October 6, 2009 – Spooky Halloween Plants

Plant a Halloween Garden!

Halloween is coming! In the next newsletter we’ll have all of the wonderful, wacky and fun things you can do with pumpkins. For now, to set the tone, here’s a little garden’s worth of spooky Halloween delights!

Spiderflower, or Cleome, is a perfect start to the Halloween garden. What’s Halloween without spooky spiders? To boot, this plant also has vicious sneaky spines along its stem. It flowers all summer, until frost, and prefers full sun to part shade. It is an annual that re-seeds like crazy, so BEWARE!

• Read on for more creepy plants

Preparing the Garden for Winter

Put your garden to bed this fall so that it can take a restful winter nap and spring to life next year. Here are the main garden chores for fall, and the reasons behind them.

• Take notes and pictures of the garden for record keeping and planning for next year. It is hard to remember everything you want to change, four months after you put the garden to bed.
• Remove dead annual flowers, leaves, and spent perennial flowers. All of this debris will sit in the yard, if not removed, and is a good hiding place and overwintering spot for fungi, insects and other pests.
• Cut and remove dead tree branches before a heavy snowfall breaks the branches. If you remove the branch, you will be able to control which part is removed and which stays, including healthy bark.
• Mulch landscape beds to protect plants from temperature fluctuations, frost heaves and erosion.
• Dig up and store non-hardy bulbs that you want to keep.
• Take cuttings from plants like basil, geraniums, and mint to grow on the windowsill during the winter.
• Rake leaves and compost them. Your lawn will say healthier during the winter if wet piles of leaves are not left sitting around.
• Stop pruning roses, shrubs and trees as they go dormant for winter.
• Put down corn gluten pre-emergence herbicide on the lawn and in landscape beds to prevent winter weeds.
• Plant trees, shrubs, bulbs and perennials to get a jump-start on root growth and establishment. You’ll have a bigger flower and foliage display next year.
• Dig up, divide and re-plant perennials. You’ll fill out your garden, and have some plants left over to share with friends!

Composting with Leaves

Leaves make some of the best compost available. And, at this time of year, almost everyone has a plentiful supply of them. Leaves can do double-duty as mulch and as a soil amendment, worked into the ground before planting. For both purposes, composted leaves work best.

Build the Pile

You can build a compost pile of nothing but leaves. The leaves will break down more quickly and easily if you shred them first. Leaf shredders are relatively inexpensive and worth it if you have a lot of leaves to compost and large areas to mulch. You can also run over the leaves with a lawn mower, and then rake them up into a pile, or bag them while mowing over them. (Bagging the leaves with grass will add some grass clippings—a source of nitrogen that will help the pile “cook.”)

Unless the leaves are wet when you build the pile, water them after piling them up. The bacteria and fungi that break down the leaves need to stay moist. To help the pile jump-start, get some compost tea, or add humic acid to the pile as you build it.

Use the Leaves

By early summer, the leaves will be ready to use as mulch or compost. If incorporating into the soil as a soil amendment, turn the compost into the soil a couple of weeks before planting, so that it has a chance to break down further and won’t sap the nitrogen from the soil.

Pumpkin Pie Cake

Pumpkins are in the squash family, and are considered winter squash. Along with butternut, hubbard, acorn and other squash, pumpkin is a healthy food (when it isn’t baked into sugary delights, like our next recipe). Pumpkin is high in Vitamins A and C, and is a good source of folate, dietary fiber, potassium and manganese.

Pumpkin Pie Cake

By Katie Elzer-Peters

(This is NOT a healthy recipe! However, it is from my awesome Aunt Rhonda)

Ingredients:

• 1 pkg. yellow cake mix (save 1 cup)
• 1 egg
• 1/2 c melted butter

• 1 can pumpkin
• 2 eggs
• 2/3 c. evaporated milk
• cinnamon
• nutmeg
• 1/4 to 1/2 c sugar

Save one cup of the cake mix.

Combine remaining cake mix with butter and egg and press into bottom of pan (9×13)

Mix 1 can pumpkin, with cinnamon and nutmeg. Stir in sugar, eggs, and evaporated milk. Pour over the cake mix in the pan.

Mix 1 cup reserved cake mix, 1/4 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and a pinch of nutmeg, and 1/4 cup butter. Sprinkle over the top.

Bake at 350° for 45-50 minutes. Done, and yum!

To all our Canadian readers, have a Happy Thanksgiving!