GOOD SUMMER BLUES
Plan Realized
Almost two years after my plan was conceived . . . success. Looking across rows of tomatoes, corn, onions, and kale in my vegetable garden, I see tall, blue spires of delphiniums that have finally come of age.
The spires required some effort. Coarse roots of the seedlings called for an extra dose of care. Potting soil could easily fall from the roots, exposing them to drying air, as the seedlings were successfully moved to larger quarters.
And then, once seedlings were planted out just beyond the western fence of the vegetable garden, my chickens threatened them. The poultry enjoy scratching for insects near the bases of plants. Doing so weakens larger plants, even woody shrubs; doing so can kill tender young seedlings. Chicken wire laid on top of the ground let the delphinium plants grow up through the 1 inch openings while preventing chickens’ scratching.
Planning for Future Blues
The delphinium show will end any day now, especially with this hot weather. It’s hard to let go of the show — and I don’t necessarily have to. Sometimes a second, later show can be coaxed from the plants. If the stalks with spent blossoms are cut back to the bottom whorl of leaves, new flower stalks will spring forth that should bloom again later this season.
Good growing conditions help bring on this second show. That means rich soil and water, as needed. These I have provided for my delphiniums in the form of compost topped with a leafy mulch, and drip irrigation. “Good growing conditions” also means cool growing temperatures, which I cannot provide.
Even under the best of conditions, delphiniums, although perennials, are short-lived perennials. Before next spring I’ ll get some fresh seed — freshness of seed is important for good germination — and start a bevy of new plants. For the freshest seed possible, I’ll collect them from my own plants by gathering whole stalks when they are partly dry and then shaking out seeds. Planted immediately and kept slightly cool, they should sprout in a few weeks and flower next June. Sometimes they even self-sow.
Doing What Good Gardeners Do
Self-sown delphinium seedings are most welcome; not so for many other self-sowers, that is, weeds. Now is the time when many summer weeds pick up steam. Now is also the time when good gardeners and mediocre gardeners take different paths.
I want to be a good gardener so I’m planning, immediately after I dot the last word of this report, to go out and weed. My garden is generally not very weedy, mostly because I never — yes, never — till or otherwise turn over the soil. And because I snuff out small weeds with an annual mulch of compost in planting beds and wood chips in paths. (Mulching and never tilling also bring many other benefits, such as encouraging more vibrant soil life, better use of water, and, well, not having to till.)
Purslane
Still, weeds have made inroads. I can’t help but remind myself that every weed that goes to seed could self-sow to spawn myriad more of the same — for example over 50,000 seeds per pigweed plant, or almost 20,000 seeds per dandelion plant! Perennial weeds, unchecked, build up energy reserves in their roots and spread by traveling roots, as well as by self-sowing. Checking growth of these weeds now makes for a bountiful fall garden and much fewer weeds next year.
Mostly, I just bend over and pull out weeds, coaxing them out, if need be, with my hori-hori knife. Where weeds are too numerous to make one-on-one treatment too tedious, I slide my winged weeder or wire hoe along the ground to dislodge them all at once. I gather up most pulled and hoed weeds and cart them over the the compost. Sweet revenge: light-, nutrient-, and water-stealing weeds recycled into garden goodness.
Amongst the weedy interlopers are some worth separating out, for eating. Among my favorites are pigweed, which makes an excellent cooked green. And purslane, very healthful and tasty if doctored up correctly, good suggestions for which can be found in Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook by Dina Falconi and Wendy Hollender.
EDEN’S GARDENS
Eden’s Start with Good Soil
G, as I’ll refer to him, has a blank canvas, about 10 acres of mostly open field. His vision is, essentially, for a Garden of Eden, with fruit trees, bushes, and vines, vegetables, nut trees, and flowers. Before he even thought about digging his first planting hole, I suggested he learn something about the soil beneath his blank canvas.
Your and my tax dollars have contributed to a most useful soil resource for G (and you and me), the Soil Web Survey, put out by the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) of the USDA. This survey provides soils maps of more than 95% of the counties in the U.S., each map delineating what lurks beneath the surface.
Web Soil Survey, opening page
Soils are distinctive, as different from one another as robins are from blue jays. These differences are harder to appreciate, of course, because soil is mostly underground, hidden from view. But if you were to dig some holes a few feet deep and then look carefully at their inside surfaces, you would find that soils are made up of layers of varying thicknesses — called horizons. And one soil might differ from the next not only in the thicknesses of its various horizons, but also in just how the various horizons look and feel. There might be horizons as white as chalk, as red as rust, or as dark brown as chocolate. A horizon might be cement hard, gritty with sand, or stuff for sculpture. And if you were to tease the dirt along one edge of the hole so it falls away naturally — wow! — each horizon would reveal its particles clumped together in such arrangements as plates, blocks, or prisms. Such information, and more, has allowed soils to be classified, much as birds, flowers, and living things are.
Armed with this information, G can know what will thrive in his future paradise and what might need to be done to better accommodate what he wants to grow.
Tax Dollars at Work
The Web Soil Survey is an easy-to-use online resource. Either google it or go directly to http://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/HomePage.htm. The big green button labelled “START WSS” gets you started.
The first step is to define your “Area of Interest (AOI)”, that is, your own back forty. Reading down from the AOI tab, you come to the “Address” line, in which, after clicking, you can fill in your own street address. Hit “Return” and, to the right, you’re zoomed into an aerial photo centered on the specified address. Click on one of the two boxes labelled “AOI” (which one depends on whether your AOI is going to be a rectangle or a random polygon) just above the map to delineate, in red, your AOI. Double click the last point and the map enlarges around the defined area.
Area of Interest defined
Back to the tabs at the top of the screen, and click on “Soil Map.” Now you know what to call your soil. Yes, its name. If more that one soil exists within the AOI, squiggly lines will delineate their names and extent.
From there, all sorts of useful and not so useful (for you) information are at your fingertips. Click on the soil name and you get a slew of information on that soil, including the all-important drainage class, depth to a restrictive layer, depth to water table, and its ability to hold onto water. Other clicks get you to the soil’s potential use for recreation, construction materials, building site, even military operations.
Most important is soil depth and drainage. G’s is fine, facilitating his first step towards Eden.
A Tree of Eden
Speaking of Gardens of Eden reminds me of fruit and western Asia. Which brings us to a mulberry now ripening in a pot sitting on my front terrace. This mulberry is quite different from those trees now ripening their fruit practically every few hundred feet around here.
Pakistan mulberry fruit
For one thing, this mulberry comes from western Asia, Islamabad, Pakistan, so is not cold-hardy here in New York’s Hudson Valley. Hence the pot, in which the plant resides during winter in my basement, along with figs, pomegranates, and other subtropicals.
The hardy mulberry trees that pop up here and there throughout most cold regions of the U.S. include Asian white mulberries (Morus alba) and out native red mulberries (M. rubra), and their natural hybrids. Note that fruit color has nothing to do with the species. White mulberry is a very variable species, in hardiness, fruit color and flavor, even leaf shape.
Pakistan mulberry is also unique for the size of the berries. Each is a couple of inches long. In warmer climates, the berry can elongate to over 3 inches.
Pakistan mulberry tree in pot
I wouldn’t trouble myself with a potted fruit tree just because it’s exotic and large-fruited; the flavor makes the effort worthwhile. They have a heavenly flavor, among the most delicious of all mulberries, on a par with the world’s best fruits: a rich berry flavor fronting a congenial background of sweetness offset with just the right amount of tartness.
Pakistan is sometimes listed as a variety of white mulberry, other times as a variety of yet another mulberry species, M. macroura. Outdoors, it can grow to 60 feet. In my Garden of Eden, the potted tree will be restrained to 5 or 6 feet.
SMALLER IS BETTER
Small Plants
Weeding. Planting. Harvesting. Making compost. Spreading compost. Staking. Pruning. Mowing. These are some of the activities I share with my plants this time of year. But, as Charles Dudley Warner wrote in his 1870 classic, My Summer in a Garden, “Blessed be agriculture! If one does not have too much of it.” Which prompts me to weed, plant, harvest, etc. most efficiently.
Bush cherry, 1 month after planting
Let’s take a look at some of the trees and shrubs I’ve planted this spring: Romeo and Carmen Jewel bush cherries, aronia, Grainger shellbark hickory, Great Wall Asian persimmon, Rosa canina, and Hidcote St. Johnswort. Just getting all those plants through their first season could entail lugging around many buckets of water. But it doesn’t.
Large plants of any of these could possibly be sourced but I chose small plants. And that was the first step to making sure that, paraphrasing C. W., I wasn’t overburdened with my agriculture.
With smaller root systems, small plants establish more quickly than large plants. In fact, establishing more quickly, smaller plants usually outgrow their larger counterparts after a few years.
A tree or shrub with a two-foot diameter root ball might require 3 gallons of water weekly until enough roots foraged out into surrounding soil to make the plant self-sufficient water-wise. Two cups of water weekly is enough to keep my newly planted Romeo bush cherry alive since its move from the 4-inch-diameter pot it previously called home.
By the end of this growing season, all these small plants will be firmly established and pretty much water independent. They’ll get supplemental water only if there’s any extended dry spells in their second season.
Small Planting Holes
Water for these young plants isn’t all about watering per se.
Site preparation is also important. Not that, as older gardening books used to suggest, it’s “better to dig a $50 hole for a $5 tree than a $5 hole for a $50 tree,” the dollar amounts reflecting the size of the tree and the hole. No need for such heroic measures. Digging that large a hole breaks up the capillary channels in a large volume of soil, leaving large air gaps in the soil through which water just runs down and out. Capillary channels can move water, down, up, and sideways.
Shellbark hickory, 1 mo. after planting
Better — and easier — is to dig a hole only twice as wide as the spread of the roots or root ball (if potted), and only as deep as needed so a plants sits at the same depth as it did its pot or the nursery.
With few exceptions, no need to add compost, peat moss, fertilizer, or anything else to the soil in the planting hole. After all, the expectation is for roots to eventually extend well beyond the planting hole. Create excessively posh conditions in the hole and roots have no incentive to leave. Then roots grow only in their planting hole, not beyond.
All soil goodies are best lathered on top of the ground. My first choice is for compost. Nutrients and beneficial soil organisms within the compost, over time, meld with the soil below. Compost also softens impact of raindrops so that water can percolate down into the ground rather than running off in rivulets — lessening my need for watering.
A mulch is the final icing on this layer cake. I’ll top the compost with wood chips, leaves, straw — any weed-free, organic material. This top layer further softens the impact of raindrops, keeps compost moist and vibrant, and slowly decomposes to nourish soil microorganisms and then the tree or shrub.
Yesternight’s rain or 1.25” did a week’s watering for me. A good rule of thumb is to apply one-inch of water once a week, or, equivalently, three-quarters of a gallon per estimated square foot spread of the roots. Potted trees and shrubs need that one-inch of water spread over 2 or 3 days of the week for a couple of weeks after being planted, until their roots begin to spread into surrounding soil. Larger tree and shrub transplants need more water, more frequently, for a longer period of time.
Followup on Drastic, and Less Drastic Pruning
I recently wrote of “renovating” my old lilac shrub, a no-brainer as far as pruning. You just lop each and every part of the plant right to the ground. My fears that such drastic pruning might also kill the plant were unfounded. Already, new sprouts are growing from the sawed off remains of the plant as well as from some distance away. All that’s needed now is to choose which sprouts to keep to grow into a whole new shrub.
Lilac regrowth from stump
My blueberry shrubs also received more drastic pruning than usual. To lower their height and to encourage and make space for younger, more fruitful stems, I lopped a few of the oldest stems of each bush right to ground level. Like the lilac, new sprouts soon rose from ground level.
Blueberry, new sprouts
Late next winter, I’ll save the most vigorous of these new sprouts and lop the rest of them all the way to the ground. And, of course, again lop to ground level some of next year’s oldest stems.
Such pruning (covered in my book The Pruning Book) keeps blueberry and lilacs perennially renewed, without any stems that are too old to flower or fruit well as well as plenty, but not too many, young replacement stems for the future.
