End of Summer? Enter the Fall Garden.
Fading Summer Brings in Fall Greens, and Hollyhocks for Cheer
There’s a flurry of seed sowing and setting out of transplants going on here. Am I deluded that it’s springtime? No. Autumn is around the corner and there are vegetables to be planted.
For many gardeners, summer’s end and the garden’s end are one and the same. But planning for and planting an autumn vegetable garden bypasses the funereal look of waning tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and other vegetables that thrive only with summer heat and long days of sunshine, and puts plenty of fresh vegetables on the table. Having an autumn vegetable garden is like having a whole new garden, one that gradually fades in, like a developing photograph, as summer vegetables fade out.
Autumn vegetables come to the fore as tomatoes fade away
Which is why today I tucked two dozen endive transplants into a double row of holes spaced fifteen inches apart in a three-foot-wide bed. And which is why, in a different bed two weeks ago, I sowed a row of Watermelon winter radishes (the resemblance to watermelon only in the color of their innards), a row of turnips, and a row of Chinese cabbage. Also, why back in March, seeds of Brussels sprouts were sown, the seedlings of which were transplanted to yet another bed last May.
Not that the time has passed for planting any autumn vegetables; plenty of vegetables that enjoy the cool moistness of autumn are still to be sown. This week, I plant to sow lettuce, spring radishes, arugula, mustard, and spinach.
Edamame Out, Endive In
The question might arise as to where to plant all these autumn vegetables when the garden is already overflowing with summer vegetables. Overflowing, really?
I planted the endive transplants in a bed that I had just cleared of edamame plants; edamame bear over a period of a couple of weeks and then they’re done, which they were. Likewise, a whole bed of onions and a first planting of corn are finishing up, freeing up space for planting. Even the bed from the second planting of corn will be freed up the end of August.
Endive transplants go where edamame once grew
Harvest of bush beans does not halt as abruptly as that of corn, onions, or edamame. Nonetheless, the bean harvest does begin to taper down after two or three weeks, so out went the first planting of bush beans a couple of weeks ago. A second planting, sown in a different bed three weeks after the first planting, took up the slack, and today I’m pulling even those plants out of the ground. Pole bean plants will keep green beans on our plates until frosty weather, which it what it takes to put a stop those plants.
Can’t Help But Smile With Hollyhocks
My garden isn’t only about food. I’m also sowing some flower seeds now, not to blossom in autumn but to get a jump on next spring.
This past spring I sowed seeds of Apricot-Peach Parfait hollyhocks (from https://www.reneesgarden.com). Right now, the plants’ seven-foot-high spires are studded along their length with frilly blossoms in delicious shades of apricot and rosy-peach. I want more.
Spires of Apricot-Peach Parfait hollyhocks add a smile to the garden.
Hollyhock self-seeds so future population growth could be left to the vagaries of nature and weather. But overly diligent weeding or mulching might quash newcomers, so I’m going to sow more seeds. Hollyhock is a biennial or short-lived perennial so that self-seeding habit is welcome.
As either a short-lived perennial or biennial, hollyhocks tend to grow just leaves their first year and flower their second year — then die if they behave like a biennial, or go on to flower for more years if they are perennial. I was able to get flowers this season from spring-sown seeds because I planted the seed early and the seedlings spent their first few weeks of growth in the greenhouse. (Through breeding, some varieties of hollyhock behave as annuals, and bloom reliably their first year — but not as seven-foot-high spires.)
Planting the seed in late summer guarantees that the plants will bloom next year, and earlier than spring-sown plants. Cool weather of late fall and late winter helps trigger the flowering response.
Delphinium is another flower to sow this week. In addition to the advantages of enjoying spires of blue flowers earlier and more reliably next summer, delphinium seeds sprout more reliably if fresh, which they are more likely to be in autumn than the following spring. Chilling the dry seed — some sources suggest stratification, that is, chilling the moist seed — for a week or so also is said to help wake it up.
Once seedlings of hollyhocks and delphiniums get going, they’ll need special accommodations to get through winter. After all, they’ll still be tender, baby plants when the weather turns frigid. The goal is to keep them alive and growing slowly going into winter. I’ll either tuck the pots close together in the cold frame or in the slightly warmer large window in my barely heated basement.
WESTWARD HO, FOR FRUIT MEETINGS AND EATINGS
Fruit Nuts, Including Me, Nurseries, & Wild Blueberries
Are there organizations for people who make and eat cheese; build and ride motorcycles; write and read books; grow and savor fruits? All I know is that the answer to the existence of the last-named organization is a rowsing “yes!” I know because I recently returned from Oregon, where I converged with other fruit nuts for the annual meeting of North American Fruit Explorers (www.nafex.org, and nuts, incidentally, are also covered under the organization’s umbrella).
No need to don a pith helmet and traipse off to Borneo to be a fruit explorer. Not that you couldn’t, and be one. No, this fun meeting brought together everyone from backyard growers with a few fruit plants to AN 88-year-old guy who grows over 3,000 varieties of apples. Fruits represented ranged from apples and pears to pawpaws and persimmons and, even more rare, haskaps and gumis. These people, we, realize that there’s a lot more to enjoy in the world of nature’s desserts — fruits, that is — than what you see on display in the supermarket, even farmers’ market.
What appeared to be a roomful of normal people was actually a roomful of fruit nuts, among which I count myself. NAFEX members are as varied as the fruits they grow, with all ages, genders, home towns, and “real jobs” represented. Members can share their trials, tribulations, and rewards of fruit growing (the title of my lecture there), ask questions, and exchange plants in their quarterly publication.
Me, staring through espalier pear at Mt. Vernon, WA research station
Each year’s annual meeting is at a “fruitful” location. Last week’s meeting took in tours of the USDA germplasm repository, which houses the USDA collection of pears, gooseberries, currants, and bramble fruits, and of research centers on hazelnuts and brambles. All accompanied, of course, by tastings. If you love fruit, grow some . . . and join NAFEX.
Branching Off to Pakistani Mulberries, Delectable Crabs, and More
I branched off (pardon the pun) from the group to visit a few nurseries. First stop was Whitman Farms (www.whitmanfarms.com), at which I made a beeline to Lucille Whitman’s black mulberry (Morus nigra) tree, an offshoot of which I’ve grown for many years. I grow it in a pot because it’s a subtropical species, not cold-hardy here. It’s worth the effort because it is among the most delectable of fruits. It’s hard to imagine that such a small berry can pack such a wallop of rich, sweet-tart flavor, much better than the wild mulberries around here. Lucille also grows a slew of gooseberry and currant varieties, another group of fruits that worthy of wider attention.
Black Pakistani mulberry
From there it was on to Burnt Ridge Nursery (www.burntridgenursery.com), worth visiting also for its panoramic view of the Cascade Mountains, including Mount Saint Helens. I soon realized, driving down the gravel nursery road, that we were passing through a virtual Garden of Eatin’, with apples and pear trees, grapes, and hardy kiwi vines. The forest of large trees turned out to be a nursery owner Michael Dolan’s extensive collection of chestnuts. It was too early in the season to taste any chestnuts but I did get to taste his Black Pakistani mulberry, which had a chewy texture and perhaps even richer flavor than black mulberry. (Black Pakistani is a variety of M. alba, white mulberry.) Another plus for Black Pakistani is that its fruit is two or more inches long. (Lucille Whitman also sells Black Pakistani. Note to myself: Get a Black Pakistani tree to grow in a pot, like a fig.)
Finally, I motored along with Sam Benowitz north to Washington state, to his nursery, Raintree Nursery (www.raintreenursery.com). We were greeted at the nursery entrance by espaliered apple trees, then plum trees whose branches bowed
Centennial crab apple rates great; a crab is any small apple.
low from their load of fruit. A Centennial crabapple tree splayed out its small but ripe fruits, which were delicious, especially for a summer apple. Another note to myself: Purchase or make a Centennial crabapple. Pots of lingonberries were lush with their shiny evergreen leaves, the size of mouse ears; persimmons leaves hung languidly from the trees’ branches; and hardy kiwifruit brightened up the scene with silvery variegation, blushed with pink. Alas, these fruits were not yet ripe so for the time being provided only eye candy.
They Call Them Huckleberries
Fruit nuts are a friendly fraternity, ready to share experiences and fruit. Blueberries are among my favorite fruits, and my newfound, northwestern friends were anxious to introduce me to some western blueberry species. First was red huckleberry (V. parvifolium). Not to be an ingrate, but . . . yuk! A very small, very tart, red blueberry. Perhaps the red color threw me off. Next came evergreen huckleberry (V. ovatum), much tastier, and evergreen, but still not holding a candle to our eastern blueberry species.
Finally, though, I had a taste of mountain huckleberry (V. membranaceum). Delicious. Different but as good as our east coast species.
I was given some leafy stems of mountain huckleberry packed for travel with their bases in water tubes and their leaves wrapped in moist tissue. As soon as I got
Blueberry cuttings in my clear plastic propagator.
home I stripped all but the upper two leaves from the stems and inserted their bases into the mix of moist peat and perlite in my makeshift propagator. The propagator sits on the north side of my house, its clear plastic cover maintaining sufficient humidity while letting in sufficient light until the cuttings root — I hope. Blueberry species are not particularly easy to root, although one of the main ingredients needed is patience. I’ll also sow seeds of the few fruits I brought home.
In a few years, my memories of last week’s journey may also live on in my taste buds.
GOOD FUNGI AND BAD INSECTS
Fungi I Like and Bean & Japanese Beetles (Don’t Like)
Where once scorned or appreciated only after being sautéed in butter, fungi have finally come into their own. If you’re among those who isn’t awed by fungi except when they’re sautéed, swallow this: each gram of soil (the weight of a paper clip) might house over a million fungi, or anywhere from 10 to 100 pounds of them in the top 6 inches of a 1000 square feet of soil. And most of what they do — for plants and soil, forget about your taste buds for now — is beneficial.
I recently heard of a project using fungi as a building material. On exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s PS1 in New York City is Hy-Fi, a cylindrical tower built our of bricks made from fungi that have been fed cornstalks, the fungi’s fine, thread-like hyphae growing to create dense bricks. An organically grown building! Among the benefits touted were that a building made of fungi could be recycled.
I’m not so sure that a building that can be recycled is a good thing, but one statement by the architect did raise my hackles: that the building could be made of waste materials, such as cornstalks. The same argument could be or has been used for ethanol production, which could be made from the same waste material.
Corn stalks might be waste material in the sense that we don’t eat them, perhaps not even always feed them to animals. But corn stalks, wheat straw, and other so-called “waste materials,” as the architect perhaps inadvertently pointed out, are a gourmet delight for fungi. Also good food for bacteria (3 million to 500 million per gram of soil), actinomycetes (1 million to 20 million per gram of soil), as well as protozoa, nematodes, and other soil creatures. And don’t forget about earthworms (2 to 22 pounds per 1000 square feet of ground). There’s a lot of hungry creatures down there.
So these materials are not waste; they are food for soil life. They are what put the “organic” in organic gardening and farming. (They are “organic” in the sense that they were once living, and that they contain carbon compounds, mostly combined with hydrogen and oxygen.) They confer a range of physical, nutritional, and biological benefits to soil, plants, and, hence the animals, including humans, that feed on them. Depriving the soil of these organic materials is what led, in part, to the dust bowls of the 1930s.
Corn stalks as well as other organic materials too often considered as waste should be returned to the soil, either directly or after being first run through a compost pile. One measure of soil quality is the amount of organic material it contains.
Waiting Out Japanese Beetles
Japanese beetles have not come into their own; they have never been and continue to NOT be appreciated. The swarmed in a few weeks ago to make lace of the foliage of a whole host of plants. Grapes are among their favorites, evident by merely looking out on the landscape and picking out the hole-y grape leaves. (The leaf veins typically remain intact.) Although roses are also a reputed favorite, the beetles left mine unscathed.
Japanese beetles made lacework of just this hardy kiwi’s foliage
Most interesting is the beetle’s effect on my hardy kiwifruits, specifically the super-hardy sorts (Actinidia kolomikta). I have four plants, 3 females — Krupnoplodnaya, Aromatanya, and Sentayabraskaya — and one male. Of all those plants, only the Sentayabraskaya plant was attractive to the Japanese beetles, dramatically so. Looking up, I can see sky through almost every leaf.
Japanese beetles are hard to keep in check. For a few plants, hand picking into a can of soapy water (the soap so they don’t just fly out after a quick bath) is effective. The biological insecticide milky spore disease, applied to lawns to kill the grub stage in the soil, is sometimes effective, especially in more southerly locations. Of course, beetles emerging from the soil in summer can fly, so milky spore is useless unless done on a neighborhood scale. Neem is a relatively benign repellant and insecticide that’s somewhat effective sometimes; it would require too much spraying, especially for something with such an iffy effect.
So I just wait the beetles out. Plants can tolerate a certain amount of damage and the beetles typically wave goodbye to go burrow into the soil and lay eggs sometime in August. The wait was especially short this year, with most of the beetles departing by the third week in July. Thank you guys, and gals.
And Where Did Mexican Bean Beetles Go?
A Mexican bean beetle threesome
Other pests also come and go. Mexican bean beetles, mentioned last week, still are keeping to themselves, wherever that might be but not in my garden. Tomato hornworms, which are large caterpillars with voracious
appetites, stripping leaves from tomato plants in the matter of hours, turned up in a friend’s garden. Fortunately, piggybacking those beetles were what looked like grains of rice. They’re actually cocoons of a braconid wasp, which will kill the hornworm. Leaving parasitized beetles alone lets the parasite live to attack more hornworms.
Parasite attacks tomato hornworm; winner: parasite.
Also worth ignoring are the pimples that have been appearing on leaves of many pin oaks. Those pimples — hemispheres about 1/2” across — are galls. Plant galls are abnormal growth made in response to an irritant such as a bacteria, a fungus, or, most commonly, an insect. A few galls here and there rarely do a plant harm.
Those oak leaf galls are pocking almost all the leaves on my pin oak. Still, I’ll ignore them or admire them; they sort of liven up the look of the tree. It’s too late, anyway, to do anything about them.
