MORE PRUNING, AN INVASIVE?

Training Sessions

   Anyone appalled at the apparent brutality with which I approached my grape and kiwi vines a few weeks ago, pruning shears, saw, and lopper in hand, would have been further shocked today. But no harm done. (The kiwis are “hardy kiwis,” that is, Actinidia arguta and A. kolomikta; fuzzy kiwis are not cold-hardy here.)Well trained and  pruned grapes
    Left to their own devices, grape or kiwi vines would, every year, grow larger and larger, eventually, if once coming upon something to climb, sending their fruits further and further out of reach. Or, if not out of reach, then increasingly tangled in a mass of stems. In the dank interior of that mass of stems, many a grape would have rotted rather than ripened.
    Most importantly, though, grape or kiwi berries on untended vines don’t taste that good. Self-shading cuts down flavor-producing photosynthesis. And the plants’ energies must be spread among too many fruits; pruning limits yield but lets the plants pack more flavor into what fruit remains.
    The first thing I did, when I began pruning a few weeks ago, was re-organize the vines. Both bear fruits on new shoots growing off one-year-old canes. I train these plants on T-shaped trellises, with 5 wires stretched from T to T. A trunk rises to the height of the wires, at which point it bifurcates into cordons — permanent arms — each traveling in opposite directed up and down the middle wire. The one-year-old fruiting canes are splayed out perpendicularly to the cordons.
Fruiting shoot emerging from 1-year-old cane    Both vines grow prodigiously every year, the fruiting canes too long and too abundant. So I shortened all the canes to 3 to 4 feet long, which was just beyond the outer wires, and cut off those super-vigorous ones having stratospheric aspirations.
    Still too many canes: So I reduced their numbers. A couple of weeks ago, I went over the vines again, aiming (ideally) for one cane on either side of the cordon every 6 inches or so.

Round Three, of Pruning Grape & Kiwi

    The average date for the last killing frost here is around the third week in May. Evidently not so, this year, but I wanted to wait to do the final grape and kiwi pruning until after that date. The tips of the canes would be the first to grow and, hence, frosted, which is not a problem if the canes would anyway be shortened again.
    Now that frost is probably just a memory, I thinned out the canes one last time — to almost a foot apart — and further shortened those that remained. The grape canes got shortened to two buds each and the kiwi canes to about 18 inches long.

Grapes, In the Bags

    The next order of business, for just the grapes, will be bagging the bunches. I’ll wait until the berries have begun to swell and then partially slit the folds of delicatessen bags so that they can be slid over a bunch with the stem holding the bunch sliding into the slits. Each bunch has a leaf or a tendril opposite the bunch which needs to be clipped off so the top of the bag can be tightly folded over the stem, then stapled shut on either side, just below the slit.Bagging grapes
    To see rather than, or in addition to, read about bagging grapes, see my video.
    Why the bags? To keep diseases, birds, bees, and other insects at bay. With this protection, ripe bunches can be left hanging longer than usual to develop very rich, sweet flavor. Worst case scenario is that a bag is opened and there’s nothing inside. This sometimes happens. Best case scenario is peeling open a bag to reveal a perfect bunch of grapes with perfectly ambrosial flavor.

Hardy Kiwi, J’Accuse!

    I’m glad I planted the hardy kiwi vines many years ago because it may be illegal to do so in the future. Yes, illegal! No, not because you can smoke the plant, but because has raised eyebrows in certain invasive plant circles. Nonetheless, it’s a very attractive vine with very tasty fruits. And mine have remained well-behaved in the quarter of a century that they’ve been in the ground.
    In case fellow New Yorkers were not aware of this, as of March 10, 2015 it will no longer be legal to buy, sell or transport 126 species identified by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation as invasive. Sixty-nine of these species are plants; hardy kiwi vines are not one of them — yet.
    I don’t doubt that there are plants that threaten to take over the world. Well, not the world, but certain ecosystems. Which is why garlic mustard, Japanese knotweed, and autumn olive are on that most unwanted list, despite their qualities. Autumn olive, for example, enriches the soil with nitrogen garnered from the air by symbiotic microorganism at its roots. Its flowers sweetly perfume the air in spring. And the small berries that ripen in early fall, if harvested as soon as they have lost their astringency, are rich in flavor and super-rich in healthful phytochemicals known as lycopenes.
    Hardy kiwifruit has not been banned anywhere, but in 2012 Massachusetts Audubon Society published an Invasive Plant Pest Alert strongly urging people not to grow or propagate this plant. Their statement was based on apparently rampant growth that was documented at two sites in Massachusetts and one in New York.
    The findings don’t jive with the good behavior of numerous vines that have graced gardens, as ornamentals, in Eastern U.S. since the late 1800s. Perhaps most of those planting included only female or only male plants, in which case no viable seeds would be produced, although the vines could also have spread by climbing trees or rooting where they touch ground under the right conditions.
    Male and female kiwi vines do socialize when grown for fruit in commercial and research plantings. But again, plants hardly, if ever, have multiplied on their own at these locations, which concurs with my observations here on the farmden.
    As a general rule, only 10 percent of any introduced species are likely to become established on foreign ground, and only 10 percent of those plants are likely to become invasive. Let’s be very careful in our condemnations and not blow the threat of invasive species out of proportion.

Plant Sale Saturday

This Saturday, May 30, 2015,  Permaculturesque Plant Sale at my New Paltz, NY farmden, from 10 am until 2 pm. Ornamental plants, edible plants, and ornamental AND edible plants such as 2 crop figs, hardy oranges (Poncirus), rosemary, dessert gooseberries, delicious and nutritious black currants, and much more.

EEK, A DINOSAUR IN MY COMPOST PILE!

 

A Creature Not Really So Strange

    One of the strangest creatures I ever found in my compost was the dinosaur that emerged today as I turned the pile. It was worse for the wear, the gash in its head probably from my machete, the “solar powered” shredder I use for stemmy compostables like corn stalks. (Think about it.) After a year in the pile’s innards, the dinosaur’s greenish, scaly skin has been bleached almost white.

Dinosaur emerging from compost pile

Dinosaur emerging from compost pile

    I typically build compost piles through summer and into fall, then turn them the following spring. Turning, not absolutely necessary, lets me mark the piles progress and, as needed, fluff it up for aeration or sprinkle it if too dry. Many people use fencing to enclose a compost pile, which is effective as an enclosure but exposes the pile to too much drying air. My bins, made from artificial wood decking, stacked edgewise and notched together like Lincoln Logs, have solid walls which helps hold in some heat and moisture.
    I should mention, at this point, that the dinosaur might, in fact be a lizard. Oh, and something else: It’s made of a rubbery plastic. This ‘saur was unearthed many years ago as I was digging up a mulberry tree. Once salvaged, it resided in one of my garden beds, where it startled people (including me, occasionally) despite its mere foot-long length. It must have hitchhiked along to the compost pile with some garden debris at the end of the season.

Good Feedstuffs Make Good Compost

    Just about everything goes into the compost piles: weedy hay, garden debris, kitchen scraps, horse manure, old cotton or wool clothes, weeds, and anything else that is or was living, that is, organic. Also, some dolomitic limestone, which is rock so never was living but is “organic” in the cultural and legal sense. Dolomitic limestone adds calcium and magnesium to the finished mix, increases the alkalinity of the finished compost (to offset the naturally increasing acidity of soils here in the humid northeast), and improves its texture.
 

Sweater, almost composted

Sweater, almost composted

   The other ingredients offer a spectrum of macro- and micronutrients to the finished compost. Carbon and nitrogen are the two feedstuffs that composting microorganisms need in greatest amounts. I don’t dwell too heavily on the ideal 15 to 1 ratio of carbon to nitrogen for a balanced feed that gets the pile heating and the compost finishing up quickly. Much depends on the size of the feedstuffs and the presence of other natural chemicals, such as natural lignins in wood shavings that slow down its decomposition irrespective of carbon to nitrogen ratios.
    I do pay attention to what I put in the piles, using a thermometer, my nose, and my eyes to monitor progress. No heat, bad smells, and slow progress indicate, respectively, too much or too little moisture or too little nitrogen, too much water or nitrogen, and too much or too little moisture or too little nitrogen. It’s all good though. Adjustments can be made when turning a pile, or do nothing and wait longer. Any pile of organic materials eventually becomes compost.

Real Reptiles in the Pile

    Other strange denizens, living denizens this time, of my compost piles have been black rat snakes. A few years back, I’d bump into them slithering out of the compost pile as well as coiled into the branches of a blueberry bush and, unfortunately, coming out of the chicken house, two swollen lumps in their bodies evidence of a recent two-egg meal. All-in-all the snakes are welcome for their meals of mice and rats.

Solar-powered compost shredder

Solar-powered compost shredder

    I’d also come upon clusters of the snakes’ soft-shelled eggs, up to two dozen or more, as I turned the compost. After incubation in a terrarium, out slid not-very-cute baby snakes.

Decisions, Decisions

    Turning compost piles provides relatively mindless relief from more thoughtful gardening such as planting decisions. Where to plant, for example, a dwarf shipova tree, an Alderman plum, and a Concorde pear? And should I risk planting out the borderline hardy Flying Dragon hardy orange (Poncirus, now named Citrus, trifoliata)?
    Easier to place are the vegetables, which need to be rotated every year, never (well, almost never) grown in the same location more than once every three years. Rotation prevents overwintering, nonmobile pests from having something to attack close at hand. The vegetable garden is in two banks of beds, so I just move what’s planted in each bed two beds counterclockwise each year, two beds to get them further away from previous years location than would a one bed rotation.
    Still, lettuce transplants, extra onions to be harvested as scallions, radishes, and short rows of arugula get spotted in willy nilly.

Heady Stuff, Here

    May 5th: This calm, warm morning the whole yard is awash in the sweet, spicy scent wafting from yellow trumpets of clove currant (Ribes odoratum) flowers. In August, this deer, drought, cold, heat, and pest resistant plant will be covered with large, black sweet-tart currants.

Clove currant flowers

Clove currant flowers

Clove currant fruit

Clove currant fruit

 

DRAMATIC PRUNING & NOT-TOO-BIG ONIONS

Henry IV Method of Pruning

   Deb get’s a little nervous every time a go into the garage for some pruning tools this time of year. Not because she’s afraid I might hurt myself but for what I might do to the plants. Today it was so-called “renovative pruning” of the St. Johnswort ‘Sunny Boulevard’ shrubs that line the western edge of the brick terrace. I approached the shrub with some unconventional pruning tools.
    Let’s first backtrack and put everyone at ease. A shrub is a shrub because it’s shrubby; that is, it’s always growing new shoots at or near ground level rather than developing a permanent, upright trunk off which permanent limbs and new shoots grow. Some shrubs — most shrubs, in fact — get congested with too many new and older shoots rising from their base and too many old shoots that no longer perform well, in this case performance meaning a good show of flowers. An old stem can put on a good show for only so many years before becoming decrepit.

St. Johnswort, pruned

St. Johnswort, pruned

    The obvious solution to the above two problems with shrubs is to, first, limit the number of new shoots arising low in or around the plant. It’s a matter of judgement for how many to leave. (Pruning is art and science, and my book, The Pruning Book, attempts to make readers better artists and scientists, when pruning, at least.) As far as those old stems, they should be cut down near ground level once they’ve overstayed their welcome.
    So much for maintenance pruning. Sometimes a shrub has gotten too out of hand for all this detail work. Enter renovative pruning. It’s very easy: You just lop everything down to the ground, which is what I did to ‘Sunny Boulevard.’ I started out using a chain saw, my Stihl pole chain saw. This saw has a smaller blade and a long reach, which allowed me to get to the base of the plant without battling all the arching stems. After that, I sawed back stems arching over the hypertufa wall edge of the terrace with a Porter Cable sawzall powered by a 20 volt battery. Final cleanup was with my Fiskars Powergear lopper and Felco pruning shears. (That’s a lot of product recommendations, but I highly recommend all of them.)

All’s Well That Ends Well (in Pruning)

    So what was I left with when I was done pruning? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Well, not really; the roots were still alive and in the ground. And I’m banking on those roots sending up new sprouts. And because ‘Sunny Boulevard’ is slated to start blossoming in July on buds that form on new shoots, I’m also banking on blossoms on those new shoots. Because they’re beginning growth way down at ground level, blossoming might begin a bit later than usual.
    Shrubs that blossom early in the season, such as forsythia, lilac, and mockorange, form their flower buds a year before they actually open. Hence, the best time to prune these shrubs, if you want a full show of blossoms, is right after the blossoms fade. Prune them before blossoming and you cut off potential blooms.
    Still, having a clean slate after a dramatic renovative pruning is appealing, sometimes even with a sacrifice of blooms. Deb is now nervous about the lilac bush, which also needs some renovation. I’m planning to do a less dramatic renovative pruning on it, and I’ll probably wait until after it blossoms.

Onions’ Size Matters

    Big onions or medium-sized onions or small onions, what to grow? The choice is mine (and yours). Much depends on planting distances.
    I’m opting for medium-sized onions, about 3 inches in diameter. Yesterday I set out about 250 transplants grown from seed I sowed in early February in a tub of potting soil: Three varieties: Ailsa Craig, an heirloom from 1887, for sweet, mild onions that need to be used early because they don’t store well; New York Early, a nonhybrid variety selected over the years by New York onion growers, for medium term storage; and Copra, a rock-hard, hybrid onion that stores very well, all the while maintaining some sweetness.  In a 3-foot-wide bed, I planted 5 rows of onions, with about 4 inches between rows and about 4 inches between onions in each row.
Onions, planted    Planting distances are not the end-all for onion size. Variety also figures in; given enough space, In northern areas, such as around here, long-day varieties, which form bulbs when daylength is 14 hours or more, get largest because they grow the most leaves before bulbing begins. More leaves means bigger bulbs, which also a reason to plant as early as possible. (Note to myself: Plant onions earlier next year, in mid-April.)
    Even among northern varieties of onions, potential sizes vary. Ailsa Craig onions have the potential grow quite large, which is why they’re grown for exhibition at state fairs and the like. I’m banking on the close spacing keeping them from growing too big, 5 pounds or more by some accounts.
    Of course, good growing conditions also make for more leaves sooner. Got that. I spread compost an inch deep over the already mellow soil and drip irrigation lines are poised to quench the plants’ thirst.

FEAST OR FAMINE

Is Gardening Too Easy?

    Control yourself, Lee! Growing seedlings this time of year is too easy. Within a single packet of seeds  is the potential for a gardenful of vegetable or flower plants, even shrubs and trees. As such, a packet of seeds is relatively inexpensive.
    I have envisioned delphinium in my garden, its tall, blue studded spires backed by the fence surrounding my blueberry planting. I could have just gone out and purchased a few potted delphinium plants, but I wanted a bolder effect so purchased instead a packet of seeds. Who would have thought that germination would be so good. After all, the seed germinates best when fresh and likes some cool temperatures to awaken; some people freeze the seeds in ice cubes for awhile before sowing them. I used nothing but patience, and not that much was needed.
    I couldn’t bear to discard most of the seedling, so “pricked out” 24 of them into cells of my APS seedling flat.

Seedling plants (and Sammy the dog) in spring

Seedling plants (and Sammy the dog) in spring

    The same thing happened with red lupines, chocolate daisies, Yellow Gem marigolds, and . . .  Growing transplants is the easy part. The difficulty will be in about a month when I’m wandering around the garden, seedling flat in one hand, trowel in the other, wondering where to plant all these flowers. (This problem does not arise with growing vegetable transplants because I keep harvest records for vegetables that let me know how many plants I need of each. Could my eyes get too full or too fat on too many flowers? No.)

Damn-ping Off, No More

    Raising transplants wasn’t always so easy for me. Decades ago, as a graduate student, I lived in a converted motel room which also became home to seedlings for my first garden. The shelves were lined with peat pots of sprouting chamomile (very easy), lettuce, beans, and other plants.
    Thence was my abrupt introduction to “damping off,” a disease that attacks seeds and newly emerged seedlings. Imagine the disappointment of a beginning gardener (me) watching seedling stems pinch in at he soil line and topple over — the telltale symptom of damping off disease.
    I soon learned that damping off was not uncommon, even among experienced gardeners. The disease is caused by any one of a few soil dwelling fungi  that raise their ugly head (figuratively) given the right conditions (for them). One obvious way to try to avoid the problem is to sterilize the potting media.
    Most commercial potting mixes are sterile, as were the peat pots I was using. The problem is that the culpable microbes are everywhere, just waiting to attack when conditions are just right, conditions that I unknowingly provided for them in my motel room. The peat pots were excessively moist; the air stood still; and little light entered the room — perfect for damping off development.
    Nowadays, my seedlings rarely experience damping off. The plants get off to a good start at temperatures they enjoy, bathe in light in my greenhouse or sunny windows (or, in the past, cozied up very close to fluorescent bulbs), and a fan keeps the air moving. I also add sufficient perlite to my potting mixes so that excess water drains feely down and out of the mix.
    Years ago, soothing brews of chamomile tea would also come to the rescue — for the seedlings, not for me. That tea hasn’t been needed for a long time. I also don’t pasteurize or sterilize my potting mixes. Beneficial microbes, from the compost in my mix, and good growing conditions have thankfully made damping off nothing more than a distant memory for me.

Oh Deer!

    Bigger creatures are still an ever present nightmare. Especially deer and especially after this winter. They have sheared the greenery from nearly every evergreen they could reach here, the hollies, arborvitaes (white cedar), yews, hemlock, and junipers (red cedar).

Deer damaged arborvitae and balsam fir.

Deer damaged arborvitae and balsam fir.

    Interesting about the yews, because the foliage is toxic to many ruminants; a mouthful will kill a horse or cow within 5 minutes. Deer, according to most reliable sources, can feed on yew without ill effect. With that said, this past winter, I did find a deer dead on the ground near my yew bushes, which had been nibbled free of their foliage.
    How about the plants; how will they fare, bare. Yew tolerates all sorts of abuse in the form of pruning. Soon, new needles will start appearing along their stems. Or, if the stems are cut back, new needled shoots will soon appear. My other evergreens should also fare well. Rhododendrons and mountain laurels, which the deer left alone, also generally sprout new growth when nibbled. So any of these so-called random-branching conifers or broad-leaved evergreens can be pruned to look prettier after deer have ravaged them.
    Not so with so-called whorled branching conifers, such as pines, spruces, and firs. They generally do not resprout from bare wood, so there’s not much that can be done to prettify them now. Just lop back bare branches because they’re always going to be just that: bare.
    For more about pruning evergreens, and other plants, see my book, The Pruning Book.

QUICK, NO WORK GARDEN, FOR STARTERS

Prescription for a New Gardener

    It seems like everybody’s a gardener, or is becoming one, this time of year. And a lot of people have been asking me questions. Like my niece Lana, for instance, who moved along with her husband, a baby, and a toddler to a new house last fall and is ready to dig into a garden this spring — but, as Lana said, a garden “that will be easily manageable for her and interesting to her 3 year old.” (The one-year-old is still enthralled with her thumb and other such things.) So, for Lana and other beginning or non-gardeners, here is a simple plan for a small garden that requires almost “no time.”

A small, productive garden

A small, productive garden

    The most stringent requirement for this garden is sun. The more the better. And the closer the garden is to the back door, the more you will be drawn to it, whether to dash out to pick a few leaves of lettuce, or to pull a wayward weed. This garden can be, probably should be, small. Let’s assume it is ten feet by ten feet.
    The second requirement is soil that does not stay sodden for hours after a heavy rain. Push a can with both ends open into a hole in the soil and add water; it should drain faster than an inch an hour. If not, choose a new location or make raised beds.
    With sun and water taken care of, soil preparation begins. And ends a few minutes later! Blanket this area with a four-sheet thickness of newspaper (do not use colored pages), overlapped and wetted.  Done, almost. The newspaper will smother existing vegetation, and keep out weeds during the growing season. And as the paper rots away, it will enrich the soil.
    The planting plan is simple: divide the garden into four beds, delineated by two 18 to 24 inch wide paths going up the center of each side and crossing each other in the center of the garden. Cover the newspaper in the paths with wood chips, wood shavings, sawdust, or pine needles. In the beds, purchase some weed-free compost, enough to lay at least a one-inch depth over the newspaper.
    Sow seed right into the compost layer. Peas and lettuce need to be planted early — as in now — because they both enjoy cool weather in rows about a foot apart. Make each pea row four inches wide, then scatter the seeds so they are about an inch apart down and across the row.
    The next wave of planting takes place after warm weather has settled, in late May. Buy tomato transplants and set them in one of the northern quadrants. If needed make a hole through the newspaper into the soil below to accommodate the full depth of the transplant. Grow a variety for flavor, like Brandywine, Sungold, or Amish Paste. Each plant should be two or three feet from its neighbor, depending on whether you are going to stake your tomatoes or allow them to sprawl. Eventually you will have a jungle of vines in danger of overtaking or enlarging your garden, so take a few minutes occasionally during the summer to prune wayward stems from the tomato plants.
    Plant sweet corn and cucumber seeds at the same time as tomato transplants. Since corn is a tall grower, it gets the other northern quadrant. Plant three seeds together in “hills,” which are groups of seeds, not mounds of dirt, spaced two feet apart each way. Cucumbers get the final, southern quadrant. Sow six seeds per hill, with hills three feet apart. Grow a bush-type cucumber, like Salad Bush or Bush Pickle. Once the corn and cucumber seeds are up and growing vigorously, ruthlessly thin the plants so each corn hill has only one plant and each cucumber hill has three plants.
    This garden gets one final planting in early July. But where, since all four quadrants are used up? Pull out the peas and lettuce, which flag anyway during hot weather, and plant in their place bush beans. Bush Blue Lake and Bush Romano are good choices.
    This garden will produce a limited amount of vegetables with a minimum amount of work. Success may tempt you to enlarge your garden and grow a greater variety of plants next year.

Get Your Compost On

    A gardening friend called to ask how much compost is needed to cover his garden. It turns out that a one inch depth of compost will supply all the nutrition, plus a lot of other goodies, that a vegetable garden needs to nourish the plants for one year. So that one-inch depth needs replenishment annually.
 

Spreading compost on bed

Spreading compost on bed

   (Less compost could be used if the deficit is made up by fertilizer. But compost is the Cadillac of plant foods while also offering protection against pests, improved aeration and water retention in the soil, protection against erosion, and other known and unknown benefits.)
    Back to the amount needed: 1/3 of a cubic yard (300-500 pounds, depending on moisture) will cover 100 square feet 1 inch deep. That’s a lot of compost, which beginning gardeners will likely be buying. If you’re buying compost in bulk, which is the least expensive way to purchase it, make sure it’s good stuff by asking some questions, such as what went into the compost. Avoid using compost that contains industrial wastes — especially in the vegetable garden — because of possible toxins like excessive quantities of heavy metals that could contaminate your food. Also ask how the compost has been prepared and stored.
    The ideal would be to make enough of your own compost. Next year, perhaps.