks roses.

As we said good-bye (just after Johnny Cash made an appearance), we made plans to stay in touch using #gardenchat, this blog , Pinterest, Facebook, and the many other great social gardening outlets. We will continue to be social­, each in our own garden—sharing and engaging—until we meet again in a garden near you.

P. Allen Smith’s rose garden.

Guest blog by Kajsa Haracz (@kharacz), a novice gardener but seasoned PR pro.

First Blooms

By Jacques Ferare

When you do what I do for a living, there is nothing like going to the fields the first time the roses begin to bloom in the spring. In Pennsylvania, this is usually from late May to early June, and in California where I now live, blooms begin by mid-April.

Roses in a test field.

There is a great alignment of the Stars (no pun intended) at that particular time of the year. It is spring after all, the weather is usually very nice, and you see the promise of great new roses just beginning to show you their stuff.

Now, selecting new plants is not love at first sight, although this can still happen. It is a long distance journey, a marathon of observations where you learn really early that being disappointed often is just part of the job. A good grower friend of mine told me a quite a few years ago, “Show me a new plant, honey, and I’ll show you a new problem.”  I found this to be one of the truest statements I ever encountered in my professional life doing product development in horticulture.  I think too many people look at the positive and forget to look at the possible hidden problems that may destroy the carrier of a very promising variety. I blame my “the glass is always half empty” approach in making selections, on my mother (bless her) who told me at a very early age to be critical of appearances and always look for the hidden issues that may blow up in your face later on. It also helped a lot that I started my professional career with florist roses, where the most successful sales reps were “selling on the negative” meaning that you would tell the grower that wanted to grow your new cut rose variety all the possible drawbacks of the particular variety he really liked.  These guys were professionals after all, and they would find out anyway, so why not tell them upfront? Your reputation would be better by being upfront about this sort of thing, since by telling them they would make an educated decision and would not come back to blame you later (although in some case a few did, but they were the customers, so it was okay).

But I digress, as usual. So going back to making selections.  I am always looking more towards what’s wrong rather than at what’s right when looking at a new plant. After all, what’s right should be pretty obvious after 30 years of doing this. What I need to do is anticipate problems, so we can make a better decision about what to do with the plant. If it has growing or disease issues, but we think the plant is worthy of introducing, we need to gather all the data so we can provide this information to the growers that will have to deal with these issues down the road.  And despite all the caution, the detective work and the constant search for flaws, I still get blindsided once in a while. While bad for the profitability of the company I work for, this keeps me honest and a bit paranoid.

In the meantime, I am still a total sucker for the thrill of the first trip to the fields in early spring when all the new seedlings compete for your attention and the promise of great things to come make the glass half full, at least for a few weeks…

 

Design with Drift® and Knock Out® Roses Contest

Have Drift® Roses helped you put the finishing touch on your garden? Are Knock Out® Roses at center stage in your garden design? If so, we’d love to see them.

First, “like” us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/theknockoutfamilyofroses. Then, submit a photo and a brief description of how you used Knock Out® and/or Drift® Roses to create your dream garden. We’ll post your entries on our Facebook page, and let our fans choose the winners. The top vote-getter in each category will each receive $250.

Deadline is June 4, so don’t delay!

 

First Time I Met With Meilland

By Jacques Ferare

The House of Meilland, or Meilland International as it is known in the trade, is in Southern France, and has been in business even longer than we have at Conard-Pyle. The century-old business is still owned by the Meilland family, and has seen ups (mostly) and downs (a few) over its remarkable history. I could, and probably will, write more about this later.

The view from Alain Meilland House in Cap D’Antibes. The greenhouses are half a mile away - the view from there was even better.

Conard-Pyle has been involved with Meilland since the 1930’s, a partnership which has brought a long string of popular roses to the U.S. and throughout the gardening world. Beginning with the Peace rose in 1945 and continuing to more recent introductions like the Drift® series of groundcover roses. Over the last 30 years I have been fortunate to be a part of this very unique relationship that has brought American gardeners a lot of great varieties over the last eight decades.

I had my first encounter with Meilland International back in the late 70s when I was in college.  At the time, the company was experiencing an extraordinary growth spurt. I did not know it, but this was the era when they almost single-handedly created the cut flower industry in South America while being one of the dominant players in Europe.

I was working on my Masters thesis at the time.  I was researching the status of the cut rose industry on the French Riviera. As surprising as it may seem, there was such a thing as a vibrant cut flower industry there before the oil crisis of the mid 1970s, due to the perfect climate and a great consumer demand after World War II. When I did my research, it was at the tail end of that golden era where growers could make a good living harvesting two crops of flowers a year. But I digress.

So I visited a lot of these growers, the local horticulture research stations, the flower markets, the wholesale florists, and of course the most famous place of all, the headquarters of Meilland International. At that time, Meilland was located in what I consider to be one of the most beautiful places in the world, Cap d’Antibes, which also happened to be located less than 5 miles from where I grew up. They had their main offices there, as well as their breeding and testing greenhouses for cut flowers. Their breeding and testing for garden roses was 100 miles away in the heart of Provence where it is still located today.

I was very familiar with their location, having gone by it countless times growing up, by bike, then by moped, and later by car. It felt very strange to finally walk onto this property that was known by the locals to be a very important place in the world of flowers, especially since their next door neighbor was the Barberet-Blanc Company, who was the number one carnation breeding company in the world at the time.

They still maintain what must be the most expensive rose testing area in the world.

I don’t know if that first visit left an impression on them, but it sure did on me. It was a remarkable operation, on top of its game, and things were humming the day I was there. It was mid-spring and the greenhouses were full of magnificent roses of all colors and shapes. Sonia, Kyria, Prive, Red Success, Visa just to name a few.  These names probably don’t mean a thing today, but these were the roses that dominated the fresh flower market during that period.  All were in full bloom in the greenhouses among thousands of seedlings that were competing to become as popular one day. The gorgeous scenery both outside and inside the greenhouses was distracting, and it was difficult to concentrate at times. But what impressed me the most that day was that their General Manager took the time to show me around and give me a complete tour of the facility.  He also made sure that I would spend some time with Alain Meilland himself, who personally explained in great detail the history of the industry in the area, and how his family was such a big part of it. He also gave me a perspective on the whole cut flower industry worldwide. I ended up spending more than one hour with him that day, and being totally under the spell of his charisma and passion. Both men were also genuinely interested in my research, which was focused more on the economics of Horticulture, and they provided me with a treasure trove of information that made me look really good at graduation time. Prior to the meeting, I thought I’d be lucky if I spent an hour there. I ended up spending most of the morning and almost missing my next appointment.

When I left, I remember thinking that I would not mind working with these people after I graduated. Little did I know what was in store for me.