The Demo Garden Blog

It isn’t often that I’ve gone outside the boundaries of our Demonstration Garden for pictures or post topics, but since our garden is pretty barren right now (see the previous post), I wanted to keep providing some garden eye candy for as long as possible. This week, I went out and visited the rose garden!

Our hybrid rose garden is still looking amazing, even after a few freezes. Aren’t these roses gorgeous?

This if the flower from the ‘Mister Lincoln’ hybrid tea rose. It is an older hybrid tea (introduced in the 1960s), and has big, beautiful flowers. A lot of catalogs show it as being a redder rose, but ours is definitely a paler, fuchsia color.

I also found a number of different articles and recipes to share this week, covering quite a range of topics. 

From a blog called AZ Cookbook (which features “food from Azerbaijan & beyond”), come two intriguing vegetable recipes that I’ll have to remember for next year. The first is Mixed Vegetable Pickle, which looks like an excellent way to use up those miscellaneous, end-of-the-year garden vegetables. The second is this recipe for Eggplant Rolls. Now if you’ve been around this blog for very long, you know that I’m not a huge fan of eggplant for things other than ornamental value. Still…these almost look good enough that we may have to grow some eggplant next year just to try these.

Wild Boar Farms posted a picture of a new tomato variety they’ve been breeding, asking for names.

Over at the Nutrients for Life blog, Dee has a great post about the nutrients in fallen leaves and using leaves for mulch.

“Food Deserts” have become all the rage this year as a new way to frame the conversation about lack of access to food and lack of access to good quality, healthy food choices in certain areas (especially very urban and very rural areas). The New York Times has an article about the success of a mobile food pantry in an urban area.

From a research standpoint, MIT and Columbia University recently released the results of a collaborative study on obesity, food deserts, and our food system. Related links: Columbia’s description of the project, a Columbia presentation on their findings and proposals, MIT’s project page, and MIT’s documents on the food system proposals.

Green roofs were big news a couple years ago, and I think the jury is still out on how well they work in different parts of the country (and how to do them right). The University of Nebraska recently installed a new green roof using one method, and the Vancouver Convention Center highlights the success of their green roof (which is very different from the Nebraska green roof) after a couple years.

Enjoy the reading, and have a great weekend!