All the Dirt on Gardening

It may look like a fragile plant, but Musa basjoo Japanese Fiber Banana is cold hardy to 20-degrees below zero. Musa is the most popular banana tree for landscapes as cold as zone 5 in Kansas and Pennsylvania. In our zone 7, gardeners plant them in gardens permanently close to a building or fence and mulch them in the winter. By the end of the following summer they can grow to 15-feet tall. Matthew Weatherbee, owner of Blossoms Garden Center in Muskogee, grows them at home and sells them at the nursery. They really do survive the winter when planted in the ground, Weatherbee said. They will freeze down but come back from the roots bigger than the year before. They also multiply and one tree becomes a clump of trees. This is a great plant! Park Seed is offering the plants this fall. Transplant mail order plants into larger pots and keep them inside for the winter while their roots expand. If you have one outside in the ground, the roots will live even when temperatures dip to 20-below z...

TODAY'S GARDEN COLUMN Each year that Blossoms Garden Center is open, owners Lora and Matthew Weatherbee grow their business to accommodate more customer requests. This year a new growing house was added. "We are really proud of what we grow," Matthew said. "This year we are growing several Proven Winners that gardeners may not find other places." Proven Winners are patented plant varieties that cannot be commercially propagated without a license. The company selects new varieties that are tested for two or three years before they are offered. Superbells calibroachoa, Diamond Frost Euphorbia and Soprano Osteospermum are a few of the many familiar Proven Winners varieties. City Line Hydrangeas are new dwarf hybrids from Germany that grow from 1 to 3 feet tall in sun or part shade. "The City Line hydrangeas are compact and perfect for containers if gardeners do not have a lot of ground space. Blossom's carries City Line dwarf Berlin, Paris, Vienna and...