[pomegranates, greenhouse lettuce, bad black walnuts]
I oversee, in all probability, the biggest pomegranate farm in Ulster County, perhaps New York State, even the Northeast. My planting recently expanded by 200 percent with the 4 new plants that arrived at my doorstep a couple of days ago. My farm is biggest because so few people in this part of the world grow pomegranates and, if they do, they might have one plant.
Pomegranates are an up and coming plant. Their health benefits have been highly touted, perhaps with some hyperbole. They are beautiful shrubs or small trees with traffic-stopping red (sometimes white or pink) blossoms. Best of all is the fruit’s flavor, combining the richness of berries with the tang of citrus.
Unfortunately, pomegranates are not adapted to growing in this part of the world. They hail from the Mideast, much the same region as figs, where winters are mild and moist, and summers are hot, dry, and sunny. Yet, I, along with many other gardeners, do grow figs, coddling them through winter by growing them in pots brought indoors, in a greenhouse, or swaddled in the ground or, where winters aren’t bitterly cold, in various insulating blankets. Why not do the same with pomegranates? Stems of both plants tolerate temperatures down to about 15° F.
Well, not exactly the same. Figs bear fruit on new wood so you can harvest a crop even if the stems die back, as long as they don’t die back too much. Pomegranates bear fruit on older wood, which needs to survive winter to bear fruit. Pomegranates also need a long season to ripen. And they don’t like humidity, and especially rain near harvest, or the fruits burst open.
All of which is why 12 to 18 inch diameter pots are what my pomegranates call home. I move these pots to my cool basement for winter. I move them outside as soon as the weather warms in spring to get them started early, and inside temporarily if frost threatens. I can move them under cover when rains threaten.
Commercial pomegranates in the U.S. are of varieties from warmer parts of the Mideast. The varieties I am growing are from colder regions — central Asia and Russia — so should better tolerate colder winters. With global warming, I may eventually try overwintering some of these plants outdoors. These varieties also ripen their fruits in shorter seasons. My plants — with exotic names like Kazake, Salavatski, and Sverkhranniy — have yet to flower and fruit. I’m looking forward to harvesting a selection of pink, red, sweet-tart, and sweet pomegranates in the next couple of years.
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A few more years of greenhouse gardening and I may get the hang of it. Up to a few weeks ago, I was so proud of all those beautiful lettuce seedlings I had transplanted into the greenhouse in September, as they swelled up into beautiful buttery and crunchy heads. Now, though, a number of them have telescoped out their once-compact heads in preparation for flowering and going to seed.
Lettuce typically switches to this flowering mode when days are 12 hours, or more, long. Around here, daylight hours through most of September are a bit more than 12 hours long. Still, I couldn’t wait too long to plant because, planted after September, lettuce grows ver-r-r-r-r-y slowly.
And daylength isn’t the only player here; temperature also plays a role, with hotter temperatures coaxing forth those flower stalks, especially when coupled with long days. On sunny days in early autumn, temperatures in the greenhouse did soar to 90°.
There is consolation. When lettuce starts to flower outside during hot, long days of summer, the leaves take on a slightly bluish cast and turn tougher and bitter. Leaves of my bolting greenhouse lettuces are still deep green, succulent, and flavorful.
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Another disappointment, one without a saving grace, are the black walnuts. Back in September, we harvested as usual. Deb took off the husks, I laid the de-husked nuts out to dry, and then packed them away in baskets for a few months of curing. So far, just about all the nutmeats I’ve cracked out are thoroughly dried out or rotten, black, and inedible.
Why? Perhaps it was the summer’s drought. Perhaps the newly husked nuts stayed too wet before being packed away. Perhaps something’s amiss with our old tree. I’ll check some walnuts a friend harvested from a different tree to see if the problem is widespread. Perhaps the late frost affected early nut development. Next September, I’ll check a few nuts when we harvest them.
As consolation, I turn to the words of Charles Dudley Warner (My Summer in a Garden, 1871), “The principle value of the garden . . . is to teach . . . patience and philosophy, and the higher virtue – hope deferred, and expectations blighted, leading directly to resignation, and sometimes to alienation. The garden thus becomes a moral agent, a test of character, as it was in the beginning.”
[cool bot]
Man can’t live on greens alone. But I still have no need to go to a store to round out my vegetable fare. Much of what grew in last season’s garden is in storage, on tap for when I need it. Besides the usual frozen green beans, corn, okra, and edamame, steamed, cooled with a fan, then packed into freezer bags, and the usual canned tomatoes, a lot of vegetables are in cool storage.
That cool storage could have been my refrigerator, except that no refrigerator is spacious enough for a winter’s worth of turnips, winter radishes, beets, and leeks, and a few heads of cabbage. A couple of years ago I built a walk-in cooler. Saving money and energy, I cool this cooler with CoolBot (www.storeitcold.com), a nifty device that tricks a window type air conditioner in believing it has not reached its pre-set minimum temperature of 60°F. I set the indicator on my CoolBot to 40°F., and there it stays. I also have some boxes of apples and pears in there, as well as, up to a couple of weeks ago, pawpaws.
As temperatures continue to drop outdoors, the CoolBot will no longer be needed. Then I’ll move all the boxes to my unheated mudroom. As temperatures drop even more, the boxes will go down into my basement, the temperature of which should by then have dropped into the 40s.
It’s amazing, if you sleuth around your house with a thermometer, especially a house built more than 50 years ago, how many different temperature zones you find. Below 40°F but above freezing is ideal for most fruits and vegetables, except for tropical fruits, sweet potatoes, and winter squashes, which like slightly warmer temperatures.
[autumn olive, painting trees for winter, fritillaria propagation
Okay, I’m braced for an attack. Imagine a fruit, ripe for the past few weeks, with a pleasantly aromatic, sweet-tart flavor. My informal “surveys” have shown very positive response to plates of the fruits brought to various gatherings; the fruits disappeared. The berries are small, yellow or red, with a silvery flecking on the outside and a soft, edible seed within.
The bush bearing these fruits is no slouch in appearance. It’s got silvery leaves and pale yellow flowers that individually don’t amount to much but together suffuse the plant with a soft haze in spring, a sweetly fragrant haze. Care needed for this bush is zip, nothing, rien, nada. And with that beauty, fragrance, and lack of trouble, I get oodles of fruit, much more than I could eat.
Now I’m ready to duck for attack . . . the plant is autumn olive. There, I’ve said it. Yes, the plant, a native of Asia, is invasive, readily colonizing roadsides and abandoned meadows. Native plant purists and invasive plant police scorn this bush for its fecundity. It was introduced into this country over a hundred years ago as a plant for wildlife food and cover, and to improve soils such as those covered with mine spoils. (Microorganisms associated with the roots take nitrogen from the air and put it in a form plants can use, like fertilizer.)
I am not advocating planting autumn olive. But, as long as it’s here, I am advocating enjoying it. The fruits are also very healthful, so says USDA research touting the fruit’s high lycopene levels, research evidently done by a different branch of the USDA than the one working on invasive plants. Just think, every berry I (or you) enjoy is one less berry eaten and seed spread by birds.
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On an even lighter note, I spent an hour or so over the last two days painting some of my trees. The goal was not for them to put on a better face for winter, but for them to better face winter. Cold and furry animals are what will threaten these trees in the coming months.
Cold per se is not the problem. The problem is warmth, then cold. The dark trunk of a tree, especially a young one, is warmed by direct sunlight on bright, crisp winter days. As the sun drops below the horizon, bark temperature plummets, to the chagrin of the tree.
Deer, rabbits, and mice are the furry threats, eating trees from, respectively, the top branches to the lower branches and bark to the trunk, again, especially young trees. Two dogs, a bit of fencing, and ‘Deerchaser’ (en effective electronic repellant) keep deer at bay.
The paint that I brushed onto trunks and the lower branches is for the cold (actually, the warmth), the rabbits, and the mice. I made my own concoction, starting with a goopy mix of old, unfired, porcelain clay from Deb’s studio, white latex paint, and enough water to make it all thick and creamy. The white color of the mix will reflect the sun’s rays to prevent bark warming.
I also put a few eggs into the mix to make painted trunks and lower branches unappealing to vegetarian rabbits and mice, which they all are. And finally, to further hit home the idea that these trunks and branches aren’t for eating, into the mix went some garlic powder, cinnamon, and cayenne. I’m hopeful that the clay, if the mix stays on through next summer, will also deter some boring (as in “hole making” rather than “uninteresting”) insects.
The trees don’t look at all bad with this cosmetic touch.
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I’m on my way to becoming the crown king of crown imperials. That’s a plant, Fritillaria imperialis, a plant of which I am a big fan. Problem is that crown imperials are very expensive, selling for anywhere from $10 to $30 for each bulb.
About 20 years ago my father grew tired of a crown imperial plant he had purchased just a couple of years earlier. So he offered it to me, and it’s been planted and flowering every April since then in a corner of the vegetable garden.
After enjoying that solitary bulb for a few years, I got to thinking that nurseries must multiply them, so why couldn’t I? And I did. And I did. And I did. And I still am.
Propagation of crown imperial starts with removing a piece of a scale from the bulb. The scale pieces go into a bag of slightly moist potting mix that’s kept warm for a few months, then cool for a few weeks. Little bulblets soon form on the scales, which can be potted up to grow until warm spring weather arrives.
I can just imagine looking out at my gardens some April years hence, the scene a sea of 2’ high heads of green stalks, each topped with a round, leafy crown below which dangles a ring of orange blossoms. End results notwithstanding, I’m always amazed — as I was this morning — to open the bag I filled last June 29th with amorphous scales and potting soil to be now filled with roots and bulblets.
