1820s Farmhouse + 24 Acres + Nursery Business 899K

HERE’S AN OLD HOUSE THAT COMES WITH A NEW LIFE, should you be in the market for one. Loomis Creek Nursery in Columbia County, N.Y., was well-known to me in my years of gardening upstate. It was a boutique nursery with out-of-the-ordinary offerings and fantastic annual display borders. Its owners are re-locating to the West Coast and the whole kit ‘n’ kaboodle, which includes an 1820s farmhouse, is for sale.

Read all about it in the broker’s listing, below:

Successful high-end nursery and landscaping business ideally located in southern Columbia County is now being offered for sale on 24 acres, with an 1820s farmhouse, a pool and several outbuildings. Branding and customer following have been well-established in the 8 years of operation. This turn-key business is offered with all of the equipment, inventory and initial consultations essential to the continuation of this profitable venture.

In keeping with the mood of this bucolic setting, the charming 2906 sf, 3 bedroom, 2 bath 1820s farmhouse, surrounded by terraced decks and meandering stone paths, is landscaped for privacy. There is an in-ground pool with a poolhouse tucked away on the other side of the road, 2 barns, and a garage – all eclectically and beautifully landscaped. Featured on The Martha Stewart Show, in The New York Times, on such blogs as A Way to Garden and Rural Intelligence, and The Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Tours.

Click here for a PDF with lots more photos.

For more info: Kathy Duffy | 518.822.0800 x11 | email

Made in the Shade: Tips from the Experts

Margaret Roach at last weekend’s shade gardening workshop, above

LAST WEEKEND, along with a few dozen other garden nerds, I attended a half-day shade gardening workshop in Columbia County, and took 8 pages of notes.

We started at Margaret Roach’s lovely, hilly two-acre spread (she being the garden blogger I most admire, and author of a forthcoming dropout memoir about leaving the city for a more serene life in the sticks — I can relate). Our second stop was Loomis Creek, a nursery known for unusual offerings and stunning display borders. One of Loomis Creek’s owners, Bob Hyland, presented the second half of the workshop, and shared the news that the nursery will be closing for good Columbus Day weekend, when Bob and his partner de-camp for new adventures on the West Coast. Great bargains there in their final close-out; I came away with a car-full.

When asked why we were there, one woman spoke for many: “Because I don’t have any SUN!!!” Despite what I hoped when I first came to my Long Island cottage in May ’09 — south-facing backyard and all that — I have NO full sun anywhere on my half-acre. It varies from part to deep shade throughout, and I’ve been gravitating toward plants that don’t have to struggle. Also, almost all my gardening knowledge to date comes from books. I wanted to see how real gardeners actually handle plants (I may never plant a quart nursery pot again without tearing it into several pieces, as we watched Bob Hyland do with a  pot of ajuga).

Here’s some of what we learned last Saturday, beyond the basics (the basics being ‘plant in multiples of 3,5,7,9; in drifts or waves rather than rows…’):

• Shade plants grow slowly. That’s why they tend to be more expensive. It takes a nursery 2-3 years to nurture seedlings (hellebores, epimedium) along to salable size.
• When transplanting/dividing plants in fall, pre-soak the ground. I’d always just sprinkled perfunctorily, but Margaret recommended a few hours a day for a few days in advance. And wait for cool, overcast weather to do the deed, if possible.
• September is THE time to transplant and divide perennials (in Zone 5, anyway; here in Zone 7, we can probably go into October). October’s the month for planting new trees and shrubs.
• A lot of woodland (shade) plants have shallow root structures, so their roots freeze easily if you move them too late. They are adapted to live in small pockets of soil between tree roots. “Pocket planting of baby seedlings may be more effective,” said Margaret, than buying larger nursery specimens. “It’s nature way.” That requires patience, not my strong suit.
• Think “opportunistic” gardening on a shady property — that is, create gardens for beauty in March through May, before deciduous trees leaf out. Identify your seasonal opportunities and make the most of them.
• An easy kind of shade garden (well, it’s all relative) is creating a “skirt” around deciduous trees, with early bulbs and primulas, trilliums, Jeffersonia, and ‘dolls eyes’ aceta (cimicifuga) — none of which I’ve tried — especially near the house, where you can view them through a window in March and April.
• The best way to design: “Look out the window.” Especially in winter, that’ll be your most frequent vantage point.
• Group containers full of high-impact, long-lasting plants, such as ‘citronelle’ heuchera, hostas, begonias, and hakonechloa to welcome visitors into a shade garden.
• Spanish bluebells are “good for the back 40” – sweeps of ground cover visible from a distance.
• Note to self: get some petasites! They’re dramatic, huge-leafed, pre-historic-looking things.
• If you want to special-order annuals from a nursery for next year — if you need a large quantity or want something unusual — do it now.

The Waiting Game

Soon: Backyard Community Garden, Red Hook, Brooklyn

SNOW IS STILL BLANKETING THE GROUND — another few inches yesterday — but it’s getting nearer the day we can start gardening in earnest. I intended to do a whole planning thing with graph paper and templates this winter, as I did two years ago in Nigel Rollings‘ garden-design class at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, but frankly, I can’t be bothered. I’ve got in my head what I want to do – must do – and when the time comes (next month, God willing) I’ll just get out there and do it.

Soon: Sissinghurst, Kent, England

There are so many steps to accomplish before I can put new plants in. The soil must be improved, first of all – it’s just sandy dirt at the moment, with a layer of oak leaves – and that will involve much purchasing of compost and manure and back-straining labor  – and then I have to move about 300 square feet’s worth of old ferns and astilbes, along with daffodil bulbs I put in rather thoughtlessly last fall (after they bloom and fade, in early May probably) to make room for a new deck.

Soon: Sissinghurst, Kent, England

Right now, I’m reading a lot. Garden books, naturally. I continue to mine the library and occasionally order something from half.com. My latest discovery is The Country Garden by Josephine Nuese, published in 1970. Sydney Eddison, another wonderful garden writer, put me on to her. Nuese wrote from Zone 5 in northwestern Connecticut, near where I used to garden, so the plants she speaks of all feel very familiar. Some of what she says is dated; painting tree wounds (cuts) after pruning is now discredited, for example.  What I wouldn’t have expected from either of these ladies is the conversational, chuckle-out-loud quality of their writing.

Soon: GRDN, Brooklyn

Nuese’s book is divided into chapters by month. February is all about seed-starting, for which I have neither the room nor the patience — not this year, anyway. So I’ve moved onto March, with its long list of “Don’ts.” In March, Nuese writes, “After months of mostly sitting, punctuated by purposeless walks, you have the figure of a woodchuck and the mentality of a stuffed owl; you can’t wait to get out into the spring and employ your mind and muscles in some meaningful work.” See how she understands me? It’s as if she’s been reading my blog…

Don’t whip off winter protection (mulches, burlap) too early, she warns; don’t attempt to work wet earth that still has frost on it. Do rake the lawn of twigs and branches; prune shrubs and small trees of storm-damaged wood; spread wood ash to add alkalinity to soil, which most perennials enjoy.

Meanwhile, tantalizing catalogues and e-mails continue to arrive from nurseries and gardening websites, the best of all being Margaret Roach’s A Way to Garden. She’s got an ambitious calendar of events planned for 2010, some in conjunction with Loomis Creek Nursery, all making me wish I lived a little closer to the Hudson Valley.

“It’s a Start”

SO I HAD THREE EVERGREENS planted in the front yard to screen the view of the road. Of course, they don’t screen the whole view of the road, just a bit of it. But as the guy from Whitmore’s, the tree farm, said, “It’s a start.”

I’m glad it’s warm and raining now. Two 8-foot trees (a thuja ‘Green Giant’ and a white pine) and a 4-foot-round holly bush that looks like a boxwood (ilex crennata) — in the photo below, it’s the three in the middle ground — went in December 10. Very late, I thought, but there hadn’t been a freeze. That night it went down to 22 degrees.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the way they put them in. I didn’t get the positioning advice I hoped for from the nursery (the boss showed up late), so I had to decide myself where to put them, while four guys with shovels waited. I’d been weighing the factors for two weeks (the need to obscure the commercial building across the street, relate to plants and trees already in place, get enough sun, have room to grow, etc.). It was a tad nerve-wracking, but I think it turned out OK. There seems to be some kind of balance there. And I feel less exposed already. $500 well spent.

I can’t imagine the roots, still in their burlap sacks (said to degrade) are very happy. The workers didn’t seem to dig holes as wide as “the books” say. It was cold, it was late, the guys were no doubt tired. They wouldn’t have watered at all if I hadn’t had several buckets (pots, wastebaskets) at the ready.

But when Brendan, the boss, showed up, he was all professional and confident about flying in the face of what the books say about planting season, depth of hole, width of hole, and need for water.

Oh, and the soil’s no good. I’ll do something about that in the spring.

Anyway, they’re guaranteed.

View from the road:

I Dig

I ALWAYS THOUGHT B&B stood for bed and breakfast. Now I know it means balled and burlapped.

Plants sold in plastic containers are a cinch to plant – you dig a hole and pop them in. Bigger trees and shrubs are B&B’d, like the two hefty mountain laurels I planted this afternoon. They’re heavy mothers.

Oh, my aching back.

Yesterday I went to Marder’s in Bridgehampton, an old-fashioned, full-service nursery where they really help you, to see what they had on sale. I was shopping on the principle that you should choose plants to suit your conditions, not frustrate yourself trying to grow what isn’t natural (and get 60% off if possible).

I went armed with a list of deer-resistant, shade-tolerant, acid-soil-loving shrubs to begin creating a ‘mixed hedge’ along the road (as opposed to the solid, all-one-kind, evergreen wall that is synonymous with the Hamptons). There’s an area about 20’x60′ along the road that is now cleared, thanks to my daughter Zoë, of most saplings and undergrowth (there’s still plenty of wisteria vine, pulled up out of the ground and coiled for later removal and ‘treatment’ — that is, poisoning [heh heh]

On my wish list was:

• skimmia
• clethera
• kerria japonica
• mountain laurel
• mahonia
• American holly

Not the most exciting stuff, but better to have un-showy flowers, I figure, than no flowers at all, because they don’t get enough sun or the deer have eaten them.

Marder’s was out of most things on my list, but I ended up buying eight plants:

• 1 pee gee hydrangea
• 2 osmanthus (purple false holly)
• 3 sarcococca (sweet box)
• 2 mountain laurels

They were delivered this afternoon. I had the delivery guy set the mountain laurels — only about 3 feet high but the root ball makes them monstrously heavy — near where I wanted to plant them. Once they were out there, right by the road, I realized I needed to plant them right away or risk their being stolen. (Call me paranoid, but this happened in Brooklyn once with two brand-new Alberta spruce; they lasted about 20 minutes on the front stoop.)

I had decided not to spring for planting services like last week, when I had a doublefile viburnum planted by the nursery and felt like a princess. Having watched the technique, I wanted to give it a try and save the bucks (planting often costs as much as the plant). It would have been easier with another person, but my daughter had gone off to the Yankee game.

Each of the two shrubs took an hour to plant: digging the hole with two different shovels; wrestling the plant into the hole, then out again and digging deeper, then in again; cutting the rope and burlap away and pulling it out from underneath; re-filling the hole with dirt (by now I was on my knees and using my gloved hands to push the dirt back in; I’d had it with the shovel); making a moat around it to hold water, much like building a sand castle at the beach, but muddier; and finally watering by hand.

I know I should have made the holes twice as wide as the plant (there’s that garden guilt again), but 1-1/2 times was the best I could manage.