Granby Drummer (https://granbydrummer.com/category/grow/page/38/)
The Holcomb Tree Trail is a small arboretum on the Town-owned, 312-acre Holcomb Farm in West Granby. Volunteers planted its first 16 trees in October 2018. Some of those trees, including a Princeton Elm, are now more than 15 feet tall. Planting has continued, with the total plantings now numbering about 80 trees. One of the design principles has been to plant trees with spring blooms or fall color—or both.
As we head into picnic and cookout season, this recipe will hopefully be one of your new favorites.
It was not long ago that the East fields of Holcomb Farm, the 100-acre hill across the street from the main farm complex, was an overgrown pasture thick with oriental bittersweet, wild grapes, Japanese barberry, and multiflora rose.
For years, Rick Orluk and Trish Percival maintained the vegetation on the little island at the intersection of Higley and Silkey Roads. Their vigilance kept it from being paved over, but the plants growing there were planted long before their time and included the invasive Japanese barberry and non-native forsythia.
A few years ago, Granby’s own Michelle Niedermeyer, owner along with Kevin Riggott of Lost Acres Vineyard, was instrumental in the formation of a Connecticut Wine Country Passport Program in conjunction with the Department of Agriculture and the Winery Council.
“At last came the golden month of the wild folk—honey-sweet May, when the birds come back, and the flowers come out, and the air is full of the sunrise scents and songs of the dawning year.”
— Samuel Scoville Jr.
Several people showed up to plant wildflower plugs in the meadow across from Maple View Farm on Salmon Brook Street.
As you talk to your neighbors about their gardens this summer, don’t be surprised if a number of them say they got their start at the Friends’ May Plant sales.
With intense heat and long sunny days, June is the best time to solarize. Solarizing is a powerful way to make wholesale, non-chemical progress on tough invaders like mugwort and other not wanted plants.
This is the tag line for the Friends of Holcomb Farm’s farming programs, and we mean it.