Archive for October, 2009

Halloween-inspired Horticultural Wonders

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Flickr Photo by Contadini

Flickr Photo by Contadini



Halloween is almost here! Get your garden ready for its closeup. Plant some of these frightful members of the plant kingdom near the front door, or where they can be up-lit for maximum effect. This is the third in a series of ghoulish garden design blogs for Halloween. The first two included orange and black plants, and plants with spook-tacular names. If you want to truly scare your trick-or-treaters, find some of these scary plants for your garden. Create creepy containers to greet little ones when they ring your doorbell.

These are our favorite Halloween-inspired horticultural wonders. For more scary plants, check out the aHa! Modern Living Facebook Fan Page, and add your favorite scary plant pictures for everyone to see.

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Blood-Curdling Plants for a Halloween-inspired Garden

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Flickr photo by Eirik Newth

Freaky Ferns photo by Eirik Newth



Are you ready for a garden of un-earthly delights?    Something to scare away the ghouls and goblins lurking around the garden?  Plant these spooky plants for a garden that will scare even the bravest of trick or treaters.   Here are our favorite creepy plants.  What are yours?  Visit the aHa! Modern Living Facebook Fan Page, and add your favorite scary plant pictures for everyone to see.

Ghoulish Garden Plants

The cackle of witches is the most spooky of sounds, so every Halloween garden needs a Witchhazel.  This plant is an understory shrub that blooms in either the fall or spring, depending on the species that you plant.  It is hardy from Zone 4 to Zone 8.  Cultivars that lose their leaves during the winter are the nicest for gardeners, because the leaf loss allows you to see the small, delicate flowers more easily.

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How to Pick the Perfect Pumpkin & the Tools to Help

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
photos by Happy Mundane

photos by Happy Mundane (from left: play it cool with blues or warm it up with oranges and yellows)

What would the month of October be without the beautiful and iconic pumpkin? Whether you plan to harvest your own home-grown pumpkins, or visit your local patch, here are some tips to insure successful pumpkin plucking.

When to Pick

Pumpkins need to be picked before the first hard frost of the year. Depending on the growing conditions, baby pumpkins can vary in size. Baby gray and white pumpkins are ready to pick when there has been no change in size for about a week. When ripe, the fruit stem will start to turn brown. Baby orange pumpkins are ready to pick when the skin gets a slight yellowish sheen.

Full-sized orange pumpkins will turn deep in color when they are ready to be picked. Their skin should be hard enough that it does not crack when you poke it with your fingernail. Don’t pick a pumpkin too early, because it will stop turning orange once it has been cut from the vine.

How to Pick

Pumpkin vines are quite prickly, so make sure to protect your hands with gardening gloves. We recommend the West County Work Gloves (below), which are lightly padded in order to completely shield your palms from prickers. Look, they have adjustable wrist straps, too, so you’re sure to get a good fit.

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Win a Copy of Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Are you dying to get your hands on a copy of Amy Stewart’s latest book, Wicked Plants: A Book of Botanical Atrocities?  Well, now you have the opportunity to win a signed “Happy Halloween” copy by the sassy, opinionated author herself (read her contributions to the Garden Rant blog).  If you share my two obsessions, plants and Halloween, then you’ll be eerily delighted by her tales of the weed that killed Lincoln’s mother and other botanical atrocities.

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Get your Garden Ready for Halloween!

Monday, October 12th, 2009

photo by OiMax

photo by OiMax



Jayme Jenkins, owner of aHa! Modern Living is a Halloween fanatic, and throws a spooktacular Halloween bash every year.  With her love of plants, modern style, and taking the outdoors in and the indoors out, the garden plays a large part in Jayme’s Halloween Scheme.  In this three-part blog series, Jayme shares her favorite Halloween plants, including: plants that LOOK like Halloween, CREEPY plants, and plants with SCARY names.  Stay tuned for parts two and three, and, in the mean time, head over to the aHa! Modern Living Facebook Fan Page, and add your favorite scary plant pictures for everyone to see.

Halloween Plant History

The ubiquitous symbol of Halloween today is the Jack-o-Lantern, or carved pumpkin.  Its place in Halloween décor and lore is firm, but its inclusion in Halloween celebrations is relatively recent.  Pumpkins have been part of the Halloween tradition of a harvest festival because they are winter squash and ready for harvest shortly before the holiday.  Halloween, as it is celebrated today, is an amalgam of several different traditions, from a Celtic holiday celebrating the end of summer and beginning of winter, to the Roman tradition of the harvest festival, to a religious “All Saints Day.”  Skeletons, apples, and ghosts as part of Halloween all come from one of these early Halloween predecessors.

The jack-o-lantern is a hybrid of several different traditions, as well.  In Europe, lanterns carved from vegetables were common at fall festivals, but rarely were they carved from pumpkins.  Perhaps, because pumpkins are a new-world crop, and wouldn’t have been available in Europe.  Turnips were the vegetable of choice, there.  There are myths about the ghost of a “lantern Jack” wandering  the world with his turnip lantern, unable to rest in peace.  The story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman includes a lantern carved from a pumpkin, the only light for the Headless Horseman’s horse.  Spooky!

Scary, Silly and Supernatural Halloween Plants

Before the next blogs about creepy Halloween plants, here are a few that will help set the mood—orange and black plants for the Halloween Party.   For more black plants, check out this charming little book:

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Garden Hand Tools: When to Spend and When Not to Spend

Monday, October 12th, 2009
From left: hand trowel, asparagus knife, Felco pruners #2 and 5-gallon bucket with caddy

From left: hand trowel, asparagus knife, Felco pruners #2 and 5-gallon bucket with caddy

Guest Post by Susan Cohan of Susan Cohan Gardens

I’m picky about tools and especially of the garden variety.  Some, like a trowel inherited from grandpa have emotional resonance, some are used once found to be fairly useless and then forgotten and still others become gardening partners for a lifetime.  How do you figure out which tools are essential and worth the big bucks and which aren’t? How do you figure out how not to waste your money?

First, think about which garden tasks you perform most often.  Most garden tasks requiring tools can be divided into four basic categories:  cutting, digging, gathering and spreading.  Each of those tasks, depending on what you are actually doing has a myriad of tools designed to make the job easier, lighter, faster or more comfortable.  Tool makers would have you believe you need a garage or shed full of tools to have a great gardening experience.  Not so, but it is a personal decision.  If you’re a gadget monster—go for it.  I have relatively few tools—my essentials are below as are my reasons to spend money or not…

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Harvesting and Storage Tips for Fall Vegetables

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

source: ifodesigns.com

Here at aHa! Modern Living, we just love the fall season. We have tucked away our bathing suits and beach towels, and instead have begun to stock our shelves with extra fleece blankets and soft wool sweaters. The refreshing outdoor air is laced with crisp breezes and the scent of drying leaves. Our favorite coffee shops feature rich pumpkin spice flavored goodies and fresh apple treats. Autumn is truly a delight to all the senses.

Just as we relish the arrival of fall, many of the vegetables in your garden love it as well. Cool nights slow plant growth, so vegetables take longer to mature in the fall than in the summer.  Warm days and cool nights also add natural sugar to corn, cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower. Ahh, how sweet they are! And with aHa! Modern Living’s versatile gardening tools in hand, such as the awesome Gardener’s Multi-Tool (below), harvesting all your delicious fall veggies will be a snap!

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