2022 – Page 6 – Lee Reich

OMINOUS HOUSEPLANTS

February 16, 2022/6 Comments/in Houseplants/by Lee Reich

Poinsettia Absolved

Sunny temperature reaching the 50s a few days ago enticed me outdoors for pruning. Today, with temperatures in the 20s, I’m back indoors (except for a very pleasant cross-country ski tour earlier) looking over what plants I have, or might have, growing indoors. Their ominous or not so ominous sides.

Mention poisonous houseplants and most people immediately think of poinsettias. Actually, poinsettia’s bad reputation is unfounded. The plant’s not really poisonous. Only a masochist would be able to ingest enough of this foul tasting plant to cause the occasional cases of vomitting that have been reported. This is not to pooh-pooh the toxicity of all houseplants. Many are poisonous.

No sane adult walks around the house plucking houseplant leaves to eat; the greatest danger from poisoning is to children. Ten percent of the inquiries to poison control centers across the nation concern plant poisonings, and the bulk of those inquiries concern children younger than three years. (But in only a small percentage of these cases does the child actually have symptoms of poisonings.)

Common Culprits

Years ago, I hosted philodendron and dumbcane (Diffenbachia spp.), two very common houseplants, in my home. These two plants are responsible for the first and second most reported poisonings, respectively.

Variegated philodendron

They are in the Araceae Family, a group of plants with needle-like crystals of calcium oxalate in their leaves and stems. When chewed, the crystals cause immediate pain in the mouth and throat, which commonly leads to swelling. This makes speech difficult and is the origin for the common name “dumbcane” for Diffenbachia species. Ingest enough leaves of either plant and vomiting and diarrhea, even death, could follow. Other houseplants in this family include elephant’s ear (Alocasia spp.), flamingo flower (Anthurium spp.), and caladium (Caladium bicolor).

Anthurium

Caladium

The “philodendron” that I grew and many people grow is commonly known as Swiss cheese plant, for its large, holey leaves. Botanically, it’s not a Philodendron, although it was originally classified as one. Now it’s botanical name is Monstera deliciosa. Deliciosa! A poisonous plant? This is one member of the Araceae that bears an edible fruit. The fruit resembles an ear of corn and tastes something like a combination of pineapple and banana. That’s when it’s ripe. Unripe, not so tasty, rich in oxalic acid, and poisonous. Monstera fruit

Poinsettias are ranked third as far as the number of reported (not actual) poisonings nationwide. Although poinsettia really is not toxic, it’s a member of the Spurge Family, a family which includes many toxic plants. Guilt by association, perhaps. Members of the Spurge Family contain a milky latex in their sap, and this latex can cause dermatitis. A houseplant Spurge that does warrant caution is the Crown-of-Thorns, which, as long as we are talking about danger to children, also is heavily armed with stout thorns.

Now is the time of year when blooms on forced bulbs carry gardeners through the last leg of winter before spring planting. Most of these bulbs are in the Lily Family,

Potted daffodils

another family with many poisonous members. The daintiness of Lily-of-the-Valley belies the fact that it contains a potent cardiac glycoside (much like the digitalis found in foxgloves), which even leaches into the water of cut flowers. Hyacinths are wonderfully fragrant, yet also toxic. All parts of sunny daffodils contain lycorine, a toxin that can cause dermatitis with skin contact, and diarrhea and convulsions if ingested.
That toxin, lycorine, also is found in another winter bulb, amaryllis (Hippeastrum spp.), though amaryllis is not in the Lily Family.

And More

A few other houseplants in widely scattered plant families also are worth mentioning for their toxicity. Jerusalem cherry (Solanum pseudocapsicum), a houseplant with brightly colored berries, is in the Deadly Nightshade Family. The family name should tell you something about the plant’s toxic properties. Not all members of the family are toxic in the amounts normally ingested; if so, we’d have to give up eating tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and potatoes.

Mistletoe is not a houseplant per se, yet it is a plant in the house at Christmas. The white berries, which tend to fall to the ground as the plants dry out, are toxic.

English ivy is a plant that is grown both indoors and outdoors. Unfortunately, its leaves are also toxic.

I don’t like to cast a somber cloud over these houseplants, but it’s important to know which are toxic so as to keep them beyond the inquisitive reach of very young hands. If a child does manage to ingest a plant, save part of the plant for positive identification, and then call a poison control center (http://www.aapcc.org/DNN/). It is not always advisable to induce vomiting, because this can further spread irritating materials.

Now why does an otherwise friendly looking plant — a philodendron, for instance — have to strike a menacing chord with a toxin in its leaves? Inside our homes, overwatering or underwatering probably is the major threat to any houseplant’s existence. But out in the jungle, a philodendron needs some way to ward off a big gorilla who might find the leaves an appetizing salad. In this case, a burning, swollen mouth is a good deterrent.

AN ICEY BEGINNING, WITH KIWIS

February 9, 2022/4 Comments/in Fruit/by Lee Reich

Pruning Weather

Yesterday was a fine day for pruning, windless with a sunny sky and a temperature of 19 degrees Fahrenheit. The ice storm had turned this part of the world into a crystal palace, with branches clothed in thick, clear sleeves of ice. Ice covered honeylocust tree From an auspicious vantage point, a pear tree glowed like a subdued holiday tree as hints of sunlight’s reds and blues refracted from the natural prisms on the branches.

Witchhazel flowers

What a pleasant setting for pruning! The usual recommendation is to hold off pruning until after the coldest part of winter, which typically occurs in late January and early February, is over. I’ll admit to rushing outdoors, pruning shears in hand, before that time period, with some plants not long after they dropped their leaves in autumn. That was with plants, such as gooseberries and currants, least likely to be damaged by cold weather.

I was anxious to begin pruning in earnest as an excuse to get outdoors and because I have lots of plants to prune, mostly fruit plants. It all needs to be done before leaves unfurl in spring. And, as spring inches closer, sowing seeds, spreading compost, and other gardening activities increasingly vie for my time. An icy cathedral of overarching trees
So I’m out in the crystal palace working on my hardy kiwifruit vines (Actinidia arguta and A. kolomikta). In case you’re unfamiliar with this plant, it’s a dead ringer for the fuzzy, kiwis you see in the markets — except that hardy kiwifruit is grape-size with a smooth, edible skin. The resemblance is even greater beneath the skin — except that hardy kiwis are sweeter and more aromatic. And while a fuzzy kiwi vine will sulk or die back below 10 degrees Fahrenheit, hardy kiwis tolerate winter weather below minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Kiwi Training and Pruning

A hardy kiwi vine bears fruits on new, growing shoots originating off one-year-old stems. Actinidia pruning detail The goals in pruning are to keep the plant reined in to a convenient size for easy harvest, to eliminate enough stems so that those that remain bathe in sunlight and air, and to coax growth of new stems off which will emerge, the following year’s fruiting shoots.

Kiwi vine, before pruning

Pruning also removes plenty of one-year-old stems. That cuts down yield but lets the vines pump more goodness into fruits that remain, for better flavor. (Pruning kiwis is described and also diagrammed in my book The Pruning Book.)

Training a kiwi vine to some sort of system keeps the vigorous growth organized. My plants grow on a trellis of metal or locust T-posts spaced 15 feet apart, with 5 wires (actually nylon monofilament) running perpendicular to and spaced out across to the tops of the T’s. Each kiwi trunk runs from ground level up to the middle wire, at which point it bifurcates into two permanent arms, called cordons, running in opposite directions along the middle wire. Fruiting arms grow out perpendicularly to the cordons and the wires, draping themselves over the two outermost wires on either side of the the cordons.

I actually began pruning a couple of weeks ago, starting to disentangle the stems by walking along on either side of the row with my cordless hedge shear, shortening any stems to a few inches beyond the outermost wires. Yesterday I began cutting any two-year-old stem — any stem that fruited last summer — back to its origin or to a one-year-old stem near the its origin. The one-year-old stems, those a little more than pencil thick of moderate vigor, will bear fruiting shoots this year in late summer or fall.

After all this pruning, plenty of one-year-old stems remain, too many for top notch fruit. So I’ll move down the cordons and remove enough one-year-old stems so that none is closer than eight to twelve inches from its neighbor. Pruned kiwi vine
Not done yet. In spring, after growth has begun, I’ll clip each one-year-old stem back to about 18 inches.

If you grow grapes, you probably noted that they bear and can be pruned similarly to the kiwis. I even grow some grape vines along the same trellis as the kiwi vines.

The main difference is that grape vines’ one-year-old shoots can be cut back more severely than the kiwi stems. Mine get shortened to a couple of buds each, which is only about three inches, from the cordon; it’s called spur pruning. Everything else is the same.

Ice is Nice, Sometimes

Those sleeves of ice on the kiwis actually made pruning easier. A sharp tug on a cut stem quickly disentangled it and let it slide free from its neighbors. Ice encased kiwi stems
All this ice did, of course, weigh down branches of large trees which, coupled with strong winds after the storm, sent many limbs plummeting to the ground. Particularly surprising were my birch trees, a tree known for the limberness of its trunk, a characteristic immortalized in Robert Frost’s poem Birches:

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

This storm was more than two of my multi-stemmed birches’ trunks could bear; they cracked. But Mr. Frost was writing about white birches. Mine are river birches.
Birches broken by ice
Late afternoon view of icy trees

A HOUSEPLANT, AN “ALMOND,” AND PAPER

February 2, 2022/1 Comment/in Houseplants, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Easiest Houseplant of All?!

What with the frigid temperatures and snow-blanketed ground outside, at least here in New York’s mid-Hudson Valley, I turn my attention indoors to a houseplant. To anyone claiming a non-green thumb, this is a houseplant even you can grow.

Most common problems in growing houseplants (garden plants also) come from improper watering. Too many houseplants suffer short lives, either withering in soil allowed to go bone dry between waterings, or gasping for air in constantly waterlogged soil. Also bad off yet are those plants forced to alternately suffer from both extremes. King Tut cyperus

The plant I have in mind is umbrella plant (Cyperus alternifolius); it requires no skill at all in watering. Because it’s native to shallow waters, you never need to decide whether or not to water. Water is always needed! The way to grow this plant is by standing its pot in a deep saucer which is always kept filled with a couple of inches of water. What could be simpler?

One caution, though. The top edge of the saucer does have to be below the rim of the pot. Umbrella plants like their roots constantly bathed in water, but not their stems.

Lest you think that umbrella plant sacrifices good looks for ease of care, it doesn’t. Picture a graceful clump of bare, slender stems, each stem capped with a whorl of leaves that radiate out like the ribs of a denuded umbrella.

cyperus plant

The stems are two to four feet tall, each leaf four to eight inches long. A dwarf form of the plant, botanically C. albostriatus, grows only a foot or so high, and has grassy leaves growing in amongst the stems at the base of the plant. There’s also a variegated form of umbrella plant, and a wispy one with especially thin leaves and stems. Cyperus flowers

Umbrella plants aren’t finicky about care other than watering. They grow best in sunny windows, but get along in any bright room. As far as potting soil, your regular homemade or packaged mix will suffice. Umbrella plants like a near-neutral pH, as do most other houseplants.

Want More?

As the clump of stems ages and expands, they eventually get overcrowded in the pot, calling out to be repotted. You could move it to a yet larger pot, or make new plants by pulling apart, cutting if necessary, the large clumps to make smaller clumps and potting each of them separately.

One way wild umbrella plants propagate is by taking root where their leaves touch ground when the stems arch over. You can mimic this habit indoors if you want to increase your umbrella plant holdings without dividing the clump. Fold the leaves down around the stem with a rubber band, as if you were closing the umbrella. Cut the stem a few inches below the whorl of leaves and poke the umbrella, leaves pointing upward, into some potting soil — kept constantly moist, of course.

An Almondy Relative

Though you may be unfamiliar with umbrella plant, you probably have come across its near-relatives either in the garden or in literature. One relative is yellow nutsedge (C. esculentum), a plant usually considered a weed and inhabiting wet soils from Maine down to the tropics.

The edible nutsedge, also C, esculentum, usually called chufa or earth almond, is not invasive, at least in what I’ve read from many sources, and in my experiences growing the plants. It’s a perennial that has been cultivated since prehistoric times and was an important food in ancient Egypt.

But esculentum in the botanical name means “edible,” and refers to the sweet, nut-like tubers the plant produces below ground. I grow this plant, and now consider it quite esculentum, with a taste and texture not unlike fresh coconut. Chufa tubers The main challenge with this plant is clearing and separating the almond-sized tubers from soil and small stones.

Storage improves their flavor, but they must be dried for storage, at which point they become almost rock hard. Give them an overnight soaking and they’re ready to eat as a snack or incorporate into other edibles or drinkables.

Paper Plant

Umbrella plant’s other famous relative is papyrus (C. papyrus), a plant that once grew wild along the Nile River. In ancient times, papyrus was used not only to make paper, but also to build boats and as food. Papyrus looks much like umbrella plant, and being subtropical, also would make a good houseplant. But with stems that may soar to fifteen feet in height, except for the diminutive variety King Tut, this species is too tall for most living rooms.

The Egyptians never recorded their method for making papyrus into paper but the Romans learned the process from the Egyptians and Pliny the Elder, a Roman, wrote about it in the first century B.C.

Genuine, Egyptian papyrus

Here’s how: You put on your toga and sandals (the latter also once made from papyrus), and prune down a few umbrella plant stalks. Cut the stalks into strips and, after soaking them in water for a day, lay them side by side in two perpendicular layers. Make a sandwich of the woven mat surrounded on either side by cloth, to absorb moisture, surrounded on either side with pieces of wood, then press.

In Egyptian sunlight, you could figure on the paper being dry and ready for use after about three weeks. Cut it to size to fit your printer.

SOWING PEARS AND LETTUCES

January 26, 2022/19 Comments/in Gardening/by Lee Reich

For the Long Haul

Among the must-have tools for any good gardener are hope, optimism, and patience. I thought of all three last week as I was planting some seeds.
Asian pear, Korean Giant
The first of these seeds especially emphasizes patience. They were a few pear seeds I saved from pears I had eaten. After being soaked for a couple of days in water, the cores were soft enough for the seeds to be squeezed out, after which they were rinsed, and then planted in potting soil.

I put the planted seeds near a bright window in my basement where the cool (about 40°) temperatures would, in a couple of months, fool the seeds into feeling that winter was over. They would sprout.

Given time, those seeds would grow to become pear trees and, given more time (ten years, possibly more) go on to bear fruit. Those seeds came from Bosc and Passe Crassane pears. The genetics of the resulting trees will represent the sexual union of egg cells within the flowers with whatever male pollen happened to fertilize those eggs. As a result, said trees would bear fruits different, and probably worse, than the fruits from which they were taken. (There’s less than 1 in 10,000 chance of a seedling apple tree bearing fruit as good or better than the fruit from the mother tree; the ratio for pears should be similar.)

Shortening the Long Haul, and Other Benefits

Grafted tree, this one NOT interstem

So why will I be wasting all that time nurturing these plants? Because they’re not for fruit. They’re for rootstocks, for grafting. Pears and most other tree fruits are very hard to root from cuttings, so are propagated by grafting a stem of a good-tasting pear low on a rootstock.
Whip graft of stem to rootstock
So-called “seedling” rootstocks make for very sturdy trees, well anchored and genetically diverse so some scourge can’t wipe out a whole bunch of equally susceptible, genetically identical trees. On the other hand, seedling rootstocks make for very large trees that are very slow to induce bearing in their grafted portions.

Enter from stage right: clonal rootstocks, that is, plants reproduced asexually (cuttings are one example of asexual plant propagation) so that all members of the clone are genetically identical. Some clonal pear rootstocks — with such unalluring names as Pyrodwarf and OH x F 87 — have been developed that make smaller grafted trees that also are quicker to come into bearing. (I delve more deeply into the nitty gritty of grafting in my book The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Much Better Garden.)

My plan is to make interstem trees, each one by grafting a 9 inch stem of one of the clonal rootstocks near the base of a seedling rootstock, and then some variety for eating, such as Passe Crassane, atop the clonal interstem. That 9 inch clonal interstem has the same good effects as if it was used as a rootstock, except that the interstem trees also have sturdy root systems and genetic diversity at their roots. Because plants grow from the tips of stems, the heights of the grafts above ground remain the same even as the tree grows.

Parts of interstem tree

I’ll do both grafts at the same time, next spring. I’m hopeful, optimistic, and have patience that I’ll be biting my first pears from these trees within 5 years.

Lettuce be Hopeful, Patient, and Optimistic

The other seeds for this week’s sowing were four varieties of lettuce. No, not for eventual outdoor planting, but for planting in the greenhouse in spaces that will open up where some of last autumn’s lettuce will have been harvested.

It’s chilly in the greenhouse, where temperatures drop into the 30’s at night and on cloudy days, too chilly for good sprouting of lettuce seeds. Sowing lettuce seeds in flats So I sowed them in a 4×6 inch seed flat filled with potting soil, then moved the flat in front of a sun-drenched, living room window. Once the lettuce seeds sprouted, which was in a few days, I moved them to the greenhouse. Warmer temperatures are needed to sprout a seed than to grow a plant.
Lettuce sprouting in flat
The seedlings should not, of course, remained crowded in their mini-furrows in the flat. So once the seedlings grow a little larger, I’ll gently lift each one by its leaves, coaxing it up and out of the flat, and then lower the roots into a dibbled hole in one potting-soil-filled-cell of GrowEase. And so on, until each of the 24 cells has a small plant in it.

Moving small lettuce seedlings I use this same method to keep up a steady supply of lettuce and other seedlings all through summer, the plants typically needing about a month in the GrowEase before they’re ready to transplant into the ground. Not so in winter, with the sun still hanging low in the sky and greenhouse temperature still cool. I estimate that it won’t be until early March before the lettuces will be ready to plant in the ground in the greenhouse.

No matter; I’m hopeful, optimistic, and patient. And I’ll still be harvesting some of last autumn’s lettuce beyond that date.

LESS SALT IS BETTER

January 19, 2022/15 Comments/in Soil/by Lee Reich

What Does “Salt” Really Mean?

A few years back, one of my neighbors planted a hemlock hedge along the road in front of their house as a screen from the road. Sad to say, the future does not bode well for this planting. The hemlocks very likely will be damaged by road salt. And the prognosis is similar for those stately sugar maples that line so many streets. Truck spreading salt Chemically, road salt — at least the more traditional “road salt” — is the same as the stuff in your salt shaker, sodium chloride. Either sodium or chloride ions can be toxic to plants. Chlorine is a nutrient needed by plants, but it is classed as a micronutrient, needed in minute quantities. Too much is toxic. Sodium is not at all needed by plants.

In a broader sense, a “salt” is any ionic molecule, that is, a molecule of two or more atoms in which electrons, which are negatively charged, are donated from one atom to another. Who gets what depends on how easily an atom or atoms can lose one or more electrons and how hungry another atom or atoms is for those electrons. That ability to donate or be hungry for an electron depends on the number of positively charged protons in an atoms nucleus and the number and arrangement of electrons around the nucleus.

In the case of table salt, the sodium easily loses one electron and the chloride atom is hungry for it. The once neutral sodium atom becomes, after losing an electron, a positively charged sodium ion. The once neutral chloride atom, after gaining an electron, becomes a negatively charged chloride ion. And bingo, these two oppositely charged ions are strongly attracted to each other; they bond. Salt and water ions What happens when water enters the picture? A water molecule, because of its shape has a slightly imbalanced charge distribution. The negatively charged side of the water molecule gets attracted to the sodium ion of table salt, and the positively charged side of the water molecule gets attracted to the chloride ion.

Salt Problem in Winter, and Beyond

Any salt (ionic molecule), not only sodium chloride, attracts water so will simulate drought if in excessive amounts in the soil in the same way that potato chips dry out your lips. This leads to common symptoms of salt injury. First evidence of salt injury is browning of leaves, starting along the leaf margins. Early fall coloration and defoliation also can occur. More severe injury is manifest by twig or branch dieback, or death of a whole plant.

Progressive symptoms of salt damage

Salt also has an adverse effect on the soil itself, which is particularly insidious since it’s not as obvious as a dead plant. Over a period of time, sodium in salt can pull soil particles together, squeezing air out of the soil. As a result, roots suffocate.

Plants suffer most from salt in dry soils, so any plant exposed to salt in winter will benefit from mulching and watering during summer droughts. Watering also leaches sodium out of the soil, which improves soil porosity. Gypsum further aids in fluffing up a soil made too compact by sodium, by displacing sodium in the soil with calcium.

Honeylocust

Plants vary in their tolerance to salt. In addition to hemlock and sugar maple, the following trees and shrubs should not be planted where they will be exposed to salt: red maple, American hornbeam, shagbark hickory, dogwoods, winged euonymus, black walnut, privet, Douglas fir, white pine, crabapples, beech. Plants with a moderate tolerance to salt include: Amur maple, silver maple, boxelder, red or white cedar, lilac. Deciduous plants with high tolerances for salt include: Norway maple, paper and grey birches, Russian olive, honeylocust, white or red oaks, black locust, and many of the poplars and aspens.

For my neighbors who wanted an evergreen hedge, better choices would have been: white spruce, Colorado blue spruce, or Austrian pine. Perhaps even yew, since the site was somewhat shaded.

Mitigation or Avoidance

An obvious way to limit problems with road salt on plants, even salt that you might spread on your driveway or paths, is to use less salt, or none at all. (After once slipping on ice in my driveway and suffering a slight concussion, I became very aware of weighing damage to plants against damage to humans.) Fortunately, there are ways to keep all creatures happy.

Traction on ice or snow can be increased by spreading sand or sawdust.

A very effective technique, one that uses less salt, used by some road crews is to spray a salt solution on dry roads before a weather event that will bring slippery conditions.

When salt must be used, use a minimum amount or substitute a salt other than sodium chloride. Calcium chloride, for instance, is a salt that is only a tenth as toxic to plants as sodium chloride. One of the best materials as far as effectiveness with minimum damage to vehicles, concrete, and vegetation, is calcium magnesium acetate (CMA); but it’s expensive.

Salts that are fertilizers, such as ammonium nitrate or calcium nitrate, melt ice and at the same time nourish plants. Salts other than sodium chloride still need to be used with caution, for they can cause salt desiccation and/or nutrient imbalances in plants. Spreading woodash My favorite treatment for icy conditions here at home is spreading wood ash. Effectiveness comes from the dark color absorbing sunlight to speed melting, a slight grittiness increasing traction, and its salt content. Of course, access to wood ash means you or an ash-rich friend burns wood for heat.

For all its benefits, wood ash is a mess if tracked indoors. I take off my shoes or boots in the mudroom.

THE BEST HERB FOR A NORTHERN WINTER

January 13, 2022/27 Comments/in Design, Houseplants, Soil/by Lee Reich

Calamity Avoidance

A horticultural calamity averted. Again. Deb was snipping some leaves from our potted rosemary “tree” for salad dressing and said she noticed that the plant looked a little wilty. I was skeptical. Rosemary leaves are so narrow and stiff that they hardly broadcast their thirst. Still, quite a few rosemary plants have succumbed to winter drought here. Potted rosemary tree in winter

I checked the plant and, in fact, the leaves did look a bit wilty. The probe of my sort-of-accurate electronic moisture tester (which I nonetheless highly recommend) confirmed Deb’s diagnosis. The soil was very dry but, luckily, not to the point of killing the plant.

Allow me to digress . . . Soil scientists represent soil moisture levels with four descriptors. Right after a thorough watering, a soil is “saturated,” with all pores filled with water. Saturation is not desirable in the long term because roots need to “breathe” to do their work of drawing in nutrients and water, which is why plants exhibit the same symptoms from either dry or sodden soil.

Without additional water, gravity begins to pull water down and out of the larger pores of a saturated soil. Once gravity has pulled all the water it can from a soil, the soil is at “field capacity,” much to the pleasure of resident plants. At this point, large pores are filled with air yet some water, which is available for plants, is retained within smaller pores and clinging to soil particles.

Roots continue to slurp more and more water from the soil, but with increasing difficulty because water within even smaller pores and clinging even closer to soil particles is increasingly tightly held there by capillary attraction. Although the soil has moisture, it’s mostly inaccessible to plants. “Wilting point” has been reached.

Eventually, the only moisture left in the soil is that held very tightly in the very smallest pores and pressed tight against soil particles. That’s “permanent wilting point” from which, as the name implies, there’s no turning back. The plant will die.

The actual amount of water in a soil at any of these stages depends on the range of particle sizes in the soil. Clay soils have tiny particles, with tiny spaces between them, so have more water at wilting and permanent wilting point than do sandy soils, with their large particles and large pores.

At or near field capacity, sands have more air and less water than clays.

Where were we? Oh, my rosemary plant. I’m figuring it was just teetering on the edge of wilting point. Needless to say, I watered both my rosemary “trees.”

(For a lot more about soil water and how to make the best of it, see my book The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Much Better Garden.)

Dry Air, Moist (Enough) Soil

You’d think — I once did — that rosemary, because in the wild it billows down dry hillsides overlooking the Mediterranean, would be resistant to drought. It does tolerate dry air. But those wild plants’ roots are in the ground where they can forage far and wide for moisture; not so in a pot.

Also, my rosemary plants are coddled with relatively consistent warmth in winter and a potting mix rich in nutrients. Couple this with low light conditions, even near a south-facing window, and you get very succulent growth. I don’t know what rosemary plants growing on a Grecian hillside are doing now, but my plants are growing like gangbusters. All that succulent growth transpires lots of water, and is very susceptible to drought.

Left half of this rosemary expired last summer

Once my plants go outdoors in summer, their leaves mature and toughen and growth is less succulent. They do still need sufficient moisture, so I have drip tubes on a timer quenching their thirst (and that of other plants). Except, that is, when the timer’s battery needs replacing and I don’t notice it. That was last summer. The plants were not at the permanent wilting point but a number of branches, which I pruned off, dried up, dead.

In Praise of Potted Rosemary

All this is not to frown upon growing rosemary where it can’t survive winters outdoors. On the contrary, I consider rosemary to be the finest herb for indoor growing. Flavorwise, it packs a powerful punch, unlike chives, for example, a plant that needs to be practically decimated if you really want to flavor something with it. Merely brushing against my rosemary plant releases an aromatic, piney cloud.

Rosemary is also a very attractive houseplant whether grown as a scraggly shrub reminiscent of the wild plants in their native haunts, trained as dense cones, or — as are my plants — as miniature trees. The leaves retain a healthy, verdant look, unlike those of basil, which look sickly and out of their element in dry, relatively dark and cool homes in winter.

Rosemary also rarely suffers from any insect or disease problem.

And finally, properly cared for, rosemary is perennial so can provide aroma, flavor, and beauty for many, many years.

But you and I do need to pay close attention to watering.

Rosemary, with its compatriots, bay and citrus, in summer

A PEAR, 170 YEARS LATER

January 6, 2022/10 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening/by Lee Reich

A Luscious Fruit in Winter

All fruits did well this past season but it was especially a banner year for pears. Why do I mention this now? Because we’re still eating them and they are delicious. “Them” is actually just one variety — Passe Crassane, not a variety you’d find on a supermarket shelf, but which is available as a tree. Passe Crassane pear sliced
Timely harvest, storage, and ripening of pears melds art and science; since this was my first crop from Passe Crassane, I was wary as I sliced off a taste. It was like slicing through butter, a good omen. The flesh was “white, fine. melting, [sugary], perfumed, and agreeably sprightly,” to quote from The Pears of New York, U. P. Hedrick’s 1921 classic. Delicious.

The seed for this pear was sown, literally, by one Louis Boisbunel in Rouen, France in 1845. Ten years later, the tree showed its worth and the fruit made its debut. Passe Crassane is a winter pear that needs to be harvested mature — here, in early November — and then kept in cold storage for a couple of months to ripen to full flavor. Under ideal storage conditions, fruits keep well for months.

This variety was very popular in its century of origin, and its cultivation spread to Italy, Spain, Germany, and England. Commercially, stems were dipped in a red wax to prevent water loss during storage; those red-tipped stems became a signature of Passe Crassane. By the 20th century, Passe Crassane had fallen out of favor because of its susceptibility to diseases, including dreaded fireblight.

(My tree was struck by what I thought might be fireblight a year and a half ago, so I had drastically lopped it back well below what might have been blighted portions, planning to graft the stump to another variety. Fortunately, one older branch remained below the lopping and that branch, for the first time this past season, bore fruit, heavily. I’ll let the tree re-develop from one of the few watersprouts that shot skyward where the tree was lopped.) Passe Crassane lopped

The Hard Part of Growing Pears

Apple, cherry, and other common tree fruits are usually beset with pest problems that make them hard to grow. Not so for pears. The hard part about growing pears is knowing when to harvest them and then ripening them to perfection.

Yeh, yeh, I’ve read all about various indicators that show pears are ready for harvest: 1) When the fruit stalk separates easily from the stem as you lift and twist; 2) When the skin color lightens slightly; 3) When the small lenticels on the skin turn from white to brown; 4) When the first fruits start to drop. And, my favorite, recording the harvest date, once you get it right, and then harvesting on about that date every year.

Picking Seckel pear

No matter what the method, a pear should be firm, not at all soft, once ready for harvest. Pears ripen from the inside out. So fruit left on tree to thoroughly ripen is mostly brown mush on the inside by then.

All those indicators notwithstanding, I am much better at timely harvesting of pear varieties I’ve grown and harvested for a number of years.

So much for harvest; now for storage. On or near freezing is ideal. Cold temperatures slow ripening, and, for all except very early varieties, primes the fruit to begin ripening.

Ethylene, a natural, gaseous plant hormone can unduly speed ripening. Mature pears give off very little ethylene; not so for harvested apples and many other fruits, so keep these other fruits away from the pears unless a whole lot of pears are needed ready for eating soon. (I cover ethylene more thoroughly in my book The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Much Better Garden.)

Finally, on to ripening, which occurs as fruits are brought into warmth, ideally a cool room, 60-70 degrees F. I press a finger against the stem end of the fruit, and if there is any give at all, the fruit is ready for eating.

All this finickiness with harvest, storage, and ripening is unnecessary with Asian pears, which are different species from European pears. Let Asian varieties ripen thoroughly on the tree, meaning they remove easily with a lift and twist, and are fully colored. Then eat. Or keep them refrigerated, and get them out to eat whenever you’re so inclined.

Asian pear, Korean Giant