CARTS, DAME’S ROCKET, INVASIVES, & ROSES

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A garden cart improves any garden, and I’m especially enjoying using my cart, now in its third decade of use. This cart has hauled hay, manure, weeds, and old vegetable plants to the compost bins, and finished compost from the bins to vegetable beds and fruit trees. It’s hauled stones for wall building and heavy locust posts that get notched and bolted together to become arbors and trellises.
Look closely: Hardware cloth in bed
A good cart has two heavy duty, bicycle-sized tires sitting just about midway across a sturdy plywood bed surrounded by three sturdy plywood walls. Tossed rocks, the scraping of a shovel, and an occasional jab with the pitchfork have eaten away that plywood over the years. Not anymore, and that’s why I’m especially enjoying using the cart.
A few months ago, I decided to replace the plywood bed, which by then had few plies left. Instead of replaying the scenario from the last replacement, about 15 years ago with exterior grade plywood, I used pressure-treated plywood, which is more rot-resistant. And next, to fend off the constant scraping of shovels, rocks, and other tools and materials, I laid 1/4 inch mesh “hardware cloth” over the plywood base and screwed it down.
Today, shoveling wood chip mulch out of the cart to spread around the base of newly planted mulberry trees, no little voice in the back of my mind was reminding me that each shovelful was also scraping off a bit of plywood. I’m expecting to get good mileage with the new bed. Stay tuned; I’ll report back in 30 years.
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Dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis), a wildflower often mistakenly thought to be phlox (which has 5 petals instead of the 4 of dame’s rocket, has put on a great show of white, lilac, and pale purple blossoms this year. Now a dark cloud has passed over those cheery flowers.
Dame’s rocket, a European native that used to be cultivated in American gardens, escaped from our gardens many years ago to invade road sides, meadows, and cultivated fields. In some places, this comely flower is billed as “invasive.” “Left unchecked, this beautiful, yet lethal plant will wreak havoc on the natural environment, threatening the survival of native plants and degrading habitat and water quality,” writes restoration ecologist Steve Apfelbaum.
Call me irresponsible, but I still like dame’s rocket. I welcome it into my flower beds and into my meadow. In addition to beauty, the flower perfumes the air with a delicious, sweet aroma.
I have been too blasé about some other invasive plants in the past. I remember praising garlic mustard for its flavor. What was I thinking? The plant is now all over the place and doesn’t even really taste very good. Garlic mustard gets ripped out of the ground wherever I see it, in and around my garden at least. Perhaps I’ll eventually feel the same about autumn olive, which I enjoy for its fragrant blossoms in spring, its silvery leaves in summer, and the oodles of tasty, small red berries it bears in autumn. Thus far, I find Japanese stilt grass, yet another invader, attractive.
Sweet, pretty dame’s rocket is allegedly going to contribute to the alleged $200 billion of damage for which invasive plants are responsible. It’s even suggested that the plant might have some resistance to the herbicide Roundup.
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The whole invasive plant threat has, in my opinion, been blown way out of proportion. Our landscapes, wild and cultivated, are not — and should not — be static. Over time, extant species might become more or less prevalent and new species might move in.
And just what does “native” mean? A few hundred feet from the alluvial soil of my garden in the Walkill River valley, the ground slopes up sharply to the craggy, rocky outcroppings of the Shawangunk Ridge. Plants native up there, such as mountain laurel, aren’t native down here. Furthermore, research has shown that non-native species sometimes have a positive environmental impact (see, for example, Mark Davis et al in Nature 474, 153–154, 2011).
Obviously, we need to try and control invasive plants, whether they are native or non-native, when they cause intolerable disruption of the environment or threaten our well-being. But change is inevitable and usually not bad. Quoting Michael Pollan, turning the “ecological clock to 1492 [or any other date] is a fool’s errand, futile and pointless to boot.”
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Rose de Rescht
What a great year for roses, even if I’ve always contended that I didn’t like the roses. Actually, I didn’t and don’t like the roses that are most commonly grown, which are hybrid tea roses. The plants are gawky, something you’d plant out of sight just for cut blossoms, and the flowers are stiff, formal, and jarring in color. They’re also very susceptible to all sorts of pests.
William Baffin
I do like the roses I have growing and which are presently drenched with blossoms. The super-hardy William Baffin rose, from Canada is sporting single, large, bright red flowers. Amber Sunblaze is notable for salmon-pink blossoms on a plant whose foliage stays glossy, green, and healthy all summer long. A couple of David Austin rose blossoms look like cupfuls of pastel-colored crêpe paper.
My favorite of all the roses, one given to me as a cutting many years ago by herbalist Ann Solomon, is Rose de Rescht. At least that’s what it’s alleged to be. Rose de Rescht is supposed to have more than one bloom period each season, though, and mine has never rebloomed. Then again, mine never flowered as well as it has this year, a couple of years since I moved it to its new and more congenial surroundings.
Whether or not my Rose de Rescht really is Rose de Rescht, it’s now covered with blowsy, soft pink blossoms that send their fragrance a few feet from the bush. Everyone that smells the blossoms says something to the effect “Now that is a real rose smell.” And the rose blossomed just in time this year to provide abundant flowers for a very special wedding.

PRUNING A LILAC, DEALING WITH APHIDS

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Who would look at a lilac bush, just leaves and flowers morphed to browning seed capsules, and even prune it this time of year? I would! Pruning a couple of months ago would have cut off many blossoms before they even unfolded. Pruning now, after enjoying the blossoms, is a way to keep the shrub shapely and queue up blossoms for next year. Next year’s flowers are formed on buds this summer so we can’t wait too long to prune or there won’t be enough time for the new flower buds to develop.

My lilac has suffered years of pruning neglect (quite an admission from the author of The Pruning Book, especially as relates to a plant that looks best with annual or at least biannual pruning). Every year my lilac has grown uglier and uglier, its flowers fewer and fewer, and the task of pruning it more and more daunting. On the flip side, the plant has been harder and harder to ignore.

So this week I attacked. A scythe made quick work of clearing old daffodil foliage, and weeds from around the base of the plant. Moving on to the bush itself, the most dramatic cuts came first, with a hand saw lopping a few of the thickest stems right down at or near ground level. Other thick stems got less severe treatment. Where branching was making parts of the shrub too dense, I cut off some of the branches. Down at the base of the plant, I thinned out some young sprouts so that those that remained could develop with sufficient elbow room. I also carefully unravelled and cut back as low as could be reached some poison ivy that had insinuated itself in amongst the lilac stems.

My lilac in bloom a few years ago.
The work was slow but worth it. Like building a stone wall, pruning a neglected, old lilac is a job that can’t be rushed. Trimmed, the lilac shrub now rises up from the soil like a graceful fountain of water. Increased light within the shrub and removal of much old wood and developing seedpods should make for a good show next May.
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A friend told me that his wife was rather frantic about aphids on some of their shrubs. Yes, aphids are plant pests, but they also are so interesting. For instance, the females — which most aphids that you see are — give birth to live young that are clones of themselves. No males or sex is needed to make those babies. 

Unfettered, a single female could give rise to thousands of offspring over the course of a season, which could result in crowded conditions or having to settle for to poorer quality food. No problem. When that happens, Ms. Aphid gives birth to babies with wings so they can fly off in search of greener pastures. Come autumn, it’s time for some sex. Females then produce a few males, mating occurs, and eggs are laid that remain dormant until spring.

We’re not knee-deep in aphids, so something is keeping aphid populations in check. Cold, heat, and rain all take their toll. Aphids also have many natural predators, including fungi, lacewings, and, most familiarly, ladybird beetles. 

Outdoors, I sometimes see aphids on plants but usually just wait for them to naturally die out. Their most dramatic damage effect is the red puckering they leave on a few red currant leaves. Plants can compensate for some leaf damage; I do nothing and the red currants have always been none the worse for wear. Many pesticides are especially toxic to aphid predators and I credit much of my lack of aphid problems to my avoidance of pesticides.

But my friend said aphids were killing his shrubs. He sprayed horticultural oil, a light oil formulated to smother pests but not damage plants. That’s a reasonable and benign strategy, effective if the spray thoroughly coats the plant. Other environmentally sound sprays are insecticidal soap or — my favorite — strong blasts of water. On small plants, aphids, which mostly congregate on new growth, can be merely rubbed off with your fingers.

My friend asked about buying in some ladybird beetles. That works, if the ladybird beetles stick around. Green lacewings are another aphid predator that can be purchased. An often more effective and cheaper alternative to buying in aphid predators is to create habitats that attract them. At some points in their life cycles, many predators feed on plant nectar, which is especially abundant in small, wide-opening flowers such as cilantro, dill, coneflower, coreopsis, alyssum, goldenrod, cosmos, sunflower, and other members of the carrot or daisy family.

This year is the first year that I see no evidence of aphid attack on my red currants. My guess is that the late frosts did in the buggers.
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I’d rather not have had those frosts and had more aphids because those frosts also knocked out some developing fruits. Hardest hit were apples, Asian pears, European pears, and hardy kiwifruits. Least affected were grapes and super-hardy kiwifruits, both of which fruit on secondary buds if primary buds are killed, persimmons, pawpaws, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, and black, clove, red, pink, and white currants. A variety of plants is a good hedge against bad weather and other calamities.
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Another WORKSHOP: BACKYARD COMPOSTING. The why and the how of backyard composting, everything from designing an enclosure to what to add (and what not to add) to what can go wrong (and how to right it). Also, how to make best use of compost. Workshop will be held 9-11:30 on June 23rd at my farmden. Space is limited. Contact me for registration or other information.

BAMBOO & GARLIC GONE WILD

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Bamboo is a plant that can strike up admiration as well as terror. Right now, my planting is leaning towards terror.

Most cold hardy bamboos are so-called running types for their ability to spread via underground runners. A few hardy bamboos behave like tropical bamboos, forming neat clumps whose spread is hardly noticeable. These cold-hardy temperate kinds (Fargesia spp.) have relatively thin canes that create picturesque, delicate-looking fountains of greenery. 

But 20 years ago I wanted (and still want) bamboo with robust canes thickening to an inch or more across, a bamboo on which can climb tomato or bean plants, that I can use for making trellises, even for eating. And the grove itself, with some pruning out of crowded canes, becomes a mysterious forest.

This spring’s new growth of bamboo towering above last year’s.
Yellow grove bamboo (Phyllostachys aureosulcata) is among the hardiest of the “timber” bamboos. Within a half-hour’s drive from here, into cold hardiness Zone 6, this species grows over 20 feet tall, with 2-inch-thick canes. In this cold spot where I live, yellow grove bamboo grows only about 15 feet high, with canes just a little more than an inch across — nice, but not quite as “mysterious” or “foresty” as I had hoped. Except for recent winters, the canes of my planting have always died back to the ground so that each year the plant had to grow all new canes, something it does with much enthusiasm. I’ve measured 6 inches of growth per day for the month or so it elongates in spring!

In recent winters, my planting has held its green leaves all through winter, just like plants further south. The result is thicker and longer canes. That extra energy saved also infuses the whole planting with even more vigor — and that is what incites terror.

I had the foresight 20 years ago to hem in most of my planting with an impenetrable barrier to stop the future spread of the roots. The thick plastic barrier reaches down a couple of feet deep into the ground and is usually used to prevent tree roots from creeping beneath and heaving up nearby sidewalks.

I lacked the foresight 20 years ago to appreciate how relentlessly the roots would seek escape from said barrier. Some roots evidently briefly braved sunshine long enough to hop over the lip and then dive back into the ground, reappearing across an 8 foot strip of mown grass in among some raspberry and gooseberry plants. My plan for the latter escapees is to cut down shoots as relentlessly as they appear, and eat them. And then, close inspection of the barrier and severing of errant escapees right there should starve out the root network that has entered the garden.

I never put a barrier to the rear of my planting. There, woods have pretty much kept the spread of bamboo roots in check. But with warmer winters, less so in recent years.
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I just don’t get all the hubbub about garlic. I was recently looking at a friend’s very small vegetable garden, almost half of which was devoted to garlic. It’s not that garlic tastes bad (although in the past it was used more as medicine or for warding off witches than for eating). It’s just that the area devoted to garlic could have been devoted to asparagus, tomatoes, lettuce, or beans. Even small fruit bushes, such as gooseberries, currants, or blueberries could have used that real estate instead. 

I’d choose any of these vegetables or berries over garlic (for eating, not sorcery). Home-grown asparagus, tomatoes, lettuce, or beans taste vastly better than what you can buy. Same goes for the berries, and you can’t usually even buy gooseberries or currants, especially of the better varieties. Garlic from a store or farmer’s market tastes as good as what you can grow, and fresh-picked is not a consideration for this storage bulb.

I grow garlic as an afterthought in out of the way places. It does get its needed full sunlight and rich soil, though. In fact, around here, I spend more time weeding out garlic than planting it. Clumps sprout in my flower beds, in amongst my berry bushes, and at the base of a rose bush. Garlic does not make seeds so I can’t imagine how it gets to all these places.

I’m glad that the one place where it does not appear spontaneously is in my vegetable garden.
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RICE IN THE NORTHEAST, GARDEN GATES

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Here I am swimming in seedlings and small, potted plants sitting on shelves or the ground in the greenhouse, on my picnic table, and on the terrace. Each plant is waiting for the right time to be planted outdoors or to be moved to a bigger pot. So why would I add to the crowd by planting something as absurd as rice? Because rice tastes good and might be fun to grow.
Interest in commercial and home rice cultivation has been on the rise here in the northeast, as attested to by last year’s Second Annual Northeast Rice Conference, held in  — of all places! — Vermont. No paddies in the works here; I’m parting ways with most of my fellow growers in planning to grow rice under dryland conditions. Growing rice in flooded fields is a useful way to snuff out weeds — dryland weeds, at least — and, more importantly, in northern regions, to moderate temperatures. My planting is going to be very small, measured in square feet, so I can weed by hand, and my site is considerably warmer than anywhere in Vermont.
My planting has to be small because I’m starting with very few seeds: the variety Hayayuki, generally recommended for northern conditions and kindly shared with me by Ben Falk (www.wholesystemsdesign.com). Ben has grown rice successfully in paddies he constructed at his homestead in central Vermont.
So today I planted seeds in a seedling tray with inch square cells in each of which I planted one or two seeds. If everything goes as planned, I’ll be transplanting in a few weeks (rice does not tolerate any frost, doesn’t even like cold weather). Recommended spacing is 12 x 8” for groups of 2 to 3 plants. My garden soil is very rich so I’ll plant closer than recommended. Harvest, with a grass shear, should come in September, followed by threshing by smacking pillowcase-filled seed heads against the floor. As for dehulling the rice, that is, removing the hard coat around each kernel . . . I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Plans for a small-scale dehuller are available at http://www.savingourseeds.org/pdf/grain_dehuller.pdf. 
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Moving on to more practical matters: gates. If good fences make good neighbors, good gates make good invitations to pass through fences. The gate to my south vegetable garden is not good. It was when I built it, the sturdy frame of natural locust wood swinging either open or closed with the mere touch of a finger.
But locust wood is heavy, and that weight was the gate’s downfall, literally. For the past few years, the bottom scraped along the ground so that lifting the handle was necessary to open and close it. A five-foot span hinged at one end put too much stress on the wood.
I realized recently that the extra trouble of opening the gate and the possibility of it breaking was was limiting trips into the garden. And there’s little worse for a vegetable garden than a disincentive — be it distance, too many weeds, or a gate that’s too hard to open — to enter it.
That full five foot breadth was only necessary to let pass the occasional garden cart full of compost to spread over the beds. So why not, methinks, rebuild the gate with two half gates, one of which would be plenty wide for passing through for the almost daily planting, weeding, and/or harvesting. With less leverage, a half-width gate would experience little stress.
The locust branches of the old gate made it charming but slow to build. I built the new gate — a temporary one — out of 2 by 4s. A pintle sticking up into a hole in the bottom and a bolt sliding down through two parallel eye bolts and then into a hole in the top together make a sturdy, effective, and adjustable hinge, so each gate swings easily and, with a spring closure, shuts automatically.
Already, the garden beckons me. Beds have been layered with compost, weeds have been pulled, and today I’ll sow popcorn seeds. The only problem is that “temporary” building projects too often morph into things more permanent. Two compliments on the new gate have already started it down that road. 
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Gardenias, Good books, and Spring Freeze

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If I might brag a bit . . . It’s been just over a couple of years that, in the same breath and on these very pages, I bemoaned the loss and decided to again take up the challenge of growing gardenia. I purchased a new one, with which I now claim success. My plant is bushy with lush, glossy green leaves, nine creamy white blossoms are fully open, and buds foreshadowing more are on the way. Fragrance from each blossom is heavenly sweet.


Gardenia is a temperamental plant, ready to be attacked by scale insects, ready to drop its flower buds, and ready to let its leaves yellow and drop. For the scale insects, I sprayed the plants weekly at the end of last summer with a “horticultural oil” spray before cold weather creeping onwards ushered the plant indoors. This benign spray smothers the insects. I kept the plant on a sunny shelf next to my desk where I could keep a close eye out for the insects and when they started to appear in late winter, I sprayed the plant with Safers Soap.


I avoided leaf yellowing by using an acidic potting soil and with regular feeding using a water-soluble fertilizer, again beginning in late winter. Except for a few weeks of yellowing leaves, probably because the leaves were getting old (even evergreen leaves eventually get old, yellow, and drop), the leaves remained healthy and attached. I’ve never experienced drop of flower buds even though gardenias allegedly do so if moved to a different window or given any other slight change in conditions.
I credit most of my gardenial success to keeping the potting mix consistently moist. And, although I checked the soil often, I credit most of that consistent moisture to an automatic watering device I described two years ago. To quote myself, the device is “a porous, hollow spike, the pointed end of which gets pushed into the soil while its opposite, open end fits to a [thin] plastic tube the end of which sits in a jar of water. As the soil dries out, it sucks moisture out of the porous spike which, in turn, draws it in from the reservoir via the plastic tube.” It’s sometimes sold as a “Water Siphon” but also parades under such names as “Blumat,” “Hydrospike,” and “Ceramic Watering Probe.”
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Now is the time to get hands dirty in the garden rather than to read about gardening. Nonetheless, 3 gardening books that crossed my desk are so noteworthy that they’re worth a look even now.


Marijuana Pest and Disease Control by Ed Rosenthal might raise a few eyebrows, but if I hadn’t already done my research and had experience with scale insects on my gardenia, Ed’s book would have been most useful. Marijuana is attacked by aphids, mold, fungus gnats — that is, by many of the same pests and diseases that attack our other plants, making Ed’s book a useful general guide to common pests and diseases. Because you don’t want to be smoking poison, the controls are organic.


Moving on, everyone knows the ecological nightmare that mowing, watering and pest and weed control can make of the average lawn. One attractive way to avoid the nightmare is to make your lawn smaller and let part of it become a meadow. Imagine the crisp edge of an expanse of mown lawn rising up to a sea of wildflowers and taller growing grasses with a mown path beckoning you to come within. Catherine Zimmerman’s Urban & Suburban Meadows is one of the clearest expositions for creating a meadow. With many photos and straightforward text, she leads the reader from ground preparation to planting to maintenance, also including plant lists and sources for supplies, plants, and further information. If I didn’t already have a meadow (entered via a meandering, mown path) and didn’t already have the book, I would buy it.


And finally, for a good read, there’s Margaret Roach’s And I Shall Have Some Peace There: Trading in the Fast Lane for My Own Dirt Road, a very engaging account of how Margaret traded in her job as editorial director for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia for full-time life in her once-weekend home in rural Columbia County. The book is funny, open, and informative but, best of all, very well written. And Margaret has been a knowledgeable gardener for decades.
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Last night’s (April 29th) low of 26°F was, I hope the last freeze of this season. Hardy kiwi fruit vines awoke blackened and forlorn although I’m still not totally discounting the possibility of a crop from buds still to open. Many pear fruitlets are blackened within, dead. Apples look okay and, of course, pawpaws, berries, and persimmons are also okay. 
Vegetables are easy! Any sort of covering thrown over them provides ample protection.


The last spring frost around here is, on average, shooed out the garden gate around the middle of May so I should not be surprised if another frost sneaks back in some night in the next two weeks.

A Reel Mower, Potting Soils

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Coming out of the gate of the warmest and driest winter in decades, weather this spring has been a roller coaster ride. March had a spate of sunny days in the 70s, then temperatures plummeted to the low 20s, then the dry spell was ended with some rain, and recently temperatures have continued on the seasonably cool and cold side. Lawngrass has enjoyed the weather, and during one of the recent calms I finally got the opportunity to roll out the lawnmower.


The opportunity!? Mowing the lawn isn’t usually one of my favorite pastimes but this spring I was anxious to try out my new lawnmower. No need to clean and tighten the sparkplug, check the gas and oil, and pray for  the roar of exploding gasoline (within the engine) with this new mower. It’s a push mower, “push” as in your pushing gets it moving and turns the front reel that lops grass cleanly as the sharp blades rotate pass the fixed bar.


Push mowers have come a long way since those heavy, iron monsters of yore and my new Fiskars Reel Mower was a joy to use. So much s that I was able to do a “Tom Sawyer” on my visiting brother and his two daughters, letting them vie to see who gets to create that musical whirring of the gears accompanied by a broad fountain of grass blades flying up and out in front of the traveling mower. (He ordered one for himself when he got home.)


Using a push mower is more than just fun, of course. It’s good for the environment. A gasoline powered lawnmower pollutes as much in an hour as a car driving 250 miles; pollution from electric corded or battery powered mowers depends on how the electricity is generated. A push mower offers the opportunity for productive exercise. And reel mowers make cleaner cuts than rotary mowers so result in a healthier lawn. I highly recommend Fiskars Reel Mower.
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A few weeks ago I fingered possible blame for poor seed germination and poor seedling growth on my having substituted peat moss for coir in my potting mix. Coir is a sustainable byproduct of coconut processing; peat moss takes eons to form so is not sustainable.


I’m happy to report that I was wrong. My seeding failures, it turns out, were due to the heating pad that is meant to provide gentle bottom heat for seed germination in my cool temperature greenhouse. Instead of the desired 75°F., the thermostat for that heating pad had been inadvertently turned up to 100°F (probably by me)!


Gardening brings into play the interaction of all sorts of physical, chemical, and biological system; the interactions are complex and this complexity makes it hard to ascribe cause and effect. But gardeners too often do this, just as I did (with reservations) relating coir in my potting mix to poor seed germination and seedling growth. 


To really find out if “A” causes “B,” (for instance, that coir is bad for seed germination) you have to control as many variables as possible (same seeds, same light, same watering, etc.) and then apply “A” to only half of your plants. It’s often not all that easy to control other variables. And anyway, if you start out believing that something — compost tea, for example — is going to make your plants grow better, you’ll be wont to not use it on all your plants. And then, if the summer happens to be sunny and warm with timely rains, you still might be inclined to tout that something — the compost tea, in this example — for good growth.
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My coir blunder did have the benefit of making me more objective about what makes a good potting soil. Many years ago, after much research, I came up with my own not-secret potting soil recipe of equal parts compost, garden soil, peat, and perlite with some soybean meal and kelp thrown in for extra nitrogen and micronutrients. Coir, in my last mix, substituted for all the peat.
After thinking that coir ruined my mix, I made up a batch of potting soil using 3 parts leaf mold (thoroughly rotted leaves) with one part perlite, again with some soybean meal and kelp. And then I actually did an experiment, planting half my lettuce seedlings in the leaf mold mix and the other half in the coir mix. Once removed from the overheated heating pad, seedlings grew equally well in either potting mix.


Which is to say, with reference to religions or potting soils: Many roads lead to the mountaintop. A good potting mix needs to drain well, hold moisture, provide nutrients, and provide a biologically friendly environment for roots. Perlite, sand or vermiculite can provide good drainage. Compost, peat, coir, or leaf mold help hold moisture and provide a biologically friendly root environment. Soil, compost, leaf mold, soybean meal, and kelp can provide nutrients. Various combinations of these ingredients make equally good potting mixes.

Ramps, Colonial Williamsburg

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A friend of a friend who was helping me turn compost stopped by the farmden and presented me with a fistful of greenery. Ramps. Although I’ve known of ramps and ramp festivals  for years, the plant never appealed to me. I foolishly figured it was one of those edibles whose main appeal was their wildness rather than their flavor.


But ramps right in your face demand attention, so I cooked and ate them that evening. The flavor was delicious, yes, onion-y but not with an overpowering aroma that’s often advertised as oozing from the bodies of attendees at ramps festivals; and they were sweet. As I have done with many other wild edibles — blueberries, pawpaws, and persimmons, to name a few — I right away wanted to cultivate ramps, both for the challenge and to have them available close at hand. The friend of the friend said she would bring me some rooted plants in a couple of days, which she kindly did.


The starting point in cultivating any wild plant is, of course, to look to its natural habitat. Ramps grow in moist, humus-y soil in the dappled shade of deciduous forests. To get my ramps off to a good start, I decided to grow them for a season in pots. There, soil, moisture, and light could be adjusted as needed. The potting mix was leaf mold (just like the forest floor) with some perlite for drainage (a necessity for roots in the confines of a pot). I set the pots on a capillary mat which, with one end dangling in a reservoir of water, would keep the potting mix consistently moist. For the couple of weeks that the roots are exploring new soil, moisture loss through the leaves will be minimized by keeping the plants in deep shade. After a couple of weeks, the plants should be ready for dappled sunlight.


Ramps have a short season. The green leaves emerge in spring, then die back as days grow longer and temperatures rise in June. After the leaves die back, seedstalks emerge.


Many wild plants that naturally grow in shade actually grow even better in full sun — as long as their roots have adequate moisture. This is true for pawpaw and blueberry, and perhaps is also the case with ramps. I have enough plants to, next year, try different exposures and see which gives best results.


The goal is to eventually plant out the ramps so they can multiply as the bulbs divide to form clumps and as the plants self-seed. The shaded, wet soil beneath my persimmon trees is one place I have in mind that might provide just right conditions for “ramp-ant” growth.
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Dateline Colonial Williamsburg: A magical place I first visited over 50 years ago, and here I am today for a lecture at their 66th Garden Symposium. (No lecture was involved at my first visit; I hadn’t even been talking for that long!) Strolling in and out of the many gardens — from the functional “four-square” kitchen garden behind Shield’s Tavern to the maze and clipped evergreens of the Governor’s Palace — Colonial Williamsburg is a reminder of America’s gardening heritage. 


What goes around comes around. Colonists, even those with small, village plots of land, grew at least some of their own vegetables and fruits. They had to. Today, even with the  panoply of fresh produce that lines our market shelves, more and more of us are planting at least some fruits and vegetables that we can reach for right outside our back doors. Now we’re doing it to avoid commercial food products too often tainted with pathogens or pesticides, to avoid the environment toll of a tomato or a head of lettuce shipped hundreds of miles, and because we want to eat fruits and vegetables with real flavor.
We’re now even using some gardening techniques of those colonial gardeners. Tunnels of wire draped with clear plastic have replaced wooden hoops of yore covered with oiled paper held in place with horsehide glue. Colonial gardeners covered other hoops with cheesecloth to screen out insects; I do likewise, using spun-bonded polyester, a more modern mesh material, to keep flea beetles off eggplants. Raising beds for better drainage and early soil warming were popular then and now.


The formality of Williamsburg’s symmetrical ornamental plantings have their place now also. Especially if today we keep those formal planting to a size that can be maintained with the same meticulousness as modern Williamsburg’s skilled gardeners. My only objection to all that symmetry and evergreens is that, along with the brick buildings, the formal plantings take on a certain sameness; it looks pretty but makes it easy to lose your way.


Okay, I’ll admit it; Williamsburg did make me jealous. Of their towering southern magnolia trees with large, leathery, glossy leaves. Such trees either don’t thrive or don’t survive this far north. (The cold limit for hardier varieties, such as Bracken’s Brown Beauty, is 5-10° F.) I also was envious of the many fig trees and pomegranate bushes growing freely outdoors in ornamental and vegetable gardens. I also grow these plants, but in the greenhouse or large pots.


Colonial Williamsburg is an enchanting place. The gardens. The quiet of car-less streets. The subdued light at night. The chirping birds on spring mornings, a prominent memory from my first visit and each visit since. With Spring’s early arrival throughout the East, an added plus was the heavy blooms of black locust trees that suffused the air with their intoxicatingly sweet fragrance. I should experience that pleasure again, back home at the farmden, within a couple of weeks.

Propagating Cuttings, Quackgrass

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Ten weeks ago I wrote of the “pot in pot” propagator that I was using to root dormant fig and mulberry cuttings. The propagator is nothing more than a small, porous, clay pot filled with water and with its drainage hole plugged that I plunged into the mix of peat moss and perlite that filled the larger pot. Water drawn out of the small pot keeps the peat-perlite rooting mix consistently moist.
The cuttings have sprouted with enthusiasm. And when I lift out the small pot, I see roots running around in the moist rooting mix, so I separated the plants and potted them up individually.
No need to put the propagator away now that plants are no longer dormant. With a simple covering to maintain humidity, the propagator also works well for so-called softwood cuttings, that is, cuttings that start out with leafy shoots. Technically, today’s new cuttings aren’t “softwood” because they haven’t had time yet to begin much growth. They could more accurately be called “leafy.” Their first leaves have unfolded and shoots (the “softwood”) are soon to appear. Whether “leafy” or “softwood,” such cuttings need high humidity to keep leaves from wilting until roots develop.
The propagator conversion involves nothing more than poking four sticks into the rooting medium equally spaced around its outer edge, and then draping a plastic bag over the sticks. Bright light will keep the green leaves feeding the cuttings. Direct light is a no-no because it would cook the cuttings in their high humidity chamber.
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I suppose I could be nostalgic about the quackgrass (Elytrigia repens, and also commonly called witchgrass and couchgrass) stealthily making inroads into my various gardens. After all, quackgrass was my first serious weed problem in my first real garden, a vegetable plot of about 500 square feet in Madison, Wisconsin. At the time, the lakes in Madison were suffering their own weed problems, the result of “fertilization” of the water with runoff from over-fertilized, residential lawns surrounding the lakes. Giant beaters plied the lakes in those days, chopping the lake weeds which were then harvested onto boats and then trucks for disposal. “Weed-free mulch!,” thought I. 
I convinced a lake weed crew to dump a truckload of those water weeds onto my front lawn. I spread the mulch quickly — I had to because the soggy mass started rotting within a few hours to what was beginning to smell like a a pig farm. Laying pitchfork after pitchfork of the stuff between rows of vegetables spelled quick death to the quackgrass.
My gardens now are far more extensive, no straight expanses beckon easy mulching, and water weeds are not in the offing. So for now, I am attacking quackgrass mano a mano, digging and pulling out every last shoot that I can find along with attached, running roots — no easy task among perennial flowers. Where I can, I’ll spread a few sheets of newspaper and top that with mulch. Now is the time to attack because in about a month, new runners will begin to push further afield just beneath the soil surface. The pointed ends of these runners are sharp enough to push right through a potato.
Quackgrass is so widespread that you’d think it was native. Not so. But it has been here for a long time, coming over from Europe with the first colonists. And it’s not all bad: It is good forage for horses and cows, and has been used in herbal medicine especially for kidney ailments. “It openeth the stoppings of the liver,” according to 16th century herbalist John Gerard. Still, it’s not welcome in my garden.
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I’ve got one more deathly arrow in my quiver with which to fight off quackgrass, but it must wait until the weather warms. Vinegar. Household strength vinegar sprayed on the plants kills the leaves; repeatedly killing the leaves eventually kills the plants. I boost vinegar’s efficacy by pouring 1 tablespoon of Ivory dish detergent and 2 tablespoons of canola oil into each gallon of vinegar. Vinegar works best when temperatures rise above 70° F.

Worst Weed, Sugar Maple, and Lithops

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Last week’s highlighting of quackgrass as this year’s worst weed was a passion judgement; the quackgrass seemed frighteningly abundant. But now that I’ve gotten the upper hand on it, I realize that quackgrass is lurking in the wings every year, ready to creep into any overlooked edge of the garden. So let’s glance down at two newbies vying for the worst-weed title this year: purple deadnettle (Lamium purpureum) and its cousin, henbit (L. amplexicaule).
Purple deadnettle or henbit, both with creeping stems, rounded leaves, and purplish flowers, could easily be mistaken for creeping Charlie (Glechoma hederaceae), a weed that’s been slinking around my place for years. Purple deadnettle’s upper leaves are purplish and more triangular than its cousin’s. 
Creeping Charlie is enjoyable to rip out of the ground. If you grab the stems just right and before they have rooted too strongly, you end up with a large mass of spreading stems in your fist. Not so for purple deadnettle or henbit. They don’t really creep along the ground; they grow just high enough to flop down without rooting where they touch down. But grab their stem and they break off, leaving the roots and lower pieces of stem intact and ready to start growing again. 
Creeping Charlie
Creeping Charlie seems mostly to creep into garden areas at the edges. Purple deadnettle and henbit spread very effectively by seeds, so clumps of the plants appear suddenly in the middle of the garden. They’re also sly in sprouting very late in the season, after everything has been harvested and cleaned up, at a time when I feel that the garden no longer needs my undivided attention.
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As long as we’re on weeds, I’m getting reports of another weed, one that’s not in my garden but is turning up in hordes in some other gardens. The weed: maple. Yes, “maple,” as in maple trees, albeit 2 inch high maple trees — for now, at least. 
These seedlings are probably, and hopefully, sugar maples (Acer saccharum). Another possibility is Norway maple (A. platinoides), generally disdained for creating shade too dense to allow grass or anything else to grow, for encroaching on and crowding out sugar maples, and for having ho-hum or downright unpleasant autumn leaf color. 
Yet another possibility is striped maple (A. pennsylvanicum), so-called for the prominent white stripes on its greenish bark. The seedlings are unlikely to be those of either Norway or striped maple unless some trees of either are nearby.
So what’s wrong with some sugar maple seedlings? Nothing, unless you don’t want maple trees there. The seedlings could be carefully transplanted to a more agreeable location. Or you could take a hoe, and hoe-hoe them out.
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With all the activity outdoors, it’s easy to overlook what might be happening, plantwise, indoors. Take, for instance, what looked like two stones sitting pressed together in a small flowerpot at one of my sunny windows. Those two stones have separated and another set of “stones” is pushing up through the widening cleft.
The plant is one of the appropriately called “living stones,” a translation of the genus name Lithops, which the plants are also called. The stone-like appearance of these plants — they also are gray in color — disguise them in their natural stony habitats in South Africa. Their cover is blown once a year when the plants flower.
The last time my plants flowered was in December. For now, it looks like the cleft will yield only more “stones.”

Winter cold, Winter chill, & Late frosts

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I’ve tended the same plot of ground for about 30 years, and this is the oddest winter and spring yet. 
In almost every year past, the nearby Wallkill River has swelled its banks in early April, then overflowed for a few days to stop traffic on my road. This year, the water level is so low that I’m hoping for some rain. Well, almost hoping for rain. I’m still recovering from last August and September’s record rains that made waterfront property of my home and back gardens.
Apple buds in “tight cluster”
If rainfall hasn’t been whacky enough, just look at temperatures over the past few months and especially over the past few weeks. Here in the Hudson Valley — throughout the Northeast, in fact — winter temperatures have been the warmest in decades. In years past, temperatures plummeted each winter to minus 25 degrees F, less so in more recent years. This winter, temperatures here never went below a balmy pus 5 degrees F. Plants know it: Bamboo (Phyllostachys aureosculcata) stayed green all winter, Chester thornless blackberry was unscathed by cold, and trifoliate orange (a citrus relative!) seedlings did not die back at all. A few more winters like this and I’ll be tempted to try growing southern magnolia (‘Bracken’s Brown Beauty’ is one of the hardiest) and camelias (Sasanqua camellias, which bloom in autumn, are the hardiest), which are among the few plants for which I bemoan living this far north.
If the relatively balmy winter was not enough wackiness, how about early spring temperatures? March’s string of daily temperatures in the 70s coaxed blossoms from such plants as Nanking cherry, saucer magnolia (Magnolia soulangiana), and forsythia more than 3 weeks ahead of schedule. Towards the end of March, apple buds were swelling and pears almost popped open.
The average date of the last spring frost around here is May 15th. Which is to say is that I’m worried about my fruit crop this year, a worry that has just been propped up the the forecast for a low of 24 degrees F. for tonight (March 26).
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Whether or not cold kills a fruit bud depends on the depth of cold as well as the speed and stage of bud development. Recent warm weather speeded up bud development, making buds more susceptible to cold.
Bud development on fruit plants is divided into self-descriptive stages: apples, for example, go from silver tip to green tip to half-inch green, tight cluster, first pink, full pink, first bloom, full bloom, and, finally, post bloom. Charts are available(http://www.hrt.msu.edu/faculty/langg/Fruit_Bud_Hardiness.html) that give approximate killing temperatures for each stage. For apples, the critical temperatures for the various stages are, respectively, about 15, 18, 23, 27, 28, 28, 28, 28, and 28 degrees F .
So fruit might still be in the offing even after tonight’s predicted freeze. But there’s still many weeks to go before mid-May! What to do?
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The easiest course to follow now is to just relax and hope for the best. There’s always next year.
The green center of this cut bud shows that it’s still in good shape.
My trees, even my older ones, are mostly dwarf in size, made that way by special rootstocks. In year’s past, I’ve scurried outside to drape blankets and other coverings over my trees. Coverings add a few degrees of cold protection, mostly for the kinds of freezes (radiation freezes) that occur on still nights with clear skies, by bouncing back downwards the heat that’s being radiated from the earth skyward. I’ve got too many trees to cover.
Someone asked me about sprinkling water on their fruit plants to fend off cold. That works, and is sometimes done by commercial growers, if water is applied continuously until it finally melts. The water releases heat of fusion as it freezes. Of course, all that water and ice can lead to limb breakage and saturated soil.
Given my number of fruit plants, I’m going with option number one. Well, almost. I have one peach tree, now in full bloom. It’s growing in a pot. Into the garage it will go, protected from cold.
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The next morning: As predicted, temperatures dropped to 24 degrees F. All plant seem happy but there are still weeks of potential frost damage in the offing. 
‘Surround’ controls insects and delays bloom — I hope.
My new tack is to slow bud development. This afternoon I sprayed fruit trees, bushes, and vines with ‘Surround,’ which is nothing more than kaolin clay, an effective organic insecticide. The ghostly white coating on the stems should reflect sun’s rays, keeping branches and buds cooler to delay flower bud development.
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Two gardening workshops in the offing:
On April 22nd, I’ll be hold ing a pruning workshop, covering the why, when, with what, and how of pruning.
On April 28th, I’ll be holding a grafting workshop, covering the how, why, and when of grafting. In addition to a hands-on demonstration, participants will graft and take home their own pear tree.
Both workshops will be held at my “farmden,” run from 2-5:50 pm, and cost $55. Pre-registration is necessary. For information o registration, 845-255-0417 or