Join us for a Wine Tasting at Old Line Fine Wine, Spirits and Bistro in Beltsville this Saturday, 1 to 4 p.m. Our Marian Parsley will be there with plenty of herbs and information on growing your own herbs plus coupons for your next visit to the garden center.  While you’re there, Old Line’s spirits experts will introduce you to a select group of liquors and ales made with different herbs, and the tasting is FREE. Good times!  Old Line is located at 11011 Baltimore Avenue in Beltsville, just south of Behnkes.

Or if you’d rather read about herbs and alcohol than taste them, Amy Stewart has a “hot off the press” book on the subject called, appropriately, The Drunken Botanist.  When not writing books, Stewart blogs on the popular blog Garden Rant with Susan Harris, who also blogs for Behnke’s.

Artemisia absinthum with B&B and Chartreuse

And all this has me thinking about Herbs and Alcohol…

Although it sounds like a boutique brewer’s latest experiment, herbal-flavored alcoholic beverages have a long history.  Of course hops offer the bitter flavor and characteristic aroma in beer, and craft beers and ales often distinguish themselves by the amount and types of hops they use.  May Wine, from Germany and Belgium, was traditionally flavored with Sweet Woodruff, Galium odoratum.  (Apparently no longer. Wikipedia says that it is now artificially flavored because the natural, organic wholesome, traditional ingredient is, well, poisonous.  Herbs often walk a fine line between whether they are edible, medicinal or deadly so you always want to do your research.  If an herb was dried and been placed in drawers to kill fleas, it might not be the best thing to sprinkle on your pasta. Just sayin’.))  Sweet woodruff is a popular shade ground cover in our perennial sales area.

Artemisia absinthum, a perennial related to sagebrush in the Western US and to ornamentals like Artemisia ‘Silver Mound’ and ‘Powis Castle’, is the flavoring ingredient of Absinthe, which is again legal after many years as a banned beverage.  My favorites are the herbal liqueurs that were originally developed in European monasteries “for medicinal purposes.”   Similar in spirit (no pun intended) to Coca-Cola, if not in flavor, they have secret recipes handed down over centuries, the exact components of which are known to only a few.  One of the formulations of Chartreuse is a lovely green color, and the color is named after the beverage, not vice-versa.  Chartreuse itself is named after the French Carthusian order of monks  who created it in the 1740’s .  Very strong, very expensive, very complex with 130 herbs in the mix.  I was going to say something similar about another favorite, Benedictine, except that Wikipedia (Killer of Dreams) has burst my bubble and says that the story that it was developed by Benedictine monks was a wee marketing ploy. Regardless: it’s good, if a bit sweet.  Benedictine and Brandy (B&B) may be more to your taste.

Posted by Larry Hurley.   Artemisia photo credit.

Spring gardening events in the DC area start this weekend!  First up, the Behnkes Spring Open House.

Discover the Joy of Gardening
Behnke’s Spring Open House 2013

10 am to 4 pm at the Beltsville Store
We will have lots of new products to show off, gardening experts to talk with and demonstrations to show you. Free door prizes will be presented throughout the day. And when you want to relax a little, you can grab some food and enjoy a little music.

Next, going on all weekend, is the Washington Home and Garden Show at the DC Convention Center.  The perennial complaint about this show is that it’s loaded up on the home side and there’s not enough on the garden side for people like us – gardeners.  But, this year there’s a special treat for vegetable growers.  The famous Barbara Damrosch (whose syndicated column appears in the Washington Post on Thursdays) is making a rare appearance in the DC area, speaking at 10:00 Sunday at the show.  (A late addition, her talk isn’t listed on their schedule of speakers but I’ve confirmed it with the show people.)

Here’s more about Barbara:  Barbara Damrosch, called “The queen of organic growers” by The New York Times is one of the nation’s most respected garden experts and writers. She is the coauthor of the recently published The Four Season Farm Gardener’s Cookbook and the author of Theme Gardens and The Garden Primer, and writes a weekly column for The Washington Post called “A Cook’s Garden.” She appeared as a regular correspondent on the PBS series The Victory Garden, and co-hosted the series Gardening Naturally for The Learning Channel.

Barbara—with Eliot Coleman—operates Four Season Farm, an experimental market garden in Harborside, Maine, that is a nationally recognized model of small-scale sustainable agriculture.

Other “Celebrities” speaking at the show include Ahmed Hassan, the knowledgeable and engaging host of DIY’s “Yard Crashers,” and local favorite Kathy Jentz, editor of Washington Gardener Magazine, who’ll be talking about local challenges to gardening, like deer.  Both Ahmed and Kathy are speaking Saturday and Sunday – here’s the stage schedule.

Posted by Susan Harris.

March is a big month for happenings at Behnkes stores – lots of teaching, demonstration, doing it yourself, and mingling with local experts.  Check out what’s happening!

Saturday March 9, 10:00 to 2:00 at our Beltsville location.  Free.
On the topic of Cool Crops, popular horticulturist Carol Allen teaches and answers all your questions.

Saturday, March 9, 11:00 to 1:00 pm at our Potomac location.  Free,
Attracting Native Pollinators with Chris Lewis. Find out why native pollinators are important to the landscape and how to attract them to your garden.

Begins Saturday, March 9:  Four two-hour sessions on these Saturdays – March 9, 16, 23 and 30 – at our Beltsville location.  1:30 to 3:30 pm
Beginner Bonsai 101 with Bonsai Master Ducky Hong.  Master Ducky will guide you step by step through the fundamentals of creating a bonsai that you will take home.  Cost: $120/person + materials (please register by March 6 – Call 301-937-1100)

Saturday, March 9 from 10 am to 4 pm.  at our Beltsville location.  It’s every Saturday!  Free.
Bonsai Demonstrations with Bonsai Master Ducky Hong.  Watch Ducky sculpt everyday plants into works of art. Questions? He loves to talk about his work and the classes he will be teaching.

Saturday, March 16 (in Potomac) and Sunday March 17 (in Beltsville), 9 am to 4:30 pm,  Free,
Orchid Clinic and Repotting with Carol Allen. Have an orchid question? Bring in your orchids and ask Carol! And for a minimal fee, she will repot your orchids.

Does YOUR lawn need some restoration?

Saturday, March 16, 11 am to 1 pm at our Potomac location.  Free.
Lawn Preparation with Chris Lewis.  Shape up that lawn! Chris will discuss basics of turf renewal and review Maryland’s Fertilizer Use Act and how it applies to you.

Saturday, March 23, 10 am to 4 pm at our Beltsville location.  Free.

Behnke’s Spring Open House.  Discover the Joy of Gardening Behnke’s Spring Open House 2013. Spring is here and we are so excited to share it with you! We will have lots of new products to show off, gardening experts to talk with and demonstrations to show you. Free door prizes will be presented throughout the day. And when you want to relax a little, you can grab some food and enjoy a little music.

Saturday, March 30 (in Beltsville) and Sunday, March 31 (in Potomac), 10 am to 2 pm.  Free.
Fairy Gardens with Carol Allen.  Learn all about fairy gardens, one of the hottest, most fun gardening trends in years.  Not just for kids, ya know.

Bee photo credit.

There are still seats available for the March 7th trip to the famous Philadelphia Flower Show, sponsored by Washington Gardener Magazine and leaving from the Behnkes Beltsville location.  Click here for more information and to sign up - and do it by Friday, March 1.  You will definitely enjoy this show!

From Kathy Jentz, magazine editor and tour guide:

The Philadelphia Flower Show is the oldest and largest indoor flower show in the world. The theme for 2013 is “Great Britain: Brilliant.” Join us for a visit to magnificent floral and garden exhibits, special programming, and new attractions will pay tribute to centuries of influential British culture, culminating in the urbane style of 21st-century London. This is not your grandmother’s Flower Show … but she’s going to love it! The Flower Show attracts non-garden non-gardeners as well as die-hard green-thumbed people of all ages.

Foodies of all tastes will love the Garden to Table Kitchen. Participate in the Lectures and Demonstrations series, Gardener’s Studio, and new “Make & Take” workshops. Especially for guys will be “The Backyard,” a room devoted to outdoor living.

Names, Please

I dug into the show’s website to find out who’ll be appearing and teaching at the show.  Great names, and those are just the ones I recognize.  Author/plant experts David Culp, Organic Gardening Magazine’s Ethne Clark and Doug Hall, gardening writer/TV host William Moss, and Chuck Hinkle of the Scott Arboretum.

The Designer’s Studio part of the show includes free daily talks – details here, with speaker bios.  I recognize Washington Post veg-gardening writer Barbara Damrosch, who lives in Maine so we don’t get to hear here often in the Mid-Atlantic, and – get this! – the gardens manager for “The Royal Household”!  Now that should be fun.  Also these expert authors: Tovah Martin, Marty Wingate, David Culp and Lee Reich, and National Gardening Association spokesman and very popular guy Charlie Nardozzi.

Scenes from a Philly Flower Show

Click here to see Kathy’s photos from the 2012 Flower Show, and here’s the second batch of photos includes shots of the busload of Washington Gardeners.  And the photos here on the Behnkes blog are some of mine from the last year’s show, one of the many I’ve enjoyed.

For more, click here for my photo review of the 2012 show on GardenRant and click here for a report on the shopping!

Posted by Susan Harris.

These junipers want to be 15 feet wide!

The concept of “crimes against horticulture is the creation of writer/landscape architect/humorist/rock drummer Billy Goodnick, who loves to find examples, attach funny captions, and post them to his Crimes against Horticulture Facebook page.   That page collects photos of what Billy calls the “amazing, boneheaded, f’ugly things that people do in the name of gardening” and now has dozens of photos from everywhere, and 1,614 followers.  Here’s just a sampling of the photos, and you’re encouraged to contribute more, especially with your own suggestions for captions.  Horticultural crimes can be fun!

Readers, can you name the identified “crime”?  Or more gently, error?

Left, wrong plant, wrong place. Right, ivy hedge has taken over half the sidewalk.

Junipers pruned incorrectly (and brutally!) left, and correctly (and beautifully) right.

This gardener has a plan and is sticking to it!

Learn How to Prune Shrubs

Whether you like the natural, healthy look in your shrubbery or a more formal styole that’s still healthy, correct pruning techniques are the answer.  So attend our free workshop this Saturday, February 23 from 11:00 to 1:00 at our Potomac store.  Chris Lewis will teach the basics of pruning common landscape shrubs, including what tools to use, which shrubs should be pruned and how much vegetation to remove.