Sales and Specials:

Spring annuals are in! New perennials and woody plants arrive every week.

Meadowbrook Farm now offers special ordering of statuary, benches, fountains, pots, and other garden ornaments by Campania International. You can preview the entire Campania catalog online at campaniainternational.com.

Spring in the Garden

• Time to think about your annuals! Rake out and prepare beds for early cool-tolerant plants like pansies and violas, stock, osteospermum, and linaria.
  
  
• Start planting your herb garden with cold-tolerant sage, parsley, and thyme. Be sure the plants have been hardened off before you plant them out. Hardening off consists of gradually exposing plants to lower temperatures than they were grown in. This is done by moving them outside in their pots, keeping track of nightly weather forecasts, and sheltering them if freezing temperatures threaten. Do not expose “soft” plants to freezing temperatures suddenly, even species that are hardy.
  
  
• If you plan on planting your potted bulbs out to enjoy next year, continue to water and feed the plant even though it has no flowers. You will help build the strength to form flowers for next year. And wait as long as you can before removing the foliage from bulbs past bloom—every bit of photosynthesis helps to make a stronger plant next season.
  
  
• Are you planning on planting rhododendron, pieris, or any other broad-leafed evergreens this spring? Amend the soil with peat to increase the organic content (improving water retention) and lower the pH (making it more acidic). Mulch with pine needles after planting to further improve the pH for acid-loving plants. If you have never had your soil pH tested, now is the time to bring a sample over to Meadowbrook Farm. We will test it for free and give you the results in a timely manner. Here is all you have to do:

• Use a zip-lock plastic bag to collect your samples.
• Take a tablespoon of soil from 10 areas in the garden where you are sampling. The soil should be taken from a 4-6” depth (that is where most roots grow!).
• Mix all 10 samples together to make a representative sample and place it in a zip-lock bag.
• If the soil is wet, place it on some newspaper overnight to dry (we can do this here at Meadowbrook, but it will delay your results).
• Put your name, address, and phone number on the bag and let us know what you are growing in the soil i.e., trees, shrubs, perennials, vegetables, lawn.

All-America Selection Winners come to Meadowbrook Farm

Meadowbrook Farm has been cultivating display gardens for more than six decades.  Currently we maintain a flower border, vegetable garden, woodland shade garden, alpine garden, hardy cacti and succulent garden, and much more around the estate house of J. Liddon Pennock. So what better place to add an All-America Selections Display garden? Meadowbrook has joined the ranks of nearly 200 botanical gardens, arboretums, and other locations across the United States that are proving grounds for growing the flowers and vegetables that make the list of new winners each year.This year marks the 75th anniversary of the All-America Selection program (AAS). In a nutshell, flowers and vegetable are trialed in gardens across the country under a variety of weather and soil conditions to see if they merit a place on the AAS list.Meadowbrook propagator Meredith Story has sown these seeds of success. Gardener Glenn Ashton has planned the vegetable displays with grower Sharon Kazan, and carefully and creatively planted the flowers in and among his beautiful gardens here at Meadowbrook Farm.For more information on the AAS program go to http://www.all-americaselections.org/.

 

Everyone Can Garden™

Meadowbrook Farm is a sponsor of Everyone Can Garden™, an organization formed to make it easy and fun for people to plant gardens to improve the environment and enhance the look of homes, businesses, and public places. A plant list of easy-to-grow selections has been developed for gardeners who have trouble knowing where to start. Visit the representative gardens at the Crestmont and Penbryn swimming pools in Abington Township. Many of the recommended plants are available at Meadowbrook Farm. For the plant list, useful links, and more information on the program, visit www.everyonecangarden.org.