A new book: Grow Fruit Naturally, pear excerpt

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Now is a good time to plan and plant for some home-grown fruits — pears, for example. Here’s an excerpt from the pear section of my NEW book, Grow Fruit Naturally (Taunton Press, 2012, signed copies available from my website, listed at right):
My ‘Yoinashi’ Asian pear, now in bloom
Pears come in two “flavors:” European and Asian. European pears, which are most familiar in American markets, are typically buttery, sweet, and richly aromatic — and pear-shaped. Asian pears are typically round with crisp flesh that, when you take a bite, explode in your mouth with juice. Their flavors are sweet with a delicate, floral aroma and sometimes a hint of walnut or butterscotch. Both kinds of pears have been cultivated for thousands of years, and within each type exists thousands of varieties.
Pears of either “flavor” are easy to grow. But growing and ripening a European pear to its highest state of perfection is an art. The best one I ever tasted was at a horticultural conference at the venerable East Malling Research Station in England. At the conclusion of the conference we were led into an elegant, large, wood-paneled room, up the center of which ran a hulking, oak banquet table on which sat nothing more than a few bowls of perfectly ripened ‘Comice’ pears, ours for the tasting. I reached for a pear, took a bite, and quickly had to make my way to the conveniently opened French doors at the far end of the room to keep the ambrosial juice dripping with each bite from marring the staid surroundings.
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Cultivation of European and Asian pears is essentially the same, with just a few subtle differences. Both need full sun and soil that is at least reasonably well-drained. Pears can tolerate wetter soils than many other tree fruits. Among my favorite varieties are ‘Magness’ and ‘Seckel’ European pears, and ‘Yoinashi’ and ‘Chojuro’ Asian pears.
A pear spur
Once a tree reaches bearing age, prune lightly every year. Completely remove some  of the overly vigorous stems, which mostly originate higher in the tree, and merely shorten weak twigs, which mostly arise lower in the tree. Fruits are borne on spurs, which are short stems elongating only a half-inch each year. Periodically, shorten old branches more aggressively to stimulate growth of new shoots and spurs. Asian pears need more aggressive pruning than European pears, although European pears, especially, are prone to growing many overly vigorous, vertical growing shoots, which shade the plant, are not fruitful, and are more prone to disease. Cut them back when pruning or, even better, grab them in your hand and rip them off with a quick downward jerk while they are still green and growing during summer.
Each flower bud on a pear tree opens to a cluster of flowers, so pear trees, left to their own devices, usually will overbear. Thin fruits to about 5 in. apart. Thinning Asian pears is very important, spelling the difference between a harvest of ho-hum pears and ones that elicit a “wow!”
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In most yards, pears can be grown successfully without any attention to pest control. Occasionally, a few pests warrant attention and action.
The main bugaboo in pear growing is the bacterial disease fire blight, readily identified by stems whose ends curl in shepherd’s crooks with seemingly singed, blackened leaves still attached. Diligent pruning out of blighted stems, cutting a few inches below damage, keeps the disease in check. Fire blight has never appeared on any of my more than a dozen trees.
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Now for the reward: harvest. Asian pears are precocious, sometimes fruiting in their third season, while European pears are slower to come into bearing. 
First, the easy harvest. Asian pears. Harvest them when they are fully colored and detach easily when you roll them upward with a twist. Taste is the final test: If flavor is not up to snuff, let the fruits hang longer.
European pears must be harvested underripe. Left to fully ripen on the tree, the flesh is brown mush. The fruit must, however, be mature before it is picked and the first clue to fruit maturity is a subtle lightening of the skin’s background color. Look more closely, at the lenticels, or raised pores on the skin; they will become brown and corky at harvest time. Lift and twist the fruit. If the stalk separates easily from the stem, the fruits are ready for harvest.
‘Magness’ pear – mmmm, one of the best!
You’re not yet in pear heaven. European pears need to be kept cool for awhile — a few days for early ripening varieties, a few weeks for late ripening varieties — before they can begin ripening. Keep them cool longer if you intend to store them.
Take some pears out of cold storage a few days before you want them for eating and put them in a cool room. They are ready to enjoy when they give slightly with pressure from your finger near the stem end. If you’ve mastered the art of pear growing, harvesting, and ripening, your reward is fruits that are neither “sleepy” nor the other extreme, “grassy,” but juicy and sweet with characteristic aromas that might include varying proportions of almond, rose, honey, and musk. Still, to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.” But what sensuous ten minutes!
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Perry is fermented pear juice, an old-fashioned beverage whose origin lies in France but reached its heyday in 16th and 17th century England. The juice was not your mother’s – or grandmother’s – pear juice. Pears for perry, a different species from European or Asian pears, are mostly too astringent for fresh eating. They’re also very long-lived: an avenue of perry pears planted in England in 1710 were reportedly still alive and fruitful in the mid-20th century. 
Perry is made like hard cider, except that perry pears need to sit for a few days after harvest for their flavors to develop. And again, after crushing, the pomace needs to sit for about a day to reduce the tannins. The end product is quite different from cider because perry pears have more fermentable and nonfermentable sugars, more citric acid, and different kinds of tannins. And because, of course, the raw material is pears.
Traditionally, perry has been a very variable product, reflecting what varieties of perry pears went into the mix, how the mix was fermented, how the fruits were grown, and the vagaries of a particular season. The drink was very much a home- or farm-made beverage, varying as much in alcohol concentration as in flavor. After experiencing a lapse in interest and various attempts to industrialize the product in the 20th century, perry is undergoing a renaissance.
Part of that renaissance lies in the re-discovery of some of the traditional perry pear varieties. ‘Arlingham Squash’, ‘Green Horse’, ‘Moorcroft’, ‘Rock’, and ‘Taynton Squash’ are among the varieties that have contributed to vintage quality perries for over three centuries. One problem with these old varieties is that their nomenclature is as muddled as the finished product can be in some years. Hundred of names exist for a much less number of varieties. Which isn’t all bad, because some of those names are worth having just because: ‘Mumblehead’, ‘Merrylegs’, ‘Devildrink’, ‘Lumberskull’, and, the longest one on record, ‘A drop of that which hangs over the wall’.
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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 or registration, contact me at garden@leereich dot com.

Planting Dates

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A few weeks ago I wrote of the earliness of the season, as evidenced by one of the earliest of the early bloomers, witchhazel. It was already in bloom at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, and the large bush at the front corner of my house has also since come into bloom. A reader, writing from  where temperatures are colder than in my garden, wrote to tell me that he has a witchhazel that started blooming in January! I don’t doubt it.

Witchhazel can mean any one of a few species: Japanese witchhazel (Hamamelis japonica), Chinese witchhazel (H. mollis), vernal witchhazel (H. vernalis), and H. X intermedia, the last of which includes hybrids of the Japanese and Chinese species. Depending on site, species, and variety, the strappy petals might unfold sometime from late fall right into spring. The reader’s plant, the variety, Jelena, at his site probably bloomed earlier than usual this winter. I grow the variety Arnold’s Promise.
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Quoting Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of” . . . planting, of course. This guy’s thoughts, at least. And especially this year, with spring sprung so early, for now at least. March is a capricious month, with a winter reminder of snow not an impossibility before the month is out.


It was over a week ago that I was visiting Guy Jones’ nearby Blooming Hill Farm and he innocently mentioned to me that he had already sown some lettuce, spinach, and other hardy greens in his fields. Already they were sprouting.


I usually plant by the calendar, with early April being my greens-sowing date. The 70 degree, sunny weather the day after my visit with Guy got the better of me. Out came packets of seeds, a trowel, and a garden rake. I carved four parallel, approximately equally spaced furrows down each of two beds, and into them sprinkled Buttercrunch, Black Seeded Simpson, and Majestic Red lettuce, arugula, and Joy Chen baby bok choy. Covered with soil then firmed with the garden rake, the seeds have all they need to begin sprouting and growing. 
Continued warmth and some water will make things happen. 
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I roll my eyes whenever someone tells me that the time to plant peas is on St. Patrick’s Day. Put simply, a gardener in Austin, Minnesota might need a pickaxe with which to plant peas on St. Patrick’s Day while a gardener Sarasota, Florida would need a time machine. Fall would have been the time for planting for the Floridian.


Peas enjoy — no, need — cool weather to thrive, which is one reason for planting them early. You want them up, bearing, and then cleared away before hot weather sets in. Heat is not a concern in very northern or coastal regions where summers never get very hot; in such places, peas can even be sown in summer for an autumn harvest.


But back to St. Patrick’s day: That partial myth probably got started because St. Patty’s is the perfect time for planting peas in Ireland. Except far enough south where peas are seeded in autumn for a winter harvest, the correct time to plant peas is when the ground has warmed enough so that the seeds sprout, rather than rot, when they hit the dirt. Pea seeds sprout at about 40 degrees F so if you really want to know when to plant them, stick a thermometer in the ground and wait for that temperature.


  Another way to know when to plant peas is by looking around at what’s blooming. Perennial woody and herbaceous plants are cued into seasonal temperature trends. I used to use forsythia bloom time as my prompt to sow peas but realized for the past few years that those blooms open at about the last, rather than the first, date for pea planting. Just about everybody grows crocus and this little flower is up and out of the ground, and spreading its pretty petals, about when the soil temperature hits that 40 degree mark.


Usually I just play the averages and plant peas on April 1st. But the climate has been a-changin’. I see that my crocuses are up. Hmmm. Just to make sure, I took the temperature of the soil and it’s almost 50 degrees F.  Breaking tradition (mine), I planted peas today. This year, peas on St. Patrick’s Day is the right time for pea planting both here and in Ireland.

Coir, A Substitute for Peat

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My kitchen isn’t filled with the fragrance and beauty of blooming daffodils, and I have no one to blame but — no, not myself, but — the local store where I bought the bulb last autumn. How could I have resisted? Sitting right by the checkout counter of the store was a bucket full of bulbs, each bulb only one dollar and having the makings of fragrance and beauty already locked within.
Yes, “already locked within.” Spring bulbs’ flowers are initiated in the growing season before the flowers appear. The key to unlocking the pleasures lurking within most spring bulbs is cold temperatures. A period of cold weather lets these bulbs know that winter is over and it’s all right to awaken and blossom. Exposure to cold happens naturally outdoors, with the flowers appearing in spring. 
When “forcing” bulbs for early bloom, you trick the bulbs into thinking that winter is over by exposing them to the requisite amount of cold, which varies for different kinds of bulbs. Brought indoors in winter to warmer temperatures, they can then blossom out of season.
The bulb that I bought was a “paperwhite” daffodil, a species (Narcissus tazzeta) that originated in warmer regions of the western Asia. In those warm regions, paperwhites evolved to flower without needing to experience winter cold. So buy one of these bulbs in autumn, pot it up or put its base in water, and bingo, flowers soon appear.
Except for the paperwhite that I purchased. That bulb just kept growing leaves, an indication that last year’s growing conditions were not good enough — insufficient light, fertility, or water perhaps — for the bulb to divert energy into making a flower bud.
The present bulb is the second one I got from the same bin this past autumn. After the first one showed no sign of flowers, I went back to the store, explained why, as long as the bulb grows, it should make a flower, and received a second one free of charge. 
I figured the first bad bulb was an aberration. It wasn’t. I’ve been watching leaf after leaf unfurl on the second dud for weeks and weeks.
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In an effort to make my farmdening even more sustainable, I’m swearing off peat moss, or hoping to. Peat moss is the partially decomposed remains of plants, mostly sphagnum species. In the garden or farmden, peat moss is very useful for improving soil aeration, and water and nutrient retention. Mostly, these benefits are put to use in potting soils to help roots in their rather limited growing space. My home-made potting mix, which I’ve made for over 30 years, is 1/4 by volume peat moss (the other 1/4s comprised of garden soil, perlite, and compost, and a bit of soybean meal and kelp meal for added nutrients).
Use of peat is unsustainable because its mining outstrips its rate of formation. Peat accumulation can occur at a snail’s pace: an inch or so per thousand years. Peat develops under boggy conditions and to mine it, the bog must be first drained. Air replaces the water and the result is that some of the carbon stored in peat is oxidized to carbon dioxide. And we all know what that does. As a final blow to sustainability, draining and mining peat bogs upsets its unique ecological habitats.
So must gardening and farmdening, both potentially sustainable practices for providing local food that can to be grown with minimal environmental disruption, be wedded to the use of peat moss? Not necessarily.
Other organic materials, such as compost and leaf mold, can fulfill the same functions as peat moss in potting mixes. They have the further advantages of being local and richer in plant food than peat moss. They have the disadvantages that you have to make the stuff, that planning is needed because you have to gather the materials and wait for them to “cook,” and that the final product may not always be consistently the same.
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A consistent, commercial peat substitute coming down the pike is coir, a renewable byproduct of coconut processing with characteristics very similar to peat moss. I’ve experimented occasionally with coir over the years and it seemed to work well enough. However, seedlings planted in a recent batch containing coir aren’t thriving.
Anytime a component of a potting mix is changed, changes might also be needed in watering regime or fertilization. My guess is that watering is the problem since my potting mix has plenty of nutrients from the compost and soybean meal, and the symptoms — poor growth and leaves wrinkly but not off-color — don’t indicate any nutrient deficiency. The symptoms seem more like those due to poor root growth, possibly from excessive moisture. Or perhaps the soil or compost had some weak root pathogen that’s getting the upper hand.
I need to sleuth out this problem soon because I’m about to make a large sowing of cabbage and its kin as well as peppers and eggplants. On the plus side, all this is some of what makes gardening so interesting.
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Any gardening questions? Email them to me at garden@leereich.com and I’ll try answering them directly or in this column. Come visit my garden at www.leereich.blogspot.com.

HINTS OF SPRING – IN MY BASEMENT!

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Hints of spring are evident even in the dark corners of my barely heated basement. There, buds of potted roses and pomegranate plants are starting to sprout. Some gardeners — including me — overwinter potted figs in such places and their early sprouting also can cause concern. So far, only a couple of pomegranates and roses are all that have sprouted from among the 20 or so plants in my basement.

And what are all those plants doing sitting down in my basement? Some, including the pomegranates, figs, and black mulberries, would shrivel up and die from our usual winter cold. The plants are in pots that each autumn are I carry downstairs from outside after their leaves have dropped. Other plants in the basement menagerie are normally cold-hardy, except that they are in decorative pots within which roots, which are not nearly as cold hardy as plant stems, would freeze to death if left outdoors. Larger or better insulated pots would offer roots more protection from cold.

The problem with early sprouting in my basement is that there’s little light down there. New stems on the roses are pale, stretched out, and tender “etiolated). When the plants can finally be moved outdoors, those sprouts, unaccustomed to bright light and wind, will dry out and die. If the plant has not invested too much energy in the sprouts, new sprouts can develop. Ideal conditions, for now, would be cool temperatures and the brightest possible light — preferably before the new sprouts appeared.
The pomegranates are special varieties so they get first-class treatment: into the greenhouse they go, even though space there is at a premium. The pomegranate buds were just unfolding so the bright light should not burn them.

The roses are more cold-hardy and not so special; they went into the garage where there is some light and, more importantly, it’s a lot colder than the basement. The goal is to hold back growth as long as possible while letting some light fall on what sprouts slowly develop.
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The figs in the basement aren’t yet acting like it’s spring. The buds are swelling slightly but are otherwise still folded closed. The goal is to keep them that way as long as possible with minimal watering. 

It’s still too cold in the garage for these plants, whose stems tolerate temperatures down in the ‘teens. Their roots, though, like those of other plants, would be less cold-hardy. I may end up moving the plants in and out of the garage, a sheltered nook of the terrace, and the mud room as temperatures fluctuate in coming weeks. Or perhaps I can find space for them in the greenhouse.

By April, everything in the basement should be fit to face the great outdoors.
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Easiest to care for among the subtropical plants in the basement are the mulberries. Anyone who is familiar with mulberries might wonder why I would coddle them in pots in my basement. These mulberries aren’t the run-of-the-mill mulberries that sprout just about everywhere outdoors and bear good-enough tasting fruit that is a bit too cloying.

No, in my basement is a plant of the most delectable black mulberry, Morus nigra, a  species not cold-hardy outdoors here. To my taste, black mulberry — which the black-colored fruits you see around here are not — is perhaps the most flavorful of ALL fruits. Each fruit, although the size of a nickel, packs such a whollop of flavor, a congenial mix of sweetness and tartness, that you’d think it came from a fruit the size of an apple.

Two other mulberries down in the basement are there because I’m not yet sure just how cold-hardy they are and because, if cold-hardy, I still have to figure out where to plant them. Gerardi Dwarf is possibly a variety of white mulberry (M. alba), a very variable Asian species well-established in eastern U.S. and often bearing black-colored fruits also. (This variety is sometimes listed as Morus macroura.) Whitman Farms (www.whitmannfarms.com), where I got my plant, states that the fruit of this particular variety is almost as good as black mulberry, the species, and the plant grows only 6 feet high, which makes picking and protecting from birds easy.
The other plant, Kokuso mulberry (M. latifolia) is supposed to be very cold-hardy and, as rumored on the fruit “grapevine,” very tasty. The plant is semi-dwarf and the  fruit, like the others, is dark.

The thing that makes all these mulberries easy is that they are late to awaken in spring. Mulberry’s generic name, Morus, comes from the Latin word mora, meaning delay. This sluggish start in the spring usually saves mulberry flowers from being nipped by late spring frosts, which makes mulberries bear very reliably and, as described in Fruit and Its Cultivation (1919) by Thomas William Sanders, “the wisest of trees.”

SEED LONGEVITY

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Watching tiny, green leaves push up through the soil never ceases to amaze me, even after watching it happen for decades. And it’s all the more amazing with certain seeds, such as onions. It must be that I was scarred years ago by having a difficult time getting them to germinate. Well, I sowed them in the greenhouse a couple of weeks ago and they’re up and growing strongly. Most of them, at least.
My failure with onions years ago was due to old seed, and old for onion seed means anything more than a year old. Lettuce seed, in contrast, is one of the longest-lived of vegetable seeds and keeps up to 6 years. Here’s the life expectancy for other common vegetable seeds: 5 years for cucumber, endive, muskmelon, and radish; 4 years for beet, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, chard, eggplant, kale, mustard, pumpkin, tomato, turnip, and watermelon; 3 years for bean, broccoli, carrot, Chinese cabbage, pea, and spinach; 2 years for sweet corn, leek, okra, and pepper; and, along with onion, 1 year for parsley and parsnip. Under poor storage conditions — moist and warm, like my garage in summer — longevity is decreased.
Still, it seemed like such a shame to throw away good onion seed only a year old. So, in the seed flat a couple of weeks ago, a sowed one row of one-year-old onion seed alongside the rows of fresh onion seeds (and one row of leeks).
Confirmed: onion seed isn’t worth sowing after one year. In the seed flat are five neat rows of narrow, green sprouts and one barren row.
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Few seeds have as short a life as onion. More astounding is the longevity of some seeds, such as the 10,000 year old lupine seed that germinated after being taken out of a leming burrow in the Yukon permafrost. Just think: This same species was up and growing when humans first crossed the Bering Land Bridge, and saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths may have brushed up against its leaves. Except that the story of the 10,000 year old lupine seed turned out to be apocryphal, as confirmed by radiocarbon dating.
The record for seed longevity is, in fact, 2,000 years and held by a date palm grown from seed recovered from an ancient fortress in Israel. But a recent discovery, once confirmed, will break that record by a long shot.
A kind of campion seed (Silene stenophylla) found buried, this time in a squirrel burrow, in Siberian tundra could very well be 32,000 years old. The seed has been grown into a charming, white-flowered plant.
Some coaxing was needed to get that original, 32,000 year old seed to sprout. A few cells, removed from the placenta, were grown under sterile conditions on a specially concocted growth medium. Once cells had multiplied sufficiently, the growing medium was altered to induce leaves, stems, and roots, and eventually the plants were robust enough to be planted in soil. The plant flowered and set seed, which germinated readily to produce more seedlings.
I wonder what seed has the shortest longevity. It’s not onion. Seeds in the family Tillandsioideae, related to pineapple, probably hold the record, with a viability of 4-6 weeks.
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BIOCHAR & FORCING BULBS

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  Hot off the press!!! My new book, Grow Fruit Naturally: A Hands-On Guide to Luscious, Homegrown Fruit (The Taunton Press). The book for anyone who wants to pick luscious fruit right from their 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. Available (signed copies) at https://leereich.com/books.html.
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Gardening’s newest wunderkind is biochar, touted as being able to preserve soil fertility almost indefinitely while, at the same time, making a dent in carbon dioxide production that leads to global warming. Biochar’s origins go deep into the Amazon, where soils are naturally low in fertility. There, explorers recently discovered regions of dark, fertile soil that were deliberately created through the addition of charred wood. Such soils are also found where vegetation was naturally or deliberately burned over.
Let’s go back to high school chemistry for some understanding of biochar. Biochar is, essentially, charcoal that is made by partial burning of wood, straw, corn stalks, or other organic materials. Charcoal, especially the activated charcoal used in chemistry, is riddled with tiny holes that can adsorb nutrients. (A single gram of activated charcoal has enough internal surface area to cover a tenth of a football field!) In the soil, biochar, similar to activated charcoal, can adsorb nutrients, provide habitat for soil microbes, and increase aeration.
Biochar is very resistant to decomposition, which leads to its other touted benefit, carbon sequestration. It locks up organic carbon, formed when plants take in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, so that it’s not re-released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide when dead plants decompose. 
Let’s say you had a pile of wood that you could grind up and make into compost, or that you could burn to make biochar. Which use is better? In soil, both compost and biochar would cling to nutrients. Compost would enrich the soil with nitrogen and, very important, provide food for beneficial soil microbes which would, in turn, feed plants. Microbial byproducts also help give soils that crumbly structure loved by plants and sought after by good gardeners. Many of the benefits of compost accrue as it decomposes, which is why it needs constant replenishment. Biochar has the leg up on longevity, some kinds lasting hundreds of years.
Compost offers little in the way of carbon sequestration, with the bulk of its carbon eventually turning to carbon dioxide that puffs up into the atmosphere. But, to repeat, many benefits of compost accrue precisely because it does decompose and eventually turn to mostly carbon dioxide and water. Decomposition of wood, straw, or any other organic material reflects microbial feeding. (What we eat also eventually turns mostly to carbon dioxide and water.)
So which is the better use of organic wastes? Compost is definitely good for the soil. Ongoing research will tell whether also using a bit of biochar is also worth the trouble. For more about biochar, see http://www.biochar-international.org/.
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Turning to more immediate concerns . . . My hopes to be eventually and happily drowning in fragrant lilies were dashed by the blue flowers recently brightening the sunny window “greenhouse” in my basement. 
For explanation, let’s backtrack to last autumn. Summer’s lily flowers — intoxicatingly fragrant, large white trumpets of the variety Casablanca — were long gone but the plants’ tawny flower stalks and seed capsules were still evident. Wouldn’t it be awesome, methinks to myself, to make every August a heady month by overrunning part of the garden with Casablanca? 
Digging into the dirt around those tawny, old lily flowerstalks easily turned up a slew of healthy little bulbs, which I potted into cell packs and put near that cool, basement window. Leaves appeared a few weeks ago, foreshadowing oodles of lily flowers a couple of years hence. 
It was not to be: Those small bulbs at the base of the lily stalks were NOT lily bulbs; they were chionodoxa (glory-of-the-snow) bulbs.
Not that chionodoxa isn’t a pleasant little flower, and it appears at a time of year when any flower is most welcome. But it ain’t no lily.
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I should also explain about that sunny window “greenhouse” mentioned above. Like many older homes, mine used to have a metal Bilco door that opened into the barely heated basement. Much of the heat in the basement was lost due to the conductivity of and small openings in the Bilco door. Those openings also provided entryway for an occasional snake or other small or thin creature.
Many years ago I decided to make use of the southern exposure of that Bilco door. So I ripped out the door, enlarged the opening with additional concrete blocks and a (semi-)waterproof coating of ThoroSeal. I then built a cedar frame into which I slid two large sheets of Exolite, a double-walled polycarbonate plastic material used for greenhouses.
Voila! I had a place to keep plants cold, but not frigid, and sunny. Temperatures in that old doorway hover near freezing on cold winter days and nights. The location has proved ideal for overwintering geraniums, semi-hardy cyclamens, subtropical pineapple guavas and an olive tree, and various other plants that need light and need or tolerate cool winter temperatures. Chionodoxa also does very well there.

Longwood Revisited

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Witchhazel blossoms on February 5th! Not here, but down in Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA, a public botanical and pleasure garden around which I had some time to wander before giving a lecture. One little grove was particularly fragrant and comely, with a few witchhazels shrubs with yellow blossoms, some with bright orange blossoms, and some with brownish orange blossoms.
February 5th is early for witchhazel even down there, reflecting what has been the mildest winter in memory. While many people prefer mild winters, this weather worries a lot of gardeners. Are plants going to become “soft?” Is possible cold weather in the weeks ahead going to do them in?
Call me a pollyanna, but I have a lot of faith in Mother Nature (or, put another way, natural systems) to adapt and protect against calamities. Not that everything will necessarily keep chugging along the way we humans like it, but that forests will remain forests, perhaps with some changes in species, and that garden plants should, in general, survive.
A few odd things are going on this winter here in the Northeast and over much of the rest of the country. First is the mild temperatures. People worry that plants might begin to grow too soon. But today’s and tomorrow’s temperatures aren’t the only things that shake plants awake this time of year. Daylength also comes into play, and no matter what the winter is like, daylength is the same on any given date from year to year. 
Temperatures over the past weeks and months also come into play: Plants won’t begin growth until they’ve experienced a certain number of hours of cool — not cold — temperatures, signaling for them that winter is over and it’s safe to grow. Some winters, those hours begin to accumulate in autumn and then finish accumulating in late winter, when temperatures turn cool, not frigid, again. In the South and perhaps this far north, this winter at least, those hours could have accumulated sufficiently through winter to cause an early awakening of plants.
The first sign that many trees and shrubs show of awakening is the appearance of their flowers. These early blossoms could, in fact, succumb to subsequent cold weather. That cold could snuff out developing fruits, snuffing out this year’s crop. Or that cold weather could turn, say, an early tulip blossom from a handsome red cup to a wet dishrag on a stalk. In either case, the plants themselves, except for the blossoms and fruits should not be harmed. 
The second odd thing about this winter is the lack of snow cover. Snow reflects light and heat from winter sun. Evergreens don’t like this at a time when their roots are cold and not especially active. The result is scorched leaves. Bark also can scorch, except this time it’s called scalding, when winter sun heats up dark bark by day and then bark temperatures plummet as the sun drops below the horizon.
On the plus side, snow is a great insulator. It helps modulate soil temperatures to minimize alternate freezing and thawing, which can heave plants up and out of the soil. Heaving is especially a problem with young or new plants, as yet hardly rooted. That insulating, white blanket also lessens roots’ exposure to cold. Without snow, less cold-hardy plants (and we gardeners are always pushing the limits) might show more winter damage.
Then again, snow isn’t the only insulator. Any good gardener mulches plants to provide nutrients, to conserve water, to build up humus, and to feed beneficial soil life. I’m banking on those layers of wood chips, leaves, straw, and other organic materials I spread through autumn to protect my roots — plants’ roots, that is.
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No question about it: Temperatures, on average, have warmed in recent years. Plants are responding. But how? Trees, for example.
To help answer such questions, the Smithsonian Institute recently began a citizen science program to track tree growth throughout the world. The way it works is that, after signing up to become a “citizen scientist,” you’re sent a tree banding kit along with instructions for attaching the tree band, selecting study trees, and gathering and reporting data. Information, including a video, is available at https://treebanding.si.edu.
It’s all free, it’s all interesting, and your data, along with that of citizen scientists worldwide, will help us better understand tree growth, and what’s affecting it, over the years.
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Turning my thoughts back to Kennett Square and Longwood Gardens . . . I’m jealous. Not of their awesome, main conservatory fragrant with citrus trees and lilies in bloom. (I have a small greenhouse, and a kumquat, a citrus relative, that blooms in summer.) Not of their small greenhouse that is home to espaliered peach and nectarine trees and to a dozen or so potted fig trees. (Three fig trees grow in my greenhouse.) Not of their grove of witchhazels in various shades of yellows and reds. (I have one yellow witchhazel.)
What I am jealous of is the care that each of their plants receive; each one is perfect. If an old leaf or spent flower drops on the ground, someone picks it up. Each stem of their peach and nectarine espaliers is tied neatly to its trellis, as are the high vines clambering up pillars in the greenhouse. Outdoors, each tree is pruned to perfection, with none of their branches crowding, with any diseased or dead limbs lopped off cleanly. Looking closely enough, I did, at least, see some evidence of scale insects on their large potted grapefruit plants in the conservatory. (My large potted bay laurel also shows evidence of scale.)
My gardens, indoors and out, would be much improved with their knowledgeable crew of helpers.

ADMIRING THE GARDEN, NOW? & COLD PLANS

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        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.
 

NEW FRUIT BOOK HOT OFF THE PRESS!

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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.

WELCOMING IN SPRING & ODD HOUSEPLANT

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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.