Charming, old-timey garden book

Written on August 2, 2010 at 3:26 pm
By Rebecca Christian

A few weeks ago, a dear lady with the you-couldn’t-make-it-up name of Melba Tingle gave me some time-honored advice passed down from her grandmother: save your banana peels, cut them up, and sprinkle them at the base of your rose bushes. Fast-forward to today. I took Melba’s advice, and not only am I brimming with potassium, but also my Knock Out roses are truly knocking me out. Maybe it’s the anti-fungal spray. Maybe it’s faithful watering. Maybe it’s the fertilizer pellets from Earl May. Maybe it’s the innate hardiness of the Knock Outs. But I prefer to think it’s the banana peels, don’t you?

There’s much more of the same sort of conversational counsel in a book that crossed my desk recently, Sleeping With A Sunflower: A Treasury of Old-Time Gardening Lore, by Louise Riotte (Garden Way Publishing, 1987). You can get it used from Amazon for a whopping $2.07 (http://www.amazon.com/Sleeping-Sunflower-Treasury-Old-Time-Gardening/dp/0882665022). What a mix of beauty secrets, dowsing tips, love potions, recipes, and Native American lore it is.  It will advise you to make kraut during a full moon, to carry three horse chestnuts for relief from backaches and arthritis, plant garlic near roses to enhance their fragrance, put pennyroyal on your cat’s collar to keep her flea free, apread human hair around plants to keep rabbits away, and use corn shucks to forecast the weather (tough shucks, tough winter ahead).

Are you as ready for fall as I am? Here is a recipe from the book that sounds wonderfully autumnal:

Indian Pudding

1/2 cup corn meal

1/2 cup cold water

1 quart milk, heated

1/2 cup molasses

1/4 cup brown sugar

2 teaspoons ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup cold milk

Pheat oven to 300 F. Add corn meal, mixed with cold water, to warm milk. Cook about 20 minutes in double boiler, stirring often. Add molasses, sugar, ginger, cinnamon and salt. Pour into oiled baking dish. Bake 30 minutes. Add cold milk and bake slowly (without stirring) for about 3-4 hours longer.

Now if I just had an old-timey way to make my hydrangeas bloom blue without resorting to aluminum sulfate, which has to be used carefully or it can burn them. I have avoided mixing such elixirs since my brining tragedy of a few Thanksgivings ago. Also there were nibble marks on the pumpkin pies, which I had placed on the porch to cool  –  some sort of varmint scrabbled though the screen to get to them, and I had to use whipped cream to cover up the evidence. None of us got rabies, but that is another blog post. Readers, can you really get the same effect by putting old nails in the soil by the hydrangea roots, or is that just an old wives’ tale?

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