Vegetable Garden

Meade to get funds for road access Fort Meade will receive $3 million in federal funding to improve access to it and relieve area traffic congestion arising from the base closings and realignment program, Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski announced. The money is part of the 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act that provides $22 million to four Maryland transportation projects related to impacted communities. The 2009 bill also provides for Army Corps of Engineers projects for two county water-related ventures: $483,000 for maintenance dredging of Herring Bay and Rockhold Creek serving commercial fishermen seafood operations in Deal; and $1.1 million to complete engineering and design for maintenance dredging for Parrish Creek, which serves area marinas.

Like a lot of people with dirt under my fingernails, I have a hard time saying goodbye to my vegetable garden. This year, Mother Nature has added an interesting twist to the separation ritual. Namely, she has refused to change seasons. Plants should have been battling autumnal chills weeks ago. Instead, they have had to cope with summer-like 90-degree heat and almost no rain. This fall, if you watered it, it thrived. If you didn't, it fried. Still, I figure that at some point, the weather will turn cold.

Q. Is it OK to use wood chips in my new vegetable garden?A. No, stay away from wood chips. They can damage tender plant stems and they will rob your soil of nitrogen. Microbes in the soil will use up available nitrogen for protein synthesis as they break down the cellulose in the wood. Select other types of organic mulches for your garden, such as grass clippings, newspaper covered with straw, or leaf mold.Q. My beautiful climbing rose was attacked by some type of insect (I suspect gypsy moth)

After having our lawns and gardens scorched and flooded in the last few months, many of us are just about ready to slink back into the house and go into hibernation.The savvy gardener knows, however, that rather than sacking out in front of the TV, time spent in the autumn garden is worth a lot. An hour or two now is an easy trade against a day in the spring, when every weekend is at a premium.So, while you're still warmed up from being out transplanting and putting in all those tulip and daffodil bulbs, take advantage of some of these fall days to put the yard and garden to bed properly for the season.

MOUNT AIRY -- Folks in this small town can blame their summer water troubles on an unlikely suspect: Old Man Winter.While rain has been sparse this spring and summer, it's the lack of snow in recent winters that has left the town's aquifer low -- just as a flurry of new residents has increased demand. The result: a ban on outdoor water use in three of the past four summers.This summer, the 5,800 people in Mount Airy, on the Carroll and Frederick county line, began living under the ban at 9 a.m., June 11, a morning when even one of its Methodist ministers awoke early to water his lawn while it was still legal.

I'm worried about the effects of the recent warm weather on my landscape. My forsythia started blooming, my peach buds are swollen, and some of my daffodils are coming up. Will I have any flowers or peaches in the spring?Any exposed flowers and swollen or green buds will probably be killed by the return of colder temperatures. Your daffodils have tough leaves, however, and should be OK.The death of a small number of flowers on a large shrub (forsythia) or tree won't detract from the floral display in spring.

Several of my houseplants have developed brown spots that seem to be growing in size. I just got these plants as a Christmas present and don't want to lose them. What can I do?Leaf spots that enlarge are symptoms of diseases caused by fungi, bacteria, viruses or nematodes. Under severe conditions the spots or lesions may run together, killing entire leaves or the whole plant. Your plants may have been infected when you received them. Pick off the infected leaves, move plants apart to increase air movement, avoid misting and allow the top of the growing medium to dry before watering.

One of the gardener's best delights of spring is planning his or her vegetable garden.A spring breeze on the cheek, blowing up out of the south, sweet with promises, stirs ancient instincts, and we begin to slip out to the garage or down to the basement and round up gardening equipment, shovels, hoes, trowels, pea trellises and tomato cages.However, for many people with busy schedules and small yards, this can be a time of angst and frustration as well as pleasurable scheming, for there is never enough space to grow everything you would like.

Take the kids into the garden this spring and give them something to do. Children warm quickly to the pleasures of gardening because it gets them outside and playing in the dirt, two things they instinctively relish. If you have kids, your garden should be designed with them in mind, too.Gardeners love to tell stories about their first garden or the precise moment they discovered an abiding interest in nature and growing things. Sometimes the tale involves someone who was kind enough to allow a curious child to harvest carrots.

A good mulch is especially important in the fall, not only to put the garden to bed for the winter, but also for its effects on the soil and the garden next spring.Mulch is one of the gardener's best friends and one of the finest tools the gardener or groundskeeper possesses. It reduces labor and conserves water, and at its best can improve the looks and health of a garden, too.Our use of mulches can be perfected by knowledge of their characteristics. Here are some of the most popular ones for use in the fall, and their effects on and uses in the garden.

Like first-time gardeners everywhere - inspired by the White House vegetable garden and bitten by the gardening bug - Maryland first lady Katie O'Malley doesn't want the fun, or the fresh vegetables, to end. So, with a couple of hard-won gardening lessons under her belt and the help of master gardener Lisa Winters, a fall vegetable garden has been planted this week at Government House in Annapolis. "I'd give the garden 100 percent," said O'Malley. "We have a few issues with the drainage and with the soil, but we have been working on those."

Just add water. That's all that was left for the residents of the East Baltimore neighborhood of Oliver to do after a vegetable garden and urban sanctuary were installed in a single day in a vacant lot in the 1300 block of N. Central Ave. Eight raised beds were filled with clean soil and planted with 150 vegetable seedlings Thursday. Around the perimeter, 400 perennials, herbs and shrubs were planted, plus 30 trees to shield the oasis from traffic noise. All planted in time for Mayor Sheila Dixon to cut the ribbon at the end of the day. "The vegetables that come out of this garden," said the mayor, "will help others make the change to greener and healthier living."

It looks like the White House vegetable garden - First Lady Michelle Obama's effort to model healthful eating for the nation - is infested with a pest previously unknown to horticulture. It's the boll weevil of the blogosphere: the conspiracy theorist. Obama detractors are suggesting that the garden on the South Lawn (planted by Mrs. Obama and schoolchildren in March) is fake. The conspiracy theorists claim that, despite a lot of compost and a very rainy spring, the vegetables harvested by the first lady and those same schoolchildren last Tuesday could not have grown so big in just 90 days.

It feels like I am the only one not planting a vegetable garden this season. The first lady is. The mayor of Baltimore is. My friend Ron has expanded his vegetable garden, and my friend Jane, whose idea of gardening is walking all 18 holes on a golf course, is lending her yard to someone else so she can plant a vegetable garden. I scattered some lettuce seeds in a pot on the deck. And I will attempt again this year to grow a tomato plant that does not die prematurely from blight. But my idea of vegetable gardening is a regular Saturday morning trip to the farmers' market.

President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, are trapped in role model hell, what with her off-the-rack dresses, his new international humility, their intact African-American family, the rescue dog search and, of course, the vegetable garden. And now Alex Lee would like them to add a clothesline. The founder of Project Laundry List, an effort to get Americans to give up their clothes dryers and the energy it takes to run them, hopes the Obamas will hang out their laundry - not dirty, just like household linens - along with the rest of the country next Sunday on National Hanging Out Day. "A picture of Sasha and Malia playing among the sheets blowing in the wind would touch the hearts of all Americans who have their own memories of wash hanging on the line," said Lee, of Concord, N.H. "Even if they put their clothesline behind a fence, it would send a signal to other institutions that laundry can be done like this - restaurants, hospitals, hotels, universities."

Squandering funds on garden, theater A few days after reading that Baltimore is scaling back its the Police Athletic League program ("Police withdraw from PAL centers, relationships with kids," March 29), I read that the city is considering putting more money into the Senator Theatre ("Senator scramble," April 2) and will plant a vegetable garden to help feed the homeless ("One-upping D.C.: Baltimore will plant bigger plot, feed the poor," April 2). The Senator has repeatedly proved itself to be a financial black hole.

Baltimore, which sometimes carries a poor-cousin chip on its shoulder when it comes to the nation's capital, is about to trump the city to the south. Mayor Sheila Dixon is planning to turn the formal gardens in front of City Hall into vegetable gardens covering about 2,000 square feet. Michelle Obama's White House vegetable garden measures only 1,100 square feet. "This was being planned before the White House," said Dixon, firmly. "We are not copying!" The city will be planting decorative urns, about 70 window boxes and several formal raised beds with spring and summer vegetable crops that will benefit Our Daily Bread, which feeds 700 to 800 people a day and often finds itself, even in summer, relying on canned vegetables.

Meade to get funds for road access Fort Meade will receive $3 million in federal funding to improve access to it and relieve area traffic congestion arising from the base closings and realignment program, Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski announced. The money is part of the 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act that provides $22 million to four Maryland transportation projects related to impacted communities. The 2009 bill also provides for Army Corps of Engineers projects for two county water-related ventures: $483,000 for maintenance dredging of Herring Bay and Rockhold Creek serving commercial fishermen seafood operations in Deal; and $1.1 million to complete engineering and design for maintenance dredging for Parrish Creek, which serves area marinas.

You said not to fertilize because of the fall drought. Can I fertilize now? Fall is the best time to fertilize cool-season grasses. Go ahead now that it has rained. It is still advisable to use a slow-release fertilizer with a nitrogen source that has at least a 30 percent to 40 percent water-insoluble nitrogen source, usually identified as WIN on the bag label. Slow-release fertilizers are less likely to leach or run off the lawn and cause problems with water quality in the Chesapeake Bay. Be sure to not apply fertilizer where it can get onto impervious surfaces, such as sidewalks, driveways or roads.

When I brought my Thanksgiving cacti indoors, they produced many flowers, but one plant dropped buds. Pesticide didn't help. What's the problem? Bud and leaf fall in Thanksgiving cacti can be caused by too little water, too much water, excessive nitrogen, deficient potassium, rapid changes in temperature and drafts. Excess buds or flowers may drop naturally. Rotating a plant when buds are small may also cause sudden bud fall, possibly because buds turn to face the light and the effort weakens them.