[to do, persimmon, peppers]
And I thought I was just about finished for the year. Ha! The long farmden “to do” list I made early this morning makes a mockery of such thinking. No particular rush for any one thing on the list although once snow falls almost everything will need to be pushed forward to next spring. Shudder the thought. I know what spring is like.
Perhaps today I’ll begin with the small meadow on the south side. It — or part of it — needs mowing, which I used to do with a scythe. That much mowing of the dense mix of grasses and perennials was a bit much for a scythe, resulting in tennis elbow (scythe elbow?) a few years ago. Nowadays a tractor and brush hog make quick work of the mowing.
People sometimes ask if I’m going to expand my plantings into the meadow, to which I reply with an emphatic, “No!” The meadow is already home to a row of dwarf apple trees, a row of hardy kiwis and grapes, a row of pawpaws and black currants, a row of filberts, and a few chestnut trees. Any more planting and this will be a farm rather than a farmden.
I’m also leaving most of the meadow intact because of a promise I made to my daughter when she was 8 years old and enthralled with Laura Ingalls Wilder. That meadow had to stay as Genevieve’s prairie.
Anyway, leaving a bit of wildness seems like a good thing, a foil for all the coaxing and manipulating of plants I cultivate. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” wrote Thoreau. I agree.
The meadow does get some care in the form of a once a year mowing. Mowing keeps vines and shrubs from invading, the first step to becoming a forest. Although it would be nice to have the mowing out of the way before spring, the tawny, old grasses and dried seed heads of goldenrods and bee balm are nice to look at through winter. So the portion in view from the dining table remains unmowed except for some welcoming paths I’ll cut through the chest high sea of dry stems.
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American persimmon fruits would never sell, especially this time of year when the golfball sized orbs hang shriveling on branches. Even their bright, persimmon orange color has faded on its way to an unappealing purplish gray. “Americans eat with their eyes,” bemoaned Cornell’s apple breeder to me many years ago.
The taste of American persimmons and the effort needed to grow them should put this tree near the top of anyone’s must-grow plant list. Southerners familiar with this native plant might turn their noses up at persimmons if they’ve tasted only wild ones. The secret to a delectable persimmon is to grow a named variety and, this far north, one that will reliably ripen its fruit within our growing season. My two choices are the varieties Szukis and Mohler. Mohler started ripening in August and Szukis, which began in September, will be good for a few more weeks. Neither variety needs the separate male pollinator tree that wild persimmons need in order to fruit.
These top-notch American persimmons are kin to Asian persimmons seen in markets, with a few notable differences. American persimmons are smaller, softer (much too soft to ship commercially), and richer in flavor. Imagine a dried apricot that’s been soaked in water, dipped in honey, then given a dash of spice. That’s American persimmon at its best. All this from a tree that’s pretty, doesn’t need pruning, and has no pests worth bothering about.
(For more about both Asian and American persimmons, their history, their cultivation, their propagation, their use, and their varieties, see my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden.)
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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” . . . this year in the garden for peppers (with apologies to Charles Dickens).
For best reliability and flavor, and early ripening to red, Sweet Italia has, for decades been the pepper to grow. This year, fruit set was poor and many peppers rotted before they ripened. Intense heat at critical moments this summer could have hampered fruit set. Sweet Italia is a floppy plant and, for the first time this year, I neglected to prop the plants upright in conical tomato cages. Flowers too hidden from insect pollinators and fruits close to or on the ground are also likely contributors to this year’s problems.
It was the best of times for a couple of new pepper varieties I grew: Big Red and Mariachi, both semi-hot peppers, the first one long and thin and the second one cone-shaped, both ripening to red. These two varieties did get staked.
Big Red was the big winner, ripening oodles of peppers, enough to eat, to freeze, to hang up indoors and dry, and to have ripe and “fresh,” even now, from almost ripe fruit brought indoors a couple of weeks ago. The same could be said for Mariachi, but yields were lower. Both taste very good and the hotness can be regulated by including more or less of the seeds and inner membrane, the seat of hotness, when eating or cooking them. Ar-r-r-r-iba.
[pitcher plant, cotton, last bagged grapes]
In? Out? In? Out? I can’t decide where to grow the two pitcher plants that I got at Broken Arrow Nursery a few weeks ago. One of them, purple pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea), is quite cold hardy so could — should — survive outdoors in the ground. The other, Scarlet Belle (S. wrigleyana), is less cold hardy, but could probably rough it through our winters. Both plants, and especially Scarlet Belle, with pale white leaves having prominent, deep-purple veins, are so spectacular that I’d hate to lose either one.
These plants are as fascinating as they are attractive. Their leaves are long, vertical tubes that, with their purplish color and nectar, entice insects within. Once inside, insects can’t climb out because of the stiff, downward-pointing hairs on the sidewalls. Eventually the insects drown in the pool of water that collects inside the tube, to be digested by enzymes from the flower, helped along, especially as a leaf ages, by resident bacteria, rotifers, and other organisms. Once everything has been pre-digested, the plant can eat.
So, where to plant these gems? Indoors, in pots in a cool, sunny room? Or outdoors, in the ground?
I think my two plants will be happier outside as long as I long can find the proper spot for these rather site-finicky plants. Their needs: full to partial sunlight and a very acidic soil that is consistently wet, high in humus, and low in nutrients. Well, that turns out to be just the conditions in the bed along the east side of my house that is home to lowbush blueberry, lingonberry, mountain laurel, huckleberry. and rhododendron.
The bed is not quite wet enough for the pitcher plants so I’m going to bury a saucer, such as used beneath potted plants, a foot or so in the ground beneath each plant. The saucers will act as in-ground reservoirs to collect and hold water. The veined leaves of the pitcher plants should echo nicely the speckled flowers of hellebore that bloom further back in that bed. Both kinds of flowers are eerily beautiful.
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Call me a cotton pickin’ fool if you want. Yes, I did try to grow cotton in this cotton-unfriendly climate. I won’t admit to the “fool” part, but I surely am “cotton pickin”. Harvest has begun. Four plants, four ripe bolls. I could easily triple that yield if I brought the 18-inch-high plants indoors or into the greenhouse to finish ripening the rest of their bolls. And this is no fish story, of which cotton has had its share. In medieval Europe, cotton was imported but people had no idea from whence the fibers came. That was clarified in 1350 by John Mandeville, who explained: “There grew there [India] a wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the endes of its branches. These branches were so pliable that they bent down to allow the lambs to feed when they are hungrie.”
To be of use, my cotton will need to be processed. First, I’ll pluck out the seeds, something that would be easier if I had a cotton gin. I can do without; four bolls won’t be too much trouble. Then comes carding, to clean and align the fibers. Card clothing, as the tool for carding is called, is made from closely spaced wire pins embedded in a sturdy rubber backing. I remember, as a child, seeing women in white cotton caps pulling cotton strands apart with such tools at historic colonial sites. The wire brushes I have for cleaning sheddings from my dogs might the perfect stand-in for card clothing.
(Even more authentic would be to card using teasel plants, which occasionally grow wild along sunny roadsides. The word “carding” comes from carduus, Latin for teasel.)
Once carded, the fibers can be twisted and pulled into one, continuous strand. Finally, weave. Sounds like a lot of work for an organic, home-grown handkerchief!
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Remember my bagged grapes, the ones in bags on which happens to be stamped the words “Fresh Delicious Wholesome Baked Goods?” Those bags have done their job well of fending off insects, diseases, and birds so the bunches can hang a really long time.
I thought the grapes were all eaten, but yesterday, discovered an overlooked, bagged bunch. The red Reliance grapes within didn’t have a lot of eye appeal, having started to shrivel and turned very dark. But their flavor was supreme, the result of being very ripe and, perhaps, exposure to a few frosts.
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[first frosts, cool weather veggies, stilt grass]
Saturday night, October 9th, while I was enjoying myself at a friend’s party around a bonfire, my garden experienced it’s first autumn frost. Temperatures plummeted to about 28 degrees F. The frost was not unexpected, so basil and pepper plants had been draped with old blankets and other pieces of cloth, the two pressure regulators and filters for drip irrigation lines had been swaddled in additional scraps of cloth, and any tender houseplants had been brought indoors or moved to protected places.
My low lying patch of ground in the Wallkill River Valley is a particularly cold spot. Still, twenty-eight degrees was colder than I expected; many nearby gardens didn’t even experience light frost. Despite the covers, peppers and basil were blackened by frost.
Yet I wasn’t disappointed. On average, the first killing frost of fall strikes even earlier than October 9th around here. (The date for Albany, NY, for which temperature records have been compiled for decades, is around September 19th; adding a degree or two for my more southerly garden still puts the average first frost date back more than a week.) So my garden got an extra couple of weeks or so of frost-free weather.
Also, with cooler weather and lowering sun, peppers, tomatoes, basil, and other summer vegetables have been petering out anyway. I’ve had my fill of summer vegetables, helped along by knowing about 40 quarts of canned tomatoes, half a dozen quart jars stuffed with dried tomatoes, and the few quarts of canned salsa on shelves in the basement.
The garden is far from over. I’m now reaping what I sowed, beginning back in July and continuing into September, of lettuce, endive, radishes, turnips, spinach, and other vegetables that enjoy this cool, even frosty, weather. Last night we enjoyed a delicious stir fry including kale and leeks, and a salad overflowing with lettuces, arugula, radishes, parsley, and carrots.
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The now sad-looking tomato vines, the result of the October 9th freeze, and another one on the 12th, just have to go. Not only do they cast a funereal pall on the otherwise lush scene, but also could provide inoculum for tomato diseases next year. Not the blackened vines per se, but any old tomato vines, leaves, and fruits.
So one one by one I cut the vines free of their bamboo or metal stakes and toss every bit of tomato debris into the garden cart. The ground is littered with fallen and rotting fruits; they also get gathered up. Even any dried, old leaves that catch my eye.
The leaf spotting diseases, septoria and early blight, wait out winter on tomato debris — not tomato roots, though — and then awaken in spring to lob spores of these infections onto new plants. Besides a thorough cleanup, blanketing the ground each fall, after cleanup, with a 1 inch depth of compost also limits new infections by putting a barrier between spores and next year’s plant. And next year, as I do each year, I’ll plant tomatoes where tomatoes haven’t grown for the previous two years.
All these machinations do nothing for late blight disease, which devastated tomato plants throughout the Northeast last year. Spores of late blight hitchhike up here from overwintering sites in the South when winds, temperatures, and humidity are just right.
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A new bad boy has turned up “on the block:” Japanese stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum). It’s been slowly invading the Eastern half of the country for awhile, first documented in Tennessee in 1919, probably after arriving from Asia in some packing material for porcelain.
You don’t have to search far to find this bad boy. Just look for a sprawling grass that typically grows on the edges of and within the woods. It would grow a couple of feet or more high if it didn’t sprawl. Look more closely and you’ll see that the 3-inch-long leaf blades each has a distinct, silvery midrib. Flower spikes rise in late summer, which is also when the whole plants begin to develop a purple tinge.
Stiltgrass is an annual (like beloved crabgrass, native to Europe) so one way to control it is by mowing in late summer, just when it flowers, to prevent its re-seeding. Mowing earlier in the season just lets it regrow and flower — and make seed — more quickly. In small patches, the plant is easy to just grab and rip out of the ground, especially later in summer.
