End of Year Punch List
Winterizing
My carpenter friends, near the end of their projects, have their “punch lists” to serve as reminders what odds and ends still need to be done. I similarly have a punch list for my gardens, a punch list that marks the end of the growing season, a list of what (I hope) will get done before I drop the first seeds in the ground next spring.
(No need for an entry on the punch list to have the ground ready for that seed. Beds have been mulched with compost and are ready for planting.)
Hardy, potted plants, including some roses, pear trees, and Nanking cherries, can’t have their roots exposed to the full brunt of winter cold.
I’ve huddled all these pots together against the north wall of my house but soon have to mound leaves or wood chips up to their rims to provide further cold protection.
I’ll save some leaves to protect strawberry plants. Their insulating blanket won’t go down until weather turns colder, with the soil frozen an inch deep, or else their evergreen leaves will rot beneath the leaves.
I’ll be digging out or cutting down a number of woody plants, some even 10 or 20 years old, in the next few days or weeks to make way for better ones. (Ruthless!) Anna hardy kiwifruit, short for Annanasnaya, grows very well but ripens a bit late and doesn’t have quite as good flavor as my other varieties: Geneva, MSU, and Dumbarton. So out it goes. The same goes for Mars, Concord, and Cayuga White grapes; their flavor isn’t up to snuff. And Halle’s Giant, Lewis, and Clark filberts, except that their shortcoming is their susceptibility to the disease filbert blight.
A 5 gallon bucket filled with equal parts sifted compost and soil will be ingredients for any potting soils I’ll need for seedlings from midwinter on. For the finished potting soil, I’ll mix in another 5 gallon bucket with equal parts peat moss and perlite.
One sunny day soon I’ll lean pitchforks, rakes, and shovels against the garden carts and brush them with linseed oil diluted with equal parts paint thinner. 
After the handles have been wiped down, 10 minutes later, they’ll be in good condition for at least another year.
Pruning hardly needs to be added to my punch list. I’m reminded about this annual job every time I look out the window or walk out the back door.
Deer at Bay
Protecting some of my trees and shrubs from animals doesn’t make it to the punch list either — because it needs to be done by now! Young pears (Concorde, Abbe Fetal, and Lady Petre) and apples (Liberty, Macon, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Ashmeads Kernel, and Pitmaston Pineapple) already have their hardware cloth and/or plastic collars protecting their bottom couple of feet of growth.
What about branches higher up, the ones the deer would find tasty. Thanks to fencing at both the north and south ends of my property, a couple of Deerchaser battery-powered repellants, two outdoor dogs, and vibes from me, deer rarely venture on site. But, as I discovered this past summer, just one deer on just one night can do a lot of damage to a young tree.
So this year I’m putting 5 foot high by 3 foot diameter cages of 2×4 welded wire fencing around my young apple trees. 
The pear trees, close to the house, don’t get bothered. The problem with such cages is that it’s a hassle to weed or prune within the cage — both very important for young trees. Two metal stakes, each a 5 feet length of EMT electrical conduit, woven into part of fencing on opposite sides allows me to slide the fence up and down to get inside a cage to work. These trees, which are replacing my very dwarf apple trees, are semi-dwarfs which can fend for themselves once they get above 5 feet. Then I’ll remove the cages.
Memorables, for Vegetables
And now, some notes for next season’s vegetable garden . . .
Reduce the number of pepper varieties to those that perform and taste best here: Sweet Italia,
Italian Sweet peppers
Carmen, and Escamillo. And stake them right from the get go.
Plant a greater proportion of tight-necked onions, such as Patterson, New York Early, and Copra, to avoid bacterial diseases.
Plant less bok choy; no need to be inundated by them just because the space is available.
Keep an eye out for whiteflies and caterpillars on cabbage family plants; act sooner rather than later to keep them in check.
Plant more Shirofumi edemame; 30 feet of bed should be about right, they need a long, hot season.
Try King of the Garden Limas again, but plant even earlier indoors.
Get Out!
Okay, time to get outside to work on my punch list before any snowfall limits the possibilities.
Autumn’s Leaves
Wherefrom the Colors?
Autumn is a season when New York’s Hudson Valley, and much of the Northeast, unfolds in all its glory. Not this autumn, though. What’s going on in the leaves this year? Is there anything I can do about it?.
Chlorophyll is what makes leaves green, but hidden behind that green, all season long, are some of autumn’s colors. Chlorophyll must be continually synthesized for a leaf to stay green. The shorter days and lowering sun of waning summer are what trigger leaves to stop producing chlorophyll and let some of the other colors come to the fore.
Yellows and oranges, no longer masked by chlorophyll green, come from carotenoids, which help chlorophyll do its job of harvesting sunlight to convert into plant energy. Thank carotenoids for the warm, yellow glow they give to gingko, aspen, hickory, and birch leaves.
Gingko
Tannins are another pigment, actually metabolic wastes, that all summer are hidden by chlorophyll. Their contribution to the fall palette are the season’s subdued browns, notable in some oaks and enriching the yellow of beeches.
Because leaves harbor carotenoids and tannins all summer long, nothing particular about autumn weather should either intensify or subdue their autumn showing. I’m blaming this autumn’s poor show on the season’s extended warm weather. It was slow to arrest chlorophyll production and induce leaf drop. A couple of hard freezes brought the whole works to a screeching halt, so instead of showy yellow leaves, my witchhazel’s stems are now “adorned” with wrinkled, green leaves frozen in place. Other trees and shrubs suffered a similar fate, and their frozen, green leaves are dropping without any fanfare.
Autumn color also spills out reds and purples, most evident in red maples and some sugar maples, scarlet oak, sourwood, blueberry, and winged euonymus. Those reds and purples come from anthocyanins, yet another pigment. Except for trees like Purple Fountain beech and Royal Purple smokebush, whose leaves unfold dusky red right from the get go in spring and remain so all season long, in most leaves anthocyanins do not begin to develop until autumn.
Sugar maple
Anthocyanin formation requires sugars, which accumulate best with a combination of warm, sunny days to maximize photosynthesis, and cool, but not frigid, nights to minimize nighttime burning up of accumulated sugars. A cloudy, rainy autumn means less red because less anthocyanin is formed, and any that does form is diluted. Warm nights, such as characterized much of autumn, reduce anthocyanins by burning up much of each day’s sugar production. The result: Less reds and purples, as evidenced by the blah color of this year’s blueberries in my garden and maples in the forests.
Can We Make the Color Better?
Is there anything we can do about the autumn show?
Here in the garden, my role in the autumn show is to plant trees genetically programmed for good autumn color. Colorful trees and shrubs include goldenrain tree, hickory, ironwood, and black tupelo. Certain varieties within each species might pack a bigger wow than the others. Hence the spicebush variety Rubra, brick red in fall, or Wright Brothers sugar maple, whose leaves become a mottling of gold, pink, orange, and scarlet. Other especially colorful varieties include Autumn Flame and October Glory red maple, Commemoration and Legacy sugar maple, Autumn Gold and President gingko, and September Beauty Chinese sumac.
Japanese maple
Despite this autumn’s weather, fothergilla and Japanese stewartia both managed to look as flamboyant this year as in others. If you believe that, going forward, autumn weather is going to bring on less spectacular color, choose varieties that originated from more southerly latitudes.
Fothergilla
Stewartia
And if warmer autumns are going to be one effect of global warming, we can help the autumn show beyond our gardens, in the forests, by traveling less or more efficiently, using less plastic and other petrochemicals, eating more locally grown food and less farmed meat, investing in energy-efficient appliances and renewable energy, etc. (For more, see https://www.conserve-energy-future.com/stopglobalwarming.php.)
Back in the garden, my other role in ratcheting up the reds and purples is to make sure that leaves bask in light. I plant a tree where light is adequate (for that species) and, as necessary, prune so that branches don’t shade each other. Street lights don’t count as light, and actually have a negative effect, disrupting the signal that days are getting shorter and it’s time to slow chlorophyll production.
Lee’s New Book!!
Knowing something about how plants work can make gardening more interesting as well as make the landscape prettier and vegetable gardens more productive. And that’s the thrust of my upcoming book, The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Much Better Garden, to be published in early spring of 2018 but available for pre-order through Amazon or, signed, from me.
Some Fruits and a Ornamental Veggie
Happy Blueberries, Happy Me
With all those years of mulching, levels of decomposed and decomposing soil organic matter have greatly increased the soil’s buffering capacity for acidity. That means that I no longer have to pay such close attention to acidity, so I rarely add sulfur anymore.
Sammy also likes the mulch
Besides all these other benefit, the mulch has created a soft root run that retains moisture, just what blueberries’ thin roots really like. Fruit is borne on shoots that grew the previous season, so each year’s vigorous new growth translates into a good crop in the offing for the next year.
New York Bananas
Two trees would be adequate for most households; I have about 20, just so I can learn more about them and their individual differences. That makes for a lot of pawpaws! (I test market most of them.)
Pawpaw fruits are very variable in both size and flavor even among the branches of a single tree. One year, I tried thinning the fruits to see if that would increase size of remaining fruits, as it does with apples and peaches. Pawpaw has a multiple ovary so each blossom can give rise to as many as 9 fruits. The small fruits are hard to see because they match so closely the green color of the leaves, so I didn’t thin as many as I had hoped. That said, at season’s end, fruits on thinned clusters seemed no larger than fruits on unthinned clusters.
Beginning around the middle of September, I began harvesting the first fruits. I picked some up from the ground and picked some softening ones from the trees, all of which continued through October. By putting them immediately in a cooler at 40°F, I still had good fruit into the middle of November.
Scarlet Runners
Despite the “bean” in the name, I’ve grown this vining bean, as do most people, primarily as an ornamental, for its scarlet blossoms. I occasionally eat the fat, hairy, yet delectable green beans.
Every year I collect some of the matured black and pale purple, calico seeds for replanting the following year. One year, I decided to cook up some of these seeds and taste them. Scarlet runner bean seeds are quite tasty (and, I learned prior to eating, nonpoisonous).
