HOT DAYS, BUT PREPARING FOR FALL

Ignoring My Gut

Like other parents, I don’t hold back preparing for fall just because of hot, sun-drenched sunny days. But my preparations don’t entail trips to the store for notebooks, pencils, rulers, and other school gear. My daughter is old enough to gear up for herself. Instead, I’m preparing for a garden that becomes lush with ”cool weather” vegetables just as tomatoes, peppers, okra, and other warm weather vegetables are fading OUT.
    Much of gardening entails NOT going with your gut. If I went with my gut, I’d be planting more tomatoes and sweet corn and, perhaps, if I was really going with my gut, even banana trees on today’s ninety plus degree, bright, sunny, humid day.

Sprouting seedlings, planting seeds, and transplants

Sprouting seedlings, planting seeds, and transplants

    Although tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers presently have more appeal, fall vegetables will have their day. I have to remind myself how a lowering sun and cooler weather make more appealing the lush green leaves of cabbages, brussels sprouts, endive, lettuce, kale, celery, and, below ground, radishes, turnips, carrots, and celeriac. And anyway, I’ll have no choice because summer vegetables will have waned by then.
    That lush fall garden, almost like a whole new garden, comes about only if I do something about it now!

To Every Thing There is a Season, a Time to Plant, A Time to…

    Timing is (almost) everything for a productive fall garden. Planted too early, some leafy fall vegetables bolt — send up tough seed stalks — because of heat and long days. Right now, I’m sowing turnips and winter radishes, the especially tasty varieties Hakurei and Watermelon respectively. Among leafy, salad vegetables, lettuce, mustard (the variety Mizuna), and endive, with repeated sowing of lettuce every weeks until early September.
    It’s still a too early for spinach, arugula, mâche, short season Chinese cabbages, and spring radishes. Some time later this month would be about right for these vegetables. My book, Weedless Gardening, gives a detailed schedule for when to plant what vegetables for specific regions.
    For a truly bountiful fall garden, more advance planning was needed. For instance, I won’t be harvesting brussels sprouts until October, but for sprouts lining stalks three to four foot tall, I sowed those seeds indoors in March. Celery and celeriac seed got sprinkled in mini-furrows in seed flats way back in early February.

Zero Tolerance for Weeds, Almost

    Almost as important as timing for my fall garden is weeding. The enthusiasm of many gardeners peaks in spring and then slowly wanes as summer heats up. Not mine.
    Every time I see a lambsquarters weed, the thought of the eventual 100,000 seeds it might sow prompts be to bend down and yank it out. Same goes for purslane plants, whose seeds remain viable in the soil for decades. And spotted spurge; each plant not only spreads thousands of seeds, but those seeds sprout quickly to mature new plants that make even more baby, then adult, spotted spurges. How could I bring myself not to pull these weeds. (Yes, I know, lambsquarters and purslane are edible — if you like their flavor.)
    With weeds kept in check through June, much less effort has been needed to maintain the status quo. Mostly, this is because drier weather has limited weed growth and seed germination, and because any watering in my garden is with drip irrigation. Rather than coaxing weed growth in pathways (and also wasting water), as do sprinklers, drip irrigation pinpoints water to garden plants.

Fresh Figs Bring Me back to Summer

    Back to enjoying summer . . . we’ve been enjoying the first crop, known as the breba crop, of figs from the ‘Rabbi Samuel’ fig tree espaliered in the greenhouse.
 

Rabbi Samuel fig, espaliered in greenhouse

Rabbi Samuel fig, espaliered in greenhouse

   Most fruit plants bear fruits on one-year-old, or older, stems. Figs, depending on the variety, can bear on one-year-old stems, on new, growing shoots, or on both one-year-old stems and on new, growing shoots. ‘Rabbi Samuel’, I have found, bears on both.
    The tree is trained to a T, with two horizontal arms growing in either direction from atop an 18” high trunk. New shoots spring up vertically at about 6 inch spacing along the arms. Late each fall, I cut all those shoots almost back to the arms to make room for and coax new fruiting shoots for the following year.

Early, breba fig crop not ripening on old stub

Early, breba fig crop not ripening on old stub

       The stubs left after cutting back the season’s shoots are one year old, and that’s where brebas have been borne. This fall, I’ll leave some a few inches long, for a larger breba crop next July; the next year I’ll shorten them more drastically and leave others a few inches long; and so on, year after year.
    The main crop, on new, growing shoots, should begin ripening not to long after the  last of the brebas have been harvested. With sufficient sunlight and a bit of supplemental heat in the greenhouse, harvest of the main crop will continue until November’s days grow too short, soothing the transition from the summer to the fall garden.

SPROUTS MAKE ME HAPPY, DARWIN DOESN’T

More Citrus in the Making

You wouldn’t think that a couple of small, green sprouts could elicit so much excitement. Especially this time of year, with vigorous, green shoots sprouting up all over the place. But they did, in me. Not that anyone else would notice the two sprouts.
    The sprouts were from grafts I made a couple of months ago. Over the years I’ve done hundreds of successful grafts; these two were special.
    The first was citrus, special because the trees are subtropical and evergreen. The many apples, pears, and plums that I’ve grafted over the years are deciduous. I graft them when they are leafless and just about ready to start growing. Because the grafts are leafless, the wood, as long as the graft union is sealed, won’t dry out.
    Not so for citrus, more specifically for the stems I clipped off my potted Golden Nugget tangerine tree. What was needed, then was a rootstock on which to graft that stem. The result would be a Golden Nugget plant above the graft (which stays right where it is no matter how much the plant grows). Clipping all the leaves from the stem forestalled moisture loss.
    My home is also home to kumquat, another citrus that lives in a pot here, outdoors in summer and in a sunny window in winter. A couple of February’s ago, I glanced down at the kumquat seeds I had just spit out from fruits I harvested and ate. Not being able to squander their potential, I planted them in pots. A decade might have gone by before they were old enough to bear fruit but, after two years, the pencil-thick stems were large enough for grafting.

Citrus graft, a success

Citrus graft, a success

   With kumquat rootstocks poised for the operation and Golden Nugget scions (the stem to be grafted atop the rootstock) stripped of leaves and also ready, the procedure was the same as for apple trees and other deciduous plants: matching, sloping cuts on rootstock and scion held in place by a wrapping with a rubber strip; covering the wound to prevent moisture loss. My usual choice of covering is Tree-Kote, which gets painted on, or Parafilm, a stretchy film that adheres to itself.
    The citrus scion was fleshy enough to also lose moisture right through the bark. To prevent this, I wrapped the whole scion in the Parafilm. A blackened scion had followed previous attempts at grafting citrus without wrapping the stem.
    A week or so ago, it was time to unwrap the Parafilm from around the stem. If the grafted parts were going to knit together, they should have done so by then. Lo and behold, a small, green sprout soon pushed out from the top bud of the scion.

 Nutty Grafting

    Not all deciduous trees are as easy to graft as apple and pear. Nut trees in the Juglandaceae family, which includes black walnuts, English walnuts, butternuts, pecans, and hickories, are notoriously difficult. Part of the reason is because cutting a stem in spring, which is, of course, unavoidable when grafting, makes these trees bleed, messing up the works.
    With a slew of failures at grafting this family under my belt, I needed to try again. The candidate this year was a nut tree called buartnut, and hybrid tree with a hybrid name, the latter a non-euphonious combination of the words “heartnut” and “butternut.” Heartnut is a Japanese species of walnut, notable mostly for how easily it cracks to yield two heart-shaped nutmeats. Butternut is a richly flavored nut borne on a native tree that is becoming increasingly rare because of a blight disease.
    Buartnuts allegedly need cross-pollination to bear nuts. My tree, large and spreading though only about 15 years old, lacked a mate. The mate needn’t be a whole other tree; a branch from another tree, grafted on my tree, would suffice and avoid the need to plant a whole new tree or wait the years it would take to flower. Grafted branches bear much more quickly than new trees.
    Fortunately, I knew of another buartnut tree that could provide pollination. Last winter, I clipped off a few of its stems, packed them in a plastic bag, wrapped the bag in a wet towel, and then packed that whole mess into another plastic bag and then into the refrigerator. There, they remained hydrated and dormant until needed.

Heartnut graft, one sprout

Heartnut graft, one sprout

    The key, I’ve been told, to grafting Juglandaceae, is to wait in spring until a spate of 80 degree plus weather is predicted. Conditions seemed right on a day last May. Because of past failures, I attempted numerous grafts, three different kinds: the bark graft, the banana graft, and the whip graft. To promote bleeding off-site rather than at the grafts, I slit stems below the grafts. I covered one of the bark grafts with a plastic bag and then, for shade so the stems wouldn’t cook, a paper bag.
    Almost all the grafts failed. Except one. Just one stem of just one of the bark grafts (each of these bark grafts carries 4 or 5 stems) sprouted. How exciting!

Temple Disruption

    Exciting goings-on in the blueberry patch also. Birds are flitting about every morning, enjoying a few berries despite our repeated efforts to secure any openings in the walk-in “Blueberry Temple.” I threaded some string to more tightly join the top and side netting. As previously, I think this will solve the problem.
    Then again, this may be a Darwinian experiment. Birds never used to work their way into the Temple. Openings in the top netting are 1” across; I fear the net is breeding for smaller models of cedar waxwings and catbirds. Or perhaps smarter ones better at finagling their way to the blueberries

DUCKS WORKING, BUT NOT ON GROUNDNUTS

 THE DUCKS CALL THIS “WORK”?

   My ducks told me that the hardy kiwifruits were ripe. No, they’re not trained to give a specialized “hardy kiwifruit ripe” quack. Instead, they’ve taken to hanging out beneath the vines to scoop up dropped fruits. No training needed for this.

Hardy kiwifruits trained for easy harvest

Hardy kiwifruits trained for easy harvest

    Those dropped fruits are one reason that these vines — Actinidia kolomikta — are not as popular for fruit as another species, Actinidia arguta. Ripening, and dropping, is fast in the heat of July. Arguta kiwis ripen in late summer and early fall, and possibly cling to the vines more reliably then because cooler weather slows ripening.
    Not that either of the fruits are well known. Both are cousins to the fuzzy kiwis (A. deliciosa), ubiquitous in supermarkets. Both hardy kiwis differ from the fuzzies in being cold-hardy (only to 0°F for the fuzzy as compared to minus 30°F for A. arguta and to minus 40°F for A. kolomikta), grape-sized, with smooth, edible skins, and better flavor than the fuzzies.
    In addition to ripening earlier and dropping more readily, kolomikta kiwis differ from arguta kiwis in coming into bearing much sooner, often in their second year, and growing much less rampantly. Argutas are hard vines to tame. Ornamental vines of both species gracing historic gardens for decades before their fruits were noticed and appreciated is testimonial to their beauty. Kolomikta’s leaves are brushed silvery white with random pink blushes.
 

Variegated leaves of A. kolomikta

Variegated leaves of A. kolomikta

   Back to harvest. Harvest from the ground is unfeasible because the green fruits are too hard to find among the blades of green grass. And unhealthy because of all the processed kiwifruits — poop — the ducks eject at their far end as they gobble up the berries. A ground cloth to catch the berries would become similarly soiled unless I went to the trouble of spreading it, shaking the vines, then gathering up the cloth after gathering up the fruits.

Hardy kiwifruit harvest into inverted umbrella

Hardy kiwifruit harvest into inverted umbrella

    Instead, I’ve taken to walking beneath the vines with a large umbrella, upturned, and shaking portions of the vines right above the umbrella. Ripe fruit drop into the waiting “funnel.” Sure, many fruits are lost, but the vine bears more than enough to share with the ducks, who can enjoy the missed fruits.

RIPENING OFF THE VINE, HOW CONVENIENT

    Like apples, bananas, and avocados, kiwifruits of all stripes are climacteric fruits. Instead of steady ripening, climacteric fruits, just before they are ready to eat, go through a burst of ripening with sugar levels and carbon dioxide production all of a sudden rapidly increasing. Fruit quality begins to decline right after this burst.
    Ethylene, a simple gas that is also a naturally occurring plant hormone, also spikes during this burst. And ethylene further accelerates ripening, which increases ethylene production even more, which increases ripening even more, and . . .  Disease, wounds, and decay also stimulate ethylene production, which is why “one rotten apple spoils the barrel.”
    If picked when sufficiently mature, but not dead ripe, kiwifruits store well for a few weeks. They’ll ripen during storage, slower under refrigeration, faster at room temperature. From experience, I know that “sufficiently mature” for kiwis is when the first fruits start ripening. So, in addition to my umbrella harvesting, I’m harvesting a bunch of the unripe fruits and refrigerating them to extend their season. Don’t worry; there’ll still be plenty for the ducks.

SOMETHING FOR YOU PERMACULTURALISTS

    Every time I walk back to the kiwi vines, I pass a perennial flower bed. Or, at least, what was supposed to be a flower bed and now is bordering on half flowers and half weeds. The major two weeds, I admit, are my own doing.
    The first of these weeds is dayflower, which arrived here with some bee balm plants from a friend. It’s actually a pretty plant with small, blue flowers, and it’s easy and satisfying to pull out. To a point.

Groundnut tubers, in years' past

Groundnut tubers, in years’ past

    The other weed, groundnut, was a deliberate planting, by me, about 20 years ago. It seemed interesting, bearing edible, golf-ball-sized tubers that string along underground like beads. Groundnut reputedly is the food that got the pilgrim’s through their first winter. Occasionally the plant, a vine, flowers, bearing chains of pale chocolate-colored blossoms. Do I remember them smelling like chocolate also? Perhaps. With all the other vegetation in the bed, the plants haven’t flowered in a long time.
  

Groundnut flowers

Groundnut flowers

 The problem is that those chains of tubers spread to make more chains of tubers which, in turn, do likewise, ad infinitum. The vines now creep over almost every plant in that bed but rarely get enough space to themselves to make tubers anymore. No matter. They didn’t taste that good anyway.
    I wasn’t as foolish as might seem planting groundnut in that flower bed. Twenty years ago that flower bed wasn’t a flower bed, but just a place for interesting plants in my then small garden.

SO MANY FRUITS, SO LITTLE . . . ?

How Can Something So Nutritious Taste So Good?

    Black currants are a berry brimming with vitamin C (in comparison, oranges are like water) and other health goodies, with an intense, rich, to me resin-y flavor that pairs well with dark chocolate or, on bread, with peanut or any other nut butter. Not everyone enjoys the fresh flavor, but that’s okay. Not everyone needs to enjoy every kind of fruit.

Belaruskaja black currants

Belaruskaja black currants

    What the doyen of horticulture, Liberty Hyde Bailey, wrote almost 100 years ago about apple varieties also applies to fruits in general: “Why do we need so many kinds of [fruits]? Because there are so many folks. A person has a right to gratify his legitimate tastes . . .  There is merit in variety itself.”
    With that said, just about everyone does like black currants once they’ve been cooked and sweetened to make jam, juice, pie, and the like, or soaked in alcohol to make a liqueur (créme de cassis). My preference is for the raw berries, eaten straight up, in my cereal, or smooshed on bread as an instant jam.
    Black currants have more to recommend them than only good flavor. In contrast to most fruit plants, they fruit well in shade. Look down my row of pawpaw trees, and in the shade between every two of them you’ll see a black currant bush thriving. In contrast to just about every other plant, black currants are deer resistant. My ducks and chickens, as well as wild birds, leave the berries alone.
 

Row of pawpaw & black currant

Row of pawpaw & black currant

   In fact, few significant pests attack the plant or the fruit — except for a disease called white pine blister rust. This disease needs two different host plants to complete its life cycle, a susceptible variety of currant or gooseberry, and a white pine. Because the disease can kill white pines, an important timber crop, gooseberries and currants were once banned by federal law. That’s no longer the case, one reason being that most cultivated varieties of gooseberries and currents are not very susceptible to the disease.
    Black currant is very susceptible to the blister rust disease — except for some rust-resistant or immune varieties. The first of these, Consort, Crusader, and Coronet, developed in the middle of the 20th century, were not very tasty just popped into your mouth raw. Newer rust-resistant varieties, such as Belaruskaja and Titania, are delicious any which way, and along with blueberry are my favorite fruits.

Bye, Bye, Black Currants

    Sad to say, black currants are finished for the season. That’s their one deficiency: They come and go too quickly. Still, bags stuffed full of black currants are now in the freezer, not to be opened until Christmas.
    And I can’t complain. Branches of blueberry bushes are bowed to the ground under their weight of fruit, and will continue to do so until almost the end of summer. And gooseberries still have a a week or so more of fruiting.  Mulberries, too, have a few more weeks, except that the birds are eating most of them.

Red and white currants

Red and white currants

    Red, pink, and white currants started fruiting with the black currants, and will hang in good eating condition for weeks to come. Red, pink, and white currants are different varieties of the same fruit (like Red Delicious and Golden Delicious apples), a different species and quite different in flavor and bearing habit from black currants. Most of the reds, whites, and pinks will hang from the branches for weeks because the berries, looking like shiny, translucent chains of beads, the seeds visible seemingly floating within when backlit by the sun, are almost too pretty to harvest. Also, not being my favorite fruits, they get to hang without being picked, especially with the abundance of other, tastier (to me), berries, an opinion that might change if I had some skill in jelly-making.

Red currant espalier

Red currant espalier

I’m an Amateur, for Sure

    Liberty Hyde Bailey would be proud of the abundance and variety of fruit here. That’s one great advantage of planting your own: You get to choose what pleases your palate as far as kinds of fruits and varieties of fruits, and you get a hedge against a poor harvest from one or a couple of fruits any year. Hence the Macoun and Hudson’s Golden Gem apples here, the grapes, and gooseberries (a dozen varieties of each), gumis, raspberries, kiwis, seaberries, and elderberries, among many other fruits.
    Again, quoting Liberty Hyde Bailey: “We give the public indifferent fruits, and thereby neither educate the taste nor stimulate the desire for more . . . Just now [1922] we are trying to increase the consumption of apples . . . it cannot be accomplished by customary commercial methods. To eat an apple a day is a question of affections and emotions.”

Summer berries

Summer berries

    Professor Bailey had great faith in the role of the hobbyist, the amateur (in the true meaning of the word, the lover) in fruit growing. Try it.
    One route to cultivating a greater appreciation for fruit and know-how for growing them is to join North American Fruit Explorers, a band of fruit “nuts” drawn from both academia and backyards, but all amateurs. For more information about some lesser know fruits, including black currant, I recommend my own book, Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden.

BLUEBERRIES GALORE, COMPOST TEA REDUX

On My Knees for  Blueberries

    For the last few years, my blueberries have had a problem. Perhaps yours also. Rather than grow upright, the stems arch downward, some so drastically that they actually rest on the ground.

Blueberries galore

Blueberries galore

    A few years ago, I pinned blame on the weather. Not that it was evident just how the weather could be responsible, but it’s always convenient, in gardening, to blame things on the weather. But this explanation is hardly convincing. Spring and summer weather have not been consistent enough over the years to be able point my finger at too much rain and/or not enough sunlight (the combination of which could lead to those bowing branches).
    How about pruning or fertilization? Too much of either could promote lush growth that couldn’t support itself. Except that my pruning has been consistent over many years. And Dr. Marvin Pritts, berry specialist at Cornell, confirmed that he and others saw the same problem, without definitive explanation, a couple of years ago.
    I like the green thumb explanation best: That is, that I’m such a good blueberry grower that the branches can hardly support the prodigious crops I’ve coaxed from them. So I’m not really complaining. Just curious. And having to get on my knees to harvest low hanging fruit.

Remember Fruit Flies?

    There is one fly in the green thumb ointment. A fly, literately. A tiny fruit fly called the spotted wing drosophila or, quicker to say, which is necessary for this fly that’s getting a lot of buzz lately, SWD. The fly attacks many small fruit, starting the season with honeysuckle berries, then moving on to raspberries, blackberries, and . . . blueberries.
    Most fruit flies lay their eggs in overripe, or at least ripe fruit. Not SWD. She lays her eggs in unripe fruit. The eggs are small and what hatches from them are small; their being “maggots” sort of takes the appeal from the berries.
    SWD is a new pest, so new ways of thwarting them are being tried. Covering the plants with fine netting very early in the season is effective but would be very bothersome, for my planting, at least. Various organic sprays are another possibility: Entrust, which is derived from a soil bacterium, is effective if used STRICTLY according to directions; horticultural oil might prove effective. Traps are also under test.
    One way to bypass the problem is to grow only earlier varieties of blueberries. SWD has not showed up here and at many other sites until early August. Plenty of varieties — Duke, Earliblue, Toro, and Blueray, for example — are finished before then.
    But I want fresh blueberries on into September. Harvesting blueberries (or raspberries or other berries) and whisking them into a refrigerator at 34 degrees for 72 hours will kill eggs and larvae. Freezing, the destiny of about half our harvest, also kills the eggs and any hatched larvae. A little egg and meat boosts the protein content of the berries.

I Backpedal, Sort Of

    It may be time for me to eat pie. Not blueberry pie, but humble pie. Regular readers of my words probably realize that I take a certain amount of pleasure in iconoclasm. And one recipient of my eye-rolling has been compost tea, something that many gardeners and farmers love to love even though there’s little theoretical or empirical support for its efficacy.
 

Compost tea, quick mix

Compost tea, quick mix

   “Little” but not “none.” A number of peer-reviewed articles describe benefits from using NON-AERATED compost tea to thwart root diseases. (The relatively recent interest in compost tea is for AERATED compost tea, often sprayed on leaves. Aerated compost tea, the brainchild and business of Dr. Elaine Ingham, is compost tea that’s bubbled with air for en extended period, often with molasses or other additions. Generally, experiments have not supported touted benefits of aerated compost tea.)
    For the past number of years, my pea crops have been failures, the plants yellowing and dying soon after harvest begins. Fusarium or some other root disease is the probable cause.
    In desperation, five times this spring, at about weekly intervals, I put a shovelful of compost into a 5 gallon bucket and filled the bucket with water. After one day of steeping, the tea was strained, put it into a watering can, and drenched on the soil beneath of my thirty foot, double rows of peas.
    Lo and behold: The peas look healthy and have been yielding good crops!

A healthy row of peas

A healthy row of peas

    I won’t say for sure it was the compost tea or what in the tea, if it was the tea, did the trick. But nothing else jumps out this year as the savior of my peas. For a more definitive tea endorsement, next year I should grow a row or two without the tea, and a row or two with the tea. I might try that, although it presents the possibility of my ending up with a row or two of unproductive vines.
    For now, I’ll just have humble pie. And tea. 

UNTRADITIONAL ROSES AND HOEING

 Rose Fan: No, Yes?

   I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m not a big fan of roses. But I can’t help myself. The garden is awash in golden yellow, crimson red, soft pink, apricot pink, and plain old pink blossoms. Almost all of this is thanks to David Austin, breeder of roses.
    My father was a big fan of roses, so I was exposed to them at an early age. Pre-dating Mr. Austin’s creations, my father’s roses were the ever popular — except with me — hybrid tea roses which everyone — except me — liked and likes for their pointy, formal blossoms, their bold colors, and their repeat bloom. Nobody mentions their gawky stature, general lack of strong or interesting fragrance, and attraction to pests.

L. D. Braithewaite rose, cold-hardy and just keeps blooming

L. D. Braithewaite rose, cold-hardy and just keeps blooming

    David Austin roses won me over with their softer colors, fuller blossoms borne on more full-bodied bushes, delicious fragrance, disease resistance, and repeat bloom. Not all have all of these qualities, of course.
    L. D. Braithewaite has been the most florific of my David Austin roses, even weathering two very cold winters unscathed. The crimson, red petals made their first appearance a few weeks ago, and are still going strong. They’re not my favorite color, though. Least successful of my roses has been Bibi Mazoon,  which is my favorite of the David Austin roses, in its blossoms, at least. Cup-shaped and apricot pink, the blossoms are admittedly few and far between, and can hardly be held up by the weak stalks. The rich yellow color of Golden Celebration is another of my favorites; this variety blooms fairly well and also pulled through winter unscathed.
    I grow a few pink David Austin roses, including Charlotte, Brother Cadfael, Sharifa Asma, and they’re all looking pretty and growing well.
    Of all the roses I grow, my favorite is . . .  well, I’m not one hundred percent sure of its name. It started life here many years ago as a cutting of Rose de Rescht, given to me by local herbalist Anne Solomon. Except that, reading descriptions of Rose de Rescht, I came to realize that mine wasn’t it. Whatever the name (after all, “a rose is a rose is a rose . . .”), the attractive crumpled, crêpe-paper blossoms fill the air with a delectable, heady fragrance, more than that of any of the roses I grow. The bush, robust, armed with prickles and clothed in leaves having having a bluish cast, has never been fazed by pests or cold.
    With the help of some rosarians (especially those at www.heirloomroses.com), Rose de Rescht was assigned its probable proper name: Ispahan. The alluring name, the blossoms, and the toughness of the plant more than offset the plant’s one deficiency, that of blossoming only in spring.

Hoe, Hoe, Hoe, But It’s Not Xmas

    I can’t just stop and smell the roses all day long; there’s work to be done. Time to grab a hoe and hoe, hoe, hoe. How retro, you may think. What with all sorts of mulches and tillers and tilthers available, the hoe is an under appreciated and underused garden tool these days.
 

My favorite hoes: wire weeder and winged weeder

My favorite hoes: wire weeder and winged weeder

   But a hoe does good work — if you use the right hoe in the right manner. The best hoes, which include the scuffle hoe, the stirrup hoe, and the colinear hoe, have sharp blades that, in use, run parallel to the surface of the ground. Among these types of hoes, my personal preference has always been for the winged weeder, which looks like an airplane wing, sharpened fore and aft, attached at an angle to a long handle.
    I’ve recently taken up with another hoe, the wire weeder (from http://twobadcatsllc.com), whose head is a stiff wire cleverly bent to be easily worked amongst plants. Rotated 90 degrees puts its short edge to work, which is very useful for wending the head in amongst closely spaced plants. The lightweight aluminum handle doesn’t look  traditional but makes the tool very light and spry in use.
    Ideally, I’m out in the garden with my winged weeder or wire hoe on sunny mornings following rains. (I’m not sure which hoe I like better, so I alternate between them.) The goal is to loosen the soil, uprooting weed seedlings before they establish, and leaving a rough surface to welcome in the next bit of rain. The work, if it could be called that, is quick and easy if done before weeds grow large.
    Only when weeds get out of hand is it necessary to get out the tool that most people associate with the word “hoe,” the traditional garden hoe with the large blade at 90 degrees to the handle. This hoe is also the one Charles Dudley Warner was referencing when he stated (My Summer in a Garden, 1870), “what a [gardener] needs is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.” I reserve mine for mixing concrete.

Hoe or Mulch

    Not that mulching doesn’t also have its place in the battle with weeds`. Mostly, though, you have to do one or the other — mulching or hoeing — thoroughly. It’s impossible to hoe even thinly mulched ground.

Vegetable garden, kept "weed-free" and fed by compost mulch

Vegetable garden, kept “weed-free” and fed by compost mulch

    Unless, that is, the mulch is compost. Given that mulch is anything that covers the ground, compost qualifies as mulch, except that you can plant right in, or hoe, a compost mulch just as if it was soil.
    Weeds occasionally poke up through or sprout within the inch of compost with which I blanket my vegetable garden beds each year. I pull large weeds individually. Periodically, or where small weeds are starting to show, I’m out in the garden, sliding the business end of either my winged weeder or wire hoe back and forth, or just pulling it along, just beneath the surface of the ground.

SECRET BERRIES, CHERRIES FOR ALL, & WEEDS

 Shad, Service, June: All The Same Berry

   I’m not saying where my juneberries — now ripe — are, except to say that they are not here on my farmden. If you don’t know juneberries (Amelanchier spp.), you’ll wish you did. Imagine, if you will, a blueberry look-alike with the sweetness and richness of a sweet cherry along with a hint of almond. The plant is also known as shadbush, shadblow, serviceberry, and, in the case of one of the species, saskatoon.

One bush of my "secret" juneberries, in bloom in April.

One bush of my “secret” juneberries, in bloom in April.

    I’ve planted and grown juneberries, but no longer do so. In the 15 years during which I had 6 plants, I harvested only a handful of berries. Juneberries, although look-alikes for blueberries, are pome fruits, related to apple and sharing many of the same pest problems. Here, apple has many problems, including plum curculio, apple maggot, cedar-apple rust, and black rot.
    But other sites are more friendly to apple and especially to juneberry. Juneberry is commonly planted as an ornamental; I’ve seen it doing well with the sun beating down on a strip of soil between a vertical wall of concrete and a concrete sidewalk near the entrance to a shopping mall, with passing shoppers unaware of the tasty berries dangling from the branches. (“My” secret juneberries are closer than the nearest shopping mall. Here’s a hint: Mine are within 4 miles of my farmden.)
    

Part of the juneberry harvest.

Part of the juneberry harvest.

Juneberry is also a native plant (in every state, in fact) that, in good years, is laden with fruit. Except, as I said, here on my farmden. It’s well worth planting on the chance that it will thrive. I should have given up on mine sooner.
    As an ornamental, juneberry is valued for it’s neat form in winter, that of a shrub or a small tree, for it’s white or pink blossoms, and, with a variety such as Autumn Blaze, for the crimson color its leaves turn in fall.
    It would be nice to be able to just wander out my back door to pick juneberries, but I won’t complain. A 4-mile bike ride on an early summer morning isn’t too much to pay for the berries.

Nanking, The Easiest Cherry of All

    Right now, I can walk out my FRONT door to enjoy another now-ripe, uncommon fruit. Years ago, I had planted forsythia along my driveway. The yellow blossoms fairly glowed with heat in April, but after that the row of bushes was just a blob of greenery. Not unattractive, but not necessarily attractive either.
    I ripped out the forsythia and planted instead a row of Nanking cherries (Prunus tomentosa), a species of cherry from Manchuria that first made it to American shores — to great enthusiasm — at the end of the 18th century. Gardeners were not sure whether to praise it more highly as an ornamental or as a fruiting plants. When my plants are awash in white blossoms, bicyclists have stopped and asked for the identity of the plants.

Nanking cherry in bloom in April

Nanking cherry in bloom in April

    Nanking cherry blossoms at about the same time as forsythia but does not subsequently recede into obscurity. Right now the greenery is punctuated by bright red cherries, their small (1/2 inch or slightly larger) size offset by their abundance. Enough to almost hide the branches. Enough so that birds can eat them, chipmunks can eat them, my ducks can eat them, and still there’s more than enough for us humans. The flavor varies from bush to bush, but they’re all good, tasting somewhere on the spectrum between sweet and tart cherry.

Note the profusion of cherries!

Note the profusion of cherries!

    In contrast to juneberry, which once joined Nanking cherry in that row along the driveway, Nanking cherries have no significant pest problems. Sometimes branches die back a little but overall production is rarely impacted. In its native haunts, the plants tolerate winter lows of minus 50 degrees F. and summer temperatures soaring to 110 degrees F.
    Mostly I just graze the fruits as I walk up or down my driveway. Last year I harvested enough at once to juice by squeezing them through a strainer. Straight up, one of the most refreshing and delicious juices I’ve ever had.

Pretty Weeds, But They’ve Got to Go

    Warm temperatures and abundant rainfall are giving weeds a heyday. The row of Nanking cherries has become home to two prominent weeds, both ornamental in their own right, but not enough to justify their crowded presence.

A sedate, cultivated variety of Japanese knotweed

A sedate, cultivated variety of Japanese knotweed

    Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica), sometimes called Mexican bamboo, has migrated from a solid stand across the road to the foot of the hedge. The arching stems, heart-shaped leaves, and foaming white flowers, the latter due at the end of summer, explain why the plant was introduced from Asia in the late 1800’s.
    The plants are either male or female, and female plants rarely set seed, making me wonder how the plant got across the street.
    The other weed, bindweed (Convulvulus arvensis), would be as welcome as its well-behaved cousin, morning glory, if, like morning glory, it was an annual, or at least a well-behaved perennial. The flowers look like pale morning glories. Beneath the ground is where bindweed shows its dark side. The perennial roots spread far far and wide, sending up new shoots likewise far and wide from the mother plant, and the plant seeds abundantly.
 

Bindweed flowers among Nanking cherries

Bindweed flowers among Nanking cherries

   Repeatedly cutting back or pulling either weed should eventually starve the roots of either plant, if not eliminating them at least keeping then from smothering the Nanking cherry bushes. That’s pretty much all the care the Nanking cherry hedge needs beyond some pruning every few years to encourage some young growth and keep the shrubs from growing too large.

HEATHERS & BARBERRIES & TICKS, OH NO!

An Evil Beauty

   Uh oh! I was pulling an odd weed here and there in my heath bed and came upon a seedling of Japanese barberry (Berberis thunburgii). Should I start checking myself for deer ticks? Are all the plants in the bed soon to expire?
    Japanese barberry is a commonly planted ornamental that was introduced into this country almost 150 years ago. For decades upon decades, it sedately graced landscapes with its boxwood-like leaves (but not evergreen), yellow flowers, and bright red berries, all set off against a backdrop of dark brown, thorny stems.

Barberry in woods

Barberry in woods

    For some reason, the plant began to spread about 35 years ago. Perhaps it was the increased planting of barberries around homes, along highways, and outside shopping malls. Those plants spawned yet more plants as birds ate the berries and spread the seeds. Perhaps it was the surge in deer populations, a response to the creep of suburbia as well as to the decreased number of humans willing to take to the woods, rifle in hand, to fell a deer. All the while that deer were munching away on our roses, rhododendrons, yews, and other landscape plants, they rarely browsed barberry.
    Okay, so more deer means more Lyme disease. Deer blood is what nourishes adult ticks and, as they feed, they reproduce and hitchhike across the landscape on their deer hosts.
    But the Lyme bacteria actually get into the ticks only after feeding on the blood of small rodents, such as white-footed mice, that are harboring the bacteria. Recent research in Connecticut has shown that barberry also creates a very nice, sheltered habitat for mice.
    To make matters worse, barberry also makes things homey for the deer ticks themselves, mostly by providing humidity. A forest with barberry growing in it hosted 120 Lyme-carrying ticks per acre; without barberry, a mere 10 per acre.

Earthworms, Friends No More?

    So much for the threat of Lyme disease in my heath bed. What about the demise of the plants there?
    Turns out that barberry is also prime habitat for earthworms, which, at first blush, would seem like a good thing. After all, earthworms are a gardener’s friend, right? Maybe. North of where the last glacier descended, the southern extent of which cut into much of northern U.S., all native earthworms were wiped out. The natives have been very slow to re-colonize but earthworms from Europe and Asia that arrived here in ship hulls and soil, and as fishing bait, have not been shy. They’ve spread rapidly.
    Non-native earthworms thrive especially well in the soil beneath barberry bushes. It could be that barberry leaves are more digestible to them; it could be that barberry alters the soil chemistry to their liking.

My heath bed in autumn

My heath bed in autumn

    These exotic earthworms are good at gobbling up raw organic matter, as in the leaf litter that blankets our forests — and my heath bed, to which I import leaves. The newcomers can actually gobble up forest litter faster than it is replenished, changing the soil habitat and exposing the soil to erosion. Plants in the heath bed, i.e. plants in the heath family, like that leaf litter; it keeps the soil cool and moist  and, as it slowly decomposes, enriches the soil beneath with decomposed organic matter, or humus. There is some evidence that the makeup of our native forests, which includes rhododendrons, also in the heath family, is changing due to the work of exotic earthworms.
    And all this from barberry!

Some Redemption

    I’m not all that worried about ticks or the demise of my heath bed. The bed is small enough and watched closely enough so that all barberries can be ripped out — just like the one I saw yesterday. My cat keeps mice at bay, and my dogs do likewise for deer. And I import more leaves each year than earthworms, even exotic ones could gobble up.
    The extensiveness of wild settings makes barberry control there difficult. Options there are cutting, pulling, fire, and/or herbicides.

Heath bed in June

Heath bed in June

    No need for such drama In a home landscape. Here, barberry is easily controlled, if desired, by nothing more than being pulled out or repeatedly cut to the ground. One or a few bushes are not going to significantly impact mouse populations or Lyme hazard. Their greatest impact would be to make berries that, with the help of birds, would further the spread of this bush. Newer, sterile varieties offer ornamental mounds of greenery that don’t contribute to the plant’s spread.

Heather, and Friends

    My heath bed, incidentally, has no heath plants. Heaths (Erica spp.) would die from in our cold winters. I call my bed a “heath bed” because in it I grow Heath Family (Ericaceae) plants in it: rhododendrons, mountain laurels, lingonberries, huckleberries, swamp azalea, and some heather (Calluna spp.). I group these plants together because all demand special soil conditions, conditions quite different from that of most cultivated plants.
    Most heath plants need a soil that is very, very acidic, relatively infertile, well-aerated, consistently moist, and rich in organic matter. As mentioned above, these plants thrive where the ground also has a mulch of leaf litter, wood chips, or other organic matter, a mulch that disappears too quickly where soils harbor large populations of the non-native earthworms that thrive beneath barberry bushes.

MAKING THE MOST OF WET GROUND

Have Fun, You Silly Ducks

    Wouldn’t you know it: I write about the extended dry spell one week, and the next week, which is now, the rain comes and doesn’t let up. Not that all this rain makes me regret having a drip irrigation system watering my garden. Rainfall could come screeching to a halt and send us into another dry spell.

Ducks, off to work and play

Ducks, off to work and play

     My five Indian runner ducks offer many advantages here on the farmden, not the least of which is affording me the pleasure of watching creatures that actually enjoy cool, rainy weather. The ducks also are entertaining and decorative, spend much of their days scooping insects and slugs out of the lawn and meadow and into their bills, and, especially when living on that diet of insects, slugs, and greenery, lay very tasty eggs. The downside to ducks is that they are dumb, and don’t know to stay out of the road.
    My four chickens offer many of the same advantages as the ducks, except they never seem as at peace with the world as do the ducks. Also, chickens scratch. Scratching at the bases of mulched trees and shrubs exposes roots; scratching elsewhere wrenches young transplants out of the ground.
    Chickens abhor rainy weather.

You ‘Shrooms, Also Enjoy This Weather

    Mushrooms I “planted” last spring are, like the ducks, reveling in this rainy change. “Planting” these mushrooms involved nothing more than pounding short lengths of wooden dowels, purchased with shiitake mushroom spawn growing in them, into numerous holes drilled in freshly cut pin oak logs. A cap of hot wax over each plug sealed in moisture. The 4-foot-long by 4” diameter logs lay in a shady place through summer while being colonized by thin threads of fungal hyphae growing out from the plugs.
 

Shiitake logs fruiting

Shiitake logs fruiting

   This spring was to be the start of a few years of “fruiting,” that is, making mushrooms, the spore bearing structures of fungi that taste so good sautéed with some onions and butter or olive oil. Dry weather of the past few weeks was slowing the mushrooms’ first appearance, so I decided to shock them. Just bouncing the end of a log against a hard surface, such as a sidewalk, sometimes wakes them up. I opted for a water shock treatment, giving the logs a 24 hour soak in a shallow kiddie pool.
    Right on schedule, within a week of being soaked, mushrooms began popping out all over the logs. With their ends levered into the horizontal openings of a metal fence gate tipped on its side against a tree, the logs and their attendant mushrooms are cantilevered out, perched above slugs and other organisms that might have enjoyed nibbling the fruits of my labor.
    The shock treatment has resulted in a mushroom tsunami. Excess go into the dehydrator, which has them crispy dry and ready for long term storage in about 4 hours. Once the tsunami ends, the fungi need to rest for a month and a half before they’re ready for another shock. Or I can do nothing, and let nature pump out mushrooms more slowly over a longer period of time. Of course, if this rain keeps up — 3 inches in the last couple of days — another tsunami might anyway be in the offing.

And I Can Plant . . . White Strawberries

    With the ground thoroughly soaked, it’s a good time to get plants in the ground . . . except in wet, clay soils. Working a wet clay ruins the almost crystalline structure that develops when it is well managed. Then, instead of the small particles aggregating together to make larger particles with larger pores in between them, letting air into the soil, the structure is reduced to only small unaggregated particles. Spaces between these small particles are so small that they draw in water by capillary action, and there’s no room available for air, which plant roots need. Good for pottery, bad for plants. Wait for any clay soil to dry a bit before digging in it, until it crumbles between your fingers with just a little pressure.
    My soil is a silt loam that’s been enriched with plenty of compost, which helps aggregation, so I can plant now, even right after rain.

'Pineapple Crush' strawberries

‘Pineapple Crush’ strawberries

    Among the plants I’ll be setting in the ground will be strawberries, right in a garden bed. Strawberries, you wonder? Big deal. But these are alpine strawberries. Okay, many people grow alpine strawberries. But these are white alpine strawberries, white, that is, even when dead ripe.
    Alpine strawberries are different from common garden strawberries in that they are a different species (Fragaria vesca), they don’t make runners, and both the plants and fruits are small, the latter about the size of a nickel. Previously, I’ve put a few in pots sitting along my front path for a nibble on the way to the door, or a few at the foot of garden beds, again, for a nibble, here while working in the garden. I want to see how the plants do under the better growing conditions of compost-enriched soil and drip irrigation right in a garden bed.
    Alpine strawberries are small but have very intense flavor, which needs to be fully developed before being picked. I especially like the white ones’ flavor, which can develop fully because, being white when ripe, they’re ignored by birds. The variety name Pineapple Crush gives a good approximation of the flavor.

DRIP, DRIP, DRIP, WHERE’S THE AGUA?

 I’m Dripping, So Why Am I Watering?

  Up to a couple of weeks ago, little water had dropped from the sky this spring here in the Hudson Valley. But a drip irrigation system automatically waters many of my plants. So why have I been spending so much time with hose in hand?Dripline with beans
    Not all my plants drink in the drips. Trees and shrubs are on their own except their first year in the ground when I religiously hand water them every few days initially, and then once a week throughout the season. These plants get 3/4 gallon per week for every square foot spread (estimated) of their root systems. That’s equivalent to an inch of rainfall which, if it does fall, exempts me from a few days of watering.
    A couple of inches depth of hay, leaf, or wood chip mulch around the trees and shrubs seals in moisture to make best use of my efforts. Also, I start with smaller plants — less than 4 feet tall — which become independent of my watering sooner because a larger proportion of their roots are soon foraging around in surrounding soil that those of larger plants.
    My flower beds also don’t get dripped. Although the soil surface is dry, moisture carried over from winter still sits in lower depths, into which established perennial flowers’ roots can tap. Annuals and newly planted perennials need to be watered on the same schedule as young trees until their roots reach that moisture.

My blueberries are my only dripped shrubs

My blueberries are my only dripped shrubs

   It is my garden vegetables that drink in the benefits of my drip system. But even here some hand watering is needed these days. Down each bed runs 1 or 2 drip lines, with emitters along the lines spaced 6 inches apart. As water enters the soil, capillary pull from small spaces between the soil particles draws water sideways and, along with gravity, downward. The resulting wetting fronts have the shape, if you could look at a cross-section of the soil, of an ice cream cone. In clay soils, with small particles and, hence, a lot of capillary draw, that ice cream cone is very fat; in sandy soils, it’s narrow, a couple of feet wide at its broadest as compared with the 6 foot spread in a clay soil.
    The wetting fronts start their sideways spread below the soil surface, deeper in sandy soils, more shallow in clay soils. In either case, the soil surface remains dry except right at the point of drip. So any vegetable transplants or seeds I set in the ground need to be hand watered until their roots reach the wetting front — except for seeds or transplants set right under or along the drip line.

Drip Irrigation Workshop June 20th; see “Workshops“, at this site, for more information.

A Statue of David

    My friend David was wondering why the leaves of his Romaine lettuce plants flopped down. I gave my usual response to most gardening questions: “Too little water.” (My other usual response is “Too much water,” often following my first response if the questioner tells of watering all the time.)
    So I asked David how much he watered, and he said he thoroughly soaked the ground by spraying it with water. Busted! It really was a water problem, too little in this case.Hand watering
    In fact, thoroughly wetting the soil with the usual 4-foot-diameter, hand held spray is almost impossible. “Thoroughly wet” means soaking the ground to at least a 6-inch depth. For his hand held sprayer to do that, David would have to stand in place like a statue, sprayer in hand, unmoving, for about an hour to wet one 4-foot-diameter part of the garden before moving on to the next 4-foot-diameter area.
    When I’m watering plants in the ground by hand, I’m wetting only the small area beneath an individual plant, just enough to soak its roots as they establish themselves in the surrounding soil.

Probe the Soil

    People find it hard to believe that that statuesque watering posture is really necessary. All you have to do is scratch the soil surface after a David-esque spraying of plants to see how deeply the water percolated, and you’d find only a thin layer of wet soil, at the surface.
 

Digital moisture probe.

Digital moisture probe.

   Digging a hole in the ground is a good way to tell if watering was sufficient. But it’s also inconvenient.
    For just a few dollars, I invested, years ago, in an electronic gizmo that bypasses all that hole digging. This soil moisture sensor has a metal probe that you plunge into the soil. Atop the probe is a dial or digital readout that tells whether the soil is “DRY,” “WET,” or something in between. More accurate sensors cost over a hundred dollars, but the cheap ones are fairly accurate and work well if coupled with observation.

Good for Pot(s) Also

    The soil moisture meter is especially useful with potted plants, which might need watering every day when the weather is warm, sunny, and breezy. (With experience, lifting a pot to feel its weight is also a good measure of moisture level, as is just getting to know your plants better.)
    I’m still hand watering the pots because I haven’t yet connected the drip tubes that will direct water to each of the pots.