Powerful pomegranates, glorious geraniums and more to do in the garden

5 things to do in the garden this week:

Fruit trees. Although all parts of the pomegranate are medicinal, extract from pomegranate peel is 10 times as rich in beneficial biochemicals as the rest of the fruit. Some advocate making a pomegranate peel powder for tea. It should be noted that the peel is the most nutritional part of any fruit. One tablespoon of shredded citrus peel, known in the culinary world as zest, contains four times the dietary fiber and three times the quantity of Vitamin C as one tablespoon of citrus pulp. Even the fleshy outer covering or jacket of almonds is highly nutritious. With avocadoes, where the peel is not eaten, the outside pulp that touches the peel is more nutritious than the inside pulp 

Vegetables. Beets grow with ease when planted now and are ready to harvest 60 days or less after planting. Beets originated in the Mediterranean where they were grown for their nutritious leaves more than 2,000 years ago. For centuries, their roots were used for medicinal purposes alone. It was only in the 1500s when a large bulbous root developed on a beet grown in Germany that this part of the plant was first consumed for its gustatory appeal. (For this reason, beets are sometimes referred to as “beetroots” to distinguish them from beets that are still grown for their foliage.) Beet seeds are unusual among vegetables since, like its close relative, Swiss chard, seeds are actually formed in multi-germ capsules or clusters. Thus, when you plant beets or chard, you are dealing with clusters from which 2-6 seeds sprout. Thin the sprouts so the most robust of them remains, although some gardeners allow two or three sprouts to develop and thin them when small beets have developed for a final thinning. 

Herbs. Rue (Ruta graveolens) is a highly attractive evergreen subshrub with delicately lobed blue-green foliage and yellow flowers that grow two feet tall. It may be used as a stand-alone member of your herb garden or trained into a low hedge. It is a strewing herb, meaning it was strewn on the floor of dwellings in the Middle Ages. Due to its strong malodorous scent, strewing it could repel insect pests, especially fleas that carried the Black Plague. It was also thought to have divine power as both Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo said they were heavenly inspired upon imbibing an infusion made from its leaves. You should be able to find rue in the herb section of any well-stocked nursery or garden center.

Flowering woody perennials. Winter cassia, or Christmas bush (Cassia/Senna bicapsularis), is an anomaly as it blooms when all other shrubs and trees have stopped flowering. The display of butter-yellow, butterfly-shaped flowers is seen from November through the first of the year. Each leaf consists of a series of small oval leaflets set opposite each other. This is an airy specimen that you will never need to prune and, grown in half-day sun, won’t need to water either. I obtained mine years ago and it is one of the most gratifying plants in my garden. You can find it online readily enough. Plants and seeds are available from vendors on Etsy.com.

Ornamentals. Winter is the season for geranium appreciation, although what we commonly refer to as geraniums are mostly pelargoniums. The most commonly seen geraniums are known as zonals (Pelargonium x hortorum). They are upright plants with lobed leaves – sometimes colorfully patterned – and always with a distinctive odor on account of which they are sometimes referred to as fish geraniums. Ivy geraniums (Pelargonium peltatum) are easily identified due to their trailing growth habit. Martha Washingtons (Pelargonium x domesticum) have flowers in many fetching colors, including salmon, creamy pink, and lavender-purple, along with sharply toothed leaf margins. And then we come to scented geraniums (Pelargonium spp.), of which there are probably a hundred different kinds or more. Their flowers in pale pink or white are an afterthought to the plethora of scents – peppermint, lemon, chocolate, nutmeg, apple, ginger, apricot, attar of roses, and cinnamon, among others – that their leaves transmit upon being rubbed or crushed. The chemical compounds that create these scents also impart a significant measure of drought tolerance. All pelargoniums are easily propagated from four to six-inch shoot tip cuttings