Don’t put away the shovels and trowels just yet. Warm days without sizzling heat make for perfect planting days. Whether you plant fall lettuces to be enjoyed now or bulbs for spring—get out and enjoy your garden. Plant new vegetablesIf fall vegetable gardening is new to you, it’s a great way to acquire fresh gardening skills while enjoying cooler temps, fewer bugs and delicious autumn meals. Calls and visits to Essex County garden centers turned up a few locations with fall lettuces and vegetable starts. The best selection I found is at Metropolitan Plant and Flower Exchange in West Orange…

Herbs are hardy low-care garden companions that don’t take up much room and add colorful, fragrant, flavorful sparkle to summer eating. If you have an herb patch or pots, now is the time to use them liberally and often in everything that comes out of the kitchen. One of the joys of garden-picked herbs is that it can pick as much or as little as you need in exactly the right combination of flavors. The garden will keep the rest perfectly fresh until the next time you need some. While you might only need a pinch for a recipe, when it comes to herbs, the more you pick, the better. Snipping at …

Monday's soaking rains — about eight tenths of an inch — were just what we needed. Since the half-inch dousing that punctuated the Fourth of July weekend, it had been two and a half weeks since the sky gave us anything other than scorching heat.   That's good, but not good enough as far as my grass is concerned. As a rule of thumb, lawns need about an inch of water a week. As of July 26, we've had about two inches of rain total, well under the 4.73 monthly average. Even with yesterday's soaking, my grass is slowly but surely packing up the chlorophyll and going dormant. Fine with me. My …

The garden is holding its breath today before the big exhale that will produce buckets of tomatoes and cucumbers and zucchini. The lilies and coneflowers and daisies are putting on a riotous show, but they are just a warm-up act for summer's vegetable headliners. And while I'm waiting, I'm watering. With no rain in sight for several more days, I'm back to last-summer's routine of hand-watering every other morning. I aim my hose directly on each plant's roots to keep the foliage dry and starve the weeds. With the nozzle set to "gentle shower," I count to eight for a quart of water so that each…

I'll start at the end of the story. A deer got into the backyard while I was away last week and enjoyed a healthy dinner of cucumber leaves, bush beans, Swiss chard, lettuce, kale, radish tops, carrot greens and parsley. The chard is munched to a stub, as is the kale. One parsley plant stands like a little green flagpole, waving a single leaf on a single stem. The bush beans have had better days, with a third of each plant's leaves chewed off. The cucumber trellis took the worst of it. Instead of a waist-high solid green wall of leaves and plump dangling Kirby cucumbers, there is a skeleton …

This is a tale of a quick flood and a slow leak, both thankfully not-too-expensive lessons about household plumbing and water conservation. I don’t know why my husband and I decided to come home early on Memorial Day, but I’m glad we did. The second we opened the door, we both heard the ominous sound of running water. We bolted down the basement stairs to discover about an inch of water covering half the basement floor. The supply tube that brings clean water into the downstairs toilet had given way and water was spewing out across the floor. A quick turn of the stop valve right next to the …

Welcome to the first full week of summer and summer garden harvesting. Whether you are picking your own home-grown or supporting New Jersey farmers, now is the time to enjoy fresh, local fruit and produce. Here in my Pleasantdale garden, I'm eating lettuces, chard, spinach, garlic scapes (more on those below), bush beans, basil, and radishes. The raspberries are coming in as are strawberries in my hanging pots. The birds have discovered both so I need to net the raspberry patch this week. Snap peas were a real disappointment this year. The pea vines that normally top my eight-foot-high pea …

West Orange moms and business owners Jen Larsen and Jen Dowd have it in the bag with their new business selling reusable, wipeable, washable environmentally friendly Snackaby snack and storage bags. "We're two moms and we created Snackabys because we just couldn't stand using so many plastic snack baggies for our sons' lunches," said Larsen. They figured there must be a better option that would satisfy their needs for a greener, safer, baggie. When they found out there wasn't, they made their own and then decided to start a business. The colorful bags are made of laminated cotton on the …

Great gardens are growing all over West Orange. Recently, I had the chance to visit one at David and Diane Allen's house in the St. Cloud section.   They are transforming their front yard space into an edible, easy-care landscape and the back into a mini-farm of 11 raised beds. The hallmark of their first-year garden is creative re-purposing of both plant and building materials. I drove up to their house and found David and Diane waiting to greet me. Their sloping front bed is attractively landscaped with plantings in a range of colors and textures. While I call my habit of getting plants …

If your kid has a garden in his or her life, whether at school or in your backyard, you may already have a budding scientist, environmentalist or farmer on your hands. To encourage summer learning, here are some ideas on getting dirty with kids. (There's still time to plant many things from seeds. But for a faster start, you can purchase seedlings at West Orange-based nurseries Metropolitan Plant and Flower Exchange or Pleasantdale Nurseries.) Magical Bean Garden: Construct a sturdy tee-pee out of bamboo stakes and plant beans at the base of each pole. Scarlet runner beans are dark blue with …

For busy families who might have not time to make it to the farmer's market, but who enjoy buying local, organically grown food, the new volunteer-run, non-profit West Essex CSA offers a new option. The new group will offer to members biweekly pick-ups of Jersey Fresh, naturally grown vegetables, fruit, eggs, and meat at the Essex County Environmental Center in nearby Roseland. CSA is short for Community Sponsored Agriculture. Simply put, a CSA is a subscription program. At the beginning of the growing year, you pre-purchase a "share", or portion, of what the farmer will grow that year. Just …

This week I'd like to recommend a visit to a one-of-its-kind botanical garden less than five miles from downtown West Orange. If you've never been to the Presby Memorial Iris Gardens on Upper Mountain Avenue in Montclair, I hope I can convince you to make a visit. If you have, you'll definitely want to go again for this year's new and expanding offerings including a free Family Garden Party, a free al fresco family movie night, and a music series. For flower lovers, the garden offers the largest collection of iris in a public park on the planet, with over 10,000 plantings that will put out a …

Mother's Day weekend is the traditional planting day in the West Orange area because it coincides more or less with our last anticipated frost date. The last frost date is the historic average date after which the chance of plant-killing frost is less than 10 percent. After this date, it's pretty much safe to plant tender plants outside. Our last-frost date ranges from May 1 to May 15 depending on what source you consult. This is a guideline, not a science of course. Gardeners who keep a journal can create a personalized time line for garden planning but every year will be different. So, did …

A walk in my backyard is a plant patchwork that connects me with friends and family who now live around the country. The rhubarb clump was a division from my mother-in-law's garden. This rhubarb was a mature planting when she moved into her first house as a newlywed in Western Massachusetts in 1961. She also gave me a clump of a ruffled lilac-colored iris that smells like exactly like grape jelly. One of my spring tasks this year is to try to match it to a bloom at at the Presby Iris Memorial Gardens in Montclair. A small dwarf crepe myrtle and a weeping juniper were some of the plants I …

To close out a month of Earth Day celebrations, let's go to the dogs (and cats) and talk about ways to make pet ownership a little "greener." Get a recycled pet: Consider pet adoption as your first choice. The West Orange Animal Welfare League's next adoption day is Saturday, May 7 from 11 am to 3 pm at the township's animal control facility at 311 Watchung Ave. Here's a Petfinder.com list of local animal shelters. Be counted: Over 1,900 West Orange dogs sport a current license tag that shows they are properly registered as West Orange denizens, according to Theresa DeNova, West Orange's …

As part of the West Orange Energy Commission's ongoing water conservation awareness campaign, West Orange residents can now purchase and pick up discounted rain barrels for home use. A rain barrel collects water from your downspout into a large container with a spigot. This water can be used on dry days to water your lawn, plants and garden. I think these barrels are a great buy for West Orange residents for the discounted price (below), high quality, ease of use, and because these barrels are made from recycled containers that would otherwise be put in the landfill. The barrels, made by …

The best definition of a weed I know is that it's a plant growing where it's not wanted. With spring weeding underway, I've been giving this topic a fair bit of thought. I keep my vegetable and flower spaces mostly weed free by thoroughly hand-weeding in the spring and then applying a heavy cover of water-conserving, weed-blocking mulch. Done well early in the season, it's a job that only has to be done once. My grass is another matter. I do root out weeds by hand, but there's a limit to how much time I'm willing to spend rooting them all out. I choose not to use lawn herbicides that would …

Let me go on record as a frugal gardener who tries not to buy plants. Most of my plants came from somewhere else or from seeds I've grown. In order of preference, I like to: get free plants from friends, swap, grow from seeds, and then buy locally from gardeners to support a good cause. After that, I like to buy from local businesses and only then buy further afield. I like the serendipity of garden gifts. Even with a few garden seasons under my trowel, I'm still a new gardener. Every plant I get or give teaches me something new and strengthens friendships. When I do spend money, I pick …

New Jersey is living up to its name as the Garden State with a January 2011 law that regulates fertilizer use by both homeowners and professionals to protect the environment. By controlling the amount and types of fertilizers applied to greens state-wide, the law will protect the ecological health of our state's inland and coastal waters in general and Barnegat Bay in particular.  West Orange assemblyman and township resident John F. McKeon was one of the bill's prime sponsors, now the New Jersey Fertilizer Law. I'm looking forward to hearing McKeon talk more about it at the April 4 Green …

Spring cleaning means airing and de-cluttering and scrubbing and shining. With all that cleaning and tossing going on, the Environmental Protection Agency has declared March 20 through March 27 Poison Prevention Week as a way to remind everyone to take care to avoid accidental poisonings, especially of children. The campaign's "Children Act Fast … So Do Poisons" theme highlights that accidents happen in the blink of an eye, so prevention is the best protection. "Most exposures that occur in the home can be prevented or substantially reduced through proper and safe storage, use and supervision…