VEGETABLE MATTERS
Homebound? Plant Vegetables!
Working from home, I’m used to being homebound. And I like it. Not everyone feels this way, and now COVID-19 has forced this situation on many people.
For anyone who isn’t growing some vegetables, if there ever was a time to start a vegetable garden, it’s now.
A garden will provide pleasant and interesting diversion, some exercise, a chance to be outdoors, the need for less frequent trips to the market, a good family project/activity, and some savings of food dollars. And the experience of — wonder of wonders — watching seeds sprout and grow into plants.
Growing vegetables is easy. Seeds have been practicing sprouting for millions of years. That’s what they do. Sprout. And plants have been doing likewise.
Paying attention to some basic plant needs will make your garden even more successful. As far as soil, don’t worry about fertility or acidity for now. The most important consideration is drainage. That is, does water move down through the soil or does it just sit in place for a long, long time.
What’s a “long, long time?” If you really want to know, cut the bottom and top off a coffee or similar can, and set the can into a hole a few inches deep, pushing it into the soil (not if it’s frozen) in the bottom of the hole. Fill the can with water, let it drain, then fill it again. If the water level drops slower than 1” per hour, drainage is poor. Find another site or make raised beds.
No backyard or front yard in which to grow vegetables? No problem. Grow them in a tub or flowerpot. Pay attention to drainage even if your “garden” is a tub or a large flowerpot. The container must have drainage holes in its bottom to let water drain out. And you’re going to fill that container with “potting soil,” not with dirt from your garden. Water can’t drain well through garden soil in the confines of a container, which is why potting soils have, among their ingredients, perlite, vermiculite, or other mineral aggregate to speed water flow.
Whether in a container or in your front or back yard, vegetables need sun, about 6 hours of direct summer sunshine daily.
Soil Matters
Next, ready the ground. For most newbies, that means transmuting a patch of lawn to a vegetable garden. There are two options. The first is the traditional one, turning over and mixing up the top few inches of ground to kill existing vegetation and leave a surface in which you can plant seeds. Do that, using a shovel, garden fork, or rototiller as soon as the soil is dry enough to crumble, not wad up, when squeezed gently in your hand.
Wait two weeks for Mother Nature to work her magic decomposing some of that existing vegetation. Or, rather, part of her magic. After two weeks, dig up the ground again, this time adding some compost or fertilizer. You could dispense with the compost or fertilizer this season if whatever was growing there before digging looked vibrant. Better not to go out to a store these days if you don’t have to anyway. Wait another two weeks, and when you’re ready to plant, use a garden rake to tickle the surface of the ground and crumble it.
Digging up the ground may be a nice way to get your blood pumping on a spring day, and may even give you a feeling of righteousness, but there’s a better, quicker, and easier way, to prepare the garden site. There’ll also be less weeds in weeks to come.
For option number two, you will need a supply of compost and either wood chips, straw, sawdust, or wood shavings. This option is easy: just cover the garden area with newspaper, four sheets thickness and overlapping, and then wet the newspaper to keep it from blowing away. Mark out 3 foot wide beds and 18 to 24” wide paths with string, and lay an inch or more of compost in the bed areas, and enough of the wood chips, straw, sawdust, or wood shavings in the paths to cover the paper. You’re all set to plant!
In most places, but not everywhere, a fence is needed to fend off rabbits. Two-foot high chickenwire (“poultry netting”) will do the trick.
(All this, and more, in my book Weedless Gardening.)
What to Grow
What to grow is a matter of taste. Kale, collards, and Swiss chard offer maximum nutrition and a very long harvest season. For some home-grown calories, potatoes and sweet corn. For rounding things out with great flavor, tomato, eggplant, pepper, cucumbers. Think about what you want to grow, look at seed catalogues, order seeds, and when we next cross paths, I’ll say something about timing.
Inspiration and Humor for the Pandemic
In these times of pandemic, the insouciance of animals and the humor they offer (and washing hands, social distancing, and covering up coughs and sneezes) is welcome. Here is a short video clip of my ducks:
Duck video
NOW, WITH COVID-19, ANOTHER REASON TO GARDEN
Not Necessarily Anti-Social
I’m feeling very lucky these days, lucky to be happy to stay home. An important way to deal with the current COVID-19 pandemic, both from a personal and a societal standpoint, is not to be out and about.
(If you are infected, you may not show any symptoms for awhile, or symptoms may be very mild. During that time, though, you could infect others. It’s estimated that, at present, every infected person infects 3 others before they get well or die. Those 3 other each infect 3 more, and so on; ten transmissions has almost 60,000 people infected.
Social distancing brings that number of 3 new infections from each infected person down to a number of cases our health care system would be able to handle. So stay at home, if possible, maintain a six foot distance from other humans, be aware of contaminated objects and surfaces, and wash hands frequently.)
For all the downsides of the internet, a big plus now is the ability it gives us to interact socially without spreading disease.
Home is Nice, Gardening
What’s so great about staying home? In my case, I have my garden, of course. Spring, as always, is a busy time in the garden.
Busy, such as: attending to my compost. The last compost pile of late fall and winter is an accumulation of end-of-season debris from garden cleanup, bedding from the duck house, and kitchen scraps. Not much happens in it with the slow additions and winter cold. I decided to dig into the pile to see how it was doing. Not good!
The innards were smelly and sodden, which could have been avoided if I had regularly thrown some straw, autumn leaves, or any other dry, old plant matter into it periodically. Oh well.
Given enough time, even that smelly, cold, sodden pile would turn to compost. I prefer to speed things up, getting the pile hot and quickly killing many weed seeds.
Aeration and some dry material could remedy the situation. I left home and got a load of horse manure mixed with dryish sawdust bedding from a nearby stable. (No human contact was needed to get the manure). Then I began turning the pile, layering in the manure and some old hay that I had cut and raked last fall. The way I tell how its doing is by taking its temperature with a long-stemmed compost thermometer. Three days after the turning, the pile is warming, 90° and rising.
Seed Starting, When?
Busy, such as: starting seedlings indoors for later planting outdoors. The ideal is to have seedlings the right size when it’s time for that outdoor planting, so they can make a smooth transition from container to ground hardly knowing they’ve been moved. Each vegetable has its own timetable for how fast it grows to transplant size and then when it can be planted outdoors.
For instance, here on the farmden, the historical average date of the last killing frost is May 21st. Cabbage seedlings need about 6 weeks of growth before they’re large enough to transplant. Since they tolerate some cold, they can be planted out here on May 1st. Six weeks before May 1st is March 15th, which is when I sowed those seeds.
Let me also use tomato as an example because that’s one that many gardeners plant too early or too late. Tomato seeds need about 7 weeks of growth before they’re ready to plant out. Freezing temperatures are not good for them, so I plant them out around the end of May. The end of May minus 7 weeks is around April 1st, which is when I’ll be sowing tomato seeds.
Sowing and planting dates are not set in stone. Temperature, potting mix, and container size all influence how fast seedlings grow. And there’s wiggle room because sowing or planting out tomatoes a week earlier or later doesn’t change the date of the first harvest that much because plants grow slowly early in the season.
One thing to avoid is being pushed around too much by the weather. Don’t let a 3 day warm spell in March convince you to sow tomatoes then, or a 3 day warm spell in early May to plant out tomatoes earlier. In the first case, the plant, being too large at transplant time, will have a harder transition to open ground; you’ll harvest earlier tomatoes, but less over the whole season. In the latter case, a subsequent cold spell might kill the plants (unless you cover them for protection).
I detail out recommended sowing and planting dates for vegetables according to locale in my book Weedless Gardening. At the very least, write down what you do in your garden this year and tweak it closer and closer each season.
Planting, What?
Busy, such as: planting out new trees, shrubs, and vines. After so many years here at the farmden, you’d think that I would have planted every tree, shrub, or vine I could have wanted. Tain’t so.
I’m very specific about what varieties I want to plant so I usually order bare root plants, which are available in greater variety than potted plants. Ideal size for a tree is about 4 feet high because their roots can establish in their new home quickly. Of course, a potted plant, if that variety is available locally, would establish even more quickly.
In the pipeline this year are Egremont Russet and Rubinette apples, Dr. Goode grape, Mohler persimmon, and a number of low bush blueberries and lingonberries.
I remember a sunny day years ago, right after hurricane Irene. The back part of my property, where my vegetable gardens are, was high and dry, a glorious early fall day. But turning 180 degrees, looking to the front, the Wallkill River and associated flood debris was flowing past my doorstep. These days, my thoughts are often on COVID-19. Again, the garden — or a hike in the woods and other home enjoyments — provide needed respite from a bad situation.
INTO THE WOODS
Forest Garden Skeptic
“Forest gardening” or “agroforestry” has increasing appeal, and I can see why. You have a forest in which you plant a number of fruit and nut trees and bushes, and perennial vegetables, and then, with little further effort, harvest your bounty year after year. No annual raising of vegetable seedlings. Little weeding, No pests. Harmony with nature. (No need for an estate-size forest; Robert Hart, one of the fathers of forest gardening, forest gardened about 0.1 acre or 5000 square feet.)
Is this a forest garden?
Do I sound a bit skeptical? Yes, a bit. Except in tropical climates, forest gardening would provide only a nibble here and there, not a significant contribution to the diet in terms of vitamins and bulk. A major limitation in temperate climates is that most fruit and nut trees require abundant sunlight to remain healthy; the same goes for most vegetables.
The palette of perennial vegetables in temperate climates is very limited, especially if you narrow the field down to those tolerating shade. I’m also not so sure that weeding would be minimal; very invasive Japanese stilt grass has been spreading a verdant carpet on many a forest floor whether or not dappled by sunlight.
The case could be made — has been made — that some of the dietary vegetable component could be grown on trees. Robert Hart wrote of salads using linden tree leaves instead of annuals such as lettuce and arugula. I’ll admit that I’ve never chewed on a linden leaf. (I’ll give it a try as soon as I come upon one that has leafed out.) My guess is that its taste and texture would leave much to desire.
And how about squirrels? I grow nuts, and part of my controlling them involves maintaining meadow conditions around the trees. This exposes them to predators, including me and my dogs, without their having tree tops to retreat to and travel within. Unprotected, I’ve had nut plants stripped clean by squirrels.
The book Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke offers a very thorough exploration of forest gardening.
But Did I Plant a Forest Garden?
I’ve actually planted a forest garden! Well, perhaps not a forest garden. Over 20 years ago, I did plant a mini-forest. My forest, only about 300 square feet, was originally planted for fun (I like to plant trees), for aesthetics, and for some nutrition. So far I’ve reaped immense visual rewards for my effort.
Here’s what I planted: Bordering a swale that is rushing with water during spring melt and periods of heavy rain went four river birch (Betula nigra) trees. They evidently enjoy the location for they’re now each multiple trunked with attractively brown, peeling bark and towering to about 60 feet in height.
River birch
I also planted 3 sugar maple trees to provide sap for maple syrup for the future. The future is now (except I no longer use enough maple syrup to justify tapping them.)
I also planted a white oak (Quercus alba), whose sturdy limbs, I figured, would slowly spread wide with grandeur in about 150 years, after the maples and birches were perhaps long gone. Unfortunately, the white oak died, probably due to winter cold; its provenance was a warmer winter climate. My mistake.
Since that initial planting, I’ve also planted a named variety of buartnut (Juglans x bixbyi), which is a hybrid of Japanese heartnut and our native butternut.
Buartnut (not mine, yet)
I hadn’t realized it, but that tree has grown very fast and now spreads its limbs wide in much that habit as a white oak. The other two trees that I planted are named varieties of shellback hickory (Carya laciniosa). These trees are slow growing but eventually will offer good tasting nuts. They’re quite pretty, even now, with their fat buds.
A Vegetable Also
What about vegetables in my mini-forest? They were not part of my original plan. It turns out that ramps, a delicious onion relative, a native, which I’ve been growing for a few years beneath some pawpaw trees, are spring ephemerals. Spring ephemerals are perennial plants that emerge quickly in spring to soak up sunlight before its blocked by leaves on trees, then grow and reproduce before the tops die back to the ground.
Ramps (Allium tricoccum) are perfect forest vegetable, so I wanted to make the ground beneath my mini forest more forest-y before moving the ramps from beneath the pawpaws. Nothing fancy. All I did was to haul in enough leaves to blanket the ground in the planting area a few inches deep. That leafy mulch will suppress competition from weeds and add organic matter to the soil.
Collecting ramps for transplanting
In just a few years, the ramps will be sufficiently established to provide good eating, perhaps along with some buartnuts and hickory nuts, all from my forest(?) garden.
Drip Opportunity
I’m looking for a site within 20-30 minutes of New Paltz, NY in which to hold a drip irrigation workshop. What I need is a vegetable garden in beds (not necessarily raised beds) for which I would design a drip system. Workshop attendees I would install the system after learning about drip irrigation. Host pays fo materials. Contact me if interested.
