2015 – Page 5 – Lee Reich

BANANAS & GINGER BRING TROPICS HERE

March 27, 2015/6 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Spring Coming? Might As Well Go For Something(s) Tropical

   Do I smell spring in the air? Must be. And the calendar confirms that it’s just around the corner. These hints finally stir longings for that season — even for a skiier. And what better way to welcome spring in than with attention to some tropical plants.
   My banana plants have weathered winter very well this year, indoors, of course. Last year I was proud that my one plant survived. After all, banana is a truly tropical plant. It shivers at temperatures below 50° F. and enjoys 80° days and nights as its broad, satiny leaves drink in year ‘round bright sunlight, occasional rains, and humid air. Even if my house was warm, which it is not, only a relative paltry amount of sunlight streams through even a south-facing window, and the air is bone-dry. Hence my pride.
   My philosophy last year was to send my banana tree into a state of suspended animation by withholding water and keeping the plant on the cool side. It did survive winter, barely. Once the weather warmed outdoors, it took a few weeks before the plant fully awakened. Actually the mother plant never did awaken, but two of its pups did. Pups are small plants that arise at the base of the mother plant, and are one of the ways in which new banana plants are propagated. (You no doubt noticed that cultivated bananas do not have seeds).
   Once the pups were growing strongly, I tipped the plant out of the pot and cut off each pup to pot up separately.
   This fall my approach was to keep the banana plants happy. Even if they couldn’t have steamy conditions of the tropics, I would at least provide their roots with plenty of water. And happy they are: New leaves have unfurled all winter, with few of the older ones drying out. By the end of May, the weather outdoors will be ready to receive the plants, which should grow exuberantly, as bananas are wont to do with good conditions.
   Bananas bear quickly so at this rate I may sometime be harvesting fresh fruit. If not, I can always use the leaves to make Indonesian pepes.

Banana (Not) Trees

    Notice, above, that I never referred to a banana “tree.” Banana plants might look tree-like and grow to the proportions of trees, but they are not actually trees. They are giant, perennial herbs. The “trunk” is composed of a sheath of tightly-wrapped leaf stalks. Each vertical stalk successively unfurls into a broad leaf which then splays its blade out horizontally.
   All new growth is pushed up from the corm at the base of the leaf stalks.
   Musa basjoo is a banana that’s cold-hardy to about zero degrees F. The top will die to the ground in winter but the corm, if mulched for further protection in the ground, survives winter. Nothing worth eating from this banana plant, although it makes a bold, tropical statement in summer.

Immature Ginger, Mmmmm

    I could never understand the current commercial interest in growing ginger, a tropical plant, in cold winter regions, such as here. Until last year, that is, when I tasted freshly harvested, immature ginger I got from a gardening friend. The roots had a smooth flavor and fiber-free flesh as compared with the mature roots usually sold.
   So this year, of course, I’ll be growing ginger, and the time to begin is now. To that end, I “harvested” some mature rhizomes from the grocer’s shelves, broke them into pieces each with 3 to 4 eyes, and planted them. Not outdoors, but indoors. And not just any place indoors, but somewhere especially warm.
   The goal is to get just the beginnings of shoots and roots growing. Each rhizome piece went into a bed of potting soil in a 4 inch pot, covered with another half to 3/4 inch of soil, and watered. Best growth is at about 80°F., no problem when the sun beams down on the greenhouse. On cloudy days and at night, though, temperatures can drop into the 30s. So I placed the pots on a large heating mat in the greenhouse that I use to warms seedling flats to get seeds started. (Seeds need warmer temperatures to germinate than seedlings need to grow.)
   Ideally, roots and shoots will have filled those pots by the time the greenhouse has been cleared of lettuce, arugula, and other cool weather greens and the soil temperature is above 55°F. That’s when the ginger can be planted in the ground; I figure on the end of May. Ginger is a heavy feeder, so each plant will go into a mound of pure compost that I’ll add to as the plants grow.
   Come September, I’ll pull the roots. They won’t yet be mature. That’s a good thing.

Corms, Cormels, Rhizomes, and More

    Banana and ginger both grow from underground structures, a corm and a rhizome, respectively, each providing energy storage and buds for new plants. Corms and rhizomes are modified, underground stems.
   A corm is an upright, fleshy, thickened stem having a protective tunic of modified leaves. Baby cormels arise near the base of the corm. The cormels sprout leaves and become pups like the two that grew at the base of my mother plant.
   A rhizome is a horizontal-growing, underground stem. New plants can be made by breaking off pieces of rhizome and planting them, as I did with the ginger and as is done with potatoes.
   Sometimes banana corms, like ginger rhizomes, are eaten. I won’t be eating my corms.

And The Winner Is . . .

Wendy, who commented on March 19 about her travails in fruit growing, is the winner, by random drawing, of my book GROW FRUIT NATURALLY. Congratulations Wendy.

New Video, Seed Starting . . .

Check out my video page for my timely, new video about seed starting.

A FRUITFUL YEAR IN THE OFFING

March 18, 2015/7 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

More Fruits to Plant!?

Pawpaw, tastes like crème brûlée

   You’d think, after so many years of gardening and a love of fruits being such a important part of said gardening, that by now I would have planted every fruit I might ever have wanted to plant. Not so!
   Hard to imagine, but even here in the 21st century, new fruits are still coming down the pike. I don’t mean apples with grape flavor (marketed as grapples), a mango nectarine (actually, just a nectarine that looks vaguely like a mango), or strawmato (actually a strawberry-shaped tomato).
   There are plenty of truly new fruits, in the sense of kinds of fruits hardly known to most people, even fruit mavens. Over the years, I’ve tried a number of them. Aronia is a beautiful fruit that makes a beautiful juice, so it’s getting more press these days. I grew it and thought it tasted awful. Goji’s another one in the public’s eye for it’s many health benefits and ease of growing; it also tasted terrible and I also escorted that plant to the compost pile.
   Some lesser known kin of raspberry had greater potential. I planted arctic raspberry, which grows as a groundcover and has been used in breeding for the good flavor it imparts to its offspring. The plant never bore for me. Salmonberry and thimbleberry similarly had gustatory potential but never bore well in my garden. I’ll give these plants another try someday.
   I’m tentative about honeyberries, which are blue-fruited, edible species of honeysuckle that bear young, fruit early in the season, and weather cold to minus 40 degrees F.. The “blueberry-like fruit” is so only in being blue. I planted a couple of bushes about 20 years ago and was not impressed with their yield or flavor — but I admit to neglecting the plants. More importantly, a lot of breeding has been done to improve the plants since I put my bushes in the ground. Stay tuned for my tastebuds’ report on the flavor of recently planted Blue Mist, Blue Moon, and Blue Sea honeyberries.

Some Fruits Are So Easy — And Tasty

Reading what I just wrote might give the impression that planting any fruit except apples, peaches, and cherries — the usual, that is — leads to either failure or tentative flavor. Again, not so!

Persimmons, nashi, figs, and grapes

Uncommon fruits adaptable over large swathes of the country that are easy to grow and have excellent flavor include pawpaw, American persimmon, gooseberry, black currant, hardy kiwifruit, Nanking cherry, and alpine strawberry — all documented in detail in my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden. All these plants grow and bear with little or no intervention on my part (and are available from such nurseries as www.onegreenworld.com and www.raintreenursery.com).

Seaberries on bush in fall

Seaberry (Hippophae rhamnoides) didn’t make it into the book, which includes only “dessert fruits,” that is, those you can enjoy by just popping them into your mouth. But I’m happy I gave these bushes some of my real estate. Juiced, diluted, and sweetened, the delectable flavor is akin to rich orange juice mixed with pineapple. What’s more, the bushes are decorative and tolerate neglect, cold, drought, and deer.

New Fruits

This spring I’m planting a new kind of a somewhat familiar fruit, back raspberries. They’re also called blackcaps, and grow wild along woodland borders, which is where I gather my harvest. (A ripe blackcap comes off the plant with a hollow core, like a thimble, in contrast to a ripe blackberry, whose core persists.)
Blackcaps have perennial roots but their stems are typically biennial, growing only leaves their first year, fruiting in midsummer of their second year, then dying.

Blackcaps, ripe last summer

Two new blackcap varieties, Niwot (www.noursefarms.com) and Ohio’s Treasure (www.hartmannsplantcompany.com), do this one better: They start to bear on new canes towards the end of the first season, then bear again on those same canes, now one-year-old, in midsummer of the following year. You reap two crops per year, one in midsummer and one in late summer going on into fall. Or, for easier care but only one crop per year, the whole planting is mowed to the ground each year for a late summer-fall harvest.
These two-crop blackcaps, just like two-crop (sometimes called everbearing) red and yellow raspberries, have the added advantage of bearing their first crop the same year that they are planted. My plan is to plant in mid-April, even though right now more than a foot of snow still blankets the ground.

Vegetables Are So Easy

Snow or no snow, I’m sowing vegetable seeds, the second wave of the season. (My seed sources are www.fedcoseeds.com, www.sustainableseedco.com, www.johnnyseeds.com, and www.reneesgarden.com.) Today, the lineup includes the new varieties (for me) Tuscan Baby Leaf kale, Tiburon Ancho hot pepper, and Round of Hungary and Odessa Market sweet peppers. With encores for their good past performance are Gustas Brussels sprouts, Early Jersey Wakefield cabbage, Winterbor kale, and Carmen Sweet, Sweet Italia, and Italian Peperocini sweet peppers.

FRUIT BOOK GIVEAWAY, AND FRUIT FUTURES

March 13, 2015/53 Comments/in Books, Fruit, Gardening, Pests, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

The Eternal (Fruit) Optimist

   We fruit growers get especially excited this time of year. On the one hand, there’s the anticipation of the upcoming season. And on the other hand, we don’t want to rush things along at all.
   Ideally, late winter segues into the middle of spring with gradually warming days and nights. Unfortunately, here, as in most of continental U.S., temperatures fluctuate wildly this time of year. Warm weather accelerates development of flower buds and flowers. While early blossoms are a welcome sight after winter’s achromatic landscapes, late frosts can snuff them out. Except for with everbearing strawberries, figs, and a couple of other fruits that bloom more than once each season, we fruit lovers get only one shot at a successful crop each season.
   How did all these fruits ever survive in the wild? They did so by not growing here — in the wild. Apples, peaches, cherries — most of our familiar fruits — were never wild here, but come from climates with more equable temperatures, mostly eastern Europe and western Asia. We favor them because they are part of our mostly European heritage.
   The fruits that I never worry about here are the few that are native: pawpaw, persimmon, grape, mulberry, lingonberry, and blueberry, to name a few. (Also raspberry, gooseberry, and currants, cultivated varieties of which are hybrids of native and European species.) After decades of fruit growing, I’ve hardly missed a harvest, no matter what the weather, from any of these native fruits. (I cover native, non-native, common, and uncommon fruits in my books Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden and Grow Fruit Naturally.)
   Still, I can’t deny the delicious flavor of apples, peaches, and other non-native fruits, especially those I grow myself. So I do grow them, do what I can for them, and hope for the best. I may even put a thin coat of white kaolin spray on these trees to reflect the sun’s warmth and further delay awakening of the buds.
   Last year was a very poor year for many tree fruits, and I’m not sure why. (Recovery from the previous years cicada attacks could be part of the reason.) Nonetheless, every year about this time I’m bursting with optimism for a bountiful fruit harvest.

Veggies, As Usual, Chugging Along Nicely

    I consider vegetables relatively easy to grow because most are annuals and because, with most of them, I can sow and harvest repeatedly throughout the growing season. Let cold or some pest snuff them out, and I can just replant.
   The first of my lettuces, sown early last month in little seed trays, are up and growing strongly, each seedling transplanted into its own APS cell (available from www.gardeners.com). Ninety-six seedlings take up little more than a couple of square feet and, with capillary watering from a reservoir beneath the APS trays, I need check the water only about every week.
   My next wave of indoor seed-sowing will take place in the middle of this month. That’s when I’ll sprinkle pepper, eggplant, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, and cabbage seeds into the miniature furrows of miniature fields of my seed flats.
   I’ll also sow another batch of lettuce seeds indoors, this batch for eventual transplanting outdoors. The first batch is soon to be transplanted into greenhouse beds.

Fig Prophylaxis

    Buds on fig trees planted in the ground in the greenhouse are showing hints of green and swelling ever so slightly in spite of the cool night temperatures in there. The scale insects that I battled last year are undoubtedly also coming to life on those plants. In the past, I’ve kept these insects at bay by scrubbing the bark in winter with soapy water or by spraying it with insecticidal soap, or, during the growing season, wrapping the trunk with a sticky Tanglefoot barrier to stop travel of ants that herd the insects.
   I’ve never gotten rid of scale insects, only kept them from gaining the upper hand. And some years it’s been a neck and neck race as to who would win out before the end of the season.
   I’ve already begun this season with prophylactic sprays of oil. Oil has a long history of controlling insects and some diseases, with the advantage of causing little collateral damage to the environment, including beneficial insects. Because it’s main effect is to clog insect breathing ports (spiracles), there’s little danger of insects developing resistance.
   Oil’s major hazard is its potential to injure plants, mitigated by spraying when temperatures aren’t too hot or below freezing, or when rain is likely, all easily avoided in a greenhouse. Various kinds and formulations of oil — kinds include vegetable, mineral, and neem oils — differ in their hazard to plants. I’m using a high-purity mineral oil (Sunspray) from which I expect no damage, especially since the plants are still leafless.
   Scale insect eggs should be hatching about now. Brutal as it may sound, I hope to suffocate the crawlers before they settle down to one spot to cover themselves with their protective armor and literally suck the life from the plants. Weekly sprays should cover successive hatches.

New Video

Check out my new video on “pricking out” seedlings!

Free Book!

Book giveaway! Write a comment here telling us which is the most difficult fruit you grow, and why, and why you grow it, and you’ll be entered in a drawing to get a free copy of my most recent book Grow Fruit Naturally. Comments must be submitted no later than noon, March 23rd.

Upcoming Lectures

Check out the “Lectures” page of my website for some lectures I’ll be giving in the next few weeks.

COMPOST TEA: SNAKE OIL OR PLANT ELIXIR?

March 5, 2015/26 Comments/in Gardening, Pests, Soil/by Lee Reich

Is the Jury Still Out on Compost Tea?

    In gardening, as in life, you can’t help but want to love some things, compost tea being one of them. After all, compost is good, tea is soothing, so what’s not to love about compost tea?
   Perhaps it depends on how you brew your tea. Traditional compost tea was and is made by hanging a burlap bag of compost in water, then diluting and drenching the ground or the potting mix of a potted plant with the nutritious, coffee-brown liquid.
   More recently, “aerated compost tea” (ACT) has soothed gardeners from coast to coast, the result mostly of the promotional efforts of soil scientist Dr. Elaine Ingham. This tea is brewed similarly to the traditional tea, except that extra foods, such as molasses (honey would seem more in keeping with the tea theme), brewers yeast, and bran, are also added, and — most important — the tea is aerated throughout the brewing process.

Brewing up a batch for some plants.

The soothing effect from ACT is not nutritional, but biological. You spray the tea on leaves or soil to spread beneficial microorganisms leached from the compost whose populations were beefed up by all that aeration and added nutrients. These happy microbes fight off attack by pathogens and insects, perhaps by making the offenders sick or unable to reproduce, perhaps by making the plants more healthy, or any one of a number of other hypothesized manners.
Coming from their home in the dark, moist, nutrient-rich innards of a compost pile, could these friendly microbes really be expected to survive on the bright, dry, nutrient-poor surface of a leaf? And evolutionarily-speaking, when would Mother Nature ever have made provisions for compost, let alone compost tea, let alone ACT microbes, to colonize a leaf and do good there? But this is all speculation; surely someone must have tested whether or not compost tea is really “soothing” to plant life.

How to Really Test Effectiveness

    A slew of gardeners and farmers have tried ACT and can attest to its benefits. Matter of fact, a whole industry is dedicated to testing composts and compost teas, even selling compost tea brewers and compost tea itself.
   The way to truly ascertain the efficacy of compost tea is to subject it to the same scientific scrutiny as you would anything else: Come up with a hypothesis (such as “Compost tea prevents powdery mildew of squash plants”) and then design an experiment to test the hypothesis. Said experiment would need both treated (compost tea sprayed) and control (water sprayed) plants. Most gardeners and farmers go to the trouble of spraying compost tea because they believe it will be effective, so are not willing to leave a portion of untreated (control) plants. Their endorsements, then, must be taken with a grain of salt, and the same must be said for endorsements from anyone reaping financial gain from compost tea.
   One treated and one control plant, even one treated and one control plot of plants, would not be sufficient for a good test. Biological systems are complex. Grow 10 tomato plants under exactly the same conditions and some will grow a little more, some a little less than the others. With too few test plants, natural variations in plant growth might overwhelm variation due to a treatment. With enough plants to even out and offer a measure of natural variations in, say, plant growth, effects of a treatment are better parsed out.
   And finally, randomization is needed to even out any effects of, say, location. Perhaps one side of a plot is more windy, or the soil is slightly different, or there’s a bit more sunlight. Rather than have all the treated plants cozied together growing better or worse because of this added effect, even out these effects by randomizing the location of treated and control plants.
   Now you’ve got an experiment. Using a few arithmetic formulas or, these days, a computer program, you plug in the numbers and come up with a probability of an effect of the treatment. In agriculture, a 90% or 95% probability is usually considered sufficient. You can then answer “yea” or “nay” to the hypothesized question, in this example, “Does compost tea prevent powdery mildew of squash plants?” with a 90% or 95% confidence level

Okay, I’ll Try It

    I have a friend who is a big proponent of compost tea. Finally, he convinced me to give it a try but only after I made him agree to supply me with a brewer, some compost, and explicit instructions, just to avoid his finding excuses for failure of the tea treatment.
   A red flag went up when he advised me not to use it in my vegetable garden because it was “too organic.” I ended up, on his suggestion, spraying a few strips down my lawn and parts of some bean rows on a friend’s farms.
   This admittedly nonscientific test conclusively showed no benefit at all from the tea.

Snake Oil, Mostly

So what’s the scientific verdict on compost tea? The answer is not so simple, in part because it depends whether the reference is to traditional compost tea or ACT, the kind of plant, the compost ingredients, how long the tea is brewed, how often tea is applied, etc.

Spreading compost, letting rain make the “tea.”

Good experiments have been performed, from which the following general conclusions can be made: 1) ACT is not reliably beneficial (and often has a negative effect or spreads human pathogens such as Salmonella); 2) Traditional compost tea has been shown to be often but only mildly beneficial for root diseases; 3) If sufficiently, but not too, dilute, either ACT or traditional compost tea can supply nutrients to feed plants.
My pea plants succumb early every summer to some root disease, possibly fusarium. I am tempted to drench the soil for the peas with traditional compost tea. Perhaps I’ll even set it up as a crude experiment, keeping in the back of my mind the admonition of Charles Dudley Warner (My summer in A Garden, 1871), “I have seen gardens which were all experiment, given over to every new thing, and which produced little or nothing to the owners, except the pleasure of expectation.”
Mostly, though, I’ll continue to do what I’ve been doing, spreading compost on top of the ground and letting rainwater make the tea.

MANURE ABSOLVED, PRUNING STARTED

February 26, 2015/12 Comments/in Design, Fruit, Gardening, Pruning, Soil/by Lee Reich

Horse Manure: Not Guilty, So On To Pruning

   A dark cloud no longer hangs over my horse manure, that is, the horse manure that I occasionally truck over here to add to my compost piles. I wrote a few weeks ago about the possibility of herbicide that, when applied to hay, retains its toxic effect when an animal eats the hay and even, for a long time, after that animal’s manure has been composted or spread on the ground.
   My herbicide residue concerns were soothed with a simple assay that showed satisfactory growth from bean seeds in both hay that was suspect and hay of known integrity. Also, the bedding in the horse manure is mostly wood shavings rather than hay.
   But another ugly dragon kept raising its head above the manure. Another chemical, this time, Ivermectin, a de-worming medication given to horses (and other animals). Ivermectin or its metabolites might pass through the animal and injure soil dwelling creatures such as beneficial nematodes and earthworms. Past studies have shown negative effects on, for example, “dung fauna and degradation of faeces” (to quote a research paper from 2006).
   Ivermectin is, admittedly, a very useful material, even useful in humans to combat lice, bedbugs, and some more frightening tropical afflictions such as river blindness and elephantiasis. Agriculture is always a balancing act, but I like to keep my soil-dwelling partners happy.
   So I was gladdened when a veterinarian recently directed me to a Stanford University publication that summarized research findings on the environmental effects of Ivermectin. To whit: Ivermectin is excreted and it can affect earthworms, springtails, and other fauna. But it degrades quickly at summer temperatures (1-2 weeks, but much longer in winter) and within a day or two of exposure to bright sunlight. With temperatures within my compost bins reaching 150°F., or more, with the compost sitting many months before use, and with the compost being spread on top of the ground, little Ivermectin would end up in the soil. And soil anyway naturally has low levels of this compound.

Snow Makes Me Taller

Let’s look aboveground, at stems; there’s pruning to be started. With well over a foot of snow on the ground, I turn my attention to taller plants. The snow is actually an advantage because, with snowshoes on, I can reach more than a foot higher into the branches without a ladder.

Sammy (the dog) and I pruning pawpaws

   For now, I’m going to start with the easiest pruning, mostly with plants that don’t need regular pruning beyond removing dead, diseased, broken, and grossly misplaced branches. Right here, such plants include pawpaws, plums, cornelian cherries, and a teenage honeylocust tree. Light is important for fruit production from the fruit trees and, generally, to keep diseases and insects at bay, so I also prune away enough branches to let remaining branches bathe in sunlight.
   I go at the pawpaws with one more goal in mind, to keep fruit from forming either too high in the tree or two far out on the limbs. Pawpaw trees will grow 15 to 25 feet high but I harvest fallen fruit from the ground. By my estimation, fruit can make a soft landing, undamaged, from a height of about 10 feet onto mulched ground. So I lop back the tops to weak side branches at about that height.
   Each pawpaw flower is a multiple ovary, potentially spawning up to nine fruits, each of which can weigh more than half a pound. That’s a lot of weight perched onto the end of a branch, so I shorten long branches to decrease leverage of that fruit load.
   (More about all types of pruning on all kinds of plants in my book, The Pruning Book.)

A Beautiful Climber

I actually did begin pruning a few weeks ago, before the first snow fall. The plant was hydrangea — no, not the common bigleaf hydrangea which has many people scratching their heads about how to prune, but climbing hydrangea (Hydrangea anomala subsp. petiolaris).

Climbing hydrangea in summer

Climbing hydrangea is one of the most beautiful vines, even right now as the peeling, pale cinnamon, bark is in focus among the leafless stems. All summer long, the stems are clothed in lustrous green foliage and, in early, summer clusters of white flowers twinkle against that backdrop like stars in the dark sky.
As expected, the vine took a few years to get firmly established. Now it threatens to engulf my brick home except that I want to restrict it to only the north wall. Every year now, I prune back stems creeping like groping fingers around the east and west walls. And each year the flower stems reach further directly out from the wall, so I also shortened them.

Climbing hydrangea, partially pruned

The present pruning doesn’t permanently subdue the plant. This summer, I’ll again shorten the wandering stems, and I’ll be back at it again next winter and for winters to come.

FIRST SOWINGS OF THE YEAR, DEADLINE MISSED

February 20, 2015/4 Comments/in Gardening, Soil, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Onions & More, Late But They’ll Be Fine

   I missed my deadline by four days, sowing onion seeds on February 5th rather than the planned February 1st. That date isn’t fixed in stone but the important thing is to plant onions early.
   Onions are photoperiod sensitive, that is, they respond to daylength (actually, night length, but researchers originally thought the response was to light rather than darkness, so the phrase “daylength sensitive” stuck). Once days get long enough, sometime in June, leaf formation comes screeching to a halt and the plants put their energies into making bulbs. The more leaves before that begins, the bigger the bulbs.
   Plants from seeds sown outdoors — towards the end of March — won’t have as many leaves as plants given a jump start indoors. I like big bulbs; hence the early February sowing.

Fresh Seeds & Mini-furrows in a Plastic Tub

    First step on my way to onion-dom is to get fresh seeds. Onion seeds are relatively short lived and I want to give the plants plenty of time to grow. I don’t risk delays from poor germination and replanting of old seed.
   Seeds get sown in a miniature “field:” A plastic tub 18 inches by 12 inches, with drainage holes drilled in its bottom and filled 4 inches deep with potting soil. Some weed seeds are unavoidably lurking in the garden soil and compost in my homemade potting mix, so I top the potting mix with a one inch depth of a weed free, 1:1 mix of peat moss and perlite.
   The edge of a board pressed into the firmed soil mix in the tub makes furrows, 6 of them equally spaced and about 1/2 inch deep within the tub. Into each furrow go onion seeds, sprinkled at the rate of about 7 seeds per inch. Once the furrows are closed in over the seeds, I water thoroughly and, to avoid washing away seeds, gently.
   Covered with a clear pane of glass and warmed to 70 to 75° F, the seeds should appear as grassy sprouts above the soil mix within a couple of weeks. From then on, my goal is to keep the plants happy with abundant light and water as needed. They get a haircut, their leaves snipped down to 4 inches, whenever they get too floppy. The compost and alfalfa meal in the potting mix should provide sufficient nourishment to the seedlings until they are ready for the great outdoors. That deadline is April 15th, weather permitting.

Other Cool Temperature Seeds Join the Party

Onions won’t be alone on the seedling bench in the greenhouse. I’m also now sowing seeds of celery, celeriac, and leek. All, like onion, need a long period of growth before they’re ready for outdoors.

Onion seedlings, up and growing.

These seeds get sown in furrows in small seed flats from which the seedlings, once they have two leaves, are gingerly lifted and cozied into waiting holes poked into the potting mix filling seed trays with individual cells. Little growing space is needed because a single seed flat can be home to a few kinds of seeds and the celled trays in which the seedlings grow until planted outdoors can house about two dozen plants in a square foot.
I’m sowing lettuce in a similar manner. In contrast to celery and company, lettuce grows quickly. It’s needed to fill in gaps opened up from winter harvests of kale, lettuce, mâche, claytonia, celery, and parsley in the greenhouse, and should be ready to eat in April.

Nature & Nurture & the Spiciness of Onions

Last year’s onions were abundant, large, sweet, and juicy. Anticipating their not keeping well, we ate them quickly, pulling the last ones from their hanging braid in the basement sometime in November. These were so-called European-type onions, varieties such as Ailsa Craig and Sweet Spanish.
Next year we should have fresh onions for soups and stews on into winter because I’m growing some American-types, New York Early and Copra. American-type onions are actually sweeter than European-type onions, but their sweetness is masked by their increased pungency. That pungency comes from sulfur compounds, which are vaporized during cooking. Those sulfur compounds are also what help these onions keep longer.

Stored onions, in basement

Soil enters the picture when it comes to onion flavor and storability. Sulfur is an essential plant nutrient and the more sulfur in the soil, within limits, the more sulfur in the onions. Sulfur is a key component of organic matter, so my compost-rich soil (with a whopping 15% organic matter) should have plenty of sulfur.
Still, I’m thinking about spreading sulfur, the same pelletized sulfur I use to maintain soil acidity beneath my blueberry bushes, on half my onion beds to see if flavor or storagability are noticeably affected.

HOW TO FEED THE WORLD

February 12, 2015/4 Comments/in Gardening, Planning, Soil, Uncategorized, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Perennial Wheat to Save Our Soil, But What About Compost?

   We — that is, almost all of humanity — get all our sustenance from the thin skin that covers out planet, the soil. In appreciation of this, the United Nations has declared 2015 “The Year of Soil.” “Soil is more important than oil,” stated Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, in his keynote at this year’s recent NOFA-NY conference. Like oil, soil is a nonrenewable, or only slowly renewable, resource. Centuries go by before rainfall, freezing, thawing, and microbes and plants eat away at rocks to make new soil; on average, it takes a thousand years for the creation of a mere half-inch of new soil.
   The problem is that, as with oil, we humans are using up soil faster than new soil is being created — 10 to 40 times faster! Also, as with oil, that soil, as it is used, releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Tillage exposes carbon stored in the ground to air, burning” it up, and annual crops, which are represented by sweeping fields of corn, soybeans, wheat, and other staples of civilization, put little of the carbon that they take in from air below ground. Agriculture is the second highest generator of greenhouse gases.
   Whew, what to do? Dr. Jackson’s tack, for the past half century, has been to focus on shifting our staples from annual to perennial crops. Wheat, for instance. Kanza, a hybrid, perennial wheat under development at the Land Institute, would sequester carbon by not requiring annual tillage and by packing carbon compounds into its long-lived root system. Perennial crops also decrease opportunities for soil erosion (another source of soil loss), grow with less added fertilizer and water, and have the potential to increase biodiversity for a healthier ecosystem.

Organic Materials: Wasted Fertilizer

What about vegetables, how are they treating our resources? Up to the podium stepped Tim Crews, director of research at the Land Institute, to give the roomful of organic and aspiring organic vegetable farmers and gardeners bad news: Our soil care is not sustainable. All that manure hauled onto our fields or piled high into compost piles is bedded with hay or comes from animals that have been fed grain. The grain or hay was grown in fields that were fertilized, most of it with commercial fertilizer which is mostly made from atmospheric nitrogen via the Haber-Bosch process which requires — you guessed it — fossil fuel for energy.
Still, the fact that organic farming and gardening wastes less energy than conventional farming and gardening should assuage some of the guilt that resonated through the room. The soil of a good organic farmer or gardener will, in general, be higher in organic matter (5.4% vs. 3.5%) and, hence, carbon. Said plot will require less water, less pesticide, and less manufactured nitrogen for fertilizer.

Compost, Garden — and Small Farm — “Gold”

    Compost, and compost alone, is how I maintain fertility in my vegetable beds. I do haul in some horse manure for that compost, and, as Dr. Crews pointed out, somewhere way back in that manure’s history, fossil fuel needed to be burned.
   But civilization, and especially industrialized civilizations, generate many waste products, of which horse manure is one. Picture also all the food waste from restaurants and supermarkets, autumn leaves and grass clippings that are considered “garbage,” even sewage effluent. All these organic materials contain carbon, some of which could be sequestered in the ground, to the benefit of agriculture and the environment, and some of which feed soil organisms and, in turn, plants.
   Better to recycle as much of those organic materials as possible into agriculture than let them go to waste or cause pollution. The bottlenecks here are cultural and political rather than agricultural.

Grow Your Own Fertilizer

Another way, as I suggested at the conference, to make vegetable farming more sustainable would be to grow your own carbon and fertilizer. A perennial grain or hay field could be harvested for the grain or hay for the animals or, even more efficiently, just for hay to use either as mulch or for composting. Running hay or grain through animals burns up carbon to grow and fuel the animal to the tune of, on average, about 6 times more needed in terms of calories. That is, for every 6 calories we grow and feed to a cow, we get only one calorie back when we eat the cow.
Left to its own devices, any field will naturally build fertility. Bacteria, free-living bacteria and symbiotic with the roots of legumes, harvest atmospheric nitrogen and put it in the ground, and the combined action of myriad soil organisms slowly chew away at a soil’s rocky matrix to release other nutrients for plant use. Plants grow, their roots oozing substances that further stimulate microbial activity and soil fertility.

Nodules from nitrogen-fixing bacteria on soybean roots.

The key word in the previous paragraph is “slowly.” In order to be able to harvest fertilizer in the form of hay from a field year after year, sufficient time must be allowed between harvests for fertility to be garnered from the air and rocks. For that you need either more land or less harvest. The big picture, then, is to have more land, to make better choices in how the land is used, to utilize organic practices, and have fewer people.
With the problems of soil improvement, global warming, sustainability, and agricultural production solved, I’m going to sow onion seeds. Planted in flats in potting soil at 7 seeds per inch, I should have plenty of pencil-thick seedlings ready to poke into holes in compost enriched beds in early May.

LECTURES THIS WEEKEND

February 8, 2015/2 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Planning, Soil, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Feb. 14, 2015
Gardener’s Supply Co.,Burlington, VT
“Espalier Fruits”
“My Weedless Garden”

Feb. 15, 2015
Northeast Organic Farming Association of VT, Winter Conference,
Burlington, VT
“Hardy Kiwifruits”
“Compost Tea: Snake Oil or Plant Elixir?”

LUSTING FOR AVOCADOS, HOME GROWN, OF COURSE

February 6, 2015/4 Comments/in Flowers, Fruit, Gardening, Houseplants/by Lee Reich

A Long Journey to Avocado-dom

This far north, an avocado plant provides reliable entertainment and, less reliably, the makings of guacamole. The entertainment doesn’t compare with the excitement of a car chase on the silver screen; it’s slower but very engaging.

To whit: I’ve been watching roots on two avocado pits elongate and branch. I spend a lot of time with plants; here is my opportunity to spend quality time with their roots. That’s all possible because avocado pits, suspended in water, will sprout roots whose growth can be watched. (Odd, since wet soils are the nemesis of avocado trees planted outdoors in tropical and subtropical climates, and you can’t get much wetter than water.)

Despite being plants of warm climates, avocados are frequently raised by us northerners, as houseplants. I could have planted the pits in potting soil in a pot, but would have missed out on root entertainment. So I stuck three toothpicks into and spaced evenly around each pit so that the pits could be suspended in a beaker with their bottoms — their fatter ends — sitting in water. Taking a thin slice off the top and bottom of the seed, which I did, reputedly speeds germination.

Roots typically sprout before the tops show any sign of growth.

Whoops, Things Don’t Look So Good

Avocado houseplants are so common that probably none of the above is new information to most readers. I’m embarrassed, then, to admit that my two plants have faltered in their growth.

One of them sent a sprout upwards after its roots were a couple of inches long. That sprout has dried out and, of course, ceased growth.

I noticed a slime surrounding the root of the other pit. This pit was very slow to sprout, and my guess is that there’s some bacteria attacking the weak growth.

I ascribe both failures to growing conditions which, here, indoors, are a far cry from the mostly warm, humid climes avocados call home. Mine sit near a window, experiencing wide swings in temperature in a room heated with a wood stove. Starting new plants in spring should bring better luck.

Entertained by Apical Dominance

I did get to effect and observe apical dominance on one of the plants. More benign than it sounds, apical dominance is the tendency for most vigorous growth from a plant’s uppermost buds, those either at the ends of branches or spatially at the highest points.

That vigor comes from suppression of buds lower down by auxin, a plant hormone that is produced in the uppermost buds and transported down the stem. Lopping off the top of a stem stops hormone production (temporarily, until the new higher buds start making it) so lower buds grow as they let go of their inhibitions.

The taproot growing from one of the avocado pits was threatening to bump into the bottom of the beaker so I pinched off a half inch of its tip. The effect was a mirror image to what happens with branches: within a few days, branch roots began to develop. Very entertaining.

An avocado sprout typically shows strong apical dominance, developing into a gawky plant with a single, upright shoot. Cutting the growing top back by a few inches induces branching and makes for a prettier plant.

Flowers, But No Fruit

More than beauty, I’d like fruit from my avocado plant. Under good conditions, such as in the ground in Florida, a pit would need 8 years or more before it became old enough to bear fruit. And then, said fruit might not be of best quality because the seedling would reflect whatever jumbling around of chromosomes occurred when the female flower that gave rise to the fruit that begot the seed got dusted with pollen from a male flower.

For quicker bearing and more reliable good taste, cloning is needed, in this case grafting a branch from a tree known to bear good-tasting fruits onto the young seedling. Bearing, then, occurs within 3 or 4 years, and the fruit should be identical to the mother plant from which the stem for grafting was taken.

Not so fast, though. You need two varieties for cross-pollination, and avocado has some pollination quirks. Still, my plan is to get new pits sprouting, and once their stems are large enough to graft, to get scions for grafting. Years ago, I did all this and got flowers but no fruit. I’m hopeful, this time around, to be making guacamole within 6 years.

Outside Now, For More Apical Dominance

The time is drawing near for some real gardening, which could start with pruning. I’ll be putting apical dominance to work on some young fruit trees — each a mere “whip,” single, vertical stem — planted last year. Shortening the main stem will induce side branches that will eventually become the permanent scaffold limbs of these plants. The more severely any stem is shortened, the fewer and the more enthusiastic the sprouts from the buds lower down.

GOOD BOOKS, GOOD LECTURES

January 29, 2015/3 Comments/in Books, Design, Gardening, Planning, Tools, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

One Book = Years of Experience

    I’ve been gardening for over 30 years. Don’t be impressed. The number of years spent with hands in the dirt doesn’t necessarily confer any particular expertise in the field (pun intended). Some gardeners do the same foolish things year in and year out, or never sufficiently investigate other, perhaps better, ways of doing what they’ve been doing. Or not appreciate cause and effect. (Was it really the compost tea spray that led to bountiful yields last year, or was it reliable rainfall interspersed with bright, sunny days? The tendency is to hold the former responsible.) Or, the wizened, old gardener’s wealth of knowledge might not extend beyond what they’ve grown on their own “back forty,” severely limiting the benefit of any wisdom passed on to others with a shorter history of gardening.
   Reading is a efficient way to squeeze wisdom of others, reflecting decades of digging, pruning, and seed-sowing, into just a few years, for yourself — depending, of course, on the weight of the words. The fact that so many gardeners have always gotten by with little or no reading is testimonial to millions of years of evolution that makes every pea seed naturally want to grow and every apple tree naturally want to bear fruit.
   So, in the spirit of becoming better gardeners, especially this time of year with nothing to do in the garden, let’s thumb through the pages of three worthy books that recently found a place on my desk.

Good Tools are a Help

    Did you know that the hose was invented by Jan van der Heijden in the 17th century? Tarred canvass, linen, and hand-stitched lengths of leather pipe were all predecessors of the modern garden hose, all of which I learned from Bill Laws’ A History of the Garden in Fifty Tools. It wasn’t until near the end of the 19th century that technology and marketing brought hoses into more general use in gardens.
   Just imagine having to water your garden with repeated trips to the spigot with your watering can, another of Mr. Laws’ “Fifty Tools.” Not that the garden hose has displaced watering cans, which have been around in various incarnations for hundreds of years and may have reached their peak in functional and visual elegance with the work of John and Arthur Haws. Haws cans are still made; my 2 gallon, galvanized Haws watering cans have served me and my plants well for over 20 years.
   . . . Fifty Tools will not, admittedly, make anyone a better gardener. Instead, it’s a very interesting history of 50 gardening tools with — okay, this might be some help in the garden — sidebars, “Tools in Action,” telling of the best use of each tool.

Haws watering can

Some listing are a stretch of the word “tool:” a radio, a scarecrow, separate entries for plant container, terracotta pot, and stoneware urn? I would have included the garden cart, pitchfork, and hori-hori knife as necessary garden accoutrements.

Inspiration from Paris

    In and Out of Paris: Gardens of Secret Delight by Zahid Sardar, with photographs by Marion Brenner is slightly more practical than A History of the Garden in Fifty Tools, even if I’m not planning to garden in Paris or like a king. The first section, eye candy, has the usual gardens of a literally majestic scale: Versailles, the Tuileries, Vaux-le-Vicomte, etc.
   Sections on private gardens are more inspirational for us non-royalty. Most of the gardens, whether majestic or small, are typically French, with long views or symmetric arrangements. Not one of the gardens, though, the 1000 square foot Japanese garden near the Bastille, with carefully placed, but not seemingly so, boulders nestled into mosses, lichen bordering a koi pond. Walls shield the garden from the sight and sound of the surrounding city, the effect softened with clumps of bamboo and a mix of evergreen and deciduous trees.
   One of the most interesting gardens is the Experimental Parc Méry-sur-Oise, which started life as the historic Renaissance-era Chateau de Méry-sur-Oise. More recently, in 1999, the grounds were re-done, this time with water features, not traditional fountains, but misty, hot, cold, brackish, and mineralized water that rains down from above or tumbles over waterfalls. Long-term goals, the “Experimental” part of the garden, include observations of the effects of the various waters on plants and the ecosystem over time. Elsewhere are free-standing gabion walls planned for vertical gardens. That never happened. Money ran out and the gardens have been neglected since 2003 — a modern, neglected garden!
   In all honesty, I mostly just looked at the beautiful photographs of In and Out of Paris: Gardens of Secret Delight.

Grow Vegetables? Study this Book

    Even if you are a backyard gardener rather than a market gardener, The Market Gardener, by Jean-Martin Fortier, will have you harvesting more and better tomatoes, and with less effort. Two themes of this book, as I see it, are planning and record-keeping. The author is a successful market gardener in Quebec, grossing over $100,000 from a mere acre and a half of land.
   The growing units on Jean-Martin’s farm are raised beds 100 feet long by 30 inches wide. Having all beds the same makes it easy for him to calculate the amount of compost needed and keep track of yields. The latter are spelled out in a handy chart showing days to maturity and yield of individual vegetables per 100 foot bed. I haven’t calculated yields from my 17 foot by 36 inch wide beds, but do know that I need to plant 4 beds at two week intervals to harvest our fill of sweet corn to enjoy during summer and, frozen, through winter.
   Another useful table spells out spacing of transplants, in flats and in beds, and another lists dollars reaped per bed from various vegetables. The only other gardening book that quantifies small-scale vegetable growing so well, in this case strictly backyard growing, is Burrage on Vegetables, from 1954, by Albert Burrage. How times have changed: Burrage is pictured in his garden in sport coat and bow tie; farmers in Jean-Martin’s book are pictured dressed as, well, farmers.

1950s vs the present: Different look but 2 good gardeners

The book also has the requisite listing of each vegetable along with growing information as well as useful chapters on soil care (generally good but with some misconceptions) and microclimate. One particularly simple, cheap yet innovative technique described for weed control after harvest, between plantings, is covering a bed for 2 weeks with a reusable 6mm thick, black silage tarp.
Jean-Martin emphasizes that it is possible for farming and gardening to be, at the same time, productive and bucolic only with planning and organization to avoid wasting time. In so doing, he can be a farmer who can put in a workday from a reasonable 8 to 5. Charles Dudley Warner wrote in his 1870 classic My Summer in the Garden, “Blessed be agriculture! If one does not have too much of it.” I agree.

Talks in Pennsylvania & Vermont Coming Up

Some good conferences and lectures coming up. I’ll be in Pennsylvania and Vermont talking about espalier fruits, weedless(!) gardening, growing hardy kiwifruit, pawpaws, and blueberries, the efficacy of compost tea, and pruning fruits. For details, see my “Lectures” page.