I Clothe The Ground
Sowing My Oats
Whew! Just made it under the wire. Sowing cover crops, that is. (Cover crops are plants grown solely to improve the soil.)
With the vegetable garden still filled to the brim, now overflowing with cabbage, kale, mustard, arugula, lettuce, Chinese cabbages, and radishes, with even corn and peppers still yielding well, where am I going to find room to plant a cover crop? Despite the cornucopia, some plants — the corn, peppers, and other warmth-loving vegetables — are on their way out. As they peter out, it’s too late in the season to sow any more radishes, lettuce, or any of the other cool season crops; there’s not enough time or sunlight for them to mature.
No reason to leave a recently cleared bed of early corn, early beans, or okra bare, so I planted those beds to a cover crop. Problem is that after a certain time of year, there’s not enough time or sunlight for even a cover crop to grow enough to do some good for the soil. My date for that is early October; further south it will be later; further north, earlier.
Right after clearing a bed of spent vegetable plants, I go over it carefully to remove every weed. Then I smooth the ground and give it a thorough watering to give the cover crop plants a quick start. What plants? Oats.
I grow oats as a cover crop because I never till the soil in my vegetable beds. Oats loves the cool weather of fall and early winter, quickly sprouting into a lush, green carpet. By February, though, that lush carpet turns tawny and flops down on the ground, dead. Come spring, I could plant right through that mulch. Or, it could be rolled up with a grass rake, or just pulled off barehanded; removing it speeds soil warming.
Other good cover crops for no-till gardens are barley and, to also add nitrogen to the soil, peas. Gardeners who till their ground usually plant rye grain as a cover crop. It survives winter, then grows with vengeance in spring; hence the need for tillage.
Back to that watered bed. I sprinkle the bed with oat seeds, then top the bed with an inch of compost. Green sprouts poke through that compost blanket in a couple of days or so.
Is It Worth It?
Planting a cover crop in a bed that gets an annual dressing of an inch depth of compost may seem like “carrying coals to Newcastle.” After all, one potential benefit of cover crops are that they add organic matter to the soil. That inch of compost is already organic matter, and plenty of it.
In fact, I have never observed any better growth from a bed that has been cover cropped over one that received only the compost blanket. And for some reason, the cover cropped beds always seem to have more weeds in them in spring — surprising, since a cover crop should be shading or pumping out natural chemicals to suppress weeds! Perhaps some weeds insinuate themselves in fall in among the oat plants, where I can’t see them. My plan, this spring, is to cover some of the cover-cropped beds for a week or so with a black blanket (recycled billboard tarp, available online) which will warm the ground up quicker and snuff out potential weeds.
Even cover crops’ potential benefit of enriching the ground with organic matter doesn’t always pan out, and surely not the way I plant them. Organic matter is largely carbon. Young plants are relatively rich in nitrogen and poor in carbon, a ratio that reverses as the plants age. A young cover crop, then, doesn’t add organic matter to the soil; its excess nitrogen could even contribute to the oxidation and loss of organic matter. Oats planted this time of year grow lushly, but never mature enough to tip the scales in that early ratio of nitrogen and carbon.
(I dive into more depth about cover crops in my book Weedless Gardening.)
Cover Crop Brings Many Benefits
Still, I’m planting a cover crop — for some of its other benefits.
Rain and snow in the coming months can wash nutrients down and out of the soil. The oat roots, as long as they are alive, can suck up those errant nutrients and keep them nearer the surface for next season’s vegetable plants. Cover crops also soften the impact of rain pounding on the soil, preventing erosion.
Oats in January
As roots of cover crop plants push through and ramify in the soil, they nudge soil particles around to improve tilth (structure of the soil) making it crumbly, all to the liking of plants. These roots also team up and nourish other organisms, such as fungi, that also improve tilth. Channels of varying size are left in the soil as roots die off and rot away. Such channels provide easy conduits for new roots, as well as for air and water.
And finally, I’m planting cover crops for myself. With green fading from the landscape into reds, yellows and tawny browns, it’s refreshing to look upon the green carpet rather than bare soil in the vegetable garden.
Some Good, Some Bad
Picking Pecks and Pecks of Peppers
Warm — no, hot — weather going on and on keeps tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers chugging along, restrained only by diminished sunshine. Still, before real autumn weather rolls in and decimates these warmth-loving plants, it’s time to do some evaluation of this season before it fades into memories that meld with previous seasons.
As usual, there are successes and failures. Good — no, great — are this year’s peppers. I credit the rousing success mostly to My choice of two varieties. The first was an old variety, Sweet Italia, aka Sweet Italian or Italian Sweet. Other varieties are available with similar names; the names are similar, but not the same, as are the fruits.
Sweet Italia has two problems: The seed is hard to find; and the plants flop over under their weight of fruit. Both problems are easily solved: Save seed (Sweet Italia is not a hybrid, so seeds come “true” as long as the plants are sufficiently distant from other pepper varieties); stake the plants. Sweet Italia is especially notable for bearing large and relatively early crops of deliciously sweet red peppers even under northern growing conditions. It’s much, much tastier than Sweet Ace, which is often grown commercially as an early ripening, sweet red pepper.
The other pepper variety of note is Escamillo, larger than Sweet Italia and also delicious, in a different way. Escamillo, bred by Johnny’s Selected Seeds, ripens yellow. Like Sweet Italia, Escamillo is a corno di toro, shaped like the horn of a bull.
Blight!!
Balancing my peppery successes are two failures celery and celeriac. Plants looked healthy from the time I sowed seed, indoors in February, until the transplants went out in the garden, in early May. It was downhill from there.
Plants are stunted and their leaves are spotted by disease. The spots are very distinctive, tan with black edges, and angular in outline. The tan areas lacked pycnidia, small, black propagules visible with the naked eye, so the disease is not one of the fungal diseases that afflict celery and celeriac.
A web search of symptoms and images identified the problem as bacterial blight (Pseudomonas syringae pv. apii). Cool, wet weather exacerbates the condition, and we did have some of that this summer. The fungus can also spend the winter in the soil, which makes a good case for crop rotation, not planting any member of a family of plants in the same place oftener that every 3 years. I did move my celery and celeriac far from previous two locations, though.
I’m pinning the blame on seedling flats that were not sufficiently cleaned. Usually, I just give them a rinse after use; next year they’ll also get a spritzing with alcohol.
Infected seed could also have been the culprit — doubtfully in my garden. The celeriac seed was from a reputable nursery. What’s more, the celery seed comes from my own plants, in the greenhouse. Those plants also self-seed in the greenhouse, and the volunteer plants that come up in the greenhouse look fine. (I thin them out, letting the best ones grow to provide celery all winter, and then self-seed again in spring.)
If infected, seed could be de-contaminated with a hot water treatment, 122°F for 25 minutes. Or with time. Seeds more than two years old don’t carry disease.
Other plans for next year are to be even more thorough with end-of-season cleanup of beds and to rip out of the ground any plants suspected of harboring disease as soon as noticed.
As a last resort, copper sprays, which are approved for organic use, could be applied. I probably won’t do that; it takes the fun out of just popping fresh vegetables into your mouth in among the beds. I have plenty of other good stuff to eat out there.
A Fruitful Season
In fruits, pears have been outstanding this year. Not because of any greenness of my thumb; everybody around here had good crops of pears. Must be something about the weather.
Also outstanding have been grapes. Again, not because of the greenness of my thumb, but because I have so many vines and so many different varieties. Despite weather conducive to diseases, there were — and still are — plenty of good grapes for eating.
Flowers did fine this year, except Lemon Gem marigolds, one flower that I try each year to sow enough of to define the leading edges of the beds in the vegetable garden.
They typically germinate poorly for me, but they occasionally self-seed. I couldn’t bear to remove the few that popped up in the main path near the leading edges of the beds. Their general absence makes those few all the more outstanding.
Taste And Aroma
Old Peaches
The peaches on a friend’s tree were small, marred with bacterial spot disease, and still showed some green on their skins. So burdened with fruits was the tree that it had burst asunder from their weight, splitting one of the main limbs.
Still, the friend insisted that the peaches tasted good. As further enticement, the tree had a history, having sprouted on the grounds of a nearby 18th century house that had an orchard. The tree was evidently cold hardy also. So I twisted one fruit off and took a bite. In spite of being not quite ripe, the fruit was delicious, quite sweet — as is usual with white peaches such as these — and with an old-fashioned, intensely peachy flavor.
I took up the offer to take a small bag of them home with me. And not only for eating. My plan is to save the seeds from many of them for planting and for making into new trees that should taste very much like their mother tree. Peaches are self-pollinating, in contrast to apples and pears, so progeny often resemble their parent. Peaches also bear within just a few years from seed so I could weed out some or all plants whose fruits were not up to snuff.
The first step to a peachy future was to crack open the shells surrounding each seed, and then drop the seeds into a plastic bag filled with potting soil on the workbench in my unheated garage.
In their natural environment, peach seeds ripen in summer but wouldn’t sprout until spring. If they sprouted immediately, winter cold would likely kill the very young seedling. Hormones within the seeds sense when winter has ended by the number of accumulated hours at cool (30 to 45°F) temperatures.
The number of hours depends on the genetics of the tree but for most hardy fruit trees, about 1000 hours, or about a month and a half, does the trick. And I do intend to trick them, to give them an early start on the season, indoors. The more they grow each season, the sooner they bear.
I’d like them to sprout in early March, so will put the bag of potting soil and peach seeds into my refrigerator in early December. Once they sprout, I’ll pot a few up and, once they emerge from the soil, move them to the sunniest window or the greenhouse, then, when weather warms, outdoors.
It’s a Weed, It’s a Garden Plant, It’s a . . .
Some plants straddle the fence of being defined as a weed. Case in point is Sweet Annie. On looks alone, the plant could easily fall to one side of the fence, qualifying only as a weed. It’s nothing more than a nondescript, upright plant — until it bends over from it’s own weight — that’s green, clumps of them sprouting all over the place. Despite being a member of the Daisy Family of plants, Sweet Annie’s flowers are small, pale green, and not notable.
I, and many other gardeners, grow the plant for its rich, resiny aroma. Bundles of them are for sale from many farms at Maine’s Common Ground Fair; it’s the signature aroma there. So I also grow Sweet Annie to bring me back, olfactorily speaking, to my good times at the Fair.
As a sometime weed, Sweet Annie is, of course, easy to grow. I first planted it 3 years ago, sowing it, unnecessarily, in pots for later transplanting. No need to plant it again; it self-seeds enthusiastically, my job now being to contain that enthusiasm.
Amazing how that plant can move around. It managed to find its way from the back of my house to the front of my house without going around either side. It manages to sprout in spaces between the bricks of my terraces holding the thinnest slivers of soil.
Sweet Annie is sometimes cultivated as a row crop for harvest and extraction of artemisinin, which has some medicinal uses. As for me, I just weed out plants in the wrong place (as defines a weed), and harvest a few bunches to hang near the door for an olfactory treat as I brush past it.
