SOMETHINGS FOR THE NOSE, THE EYES, AND THE TASTEBUDS
Makes a Lot of Scents
Many years ago, at this time of the year, I was hiking in the nearby Shawangunk Mountains, in Minnewaska State Park, when a most delectable, spicy-sweet aroma wafted past my nose. I followed my nose off the trail and into the woods. After stepping over and around fallen stumps in boggy soil and ducking under low-hanging branches, I came upon the source of that aroma: the white flowers of a large swamp azalea (Rhododendron viscosum).
Last night as I lay in the comfort of my bed and was about to drift off to sleep, that very same scent drifted into the open bedroom window. I immediately knew the source of that aroma: a swamp azalea that I had planted in a bed along the north side of my home back in 2006.
My yard is obviously quite a different habitat from that of Minnewaska woods, and especially where that wild swamp azalea grew. Besides shade and moist ground, that forested site‘s soil is very acidic, relatively poor in nutrients, and rich in humus.
The bed near my window emulates those conditions. It’s on the north side of the house, so it’s partially shaded. I added sulfur, a naturally mined mineral, to bring the pH down to about 5. I dug in abundant sawdust to build up humus in the soil, and mulch each year with more sawdust or autumn leaves to maintain it. Drip irrigation tubes running through the bed automatically provide daily watering to maintain a moist soil.
Besides aroma, swamp azalea doesn’t have much going for it. The plant is deciduous, so fades out of view in winter. I’ve read that fall leaf color can be very nice, but never noticed it. The white flowers are nice enough, but nothing spectacular to look at. For me, this plant is all about scent.
The Family is Invited
Scent alone from one swamp azalea plant wouldn’t justify drip irrigation, annual mulching, and periodic additions of sulfur. So that bed near my bedroom window was developed as a home also for other plants that enjoy the same special soil conditions as swamp azalea. Mostly, these are plants in the heath family (Ericaceae), which includes blueberry, lingonberry, mountain laurel, rhododendron, other kinds of azaleas, and, of course, heath and heather.
Most of the above family members are growing in that bed. Right after the swamp azalea blossoms wave goodbye for the season, lowbush blueberries begin ripening, then huckleberries, and then lingonberries. Earlier in the season, rich red or lily white ornamental rhododendron blossoms were followed by mountain laurel blossoms, which finished blooming a couple of weeks ago.
Even beyond blossoms and fruits, this bed offers a visual symphony of harmonies and contrasts. The rhododendrons and mountain laurels are mostly dwarf varieties that are 3 foot high mounds of glossy greenery year-round. The lingonberries and lowbush blueberries knit together everything right at ground level, both plants spreading via underground runners to intertwine for a dense ground cover. In fall, blueberry’s crimson leaves and then, through winter, its reddish stems, contrast pleasantly with lingonberry’s mouse-ear-sized, evergreen leaves and red, pea-sized berries.
Lingonberry and lowbush blueberry in fall
The lingonberries need not be picked as soon as they ripen because they’ll hang in good visual and gustatory condition for many months.
I’ve invited a few non-family members into the bed. Most notable are a witchhazel that’s covered in fragrant, yellow blossoms in late winter and a stewartia that is now spreading open the white petals of its camellia-like blossoms.
Still Planting Vegetables
A friend has a new vegetable garden which she has been planting all spring. She has two beds not yet planted and asked me if and what she could still plant there for this season. “Plenty,” I told her.
For starters, how about a late crop of bush beans and/or zucchini? Bush beans start to peter out after bearing for a couple of weeks, which is why I make 3 plantings each season, the first in the middle of May.
The same goes for cucumbers, which in a few weeks usually succumb to bacterial wilt. Two plantings, the second sown about now, often do the trick to keep the cukes a comin’. Here on the farmden, the varieties Shintokiwa and Little Leaf H-19 seem better able to fend off pests than other varieties I’ve grown. Also, to a lesser extent, the variety Suhyo (sometimes spelt Suyo).
And, of course, zucchini or any other summer squash. Zucchini typically succumbs to borers or mildew by midsummer; a fresh planting keeps zucchini coming on all season long. One caution is not to plant too much zucchini! Any more than a few plants and you’ll be forced to come up with concoctions such as zucchini bread to use up the excess.
FRUITS AND NUTS
After about twenty years of waiting, I happened to look at the ground and see a pine cone. The only pine tree nearby is a Korean pine (Pinus koreanensis) that I planted that many years ago, a tree that liked its new home and has soared, in that time, to fifty feet in height. My problem with the tree is that all it has done is grow; I planted the tree for its pine nuts.
A few years ago I did see a few cones way up near the top of the tree. Would the cones fall, carrying down the nuts, or would the nuts fall out, to be lost in the high grass? Would squirrels make all this moot?
I picked up the cone and clawed back its scales to see if any nuts were hiding within. Zut alors! Nuts! Most nuts need some curing before tasting good so I laid the cone in the sun for a few days.
Tasting was next. First they needed to be cracked out of their shells, which was surprisingly easy with a pair of pliers. The first two nuts cracked were well filled and yielded delicious nuts. The next ten nuts, which comprised the rest of the harvest, when cracked, yielded nothing.
Many Nut Pines
The pine nuts you see for sale are generally one of the piñon pines native to the Southwest, the pignolia native to Italy and other Mediterranean countries, or Chinese white pine (Pinus armandii). In fact, though, a number of pine species provide edible nuts.
One of my favorites, the Digger pine (P. sabiniana), yields nuts the size of lima beans and is native to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Driving west down those mountains many years ago, I came to a screeching stop (well, not really screeching) upon seeing the giant cone of this tree on the ground. I picked it up and must have provided entertainment, perhaps elicited fear, in passerbys seeing some guy smashing open a pine cone on the guard rail.
My Korean pine is a dead ringer for our native white pine, the latter of which does not yield edible nuts. Korean pine is only one of a number of nut pines that grows well in cold winter climates, such as Zone 5 here in this part of New York’s Hudson Valley. Swiss Stone pine (P. cembra) and Siberian pine (P. sibirico) are also reliable nut-producers for cold climates, but are very slow growing.
Many other pine species potentially could produce pine nuts outside their native range, though their adaptability to very cold winters climate is not thoroughly tested. The closely related Colorado Pinyon (P. edulis) and Singleleaf Pinyon (P. monophylla) pines are bushy trees that become flat-topped with age. I planted a Singleleaf pine years ago and though it tolerated the cold winters here, it’s annual growth measured in inches. With the slow growth and lack of nuts, I eventually tired of it.
Over the years, my pinetum (yes, that is a word) has expanded. A Lacebark pine ((P. bungeana), after five years or so in the ground, has finally taken off and is growing over a foot a year. This species is especially worth growing also for its decorative bark, which is a patchwork of muted colors.
Blanks
Back to the blank shells borne by my Korean pine. One possibility is that this pine needs cross-pollination from another tree of the same species to bear nuts or, at least, to bear them well. The cone that I found lying on the ground was pretty soggy and might have been lying there for a year or more. Perhaps nuts within dried up and/or rotted away. I subsequently found three more soggy cones, all devoid even of nut shells.
I recently planted pollinators for the pine. They’re small, but after a couple of years of nurturing are finally growing well, the largest of the two now two feet tall. I’ll report back, hopefully in less than 20 years.
Survival of Fittest and Tastiest
On the bountiful side of the fruit and nut ledger this year are my tree fruits, especially the more common tree fruits. (Berries and uncommon tree fruits such as persimmon, mulberry, and cornelian cherry always do well here.) Winter and then spring weather were all perfect for a good set of fruit. Once that usually fraught time in fruit growing was passed, Mother Nature took over and the trees naturally shed fruits that had been poorly pollinated or insect ridden. That lets a tree channel its energies into making bigger and more flavorful the fruits that remained hanging on branches.
Nature’s aim in growing fruit is to make it appealing to all sorts of animals that incidentally spread the seeds as they eat the fruit. We humans are more discerning (would “finicky” be a better word?) when it comes to fruit quality. So once that natural fruit drop, “June drop” as it is appropriately called, is finished, we step in to remove even more fruit.
Pruning branches, on which some fruit would have been borne, in late winter and early spring already did some of that work. This week it was time to finish the job, by hand. This means putting some distance between each fruit and its neighbor, about five inches, always saving the largest and most pest free of the lot. Hand thinning would be tedious with smaller fruits, such as cherries and plums, so fortunately is unnecessary with them.
I ended up with a bucketful of cute apple and pear fruitlets. Cute, but into the compost they went where heat and time would cook any insect or disease pests lurking within that might have awakened to attack next year’s crop.
ROSES AND STRAWBERRIES AND — OH NO! — HONEYBERRIES
Roses, Oh Yes
I bake really good bread, but “man can’t live by bread alone.” Sometimes, you’ve got to “stop to smell the roses.” Enough with the quotations! But back to the roses.
A love of roses has crept up on me over the years, due mostly to changes in kinds of roses available. Up until about 30 years ago, hybrid teas were pretty much the only roses on the block. These plants’ gangly stems are each capped by a vividly colored, fairly stiff, formal blossom whose petals wrap together into a pointy peak. You see where I’m going: hybrid teas are ugly, to me at least.
Also available were grandiflora and floribunda roses. Grandifloras are like hybrid teas, except their stems end with clusters of a few, but smaller, blossoms. Floribunda roses have even larger flower clusters of even smaller flowers. Despite being bushes more full with flowers than hybrid teas, grandiflora and floribunda flowers are still rather prim and proper except for their traffic-stopping colors.
Then so-called species and old-fashioned roses entered the scene, roses that are as nature made them or only slightly hybridized. These roses constitute broad groups, but generally, what they have going for them are more subdued — think pastel — colors and more blowsy blossoms on more heavily branching, fuller-bodied, shrubs.
The downside to species and old-fashioned roses, even if you like their blossoms and their growth habits, is that many bloom only in the spring. Hybrid teas pump out blossom after blossom all summer long.
Rose d’Ipsahan
Enter Rose de Rescht, my first old-fashioned rose, given to me by a local, fellow gardener. Ann told me that this rose variety had soft pink flowers and heavenly scent. She was right about the appearance and fragrance, wrong about the name. After years of sleuthing, I’ve identified the rose as Rose d’Ispahan, probably originating in Persia but first discovered in a garden in Isfahan, Iran, renowned for its gardens and roses.
If I had to grow only one variety of rose, Rose d’Ispahan would be the one, for the beauty of its flowers, for its intense fragrance, for its cold-hardiness, for its lack of large thorns, and for its pest resistance. And that’s even though it blossoms only in spring. (It does so over a long period, though.)
Rose d’Ipsahan
But I don’t have to grow only one variety of rose. My other favorites are some of rose breeder David Austin’s varieties which combine the pest resistance and repeat blooming of modern roses with the blowsy, fragrant, pastel colored blossoms and full-bodied shrubs of old fashioned roses. My currant, and perhaps all-time, favorites are Lady of Shallot and, in my opinion needing a more euphonious name, Golden Celebration.
Golden Celebration rose
Both sport yellow — no, Golden! — blossoms, some apricot in those of Lady of Shallot, and a rich yellow, all contained in a petal-filled cup-shape in those of Golden Celebration. Another of my favorites, Lady Judi Dench, never woke up in spring a year ago; perhaps it was the cold, perhaps something else.
Lady of Shallot rose
I also grow another David Austin Rose, LD Braithewaite, with deep red blossoms and dark green, slightly reddish leaves. Not my favorite as far as appearance but this rose is very cold hardy and pumps out tons of blossoms almost all season long.
LD Braithewaite rose
And Strawberries, Oh Yes
On to strawberries. I’m growing three kinds: the Pineapple Crush variety of white alpine strawberries; the Earliglow variety of garden strawberry; and a few varieties of vescana strawberries, which are hybrids of garden and alpine strawberries. This also is the order, starting with the best, of flavor for the three types.
Why do I grow anything but the best? Because alpines are so small that it’s hard to fill a bowl with them. I grow vescanas, for the first time this year, because I never grew them before.
The Earliglow berries taste good and do quickly fill a bowl, ideally yielding one quart of berries per plant over the course of the season. Except this year, a problem has surfaced. Leather rot is a fungal disease (Phytophthora cactorum) that rears its ugly head — infected berries that taste bitter and have white patches that turn brown — usually following excessively wet periods from late spring to early summer, which is odd because weather has been on the dry side. Also odd because I’ve never seen the problem here before.
Which brings me back to vescana and Pineapple Crush. Both are very disease resistant, and vescana berries are almost as big as garden strawberries, so I’m thankful to have them, even if they do taste like canned strawberries.
And Honeyberries, Oh NO!
After three weeks of hanging on (the berries, not me), honeyberries, which are edible honeysuckles, are ready for a fair tasting. I wrote previously about the awful flavor of this new fruit and was instructed to let the berries hang till dead ripe.
The berries sampled this year were so ripe that each had to be plucked from the branch with my palm facing upwards beneath the berry; a mere touch would cause ripe ones to drop.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat (a drum roll). First to be tasted was the variety Solo. Reaction: spit it out quickly. Tart with bad flavor. Second fruit tasted was Sugar Mountain Blue. Also spit out, but not quite as quickly. And finally, Sugar Mountain Eisbär. Although retained in the mouth and having a hint of sweetness, this one, like the others, had bad flavor.
The flavor of honeyberries is allegedly like a mix of blueberry and raspberry. Not so! If you have space, plant blueberries or raspberries instead.
