Albert's Greenhouse

Arisarum proboscideum is a plant uniquely suited for culture in the San Francisco Bay Area. It just works. By which I mean that if it's given the right place, it grows happily without a lot of worry, but doesn't spread like a plague. It likes a bit of shade, a bit of water, and to be left largely alone.

It's an aroid, which is a genus that can provide strange leaves and even stranger flowers, but it's not too controversial for the woodland garden. The leaves are nothing much to look at, but peer under them and you find a small purple flower that is a work of art on a very small scale. It doesn't hurt that it seems to have a long flowering season during the winter months when not all that much else is happening.

It's a plant that takes a little time to really appreciate. And a little time to spread enough to make an impact. But it's one plant I would not be without.

What's going on in the greenhouse is dependant on the season, strangely enough.
Despite relatively stable temperatures and moisture, the changing of day length brings different plants into flower at different times.

These huge stanhopeas grow in hanging baskets on a piece of metal pipe which runs the length of the single aisle in my greenhouse. The plants themselves are not too much to behold when out of flower. Squat pseudobulbs give rise to a single ribbed leaf each.

But sometime in late summer, a shoot pokes its way from the bottom of the baskets, and buds - sometimes just one, and sometimes as many as five or six, swell at the end of the hanging stalk. One night, they pop open and release what must be one of the nicest and mightiest scents in the greenhouse. The ratio of flower to plant size is nothing to scoff about either.

I find they do well in moderately bright light, and flower best for me with plenty of fertilization. The wire baskets are lined with long fiber sphagnum moss, then filled with a very lose, well draining mixture of wood chips, carbon, and clay pellets. Dividing and re-potting is needed every few years.

The infloresences look a bit like wax sculptures. They feel waxy too. They are complicated traps for little euglossine bees in their native habitat, and almost all have beautifully scented oils which fill the greenhouse with a pleasant aroma. The closely related coryanthes have even more spectacularly complex flowers.

I like these orchids. They are complex, not seen too often, have a very different flowering habit, and despite all this are remarkably easy to grow in a tropical greenhouse.

The other day my wife and I were walking along the beach out on the Northern California coast. It's winter here, which means there's a chance of seeing the sun out on the beach, but this being Northern California, it's likely to be accompanied by a lot of wind and fairly cold temperatures.

The beach-front flora is interesting - nothing at all like what we see inland. The same mild, damp weather that allows broccoli and artichokes to grow well here also gives rise to a different set of plants. Mostly low growing, small flowering plants.

Of course, there are the invaders. Ice Plant ( Carpobrotus edulis ) is famously planted all over Calfornia - on the beaches to tame dune erosion, and inland as a cheap ground cover. There are also others - Arum italicum naturalizes well. The everpresent eucalyptus trees grow like weeds alongside the monterey pine. Lupine, both native and introduced, is a California staple.

The Zantedeschia ethiopica pictured here growing in a drainage on a cliff above the ocean is also non native. And it's flowering beautifully on New Year's day in the dead of winter, while mine have been turned into a sort of brown sludge further inland by the frosts.

The non-natives are everywhere, and they have brighter flowers, and in many cases they grow faster than the natives. We can complain all we want about habitat destruction, but these plants tell me what is likely to grow well in my garden, and now that they're here, they give me some beauty in the dead of winter.

It's winter. It's cold outside. Time to sit by the fire, and see what the mailman brought us this year... This is part of a series of short looks at some of the plant catalogs that arrived in January.

Catalog: Johnny's Selected Seeds
Cover Plant: New Girl Tomato. $3.30/pkt.
Paper: Semi-glossy, 172pgs.
Pictures: Color photos throughout. And inexplicably, all the managers appear to have huge beards.

Selling Ice to Eskimos: Queen Anne's Lace? Just go walking through any field in Northern California or Oregon, in the late summer, and you'll have more than a packet worth of seed adhering to your jeans. Still, if you insist, they have two types starting at $2.95 for 100 seeds. Actually, it's a slightly different plant called "False Queen Anne's Lace" - Ammi sp., but with so much of the true one already available, one does have to wonder.

Cost of the Black Colocasia: ( not offered ) But they do have a few bulbs, including Allium caeruleum at $6.50/10 pcs.
Cost of the Beefsteak Tomato: Brandywine, $2.95/mini pkt. Unclear how many seeds this is.
Best Bet: Cramers' Series Celosia - $2.60/100 seeds. This is a very nice cockscomb celosia, and something that's not offered by a lot of people anymore.
2nd Best Bet: Ginkgo - $3.40/25 seeds. This is either the best bargain in trees there is, or a sure way to doom somebody to having 25 saplings growing in pots in their back year. Still, Ginkgo is an excellent bonsai subject, and the price is not bad at all.

I admit to this being the first year I've read this catalog, but so far I'm favorably inclined. They seem happy to provide volume pricing on pretty much every seed they sell, and the cheaper to produce seeds seem to be priced accordingly. They offer a large variety of less usual vegetables, herbs and flowers. They have 3 pages of pumpkins ranging from Atlantic Giant to the diminuitive Wee-B-Little. They are a bit vague about how many seeds to expect when you buy a packet, though.
In the end, there are enough offbeat and unusual seeds on each page to make it a worthwhile skim.

Long ago in my mis-spent youth, I bought a little packet of those peat pellets that are used for seed starting. The Jiffy-7 is probably the most common type. The miraculous thing about these being, of course, not so much that they are the ideal seed starting medium ( which I would guess that they are not ), but that they grow when placed in water. Just like those little sponge animals that come in the gel capsules. In fact, I think the case could be made that the success of these little peaty disks is not so much based on their effectiveness or admitted convenience, as the miraculous way they expand.

But there are other uses for the esteemed Jiffy-7. Fish people are using it as spawning medium. They also make giant jiffy pellets for growing trees.

Jiffy International is a Norwegian company, started in the 1950's manufacturing peat pots, and still privately held.

I have two very good reasons for using the Jiffy-7 peat pellet for starting almost all the seeds I start. First, it is convenient - just add water, add a seed, and you're done. The second reason is that about ten years ago, I invested in a case of these things, and given the current rate of use, I expect it will last me the rest of my life.

It's winter. It's cold outside. Time to sit by the fire, and see what the mailman brought us this year... This is part of a series of short looks at some of the plant catalogs that arrived in January.

Catalog: Kitazawa Seed Co
Cover Plant: Akarenso Hybrid Spinach, $3.25.
Paper: Rough, but classy manila with green and black ink. 56 pages, including 11 pages of recipes.
Pictures: A few nice line drawings.

Selling Ice to Eskimos: Amid all the strange asian veggies, they also sell Kentucky Wonder beans. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just odd to see a familiar face in the crowd.
Cost of the Black Colocasia: They'll sell you Myoga ginger roots, but no taro. And they call themselves an asian vegetable catalog?
Cost of the Beefsteak Tomato: Momotaro $3.25/pkt.
Best Bet: Aka Shiso - red perilla. This is a traditional Japanese herb used to both flavor and color many foods. It's tasty and an essential component of many Japanese foods, yet not commonly available in the USA.

Kitazawa seed company seed packets look exactly like their catalog cover - green print on strong manila paper with a line drawing, as it has been since 1917. They're based in Oakland, California, not all that long a drive from where I live, and have been providing Japanese and Asian vegetable seeds for years.
Every single packet of seed in the catalog goes for $3.25, and there's a large section of the catalog devoted to recipes. Number of seeds per packet is left to your imagination, but in my experience has been more than generous.
I like the catalog. It has a bit of history, a bit of amateur nature, and a bit of personality. And there's something you haven't grown on pretty much every page, I'd be willing to bet.

Spring has sprung and fall has fell. Winter is here and it's colder than ... usual.
So this week, Albert's greenhouse reviews a vacation to China and Japan last fall.

In both Japan and China, there are a lot of temples and shrines. One of the plants seen at many a temple is a huge Ginkgo tree - often said to be a thousand years old. The one to the right is part of a pair of plants ( one male, one female ) at a temple near Lianyungang, Jiangsu, China.

The ginkgo tree is a very interesting plant - it's a plant with heritage going back 270 Million years, and was until recently thought to be extinct in the wild, only existing where planted by humans. A couple of small, probably wild, populations in Eastern China may be the only remaining untamed plants.

Some interesting Ginkgo observations:

* The seed coats smell pretty bad to many people, which may contribute to the fact that these days it's a popular street tree, but only the males are planted.

* The leaves turn a brilliant yellow in the fall.

* Gingko extract marketed as a memory enhancer, among other things, comes from the leaves of the tree.

* Gingko seeds are used in Chinese and Japanese cooking, especially in soups and stews. They may however be poisonous to children when ingested in large quantities.

* The oldest living Ginkgo tree is claimed to be in Shandong province, China, and is supposedly over 3000 years old.

It's winter. It's cold outside. Time to sit by the fire, and see what the mailman brought us this year... This is part of a series of short looks at some of the plant catalogs that arrived in January.

Catalog: Forest Farm
Cover Plant: Miscellaneous line drawings
Paper: Newsprint, 556pgs.
Pictures: None to speak of. There are some line drawings and appropriate quotations.

Selling Ice to Eskimos: Vinca minor $5.95 - for every one person who wants to plant this groundcover, there's another just trying to get rid of it ... unsuccessfully.

Cost of the Black Colocasia: Not Offered. They sell Podophyllum "kaleidoscope" for $29.00. Not a bad price at all for what it is.
Cost of the Beefsteak Tomato: Not Offered. They do have fruit trees, though, and cranberry.
Best Bet: Osmanthus fragrans in a tube for $9.95. This "sweet olive" is a shrub which flowers at an early age, and the flowers smell quite strongly of apricot. Some evenings you can walk around my neighborhood and smell the trees in back yards from the street. When we were in China, we saw people in the parks gathering the fallen blossoms to flavor and scent tea.

Forest Farm's catalog, I must say, is probably better viewed online if you're looking for a specific plant. It's over 500 pages of short descriptions of available plants, and it's tough going in spite of the occasional gardening quote or line drawing. If, on the other hand, you are missing that rare variety of osmanthus, or want to collect every known species of pine, this might just be your nursery.

I live a couple hundred miles from Forest Farm on the west coast, and am therefore in ideal shipping territory. The shrubs and perennials I have ordered from them have been without fail well packed, quickly shipped, and excellently grown. It's really a classy operation, and the prices for tubes are a bargain for the quality and rarity of what they offer.

It's winter. It's cold outside. Time to sit by the fire, and see what the mailman brought us this year... This is part of a series of short looks at some of the plant catalogs that arrived in January.

Catalog: Plant Delights Nursery
Cover Plant: As usual, a cartoon with a twist.
Paper: Thin, glossy, 112 pages.
Pictures: Color Throughout

Selling Ice to Eskimos: There's really not much in the catalog that could be considered common, and most of it is very unusual. If you are in an area that an grow it, you'll probably find Brugmansia "Charles Grimaldi" as well as "Double White" at your local nursery or in somebody's backyard, though. And at $20.00 a pop, it would not be a bad idea to check.
Cost of the Black Colocasia: Colocasia "Black Magic" will set you back $18.00.
Cost of the Beefsteak Tomato: They sell nothing remotely edible unless you want to get into eating taro, konnyaku, or perhaps ginger.
Best Bet: Aloe polyphylla $25.00 - the spiral aloe from South Africa is pretty much the pinnacle of perfect geometric form in nature. Only trouble is they don't provide any guarantees about right or left handed spiral...

Plant Delights is a unique operation in many ways. It's got a knack for offering really weird plants, the catalog descriptions are some combination of political, funny and wry, and it's stayed in business while other similar nurseries have passed into the mists of history. I just wish they weren't so expensive. Prices start around $12 for even the most common plants out of tissue culture and go up rapidly from there.

The catalog is an excellent read with tons of interesting pictures. They are rightly famous for their collections of Amorphophallus and especially of Hostas.

They are responsible for a lot of plant introductions, and are a very professional operation offering well grown stock which is handled with a lot of care ... if you can afford it.

Spring has sprung and fall has fell. Winter is here and it's colder than ... usual.
So this week, Albert's greenhouse reviews a vacation to China and Japan last fall.

The USA grows more soybeans than any other single nation in the world. Despite this, most of us don't actually EAT recognizable soybeans or even soybean products like tofu other than incidentally. Aside from their use in oil production and livestock feed, soybeans are the largest agricultural export of the United States. They turn up in a remarkable variety of processed foods, but it's not something you can just go and buy fresh in the grocery store. Hardly anyone even grows their own.

In my experience, soybeans can be a pain to grow because the entire crop matures at once - you basically just pull up the whole plant and strip off all the pods. The beans are excellent either boiled or steamed in their pods with a little salt - the Japanese call them edamame and they are a popular drinking snack or appetizer. It takes a little practice, but once you learn how, they are easy to pop out of their pods directly into your mouth.

You will notice that these soybeans, growing in the Chinese countryside, have an insect problem. The soy bean caterpillar found in Jiangsu province grows about the size of your index finger, and is soft and green. A novel method of pest control has become traditional in the area - they collect and eat the caterpillars. It's actually a little more complicated, and we happened upon a family preparing the dish alongside the road.

What actually happens is that they cut off the end of the caterpillar, put it on a little wooden board, and use a tiny rolling pin to squeeze out the insides of the caterpillar, much like a little tube of toothpaste. They then discard the outside of the caterpillar and make the internal caterpillar goop into a soup - apparently both nutritious and tasty.

Organic gardening - not only is it less chemically, it's actually nutritious!

It's winter. It's cold outside. Time to sit by the fire, and see what the mailman brought us this year... This is part of a series of short looks at some of the plant catalogs that arrived in January.

Catalog: Thompson and Morgan
Cover Plant: Calendula "Sherbet Fizz" $2.45/80 seeds.
Paper: Thin, semi-glossy, small format, 204 pgs
Pictures: Color Throughout

Selling Ice to Eskimos: Eschscholzia californica $2.95/200 seeds. Living in Northern California, the california poppy grows alongside most country roads. But even I had no idea that there were so many color forms and cultivars available.
Cost of the Black Colocasia: ( not available ) but check out Coleus scutellarioides "Palisandra" at $2.95 / 15 seeds.
Cost of the Beefsteak Tomato: Brandywine $2.25/30 seeds
Best Bet: Primula auricula "Douglas Prize Mixed" $5.45/90 seeds - what other mainstream catalog sells something so beautiful, uncommon, and British?

Thompson and Morgan, being the US arm of a British company has a seed catalog which is, if nothing else, different. They are also a little more adventurous than most, offering strange things which may or may not actually germinate. For instance they offer two taccas ( p. 43, $4.95 and $5.95 ), which are notoriously difficult from anything but the freshest seed.

Prices have a bit larger standard deviation than some other catalogs, centered around about $3.00 for a packet of around 30 seeds, but rising to $5.25 for 5 individual seeds of something like Arisaema ciliatum. That's $1.05 per seed, and though I don't know if its the case for Arisaema, most aroid seeds don't survive dessication well.

Last time I ordered, the seeds arrived quickly, shipped from their US warehouse, and with a couple extra seed samples thrown in.

Drawing from a somewhat different set of seed suppliers than most, this catalog has a lot of unusual varieties, and shows no fear when it comes to selling seeds of tropicals and exotics. There's enough surprises to keep me turning the pages.

Spring has sprung and fall has fell. Winter is here and it's colder than ... usual.
So this week, Albert's greenhouse reviews a vacation to China and Japan last fall.

Seems most people aren't too familiar with Sorghum. I know I had no idea what it was, other than a vague feeling it was a grain of some sort. In fact, it is an interesting study in the march of progress, the march of technology, and the effects of irrigation.

My father in law was born in northern Jiangsu province in about 1930. At that time, what they grew and ate was sorghum. Not rice. In fact, only in the southern part of China is the traditional staple food rice. It's too dry in some parts and too cold in other parts up north to grow rice. Sorghum is drought tolerant, heat tolerant, and relatively nutritious. Several traditional liquors ( the most famous being Maotai ) are made from Sorghum.

The only sorghum we saw on our visit this time was growing as a weed alongside the road. The vast fields had been replaced with rice, made possible by a big irrigation project.

Sorghum is actually very much like maize, or corn, but more drought tolerant. It may surprise you to note that the United States is actually the largest producer of sorghum in the world - nearly all of the production ends up as a substiute for corn in livestock feed. About 12% is used to produce ethanol.

Spring has sprung and fall has fell. Winter is here and it's colder than ... usual.
So this week, Albert's greenhouse reviews a vacation to China and Japan last fall.

When I visited Japan in the 1980's, there was no way to escape the smoke. It was everywhere - in the restaurants, in the trains, on the sidewalks, in the offices, and in everyone's homes. Things are changing, though. Not only in Japan, but also in China. They even have non-smoking areas on the sidewalks in Tokyo.

But we are not here to talk about the lung clogging, cancer stix. We are here to talk about the plants. And despite a certain popularity of the American brands in Japan and China, there is a surprising amount of homegrown tobacco out there.

At the end of a dirt road, in a small town, in northern Jiangsu province, about an hour's flight from Shanghai, amongst the soy beans, corn, cotton and pumpkins, we found tobacco being dried along the side of the road.

In the aftermath of the epidemic of opium addiction in China in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, one would think that there would be some resistance to smoking a random plant imported from the west. We found this tobacco on the way to visit a farm formerly owned by my inlaws. About half of the farm had been sold off to feed an opium addiction before the Communists came and nationalized the rest.

It's winter. It's cold outside. Time to sit by the fire, and see what the mailman brought us this year... This is part of a series of short looks at some of the plant catalogs that arrived in January.

Catalog: Seeds of Change
Cover Plant: A buncha wholesome people and a buncha wholesome plants with some nice friendly insects like butterflies and ladybugs. Not the mealybugs and whitefly.
Paper: Thin, semi-glossy, 84 pgs
Pictures: Color Throughout

Selling Ice to Eskimos: Purslane $2.79/500 seeds. This stuff is the 2nd most common weed I have here in northern California. Despite being slightly unsure if the particular type I have is edible, I think I'll pass on this one.
Cost of the Black Colocasia: Not. Even.
Cost of the Beefsteak Tomato: Brandywine, $2.59/ 50 seeds.
Best Bet: Giant Szegedi Pepper $2.59/50 seeds. Szeged is famous for paprika, and now you can apparently make your own!

Well, color me green! It's organic, it's in full color, and somehow they can provide every packet of seed for under $3.00. You also get at least 50 seeds in most packages.

And they sell weird things like yacon, edible chrysanthemum and beetberry.

I've never ordered from them, but this is enough in comparison to Burpee to make me want to start. On just about every page there's something a little unusual.

Spring has sprung and fall has fell. Winter is here and it's colder than ... usual.
So this week, Albert's greenhouse reviews a vacation to China and Japan last fall.

This bamboo forest is located near the ancient capital city of Kyoto, Japan. It's actually in a town called Arashiyama to the north of the city center, backed up against a mountainside.

Bamboo is, famously, a grass. It's one of the fastest growing plants, and a new shoot may literally grow feet per day.

It needs well drained soil, so the slope of a mountainside suits it quite nicely.

Bamboo, though something that those of us in the United States might feel is a bit exotic, can be quite cold hardy. Even some of the larger varieties can survive chills down to -20F or so. Being a plant which stores much of its energy in its roots, it spreads rapidly given the right conditions, and can be very difficult to eradicate or contain. Some success with plastic barriers sunk three feet into the ground has been reported, but the best barriers are composed of poor growing conditions - soil too wet for the roots to survive.

I grow most of my bamboo in pots due to the spreading issues, and as would appear fitting, the one bamboo (Pleioblastus viridistriatus) which I have allowed free range due to its small size and innocuous appearance appears to be trying slowly to take over my front garden. The runners must be plucked from deep under ground at least twice a year lest the bamboo cover more than its fair share of area.

The danger of bamboo like this is that should I ever sell the property, the new owner might not understand that work is required to control it - it's not so agressive that a couple minutes work a few times a year won't keep it in its place, but being unaware that the landscaping is not a static thing could have far reaching consequences...

It's winter. It's cold outside. Time to sit by the fire, and see what the mailman brought us this year... This is part of a series of short looks at some of the plant catalogs that arrived in January.

Catalog: Burpee
Cover Plant: Porterhouse Beefsteak Tomato $4.40/pkt
Paper: Thin, semi-glossy, 136 pgs
Pictures: Oversaturated Color Throughout

Selling Ice to Eskimos: Horseradish. 5 roots/$7.95 - those of us familiar with horseradish know that just one root will invariably multiply when you don't dig it up completely into a hoard of horseradish. What are you going to use that much of it for anyway? We go through like a bottle every couple years at most.

It Will Never Germinate: Impatiens Rose Parade Mix. $4.95/30 seeds in 5 different colors. Or approximately six seeds per color if you're lucky. I'm not that lucky, and furthermore have had horrid luck getting those little seeds to sprout.

Cost of the Black Colocasia: ( not offered ) They will sell you 8 dwarf canna bulbs for $9.95, though.
Cost of the Beefsteak Tomato: Better Boy $3.35/30 seeds
Best Bet: Mache, Lamb's Lettuce $4.40/1500 seeds. This is a great cool weather crop, and the stuff is expensive in stores. With 1500 seeds, it's almost a bargain.

Burpee is one of the catalog companies I remember my dad ordering from when I was young. I seem to recall it was a bit different back then, offering fewer varieties and mostly just seeds, but it's become a tradition to at least look the catalog over each year.

I know what my dad would say: "$4.40 for a packet of 30 seeds???"
The interesting thing is that this is apparently not some kind of record. In fact, on page 3, there's a couple of new introductions priced as $4.95 for 30 seeds. The seed packets seem to bottom out at $2.50, and it's rare to see one under $3.00. I guess somebody has to pay for all the bright color photos, but at these prices it's not likely to be me.

They now have a small section offering organic seed - a concept I'm not quite sure I understand. Heirloom, I understand the attraction. You're telling me, though, that some treatment of the seed or the mother plant is going to make its way into the seedling and into the daughter plant in a large enough concentration that it's going to effect me when I eat it?

It's a big catalog and it's a pretty catalog, but aside from a couple offerings of weird colored carrots, there's not really anything in there this year for those of us into plant oddities.

Spring has sprung and fall has fell. Winter is here and it's colder than ... usual.
So this week, Albert's greenhouse reviews a vacation to China and Japan last fall.

Tea is the national drink of much of Asia, especially China. Each taxi driver in Shanghai seems to be equipped with a mug of hot tea. Tea is offered at the slightest excuse as a sign of hospitality. Even on our short trip, we shared tea with a shopkeeping in Kyoto, sat down to talk over tea with family in Niigata, bought bottled iced tea in a basement grocery store, and of course extracted a can of tea from a japanese vending machine.

The most famous tea is likely Chinese green tea, and the most famous Chinese green tea is probably Longjing or Dragonwell tea. It's grown near Hangzhou a few hours outside of Shanghai.

Tea leaves are the young terminal leaves of a special type of Camelia bush which are picked by hand, quickly roasted to stop oxidation ( if you don't quickly do this, you get oolong and then black tea rather than green ), and then dried and packaged. Tea comes in many types and grades depending on the age of leaves and when they are picked, as well as where they are grown.

Tea plants need moderate temperatures, and good drainage in order to make the best tea. They are often grown on terraces on mountainsides where they get the benefit of the morning mists. Just as each place you travel may have a local wine or liquor, and a local food specialty, each tea growing region has a famous local tea. The terraces to the right are near the city of Lianyungang, China.

Tea is supposedly full of antioxidants, caffeine and all sorts of good stuff. Personally, I drink it because it tastes good, warms me up on a cold day, and connects me with places like this.

You can sometimes get seeds of tea plants from The Banana Tree, but I've never been successful with germination. Maybe it's time to give it another try.

It's winter. It's cold outside. Time to sit by the fire, and see what the mailman brought us this year... This is the first of a series of short looks at some of the plant catalogs that arrived in January.

Catalog: Logee's ( Growers Since 1892 )
Cover Plant: Hoya lauterbachii $24.95
Paper: Thin, semi-glossy, 96 pgs, savaged by the post office
Pictures: Color Throughout

Selling Ice to Eskimos: Cyperis papyrus "Paper Plant" $9.95 /2.5" pot. This the same cyperis that is invading my lawn and broadcasting its seeds to the rest of the neighborhood?
Fastest Time from Box to Compost Heap: Strongylodon macrobotrys "Jade Vine" $18.95. Yes. But. It flowers about the time the vine gets to 30 feet, in my experience. And the only place that's happening in the US is Hawaii or South Florida. If they don't get a cold snap.
Cost of the Black Colocasia: $8.95 /2.5" pot
Cost of the Beefsteak Tomato: ( not offered ... they have a tree tomato for $10.95/2.5" pot )
Best Bet: Burbidgea schizocheila "Golden Brush Ginger" $8.95/2.5" pot

You have to hand it to them - the picture on page 3 showing a Hoya infloresence with each individual flower the same width as a person's hand is really something. On the other hand, I think that the majority of hoyas I've bought from these folks were mis-named. Not bad plants, you understand, just not the right names. They also claim it's their exclusive, but Bob Smoley's got it too... though at $35.00, and the often expensive Asiatica is offering it at $30.00.

It's a hefty catalog this year, with tons of bright pictures and some really good plants - excellent reading. On the other hand, even the least expensive ones are in miniscule 2.5" pots and hovering near a $10.00 price point. In my experience, Logee's packs and ships well, and the condition of the material is generally very good.

The Golden Brush Ginger, Burbidgea schizocheila, does extremely well for me every year and as a bonus its bright orange flowers open just in time for Halloween in my climate.

Spring has sprung and fall has fell. Winter is here and it's colder than ... usual.
So this week, Albert's greenhouse reviews a vacation to China and Japan last fall.

This is not your typical tourist visit, either. We went to exactly zero Japanese gardens, zero botanical gardens, and brought back zero seeds, plants, and cuttings ( thank you, US Department of Agriculture ). I counted them all. Twice.

Albert's family in Japan and Albert's wife's family in China were ( and in some cases still are ) farmers. And heavily domesticated though they may be, farmed plants are still interesting plants.

What we have here is a Japanese rice field, just about ready for harvest. This particular field is near the town of Wakinomachi in Niigata prefecture, an area famous for the quality of it's rice crop, and therefore also famous for its quality of sake ( rice wine ). Rice is the staple starch crop in much of the south part of Asia, at least where there's enough water and warmth to grow it. Japanese grow primarily short and medium grained rice which cooks up quite sticky. Nothing like Uncle Ben's.


In front of the rice field is a typical Japanese vegetable garden, where they grow familiar things like tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, cabbages and carrots. Somewhat less familiar items include a lot of taro ( seen on the left ) and soybeans. If you're interested in growing some asian vegetables, you might take a look at the Kitazawa Seed Company catalog. They've been selling seed since 1917, and if you're interested, they'll even sell you some rice.

Rice is grown in wet, marshy soil, and uses a lot of water. It's still planted by hand in many places, though most of the harvest appears to be mechanized these days. These days, the Japanese are trying to protect their rice industry from cheaper sources overseas, primarily the northern part of the central valley of California where huge mechanized farms produce excellent quality rice for very low prices. If you visit Willows, California in the summer and have cause to wonder why there are so many mosquitos - it's the rice paddies.

It is sad to think that the land which my family has farmed literally since before Colombus sailed to America might someday soon be planted with housing developments instead of rice and soybeans. The picture to the right is rice farming in the 1960's.