PERENNIAL VEGETABLES
Hablitzia: What a Name!
At last night’s appropriately social distanced “zoom” dinner with my daughter, she commented on how tasty my salad looked. “All home grown,” I replied, and held up to the computer screen a leaf of one of the major contributors to my bowl of greenery, Caucasian mountain spinach (Hablitzia tamnoides). “Looks like some leaf you just plucked off a tree,” says she. Yes, it did, but it was as tasty and as tender as any leaf of regular garden spinach.
It’s with good reason that the two “spinaches” are so similar: They’re both in the same family, Amaranthacea, also kin to beets, chard, quinoa, lamb’s quarters, and pigweed.
Caucasian mountain spinach has it over conventional garden spinach in a number of ways, most significantly its being a perennial. I planted it last spring and don’t plan on doing so ever again. Not that making new plants would be difficult. They were easy from seed, and cuttings are also said to root easily. The quickest way to have larger new plants would be to divide the clump sometime after the tops have died back for winter or before new sprouts appear.
Being a perennial, Caucasian mountain spinach won’t lose quality as it goes to seed during the warmer, longer days of late spring and summer. White flowers, with a faint aroma of cilantro, appear in June and July, but the leaves still make tasty additions to salads or cooked dishes.
Right now, plants are starting to stretch their leafy stems skyward. Making use of the third dimension in gardening — up — makes for efficient use of garden space, a plus for any plant in an intensive garden. They’d like something on which to climb, which they do by pulling themselves upward in the same way as do clematis vines, twisting their leaf stalks around whatever they can. I’ll be providing a ladder for them made from posts and chicken wire.
Now that I think of it, Caucasian mountain spinach also makes use of the fourth dimension in gardening — time — since it can make its way into the kitchen from when my plum trees bloom until I harvest the last of my apples.
The Good King, and Others
The bed that’s home to Caucasian mountain spinach is also home to another perennial bit of edible greenery, Good King Henry (Blitum bonus-henricus), also sharing the Amaranthacea family. That bed gets some shade in the afternoon, which is all to the liking of Caucasian mountain spinach, not so much to Good King Henry.
No matter, because Good King Henry is not, in my opinion, nearly as tasty as its Caucasian cousin. The King’s leaves are good cooked, but not great, and not very good raw in salads. One reason I like it so much is for its name, both the common name and the botanical name.
I had hoped the bed would also be home to the perennial leek and perennial onion (Welsh onion) that I sowed and grew last season. But there’s not a sign of either plant this season. I guess they’re not all that perennial, odd since last winter was downright tropical (for here), the thermometer hardly dipping below zero degrees Fahrenheit.
If I wanted early onions, as greens, some kinds are reliably hardy. An interesting one that I grew decades ago is Egyptian Onion, also known as Walking Onion. They “walk” because the cluster of small bulbs atop the green stalks weight the stalks down till they eventually bow to the ground, depositing the cluster a few inches from the plant. 
The bulbs take root, grow, bow, and deposit the bulbs another few inches away, so, unfettered, the plant spreads by “walking” around the garden. I stopped growing it because the flavor was too sharp for me.
One More, This One Well-Known
One more perennial vegetable, this one familiar to everyone, is asparagus. I don’t understand why anyone who has a garden doesn’t grow asparagus. Even a flower garden, to which asparagus can offer a soft, green ferny backdrop. A bed offers two months of almost daily harvest. Rabbits and deer don’t eat it, so fencing isn’t needed (except in my garden, where my dogs have developed a taste for it).
And pests are rarely a problem. Except for weeds.
Perhaps you’ve been put off by the heroic measures for planting it suggested in older gardening books. That is, digging a deep trench, planting the roots in the bottom of the trench, and then gradually filling it in as the plants grow. Not necessary!
The deep planting suggested was to keep the plants’ crowns beyond the reach of tractors’ cultivator blades. But there’s no reason to cultivate an asparagus bed, and most home gardeners don’t anyway, so make holes just deep and wide enough to cover the roots when planting.
So there you have it, for easy gardening and tasty meals: Plant Caucasian mountain spinach and asparagus, and perhaps, especially if you like the name, Good King Henry.
I MAKE TREES
Here are 3 Easy, Fun Grafts I Made Yesterday
Finally, the weather cooperated and I got around to doing some grafting. I could have done it a couple of weeks ago, as I had planned, but I’m blaming cooler weather for the delay. Not that I couldn’t have done it back then, but things chug along more quickly in warmer weather, so I waited.
Apple tree on very dwarfing rootstock
I’m going to describe 3 easy grafts I did yesterday. Which one I chose to do depended on the size of the rootstock on which I was grafting. The scions, which are the varieties I’m grafting on the rootstocks, are all one-year-old stems 6 to 12 inches long and more or less pencil-thick (remember what pencils are?). They have been stored, wrapped to prevent drying out, in the refrigerator so that they are more asleep than the awakening rootstocks.
The principles that make any graft work are all the same. Close kinship of stock and scion. Close proximity of the cambium — the layer just beneath the bark — of the stock and of the scion. All open wounds sealed against moisture loss. And immobilization of rootstock and scion until graft succeeds. My book, The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Much Better Garden, goes into more detail about the why and the how of grafting.
A Tree Make Over
For starters, I turned to the bark graft, good for grafting on rootstocks a couple or more inches across. This first graft was on a Tyson pear tree whose flavor wasn’t up to snuff, so that graft began with doing a Henry the Eighth, lopping off the tree’s head to graft height, which was a couple feet from ground level.
The bark graft comes with an good insurance policy. That’s because onto each rootstock, depending on its diameter, I can stick 3, 4, 5, or even more scions. Only one scion needs to grow, but the more that are grafted, the greater the chance of at least one growing.
I prepared a scion with a bevel cut 2 inches long, at its base, not quite all the way across from one side to the other. On the opposite side of the cut, I nicked off a short bevel.
Then, into the freshly cut stub on the rootstock, I made two vertical slits through the bark, each about 2 inches long and as far apart as the width of the base of the scion.
Carefully peeling back the flap of bark welcomed in the long, cut surface of the scion, putting the cambial layers of rootstock and scion in close contact. This was repeated with the other scions, all around the stub. With the peeled back flaps of bark from the rootstock pushed back up against each inserted scion, one or two staples from a staple gun or a tight wrapping with stretchy electrician’s tape sufficed to hold everything in place.
Finally, I sealed all cut surfaces against moisture loss, for which there are a number of home-made and commercial products. My favorite is a commercial product called Tree-Kote, a black goo that works really well and absorbs sunlight.
Another Tree Make Over, For Smaller Trunks
For smaller rootstocks, say 3/4 inch up to a couple of inches across, there’s the cleft graft. This also comes with an insurance policy, though not as good as that of the bark graft because it only gets two scions per graft. Still, it’s easy so chances for success are high.
At the base of each of the two scions, I made two bevel cuts less than halfway through, each two inches long and not exactly on opposite sides. Viewed head on and from below, the uncut portion was slightly wedge-shaped.
Turning to the rootstock, an older rootstock (OH x F 87), I lopped it off squarely, with a saw, then created a split a couple of inches deep in the middle of the cut surface by hammering a heavy, sharp knife right down into it. After removing the knife, a screwdriver pushed down into the split separated it enough to insert the two prepared scions at each edge of the cleft with their cambiums aligned with the cambium of the rootstock.
Pulling out the screwdriver caused the springiness of the rootstock to close the cleft and hold the scions securely in place. As with the bark graft, all cut surfaces got smeared with Tree-Kote.
And Some Baby Tree Grafts
The whip graft is my graft of choice when rootstock and scion are about the same thickness, pencil-thick. Rootstocks for whip grafts were again OH x F87 pears, this time one-year-old rootstocks, pencil-thick.
I cut at the bottom of the scion with a smooth, sloping cut an inch to an inch and a half long, and made a similar cut at the top of the rootstock.
Holding the sloping cuts against each other and aligning just one edge of each if their diameters didn’t exactly match, I bound rootstock and scion together with a rubber grafting strip. (I’ve also used thick rubber bands, sliced open.)
Wrapping whip graft
As with any graft, cut surfaces must be sealed against moisture loss. Parafilm® helps holds the graft together and seals in moisture. Once my whip graft scions are growing strongly, I’ll cut a vertical slit into the binding to prevent it from choking the plant.
Bark graft, season 3, note flowering
There you have it: 3 easy grafts to make new trees or make over an older tree. Now the excitement begins, watching and waiting for new growth. Sometimes, with that large root system fueling growth, a bark graft scion will grow 2 or 3 feet its first season!
PRUNING FOR BEAUTY, FUN, AND FLAVOR
Yew Love
Mundane as she may be, I love yew (not mispelled, but the common name for Taxus species, incidentally vocalized just like “you”). Hardy, green year ‘round, long-lived, and available in many shapes and sizes, what’s not to love? Perhaps that it’s so commonly planted, pruned in dot-dash designs to grace the foundations in front of so many homes.
Still, I love her. For one thing, Robin Hood’s bow was fashioned from a yew branch (English yew, T. baccata, in this case). Two other species — Pacific yew (T. brevifolia) and Canadian yew (T. canadensis) — are sources of taxol, and anti-cancer drug.
At a very young age, I became intimate with yew bushes surrounding our home’s front stoop, on which my brother and I would often play. Yew’s red berries, with an exposed dark seed in each of their centers, would give the effect of being stared at by so many eyes. Sometimes we’d squish out the red juice, carefully though, because we were repeatedly reminded that all parts of the plant are poisonous. (I’ve since learned that the red berries are not poisonous; but other parts of the plant, including the seed within each red berry are poisonous.)
If yew has, for me, one major fault, it’s that deer eat it like candy. Interesting, since grazing on yew can kill a cow or a horse.
Mostly, I love yew because she takes to any and all types of pruning. My father once had a very overgrown yew hedge threatening to envelope his terrace. I suggested cutting the whole hedge down to stumps. Following an anxious few weeks when I thought my suggestion perhaps overly bold, green sprouts began to appear along the stump. A few years later the hedge was dense with leaves, and within bounds.
Although usually pruned as a bush, yew can be pruned as a tree. A trunk, once exposed and developed, has a pretty, reddish color. Deer sometimes take care of this job, chomping off all the stems they can reach to create a high-headed plant with a clear trunk.
As an alternative to being pruned to dot-dash spheres and boxes, yew hedges can be pruned to fanciful shapes, including animals, or “cloud pruned” (niwaki, the Japanese method of pruning to cloud shapes). Many years ago, I followed the herd and planted some yews along the front foundation of my house, pruning them to one long dash. No dots.
Since then, I’ve converted that hedge to a giant caterpillar and, more recently, tired of the caterpillar and attempted to cloud prune it, not with great success so far. (It’s my shortcoming as a sculptor, not the plant’s fault.) The goal in this case is not the kind of cloud pruning with clouds as balls of greenery perched on the ends of stems. My goal is to blend the four plants together as one billowy, soft cloud.
Facing my kitchen window is another yew, a large one that was planted way before I got here. Its previous caretaker, and up to recently I, have maintained it as a large, rounded cone. Last year I decided to make that rounded cone more interesting, copying a topiary in Britain. The design is in its early stages, awaiting some new growth this year to fill in bare stems now showing in interior of the bush.
Not Too Late for Peaches
Moving on to more pragmatic pruning . . . peaches. No, it’s not too late. In fact, the ideal time to prune a peach tree is around bloom time, when healing is quick. This limits the chance of stem diseases, to which peaches are susceptible.
Peach tree, before pruning
Peach trees need to be pruned more severely than other fruit trees. As with other fruit trees, the goals are to avoid branch congestion so remaining branches can be bathed in light and air, to plan for future harvests, and to reduce the crop — yes, you read that right — so that more energy and better quality can be pumped into remaining fruits.
To begin, I approached my tree, loppers and pruning saw in hand, for some 
major cuts aimed at keeping the tree open to light and air.
Peaches bear each season’s fruits on stems that grew the previous season. So next, with pruning shears, possibly the lopper, in hand, I went over the tree and shortened some stems. This coaxes buds along those stems to grow into new stems on which to hang next year’s peaches.
And finally, I went over the tree with pruning shears, clipping off dead twigs as well as weak, downward growing stems. They can’t support large, juicy, sweet fruits.
Done. I stepped back and admired my work.
And, of course, for more about pruning, there’s my book, The Pruning Book.
