In Lee's Garden Now

2012-02-16T07:32:00.000-08:00

See previous post, below, about my new book, just out!! GROW FRUIT NATURALLY: A HANDS-ON GUIDE TO LUSCIOUS, HOMEGROWN FRUIT.

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Every time I walk out the back door on the way to the greenhouse, chicken coop, or compost pile, I take a look at my vegetable gardens. No, I’m not checking out what’s growing. Nothing’ growing, except for a few stalks of kale and some green tufts of mâche.

My real interest is how the vegetable garden looks, now, in midwinter. Too many people plant their vegetables in “vegetable prisons:” undersized gardens with oversized fencing relegated to a distant corner of the yard.

A vegetable garden needn’t be an eyesore, even in winter when nothing is growing in it. Consider the fence, which endures year ‘round. How about white pickets, rustic cedar or locust, or fanciful arches of rebar filled in with mesh? And no need to segregate plants, banning ornamentals from the vegetable garden. How about dwarf boxwood as accent or edging within the garden and shrubs outside the fence to soften its transition to lawn? How about some cover crops in the vegetable beds for a verdant cover, turned tawny this time of year, which also improves the soil? How about an arching arbor as an invitation to enter the garden, the arbor perhaps dressed up with clematis, whose fuzzy seedheads persist long after the flowers fade.

Once a vegetable garden becomes inviting, there’s no longer the need to relegate it to that distant corner of the yard. Move it closer to the house or, even better, the back door or, better still, right against the house, linked to it with eyes and feet. (Brick house, brick paths; white clapboard house, white picket fencing; etc.) Now you have a garden that not only looks prettier, but one that also will get more care and use because of its proximity and visual draw, ad looks good even in winter.

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My two vegetable gardens are hardly eyesores, but as I look upon them now, I see that they could be prettier. And one of them could be even closer to the house. (It’s now about 25 feet distant.)

I originally rented my house and the closer vegetable garden still stands where the original one was once differentiated from the then-weedy, tall grassy field by a rickety chicken-wire fence. The fence has been re-built twice, most recently with locust posts and cross-pieces, and welded wire fencing. I have dressed up its outside perimeter with billowing outpourings of trees and shrubs, including some red currant bushes which ripen tasty, brightly-colored, jeweled fruits in early summer, and a cornelian cherry tree, also with tasty, bright red fruits later in summer. In a month and a half, that cornelian cherry tree will be showered in yellow blossoms. (More on all this in my book Landscaping with Fruit.)

Although I am loathe to move the vegetable garden, with its 30 years of compost-enriched soil, closer to the house physically, I have attempted to do so visually with a series of gateways and arches. Standing in my kitchen and looking out a glass, sliding door towards the garden carries your eyes under the grape arbor over the terrace attached to the house, across a small patch of lawn, and thence through a rustic, locust arbor into the garden. The path through the garden carries you further, across the garden and then out through another arbor, the path extending into a berry patch. Further along, that path ends in yet another, arbor, this one simpler, and finally outside the planted areas to a short path that meanders mysteriously out of sight into a patch of bamboo.

Still, my landscape seems too disjunct. The gardens aren’t sufficiently tied to each other or to the surrounding landscape and house.

The vegetable garden also is now too gray and brown. The evergreen white cedars, boxwoods, and Meserve hollies around and near the gardens cheer and warm up the landscape, but more is needed.

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The traditionally coldest part of winter is past and it hasn’t been very cold, so I may risk expanding the outdoor evergreen palette, which is somewhat limited this far north. Temperatures did drop to about 5°F a few weeks ago, but nighttime lows at the end of January were only in the 20s, nothing like the lows of minus 25° experienced many years ago.

The USDA, recognizing the shift to warmer winter temperatures, recently updated their cold hardiness zone map, available at http://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb/. Wavy lines overrunning this map bracket each zone, from 1 through 11, delineating the average annual minimum temperature within each zone. (My garden, over the years, has been re-classified from 4b to 5b.) Nursery catalogs and tags on plants in local nurseries spell out, among other bits of information, the hardiness zone limits for specific plants and varieties.

Helping me out on my search for new evergreens will be Michael Dirr’s new book, Encyclopedia of Trees & Shrubs, a weighty and informative tome in all respects. In a few years, with continued warming, I may try planting two southern evergreens that I long for here in the north: southern magnolia and camellia.

2012-02-15T06:40:00.000-08:00

Hot off the press!!!! My new book, Grow Fruit Naturally: A Hands-On Guide to Luscious, Homegrown Fruit (The Taunton Press). Grow Fruit Naturally is THE book for you if you want to pick luscious fruit right from your own sunny balcony, suburban lot, or farmden. Sure, growing your own fruit will save money but -- even better -- your home-grown apples, blueberries, peaches, or oranges will be the best you’ve ever tasted and won’t be doused with toxic sprays.

Grow Fruit Naturally shows you the way to successfully harvest fruits that are delicious and healthy, with information on over 30 fruits, from temperate to tropical, and how to reap the most of their bounty. Natural growing begins with creating a healthy soil environment for roots and their microbial friends, and choosing the best kinds and varieties of fruits to plant both for top-notch flavor and for pest and disease resistance. Grow Fruit Naturally will lead you from those first steps right through harvesting for peak flavor and storing any excess. Some topics include:

• Planning for growing fruit

• Choosing plants for flavor and pest

and disease resistance

• Propagating fruit plants

• Pruning a fruit tree, bush, or vine

• Growing fruit plants in containers

• Avoiding or controlling common pests

and diseases naturally

• Storing your bounty

The emphasis here is also on simplicity, guiding you through pruning and other care needed to make growing everything from apples to figs to oranges to pawpaws to strawberries feasible within any constraints of time and space. Grow Fruit Naturally will soon have you harvesting luscious, wholesome fruits outside your own back (or front) door.

Grow Fruit Naturally is not available through the usual outlets until mid-March. If you're anxious to get started to heavenly fruitdom, the book is available RIGHT NOW from me, signed, through my website, listed at right.

2012-02-08T18:13:00.000-08:00

The first sign that spring is around the corner -- well, perhaps around the block -- is the aphids clustering on lettuce leaves in the greenhouse. For organically-grown lettuce, eradication of these pests isn’t reasonably feasible or probably even possible. So I try to strike a balance: As long as aphid populations don’t get too high, plants suffer but little. It’s also a balance between my tolerance for having to wash lettuce leaves to rid them of aphids and the number of aphids I would tolerate eating. (They’re really not that noticeable or bad to eat; sort of tasty, in fact.)

You know those ladybugs that appear on the insides of south-facing windows this time of year? They used to be my first line of defense against aphids. I would vacuum them up with my Dustbuster, which made the ladybugs dizzy but otherwise caused little harm, and then sprinkle the stunned bugs around the greenhouse in late afternoon or early evening. Next morning, as temperatures warmed in the greenhouse, the ladybugs would go to work like little tractors, methodically crawling up and down leaves gobbling up aphids.

The problem is that the ladybugs can’t get past the new windows I installed a year ago in my house. But no need to resort to pesticides.

A blast of water from the hose in the greenhouse is sufficient to knock many aphids off the leaves. It’s important to get both sides of the leaves. And it is important to keep up with burgeoning populations. Aphids are amazingly fecund, under ideal conditions their populations doubling every couple of days. They reproduce by mating, like most other animals, and also by parthenocarpy, that is, without mating. Sometimes they lay eggs and sometimes they give birth to live young. I’ll also keep an eye on other greenery in the greenhouse because a single aphid species can attack many different host plants.

Natural controls, including other insects, rain, and cold, help keep aphid problems in check. But natural controls are not as effective in the greenhouse as outdoors, where I rarely encounter aphid problems worth bothering about. So I’ll be regularly blasting the greenhouse plants with water in the coming months. And, no doubt, eating some aphids.

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Staghorn fern is among my weirdest houseplants, especially as it grows larger and larger. About 1990, I bought the plant, a cute little thing in a 3 inch flowerpot. I also bought a softball-sized chunk of tree fern fibre on which to grow this normally epiphytic plants. The plant went into a hole gouged into the fibre, then was held in place with wrappings of fishing line. An eyebolt screwed into the fibre offered a convenient way to hang the plant.

Staghorn fern grows two kinds of fronds. The fertile fronds are green and are the ones that resemble stag horns in shape. Infertile fronds are tan and hug the soil, tree fern fibre, or -- the usual support for an epiphyte -- organic duff accumulated in the crotch of a tree.

Over the course of the 20 some odd years the plant has called that fibre block home, it’s grown many fertile and infertile fronds. The infertile fronds have totally enveloped the fibre block to hide it, and the fertile fronds now appear at various places around the tawny mass.

Most growth is in summer, when seedlings of other plants, including cedar trees and other kinds of ferns, sometimes take root in the moist mass. In winter, when the plant is indoors and hardly ever watered, these interlopers usually die off. The staghorn fern tolerates some drying out in winter, which is a good thing because watering it entails putting it in the bathtub and then giving it a shower long enough to let the water penetrate through all the layers of sterile fronds to wet the tree fern fibre. I let the plant set a couple of hours to let excess water drain away, then return it, now weighing about 10 pounds, to its east-facing window.

The wild fern interloper that established itself in some crevice in the sterile staghorn ferns last summer seems to be thriving along with the staghorn fern this winter, which should make for an even more interesting hanging plant in years to come.

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Today is a big day, the first seed sowing of the 2012 gardening season. Lettuce and onions. The lettuce for the greenhouse. The onions for eventual transplanting outdoors.

Some of the lettuce seeds will go right into the ground in the greenhouse and some of the seeds will be sown in seed flats for later transplanting in the greenhouse. The seeds sprout sooner in seed flats but the plants are more resilient, less apt to dry out or go to seed, when started right in the ground.

The plan is for these new lettuce plants to come into their own just as the last of last autumn’s lettuce plantings are harvested.

2012-02-02T07:27:00.000-08:00

At almost a year old, my bonsai is looking, if not wizened, at least tree-like and a welcome sight in winter. This bonsai began life in a big box store, a weeping fig in a 4 inch pot. Weeping figs are so easy to root from cuttings that the propagators of these plants evidently don’t even bother with individual cuttings, instead just sticking clumps of them together. Or maybe they’re sold in clumps to make the plants look bushier. At any rate, I divided the clump as soon as I got home and then had 4 weeping figs.

In the tropics, I’ve seen weeping figs as large as our sugar maples. In large pots indoors, I’ve seen -- and once had -- weeping figs 6 feet high. I planned for one of my new weeping figs to call home a rectangular pot 1 inch deep by 6 by 4 inches long and wide -- for its whole life! Another of the weeping figs was destined for a round pot just a bit over 2 inches wide and deep, also for life.

To fit these small plants into even smaller pots, each got its roots and tops clipped back, the roots for a good fit into its future pot and the tops to balance root loss and to give the “tree” an attractive form. All this began last summer, and the plants spent a few weeks in light shade to recover from the butchering.

Once recovered, the plants began to grow, which is good and bad. Growth is needed to keep any plant alive but the goal was, and is, to keep the plants small and in proportion to the dimensions of their pots, all the time maintaining good form, of course. One way to keep a plant small is to periodically cut back shoots. Another way to keep a plant small is to periodically cut off its leaves. As I wrote in my book, The Pruning Book, “Timed correctly . . . leaf pruning forces a second flush of leaves that are smaller and hence better proportioned to the size of the plant.”

I also wrote that “leaf pruning is not for every bonsai. Do not do it to evergreens . . .” Weeping fig is evergreen. Oh well, I’m going to try it anyway.

This is the bonsai last summer, after I snipped off all its leaves.

As the plants age and their trunks thicken, I’ll help them along on their way to wizened gnarliness, creating dead stubs, gouging out wood where branches are removed, and, if necessary, using temporary wires to direct branches.

Plants need to be healthy to tolerate such treatments. In a few weeks, and every late winter or spring thereafter, I’ll tip the plants out of their pots, cut back some roots, and then snuggle the roots back into the pot refreshed with new potting soil. Branches also will get pruned at least yearly for health and beauty.

I hope these trees thrive not only for my viewing pleasure but also because I devoted a whole chapter to bonsai in The Pruning Book. (This book also covers other special pruning techniques, such as espalier and pollarding, as well as standard pruning techniques for all kinds of plants.)

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It doesn’t seem premature to state that I’ve failed again: Three jasmine plants are, once again, all leaf and no flowers. Jasmine (Jasminium polyanthum) is a plant that is easy to grow and easy to propagate; hence all the greenery and the number of plants I’ve had over the years.

The main reason to grow jasmine, though, is for the sweet perfume with which it fills the air when in bloom. At least I think it’s a sweet perfume because I can hardly remember the aroma. I got the original plant 11 years ago and remember how proud I was getting it to rebloom for the first couple of winters.

So what makes your typical tropical or subtropical winter blooming plants -- Christmas cactii, poinsettias, amaryllises, and the like -- bloom when they do, or at all? A period of cool temperatures, short days (long nights, actually), or dryish conditions. Any or all of these changes for a period of time in autumn triggers flower buds for winter.

My three jasmine plants have received the requisite treatments yet, as I stare at the plants, I see no hint of a flower. Just lanky stems grabbing at other plants or sprawling on the floor.

A friend suggested that my jasmines have grown old. They did all originate as cuttings from my original plant of 11 years ago. It’s not a good explanation but the only one left. I’m buying a new plant.

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No, I’ve decided not to buy a new jasmine plant. I’ll give my plants one more chance (as I have every year for the past 9 years). White Flower Farm nursery, which has sold jasmines for years, offers some more exacting instructions on growing the plants: “Prune as necessary to control size or to maintain shape, but stop pruning by August 1, because the plant sets flower buds in late summer. To encourage the formation of flower buds for next winter, be sure your plant experiences the cooler temperatures and shorter days of early autumn. The plant needs 4-5 weeks of nighttime temperatures between 40° and 50°F, plenty of sunlight, and the complete absence of artificial light after sundown. Bring the plant indoors before frost. Then give it cool temperatures [below 65°] and indirect [but bright] light until it blooms again in late winter.” I will follow these instructions to the letter. Wish me luck.

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Last post I mentioned battling scale insects on house plants with sprays of horticultural oil in autumn. A reader wrote to offer another remedy: soap sprays. I’ve also used soap at various times, and it is effective, especially specially formulated “insecticidal soaps.” You do have to be a little careful because some soaps at some concentrations can damage some plants. (That’s a lot of “somes.”) The reader mentioned the especially environmentally friendly tack of saving shower water in a bucket, which, the reader wrote, results in a perfect soap concentration for insect control. Whatever works.

2012-01-26T04:29:00.000-08:00

Dryish and cold, but not frigid, weather: What else is there to do outdoors, gardenwise, but mulch? (Pruning is best left until after the coldest nights of winter have passed, in late February.) Arborists dumped a large pile of wood chips near my neighbor’s garden and he spread all he could in paths and among berry bushes. What’s left is for me.

Not that I hadn’t myself been spreading mulches all through autumn. Compost went on the vegetable beds, wood chips from my own pile (long gone) beneath my berry bushes and around trees, and horse manure mixed with wood shavings beneath the young row of dwarf apple trees.

Mulch is one of those things in life that you can’t have too much of -- if you’re a gardener -- so I forked the neighbor’s wood chips into my garden cart and hauled five loads over to my apple trees. The apples would be thankful because, as dwarf trees, they need the best possible soil conditions to keep them growing vigorously, vigorously for dwarfs, that is. Also, manure left on top of the ground in winter, especially manure left exposed to the elements, loses some its goodness as its nitrogen evaporates into thin air. Barring snow, not in the offing as of this writing, the wood chips blanket should minimize that loss.

One other benefit of wood chips are that they look nice. They are dark brown, similar to dirt. Unfortunately, the five cart loads was enough to cover only half of the 150 foot row of apples.

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I like to get on top of any gardening fad as it comes down the pike, although not necessarily to embrace it. One such fad concerns wood chips, not any old wood chips, but “ramial wood chips,” defined as wood chips made from wood no larger than about 3 inches in diameter.

Is there anything magical about ramial wood chips? These chips are surely better than the chunks of bark or wood mulch, some of it dyed red, sold in plastic bags. Ramial wood chips are cheaper, often free and, having smaller pieces, are more biologically active and better at smothering weeds and maintaining soil moisture than chunks. As compared with local, arborists’ chips that would include chips from from larger diameter wood, ramial wood chips, with their higher proportion of bark and living tissue, would be higher in nutrients.

Still, no reason to snub your nose at any and all wood chips (except for those bagged chunks). When used as mulch, a dynamic interface of decomposition develops where the bottom layer of raw chips meets the top layer of decomposed material. Nutrients are concentrated as microbes gobble up the materials and carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen are breathed away as carbon dioxide and water, so the nutritional advantage of ramial wood chips over run-of-the-mill arborists’ chips is lost.

Some people tout ramial wood chips as promoting beneficial fungi in soils, allegedly to the liking of trees -- such as apples -- naturally found in forests. But when any old kind of wood chips -- any organic materials, for that matter -- is laid atop the ground, it is worked upon by a naturally orchestrated sequence of microorganisms, fungi included. Yes, fungi are promoted, but so are bacteria and other organisms, standing ready to gobble up the more readily accessible foodstuffs after fungi have finished with them. No need to use special kinds of woods chips for special effect.

So, enough about ramial wood chips! Wood chips of every stripe are available free or cheap as a waste product. They’re all beneficial. I use any and all that are offered, and that’s what went on the ground beneath my apple trees.

To quote Thoreau: “Simplify, simplify.”

2012-01-19T06:30:00.000-08:00

As if to ring in the new year, scale insects are starting to make their presence known. These insects crawl around as babies, find nourishing spots on leaves or stems, insert their feeding tubes, and then spend their days sucking plant juice. Carbohydrates and sugars are what result when sunlight and chlorophyll get together, so longer days may be making plant sap sweeter and more plentiful, much to the liking of these suckers.

I encounter two kinds of scales on my houseplants. Each armored scale looks like a small, raised, brown tab. Cottony cushion scale looks like a small tuft of white cotton. As either kind feeds, it exudes a sweet honeydew that drips on leaves, furniture, and floor, and eventually becomes colonized with a fungus that airbrushes those sticky drippings an unappealing smokey haze.

(Scale insects are often problems on trees and shrubs outdoors. I’ve never had any problems outdoors probably because I avoid toxic sprays so predators, of which scale insects have many, can do their job. Once indoors in autumn, houseplants generally lose the benefits of these natural, outdoor predators. )

Repeated sprays last autumn of “horticultural” oil smothered the creeping, crawling baby scales as they were looking for homes on houseplants. I do all this spraying outdoors, where it is most convenient, before the plants come indoors for winter. None have turned up yet on the kumquat, staghorn fern, or gardenia, all three of which have been scale magnets in the past. I don’t see any on the bay laurel, another magnet, but I do see and feel the tell-tale sticky honeydew.

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Cute, little white tufts of cottony cushion scale are starting to dot the undersides of strawberry guava’s leaves. It’s not surprising: I received this plant last autumn, already with scale, and it was too late then to start spraying with oil. As autumn progressed, the undersides of its leaves became increasingly covered with those white tufts.

Repeatedly, over the last few months, I have fought back the buggers mano a mano by dipping cotton swabs in alcohol and methodically cleaning them off each leaf. (The plant is young and its leaves are large and few.) The last cleaning was especially thorough but some eggs evidently survived. Time to get out the alcohol and swabs again.

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I feel the distant tug of spring and spring seed orders are complete. With most vegetables and flowers, I’m pretty picky about variety so have to rely on mail order sources for my seeds.

And especially so with tomatoes: I refuse to waste time and space growing anything but the best tomatoes (to me), which makes me very wary of trying new varieties. My own tried and true varieties -- flavor is what I’m after -- include Belgian Giant, Sungold, Anna Russian, San Marzano, Amish Paste, Rose de Berne, Nepal, Valencia, Cherokee Purple, and Blue Beech. Every year I’ll also grow a few others, but only if they come highly recommended from a reliable source and especially if they are an “oxheart” or “black” fruited variety. Not even worthy of consideration is any “determinate” variety because their leaf to fruit ratio is too low for good-tasting fruit. The seed catalog or seed packet itself should say whether a variety is determinate or indeterminate. This year’s tomato newbies include Honeydrop Cherry and Black Prince, both recommended by Fedcoseeds.com.

I highly recommend growing tomatoes from seed. It’s easy, especially if the seeds are sown in a timely manner, which is about 6 weeks before the average date of the last killing frost of spring -- about April 1st here in USDA Hardiness Zone 5.

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It’s really not all that early to be ordering seeds. My date for sowing onion and leek seeds is February 1st. New York Early, Varsity, and Prince were three new onion varieties that did well for me last season. Last summer’s onions hang in braids from the basement rafters, ready to be pulled off as needed to chop into a pan for roasting with sweet potatoes, into the soup pot with chickpeas and kale, and other savory dishes for weeks to come.

2012-01-14T14:52:00.000-08:00

Cold weather and short days have put a not totally unwelcome lull in the gardening year. Nonetheless, I wander into the greenhouse occasionally just to drink in the sight and smell of lush greenery suffused in warmth and humidity, and to pull some weeds. The figs, I see, haven’t been pruned; they are dormant and leafless and need all stems cut back to 3 to 4 feet in height.

Gardening lull or not, I can’t just toss those cut stems away, putting them to waste. Each stem can make a whole new tree, and fairly easily. So I set up a little propagator for rooting some of these “hardwood cuttings.”

Being leafless, the cuttings lose little water so have no need for the high humidity demanded by so-called softwood cuttings, which are cuttings taken while plants are actively growing and leafy. Any cutting, hardwood or softwood, does need its bottom portion, where roots will form, cozied in moisture and air. Some people just plop stems into a glass of water. That works for easy-to-root plants, like fig, as long as the water is occasionally changed so bacteria don’t build up and the roots get a fresh charge of aeration. Roots formed in water are morphologically different from those in soil, so the eventual and inevitable transfer to soil must be done with care, with attention to root breakage, aeration, and moisture.

Here's my propagator for cuttings, in this case with figs.

My cuttings will root directly in soil, or a “soil” of some sort, actually a soil-less soil similar in makeup to most commercial potting mixes. That soil is nothing more than a mix of equal parts perlite, a “popped” volcanic rock, and peat moss. The perlite is for aeration; the peat moss is to hold moisture. (Coir, a byproduct of the coconut industry, or leaf mold could be substituted for the peat moss.)

Now here’s the cool part: After filling a large flowerpot with the rooting mix, I scooped out the center and put into the hole a smaller flowerpot. That smaller flowerpot has to be terra cotta and unglazed. It also needs it’s drainage hole plugged; some moldable wax, saved from when my daughter had braces, worked well. (I knew I had saved that wax all these years for something!) Rapping the large pot and pressing lightly on the soil ensured good contact and a continuous capillary connection between the water in the inner pot and the surrounding soil between the inside and outside pots.

I slid the cuttings into the circle of soil with only one or two upper buds showing. Until leaves appear, and there’s no rush, the only attention the pot needs is to keep the inner reservoir of soil filled with water. Once leaves appear, the cuttings need light.

Sometime I’ll have to figure out what to do with all my new fig plants.

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New plants in the wings could have been the spark for a horticultural dream the night following setting up the propagator. In this dream, I lived in a large, modernistic house, the most significant features of which were its 3 stories and large, south-facing windows. I evidently wasn’t all that familiar with the house because I wandered around in amazement.

Not a bad guava harvest -- two delicious fruits!

And most amazing were the plants sitting in the windows: potted fruit plants of all sorts, everywhere I turned. In one window was a potted pawpaw tree, in another a peach, then a guava, and still other fruits in other windows. Turning to go down the stairway from the uppermost floor, I came upon small pots of strawberries. (The floors themselves were broad expanses of polished wood and furniture was sparse or absent.)

Most amazing was the shadow of a lush plant hanging in front of a shaded window. (In my waking life, I had that day put up a new window shade.) Coming closer, I saw that the plant in the hanging basket was a grape vine, a grape vine with a compact growth habit and that was loaded with tight bunches of delicious, ripe grapes.

The kumquats are almost ready for harvest.

In fact, much of the dream is not far-fetched. True, I do not live in a large, modernistic house of 3 stories. But some of my windows are, in fact, home to edible plants such as bay laurel and rosemary. I even have some fruiting plants, tropical and subtropical ones such as kumquat and guava rather than pawpaw, grape, and other temperate-zone plants that need to experience winter.

I harvested a guava a couple of weeks ago and the kumquats will start ripening next month. Fruiting takes energy, so these fruit plants sit near sunny windows. Indoor fruiting by a shaded window only works in dreamland.

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In that same dream, I was in school. (I spent an inordinate number of years in school.) In the dream, I couldn’t keep track of my school assignments, even what classes I was taking or where. I was too preoccupied with caring for all those plants in all those windows at home.

It was good to wake up to a gardening lull.

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2012-01-06T06:05:00.000-08:00

Cold has yet to throw a wrench into salads fresh from the garden -- even though December 16th saw a night-time low of 12°F. Yes, the lettuce would be mush if unprotected but under the sheltering clear plastic and wooden sides of my 5 foot square cold frame, the plants are barely scathed. Just a few leaves wilted at their edges. Spinach that I sowed between the lettuce plants, for harvest after the lettuce is finished is still looking spry.

Plastic tunnels supported by wire hoops are offering almost as much cold protection over 3 garden beds. Beneath them, mustard greens, endive, and arugula don’t exactly thrive, but do survive.

A few fresh greens are even surviving out in the garden without any sort of protection whatsoever. That would include some arugula that was never covered as well as kale, what’s left of it, and mâche, the most cold-hardy of all salad greens.

Once temperatures plummet or the ground is blanketed with snow, fresh salads will come from the greenhouse, which, with night temperatures never allowed to drop below 37°F., is packed with lush greenery as if it were May.

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Update: Lettuce in the cold frame is flagging after a night-time low of 8° a few days after that 12° low. Unprotected out in the garden, only mâche and kale survive.

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The holiday tree, only a half a foot tall and ornamented with 3 silver balls, is cute as a button. It’s a Norfolk Island pine (Araucaria heterophylla), a free gift I received a couple of weeks ago from a mail-order nursery. This tree will green up the darkest days of the year for year after year because it’s a tropical species that does well in the eternal warmth and somewhat dry air, in winter at least, of any home.

Over the years, the tree will lose its impishness and develop a straight, upright trunk off of which will grow relatively widely spaced, whorled tiers of horizontal branches, all clothed in green needles. With age, the plant becomes quite majestic. Too majestic, in fact, for any home. I have seen the spreading branches of this tree towering 40 feet or more over the tiled roofs of homes in tropical climates.

So what’s a gardener to do with such a plant, after years of nurturing it and watching it grow? One option, of course, is to bite the bullet and walk it over to the compost pile. Or it could be gifted to a friend with a higher ceiling, but that just shifts responsibility and puts off the inevitable. How about giving it to grandma for her front lawn in Florida?

A natural inclination for any real gardener in this situation would be to try to keep the plant going, not as its original self but in the form of a cutting. The rooted cutting, then, is genetically the same as the original plant, only a smaller version. Norfolk Island pine does root from cuttings especially, as with many conifers, if the cuttings are taken from young growth.

This plan has one problem: fixed plagiotropism. This botanical mouthful signifies the tendency for a horizontal shoot of certain plants to always retain its horizontal growth habit. Put more simply, if a cutting is rooted from one of Norfolk Island pine’s horizontal stems, that stem will always grow sideways to creep along a windowsill or wherever else the plant is growing.

The solution to this problem is to take a cutting from the leading, upright stem. It the mother plant isn’t destined for composting, though, cutting out that leading stem does ruin its form. Also, because young cuttings root best, you might end up with only one cutting, perhaps two, from that short length of young, leading stem. Not much insurance for a plant that doesn’t root all that easily.

The leading, upright stem, of a plant can have the opposite inclination: fixed orthotropism, a permanent, upright growth habit. With other plants, their plagiotropism or orthotropism may be temporary.

Not so for Norfolk Island pine’s plagiotropism. I’ll figure out how to cross that plagiotropic bridge, or not, when I come to it.

(For further discussion of topophysis, which encompasses plagiotropism an orthotropism, and related topics on plant growth, see Plant Form: An Illustrated Guide to Flowering Plant Morphology by Adrian Bell and Alan Bryan.)

2011-12-29T01:12:00.000-08:00

Nuts are underrated as a food and in the garden. After all, how many gardeners plant nuts? In the landscape, nut plants range from majestic trees to graceful shrubs. As a food, nuts are an excellent source of protein, heart-friendly fats, and all sorts of other nutritional goodies known and unknown. Did you ever see a fat or tired squirrel? (True, we wouldn’t see those couch potato squirrels as they lounged in their den.)

Right now, I am enjoying the fruits of my nutty labors. Some nuts -- most nuts that grow around here, in fact -- need to be cured before they taste their best. Hazelnuts, ready in September, were good as soon as harvested but even better after resting a couple of weeks. Chestnuts, likewise ready in September, were likewise pretty good immediately, but sweetened after a few weeks in storage. The hazelnuts grow on arching shrubs that could instead be trained to small trees. The chestnuts are picturesque, spreading trees. Both hazelnuts and chestnuts are fast-growing and begin to bear within 5 years or less after planting.

The improvement in flavor from curing is dramatic when it comes to black walnuts and their kin. They were harvested (from the ground) in October, hulled (a messy job), and left outdoors in the sun a few days to dry before being moved to a loft area above the garage. The loft area was cool, airy, and -- very important -- squirrel-proof. Now they are ready to crack and eat.

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Black walnuts are, in my opinion, the best-tasting of the nutty lot. And the trees grow wild throughout much of eastern U.S. This is one nut that I have not planted because I inherited a large tree right on my property. Over the years, new trees have also sprung up to bear nuts. Growth is fast and the trees become quite large. The downside to growing black walnuts for eating is that they are a hard nut to crack. After years of banged thumbs from cracking black walnuts on a concrete floor with a hammer, I purchased the Master Nutcracker, which is elegantly designed, somewhat pricey, but very effective. Separating the nutmeats and picking them out from their cracked shells makes for a convivial accompaniment to after-dinner conversation in winter.

Butternuts, also native to eastern U.S., but not as widespread and currently threatened with a blight, need the same treatment as black walnut and are equally tough nuts to crack. I don’t bother with them because the trees, in contrast to black walnut, are hard to find. Their flavor also has less appeal.

Butternut has naturally and been deliberately hybridized with heartnut, a Japanese-type walnut, to yield what’s known as a buartnut. Many trees thought to be butternuts are actually buartnuts, such as the gigantic, spreading tree I “discovered” in Rosendale a couple of years ago. My young tree, only a few years old, is very fast growing and already shows inklings of future grandeur -- and nuts, in the form a few flowers last spring (that, unfortunately, failed to develop into nuts).

Here's the Rosendale tree in summer.

I did revisit the Rosendale buartnut in September and rushed to gather up as many nuts as I could ahead of squirrels, who were also working the tree. Those nuts are now cured. Heartnuts are known for their ease of cracking, a trait also borne out in the buartnut offspring. With the Master Nutcracker, the shells popped open to reveal whole nutmeats. The flavor was mild and a little dry, good for variety and ease of access but not nearly as tasty as black walnuts.

The nut menu needn’t end there. The season here is too short to ripen pecan nuts, although the trees will survive. Enter hicans, hybrids of hickory and pecan with a shorter ripening season. I’ll report back in a few years. Hickories are a native nut that is delicious although small, hard to crack, and yielding little nutmeat. Still, there are some named varieties that improve in all respects. I planted two in the spring of 2011 and hope for some nuts to try within five years. I also have some young Persian walnut trees, the one nut among this bowl of nuts for which I am not hopeful. Persian walnuts blossom early, so the flowers often succumb to subsequent spring frosts, are susceptible to some serious diseases, and -- mine, at least -- are on a squirrel highway (beneath power lines).

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Have I been mentioning squirrels? Ah, squirrels, once the bane of my nutty endeavors. In years past, these “tree rats,” as they are sometimes nonaffectionately referred to by gardeners, have stripped my hazelnut shrubs bare.

For now, I have the creatures under control. They won’t wander into the high grass that I let rise up through the summer around the hazelnuts. Chestnut burrs are too spiny for them -- until the nuts drop out, by which time I’ve gathered them up. My hickories and buartnuts have not yet begun to bear, but the trees are isolated so a temporary squirrel guard of a cylinder of sheet metal should keep the squirrels from climbing. And black walnuts? There are plenty for everyone. The squirrels and I gather them and I still see plenty left on the ground.

2011-12-27T06:10:00.001-08:00

Lee Reich’s upcoming lectures and workshops:

Jan. 13, 2012, “Luscious Landscaping, with Fruiting Trees, Shrubs, & Vines” at Conversations Across Fields: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Ecological Landscape Design Symposium; http://www.ndal.org/NDAL2012winterconferencebrochurefinal.pdf; Haverford College, Haverford, PA

Jan. 18, 2012, “Luscious Landscaping, with Fruiting Trees, Shrubs, & Vines” at Conversations Across Fields: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Ecological Landscape Design Symposium; http://www.ndal.org/NDAL2012winterconferencebrochurefinal.pdf; Connecticut College, New London, CT.

Jan. 21, 2012, “Pomona’s Secrets: Lesser-Known, Cold-Hardy, Delectable, Pest-Free Fruits,” “Pruning and Grafting Techniques for Fruit Trees,” and “No-Till Vegetable Production” at Northeast Organic Farming and Gardening Conference NY Winter Conference, http://www.nofany.org/events/winter-conference; Saratoga Springs, NY.

Feb. 5, 2012, “Fearless Pruning” at Longwood Gardens, http://www.longwoodgardens.org/FearlessPruning.html, Kennett Square, PA.

Feb. 12, 2012, “Growing Figs in Vermont,” and “How to Grow a Blueberry Bounty” at Northeast Organic Farming and Gardening Conference VT Winter Conference, http://nofavt.org/annual-events/winter-conference; Burlington, VT.

March 3, 2012, “Weedless Gardening,” at Miami Valley Gardening Conference, http://www.metroparks.org/Parks/WegerzynGarden/MVGardeningConference.aspx?id=2010redirect, Wegerzyn Gardens MetroPark, Dayton, OH.

March 24, 2012, “Weedless Gardening,” at CT Master Gardeners Association 2012 Symposium, http://www.ctmga.org/#/2012-symposium/4556870003, Manchester Community College, Manchester, CT.

March 31, 2012, “Native Fruits,” at the U.S. National Arboretum Lahr Native Plant Symposium, http://www.usna.usda.gov/Education/events.html, Beltsville Area Research Center, Beltsville, MD.

April 15-16, 2012, “Luscious Landscaping, with Fruiting Trees, Shrubs, & Vines” and “Backyard Composting,” at Colonial Williamsburg Garden Symposium, Williamsburg, VA.

May 9, 2012, “Backyard Fruit: It's Local, it's organic, and it's delicious,” Rosendale Library, Rosendale, NY.

2011-12-21T14:31:00.000-08:00

The dark green wreath was tied with red ribbons and gliding towards me, in its progress stirring up snowflakes gently floating out of the grey sky. No, the wreath was not hanging from a horse-drawn sled, but was plowing through the frigid air affixed to the chrome grille of a gleaming white Cadillac! Here we are in the twenty-first century, still infusing a breath of life into our winters with cut evergreen boughs, just as did the ancient Egyptians, Persians, Jews, Christians, and Druids.

And it's true: a few evergreen boughs tied together and accented with a red ribbon do make a doorway more inviting, or a room more cozy in winter. (I’m still undecided about what greenery does for a Cadillac grill.) But going one step further with the greenery, to a bona fide wreath, creates something special. And the actual making of a wreath can be an end in itself this time of year, particularly to the accompaniment of a warm fire and friends and children.

To make a wreath, start with a base. The base might be a sturdy ring of wire (from a coat hanger, for example), or straw that has been bound into a bulky circle with string. Either of these bases can be made from scratch or purchased. For a more natural base, one which might be part of the final design, use a vine such as grape, honeysuckle, wisteria, or bower actinidia. Weave the vine into a circle of triple thickness, tucking in a new piece of vine as an old one ends.

The base might be all, or just about all, that is needed for a simple wreath. I have seen a very attractive wreath that was nothing more than a thick ring of wild rose sprigs showing off a profusion of pastel red fruits. Carefully overlapped sprigs of lavender or rosemary, bound with thin wire to a heavier wire frame, make a dainty, fragrant, blue-green wreath. Thyme is another good plant for this purpose, also fragrant. Keep thyme's wiry stems somewhat loose, though, because they are as important in adding body to the wreath as are the tiny leaves.

This time of year my penchant is for wreaths that are rich green in color, and almost gaudy with ornamentation. The base for such wreaths is some evergreen plant. Not all evergreens are suitable, because some drop their leaves too readily indoors (and in the brisk wind riding on the front of a car!). Amongst needle-leaf evergreens, juniper, white pine, mugho pine, red pine, and spruce are good choices. Or, for something brighter, needled evergreens with yellow-tipped leaves, such as Gold Star and Kuriwao Sunburst junipers. Mahonia, holly, leucothoe, rhododendron, boxwood, lingonberry, and English ivy are suitable broad-leaf evergreens for a wreath, but none of the broadleaf evergreens will hold their leaves indoors as long as the needle-leaved evergreens.

Wire, glue or tuck small bunches of evergreens onto the base, with all the bunches facing the same direction. Don't be stingy, because this mass of green color is what is going to calm down and visually hold together the whole wreath.

Next, add accent. Ornaments that are darker shades, and blue or green, make a quieter wreath than ornaments that are lighter shades, and red or yellow. As I said, this time of year I prefer spirited ornamentation, perhaps due to the impending dead of winter. Lively ornaments might include chains of shiny red cranberries or popcorn threaded together, bunches of bright red peppers and garlic clove.

Fruits, like evergreen leaves, flaunt winter’s cold darkness to celebrate the continuity of life from one year to the next. Some brightly colored fruits still clinging to vines and shrubs include mountainash, bittersweet, winterberry, barberry, and, of course, holly. Deck the halls.

2011-12-15T06:27:00.000-08:00

A living Christmas tree seems the “right” thing to do: You get a holiday tree decorating your living room for a couple weeks; the planet gets a tree to soak up carbon dioxide, provide a playground for wildlife, and contribute to the landscape greenery. The problem is that yearly planting out of living Christmas trees in most yards pretty soon leads to a small-scale version of the Black Forest. A lugubrious and mysterious landscape is not for everyone.

But there is a way to enjoy living Christmas trees, and keep the scene sunny and winsome: Plant very young trees, then harvest them when they reach the size to cut for Christmas. Essentially, have your own tree farm. The tree lives -- and you enjoy it as such -- until you cut it.

You may imagine that a tree farm big enough to supply you with one tree a year would take up too much space. Not so. A Christmas tree needs about eight years to grow to a harvestable size of about six feet tall. If you have enough space for eight trees, you can cut one and plant a new one every year, for an endless supply. At five foot spacing, all you need is about 200 square feet of area -- perhaps a forty foot row, perhaps a rectangular plot ten by twenty feet. This spacing gives each plant enough sun to grow into a well-shaped tree, and allows you plenty of room to mow around each tree. If you prefer smaller Christmas trees, you can plant even closer.

Your tree farm need not be in an out-of-the-way place. A row of trees might make a nice, evergreen hedge. With the wide spacing and variation in tree sizes, the hedge will be somewhat informal. But at least you do not have to worry about the hedge becoming too tall, because trees get removed as soon as they are about head height. The trees also might make a nice screen for your compost bin or dog's house. How about a miniature forest for your child?

Growing your own trees gives you the option of choosing whatever type of Christmas tree you want. Most commonly cut nowadays for Christmas trees is Scotch pine, a tree that is very cold-hardy, fast growing, and tolerant of many different soil types. And, the plant holds its needles very well indoors.

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Scotch pine has been popular only since the 1930s, and over the years many other species have been in favor. In the middle of the 19th century, cedar was a favorite. But it dropped its needles too easily indoors. Then hemlock, one of the fastest growing evergreens, became popular. Its main defect is that its flexible branches bow too far to the ground under the weight of ornaments. Nowadays it’s also beset by a serious insect pest, the woolly adelgid. By the end of the 19th century, balsam fir became popular. This tree, still popular for Christmas in New England, makes up for its deficiencies -- slow growth, less than ideal shape, and some needle drop -- with its woodsy aroma that is rightly reminiscent of northern or mountaintop forests.

If you grow balsam fir -- and I planted a half-dozen of them almost 20 years ago -- make sure to give it a cool, moist soil. The climate around here is warmer than usually enjoyed by balsam fir, but I figured that the fragrance made balsam fir worth a try. My dog Stick, then a leashed puppy, soon chewed up 5 of my young trees, which were all that he could reach when he was young and leashed. One survived, and the survivor is now a towering, fragrant beauty about 25 feet tall and so wide that I had to cut an opening in its lower limbs to allow passage past it along the back portion of the garden.

I never could bring myself to cut that sole survivor to bring indoors for the holidays. The tree is so kind as to keep making two leading stems. Cutting one of them lets the other grow and gives me a manageable holiday tree that leaves the remaining tree healthier. If both leading stems were allowed to grow, they would be apt to split apart at their origin.

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Nowadays, besides Scotch pine, other popular Christmas trees include eastern white pine, Norway spruce, white and Colorado spruces, Douglas fir, and Fraser fir. White pine is fast growing, with an open form that you may or may not prefer in a Christmas tree. This native plant tolerates almost any soil, and even a bit of shade. Norway spruce is almost as fast growing, and is a graceful tree with arching limbs along the bottoms of which dangle short, needled branchlets. Norway spruce needs well-drained soil and full sun.

White and Colorado spruce, and Douglas and Fraser firs, are slow-growing trees. (The two firs are unrelated: Douglas is Pseudotsuga menziesii; Fraser is Abies fraserii.) The two spruces require moist, yet well-drained soil, in full sun. Douglas fir needs full sunlight, but cannot tolerate a windy site or dry soil. Douglas fir holds its needles indoors almost as well as does Scotch pine. Fraser fir needs wet soils in full sun or part shade.

A miniature tree farm requires very little time for maintenance. A thick mulch of straw or leaves will conserve soil moisture and smother weeds. Grow grass between the trees and mow it regularly to prevent competition for nutrients and moisture, especially when the trees are very small. If you prefer a tighter growth habit to your trees, and have the time and inclination, prune them once a year, shortening by half the "candles" of new growth before they expand in early summer. And finally, keep teething, playful puppies at bay from any trees for their first couple of years.

2011-12-08T06:34:00.001-08:00

As part of my Thanksgiving celebration, I’m thanking the soil. Soil, after all, is where it all starts. We’re thankful for the plants, but the plants got where they got because of the soil, offering plants support, water, air (which roots need), a friendly microbial environment, and nourishment.

Basically, I thank the soil with organic materials, that is, stuff that is or was living. Stuff like wood chips (dead), straw (dead), compost (living and dead), manure (living and dead), and autumn leaves (dead). Organic materials are what put the “organic” in organic gardening and farming. Organic materials are bulky, and are what chemical fertilizers have too often replaced. Compost, for instance, is about one percent nitrogen, so to supply the average 2 pounds per 1000 square feet of actual nitrogen needed would require 200 pounds of compost. Opt for 10-10-10 chemical fertilizer and a mere 20 pounds per 1000 square feet would do the trick.

Oh, but that 180 pound difference between compost and 10-10-10 offers so much more than just nitrogen. Compost serves up a smorgasboard of nutrients reflecting the diversity of what went into the compost pile. Just about everything goes into mine, including orange peels from California, olive pits from Peru, even my old Levi’s in addition to garden and kitchen waste, hay, and manure.

That’s not all: Compost and, as they decompose, other organic materials, offer a witch’s brew of natural compounds that improve plant nutrition by unleashing nutrients from the soil’s rocky matrix and rendering nutrients already in the soil even more available to plants. As important, these organic materials help soils hold both water and air, and provide a congenial, nutritive environment for beneficial organisms that help plants fend off diseases and further abet plant growth. Whew! That’s a lot of goodness.

So I’m hauling cart after cart of organic materials. Vegetable beds get an inch depth of crumbly, dark, pleasantly fragrant compost from piles built last year. Paths in vegetable gardens get wood chips. I am mulching berry plantings with wood chips or leaves, according to what’s available and my whims. Leaves that drop from the chestnut trees will be supplemented with leaves that neighbors with leafier yards need to discard. Other trees get wood chips. Fruit trees get rotted leaves, which are very similar in composition to compost in addition to wood chips and, possibly, horse manure with wood shavings.

I hope to finish soil Thanksgiving before the first snow that stays.

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My gut reaction is to shy away from eating any plant with “choke” in its name. Chokecherries (Prunus virginiana) are not for me. I did once grow chokeberry (Aronia spp.), which lived up to its name; the plant is long gone. Chokeberry is said to make a tasty jam or juice, which I realized, anything can if given enough sweetener, dilution, and addition of other flavors.

Artichoke is one “choke” worth growing; its “choke” comes not from the throat but from the Arab name for the plant, al-qarshuf. The problem is that artichoke is one choke that isn’t very happy here. It needs mild winters and summers not searing, which are conditions you might find right along the coast in California or the Mediterranean. So, of course, I am growing it here in New York’s Hudson Valley.

I grew artichoke years ago and did harvest a few small buds; this year I was hoping for at least larger buds. Imperial Star is the variety recommended for northern gardens because it forms buds the first year so can be grown as an annual. Not mine. I sowed seeds early this spring after giving this perennial the cold treatment necessary to fool it into thinking it’s gone through a mild winter and can begin flowering. Imperial Star is more easily fooled than other varieties. Plants given to a friend did make a few small buds but my plants just grew. (Northern Star is another, newer possibility for northern gardens because it allegedly survives winter temperatures below zero degrees F.)

No need to throw in the towel in growing artichokes, though. Among my last activities in the vegetable garden is to dig up one artichoke plant, pot it up, and overwinter it in a bright window in my cool basement. I’ll give it a head start in the greenhouse in spring, then plant it outdoors again when the the weather warms. If the harvest is nonexistent or unreasonably small, I’ll abandon artichoke growing for another 15 years.

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Increasingly, my attention is turning indoors. It has to, with all the thirsty plants now sitting in sunny windows. One of the thirstiest, oddly enough, is rosemary. Too many rosemary plants towards the end of too many winters have surprised me by all of a sudden, when brushed against, shedding leaves, dried and dead, as were the plants.

As a Mediterranean plant, you’d assume it likes dryish condition. It does like its head dry, at least in summer. Stiff leaves make it hard to tell when rosemary is thirsty. They don’t wilt, they just dry up and die.

So now I err on the side of too much rather than too little water. With extra perlite, my potting mix is well-drained, making too much water hardly a problem as long as the saucer beneath the plant isn’t filling with water. The best way to tell whether or not a rosemary plant is thirsty is to feel the weight of the pot.

Except for one rosemary plant conveniently growing in the kitchen, the others are spending winter in the basement, along with the artichoke.

2011-12-02T06:00:00.001-08:00

With the economy the way it is, forget about any hedges against inflation. Anyway, I’m more concerned about hedges against poor harvests, and that hedge is to grow a diversity fruits and vegetables. I’ve never had a year of poor harvests of everything. Cabbage and broccoli will revel in a cool summer during which peppers or melons hardly ripen. Bean beetles that might ravage green beans won’t touch tomatoes, okra, and other vegetables; they won’t even nibble soybeans.

Besides offering a hedge, that diversity also usually presents me with a spectrum of flavors and nutrition.

In fruits, 2011 was a particularly good year for pears and hardy and super-hardy kiwifruit. These kiwifruis are grape-sized, smooth-skinned cousins to the fuzzy kiwifruit of our markets. The flavor is similar, but better, and you pop the whole fruit into your mouth, skin and all. The plants are strong-growing vines, so pretty that they were for decades planted strictly as ornamentals, their gustatory treasures lying hidden behind leaves and ignored. In contrast to fuzzy kiwifruits, hardy and super-hardy kiwifruits can be grown just about everywhere.

Super-hardy kiwifruits, Actinidia kolomikta (“super-hardy” because they tolerate cold to minus 40°), ripened back in early August and hardy kiwifruit, A. arguta (hardy to minus 25°F.), started ripening in mid September. You know these fruits are ripe for picking when the first berries just begin to soften.

I harvested all my hardy kiwifruits once the first ones ripened. Some were firm and some were ready to eat. Kept under refrigeration, the firm ones slowly ripen; at room temperature, they ripen faster. Ripened berries have been, and will be, for a few more weeks, a colorful, sweet-tart, flavorful addition to morning cereal.

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Apple trees have never borne well here. The reason is because I am trying to grow them “organically.” That means giving special care to the soil, keeping it nourished with compost, leaf mold, wood chips, and seaweed. That means maintaining a diversity of flowering plants to attract beneficial insects. And it means minimum or no spraying of pesticides which, if needed have minimum impact on everything but the target pest(s).

Admittedly, my farmden is not ideal for apple growing. Six-thousand acres of woods (not mine, Mohonk’s), overwintering home to many pests, lie within 50 feet of my trees. And cold air settles into this floodplain of the Wallkill River, so morning fogs and dews linger longer than on higher ground to fester disease problems. So I do spray my trees, many times each season, with Surround (a commercial formulation of kaolin clay) and sulfur (a naturally mined mineral).

The apple trees looked so hopeful in the spring. No late frosts. Exuberant, new growth. Pea-sized fruitlets rapidly swelling to marble-size, then golfball-size, and larger.

But something, some things, happened between those halcyon days of June and harvest. Fruits disappeared, dropped, became ugly with blotches and dimples. My farmden isn’t the only one to suffer such affronts. Basically, if you wanted to pick the hardest fruit to grow in eastern U.S., what fruit would that be? Apple! Why? Because of a very few, but very serious insect and disease problems. Plum curculio, codling moth, apple maggot, apple scab, fire blight, cedar-apple rust, and powdery mildew are the culprits.)

Still, I haven’t thrown in the towel yet with apples. I noted this year that more attention is needed to late summer diseases, such as black rot and bitter rot. And the apples I do harvest might be few, but their flavors are supreme, in large part because of variety selection and perhaps due to terroir.

Apples are not the only fruit worth growing around here. Even if the apple crop is poor, this year I had and have plenty of, in addition to pears and kiwifruits, medlars, raspberries, and grapes. And every year seems to be a good one for pawpaws, persimmons, and blueberries. I’ll be digging into the 40 quarts of blueberries in the freezer just as soon as the last of the kiwifruits are finished.

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And speaking of hedges, green ones, my yew caterpillar is going into winter looking better than ever. This hedge started out as 4 boring yew bushes planted about 25 years ago and needing multiple prunings each growing season to prevent their overwhelming nearby windows, or even the whole house.

Inspired by Keith Buesing’s (of Gardiner, NY) fabulous green sculptures, a couple of years ago I began re-forming the yews. Yew is an adaptable plant, amenable to pretty much all manners of pruning, and the reformation is now pretty much complete. (The smiling mouth is still under construction.)

Multiple prunings are still needed each growing season, but they are mostly light cuts to polish and maintain the form.

2011-11-22T10:09:00.001-08:00

One thing I like about my kiwis, besides great flavor, is that
they don't have those obnoxious plastictags on them.

Besides offering a hedge, that diversity also usually presents me with a spectrum of flavors and nutrition.

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Admittedly, my farmden is not ideal for apple growing. Six-thousand acres of woods (not mine, Mohonk Preserve’s), overwintering home to many pests, lie within 50 feet of my trees. And cold air settles into this floodplain of the Wallkill River, so morning fogs and dews linger longer than on higher ground to fester disease problems. So I do spray my trees, many times each season, with Surround (a commercial formulation of kaolin clay) and sulfur (a naturally mined mineral).

The apple trees looked so hopeful in the spring. No late frosts. Exuberant, new growth. Pea-sized fruitlets rapidly swelling to marble-size, then golfball-size, and larger.

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Multiple prunings are still needed each growing season, but they are mostly light cuts to polish and maintain the form.

2011-11-18T06:15:00.001-08:00

Winter seemed to have begun all of a sudden on October 29th when, after weeks of balmy autumn weather, large flakes poured out of the sky to bury lush green lettuces, leeks, Chinese and Occidental cabbages, and radishes beneath a heavy, white blanket. The next night, temperatures plummeted to below 20°F.

Thanks to modern weather reporting, I was ready. Before the snow fell, I set arches of 5-foot-long wire at 4-foot intervals over some of the vegetable beds. On top of these wire hoops went a layer of row cover fabric, which lets in some light and affords a few extra degrees of cold protection, topped by clear plastic for even more protection from cold. More wire arches at the same locations as the first set of hoops sandwiched the plastic and row cover material to keep everything secure. Vegetables are accessible by merely sliding the plastic sides up.

As for lettuces, leeks, Chinese and Occidental cabbages, and radishes that remained open to the elements, they fared well also, remaining crisp and protected from freezing beneath a snowy blanket.

Depending on the vegetable and what protection it’s afforded, the garden should provide salad fixings and greens at least through the end of this month. After that, it’s on to the 5 foot square cold frame that’s filled with almost 3 dozen heads of Romaine lettuce just waiting to be picked. And then it’s on into the greenhouse.

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So many plants, so little space. Potted plants, that is. Roots, which have evolved in the relative warmth of the earth, can’t tolerate as much cold as trunks and branches. So roots in pots experience colder temperatures than roots in the ground. Before the snow and cold weather descended, I began frantically moving all my potted plants to shelter.

My cold-hardy, potted plants, a miscellany that includes a flowering dogwood, a fantail willow, Japanese hollies, aborvitaes, some roses, and black currants, got shoved right up against the north wall of my brick house. With some mulch thrown up to the rims of the pots and snow cover that slides off the roof, plants there weather winter well. (The reason these hardy plants are in pots is because I haven’t yet figured out where to plant them; more homeless plants always seem to come my way every year.)

My subtropical plants need more protection because their trunks and branches don’t tolerate cold below about 25°F. I weeded and trimmed back some branches of potted figs, pomegranates, an olive tree, a couple of pineapple guavas, some black mulberries, and a che, and bound the remaining branches together with string. Stripping off any remaining leaves helped put the plants to sleep.

A couple of rose plants also joined this mostly Mediterranean crowd. The roses are hardy but they are particularly luscious-looking David Austen varieties I need to have available in late winter to force blossoms for a very very special wedding at the end of May.

Finally, the roses and other plants each then had to be wrestled down the narrow stairs to my barely heated basement. The plants crowded in down there might be those you’d find along the Mediterranean, but the dank, dark scene there is decidedly non-Mediterranean.

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Mother Nature usually calls the shots. Fifteen years ago I transplanted a chestnut seedling into my south field. With time, I helped Mother Nature along, coaxed the tree with pruning shears and saws to develop a pleasing and sturdy form.

Major limbs radiating out at wide angles indicate good anchorage to the trunk; I had selected these limbs as “keepers” in their youth. I had lopped off any young branches originating closer together vertically than a foot or two apart, even though, to the untrained eye, the developing tree then looked sparsely branched in its youth. This wide spacing allowed each limb to develop without interference as it swelled to 4 and then 6 inches in diameter. I also had favored keeping only those young shoots that originated in a spiral pattern up the trunk, again to minimize competition for nutrients pumped up from below and from sunlight falling from above.

The tree grew rapidly, after 15 years achieving a height and girth of 25 feet.

The recent snowfall made light of my efforts. Snow clinging to leafy branches bowed limbs towards the ground at angles beyond which early good training could sustain. They broke. Almost half of the once fully rounded crown ended up with a skirt of leafy branches ground level and, higher up, splintered stubs of broken limbs stared out.

The sight is not as upsetting to me as might be imagined. Chestnuts are fast growing trees. Within three years, the tree will be well on its way to symmetrical elegance again.

Also, this past spring I had done myself more cleanly what Mother Nature chose to do: I had lopped back two sturdy limbs to within a foot of the trunk. On the remaining stubs I grafted stems of two named varieties of chestnut hybrids notable for their particularly large and flavorful nuts. The grafted stems spent the summer knitting to the stubs and growing out into long shoots. Because those shoots were shaded by overhanging limbs, my plan was to lop back some upper limbs next spring to let those young, grafted shoots bask in sunlight.

Mother Nature got the jump on me with an admittedly much freer hand. I’ll soon trim those splintered stubs back to well placed side branches so that the stubs heal quickly and cleanly to limit the possibility of diseases.

2011-11-10T18:53:00.001-08:00

It’s a quirk, but it’s benign: When a pretty or useful tree presents seed-laden branches to me, I start conjuring up visions of whole new trees. Whole new trees that I can grow. What amazing potential is contained in such small packages! I was presented with some of these packages on a recent hike.

The date was about three weeks ago, before fall color had peaked -- except for that of black tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica), also known as black gum or sour gum. This native of eastern U.S. is often planted as an ornamental for its early and striking color. The fluorescent purple, red, and yellow leaves are the first harbingers of autumn color.

Walking along the top of a rocky ridge, I came upon a tupelo lit up for autumn and presenting, within easy reach, many small, dark purple fruits. Although native, tupelo isn’t all that common around here, and trees are either male or female, with only females, of course, bearing fruit. So here was an opportunity, one not all that common.

Six tupelo trees for the future

I could leave the flat outside, in which case the seeds will probably sprout around April. In the refrigerator, constantly chilly, the seeds would get off to an earlier start, probably sprouting in February. The seedlings will need transplanting into deeper containers or outdoors soon after sprouting because tupelo tends to develop deep tap roots.

Most trees are very easy to grow from seed. The hard part comes later: Figuring out what to do with all the seedlings.

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I recently contended that no one, or I, at least, would eat any other pear as long as ripe Magness pears were available. How foolish. Over 5000 varieties of pears exist. Could anyone really declare that just one of those would surpass so dramatically all others or that an occasional variation in pear flavor would not be welcome?

Fortunately, I had some other home-grown varieties waiting in the wings. Vermont Beauty -- sweet and juicy, with a bit of spiciness -- was just what was needed to relieve week after week of sweet and juicy, smooth-flavored Magness. Almost as good was the variety Frederick Clapp although lack of top notch quality in this case could be due do less than perfect harvest timing or after-ripening.

Seckel is one variety that definitely would have measured up against Magness. Unfortunately, the last of the Seckel pears, which are small, sweet, and very spicy, are long gone. Triomphe de Viene pears are still to come, after a few more weeks of refrigeration; this is the trees’ first year bearing fruit in my garden.

And next year . . . Beurée d’Amanlis, Aurora, Warren, Tyson, Rescue, and more should bear fruit. I have it on good authority that Flemish Beauty is another pear variety worth adding to the collection.

Where to put all these pear trees? I have two approaches. I lop the top off any pear variety that’s not up to snuff and graft onto the remaining stump a new, better variety. Alternatively, I graft a branch of one of these better varieties on a branch of an existing pear tree, so the resulting tree then hosts two -- or more -- varieties. One old tree hosts about eight varieties.

I highly recommend pears as backyard trees for their spring blossoms, their glossy leaves in summer, their luscious fruits, and -- in contrast to apples -- their relative freedom from insect and disease problems.

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Tree seedlings and pear varieties aren’t the only things multiplying around here. Some orchid cactii grow too large so their fleshy stems need to be cut back occasionally. And, the fleshy stems are easy to root. So how could anyone resist making more plants?

All that’s needed is to stick the bottom ends of the stems in potting soil in bright light and then water thoroughly each time the soil gets bone dry. The upshot of this is that now I have many orchid cactii hanging around the house.

The one downside to orchid cactii is that they typically bloom only once a year, usually in early spring. As a capper to our very strange growing season (early warming in spring followed by alternating periods of excessively droughty and excessively rainy weather followed by the torrential rains of hurricane Irene followed by a long, warm autumn), one of my orchid cactii is now in bloom. Jumping on the bandwagon is another plant, a true orchid, Odontoglossum pulchellum. I notice a flower stalk developing. In its 20 years here, blooms always arrived in February.

2011-11-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

Lance the Plumber is also quite a good gardener; I’ve seen his garden. So I had some faith in his recipe for growing sweet potatoes: Make a circle of fencing a couple of feet across, fill it with soil, and plant. The raised cylinder of soil, being warmer than soil at ground level, would be much to the plants’ liking.

I eat a lot of sweet potatoes but have never grown them because summer weather here in the Hudson Valley isn’t quite warm enough for best yields and because the trailing vines take up a lot of space. Still, Lance’s method seemed worth a try -- with some “leafy” modifications.

Every autumn I get truckloads of leaves dumped at a holding area where they sit to let snow, rain, heat, and time reduce the volume and bring about decomposition to create an ideal mulch. I spread that mulch the following autumn. (Freshly fallen leaves are also a good mulch but tend to blow and are too fluffy for easy handling.) So, methinks, “That leaf pile just sits there from spring through autumn; why not plant sweet potatoes right into the pile in spring?” It was worth a try even though sweet potatoes don’t like soils having abundant fresh organic matter. The leaf pile was pure organic matter!

I tried this on a small scale last year. Mice ate the potatoes which, anyway, were few because I got the plants in late and sweet potatoes are a long season crop. I did salvage cuttings from the vines, which root easily, and carried them over last winter on a window sill to make plants for this year.

This year’s leaf pile was further from the stone wall that mice evidently call home, and potted plants went into compost-filled holes hollowed out into the pile. All summer the vines grew, and grew, and grew. Frost, anathema to sweet potatoes, is imminent so yesterday I decided it was time to start grubbing into the pile to look for sweet potatoes. I found a few small and medium-sized tubers, one of which had been gnawed by mice. Not very encouraging.

Wandering past the pile a couple of hours later, I spied what looked like a large butternut squash starting to emerge from the pile. It was, in fact, a giant sweet potato tuber, a couple of feet long and a few inches across, that had formed where the vine had rooted as it sped along atop the leaf pile. Then I found another humongous tuber. And another, as well as some rationally sized ones. Success. I can’t wait to show them to Lance.

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For a variety of known and unknown reasons, this year was good for pears. Not just here, but generally in the northeast, at least judging from reports from a number of people. Spring weather was ideal for pollination, with no late frosts once weather started to warm. I had a number of varieties in bloom so cross-pollination was good. And for some reason, despite alternating periods of rain and drought followed by too, too much rain, the crop developed and ripened nicely.

Of all the pears I grow, the best-tasting is the variety ‘Magness’. It takes awhile to begin fruiting and then doesn’t yield well or consistently, or keep very well. But when ‘Magness’ is available, there’s hardly reason to eat any other pear. (Except for ‘Comice’, which is the pear usually grown in the Pacific northwest and packed into fancy fruit gift boxes; ‘Comice’ allegedly doesn’t grow well in the northeast. ‘Comice’ is one parent of ‘Magness’.) My two ‘Magness’ trees bore abundantly this year, I harvested the fruits just as the first pear dropped, kept them refrigerated for about a month, and now eat them after a day at room temperature. The flesh is juicy, sweet, and perfumed.

Anyone planning to grow this excellent variety needs to provide for for cross-pollination. ‘Magness’ is pollen-sterile and can’t pollinate anything else so three different varieties are needed to be able to pick fruit from all three trees.

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What an honor it would be to have a plant named after you. I was fortunate, many years ago when I worked in the USDA Fruit Laboratory in Maryland, to meet Dr. Magness, for whom ‘Magness’ pear was named. He had retired as chief of the Fruit Laboratory. And there was the Canadian farmer, John McIntosh, who discovered the tree that became his namesake variety two hundred years ago. ‘Macoun’ apple was bred here in New York, a deliberate hybrid of ‘McIntosh’ and ‘Jersey Black’ that was named, in 1923, after Canadian fruit grower W. T. Macoun. And so on.

How about having a weed as your namesake? I’d even take that, with reservations. One weed that comes to mind because it’s still spreading as if it was high summer is Asiatic dayflower. Actually, it’s quite an attractive plant, with arrow-shaped, succulent leaves that clasp the decumbent, fleshy stems. The genus, Commelina, is characterized by flowers with two prominent, sky blue petals that pay homage to two similarly prominent brothers, 18th century Dutch botanists Johann and Caspar Commelin.

Look closely at the flowers, though, and you’ll see that in addition to the two prominent, blue petals, each flower also has an insignificant, minuscule, white petal. There was also a third brother.

2011-10-27T08:42:00.000-07:00

Deep in the hills of West Virginia, at the end of a steep, gravelly driveway, is where I found Glicksterus maximus. Sounds like a plant, doesn’t it? It’s not. It’s the self-ascribed nickname for Barry Glick of Sunshine Farm and Gardens (www.sunfarm.com), a mail-order nursery offering oodles of species and varieties of mostly herbaceous plants, many of them obscure and many of them native. I’d spoken with Barry, I’d planted his plants, and I’d sat on the receiving end of one of his entertaining and informative lectures, but I’d never visited his nursery/home. My own speaking engagement last week at the International Master Gardener’s Conference in Charleston, WV afforded me the opportunity for this visit.

Let’s cut right to the chase: Barry’s deepest affections go to one genus, Helleborus. And hellebores, as they are commonly called, were everywhere. (The plants are also called Christmas rose or Lenten rose although the blossoms do not really resemble roses and the plants do not necessarily bloom at Christmas or Lent.) Steep slopes beneath towering maples and oaks were blanketed with verdant carpets of thousands of hellebore plants. Many of these plants were seed plants for Barry’s breeding program. In addition to selling thousands of hellebores, Barry also has developed some new varieties.

I had fun trying to identify some of the other plants tucked here and there all over the place, or lined out by the hundreds in pots. Ligularia was easily identified by its tall, straight, upright flower stalk even though its yellow flowers were long past. Rather than the familiar Ligularia ‘The Rocket’, Barry grows Ligularia sachalinensis. Fringetree (Chionanthus virginicus), a small tree whose branches burst with fringed, white blooms in spring, gracefully spread its branches; I brought home a small plant. As we walked up and down the hilly landscape past myriad plants, Barry called out their botanical names

One particularly attractive tree that I found impossible to identify was a mature sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua). Rather than sweetgum’s characteristic, five-pointed, star-shaped leaves, Barry’s tree, the variety ‘Rotundifolia’, had leaves with friendly-looking, rounded lobes. This variety is sterile, so also couldn’t be identified by the species rounded, spikey fruits commonly known by such names as “gumballs,” "burr balls", "bommyknockers", or "conkleberrys.”

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We can’t just leave hellebores hanging a few paragraphs back. I also am a big fan of most of this genus, and am the proud grower, for 8 years now, of some of Barry’s creations. One asset of hellebores, mentioned previously, is their verdant foliage; I didn’t mention, though, that the leaves stay green all winter. This far north, I value anything green in our mostly achromatic winter landscape.

Another plus for this genus is that deer leave the plants alone. And that the plants thrive in partial shade. And that they self-sow to make new seedlings as well as spread vegetatively. They do so with enough restraint to never become a bother or, worse, invasive.

While the flowers do not look like rose blossoms, they are beautiful, in colors from white to white suffused with purple to purple, and sometimes pale green.Wait, that’s not all! The flowers start blooming very early in spring, typically in March in my garden, and then continue to bloom for weeks and weeks.

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One of my lecture topics at the master gardener conference was “Landscaping with Fruit,” and one of the premier dual-purpose plants that I touted was pawpaw (Asimina triloba). The tree has a neat, pyramidal form and all season long sports large, lush, healthy green leaves that lend a tropical air to the landscape. It’s a tree that you can plant (plant two, for cross-pollination), give some care to get it growing, and then year after year harvest fruit without giving a second thought to pests or pruning. Even deer usually leave mature trees alone.

In addition to those lush leaves, pawpaw has other tropical aspirations. It is the northernmost member of the mostly tropical custard apple family. Each flower is a multiple ovary so can yield a cluster of up to nine fruits, similar to clusters of bananas except that pawpaws are shaped like and about the size of mangoes.

Most tropical is the flesh itself of this cold-hardy, native fruit. Pawpaw flesh is creamy and yellow, like banana. What’s more, it has flavor that also is similar to banana along with some mango, pineapple, and avocado mixed in; or vanilla custard; or creme brulee.

Pawpaw trees shed their tropical aspirations in autumn, about now, when the leaves turn a clear, bright yellow and then drop. That’s also when the fruit ripens; I’m presently inundated with this easy-to-grow “tropical” fruit.

(I devote a whole chapter to pawpaw in my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden.)

2011-10-21T06:44:00.000-07:00

One more sandwich of sliced tomatoes laid on home-made bread and topped with cheddar cheese, warmed until melted, and I’ll close the garden gate on fresh tomatoes for the year. Tomato season used to end more dramatically: The four years that I gardened in Wisconsin, a heavy frost would descend on the garden some night about the third week in September. Morning would present a scene of blackened, dead tomato, cucumber, and pepper plants. The same thing used to happen here, only a little later in autumn.

For many years now, killing frosts have arrived late, so much so that cool weather and short days sap the vitality from summer vegetables before frost arrives. The plants peter out so I have no qualms about clearing them out of the garden before they are dead. As a matter of fact, they look so forlorn that I’m anxious to clear them away and neaten up the garden.

Cleanup is especially important with tomatoes because a few diseases, such as early blight and leaf spot diseases, wait out winter on plant residues to infect next year’s plants. I clean up every bit of stem, leaf, and fruit possible, hand picking to begin with and then finally giving each bed a light raking to gather up remaining debris. With a garden knife, I cut into the ground around the base of each plant to make it easy to remove the stem and largest roots. Small roots stay in the soil, decomposing to become humus and to leave behind large and small channels for air and water movement. All that spent tomato stuff goes into the compost pile where time and temperature do their job defusing pathogens and creating rich compost.

Just to make sure that pest problems are minimized next year, and to enrich and protect the ground, I cover each bed with an inch depth of finished compost from piles built last year. Disease spores can’t get up through the compost blanket. And then, to further limit pest problems, next year’s tomatoes go in a different bed than this year’s tomatoes.

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Even with the declining tomatoes and other summer vegetables, the garden generally doesn’t look forlorn. Beds of late green beans, sweet corn, and squash that were cleared, cleaned, and composted over the past few weeks look neat and weed-free. To me, something like the zen gardens at Ryōan-ji, except with compost and straight lines instead of neatly raked gravel. Grassy blades of oats are sprouting with all the youthful exuberance of spring in beds that were readied before the end of September. And long before summer vegetables started to wane, I snuck autumn vegetables into the garden, so some beds are now lush with radishes, arugula, lettuce, cabbage, and other greenery that thoroughly enjoys this cool, wet weather.

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Butterscotch on a tree, that’s what Chojuro pear tastes like. Juicy butterscotch, because an explosion of juice fills your mouth with each bite,

Chojuro is one of a few Asian pears, also called nashi, that I grow; it’s my favorite as far as productivity and flavor, my others being Yoinashi, Yakumo, and Seuri-Li. Because they are generally round and crunchy, Asian pears are also sometimes called apple pears or salad pears. They have a long history in Asia, and over a thousand varieties exist.

My pears were planted 10 years ago, actually not planted but grafted on existing rootstocks to replace other, less satisfactory varieties. The rootstocks are dwarfing and the plan was to train them as a row of espaliers en arcure, that is with successive tiers of branches gently arching in curves to meet those of neighboring pear plants, all sitting in a row atop a low wall. But deer soon discovered the plants, which became a smorgasbord for which the deer didn’t even have to bend down to enjoy.

The deer problem was eventually solved but the plants were not en arcure anymore. I could have lopped everything back to just above the grafts and started again but lacked the heart to do it because the trees were, by then, bearing fruits. So now I have an arcure-esque espaliers laden with fruit. And especially laden is the Chojuro tree, every year.

Asian pears differ from the more common European pears in a number of ways. They are generally easier to grow. With large, healthy leaves, they tend to be more decorative. They bear more heavily and at a younger age, so much so that you have to be careful not to let plants on dwarfing rootstocks bear too much too young and runt out. And while European pears must be harvested before they are ripe, then ripened off the trees, Asian pears don’t taste at their best until they are dead ripe on the tree.

Even then, they don’t taste at their very best if the trees overbear, which they are wont to do. So beginning in June, and a few more times through summer, I kept pinching off enough fruits so that eventually remaining fruits were a couple of inches apart. It was worth it for the crunchy, juice-laden, butterscotch-flavored Chojuros.

2011-10-14T08:05:00.000-07:00

It’s a tied score, 1 for the squirrels, 1 for me. At least since I started counting, which was last year. I had some squirrel issues in previous years, but last year is when all out war started. They cleaned out the raspberries and the gooseberries early in the season, and then started eyeing the blueberries. Anyone who reads “A Gardener’s Notebook” knows how I feel about blueberries, and the squirrels evidently picked up those vibes (with some ballistic coaxing) and left the blueberries alone. Not that they kept to their nearby forest homes; they scurried across the field in late summer to strip the hazelnut bushes of every single nut.

This year is different, very different. The squirrels didn’t eat even one raspberry or gooseberry, didn’t even eye the blueberries. And my harvest of hazelnuts is secure in bushel baskets.

In fact, I only saw a couple of squirrels the whole season. They were two young ones gamboling in the tree tops, taunting me in full view from the back window of my bedroom.

A multifaceted approach is responsible for this year’s victory. Two excellent cats are one line of defense, although I can’t imagine how cats could keep squirrels at bay. Perhaps the squirrels also saw me practicing my marksmanship. And finally, I let the field in which I planted the hazelnuts grow up into an overgrown meadow. I’ve never seen squirrels in high grass and other herbaceous vegetation, probably because it slows them down too much. (Then again, perhaps I’ve never seen squirrels in unmown meadow because I can’t see them in unmown meadow.)

To reduce competition for water and nutrients to the hazelnut plants from the meadow, I kept vegetation scythed down in a circle around each hazelnut bush and accessed the plants via a mowed path that originates only 50 feet across mowed lawn from my deck. My two dogs, Leila and Scooter, spend a lot of time sleeping on that sunny deck, so it would take a bold squirrel indeed to make the journey across the lawn and then down that no-exit, mowed path in overgrown meadow.

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As for anyone who pooh-poohs my obsession with squirrels, mark my words: In a few years you’ll consider them much, much worse problems than deer. Some people tell me that squirrels are even eating their tomatoes. Fencing is, obviously, useless against squirrels.

Squirrels have never eaten my tomatoes. I’ve never even seen them in my vegetable gardens although black walnut seedlings that sometimes pop up here and there are evidence of their occasional trespass.

I wonder if squirrels eat lettuce; I hope not, because I have some nice heads developing in the garden and in seed flats. This is the time of year that takes advance planning with lettuce because, although the plants enjoy the cooler weather, it, along with shorter days, drastically slows growth.

I aim to grow enough lettuce for salads all winter so must have enough plants started to slowly mature in the weeks and months ahead. If the plants are too small, they won’t size up when it’s their turn to be eaten. If the plants are too large, they bolt, that is, make seedstalks and turn bitter. Right now, I have two rows of mature heads in the garden and over 150 seedlings of various sizes. All those seedlings take up only about 4 square feet of space. The smaller seedlings will get transplanted into the greenhouse sometime soon.

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Greenhouse lettuce can tolerate a little shade right now, but not in a few weeks. That works out perfectly, because right now the greenhouse is shaded by 3 large fig trees growing within. They are three different varieties, each loaded with fruit.

Kadota is the best-tasting of the three, with a sweet, rich flavor held in a chewy skin. The problem is that Kadota likes dry weather, as do all figs, to some degree. With the current humid weather and incessant rain, many of the Kadota fruits rot just as they are about to ripen.

My old standby, Brown Turkey, sweet, small, and dark purple, does better. The tree has been ripening fruits since about early September.

The best of the lot, in terms of flavor (not as good as Kadota but, still, very good) is Green Ischia, also known as Verte. This variety bears fruits on stems that grew last year as well as, like my other two varieties, stems that started growing this year. Green Ischia’s earliest figs ripen in July on last year’s stems, followed by more fruits, beginning in September, on this year’ stems. The figs are sweet and very large and juicy, so much so that they begin to burst open if harvest is delayed too long. My Green Ischia, by the way, is probably not Green Ischia; figs are notorious for having multiple names and for being mislabeled, as I think mine was in the nursery.

The fig crop will end in a few weeks, the plants’ leaves will fall, and I’ll cut back all stems, except for a few on Green Ischia for next year’s early crop, down to about 4 feet high. Greenhouse lettuce can then bask freely in whatever sunlight autumn and winter sun offers.

2011-10-06T16:41:00.000-07:00

I didn’t need the house number to hone in on Bassem’s home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania last Saturday. The Asian persimmon, pawpaw, and fig trees rising above the front hedge distinguished the landscape from those of the neighbors’ more conventional -- and much less luscious -- home grounds. Over the years, I have corresponded with Bassem, a fellow member of North American Fruit Explorers (www.nafex.org), and had planned to sometime stop by on one of my frequent trips to Philadelphia. Finally, I took that fruitful side step.

And what a fruitfully timely fruit step I hoped it to be: Fig season! Figs are a main interest of Bassem (http://www.treesofjoy.com/), who grew up in Lebanon. His quarter acre house lot, crammed with all sizes and varieties of fig trees, makes the collection of 35 varieties that I once grew in Maryland look like child’s play.

But figs were not all of it. Everywhere I looked was an interesting fruit plant. Hardy passionfruits (Passiflora incarnata), which I also grow, covered the ground among his foundation plantings, even sprouted up in the lawn. Did I write “foundation plantings?” Lest that conjure up an image of your standard junipers and yews, Bassem’s foundation plantings were more diverse and, of course, fruitful. There was the edible cactii (Opuntia spp.), a pomegranate with ripening fruit (the fruits on my potted pomegranates, which I mentioned early in summer, fell off), and, of course, many varieties of figs.

The backyard is home to a small greenhouse, in which Bassem overwinters some tropical fruits, and more fruit plants. A few large banana trees rose right next to the greenhouse -- very decorative but not able, of course, to ripen fruit. They die to the ground each year and then sprout from overwintered roots each spring. An eight-foot-tall papaya plant, grown from seeds sown in spring, was expectantly flowering but likewise won’t have time to ripen fruits. Fruiting trees in the ground included quince (Cydonia oblonga), jujube (Ziziphus jujuba, yes, the original jujube candy was made from candied jujube fruits), and, in the back, more Asian persimmons and pawpaws.

It’s too cold here in the Wallkill River valley to plant outdoors much of what Bassem plants right in the ground even though our homes are separated by only about 80 miles of latitude. My extra few degree of cold are the result of my more rural setting, with less heat-trapping concrete, and my valley, into which cold air settles. Still, I couldn’t resist going home with 2 new fig varieties (Black Bethlehem and Pontlican) and a strawberry guava, both in pots that I’ll move indoors for winter. If the figs prove especially tasty, they might get planted in the ground in my cool temperature greenhouse.

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Goldenrod in the south field has turned the landscape a glorious yellow color. The plants have been blooming there for weeks and weeks but the intensity has recently ratcheted up.

The reason for the increased color isn’t the weather; it’s the plants. There are dozens of goldenrod species not easily distinguished from each other, even by botanists. My field is, no doubt, home to a few species and the one now blooming seems to be the one in greatest abundance.

I mow most of the south field once a year, in spring, a schedule that suits the goldenrods well. Other parts of the field that I used to mow more frequently than once a year (for a volleyball court) are mostly grasses, Queen-Anne’s-lace, and chicory, but I see some goldenrod now finally creeping in. I keep a path mowed through the field that each year follows a different trajectory. The ghost of last year’s path is high with vegetation, but not goldenrod -- yet. There’s even a tropical-looking patch in the field where the large leaves of sumac seedlings shoot skyward above the surrounding goldenrods. That sumac is the legacy of a brush pile that I burned there over 10 years ago.

It’s all very interesting and pretty.

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And, for a little more fall color: Persimmons. The orange fruits -- persimmon orange fruits -- are ripening on my trees and dropping to the ground. (Isn’t it odd that a color should be named “persimmon orange” when so few people know this relatively uncommon fruit? I helped remedy that situation by devoting a chapter in my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden to persimmons.)

The persimmon fruits, as usual, are delectable, with a taste and texture of dried apricots that have been softened in water, dipped in honey, then given a dash of spice. Something like Oriental persimmons but with richer flavor and texture.

The trees, as usual, are bearing an abundant crop. In over two decades of growing this fruit, the trees have failed me only 2 years, both from a very late frost that didn’t allow time for ripening. Few fruits are easier to grow: no notable pests; no pruning; just plant and pick.

Ripening is important with American persimmon because few gustatory experiences are as horrendous as biting into an unripe persimmon. The feeling is akin to having a vacuum cleaner in your mouth, and spitting out the fruit doesn’t help. Unfortunately, fruits from some wild trees of this native plant never fully lose that awful flavor, which is why I grow named varieties that are known to have excellent flavor. Over two dozen such varieties exist.

This far north, we’re restricted to growing ones that taste good and will ripen within our relatively short growing season. Which is fine, because my two favorite varieties, Mohler and Szukis, are both cold hardy, ripen within our growing season, and taste as good as I would hope from any persimmon. Any fruit, perhaps. Persimmon’s botanical name, Diospyros, translates to “food of the gods.

2011-09-30T06:51:00.000-07:00

As the curtain slowly closes on the summer garden and the autumn garden edges towards its glory, I’d like to offer thanks. No, not a religious thanks for a summer of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, okra, and other warm weather vegetables. But thanks to a person, the person who bred Sungold cherry tomato.

Anyone who is not familiar with Sungold tomato should be. It’s sweet but not cloying, and has a beautiful persimmon-orange color. I once grew over 20 varieties of cherry tomatoes, including Sungold, for a magazine article. Mostly, the tomatoes were ho-hum, with the exception of Sungold, its hardly known sibling Suncherry, and Gardener’s Delight and Sweet Million. Of the great-tasting lot, Sungold was the best, which is why so many people grow it.

With all that beauty and flavor, Sungold is not hard to grow. It starts bearing relatively early each season and bears heavily all season long.

As testimonial to Sungold’s flavor and other qualities, it’s sometimes listed along with heirloom varieties. It’s not an heirloom. It is an F1 hybrid variety, which means I can’t save seed myself to plant each year. Not if I want Sungold, as opposed to a tomato that hints of Sungold. Ever since Sungold was introduced, gardeners have been trying to develop an open-pollinated form, that is, one that would be “true” from seed.

So who was it that gave us Sungold? The only information I could sleuth out was that Sungold was developed in the 1990s by Japan’s Tokita Seed Company. It seems that the Japanese enjoy sweet tomatoes. It seems that so do many Americans.

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Too bad about Sungold because saving vegetable and flower seeds provides such primal satisfaction, and saves some money. Every year I save seeds from such vegetables as Shirofuma edamame, Sweet Italia pepper, and Ventura celery.

Especially satisfying are the popcorn and polenta seeds I’ve saved over the years. Corn, after all, is a staple, a grain that we can each grow in our own backyards. It’s more suited to backyard production than other grains because its grains (kernels) remain attached in profusion in a neat, husk-wrapped cylinder. That’s perfect as a cultivated grain for us humans for easily gathering at the end of the season although not so good for a wild grain because they are poorly dispersed. Corn’s ancestor, teosinte, which originated in Mexico, was a better wild plant, with each primitive ear hosting just a few kernels that had plenty of elbow room to grow once they dropped to the ground and sprouted.

Popcorn is also especially satisfying because it’s a fun food. Today I harvested two beds of Dutch Butter popcorn and one bed of Pink Pearl popcorn. These two varieties, in my opinion, taste better than commercial varieties I’ve tasted even if they don’t puff up as large when popped. The white or pink ears also look very pretty hanging all winter from a rafter in the kitchen.

I started growing and saving polenta corn seeds a few years ago after being given a couple of mature ears of Otto File, an heirloom Italian variety whose name translates to “eight row,” which it has. The kernels have an orange tinge and, once ground -- especially if ground fresh -- cook up into a delectable polenta of distinctive flavor. This variety was almost lost, and I was given it as part of an effort to maintain it.

The one problem with growing popcorn and polenta corn is that each variety has to be sufficiently isolated so that no cross-pollination occurs. They also have to be isolated from sweet corn, which I also grow. So I planted sweet corn in my north vegetable garden, and clumps of Otto File in the south field between the dwarf apple trees.

The two popcorn varieties go into the south vegetable garden. Evidently, they were not sufficiently isolated because Dutch Butter sometimes has some pink kernels and Pink Pearl sometimes has some white kernels. Even the mutts -- Pink Dutch Pearl Butter? -- taste very good.

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I must mention Lee. No, not me, but the recent tropical storm that followed on the heels of hurricane Irene. Tropical Storm Lee brought a surprising amount of water so that extensive flooding again occurred, the second worst I’ve ever seen.

A prominent legacy in these days following the storm are mosquitoes, hordes of them. It is almost impossible -- no, it is impossible -- to go outdoors unprotected. I’m relying on my mesh Bug Baffler and, to a lesser extent, the effective deet alternatives picaridin (found in Natrapel) and lemon eucalyptus.

I’m hoping that the abundance of mosquitoes will build up populations of their predators so that next year will bring even fewer mosquitoes than usual. Bats and purple martins, contrary to popular lore, are not particularly effective at reducing mosquito populations. Most effective are dragonflies as well as some other insects (including the larvae of some species of mosquitoes!), small crustaceans, and fish. Mosquitoes can also be controlled by treating their watery breeding grounds with the bacteria Bacillus thurengiensis var. israelensis or B. sphaericus, both of which are relatively nontoxic to everything except mosquito larvae. As natural waters recede, draining containers and other open sources of water will also limit mosquito numbers.

A couple of frosts or a heavy frost, to 28°F. will do in some mosquitoes (Aedes). But for all the beauty and abundance of the autumn garden. could I really hope for that which would put a quick end to summer’s vegetables?

2011-09-22T23:27:00.000-07:00

I’m frantically getting ready for spring. Mostly, that means making compost. Compost piles assembled now, while temperatures are still relatively warm, heat up right to their edges, cooking quickly and killing most resident weed seeds, pests, and diseases. Fortunately, plenty of organic materials are available to feed compost piles this time of year.

I like to think of my compost pile as a pet (really, many pets, the population of which changes over time as the compost ripens) that needs, as do our dogs and cats, food, water, and air. Right now, I’ve been feeding my pet corn stalks, lettuce plants that have gone to seed, rotten tomatoes and peppers, and other garden refuse.

No, I’m not checking to make sure that each leaf, stalk, and fruit is free of pests before it gets tossed on the growing pile, as is suggested by some people. Look closely enough, and you’d find that just about everything would have some hostile organism on it. Given sufficient time and heat, a well-fed compost pile should take care of such potential problems. Joseph Jenkins, in his excellent (and fun-to-read) book, The Humanure Handbook, quotes research showing complete human pathogen destruction in composts that reach 145°F for one hour, 122°F for one day, or 109° F for one week. The same should be true for plant pathogens and pests. For decades, I’ve tossed everything and anything into my compost piles and never noticed any carry over of pest or disease problems.

Heat and temperature can also do in weed seeds. Survival depends on the kind of weed: Research shows that a couple of weeks at 114°F kills pigweed seeds while only about a week at that temperature killed nightshade seeds. Generally, though, temperatures of 131°F for a couple of weeks kills most weed seeds.

Heat and time aren’t the only threats faced by pathogens, pests, and weed seeds in the innards of my compost piles. In addition to heat, various antagonistic organisms -- including friendly (to us) bacteria, fungi, and nematodes -- stand ready to gobble them up.

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Speaking of weeds, they also become compost food. What sweet revenge it is to toss a mugwort, creeping Charlie, and woodsorrel onto a growing compost pile and then get them back as dark, rich compost.

Other organic materials that go into the compost piles are a mix of goldenrod, bee balm, grasses, yarrow, and whatever else is growing in my south field. I cut it with a scythe, let it wilt for a day, then gather it up. Also some horse manure, which I like mostly for the wood shavings that provide bedding for the horses. The manure itself furnishes nitrogen, which compost pets need for a balanced diet -- 20 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen but no need to be overly exacting because it all balances out in the finished compost. Lacking manure, soybean meal is another nitrogen-rich feed, as are grass clippings and kitchen waste.

Feeding a variety of compost foods provides a smorgasbord of macro- and micronutrients to the composting organisms and, hence, to my plants. Every few inches I also sprinkle on some soil, to help absorb nutrients and odors, and some ground limestone, to lower acidity of our naturally increasingly acidic soils, and to improve the texture of the finished compost.

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Compost made this year gets used next year, mostly around now. It was too late to plant a late vegetable crop in the bed I just cleared of old corn stalks, so I’m blanketing that bed beneath an inch deep in compost. The same goes for a bed in which grew an early planting of zucchini.

Actually, any beds that get cleared before the end of this month will get, before I lay on that blanket of compost, a dense sprinkling of oat seeds. The seeds will germinate and the seedlings will thrive in the cool weather of autumn and early winter. This “cover crop,” as it is called, protects the soil surface from pounding rain and insulates the lower layers. The oat roots latch onto nutrients that might otherwise wash down through the soil. And as the roots grow, they nudge soil particles this way and that, giving the ground a nice, crumbly structure that garden plants like so well.

Beds cleared after October 1st get only compost, which is almost as good. In all honesty, I’ve never noted any difference in the soil or vegetable plant growth from using compost alone as opposed to compost plus a cover crop. The abundance of compost, in either case, might trump the effect of the cover crop. The green cover does look nice going into winter.

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Turnips and winter radishes planted 6 weeks ago are growing well and need thinning so that each plant has space to swell up its fat, tasty root.

2011-09-15T08:40:00.001-07:00

The nice thing about living in a flood plain is its fertile, rock-free soil. Here on the flood plains of the Wallkill River, I can dig a 3-foot-deep post hole in about 5 minutes. The soil here also drains well, allowing me to plant even during heavy rains.

The problem with flood plains is that they flood. Hurricane Irene recently submerged the farmden here with anything from 4 feet of water, along the road, to no feet of water, in back, where the vegetable gardens are. The ground elevation also drops going into the south field, where I paddled along on August 29th in a kayak inspecting pawpaw and dwarf apple trees, and grape and hardy kiwifruit vines.

Thankfully, lives and homes here generally fared well through the storm; what of the plants? As I write (August 31st), persimmon, chestnut, black walnut, and filbert trees that I planted are still ankle deep in standing water. Farm fields a mile down the road also are still inundated or, at least, have soggy soil.

The combination of heavy rains and winds loosened the grip of tree roots onto the soil. Some trees blew over. Some are wobbly in the soil. It may be possible to right and stake the former, and just stake the latter, if the trees are not too big. After a year or more, new roots will grow to provide sufficient support without the stakes.

The other problem with wet soil is that the water displaces air. Roots need to breathe. Without air, roots don’t function. They then can’t even take up water so may show the same symptoms -- leaves dying and drying up beginning at their edges -- as do plants suffering from drought. Fruits also may drop prematurely and various nutrient deficiencies may show up in the form off color leaves.

So the faster the water table recedes down into the soil the better. I’ll be watching and waiting; not much else anyone can do.

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The weird thing about hurricane Irene is the clear sunny days that have followed. Look out any rear window in my house at ground that wasn’t flooded, and it’s business as usual. The plants there got a good soaking and and then had bright, sunny days. What else could a plant ask for?

The bed with the last planting of corn needs to be harvested and cleared, as does a bed of bush green beans and edamame. Once cleared, these beds will snuggle in beneath a one-inch blanket of compost (yearly additions of which have contributed to the soil’s excellent drainage). They are then ready to be seeded for late crops of spinach, radishes, and lettuce, planted with waiting transplants of baby bok choy and lettuce, or planted to a soil-improving and protecting cover crop of oats and peas.

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My vegetables were not exposed to flooding; not so in other vegetable plots. If the flooding was only from rainfall on-site, the only thing to do is to watch and wait for the water to recede and roots to take a deep breath. Flooding from overflow of streams and rivers poses other problems.

Think of all the detritus carried along by that floodwater. And then try to imagine some of the stuff you didn’t think of. The major problems I see are floating gasoline and diesel cans and the major problem I smell is of the stuff in those cans. What I don’t see or smell is whatever is running off farm fields and the overflow from sewage treatment plants, not to mention harmful chemicals and bacteria.

Any of these substances could contaminate flooded vegetables, especially vegetables that were ready to be harvested, by lodging onto leaves and fruits and working their way into pores. Root vegetables would be least contaminated. Hardest to clean and most subject to contamination would be leafy vegetables. Easiest to clean would be vegetables with hard skins, such as winter squashes. A warm solution of Chlorox in water used as a wash or a soak should kill surface bacteria of those vegetables that can tolerate such treatment.