MIX POTTING MIX

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Coconutty Coir

 For a couple of years, a block of coir has sat atop my bale of peat moss.
    Peat moss, the product of slow, anaerobic decomposition of organic materials, accumulates, at a snail’s pace, in bogs: an inch or so depth per thousand years. To mine peat, the bog must be first drained. Besides upsetting bogs’ unique ecological habitats, draining  the bogs aerates them, sending some of the carbon wafting into the air.Peat and coir
    But peat is good stuff for potting mixes. My mixes are made up of equal parts peat moss, soil, compost, and perlite, along with sprinklings of soybean meal (for nitrogen) and kelp (for insurance against lack of any trace elements). Peat’s contribution to the mix is a long-lasting source of organic matter that helps cling to moisture and to nutrients, important in the relative confines of a flower pot.
     Coir is marketed as a substitute for peat in potting mixes. A sustainable substitute, made from the fibre left around coconut husks after they’ve been cracked open to remove their meat.
    This spring it was time to put that block of coir to the test, with a head to head comparison to peat. (I’ve tried this comparison before, but more casually.) The block, after slurping up a large volume of warm water, was ready to mix with the same ingredients as I mixed with the peat moss.
 

Some potting soil components

Some potting soil components

   Both mixes went into their separately labelled , 5 gallon buckets. Each mix then was used to fill one-half of a few GrowEase Seed Starter Kits. Into one of the kits went lettuce seedlings, another got tomato seedlings, and a third got pepper seedlings. The 24 cells of each kit are automatically watered via a capillary mat that sits atop a water reservoir, providing very uniform moisture to all cells within a kit and from one kit to the next.

Peat, Coir Standoff

    Drum roll . . . and the winner is . . . well, as I recently wrote, some of this year’s seedlings grew very poorly, perhaps, I’ve hypothesized, due to the soil I used, or the compost, both of which vary some from batch to batch. The overcast, cool conditions in the greenhouse during critical growth periods also could be to blame.
    Differences in growth between coir and peat based mixes were not great, but tipped slightly in favor of the peat based mix. This, incidentally, jives with my previous, more casual observations. It also jives with more rigorously planned and executed, published research.

Coir Still in the Ring

    The results of all this testing don’t spell continued destruction of peat bogs. Coir might still be a viable alternative.
    Peat and coir are not the same material. I perhaps should not have used the same ratio for coir as I’ve long used for peat in my mix. There’s some evidence that coir, as it slowly decomposes in a potting mix, can suck up nitrogen at the expense of plants. If so, more soybean meal in my mix could solve that problem. Other nutrients, or lack thereof, could also come into play, as could anti-growth factors, such as phenolics, known to be present in coir.
    More playing around is needed with coir.

Peat and Coir Substitutes

    No need to put all our eggs in one coir basket. Other organic materials can and have fulfilled the niche of peat (and coir). And our culture has no lack of organic “waste” products. Composted bark has been used in commercial mixes for many years, as has sawdust. More exotic, around here, at least, would be rice hulls.
    Home-grown and readily available “organics” for a potting mixes would be compost and leaf mold, both of which I’ve used in rougher mixes, such as for temporarily repotting small trees.Mixing potting soil
    The point is that any of these organic materials, including coir, could make a good potting mix if ratios and amounts of other materials are adjusted accordingly.
    Gardening (and farming) should be, and could be, sustainable; even the potting mixes used to raise seedling or grow potted plants.

Now Perlite, Hmmmm

    The other major component of any potting mix is some aggregate, for providing good drainage. My mixes use perlite. Not sustainable. More on that another time.

SUMMER WEATHER, PLANT THE GREENHOUSE

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 Ginger on the Way

   Now that summer-y weather has blown in and is here to stay, it’s time to plant the greenhouse. Plant the greenhouse?! This time of year? Yes. No reason to let all that real estate go to waste through summer.
    Ginger plants that I started from supermarket tubers a couple of months ago were crying out to be released from the confines of their 4-inch pots. Warming their bottoms on the seed-starting heating mat pushed them along even when early spring skies were overcast and the greenhouse relatively cool. Ginger is a tropical plant that shivers even when temperatures drop below 55°F.Planting ginger
    I never could see the rationale for the current interest in growing ginger in northern regions. That is, until I tasted freshly harvested, baby ginger. This far north, ginger rarely has time to develop the mature, tan-skinned roots you see in supermarkets. No matter, because immature, or “baby,” ginger, which is ginger harvested before it matures, is better — a white, tender, tasty tuber. It doesn’t keep or ship as well as mature ginger, which is no problem for backyard growing or local sales.
    So 4 ginger plants went into two greenhouse beds. I’ll dig up the ginger in September, freeing up space for lettuce, celery, kale, and other cool weather salad makings that will inhabit the winter greenhouse.

Early Curcurbits

    One can eat only just so much ginger. (We’re still using last year’s harvest which, for long term storage, was sliced thin and put into jars with vinegar.) What about other greenhouse beds that are being vacated as the last of winter’s lettuce, celery, kale, and chard get harvested and cleared away?
 Greenhouse in June   Cucumbers and melons love heat, so a few extra plants that I started back in early May went into beds.
    The permanent fixtures in the greenhouse, the plants that really help the greenhouse earn its keep, are the four fig trees — Bethlehem Black, San Piero, Brown Turkey, and Rabbi Samuel — planted right in the ground. The largest of these has a trunk 7 inches in diameter. All yield bountiful crops daily in August and September, and less bountiful ones going into October.Figs growing, last of greenhouse lettuces

Tropicals and Subtropicals Summer Vacation

    In a reversal of fall, tropical and subtropical plants that had been moved into the greenhouse and house are now lined up outdoors, ready to offer fresh black mulberries, Pakistan mulberries, pineapple guavas, pomegranates, Golden Nugget mandarins, olives, dwarf Cavendish bananas (probably no fruit from this one, just a very tropical look), and a few other varieties of figs, in pots.
    (My black mulberry is the species Morus nigra, one of the best-tasting of all fruits, but is not cold hardy here. Black-colored mulberries that grow all over the place outdoors here are, despite black fruits, species of red or white mulberries, or their hybrids.)
    Any of my tropical and subtropical plants, given their druthers, would reach 8 feet, 10 feet, or even more feet skyward, and spread their roots many feet in all directions. Here, they can’t do that or they would be too big to move or to house in winter.
    So I mixed up a batch of potting soil, and started root pruning. It sounds brutal, and it is, but plants recover nicely and then happily have new soil to explore. Basically, I slide a plant out of its pot, stand it upright, and then start slicing off the outer edges of the root ball. Pruning shears take care of any roots too large to slice with a knife.
    The finished root ball is an inch or two smaller in diameter than it started out. How much to remove depends on the initial size of the root ball — larger plants get more removed — and, to a lesser degree, the kind of plant. Figs, for instance, tolerate especially brutal treatment.
 Root pruning   So much for the roots. To keep it manageable, the plant also needs stem reduction. Some stems get shortened, some are removed in toto, and some are left untouched. Who gets what treatment depends, for fruiting plants, on their fruiting habit — just where and how they bear fruit. Figs that bear on new shoots can be pruned rather severely; pineapple guavas bear on new shoots growing off older stems, so only moderate pruning is tolerated so that some older stems are preserved, etc.
    After root and shoot pruning a thorough watering, plants are ready for a year or two of good growth before they will again feel constrained.

WINTER’S LEGACY, STILL

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Half a Pear, Tree

   Perhaps last winter’s weather — extended cold, but not frigid temperatures, and hardly any snow — is still playing games with us. Perhaps it is mischief from the early, extended, very warm weather in early spring that was followed by plummeting temperatures and our biggest snowfall (4 inches) of the year. Whatever the reason, some weird things are going on this growing season.Half dead pear tree
    Look at one of my old pear trees, for instance. This tree might be called my “sample” or my “first cut” pear tree. When I hear tell of a pear variety that might be worth growing, I get a scion and graft it onto this tree. The scion bears quickly, in theory, at least, and, if it passes the “first cut,” perhaps it will warrant its own tree. There’s not enough time or space to put every Tom, Dick, and Harry of a pear variety on its own tree.
    The tree now has about a dozen varieties of pear growing off various branches. That’s not weird, though. What is weird is that, right now, the top half of the tree is fully leafed out while limbs on the bottom half of the tree are leafless.
    A disease? Doubtful. A disease killing that much of a tree at once would probably originate in the trunk or roots, in which case the whole tree or only the upper portion would be leafless. And anyway, those leafless limbs are not dead. Cutting beneath the bark reveals living, green tissue.
    My hypothesis — a weak one — is that the cold snap in spring, where temperatures in the ‘teens followed a spate of temperatures in the 70’s, is the culprit. Warm temperatures in late winter and spring cause plants to rapidly awaken and lose the cold-hardiness they maintained through the coldest parts of winter. The pears seemed quite awake when that cold spell struck.
    But why was only the bottom portion of the tree affected? (Here’s the weakness in my hypothesis.) Windless, clear nights, such as during spring’s cold snap, bring a temperature inversion. Under such conditions, denser cold air can settle down near ground level. Even a few feet of elevation can make a difference, one that’s evident when riding a bicycle or motorcycle on a clear summer night on rolling terrain.
    So maybe the bottom half of the pear tree experienced temperatures just below the tipping point where enough damage occurred to delay leafing out.

Other Pear Trees, Still Whole

    No other plants, including other pear trees, experienced this bifurcation. Then again, the “sample” pear is all by itself where the microclimate might be slightly different.
    During that cold snap, the other pears were quite awake, seemingly just about ready to spread their blossoms. I was braced for a total crop loss. Weirdly, the trees went on to blossom just fine and now have what’s shaping up to be a decent load of fruit on them.

Seedling Troubles

    More weirdness: Every season I sow vegetable seeds according to a schedule I’ve developed over the years. I sow the seeds in mini-furrows in flats of potting soil or potting soil topped with a mix of peat moss and perlite. Every season I make my own potting soil from a mix of equal parts peat moss, perlite, compost, and garden soil, with everything sifted together through half-inch mesh hardware cloth.
 Sickly tomato seedlings   And every season I’ve had sturdy, lush green transplants to set out over the past few weeks. Not this season. Too many of the transplants are stunted, with flaccid leaves that are not uniformly lush green. Some have slight, interveinal yellowing of oldest leaves, some have slight reddening of veins, hinting, respectively, at insufficient nitrogen and phosphorus uptake .
    As usual, the weather could be blamed. Those auspicious, sunny days of late winter gave way to a long period of overcast days. Rain or not is not the issue because seedlings were in the greenhouse, watered as needed. Overwatered? Underwatered? Cool greenhouse temperatures could limit root growth, in turn limiting uptake of nutrients even if they are in the soil.
    The potting soil could be the culprit. Although ingredients of my mix are always proportionately the same, the compost isn’t exactly the same from year to year. Same goes for the “garden soil” that goes into the mix. I scrape it up from various places around the yard: the bottom of a finished compost bin, from my catch-all extra soil bin, from top layers of a pond I’m occasionally hand-digging.
    A couple of other gardeners and farmers have concurred with their seedlings’ poor growth this year. Perhaps it was the weather? Do you want to weigh in?

And the Winner Is . . .

    Very few people offered hypotheses on why only one limb of my plum tree was in bloom. Neither the weather nor any other environmental condition was to blame. In fact, I had grafted the tree a few years ago to four different varieties in order to spread out the harvest date and offer a greater variety of plum flavors.Plum, blossoming branch
    The bulk of the tree had already flowered.The one blooming branch was that of beach plum, the least reliable, smallest, and, to my taste, least flavorful of the lot. Perhaps I’ll graft that limb over to yet another variety.
    Congratulations to Tom, tkjazzer@gmail.com, on winning a copy of my book Grow Fruit Naturally.

MAKING SCENTS (AND A BOOK GIVE AWAY!)

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Reader Alert: Invasive Plant

    The sweet scent practically bowled me over. My friend, walking with me along the nearby rail trail, characterized the aroma as citrus-y rather than sweet. Either way, the aroma was delicious and welcome. Too bad the source of the scent, autumn olive (Elaeagnus umbellata), is a plant so reviled.Autumn olive blossoms
    “Too bad” because the plant also has other qualities. The olive-green leaves lend a Mediterranean feel to any setting. Microorganisms associated with the shrub’s roots garner nitrogen from the air to enrich the soil. And come early fall, the plants are loaded with delicious and nutritious, small, red (sometimes yellow) berries.
    Alas, this non-native plant grows too easily, frequenting fields and waysides. It’s deemed invasive, which it is . . .  but?
  Autumn olive fruit  (Autumn olive is often confused with Russian olive, E. angustifolium, a close relative that is more tree-like, less invasive, and with sweet, olive-green fruits. Another equally attractive, fragrant, tasty, and soil-building plant is gumi, E. multiflora, not well known but closely related to the other “olives.”)

And Yet Another Invasive

    Soon, by the time you read this, the rail trail and elsewhere will be suffused by another pleasant aroma, that of honeysuckle. These flowers are also followed by red berries, but they’re not edible. (Other honeysuckle species do yield edible berries, an up and coming fruit called haskaps.)Honeysuckle flower
    How could anyone not like a plant with a name like “honeysuckle?” A lot of people don’t like honeysuckle because it too, despite its qualities, is invasive.

You Call This Renovation

    Before anyone attacks me for heaping praise on invasive plants, let’s sidle off the rail trail and back to the home front, where yet another delicious scent fills the air. This one wafts from a plant that, unlike autumn olive, Russian olive, and gumi, is not invasive and is truly in the olive family: lilac (Syringa vulgaris).
    Actually, for years now, my lilac bush has not been perfuming the air as much as it should. The plant is old, my guess is over 50 years old. Not that age alone is responsible for its poor showing. Lilac, like other shrubs, have long-lived root systems. No stem ever develops into a permanent, long-lived trunk and — important for all flowering and fruiting shrubs — after a certain age stems can’t keep up the flower production of its youth.
    The way to prune any flowering or fruiting shrub is by a renewal method. You cut down some of the oldest stems that are no longer performing well. And then you thin out — that is, reduce the number of — some of the youngest stems so that each can develop to its fullest potential without being crowded.
    How long an old stem is worth keeping and how many new stems spring up each year from ground level depends on the kind of shrub and the growing conditions. A highbush blueberry stem, for example, retains its youthful fecundity for about 6 years; a raspberry, for two years.

Young lilac, old lilac, renovated lilac

Young lilac, old lilac, renovated lilac

    I’ve pruned my lilac over the years, but — I have to admit — never cut the old stems close enough to the ground nor thinned out the many young stems sufficiently. (My excuse is that the dense crowding of 5-inch-diameter stems made cutting difficult, the difficulty made more so by the haven they provided for poison ivy vines.)
    A non-blooming lilac shrub isn’t worth keeping, so drastic renovation was in order. This treatment can be applied to any old, decrepit shrub. It’s easy. All that’s needed is to cut everything to the ground. Which I did.
    My lilac’s stumps gave evidence to the shrub’s poor showings over the years with their many thick yet half-rotten, old stubs. Shrubby stems, as I wrote, just aren’t meant to live that long, and over time can’t support good flowering.
    If all goes well, new sprouts should soon poke up from ground level, vigorous new sprouts because they’ll be fueled by a large, old root system. It’ll be a few years before any of those sprouts get old enough to start flowering. But I’ll make sure to thin them out so each has room to develop. I promise.

Win a Copy of My Book

A few weeks ago my plum tree was in full bloom, actually only part of it was in full bloom. Winter’s wacky weather? Spring’s wacky weather? Plum, blossoming branchOffer an explanation and, if correct, you’ll be in the pool of readers, one of whom, randomly selected, gets sent a free copy of my book Grow Fruit Naturally. Respond by midnight, May 31st.
GFN Front Cover

WEEDS (SOME GOOD)

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Anti-Weed Tools

    Recently sown vegetable seeds that have sprouted are growing slowly; weeds and lawn are growing fast. Give weeds an inch, and they’ll take a mile. Ignore growing lawngrass, and soon you’ll need a tractor or a scythe to cut it down to size.Wire weeder and winged weeder
    But few people ignore their lawns. Dealing with the growing grass is straightforward: You get out the lawnmower and go back and forth or round and round until every grass blade has been sheared.
    Weeding demands more thought, technique, and intimacy with vegetation. Different weeds and different settings call for different approaches. In a vegetable garden, a hoe might be the tool of choice. My choices for hoes are the winged weeder, with a sharp blade that runs parallel to the ground surface and just slightly below ground in use, and the wire weeder, whose wire performs similarly.
    Mostly, though, I don’t need or use a hoe in my “weedless” (actually, “weed-less”) vegetable garden. Weeds are few enough and the soil is soft enough so that all that’s necessary is to bend over and pull out a weed, tops and all. Tap-rooted weeds, such as dandelion, need coaxing out with the aid of a trowel or hori-hori knife. That coaxing also helps lift a quackgrass plant gently enough to allow following its subterranean runner as far as possible until it breaks.Quackgrass with runner
    Along garden edges, my half-moon edger is very good at scouring out a dry moat that stops weed. Problem is that my garden has a lot of edges. And furthering the problem, any edges neglected for more than a couple of weeks during a spell of good growing conditions puts that edge back to square one.

Fire and Acid

    Just outside the glass sliding doors of my living room is a brick terrace that makes a nice take-off point to a short expanse of lawn and then, through an arbor, into the main vegetable garden. Or, turning, south, towards the greenhouse and meadow. You’d think that the brick surface of the terrace would be maintenance- and weed-free. Not so.
 Flame weeding   It’s a tribute to the tenacity of weeds how they manage to take root or sprout, and then thrive, in the small openings between adjacent bricks. Even in the small cracks between the bricks and the masonry wall of the house. Some of those “weeds” are actually welcome there — such as the wild columbines that send up thin stalks at the ends of which hover orange and yellow blossoms whose rear-pointing spurs gives the flowers the appearance of flaming rockets.
    Still, most of those weeds have to go. Pulling them out individually would be too tedious, and takes with them what little dirt or rock dust lies between the bricks. So I torch them, instead. A small, hand-held torch would be effective, but slow. I use the appropriately named Dragon Weeder, whose 3-inch diameter nozzle attaches, via a 10-foot long hose, to a 20 gallon propane tank. Fire roars out of this dragon’s mouth like a jet engine, and all that’s needed is a quick pass. No need to set plants on fire; just heat them enough to burst their cells. And this wet day is ideal to reduce the risk of fire spreading.
    Equally effective for an expanse like my terrace is to burn foliage with vinegar. Household vinegar, straight up (5 or 6% acetic acid), does the trick as long as the temperatures are above 70°F. Effectiveness is increased if 2 tablespoons per gallon of canola oil and 1 tablespoon per gallon of liquid soap is added to the vinegar, and if vegetation is not so large as to cause “shadows” where lower vegetation gets bypassed.
    Either fire or vinegar kills only the tops of plants. Roots might have sufficient stored energy to send up new sprouts, so treatments must be repeated until roots have used up all their energy.

Weed Food

    Corn salad is considered a weed in Europe. It’s borderline weedy in my garden, with its tufts of greenery clustering near the foot of some of my vegetable beds and occasionally elsewhere.
    No need to hoe it, hori-hori it, torch it, or vinegar corn salad. I let it be, even coax it along, in some areas, and weed it out in others. Corn salad and I can maintain this congenial relationship because I like to eat it.
    The same can be said for Good King Henry, another European import that could take over my garden if given free rein. It’s a relatively unknown relative of more familiar edibles like lamb’s-quarters (Cheno­pod­­­ium album), epazote (C. ambrosioides), and quinoa (C. quinoa), and, to me, the best-tasting of the lot. Even if you didn’t like the flavor of Good King Henry, you couldn’t help loving its botanical name, C. bonus-henricus. Eat it and weed.

APRIL SHOWERS BRING . . . NO!

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Don’t Go With the Gut

   “April showers bring May flowers.” Where? Not here. I had many years of gardening under my belt before I realized the falsity of that little ditty. Yes, it happens to be raining as I write these words at the end of April. But generally, April is dry, and todays’s rain amounted to a mere quarter-inch.
    For years, I would sow radishes, lettuce, arugula, and other early, cool season vegetables in April, and figure “April showers” would take care of watering needs. Which they did not. With frosts still likely around here, April was too early to get the drip irrigation going. So watering vegetable beds requires tedious lugging of hoses, making sure, as I pull on them, not to knock over plants or mess up carefully formed beds.
 Watering wand   Hand watering also required patience. A light sprinkling of the ground does nothing but wet the surface fraction of an inch. If you care to know, the amount of water needed to wet a soil about 6 inches deep is 3/4 of a gallon per square foot or, equivalently, a one-inch depth of water. And said water needs to be applied slowly enough to percolate into the ground rather than running off elsewhere.
    Fortunately, with cool temperatures and plant growth only just beginning, much of the moisture from previous months’ rain and snow still sits in the soil. The surface often looks dry while moisture is sufficient below. So all that’s needed is to keep the soil moist from the surface to a depth where the ground is still moist.

Measure

    Eyes or the gut are not reliable indicators of when to water. Sometimes I’ll just poke my finger into the ground to assess moisture level. But does it really feel wet, or does the soil feel cool because it’s April?
    All that’s needed are your hands for the more accurate “feel method” of soil moisture determination. For this method, you need to know your soil’s texture; that is, is the soil a sand, a loam, or a clay? Crumbling it, feeling its slickness, and attempting to form it into a ball or a ribbon gives some indication, depending on the texture, of moisture content (see http://www.ext.colostate.edu/sam/moisture.pdf for details).
    All sorts of high-tech soil moisture measuring devices are available: electrical resistance blocks, tensiometer, time domain reflectometer, neutron probe, and more, all beyond the wallet and accuracy required by of most gardeners.pH, moisture testor
    On the other hand, inexpensive soil moisture meters are readily available. What they lack in accuracy they make up for in convenience. Sliding the thin, metal rod into the ground gives a pretty good, qualitative measure of moisture anywhere from just below the surface to the length of the rod, which, depending on the device, is 8 to 12” inches long.
    Watering is an important key to success in gardening, and for $10 to $50, these relatively moisture meters are well worth the money. The more expensive, previously mentioned monitors can be left in the ground. The inexpensive meters must be removed and their probes cleaned after each measurement.

Indoor, April Showers Bring . . . Yes!

    Even if April showers do not bring May flowers, April — the month — does bring a few May flowers, but mostly flowers in June and beyond. That’s because April is the month when I sow many flowers for transplanting out into the garden after warm weather settles in. On the slate for this year are Lemon Gem marigold, sunflowers of all stripes, chamomile, moonflower, morning glory . . . (Where am I going to plant all these flowers? Spring’s got a hold on me.)

Tussler Was Correct After All

    The ditty “April showers bring May flowers” really does have some truth to it — if you’re in the UK, where the ditty originated. There, the northward moving jet stream picks up more and more moisture as it travels across the Atlantic Ocean; the result is rain by the time the winds reach the UK. (On this side of the “pond,” the jet stream, traveling across land, has picked up relatively little moisture.)
    So Thomas Tusser, who allegedly penned “Sweet April showers / Do spring May flowers” in the 16th century (in A Hundred Good Points of Husbandry), was not wrong, for Great Britain. Here, we have to water in April. But not too much.

RATIONALITY CHALLENGED

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New York Avocadoes!?!?

    I make no claim to be rational in my gardening — especially this time of year. This thought comes to mind as I look closely at two avocado plants sitting in a sunny window. “Nothing irrational about growing avocado plants in New York,” you might say. After all, the large seeds are fun and easy to sprout, and the resulting plant adds some tropical greenery indoors.
    My two plants were run-of-the-mill avocado houseplants until I took knife to them.
    Let’s backtrack . . . Among my regrets of not living 1,000 miles or so south of here is not being able to harvest my own citrus and avocados. (Also, no outdoor gardenia shrubs or southern magnolia trees here.) A few indoor citrus plants do call mi casa sus casa. But no avocados.Avocado grafts
    From seed, an avocado would take a long time before it bore its first fruit. And especially long under less-that-ideal northern conditions, including indoors in winter.
    And worse, when the plant does finally flower, it might not bear fruit. Avocados generally need cross-pollination because the pollen isn’t ripe at the same time that the female stigma is receptive. Avocado pollinators need to be fairly specific, so that one plant’s pollen is in synch with another plant’s stigmas.
    And even worse, after all that time and hoping for appropriate mates, fruits that do form might not taste good. They wouldn’t be selected clones, such as the delectable Haas or Mexicola, but seedlings. (Plant a seed from a good tasting apple and the resulting tree has only one in 10,000 chance of bearing a good-tasting fruit.)
    Which is why I took a knife to my two avocado seedlings, to graft them to known, good-tasting varieties that are pollination compatible. A friend in Florida overnighted me scions — pencil-thick stems, with leaves stripped — cut from his Marcus Pinkham and Lula avocado trees. One of my seedlings got a whip graft of Marcus Pinkham; the other got a side-veneer graft of Lulu.
    I coverWithed both grafts with plastic to maintain humidity, and every day peer at the scions hoping to see some swelling in preparation for growth.
    Rational gardening? No. After all, even if all goes as planned, how many avocados could I expect to harvest from two small trees? Still, it’s fun.

Warm. Plant.

    Outdoors, it’s the weather that toys with my rationality. A spate of warm days and great restraint is needed not to plant vegetables. I keep referring to my notes (and the chart I made in my book Weedless Gardening) that tell me when to plant what.
  Planting onions  With yesterday’s 75 degree temperatures, urges to plant were satisfied — for that day, at least — by my poking holes into the ground into which I dropped onion plants sown indoors on February 1st. Three-hundred of them in a 20 foot long by 36 inch wide bed. (This was later than the April 21st onion planting date specified in my book, but the weather was cold so I forgot to look at my book.)

Planting Break. Turn Compost.

    When I get tired of planting, I can always turn to turning my compost piles.
    Not that compost piles have to be turned. In contrast to other fermentations, such as bread-making and wine-making, compost always comes out right. Pile up any mix of organic (living or once-living) materials, and eventually you get compost.
    I turn my compost piles so that materials on the outside of the pile get to be on the inside of the pile, second time around. This makes for a more homogeneous finished product.Turning compost
    I turn my compost piles to better monitor their progress, so adjustments can be made, as needed, and to get some idea when they’ll be ready for use. Occasionally, a pile will have a dry region; it gets watered. Occasionally, a mass of material needs to be broken up to better expose it to moisture and microorganisms.
    I also turn my compost piles because it’s good exercise and it’s interesting. But, like I wrote, turning a compost pile is not a must.

OLD ENEMIES RETURN

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Damn Damping Off

    My first garden foe, which I haven’t seen for years, recently sneaked into the greenhouse. Damping-off sounds pretty bad but not as bad as its scientific names, probably Rhizoctonia or Pythium, which, along with a few other fungi, can cause damping off.
    My introduction to damping-off disease came before my first plants even made it out to my first adult garden. At the time, I was living in a relatively dark apartment, a converted motel room, and was eager to start seedlings. I sowed all sorts of seeds in peat pots, stood them in a little water, then crowded them together on all the shelf space that could be mustered.Damping off of cabbage
    Young sprouts never appeared in some of the pots. In others, seedling emerged, then toppled over, their “ankles” reduced to a withered string of rotted cells, unable to support the small plants physically or physiologically.
    Conditions created were perfect for any one of the damping-off culprits: overly wet soil, cool temperatures, low light, weak growth, stagnant air. How was I, a beginning gardener, to know? I soon learned to avoid the disease by, in addition to providing good light, providing sufficient fertility to promote strong growth that resists disease, paying careful attention to watering, and using a fan to keep air moving.
    My seeds now go into a potting mix containing sufficient perlite to help drain away excess water. Sterile potting mixes, such a those sold bagged, are presumably free of damping-off culprits. But sterile mixes also lack beneficial soil microorganisms so afford free rein to any culprits that make their way into a mix. My home made potting mix isn’t sterilized.
    A couple of other tricks also limit damping-off disease. Spreading a thin layer of dry material, such as perlite, vermiculite, sand, or kitty litter (calcined montmorillonite clay) on the surface of the potting mix keeps the stem area dry. And there is some evidence that chamomile tea (cooled) controls damping-disease if sprayed on plants and soil surface.
    I’m considering this most recent damping-off incident to be a fluke, so far affecting just a single cabbage plant in a whole flat of cabbages.

Second Garden, Second Foe

     That first garden, my first garden, was short-lived. Not because of any horticultural trauma, but because it was begun on August 1st and, before the following year’s gardening season got underway, I had moved. My new site, home to my second adult garden, was also home to my second garden foe, which has been lurking in the wings of every garden ever since then.
 

Quackgrass with runner

Quackgrass with runner

   That foe is and was quackgrass, also known as witchgrass, couchgrass, and, botanically, Elytrigia repens. It is small consolation that quackgrass isn’t only my problem; this native of Europe,  north Africa, and parts of Asia and the Arctic, is now a worldwide weed.
    Soon after turning over the soil to begin that second garden, quackgrass invaded. With vengeance. Long story short: I had read of the benefits of mulches in smothering weeds; in Wisconsin, where I lived, lakes were becoming clogged with water weeds, which municipalities harvested; I convinced a water weed crew to dump a truckload of water weeds on my front lawn; my quackgrass expired beneath a slurpy mulch of quackgrass laid atop the ground pitchfork by pitchfork.

Foe #2, Defeated (Sort Of)

    Quackgrass has always stalked the edges of my gardens, waiting for a chance to slink in. It spreads mostly by underground rhizomes, which are modified stems that creep just beneath the surface of the ground. Growing tips of quackgrass rhizomes are pointed and sharp enough to penetrate a potato. Given time, quackgrass develops an underground lacework of rhizomes.
    My current garden never had a quackgrass problem, mostly because I never tilled it or turned over the soil. Tilling or hand-digging it, as I did in my second garden, compounds quackgrass problems because each piece of rhizome can grow into a whole new plant.
    My current hotspot of quackgrass found a fortuitous opening, creeping in among a planting of coral bells beneath a very thorny rose bush along the edge of my vegetable garden. Quackgrass rhizomes must be removed or the quackgrass smothered, either difficult to do among the coral bells and the rose.
 Concrete garden edge   My plan is to sacrifice the coral bells and pull out every rhizome I can find. In soft soil this time of year, long pieces can be lifted with minimum breakage or soil disturbance. A mulch with a few layers of newspaper, topped with a wood chip mulch (part of weed management, as described in my book Weedless Gardening) will suffocate any overlooked rhizome pieces trying to sprout. In the absence of other plants among which the rhizomes could sprout, mulching alone can do in quackgrass, as it did in my second garden.
    Longer term, barriers around garden edges could prevent quackgrass rhizome entry. Barriers need to be deep or wide. A concrete strip, 6 inches wide and decoratively inlaid with handmade tiles, has been effective elsewhere along my garden edge.
    For now, I have to stop writing and get to work on the quackgrass. I have too, after all, because a wrote a book called Weedless Gardening!

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE WEATHER

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Snow!!

    The talk of the town these days is the weather. In this town, at least, and other towns throughout the Northeast. After a relatively snowless winter punctuated with warm spells, spring knocked early at winter’s door and was let in. Even I, who try to be guided by the calendar rather than my gut, succumbed, planting peas a full two weeks earlier than my usual date of April 1st. Flowering trees and bushes — and more importantly, those whose flowers later morph into luscious fruits — similarly fell prey to spring weather’s apparent arrival.
    As I write, snowflakes tumble down from a gray sky, adding to the three inches of snow already piled onto spring green grass. Temperatures tonight and tomorrow night are predicted to drop near 20 degrees F. We’ve all been duped!!

Nanking cherry flowers with snow

Nanking cherry flowers with snow

    I’m most concerned, and least able to do anything about, weather’s effect on my fruit trees and bushes. Nanking cherries were in full bloom a few days ago, a full two weeks earlier than average. Asian pear flower buds look about to pop open, blueberry buds have fattened in preparation for opening , and black currants and gooseberries have almost fully leafed out.
    Options available to commercial orchards are not feasible in backyards. Such as sprinkling plants with water so that the heat of fusion released as water freezes keeps buds warm; you can’t stop sprinkling until weather warms enough to melt all ice. On clear, cold nights, heavier, cold air sinks but can be warmed by mixing in warm air from higher up. Not many backyard gardeners have wind machines or are willing to have a helicopter hover overhead all night pushing down warmer air.
    What we backyard growers can do that orchardists cannot, feasibly, is to snug a few small plants — bushes and dwarf trees — beneath a blanket. (Except that I have a lot more than a few small fruit plants.) That’s about it. Besides keeping fingers crossed and hoping for the best.

Winter Cold!!

Peach flower buds, dead

Peach flower buds, dead

   Peaches are famous for their early blossoming, so I was especially worried for them. My peach tree spent its first few years in a large pot which could be conveniently lugged into the garage whenever cold weather threatened its blossoms.
    No need to worry this year. I checked the fat, flower buds, and they are already dead. Winter’s cold and/or fluctuating temperatures evidently had already done them in.

(Too) Early Peas

    My early planted peas took advantage of the last couple of weeks of balmy weather and sprouted quickly. Temperatures near 20° will surely freeze those sprouts. They might resprout from protected buds below ground, or not.
    I nudged ol’ man winter aside and created a warmer microclimate over the sprouts by putting up metal hoops covered with row covers over them. They may have been better off with the blanket of snow tucked all around them. Then again, the snow cover might settle too much, or blow away.
    In a few days, I’ll see how the peas fared. Worst case scenario: replant.

Not Climate Change

    “Climate change” is the battle cry for this whacky weather. But is it really so whacky?
    As far as the cold, the average date for the last killing frost of spring in my garden is around the third week in May. The key word here is “average.” Looking at a tabulation of percent chance of cold temperatures on various spring dates (davesgarden.com), on average there’s a 50% chance of the thermometer hitting 24° on April 14th around here, a 10% chance on April 27th.

Peas under tunnels & snow

Peas under tunnels & snow

    “Frost” means 32°F. For that magic 32°, which is lethal to tomato and pepper seedlings but of no consequence to cabbage and onion transplants, there’s a 50% chance of that temperature on May 13th, even a 10% chance on May 27th.
    Of course, temperatures in my (or your) garden could be a few degrees different from those at nearby weather stations, which supply those averages. Still, looking back at my own records, while last year Nanking cherries blossomed here on May 2nd in 1999, they blossomed on April 18th in 2004, on April 26th in 2012, and on March 29th in 2015.
    So it seems like whacky weather is the norm. Except this year, it does still seem that the early warming was slightly earlier, and the later cold — 15°F, now, the day after the snowfall — more intense. Then again, Nanking cherries have never failed me.

HISTORIC PEAR AND NUTTY PINE

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M’Lady’s Luscious Pear

    Gardening provides so many avenues of interest down which to wander. The broad avenue of history, for example, which comes to mind as I checked up on the Lady Petre pear I made.
    This pear’s most recent history traces back to last year when, after doing a grafting workshop with the Philadelphia Orchard Project at historic Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, I was offered a sprig from the Lady Petre pear tree there. I grow about two dozen varieties of pear, so the last thing I needed was another pear tree. But Lady Petre was special.
    John Bartram is often considered “America’s first botanist.” In addition to collecting plants and sharing them with others, mostly in England, he sometimes received plants. Such as the pear seed from England’s Lady Petre, in 1735.
    Quoting from the account published in John Loudon’s The Gardener’s Magazine of 1831,  the seed was “planted by Mr. Bartram near one end of the dwelling-house, at the edge of a gravel walk, where It has never received any manure or rich earth . . . The tree has never been subject to blight, and has not once failed to bear In the last thirty years; some seasons producing 10 to 12 bushels of fine handsome fruit, which Is in good eating from the middle of September to Christmas. The fruit is always worth from three dollars to five dollars a bushel . . . It Is in the most perfect health, although near a century old.”
    Almost a hundred years after that, Ulysses P. Hedrick wrote, in his 1921 tome, The Pears of New York, that “the tree still stands, somewhat stricken with its two centuries, but withal a noble specimen seemingly capable of breasting large blows of age for many years to come.” Alas, the Lady Petre tree finally succumbed to old age in the latter half of the 20th century — but not before someone had the foresight to clip of some branches to graft and make new trees.
    As far as the fruit, Mr. Bartram wrote that “The Pear raised from her (Lady Petre’s) seed hath borne a number of the finest relished fruit. I think a better is not in the world.” More specifically, the fruit was described as having flesh that is “white, soft, juicy, melting, like a butter pear; delicious flavour, peculiar, very slightly musky, and vinous.”

Flowers already forming on young grafted tree

Flowers already forming on young grafted tree

    And now I have a clone of that original plant and can look forward to tasting the fruit, the first variety of pear to have originated in America. The stated resistance to blight is a plus because blight — fireblight — is still a problem in pear orchards. (And fireblight has its own history: First noted in Highland Falls, NY, and the first recognized bacterial disease of plants.)
    Mr. Bartram did state that “the tree was about twenty years old before It produced fruit, and narrowly escaped being cut down as barren.” Pear and apple trees grown from seed will often take 10 or 20 years before bearing fruit — and then the fruits they bear, more often than not, aren’t worth eating. Grafted trees bear sooner, and especially those grafted on dwarfing rootstocks. I made my Lady Petre pear tree by grafting the sprig I got onto a dwarfing rootstock so I’m hoping to be able to report back on the fruit within 5 years.

Not One, But Two, Grafts

    My Lady Petre tree is special because not only is it the variety Lady Petre, and not only is it grafted on a dwarfing rootstock, but also because it’s an “interstem tree.”
    Dwarfing rootstocks having the advantages of making trees that can be pruned and picked with feet on the ground. Not as obvious is  their yielding more fruit per square foot of land because they harvest sunlight so efficiently. They also tend to bear at a younger age.
    Many dwarfing rootstocks have restricted or brittle root systems. As a result, dwarf trees generally need first-class soil conditions as well as staking throughout their lifespans, which usually are shorter than full-size trees.
    My interstem tree began life as a seedling I grew from a pear seed. Seedling trees are full-size and slow to begin bearing, but have resilient and sturdy roots. A few inches above ground level, I grafted a foot-long stem from a dwarfing rootstock. Atop that dwarfing interstem went the sprig of Lady Petre I had brought home from Philadelphia. That foot-long piece of stem from a dwarfing rootstock is all that’s needed to graft whatever goes above it.
    Pears graft easily, so I was able to do both grafts at the same time last year, and have them take.

Many Pines are Nutty

    Wandering down a different avenue, gardening can lead us into the future, or, at least, a vision of the future. Embodied, for example, in the 4 inch pot of soil sitting on my greenhouse bench. Poking up out of the soil are two small twigs. And I do mean small, each an inch or so high. Capping each is a small whorl of green needles.
 

Limber pine seedlings

Limber pine seedlings

   These two twiggy thingies are limber pine (Pinus flexilis) trees that I’m growing from seed. The common and botanical name relate to the plants flexibility; branches can be tied into knots. Looking into the future, these seedlings could grow to 60 feet in height and under good conditions — which would be drier, mountainous regions of western North America — could live over 1,000 years!
    I’m growing limber pine for its seeds: pine nuts. All pines’ nuts are edible but only those with large nuts are worth bothering with. This one’s can be 1/3 by 1/2 inches large, although it will be many years before I’ll get to gather these tasty morsels from the two plants.
    I’m guessing limber twig pine nuts and Lady Petre pears, both ready for harvest in early fall, will be a tasty combination.