Luxuriating in my Greenhouse

How Cool is That (Greenhouse)?

    Having a greenhouse is a much-appreciated luxury. To avoid being profligate, I eke all that I can from its every square inch in every season.
    For starters, it’s a cool greenhouse — temperature-wise “cool,” not “ain’t this a cool greenhouse” cool. Winter temperatures are permitted inside drop to 35°F. before the propane heater kicks on. And in summer, roll-up sidewalls let in plenty of cooler, outside air to save energy (and noise) in running the cooling fan. Demands on the cooling fan are also minimized by letting summer temperatures reach almost 100°F. before the fan awakens.
    I have to choose my plants carefully for them to tolerate such conditions.Grennhouse beds in October
    Right now, lettuce, arugula, mâche, celery, parsley, kale, and Swiss chard seedlings and small transplants trace green lines up and down ground beds in the greenhouse. I sowed seed of most of these cold-loving vegetables about a month ago. They’re too small to harvest now. No matter: The outdoor vegetable garden is still replete with greenery available for harvest through November and, probably, on into December. By then, greenhouse greenery will have grown to harvest size, then continue to do so very slowly through the dark, cold days.
    And the 100° summers in the greenhouse? Above the beds spread the branches of three large fig trees, planted right into the ground (rather than pots). From those branches dangle ripe and ripening figs, as they have since July. Figs originated in the searing heat of summers in Western Asia; they can take the 100° heat of my greenhouse. Soon, cooler temperatures and lowering sun will drive the trees to stop ripening fruits, and lose their leaves and enter dormancy. (Figs are subtropical, rather than tropical, trees, so enjoy a cool — but not frigid — winter rest.) The few, leafless branches, most of them pruned back, will cast little shade to let the cool weather greenery in the ground beds below bask in what little sunlight fall and winter have to offer.
    Starting in February, my greenhouse does triple duty, becoming also a home for transplants for the upcoming season’s vegetable and flower gardens. I plant the first seeds — onions, lettuce, celery, and leek — in early February, sowing them in seed flats on the narrow bench along the greenhouse’s north wall.

(Hot) Beds in Summer

    As each spring morphs into summer in the greenhouse, fig growth begins anew and winter’s cool weather vegetables wane and are cleared away.
    How about putting the ground beds beneath the awakening fig trees to some good use? In the past, I’ve tried growing melons and cucumbers, all of which originated in hot regions of Africa and Asia, in those beds. Neither the melons nor the cucumbers did particularly well — yet.

Ginger Loved the Heat

    Which brings us to this week’s ginger harvest. Greenhouse beds this summer provide a warm, moist home in which to grow ginger, a plant indigenous to the hot, muggy climate of south China. Ginger would be hardly worth growing if all I wanted was the khaki-skinned rhizomes that I could pick off a supermarket shelf. Those tough-hided roots are mature ginger, which has a fibrous flesh.
 Digging up ginger   What I was shooting for was baby ginger, whose pink-tinged, white skin, encloses flesh that is tender, lily-white, and free of fibre.  The flavor is a little different than mature ginger, cleaner. This tropical plant I figured could — and it did — thrive in my hot greenhouse all summer.
    To get started, way back in March, I purchased a single root of mature ginger at the supermarket, broke it into four sections, and potted each section into a 4 inch pot. As I said, the plant needs heat, so I set the pots on my seed-starting mat to maintain a temperature of about 70°F. Still, it took awhile for green sprouts to show.
    The potted ginger plants were ready to plant out in a greenhouse bed just as the last of winter’s vegetables were being cleared away there. After planting, I refurbished the soil with a mulch of compost. Cool soil got the plants off to a slow start but once summer heat kicked in outdoors, and then really kicked in within the greenhouse, the ginger thrived.Harvested ginger
    The goal was to let ginger linger to eke maximum yield but not so long that the rhizome would begin to mature. I also needed space for this winter’s plantings. As it turns out, the first objective, maximum yield, was moot. Yields were prodigious, four plants yielding much more than we could possibly eat.

Pickle It

    The first order of business with the harvested baby ginger was to pickle it. All that was needed was to slice it thinly with a carrot peeler then pour boiling vinegar sweetened with a bit of maple syrup over it.

I Find Common Ground, and More, in Maine

 My Favorite Country Faire

   Two dogs, one cat, six ducks, and one chicken are trusted to the care of friends; sourdough starter is re-fed and chilled; plants are on their own. It’s hard to leave the farmden. But this trip — to Maine — is well worth it.
    Walking through the entrance gate to the Common Ground Fair in Unity, Maine, my senses are overloaded with color and fragrance. Along either side of the entrance path are boxes piled high with bright orange carrots, spilling over with the blue green leaves of kale, or packed full with yellow or red beets. Also flowers, herbs, and cheeses. Pervasive is the resiny fragrance of sweet Annie (Artemesia annua), which for some reason seems to be perennially the signature herb of the fair. Buckets are filled with stems for sale; knapsacks sprout bunches of purchased sweet Annie from their zippered pockets; and girls and women sport woven sweet Annie headdresses. From the shade of tents on either side of the walkway, Maine’s myriad organic farmers are hawking their wares.Crafts at Common Ground Fair
    Sweet Annie isn’t the only fragrant herb at the fair. In the tent devoted to some of Maine’s political groups, buds of marijuana — medical marijuana — are available for olfactory sampling.
    Central to the Common Ground Fair, like all country fairs, are agriculture and rural skills. A team of oxen strain under the weight of logs they are pulling. Border collies bead down on sheep, demonstrating their herding skills and the training skills of their owners. A bearded, young man swings an adze as the log on which he is standing takes on a square cross-section. Another bearded man helps a young boy pull a bow back and forth until smoke curls up from the round, maple peg rubbing the round notch in a maple board: fire-making without matches.
 Common Ground Fair, fire making   In other tents, these with closed, darkened flaps, someone standing near a flap holds the attention of a seated crowd in the darkened interior. No, not a cult gathering. Throughout each of the three fair days, workshops are offered in such diverse topics as “Farm-Raised Kids on an Organic Farm in Maine,” “Backyard Grain Growing,” “Advanced Seed Saving,” “Growing Grass-fed Vegetables,” and “Weedless Gardening.”  (The last was one of the three workshops I held at the fair.)
Common Ground Fair, barn dance

Old-Fashioned Fun

    Common Ground Fair is “retro,” an improvement on country and county fairs, in doing less. No amplified voices of barkers try to woo you in to win a stuffed gorilla. In fact, a three-year-old boy trying to pound an oversize sledge hammer onto a pad as a test of strength, with a lot of help from his mom, was the only strength or skill test I saw — and no prizes offered.
    No rides either. No fun? Given the happy whoops of the slew of children running up a grassy slope with flattened cardboard boxes, then jumping on them with a running start to slide down, I’s say they were having fun.Common Ground Fair, grass slide
    Just about everything at the fair is made or grown in Maine. (Used to be that everything had to be grown in Maine, which put coffee drinkers on edge. Maine-roasted coffee is now available at the fair.)
    Twilight is wondrous at the fair, mostly because you can see the twilight. No strings of electric lights bring the fair to new life at the end of the day. Most people leave. The only light, besides the setting sun, is the soft, yellow glow of lanterns or campfires. The fragrance of the campfires and the sounds of campers’ home-grown music around the campfires are the parting senses as I leave the fair.     

My Favorite Garden Designer

    Beatrix Farrand is a name that most people do not recognize, although she was a woman who created some of the most beautiful landscapes and gardens in the world. And she did so at a time — in the early 20th century — when such professions were not open to women. Much of her landscape work was in Maine, on Mt. Desert Island, as was her home, Reef Point.
    Reef Point was Beatrix’s family estate; under her care, it evolved into a horticultural heaven, with garden areas woven together by grassy paths. Spruce trees created microclimates that allowed azaleas and other plants not usually adapted to cold of Maine winters and the buffeting by ocean winds to survive and thrive. The gardens, the experimental plantings, and their descriptions in Farrand’s Reef Point Bulletins were all part of her vision of Reef Point as an educational enterprise.
 Garland Farm   Alas, Reef Point Gardens did not fulfill the vision: wildfire and lack of funding forced Ms. Farrand to down-size. She dismantled Reef Point and moved to an addition she had built attached the home of Lewis and Amy Garland, the superintendent and chief horticulturalist of her Reef Point Estate.
    Garland Farm — my last stop on my visit to Maine — was Beatrix Farrand’s final design, incorporating many architectural elements and plants salvaged from Reef Point. In contrast to Ms. Farrand’s other projects, which included designs for Princeton University, Rockefellers’ Seal Harbor estate, The Mount (home of Edith Wharton, Beatrix’s aunt), Dumbarton Oaks (my favorite of all gardens), and the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, Garland Farm is a small garden.
    Looking out the French doors of Ms. Farrand’s study at Garland Farm onto the small parterre garden, your eyes are carried along a path to a Buddhist statue. Along that path are beds home to lavender, heathers, and other plants with year ‘round effect. The whole area is defined by a low balustrade, setting it off from the view of the meadow and grove of Norway spruce trees in the distance. This garden incorporates the same design principles — axis, year ‘round effect, structure, and integration of views — on an intimate scale, that were so successful in Beatrix Farrand’s larger projects.

SLOW SEED

 Appreciated but not Touched

   “Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower . . . “ Whoa! Hold on there Lord Tennyson! Relax, little flower. I’m not doing any plucking.
    I had hardly a hand in some of my best plantings, and that little flower is one of them.
    There’s a small, moss-covered ledge at the base of the brick wall next to my front door, an east-facing spot that enjoys some morning sun in summer but shade from the nearby north wall the rest of the year. In short, it’s a perfect place for a summer vacation for my orchids, bonsai, and cyclamen.

Cyclamen flower in a crannied wall

Cyclamen flower in a crannied wall

    The cyclamen is Cyclamen hederifolium, sometimes commonly called Persian violet (though a violet it is not; hence the need for botanical names). Although the flowers and leaves resemble those of the better known florist’s cyclamen (C. persicum), the two cyclamen species part company in some ways. Both the flowers and the leaves of Persian violet are much smaller than those of florist’s cyclamen, and the leaves of this diminutive species have decorative patterning. They resemble those of English ivy; hence the specific epithet “hederifolium.” Hedera is the botanical genus of English ivy. Flowers hover a few inches above the leaves on thin stalks, much like small, pink butterflies.
    Best of all, Persian violet is cold-hardy where winter lows plummet as low as minus 20° F. Florist’s cyclamen must be grown as a houseplant.
    Decades ago, I purchased seeds of Persian violet, and managed to raise a small stable of plants. They are ideal for naturalizing in partially shaded areas. While naturalizing the cyclamens seemed like a good idea, the dainty cyclamens would be gobbled up by the exuberant growth coaxed in the rich soil here. So my carefully nurtured cyclamens remained in their pots, wintering in a very cold spot in my basement and summering on that ledge near my front door.
    Lo and behold, this year I’ve noticed two little plants that have seeded themselves in the bit of soil where the flagstone terrace butts up again the ledge. The effect is subtle, to say the least, but the flowers are all the more charming for their shyness. I can appreciate the second half of Lord Tennyson’s poem — “Little flower—but if I could understand, What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is” — but feel no need to, an aversion, in fact, to plucking the flower from its crannied wall.

Slow Cyclamen

    Years ago, I learned three things about growing cyclamen from seed. Fresh seed is best. Keep the growing medium consistently cool and moist. Be patient; germination could take many weeks, and keep plants growing well for at least two years to allow the tuber to develop.
    After that, plants can begin their spring dormancy, flowering and sprouting new leaves in late summer, the latter lasting well into winter, depending on temperatures.

Slow Ramps

    Ramps (Allium tricoccum) are all the rage; here also, and my plan is to expand my ramp planting of two potted plants into a passel of ramps by growing them from seed. My experience in growing cyclamen from seed might come in handy here.
    Although both plants enjoy similar growing condition, at least as far as the need for part shade in spring, the life cycle of ramps is different from cyclamens. Ramps sprout leaves in spring, send up a flower stalk, and then the leaves fade away as the plant goes dormant. The flowers talk remains, developing a head full of seeds — which I collected last week.
 Ramp seedlings    I planted the small seeds in potting soil in a flower pot. The journey begins. Those seeds could take anywhere from 6 to 18 months to sprout. When just ripe, ramp seeds have an under-developed embryo, a situation that inhibits germination. Keeping the seed warm and moist permits development of the embryo and, eventually, root growth.
    Once root dormancy has been broken, there’s still shoot dormancy to contend with. Shoots won’t grow until the seeds, with their root sprouts, have experienced a period of cool, moist conditions — that is, they recognize that winter is over and it’s safe to send a green shoot aboveground.
    If root dormancy isn’t completed before winter sets in, it has to finish the following year, with shoot dormancy needing fulfilling after that: 18 months after sowing. Fulfilling root dormancy before winter allows shoot growth the following spring: 6 months after sowing.  I’m making sure of root dormancy being fulfilled before cold weather sets in by keeping the pot of seeds moist and in the greenhouse. Temperatures are cool in the greenhouse in winter, so I’m expecting — hoping — for sprouts to appear by late winter.
    Growing ramps and cyclamen from seed is similar in that a prime ingredient for success is patience. In the case of ramps, if everything goes right, I could be harvesting my first home grown ramps in 5 to 7 years.

SUCCESSES, EDIBLE AND OTHERWISE

 Stand Up Straight!

   I am particularly proud of my Brussels sprouts this year — and I haven’t even tasted them yet. How odd that I should be proud of this vegetable that I spurned in the past, often quoting a friend who referred to them as “little green balls of death.” Then I put my own twist on that description, saying that perhaps the friend meant that Brussels sprouts were only palatable a “little boiled to death.”
    I’ve come around, and decided, a couple of years ago, that Brussels sprouts were worth growing, despite their high demands on space and time. For good production in northern climates, the seeds need to be sown indoors in early March, and then harvest doesn’t start until October or sometime after the first frost. And for all that waiting, each plant — a mere single stalk with whorls of leaves from top to bottom and a sprout at the base of each leaf — takes up an area of about three feet by three feet.

Gustas Brussels sprouts, standing up straight.

Gustas Brussels sprouts, standing up straight.

    Things would be bad enough if a Brussels sprouts plant just grew straight up to fill its allotted area. But the plant can’t support itself, so in its youth it flops down on the ground. Once that supine stem has created a firm base upon which to rise, the end of the growing stem curves more or less upward according to original plan. That youthful waywardness wastes and muddies lowermost sprouts, with the sprawling plant demanding even more space, which is a problem in an intensively-planted garden.
    This summer, before the plants even had time to consider flopping down, I poked a bamboo pole into the ground next to each one, which I tied to the pole, adding ties to keep up with growth. Perhaps a bit too orderly  for a vegetable garden, but my Brussels sprouts “trees,” each now over four feet tall, look quite attractive.
    The “trees” are not likely to grow much higher because I pinched out the top bud of each plant in early September. This pinching redirects the plants energy from the highest growing point to the side shoots — which are the sprouts. All month, the sprouts have been fattening, soon to be snapped off and eaten.

Not Your Average Marigold

    I also count among this season’s successes two little-known flowers, both of which elicited “oohs and ahhs” from visitors here. One of the flowers were Signet marigolds. You might think, marigolds?, they’re okay, but more “ho hum” than “ooh and ahh.” Not so.
    Signet marigolds, Tagetes tenuifolia, are a different species from common marigolds, and they look a little different. Mostly, they’re smaller, expanding into amorphous mounds of fine, lacy, lime-green leaves, from which stare out small yellow or orange blossoms — most charming. A lemony-marigold aroma wafts from both the blossoms and the leaves.
    Actually, the aroma can waft over the whole garden if you plant enough Signet marigolds — which I did this year. In the past, the seeds never germinated very well for me, so I just spot planted what few seedlings I could raise here and there in the garden.
 Signet marigolds lining garden paths   This spring, in mid-April, I sowed the seeds densely in an 8 by 6 inch seed flat. The dense planting led to an excessive number of crowded seedlings. While they were still young, I gently lifted each one to transplant into its own potting-soil-filled cell to grow for a month or so before planting out in the garden.
    The few plants I poked in at the feet of vegetable beds on either side of the main path through the vegetable garden have grown into sprawling mounds that wash into the main and side paths of the vegetable garden like seawater into an undulating beach. The flowing mounds effectively soften any excessive orderliness of the garden — from the soldier-straight Brussels sprouts plants, for example.

A Cardinal in our Midst

    My grape arbor creates a horizontal roof nine feet above my terrace. Each of the four grape vines rises to that height on a single trunk. What an opportunity for a climbing vine, especially one that climbs by twining! My other floral success this year has been with such a twining plant, cardinal climber (Ipomoea x multifida, a hybrid created by mating I. coccinea and I. quamoclit).
    In the past, other species of Ipomoea climbed those trunks. Morning glory was one, but that only blooms, of course, in the morning. Moonflowers have also dressed up the trunks, but they bloom only at night.Cardinal climber
    So this year, cardinal climber was the Impomoea species for the grape trunks. It blooms all day long, clothing itself in blossoms from top to bottom. The size and color of the blossoms, an inch or so across and cardinal red, seem best for relatively close viewing when sitting on the terrace.
    No need for these flowers to soften any excessive orderliness of the arbor. The grape trunks wend their way skyward and their long, new shoots create plenty of disarray except right after they are pruned each spring.

VEGETABLE GARDEN FRUITS

End of Summer But I Still Need some Watermelon

    Given sun, heat, and reasonably moist, fertile soil, watermelons are easy to grow. The greater challenge is in harvesting them at their peak of perfection. Even professionals sometimes fall short, as witnessed by not-quite-ripe watermelons I “harvested” awhile ago from a supermarket shelf and, a couple of weeks later, from a table at a local farmers’ market.
    That was while I was waiting for my own watermelons to ripen — the delectable variety Blacktail Mountain. But should I have been waiting?
    All sorts of indicators are touted for telling when a watermelon is ripe. The part of the melon laying on the ground supposedly turns yellow. The tendril opposite where the melon in question is attached dries up. Or my favorite method: thumping. Knock you knuckles on your forehead, your chest, and your stomach. The sound of a ripe watermelon should match the sound of the chest thump. The forehead sound indicates that the melon is underripe; the stomach thump, overripe.

Watermelon, it was ripe & delicious

Watermelon, it was ripe & delicious

    Sure, one could pull out the bells and whistles. As I wrote, even professionals have problems determining watermelon ripeness. To aid in commercial harvesting, nuclear magnetic resonance, one possibility, was considered — at $60,000 to $1,000,000 — out of budget. Acoustic resonance testing ($950) was a more viable alternative, but still not for me, with my five plants.
    After my two disappointing purchases, my mouth was watering for my own melons. I ignored the question mark hovering in air above the largest of the lot and, despite its lack of a dried tendril, a yellow bottom, or a telltale thump, cut it from the plant. Long story short: It was delicious, perhaps just a tad overripe.
    What about the other waiting melons? I’m just going to harvest them, as needed, and hope for the best.
    Update: I may have one more addition to the imperfect list of watermelon ripeness indicators. It seems that ripe melons might develop a whitish, waxy “bloom” on their skins.
    Update on the update: Scrap that way bloom indicator. Or, it might be part of the picture. Now I look for a number of indicators, and if some indicate ripeness — I thump the melon before picking.

Next Year: More Watermelon Plants

    Part of the watermelon problem is that I don’t grow enough watermelons. I once lived and gardened in southern Delaware, a few miles from one of the epicenters of watermelon production. With ideal climate and soil (sandy), I grew an abundance of large watermelons. Whether or not a single melon was picked underripe was not so critical. Once ripening began, any unripe ones could be relegated to the compost pile; a better one was always in the offing.

My Favorite Vegetable (Fruit?)?

    Like watermelons, sweet corn is also easy to grow. It can get by with less heat than watermelon, but demands a more fertile soil. Harvesting sweet corn at its peak of perfection also can be a challenge, though not nearly the challenge of watermelon. Picked too soon, corn is tasteless and toothless; picked too late, and it’s too starchy and toothy, a delight for animals, excepting humans.
    The first hint as to when I get to pick corn is when tassels atop the stalks begin to shed pollen grains — millions per tassel!
 

Corn, testing for ripeness

Corn, testing for ripeness

   About three weeks later, I start peering into the corn bed to look at the silks spewing out the ends of each ear. Silks are more or less dry on a ripe ear. At that point, I can usually tell ripeness by just wrapping my hand around the ear to feel its fullness, although less than perfect pollination can drain the bulk of a ripe ear so it feels underripe. (It’s hard to imagine less than perfect pollination when you consider that each tassel sheds literally millions of pollen grains; then again, each grain remains viable for only a few minutes; then again, again, it can travel hundreds of feet in that few minutes; then again, again, again, each kernel only develops if a pollen grain lands on a germinates on the single silk to which it is attached.)
    Any doubt about ripeness, and it can be confirmed before committing to harvest by peeling back the husk just enough to see some kernels. Their color and plumpness might be a giveaway. If not, a thumbnail pressed into a kernel should yield a milky fluid.
    Sweet corn, in contrast to watermelon, is easy to produce in quantity, even in a relatively small garden. So tasting an ear is no great sacrifice; there’s plenty more.
    Hybrid varieties of corn tend to ripen uniformly, so once one ear in a bed is ripe, the whole bed is likely also ready for harvest. A bed of a non-hybrid variety requires more frequent assessment and harvesting, which is better for home use where you might want a few ears each day or so, rather than a once-over harvest. With successive planting and selective harvesting, we’ve been enjoying sweet corn almost daily since the end of July.

ON TRIAL

And the Best Cherry Tomato Is . . .

 Take your picks from the descriptor grab bag: Honey, Gold, Drop, Sun, Bunch, etc. Now put a couple of them together and you might end up with a luscious-sounding name for a tomato variety. People have done this, and reeled me right in. This year I got fished into planting a few, new (for me) varieties of cherry tomato.
    Sungold is the gold standard of cherry tomatoes, the one I always grow. Its rich aroma underlies a sweetness livened with just the right amount of tang. One problem with Sungold is that it’s an F-1 hybrid, which means that you can’t save the seed and expect the resulting seedlings’ fruits to have the flavor of Sungold. The flavor might be better, but it’s more likely to be not as good. The other problem with Sungold is that the seeds, which must be purchased, are expensive.
    The first of this year’s lineup was the variety Solid Gold, a yellow, teardrop shaped tomato. Like Sungold, it’s an F-1 hybrid. Perhaps it would offer better or different, but also excellent, eating. It has been billed as having “outstanding flavor of true grape tomatoes” (by those selling the seeds). Grape tomatoes are tiny tomatoes, a different species from other tomatoes, with very good, very sweet flavor.

Tomatoes-Honey Drop, Honey Bunch, Solid Gold

Tomatoes-Honey Drop, Honey Bunch, Solid Gold

    Honeybunch, the second in the lineup, is another F-1 hybrid, this one red and teardrop shaped. “As if a pearl tomato(?) had been drizzled with honey,” so they say.
    The flavor of another variety, Honey Drop, was likened to that of honeydew melon. This one’s a Sungold look-alike and is open-pollinated, so seedlings should generally yield the same fruits as the parent.
    All three of these new varieties have borne early, and their stems have been heavy all season long with beautiful golden or red fruits. One reason their stems are so laden with fruits is because we don’t pick them. Not when we also have Sungold tomatoes to munch on. Solid Gold, Honey Bunch, Honey Drop, and the unnamed variety are all very good tomatoes, but why eat a very good tomato when you can eat the best tomato?

Filbert Plague, How Bad?

    Moving out into the field, literally, to my filbert (hazel) nut bushes . . . East of the Rocky Mountains, most people who plant filberts, and especially permaculturalists, plant American filberts (Corylus americana). This species is resistant to eastern filbert blight, a fungal disease endemic in these parts. I once grew American filberts, and they are beautiful in fall when their leaves turn blazing shades of red. Unfortunately, their nuts are small, with bad flavor — a good wildlife food, a poor human food.
 

Pustules of filbert blight

Pustules of filbert blight

   European filberts (C. avellana), and various hybrids, are what yield the large and tasty nuts of commerce. Orchards of these filberts are mostly in the Pacific Northwest. About 50 years ago, Eastern filbert blight made inroads to those orchards, which prompted breeding programs for blight-resistant varieties.
    I’ve planted a number of blight resistant filbert varieties, including some older varieties bred decades ago in the East. As  it turns out, though, the the blight fungus exists in more than one regional strain; like some other fungi, the blight fungus might also morph over time.
    Join me as I walk my row of filberts and note the performance of the various varieties. Four of the plants are only in their second year and are from the New Jersey breeding program of Tom Molnar, at Rutgers. The hope is that they’ll be more blight resistant than the western-bred varieties.
    The worst of the older plants include the varieties Clark, Eta, and Hall’s Giant. Clark and Eta are western-bred, while Hall’s Giant is an older, easter-bred variety that is bearing a moderate number of good-sized nuts in spite of the blight.
    Santiam, from the west, is afflicted with a moderate amount of blight. The nuts it bears are small but still much larger and tastier than native American filberts.

Ripe filbert nuts

Ripe filbert nuts

    Least blight-infected are the western varieties Lewis and Yamhill, the Italian variety Tonda di Giffoni, and Graham, an older, eastern variety. Thus far, my favorite is probably Graham, a hybrid of American and European filberts bred by Samuel H. Graham of Ithaca, New York, and introduced in 1950. It yields the largest nuts of the lot and shows its American parentage in its wide suckering growth habit and the fiery red of its leaves in autumn.

Results May Vary

    As they say in ads: “Your results may vary.” The above are my experiences. Filbert blight, like any disease, only thrives with suitable environment, a susceptible host, AND presence of pathogen. My farmden fulfills all three conditions, with varying host plant susceptibility. But I only am growing one plant of each variety; slightly different conditions might affect susceptibility of individual plants.
    Now, about my cherry tomato experiences: Tomato flavor varies little with climate or growing conditions, so your results probably would NOT vary from mine. Except of course, that it’s surely a matter of taste when it comes to taste.

I WAS WRONG

 Hog Peanuts, Groundnuts, Whatever

   I was wrong. A few weeks ago I wrongly dissed groundnut (Apios americana) for invading my flower garden. Yes, I planted it; that was 30 years ago, and it’s resisted my attempts at eradication for the past 28 years.
    The worse culprit, this year at least, is related to groundnut. Like groundnut, it’s a legume, it’s native, it’s edible, and it’s a vining plant with compound leaves. But each leaf of hog peanut (Amphicarpaea bracteata), has 3 egg-shaped leaflets, as compared with groundnut’s 5 lance-shaped leaflets.

Hog peanut leaves

Hog peanut leaves

    Hog peanuts produce flowers both above ground and below ground. Below ground is where the goodies are. Pods that form there enclose peanut-sized seeds that allegedly are tasty raw or cooked. I’ll see if I can dig some up in a few weeks. Like groundnuts, hog peanuts provided food for Native Americans; the plants were among the four sacred plants of the Osage.
    So what can be bad about a plant that tolerates some shade, adds nitrogen to the soil, and yields an allegedly tasty seed below ground? The problem is that it’s run wild over the flower bed, the fine stems and leaves attempting to smother, sometimes successfully, every plant in its path. Even non-native, invasive Japanese stilt grass and garlic mustard can’t hold their own against hog peanuts.

Permaculture Reality

    Low maintenance, protection and enrichment of soil, and edible parts recommend hog peanut and groundnut to permies (permaculturalists). As with so much in permaculture, these plants perform better in theory than in practice.
 

Hog peanut & groundnut strangling crocosmia

Hog peanut & groundnut strangling crocosmia

   In humid climates, plant growth — and not just groundnut and hog peanut — can run rampant. Growth needs to be controlled and balanced, a job made more difficult in a permaculture “guild” of groups of plants working together. I’m all for interplanting different species to make best use of light, water, and soil resources, and form communities that resist pests — to a point.
    I’ve had the opportunity, over the years, to visit the permaculture garden planted by students at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Now in its 5th year, the garden pays tribute to the compost, mulch, and sweat students put into soil preparation. The plants have grown very well. Too well, perhaps. One could say that the plants have commingled nicely; from another perspective, one could say that they are overunning each other. A blackcurrant bush or bushes has swelled into a mass of unapproachable stems 10 feet deep and wide. Chives and oregano have each taken over their areas. (How much chives or oregano can you eat? I’d rather eat tomatoes.)
    Not that I’m immune to such errors. A few years ago I created a very permaculturesque planting that included elderberries, seaberries, and rugose roses almost elbow to elbow. It all looks very nice but these three shrubs all spread by suckers. I keep everything in check with elbow grease and a scythe . . .  for now, but Mother Nature is relentless. Am I?
    The most productive and accessible parts of the UMass garden are the beds of kale, beets, and other vegetables — straight rows in cultivated soil. How un-permaculturalesque.
    Oh, I forgot to mention the groundnuts at UMass. Stems of those plants are twining around and overpowering others in their guild in an ever-widening circle. Even if the groundnuts could peacefully coexist with their neighbors, grubbing up the golf ball size tubers will require an inordinate amount of time and soil discombobulation.
    My memory fails me. Perhaps it was hog peanut rather than groundnut vines threatening their neighbors. Perhaps it was both plants. Hog peanut has been suggested for erosion control, and as a groundcover, a livestock forage, and a food for humans. My suggestion: Hog food. Turn some hogs loose in a patch, and they’ll fatten as they clear the ground of this pernicious weed. Does anybody have a small hog for rent?

Elderberry Wine — No, Syrup

    Elderberry looked to be one of the most successful plants in the UMass permaculture garden. It grows fast and it grows high. My two plants, now in their third year, yielded more than four gallons of berries. And harvest, last week, was quick and easy; aggressively tickling the umbels had the berries quickly filling a basket.Elderberry harvest
    Elderberries can also be recommended for their flowers and the berries’ deep, blue color. Flowers open in June to dinnerplate size umbels of small, white blossoms. They’re good for tea, fritters, or to flavor wine.
    The berries impart their good color, but little flavor, to wine, pie, and juice. (They should not be eaten uncooked or unripe.) There’s a bit of scientific evidence than an extract or syrup of the berries  can help fight flu, perhaps other ailments also. I’m good at growing fruit, not cooking it, so I gave my crop to Dina Falconi who concocted a syrup using the recipe from her book Foraging & Feasting. I look forward to tasting the benefits of my horticultural and her culinary skills.
Elderberry flowers

GOLDEN REWARDS, NOW & FUTURE

 Why Grow Sweet Corn?

   With all the supersweet, tender ears of corn readily available at farms, farmers’ markets, even supermarkets these days, why do I bother to grow my own sweet corn? Because it tastes better, much better. Corn can be too sweet, and too tender for many of us maizophiles.
    I grow the variety Golden Bantam, which was the standard of excellent in sweet corn a hundred years ago. Its fat, golden kernels are toothsome, giving you something to chew on (but they’re not too chewy), with a rich, corny flavor. And yes, they are also sweet, just not supersweet.
 A bed of ripe Golden Bantam corn   Corn is a relatively pest-free vegetable that warrants space in any garden. I grow corn in hills (clusters) of three plants each with 2 feet between hills in the row and two rows of hills down each 3-foot-wide bed. With each stalk yielding one to two ears, I reap 30 to 60 ears for each ten feet of bed! That’s a lot of ears, and it’s in space in which I sow early lettuce or spinach before planting the corn, and late turnips or, again, lettuce, spinach, arugula, or other cool season vegetables to follow the corn harvest.
    Of course, I plant more than just one 10 foot bed of corn and I spread the harvest season with successive sowings, 4 of them 2 weeks apart.
    There is one limitation to backyard corn: raccoons. Given the opportunity, they will harvest every ripe ear. Trapping is one way to keep them at bay. My dogs, Sammy and Scooter, spend day and night frolicking outdoors — and convincing raccoons to search for greener pastures.

GMO and Crap Shooting

    Golden Bantam corn, because it originated in 1906, is, of course non-GMO, that is, a “non genetically modified organism.” (As of now, almost all commercial sweet corn is still non-GMO; just about all field corn, which makes its way into animals, corn syrup, and more packaged products than you can imagine, is GMO.) This is my lead-in to clearing up some basic misconceptions about what GMO means.
    When the pollen from any plant lands on the female part of a flower of another plant, cross-pollination occurs. The resulting seeds and the plant growing from those seeds carry genes contributed from each of the two parent plants. As a result, the offspring are similar to, but not genetically identical, to the parents. The offspring is a natural hybrid.
    Enter Homo sapiens . . . Since the dawn of civilization, we humans have sought certain traits in our plants. To get plants with such traits, we chose plant parents having qualities to our liking and deliberately mated them in the hopes that their offspring would pick up only the parents’ good traits. The more offspring that are grown, the better the chance of finding a hybrid — one produced with human assistance, in this case, possessing desirable traits.
    Besides the crapshoot of traditional breeding, success is further limited by our only being able to choose from among plant parents that are related closely enough to breed. For instance you could not mate a tomato plant, which is not frost tolerant, with, say, a flounder, a fish very tolerant of freezing temperatures, in an effort to make a frost tolerant tomato. Tomatoes and fish are not even distant kin and could never breed with each other under natural conditions.
    About 30 years ago, scientists developed methods for circumventing the capriciousness of natural or human-assisted breeding. Laboratory methods were developed for teasing a desirable gene out of a cell of one organism, then injecting the gene into cell of another organism to create new organism — a GMO. And I do mean a “new organism,” because it contains genetic material that need not have come from a related organism.
    That “fish tomato” was, in fact, created by incorporated the so-called antifreeze gene from winter flounder into a tomato. It turns out that gene expression is not as straightforward or as predictable as once imagined. The fish tomato was a commercial flop in its frost tolerance and other agronomic characteristics; perhaps it would have been a good swimmer.
    Since that fish tomato came and went, other GMOs have been developed. Many have been commercial successes.
    Just to be clear: While it is true, as is often stated in support of GMOs, that hybridization or cross-breeding has been going on in nature for eons, that cross-breeding has always been between closely related species. Humans intervened, but nature could also have produced those traditional hybrids.
    All the above involves, in some sense, genetic modification. You are a genetic modification of your parents. But the term “genetically modified organism,” or GMO, genetically engineered, or transgenic organism, signifies an organism that has picked up genes via manipulation in a laboratory, often genes that never could have showed up naturally in the organism.

Some Summer in Winter

    I awaited my first taste of this season’s Golden Bantam with more anticipation than my first taste of tomato. Finally, we’re awash in sweet corn, more than we can eat.Dried sweet corn, for storage all winter.
    But six weeks of sweet corn will not satisfy, so we’re packing away some for winter. Steaming or boiling the shucked cobs arrests enzymes that change kernel’s sugars to starches. With sweetness retained, we slice kernels from cobs, then either freeze them or dry them. Either way, they are a flavorful addition to soups, stews, and breads on dark, cold, winter days. But nothing like biting into a freshly steamed cob in the heat of summer sun.

For More, Live . . .

Check out my upcoming lectures for the weeks and months ahead at https://leereich.com/lectures

MAYPOP & ASPARAGUS, BEAUTIFUL & EDIBLE

 Awesome, Made More So

   You would think — or I, at least, would think — that a purple and white passionflower would be more passion-inducing than one that was merely white. Not so. The white one displays a passionate juxtaposition between a pure, lily-whiteness and a wildness from the the squiggly, threadlxike rays of its corona backdropping female stigmas’ that arch over the yellow pollen-dusted anthers.White maypop flower
    A white passionflower is a rarity. Mine sprung up by chance from a batch of seeds I planted last year. Mostly the plants bear purple and white flowers.
    Most passionflowers are tropical, but this white-flowered passionflower, like its mother and siblings can survive outdoors even with our winter lows of well below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Commonly known as maypop, Passiflora incarnata is native to eastern U.S. as far north as Pennsylvania. Tropical passionflowers, are woody perennial vines; maypop is an herbaceous perennial vine, dying back to the ground each fall, but sprouting each spring from its perennial roots.
 Bluish -- a more usual maypop flower color   Vine growth begins late, typically not showing until early June here in the Hudson Valley. Summer warmth coaxes it along to begin flowering in July. Once the flowers appear, they continue almost nonstop through the summer until fall, with one to a few new flowers opening each day.
    Fruits soon follow the flowers. Yes: Fruits! Passionfruits are delicious, and maypop fruits taste pretty much the same as tropical passionfruits — the main flavor in Hawaiian punch, in case you think you’re unfamiliar with the fruit. The fruit is egg-shaped, its interior packed full of seeds, each of which is surrounded by a thick coat of deliciousness, in much the same way as pomegranate seeds.
 Maypop fruit   I haven’t figured out where to plant my maypops, so they’re still in large pots. Years ago, I had a couple in the ground at the base of a lilac tree. The maypops climbed into the lilac to put on a show through summer, after the lilac itself was no longer interesting. Now I want a fence for it to clothe in a heat-capturing spot in full sunlight. Maypop does spread underground, to the extent that it’s considered a weed in the Deep South, where it really can run wild. Spread is less here, but still, I need a location for it that takes that potential into account. Alternatively, I’ll plant it in a deep, bottomless container, such as a chimney flue.

The Other Kind of Passion

    If truth be told, the “passion” that gave passionflowers their name refers to a religious passion, the passion of Christ. The plant was a seventeenth-century teaching tool for spreading the gospel.
    Passionflower “had clearly been designed by the Great Creator that it might, in due time, assist in the conversion of the heathen among which it grows,” wrote a Christian scholar of the seventeenth century. The ten so-called petals (botanically, five petals and five petal-like sepals) were taken to represent the ten apostles present at the crucifixion. The threadlike rays of the corona were taken for symbols of the crown of thorns. The five stamens and three styles referred, respectively, to the five wounds of Christ and the three nails used in the crucifixion. Even the rest of the plant figures in, with the three-lobed leaves representing the Trinity and the tendrils representing the scourges. White maypop flower
    Passionflowers are heavenly enough to bring on a religious devotion to growing the plants. Which brings us to sex . . . The flowers are andromonoecious, which means that on every plant some flowers are perfect (have functioning male and female flower parts) and some are functionally male. Functional males have female parts but are functionally male either because their stigmas are held upwards out of the way of insect visitors or because their female parts are atrophied. So grow two plants if insects are to do your bidding, one plant if you’ll take care of pollination.
    See my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden for more — a whole chapter! — on hardy passionfruits.

“Sparrowgrass” Need Help

    My asparagus is now a six-foot-high, ferny hedge outside and along the eastern edge of one of the vegetable gardens. It’s a pretty sight until my eyes drop downward to see the weeds sprouting at the “hedge’s” feet. Not that the weeds are putting the brakes on the asparagus, but they are making seeds that then spread into the vegetable garden.Weeding asparagus
    I’ve seen gardens and farms where asparagus beds were abandoned because of weeds. Mulching and early season weeding only go so far.
    The usual recommendation for growing asparagus is to purchase roots and plant them at the bottom of a deep trench. As new shoots grow, the trench is gradually filled in with soil.
    More recent research showed that such heroic efforts were unnecessary. I planted my asparagus just deep enough to get them into the ground.
    The reason for trenching asparagus was to get the crowns low enough so that a tiller or hoe could be used to kill weeds without damaging the crown. All of which is impossible when the crowns are planted with their buds just beneath the surface.
    So these days I’m periodically crawling into the hedge, becoming very intimate with the ground there, and pulling out all the weeds.

SUNNY DAYS & YOGA, BUT TOMATOES?

Springtown Farmden Health Spa

    In the past, I have written of rei-king and sie-thing as two of the many healthful exercises offered here at Springtown Farmden Health Spa. We now have a new offering at the spa: garden yoga or, more catchy, gardoga or yōgdening. I like the last one best.
    Yōgdening grew out of my respect for the soil, my desire to maintain and foster a healthy balance of life below ground. A healthy population of bacteria, fungi, worms, actinomycetes and other below-ground dwellers translates to healthy plants above ground. Those beneficial creatures need to breathe, which is why most gardeners and farmers till their soil. To aerate it.

Yogdening, for health and weedlessness

Yogdening, for health and weedlessness

    But tilling a soil also burns up valuable organic matter. This organic matter feeds soil organisms and, in turn, plants, makes nutrients already in the ground more accessible to plants, helps hold moisture for plants, and helps aerate the soil.
    I avoid the need to till my soil for aeration by almost never walking, rolling a wheel barrow, or allowing any other traffic where plants are growing. Plants in fields and forest grow well despite never being tilled except what earthworms and other small animals manage to do. (No small amount: Charles Darwin computed that earthworms completely turn over the upper six inches of a pasture soil every 10 to 20 years — in England, at least.)
    Getting back to yōgdening . . . Weeds are making inroads into certain parts of my gardens. Not my vegetable gardens, the 3-foot-wide plant beds of which I keep well weeded with my feet firmly planted in the 18-inch-wide paths bordering the beds. But the only way I can reach into some other planted areas, a bed of various flowers sprawling beneath some Asian pear espaliers, for example, is by stepping into them. To minimize foot traffic, after stepping into a planted area, I try to keep my foot anchored in place, from which I pull every weed I can reach.
    As you might imagine, reaching every weed possible with feet planted in one place calls for all sorts of contortions and stretches forwards, backwards, and sideways involving my legs, trunk, shoulders, arms, and neck. My guess is that after a half-hour of weeding, I’ve run through a close approximation of Utthia Trikonāsana (Triangle Pose), Vīrabhadrāsana (Warrior Pose), and Uttānāsana (Standing Forward Fold Pose), to name a few classic yoga poses — and cleared away weeds!
    Weeding (or, perhaps, I should write “we-ding,” another spa offering) is especially satisfying this time of year. Dry weather has slowed sprouting of new weeds so cleared areas remain clear.

Brown Rot Not (Too Much)

    Dry weather is also good for fruit ripening. That is, ripening rather than rotting. As sweetness develops in ripening fruits, they become more susceptible to rotting. Fungi, like humans, can make quicker use of simple sugars than more complex carbohydrates, such as a are found in unripe fruits. Fruits with thin skins are especially susceptible to attack from fungi.
    For a variety of reasons, known and unknown, this has been a good year for plums. In past years, late frosts in spring have snuffed out blossoms or plum curculio has caused many, if not all, plumlets to rain to the ground. This year, blossom buds were unscathed from winter cold or spring frosts, curculios were kept at bay by my spraying Surround, a commercial product that is nothing more than kaolin clay.
 

Shiro plum

Shiro plum

   Current dry weather should also limit plums’ other nemesis: brown rot, a fungal disease that turns ripening fruit gray and fuzzy and then, at the end of the season, into dark brown, shriveled mummies. (Of course, beautiful clear days are often followed by clear nights during which water, in the form of dew, condenses on fruits and leaves.) The mummies hang from the branches, along with cankers on branches, spread spores and infection the following year. Fallen mummies are also a source of the following season’s infection.
    Brown rot gets to work early in the season, around blossom time, and then later in the season, as fruits are ripening, which is now, for my Shiro plums. Early in the season, I added sulfur, a naturally mined mineral whose use as a fungicide goes back to the ancient Greeks, to the mix when I was spraying Surround.
    Supplementing that spraying was cleaning up hanging and fallen mummies at the end of the season, and promoting drying of branches and fruits with pruning and thinning out of excess fruits.
    The upshot is that some brown rot is showing up on ripening plums. But not all of them. And those that have been spared are delectable. Even the birds think so. Their peckings, unfortunately, like wounds inflicted by plum curculios, increase fruits’ susceptibility to brown rot.

Tomatoes, Where Are You?

    Tomatoes are growing like gangbusters, here and in other gardens I’ve seen locally. And the fruits are likewise growing very plump.
 Tomatoes, not yet ripe   But the scene is not as rosy as it should be, literally, because too many of the tomatoes are still green. Again, other local gardens mimic my experience. How are your tomatoes doing this year?
    Day after day of bright sunny, weather and moderate temperatures should have promoted ripening. Then again, day after day of rainy weather last month might have retarded it. At any rate, in gardening and farming, you can’t go wrong blaming the weather.