Have I ever mentioned my fondness for my scythe? Of course I have, but it bears repeating, now that scything season is upon us. This scythe is not the heavy, picturesque tool with a curved handle that you often see, and is best used, for decorating an outdoor wall. And it’s also not a tool best suited to the gentleman farmer with acres of land and oodles of time.
No, the scythe of present interest is a sleek, lightweight, razor sharp – dare I say “modern” – tool that would be useful around many a home and garden. The blade is sharp and light because it’s hammered out thinly, rather than stamped out like the one on an old-fashioned scythe. The razor-sharp edge needs to be touched up, which means about 30 seconds of swiping with a whetstone, after about every 15 minutes of use, and a hammering out of the edge every year.
My scythe has a straight snath, or handle, although some modern ones have curved snaths. Making a curved handle would have required more expertise and time than I had available when the curved snath I once had needed replacement. Maple wood, rather than the previous hickory wood, keeps the tool lightweight.
I use my scythe for much the same purpose as most people use a weed whacker. After years of practice, I can trim grass and weeds right up to the bases of trees and rock walls, as well as neaten up the lawn at the edge of the flower and vegetable garden. The sharp blade makes cutting possible even when the tool has to be moved slowly on those occasions where care is needed as to exactly where the end of the blade is – right up against a young tree, for example.
In contrast to the weed whacker, the scythe is quiet and gentle. Earplugs and goggles are unnecessary, and scything can be done any hour of the day without disturbing neighbors. Larger patches of grass can be mowed in weather that would bog down a lawnmower. And finally, scything is a very pleasant (and useful) physical exercise.
(I get my scything goods at www.scythesupply.com.)
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The scythe has traditionally been used to mow whole fields of grain or hay. Besides using my scythe in a weed wackeresque manner, I do use it also for a little hay, which I mow from odd corners of the property where I let the grasses and wildflowers grow tall. Last week was my first scything of the season. Depending on rainfall, the grasses and wildflowers might grow tall enough for an addition 2 or 3 mowings.
My hay doesn’t feed a flock of cows or sheep or any other domestic animal; it feeds a flock of bacteria, fungi, and other creatures in my compost piles. With air, moisture, and time, this hay, along with kitchen waste, old garden plants, and an occasional load of manure from a local stable, metamorphoses into dark, crumbly compost. The resulting witch’s brew of goodies that makes up the compost includes friendly organisms that help feed my plants and fend off plant diseases, as well as compounds that help the ground hold both water and air for plant use.
By my calculations, a one-inch depth of ripe compost should provide sufficient nutrition to keep plants happily chugging along for a whole year. A couple of years ago, I finally had enough faith in my calculations to abandon use of any other fertilizer. The compost does it all.
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I’m keeping my eyes out for what flowers bloom around Memorial Day because someone I know (more on that some other time) will be getting married next year on Memorial Day and I, of course, will be growing the flowers. There’s surely no dearth of flowers – wild and cultivated – this time of year.
First to make their appearance for Memorial day were some alliums (ornamental onions) and, in the garden and in the wild, dame’s rocket. As I write, floppy stems of Oriental poppies are spreading their first of many bright red flowers with petals as fine as fairy’s shawls, and the pastel blossoms of bearded irises are unfolding in sequence along their upright stems. Columbines, wild and cultivated, are hovering above the plants on thin stalks like butterflies. Stems of cerastrium, aptly known as snow-in-summer, are spilling over a rock wall along with their small, white flowers and hoary leaves, and, at the base of another rock wall, pure yellow Stella d’Oro daylily blossoms open daily. (Individual daylily blossoms bloom for only one day.)
Moist fields are awash with yellow buttercups and pink geraniums stare out from the partially shaded edges of woods. (These geraniums are true geraniums in contrast to the potted plants which, despite being called geraniums, are really pelargoniums.)
Among shrubs, at least two of the viburnums are prominently in bloom: doublefile viburnum (Viburnum plicatum) and American cranberrybush (V. trilobum), both with starry clusters of white flowers, flowers. In the center of each flower cluster are nonshowy, fertile flowers and around the rim lie sterile flowers that open with broad, showy petals.
One of the best flowers for vases that is now open looks to me like bachelor’s buttons. It comes up spontaneously in my garden every year; perhaps it self-seeds, perhaps its a perennial.
I’m not sure what the flower is, but it’s clear blue and produced in abundance. If it is a bachelor’s button, it was so named because the flowers lasted so long in buttonholes when bachelors when a-courting. So it may be a good cut flower but perhaps not best in a wedding bouquet.
I broke my own rule and planted tomatoes out in the garden on May 13th. The weather was warm, the tomatoes were ready to pop out of their containers, and the bare ground seemed to cry out to be finally clothed with plants.
The correct planting date for tomatoes around here is during the last week in May, not May13th. Warm weather before the end of May can be deceiving and often, in the past (last year, for instance, has been followed by night temperatures that plummeted. That’s why I try never to go with my gut as to when to plant.
But this year seemed different. The weather had been warm for days, so the ground was warm. The weather report (not that, judging from experience, it could be trusted) didn’t call for any day or night temperatures dropping below even 50° F. Rain was forecast for the following few days, which would spare me the need to water the young plants for the few days while their roots had reached out into surrounding soil. And if low temperatures did threaten, I could quickly throw a cover over the plants or, with extended cold weather, quickly erect a wire-hoop supported tunnel of plastic over the beds.
So the tomatoes have been in the ground for a few days. The rain fell — over 2 inches! With cloudy weather, temperatures have remained cool, in the 50s and 60s. Tomatoes are native to moderate elevations in the Andes mountains, so perhaps are enjoying this weather.
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As long as I was planting tomatoes, I got on a role and started planting myriad other seedlings – zinnias, cosmos, leeks, morning glories, and sunflowers – in the ground also. Yes, it was raining, which normally makes for goopy soil that if clayey, is unpleasant for planting. Digging around in goopy clay soil also can also ruin its structure so it becomes poorly aerated.
My appreciation for being able to plant in rainy weather sends me back decades, when I visited 90 year old Scott Nearing, radical economist, political activist, and advocate of simple living, and helped out in his coastal Maine garden. Although I had just begun my agricultural education, academic and hands-on, I marveled at the feel of his soil. Planting and weeding were sheer pleasure, in spite of the rain, in soil of such good tilth. I was told that the soil there used to be a goopy clay but was transformed into that heavenly stuff in which I was working with years of copious additions of compost.
If only, I thought, I could someday have garden soil like that. I do! Every year I have blanketed the ground with an inch or more of compost so that the surface, rain or shine, presents a soft, water absorbent yet workable, nutrient and biologically-rich home to hands and plant roots.
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May 16, I mark on my calendar the day that Korean mountain ash (Sorbus alnifolia) is blooming. This relatively rare plant is notable for its sprays of clear, white blossoms, for its warm, coppery-bronze autumn leaf color, and for it showy – perhaps the showiest of all plants! – display of small, flaming red berries. The fruits are also a tasty nibble (which warranted the plant a place in my recent book Landscaping with Fruits).
I first met this plant “in person” at the Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore College 5 years ago in October. As I stood there admiring the tree, I nibbled at the fruits. And, of course, I couldn’t bring myself to spit out the small seeds. Not because of propriety but I because each seed had such potential.
Long story short: I took the seeds home, mixed them with moist potting soil in a bag which went into my refrigerator for 3 months of stratification (fooling the seeds into thinking winter was over and it was safe to sprout), potted them up, and ended up with 2 good seedlings.
One of my two seedlings is now about 10 feet tall, and that’s the one now in flower. What’s amazing is that the plant bloomed at such a young age. Ten years might go by before an apple tree makes the physiological transition from juvenility to maturity – that is, reproductive and, hence, flowering age. Grafted trees, which are made by grafting mature stems onto rootstocks, bloom much quicker. Ten feet of growth and 5 years till first blossoming from seed is quick.
I’m looking forward to seeing and tasting the fruit of my own Korean mountain ash seedling in October.
May 10th, an exquisite day with a slight breeze, temperatures in the 70s, and a limpid blue sky matching the blue on the backs of the resident pair of male bluebirds flitting about. What a day to be in the garden. So how come I’m not there? Because I’m building garden gates.
Having recently re-built the arbored gateways leading into and out of one of my vegetable gardens, building of gates themselves was the next order of business. Or, rather, has been for the past month or so. The original arbors and gates were cedar, everyone’s go-to wood for rustic garden structures. I hand cut and hand carried all the cedar out of the woods for those original arbors and gates, and fashioned them into what I thought were quite attractive structures – until they rotted.
The only rot resistant part of cedar is the heartwood, and 3 or 4 inch diameter posts such as I used have a red tube of heartwood running up their centers only an inch or so wide. The rest rots, which it did very thoroughly over the past 15 years.
The new arbors and gates are of black locust, a dense wood that vies with commercial pressure-treated wood for longevity. I grew most of the posts myself, in my miniature woodlot that’s about 50 feet long by about 15 feet wide. There, locust saplings swell up to the needed 4 to 6 inch diameter posts in 12 years. New sprouts develop at the base of cut stumps and from root suckers so the mini-woodlot offers an ongoing supply of locust posts. (This year’s construction necessitated supplementing my woodlot’s production with wood from my friend Bill Munzer, who has a bona fide forest of black locust trees in Gardiner and sells locust posts.)
So, yes, it would have been a nice day to have been in the garden. But it was also a nice day to be building garden gates. As with so many things in gardening, building the gates provided a satisfying commingling of art and function. One gate down, 3 to go.
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Dead or living, black locust is among my favorite trees. One other endearing feature of dead locust is its enormous heat output when burned. There are few other woods that provide longer and more warmth in the woodstove than black locust.
The living tree has a deeply furrowed bark and craggy form that reminds me of the trees along the yellow brick road that grabbed Dorothy on her way to Oz. In a couple of weeks, black locust branches will be dripping with chains of pale, blue flowers looking something like those of wisteria but more subdued. The flowers emanate a sweet fragrance that can be enjoyed from even a couple of hundred feet distance.
Another endearing quality of black locust is that the living tree improves the soil. It’s a legume, just like peas and beans, and like other legumes harbors a symbiotic bacterium in its roots that takes nitrogen from the air and puts it into a form on which plants can feed.
Black locust has the distinction of being classified as a “native invasive” plant, a tricky (goofy?) classification that’s not immediately clear. The tree is truly native to a small area in southeastern U.S. from which it has naturally spread.
As I wrote above, “new sprouts develop at the base of cut stumps and from root suckers,” Black locust also sometimes makes new plants from fallen seeds. I welcome this invader.
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I did take a break from gate-building to get into the garden. I had to because today is the day for my first planting of corn. We still have a week or two of possible frost, which shouldn’t hurt the planting. Corn is a grass, with its growing point sheltered beneath the ground, ready to push up new leaves even if they suffer cold injury above ground. The only requisite for planting is sufficiently warm soil, 55° and above, to promote germination rather than rotting.
This year’s plantings, like those of past years (pictured at right), is Golden Bantam sweet corn in one vegetable garden and Pink Pearl and Dutch Butter popcorn in the other. I isolate these plantings to prevent cross-pollination from making the sweet corn less sweet or the popcorn less poppable.
Into each 3 foot wide bed goes two rows of hills (“hills” as in “stations,” not mounds), with 18 inches between hills in the row. I drop 8 seeds into each hole, water, and, with my foot, push the soil back into the hole and firm it with my heel. Hills provide closeness for corn mating and withstand winds better than wider spaced individual plants. Once up and growing strongly, the seedlings get thinned to the sturdiest 4 plants per hill.
