SISSY'S LIFE AND GARDENS
ISSUE 3
Table of Contents
By Mark Stith
Hello once more! I hope winter wasn't too brutal on your or your gar-den. So far, so good in mine. We've put together a pretty bouquet of Spring-themed stories for this issue of Sissy's Life and Gardens.
Our good friend Virgil Adams returns to give you the scoop on dirt. We also introduce two new contributors to Southern Ledger. First, we're delighted to have Lois Trigg Chaplin, former associate garden editor for Southern Living and author, offers valuable advice about potted plants.
Second, Gerry Davis, author and writer, contributes with a wacky and wonderful trip to northern Georgia to visit a special inn. Finally, Mark Stith plays a little bit with tv talk show host David Letterman's Top Ten List and gives you the Five Worst Gardening Mistakes. However, he of-fers remedies for each.
RACHEL RAY ANNOYING? YES. BUT DON'T WRITE HER OFF
By Emily Battle
If you read much of anything about popular culinary culture, you can't help but have noticed a barrage of recent criticism of Food Network's star Rachel Ray.
For those of you out of the loop, Ray is that perky gal who's always telling you to coat your cookware in "EVOO" before spending thirty minutes cooking a "super-easy," "dee-lish" meal sure to make you say, "Yum-O."
(If I lost you at EVOO, don't worry, because the term is being added to the 2007 Oxford American College Dictionary as an acceptable abbreviation for extra virgin olive oil, thanks to Ray's popularizing it. How's that for influence?)
There are Web sites devoted to poking fun at the ever-giggly Ray, who has kicked her already potent personality into overdrive now that she has become a brand, with her own daytime talk show (produced by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions), her own magazine and her picture inviting supermarket shoppers to pick up boxes of Nabisco crackers.
THE NEW SOUTHERN TABLE
By January Johnson
The new Southern table is brimming with locally grown ingredients sitting side by side with artisan food products from around the world. Where we once found dinner tables heaped with pork chops, beans, and collard greens there is now much more sophistication and refinement in much of our Southern fare. Chefs and home cooks alike are using globally sourced finishing ingredients to highlight the flavors of their favorite recipes.
At Savor, our specialty food shop in Atlanta, we help customers elevate the flavors of their foods with simple but delicious finishing products such as complex and fruity estate grown Extra-Virgin Olive Oils and dense aged vinegars. A salad of local butter lettuce and ripe tomatoes is taken to new heights by the addition of a delicious vinaigrette made with local honey, Tuscan olive oil, white wine vinegar, and a generous dose of French Blackcurrant mustard.
LIFE IN A POT IS WHAT YOU MAKE IT
By Lois Trigg Chaplin
Plants that you put in a container depend entirely on you for life-giving soil, food, and water, so be good to them. Consider these basic principles about life in a pot so that your containers will make you proud.
Temperature. Plants in pots feel temperature extremes more directly because the soil mass is above ground and relatively small. Sunshine beating on a side of a pot heats the soil. In summer, a trailing plant such as ivy spilling over the side will do wonders to keep the soil cool. In winter, you must be sure roots are hardy enough to stand occasional freezing and thawing. Ivy is a hardy choice.
THE TOP FIVE WORST LANDSCAPE MISTAKES
By Mark G. Stith
1. Little tin soldiers. It goes something like this: A flat (let's say 36 plants, a common number of little plants in a flat) needs to be planted. Many times, they are plopped into a thin line along a shrub bed, sidewalk, or along the driveway. If one of those soldiers steps out of lines, so to speak, or goes "awol," the whole formation looks bad.
Instead: Concentrate your color. Mass plantings of flowers-say the above 36 plants-near the front door, garden gate, or archi-tectural feature, produce a much more stunning show of color than a long, thin line.
GEORGEOUS GLEN-ELLA SPRINGS
By Gerry Hempel Davis
Georgia lures visitors with many attractions, from mountains to metropolitan areas and coastal attractions. On a recent visit, I wanted to go someplace lesser-known but just as rewarding as more common destinations. I had heard about The Glen-Ella Springs Inn, a marvelous, cozy inn tucked into the northeast mountains near Clarkesville. "That's where I'll go," I say to my-self, and so I pack up the car and head for the hills.
The general directions someone offered to me- turn off Inter-state 85 and then get on U.S. 17 and then U.S. 441- are all well and good for the area's cognoscenti. For the newcomer, though, lots of luck. As I drive along, I have an inkling of slight despair. I turn off of I-85 and go into a gas station for help. No one knows the road I am looking for!
"I can help you get there," a lady finally says. I jot her directions down carefully while realizing that I'm nowhere close to the inn.
I follow her directions carefully, but still feel somewhat lost. So while stopped at a four-lane traffic light somewhere in rural Georgia, I ask the driver in the car beside me how to get to Clarkessville.
"Follow me and when I turn off you go straight," he says. His uniform identifies him as a Corrections Officer, so his instruc-tions have to be correct, right? He vanishes all too soon.
PREPARE BEFORE YOU PLANT
By Virgil Adams
How well you prepare has a lot to do with how well you plant, and how well you plant has a lot to do with how- and how much- you harvest. But in gardening, as in most everything, you start with preparation. Sounds redundant, but it's right. In this case, you start preparing the soil.
Soil scientists call it "pre-plant tillage." City gardeners may call it "soil preparation." Most country gardeners I know simply say they are "getting ready to plant." Whatever you call this step, it is no wimpy, sissy (I'm not talking about you, Sissy) exercise.
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