[caterpillar yew, grape training, prune bay laurel]
The hardest part has been getting the caterpillar to smile. This caterpillar is about 20 feet long and 3 feet high, 5 feet to the top of its antennae, and it lives near a wall along the front of my house. It’s green. It’s a yew.
The caterpillar started out conventionally enough. Like so many gardeners and new homeowners, I succumbed to the enticement of inexpensive evergreens – in this case, 5 innocent-looking, small yew bushes – to dress up the bare front of my house. Once planted, they would contribute to the ubiquitous gumdrop school of landscape design. That was over 25 years ago.
Well, at least I decided not to shear them into exacting gumdrops. Pruning with a hand shears once or twice a year kept them informal. My plants never suffered neglect, a good thing because too many innocent-looking, small evergreens get neglected, outgrow their surroundings, and gobble up homes. I can still look out from my windows.
A couple of years ago, inspired by local plant sculptor and stone artist Keith Buesing, I decided to morph my informal gumdrops into a giant caterpillar. Repeated shearing has finally released a caterpillar from the mass of greenery. Not that my caterpillar is anatomically correct: I carved out two eyes from the foliage and am still working on the big smile, the latter to keep the creature looking friendly.
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After “smiling” and trimming the caterpillar today, I put away my hedge shears, reached for my pruning shears, and set to work on the grapes. With many varieties of table grapes – including seedless Vanessa, Mars, Jupiter, Somerset, and Glenora as well as seeded Lorelei, Briana, Alden, Swenson Red, Edelweiss, Swenson White, Campbell Early, and New York Muscat – there will be plenty of flavors. But I want to make sure each variety tastes its very best, for which pruning is key. Pruning balances the crop load so enough leaves pump each berry with flavor and keeps the plant bathed in sunlight.
In this part of the country, most grapes, including my own, are trained to the traditional 4-Arm Kniffin system, with a central trunk and two fruiting arms running off in opposite directions at 3 feet and 5 feet above ground level. My grapes got a makeover this year because of my visit, last summer, to Purdue University’s experimental grape plantings.
Now my grapes are emulating Dr. Bordelon’s “high-wire cordon” grapes, each of whose vines has a trunk rising to almost 7 feet, then splitting off into two permanent arms (“cordons”) running in opposite directions along a wire at that height. Fruiting shoots grow downward off those arms. (I train my plants with two trunks, each topped by a single cordon, as insurance against losing a trunk to our more severe winter cold.) My job is to position those shoots and prune them so that none originate closer that 6 inches apart along the cordon, so that they don’t tangle, and so that the bunches don’t get shaded by more than 4 layers of leaves. I’ve done that and everything looks tidy, airy, and drenched in sunlight.
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One more job with the pruning shears, and that is to get to work on the bay laurel. This tree is 20 years old this year and, if never pruned, would be 30, or more, feet tall. It’s only 5 feet tall.
Planted outdoors, the bay laurel would also be dead. Our winters are much too cold for this native of the Mediterranean region. My bay laurel calls an 18 inch diameter flower pot home so it can move indoors in autumn to spend winter near a sunny window in a cool room.
Every couple of years or so, I slide the root ball out of the flower pot and cut 2 to 3 inches off all around the ball to make room for new potting soil when I put the plant back into its pot.
Each and every year, though, I cut back the top. The plant is pruned as a “standard,” that is, in the shape of a small, idealized tree with a straight trunk capped by a ball of foliage. Sort of like a lollipop. I take my hand shears and shorten some branches and, where growth is too dense, completely remove other branches. A hedge shears is not the tool to use for this job because they would leave mangled the big leaves of a plant like bay laurel.
Besides looking very pretty, this lollipop of a tree offers fresh bay leaves, which have a delicate flavor that hints of olive oil, another Mediterranean plant.
[kiwiberry, corn 3, D. Austin rose]
A trip through Pennsylvania last week, on the way back from a lecture at the Millersville Native Plant Symposium, finally afforded me a convenient opportunity to stop in for a visit with David Jackson at KiwiBerry Organics (www.kiwiberry.com). David was not easy to find, as he’s nestled deep in the hills and back roads of rural Pennsylvania near Danville. Finally, after driving past acres and acres of forest alternating with corn and soybean fields, I came upon a hillside beribboned with neatly trellised hardy kiwi plants (Actinidia arguta).
What’s a hardy kiwi, you wonder? These fruits are cousin to our fuzzy supermarket kiwifruits, with a few notable differences. Hardy kiwifruits – or “kiwiberries,” as David and his partner Holly Laubach call them – are grape-sized and have smooth skins, so can be popped into your mouth just like grapes. Inside, they’re green with black seeds, just like fuzzy kiwifruits, except that hardy kiwifruits’ flavor is much sweeter and more aromatic. (I know this from what others say and because I have about a dozen fruiting vines myself; I devoted a chapter to kiwifruits in my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden, available at https://leereich.com/.)
What really dazzled me on this visit was the beauty of the plants and the care that is lavished on each one of them. The beauty was no surprise because hardy kiwifruits, since their introduction into North America from Asia at the end of the 19th century, have been grown mostly as ornamental vines for clothing arbors and pergolas.
Lavish care further enhanced Kiwiberry Organics plants plants’ natural beauty, starting right at ground level with the neat, weed-free strips in which the plants were growing. Weeds were not kept at bay with herbicides, but with careful use of a grape hoe, pulled by a tractor, that rolls over the soil to bury weeds in the soil ridges beneath the plants. From the ground, each plant rose as a sturdy trunk up the the center of a T-trellis whose 8-foot-wide arms are joined by wires running down the length of the trellis. At trellis height, the trunks branch into two permanent arms that run along and are supported by the middle wire. Fruiting arms growing off the two fruiting arms reach perpendicularly out to the outside wires.
I’ve tasted David’s kiwiberries and can attest to their especially fine flavor, the result of careful training and pruning that lets the plants bathe in sunlight. Excess growth is pruned off throughout the growing season to reduce congestion. Fruiting shoots draping down over the ends of the outside wires are repeatedly shortened. Stems that will yield fruit-bearing shoots for the following year are positioned in readiness. All this pruning is in addition to dormant pruning in winter.
My only regret with this visit was that the plants were in flower – very pretty, but I would rather have been tasting fruit.
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June 6th: My third planting of sweet corn went into the ground this morning. Rumor has it that backyard gardens are too small to make sweet corn worth planting, especially when supersweet corn is so available at farmstands and markets. Not so!
This latest corn planting went in between lettuce plants in a bed that has been home to 4 rows of early season salad fixings, including arugula, radishes, mustard, erba stella, and 4 varieties of lettuce. That bed now yields more than can be eaten on a daily basis, plus I have other beds of greenery.
So I sighted out 2 rows in the bed and every 2 ft. in each row yanked out a clump of greenery to make space for a clump – a “hill” (cluster) of 8 seeds – of sweet corn. Once those corn seeds sprout, I’ll thin the seedlings out to the best 4 plants. Once those “best 4 plants” start growing strongly, the salad fixings between them will be well past their prime and I’ll just pull them out, leaving the corn to thrive alone in the bed.
All sweet corns are not created equal, and planting sweet corn lets me choose which varieties to grow. I’m partial to old-fashioned sweet corn. It’s not nearly as sweet as modern supersweets but has a rich, corny flavor. My favorite variety, Golden Bantam, was the standard of excellence for sweet corn a hundred years ago.
Not everyone is a fan of Golden Bantam today; my friend Kit says it tastes like “horse corn.” Still growing your own corn lets you seek out and grow whatever variety you like best.
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David Austin (http://www.davidaustinroses.com/american/advanced.asp), rose breeder extraordinaire, has done it again, with Strawberry Hill rose. Two plants of this variety went in last spring near two south-facing, brick walls. One of them, the one in more sun, is now drenched in soft, pink blooms. As with many of Mr. Austin’s roses, the flowers have the shape of old-fashioned, cottage garden roses and the bushes are full bodied and robust. I was a little disappointed in the lightness of the fragrance, “fine myrrh” for this variety. But “every rose (and even Strawberry Hill) has its thorns.” Everything else about the bush makes it a winner.
[poppies, hoeing]
It’s poppy season! Oriental poppies and Shirley poppies and California poppies. Unfortunately, no Himalayan poppies. And no bread seed poppies, yet. Each species has similarly delicate petals, yet each species also has its own character.
The Oriental poppies (Papaver orientalis), the first to open in my garden, have enormous heads of tissue paper thin petals in traffic-stopping red. I visited a garden last weekend in which were growing Oriental poppies with petals in soft pink, with white petals, or with, even more traffic-stopping than my fire engine red poppies, orange-red blossoms.
Corn poppies (P. rhoeas) are waiting their turn right next to my Oriental poppies. They have similarly fuzzy foliage but the foliage is more upright growing. And the flower heads, still closed in bud, are hanging downwards from the ends of thin, upright flower stalks. They will soon open to an intense red suggestive of blood, which is why paper reproductions of them are passed out on Memorial Day in remembrance of soldiers killed in war. These are the poppies that naturally populated the World War I battlefields and cemeteries, as immortalized in John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields”
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
On to the more cheery California poppies (Eschscholtzis californica), which blanket California hillsides with yellow flowers having just a hint of orange. These poppies grows near ground level and also keeps their flowers there.
Like corn poppies, California poppies are easily grown from seed scattered on the ground in late winter. Growing either poppy requires faith because their seeds are almost as fine as dust. Yet the plants transplant poorly, so in situ sowing is the only way to grow them. I always get an abundance of Shirley poppies sprouting. The California ones also probably sprout but most get shaded out by the surrounding, more exuberant flowers and weeds.
Bread seed poppies (P. somniferum) are also annuals, but need no sowing. They self-sow profusely on their own, so this week I spent some time un-sowing them, i.e. weeding out excess. They grow quickly, rising to cap the 2 to 3 foot high flower stalks with what look like balls of crepe paper in pink, white, and lavender, with occasion flowers having only single rows of petals.
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I forgot to mention Welsh poppies (Meconopsis cambrica), which actually started to bloom a little before the Oriental poppies. I originally grew Welsh poppies only to try my hand with its genus, Meconposis. Welsh poppy is easy, even self-seeding to some degree.
Himalayan poppy (M. betonicifoliais) the Meconopsis I’ve really wanted to grow. Unfortunately, it needs cool summer temperatures. Both times I raised plants from seed, they grew well until July, when they collapsed, dead, from the heat and humidity.
Welsh poppy produces a whorl of gray-green leaves from the center of which rises a flower stalk capped by a flower whose pale salmon flowers stare straight ahead, right at you. They’re not as pretty as the clear blue of Himalayan poppies, but pretty enough, especially considering the non-effort needed to grow them.
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Black locust trees burst into bloom at the end of May, in a particularly profuse display this year. Much better than the show of the blossoms was their sweet perfume suffusing the air all over the countryside.
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Abundant rain and warm weather have made for a good crop of weeds this season. Their abundance was a little daunting, at first. (Yes, even to the guy that wrote a book titled Weedless Gardening. “Weedless” in, this case, means free from weed problems; I do do some weeding.)
The thing to do is to take a deep, calming breath, and do what you have to do: weed. In my garden, weeds release easily from the soft soil so I pull the few deep-rooted ones out, roots and all.
I use a hoe where a bunch of small weed seedlings are popping up, but – very important – a hoe with a sharp blade that I can skim along a fraction of an inch beneath the soil surface to separate the roots from the tops of small weeds. Being too small to have stored any energy yet, the plants die.
A number of hoes do this job well, including the colinear hoe, push hoe, scuffle hoe, pointed action hoe, stirrup hoe, wire weeder, and (the one I use) winged weeder. The thing all these hoes have in common is a sharp blade that sits parallel to the surface of the ground when you hold the handle in hoeing position. I recently realized a need for a hoe with a smaller blade that I could squeeze into the 4” row spacings in some of my vegetable beds so I bent the blade of a cheap steak knife at almost a right angle and taped and screwed its handle to a 5 foot length of bamboo.
Any of these hoes make quick and pleasant work of weeds if used regularly, which means before weeds grow big. Sometimes I’ll even run the hoe quickly down some rows before weeds even appear. This preemptive move snuffs out any weeds starting to germinate and keeps the soil surface loose.
As the season progresses, weeds will have a harder time of it because of drier soil and stiff competition from garden plants – if you and I keep on top of them now.
