When I weed a section of my garden, I leave no proverbial stone unturned – unless I can’t identify the weed and it looks, for one reason or another, like like one that has garden potential. Such has been the case with the mounds of moss-like leaves that sprouted and have been slowly growing at the ends of some beds in the vegetable garden.
The plant hardly seemed menacing. And it wasn’t.
The plant graduated out of the “weed” or “potential weed” category as a scattering of lemon-yellow flowers opened atop the mounds. Aha! I looked back on my early autumn notebook entry of last year and identified this year’s plant as Goldilocks Rocks (Bidens ferulifolia), one of a few annual flowers that I received last year for testing. The plant bloomed nonstop all last summer, and has returned for an encore.
The plant is sometimes billed as an annual, blooming from “planting until hard frost,” yet last fall, my plant kept blooming until temperatures dropped to 24° F. Sometimes the plant is billed as a warm climate perennial, hardy to 30° F., yet temperatures dipped to -18° F. in my garden last January. For one reason another, the plant returned without my doing. Snow cover may have kept the plant warm enough to act like a perennial that overwintered from last fall. Or new plants sprouted from self-sown seeds. In the latter case, which is more likely, I will add Goldilocks Rocks to my list – along with mache, dill, cilantro, breadseed poppy, dame’s rocket, cleome, and bush balsam – of friendly volunteers that annually show up in my garden.
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Pears in July? On July 11th, I was weeding around the base of a pear tree and came upon a few small pears on the ground beneath Blanquet Precoce (an old pear variety probably originating in Germany about 200 years ago). And they were ripe, overripe, in fact.
I gathered them up from the ground and picked the few that remained on the tree. The worst of them was mealy, with pear flavor that was on the “sleepy” side. The best of them had firm texture and more lively pear flavor.
Even at its best, Blanquet Precoce is not a very flavorful pear. Surely not one that would be worth growing if it ripened in late summer of fall, when other pear varieties are abundant. And, did I mention the fruit size? Very small, the size of a very small plum.
Still, Blanquet Precoce is notable for, if nothing else, being a pear that is ripe in July. The flavor would probably be improved if it was picked at just the right moment. That moment is before it is fully ripe, after which it can finish ripening in a bowl indoors, off the tree. Some pears – and perhaps Blanquet Precoce is one of them – need a period of cool, refrigerator temperatures before they can be ripened at room temperature. Skill is needed to harvest and ripen a pear to perfection, and then, to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.” I’ll give Blanquet Precoce another chance, next year.
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Diligence in weeding the vegetable garden throughout spring and early summer has paid off. The garden has few weeds now, and just a few minutes pulling a weed here and there now and then is all that’s needed to keep the garden free of weed problems.
Without weed problems, the garden looks nicer, is more productive, and – very important – is ready to fill baskets, salad bowls, and the freezer with fresh vegetables from late summer on into autumn. As tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and other warm-weather vegetables of summer exit stage left in a couple of months, lush leaves of cabbage, kale, endive, and lettuce, and crisp roots of turnips, winter radishes, and beets enter stage right. The change is gradual, like a developing photographic film with the late summer and fall vegetables gradually coming into focus from among the fading tangle of summer vegetables.
Enjoying the late summer and fall vegetable garden is like having a whole other vegetable garden with little more effort and no additional garden area; but it takes planning and planting. Endive, broccoli, kale, and cabbage seedlings are on their way, ready for planting out in couple of weeks. At that time, I’ll also be sowing turnips and winter radishes and, a couple of weeks later, spinach and small (spring) radishes. From now until early September, I’ll also be sowing and transplanting lettuce.
I will be spreading the blueberry gospel with a BLUEBERRY GROWING WORKSHOP at my farmden on July 30th, from 9:30 to 11:30 am. This workshop will cover everything you need to know to be on your way to picking your own blueberries, including soil preparation, obtaining plants, watering, fertilizing, pruning, and, or course, eating (and tasting). The cost is $40. Space is limited so reservations are a must. Contact me through my website “contact” (at right) for more information.
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One small, red flower caused quite a bit of excitement last week. It was a pomegranate blossom, which is quite flamboyant in and of itself, but the real excitement was because I’d been waiting for this one for 6 years.
Pomegranate would normally freeze, dead, in our cold winters. It’s a Mediterranean plant that calls Western Asia home, just like figs. And, like figs, it can be grown in pots that can be carried to a cool place (a barely heated garage, an unheated room, or my cool basement) in winter, and then put outside during the growing season to bask in sunlight and warmth. One big difference with figs is that many fig varieties bear fruit on new shoots each season. So figs bear well even if old stems are cut back by pruning shears or winter cold, as long as the growing season is sufficiently long. Pomegranates stems need to be 2 to 3 years old before they’ll bear fruit.
So every spring and early summer for the past few years I’ve been anxiously eyeing the stems, looking and hoping for signs of blossoms. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a red swelling and finally, last week, that swelling unfolded into a beautiful, fire engine red blossom. Such beauty! Pomegranates are sometimes grown as ornamentals for their blossoms alone.
Not here, though. I want fruit. I dabbed an artist’s brush into the blossom just to make sure it got pollinated, and it soon started swelling into the beginnings of a fruit. Or, so I thought. Today, I touched the fruitlet, and it dropped to the ground.
No matter, because a few other blossoms have also begun to form and open on that and my three other pomegranate plants. Last week’s bout of rainy weather – very un-Mediterranean-like – could have been responsible for the poor fruit set. I have high hopes with this week’s dry, sunny weather.
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Another delectable fruit of Mediterranean climates, pineapple guava, has been in bloom for the past couple of weeks. This plant is native to South America but I’ve seen it planted and thriving as an edible, ornamental shrub in California and Italy. The leaves, silvery green on their upper sides and almost white on their undersides, look right at home under intense Mediterranean sunlight, and also look pretty good on the plants at the end of my driveway.
Like my pomegranates, my pineapple guavas are in pots so they can be carried down to the basement for winter. In years past, I’ve harvested a few of the torpedo-shaped, velvety green fruits; they are delicious, with a minty pineapple flavor and smooth, soft-gritty texture.
The flowers are as much a culinary treat as are the fruits. The fleshy petals are intensely sweet with a refreshing hint of mint. I’m careful to pinch off the petals without damaging the rest of the flower so that the flower can then go on to become a fruit. I also brush my fingers from the bottlebrush of carmine stamens to the central stigma to effect pollination since the petal-stripped flowers will no longer be attractive to insect pollinators (although I’ve never seen any insects playing on the flowers anyway).
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Once fruits begin to swell on the pomegranate and guava plants, the race begins for the fruits to ripen before the growing season ends. Both fruits require a long season from the time they first set until they mature. I may have to bring them indoors to finish ripening. Even better would be to move them into the greenhouse so that warmth and bright sunlight there can bring out the best flavor in these fruits. Sunlight should be adequate in the greenhouse because the latitude here in the Hudson Valley is about the same as that of Tuscany, Italy.
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Hanging on the brick wall near my Mediterranean fruits is a Mediterranean flower, or one that also thrives in climates with hot, dry summers. The flower, moss rose (Portulaca grandiflora), is, in fact, native to Argentina. It’s powdery seeds germinate quickly and easily and the plants are as care-free as any plant can be as long as given sun and well-drained soil.
An old pair of Crocs garden shoes that I no longer wear seemed like they would be a perfect home for a few of the moss rose seedlings I grew in spring. So I lined the inside of the hole-y footwear with coir (coconut fibre) and filled it with potting soil. I also embedded a small loop of wire near the heel so the Crocs could be hung. Soil drainage: Taken care of. The brick wall near my front door bathes in unobstructed sunlight from early morning until about 2 pm, and that’s where the portulaca-ed Crocs now hang. For the occasional watering the plants require, I get day after day of the cheeriest, colorful blossoms you can imagine.
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[inter and succession planting, nasturtium, mulberries]
In 1810, English essayist Charles Lamb wrote: “Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think of them.” Obviously, Charles was not a gardener. I spend a lot of time thinking about time and space in the garden, and out there this morning was particularly proud of one result of that “trouble.”
That source of pride is a bed 20 feet long by 3 feet wide that’s overbrimming with luscious greenery. I planted it back in April, 4 rows, one of radishes, one of mustard and arugula, and two of various varieties of leaf lettuce. The radishes are long gone and the mustard and arugula are just now going to seed, but the lettuces have a little more time left in them. The bed is packed so full of garden plants that hardly a weed peeks through anywhere.
As the lettuce passes its prime, all will not be over for that bed. I could wait, pull the lettuce, and then plant a later crop of, say, bush beans or endive. But, with a nod not to Mr. Lamb, I meshed space and time 3 weeks ago, removed a clump of plants every 2 feet down 2 rows in the bed, and planted sweet corn. Now, the sweet corn is looking tall among the waning other plants and, in a few weeks, the bed will be lush with only corn stalks.
The growing season here isn’t long enough to squeeze another crop in after the sweet corn in harvested in September. But maybe, if I plant some quick-maturing radishes in amongst the stalks in the beginning of September . . .
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Plants that are too easy to grow are sometimes not given their due, and nasturtiums are, I think, one such plant. Wherever you poke the pea-size seed into the ground, you get, just a few weeks later, a nice, sprawling patch of round, blue-green leaves and colorful flowers. That’s what I do here and there in the bed near my terrace and near my garden gates every year.
That small amount of effort gets me not only beauty but also something tasty to eat. The leaves and flowers are edible. Most edible flowers have a subtle flavor, if that; nasturtiums have a strong – a nice, zippy – flavor. The name nasturtium means “nose twist,” sort of like what horseradish does, a relative. Nasturtium flavor is more mellow and the plant doesn’t spread, at least not year after year. Nasturtium’s bright color also adds visual appeal to any salad or spread.
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Mulberry is another plant that’s not usually given its due. Sure, wild plants abound; except in deep woods, I could probably find at least one mulberry tree within a quarter of a mile from wherever you put me. (It’s the second most common “weed” tree in New York City.) And yes, the fruit is usually very sweet but lacking in character. But nobody’s knocking marshmallows, which are even sweeter.
Not all mulberries taste the same. Check out the taste of a number of wild ones and they’ll run the spectrum from almost pure sweetness to those with a bit of tang. They also vary in size. Both size and sweetness depend also on growing conditions.
Named varieties of mulberries, with bigger and/or better tasting fruits, exist although they are not well-known. I grow four of them. Illinois Everbearing has been around for over a half a century and is one of the best. I have on good authority that Oscar (a funny name for a mulberry) and Kokuso taste very good, and ordered (from www.whitmanfarms.com) a plant of each this past spring. I also ordered a Gerardi Dwarf tree, now with about a dozen fruits ripening on 2 foot tall plant still in its pot.
The flavor of Gerardi Dwarf fruits are said to taste almost as good as those of yet another mulberry, the black mulberry (Morus nigra) which, in my opinion and that of many other fruit lovers, may be the best-tasting of all fruits. Lest you believe that all black-colored wild mulberries you’ve seen are Morus nigra, they’re not. Fruit color and species names of mulberries are unrelated. Illinois Everbearing, which is a natural hybrid of white mulberry (M. alba), from eastern Asia, and our native red mulberry (Morus rubra), bears jet black fruits. (For more on mulberries, see my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden.)
Black mulberry is native to the mild climates of southwestern Asia and grows well only in Mediterranean climates. Unless, that is, it’s in a pot, which is how I grow black mulberry, bringing it down in winter to my cool basement, along with figs, pomegranates, and other fruits native to southwestern Asia.
I’m looking forward to tasting Gerardi Dwarf mulberries, which should make a cold-hardy, decorative plant that, like other mulberries, is easy to grow.
