OLD ENEMIES RETURN
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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.
