Thanks(soil)giving, Chokes, & Rosemary
As part of my Thanksgiving celebration, I’m thanking the soil. Soil, after all, is where it all starts. We’re thankful for the plants, but the plants got where they got because of the soil, offering plants support, water, air (which roots need), a friendly microbial environment, and nourishment.
Basically, I thank the soil with organic materials, that is, stuff that is or was living. Stuff like wood chips (dead), straw (dead), compost (living and dead), manure (living and dead), and autumn leaves (dead). Organic materials are what put the “organic” in organic gardening and farming. Organic materials are bulky, and are what chemical fertilizers have too often replaced. Compost, for instance, is about one percent nitrogen, so to supply the average 2 pounds per 1000 square feet of actual nitrogen needed would require 200 pounds of compost. Opt for 10-10-10 chemical fertilizer and a mere 20 pounds per 1000 square feet would do the trick.
Oh, but that 180 pound difference between compost and 10-10-10 offers so much more than just nitrogen. Compost serves up a smorgasboard of nutrients reflecting the diversity of what went into the compost pile. Just about everything goes into mine, including orange peels from California, olive pits from Peru, even my old Levi’s in addition to garden and kitchen waste, hay, and manure.
That’s not all: Compost and, as they decompose, other organic materials, offer a witch’s brew of natural compounds that improve plant nutrition by unleashing nutrients from the soil’s rocky matrix and rendering nutrients already in the soil even more available to plants. As important, these organic materials help soils hold both water and air, and provide a congenial, nutritive environment for beneficial organisms that help plants fend off diseases and further abet plant growth. Whew! That’s a lot of goodness.
So I’m hauling cart after cart of organic materials. Vegetable beds get an inch depth of crumbly, dark, pleasantly fragrant compost from piles built last year. Paths in vegetable gardens get wood chips. I am mulching berry plantings with wood chips or leaves, according to what’s available and my whims. Leaves that drop from the chestnut trees will be supplemented with leaves that neighbors with leafier yards need to discard. Other trees get wood chips. Fruit trees get rotted leaves, which are very similar in composition to compost in addition to wood chips and, possibly, horse manure with wood shavings.
I hope to finish soil Thanksgiving before the first snow that stays.
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My gut reaction is to shy away from eating any plant with “choke” in its name. Chokecherries (Prunus virginiana) are not for me. I did once grow chokeberry (Aronia spp.), which lived up to its name; the plant is long gone. Chokeberry is said to make a tasty jam or juice, which I realized, anything can if given enough sweetener, dilution, and addition of other flavors.
Artichoke is one “choke” worth growing; its “choke” comes not from the throat but from the Arab name for the plant, al-qarshuf. The problem is that artichoke is one choke that isn’t very happy here. It needs mild winters and summers not searing, which are conditions you might find right along the coast in California or the Mediterranean. So, of course, I am growing it here in New York’s Hudson Valley.
I grew artichoke years ago and did harvest a few small buds; this year I was hoping for at least larger buds. Imperial Star is the variety recommended for northern gardens because it forms buds the first year so can be grown as an annual. Not mine. I sowed seeds early this spring after giving this perennial the cold treatment necessary to fool it into thinking it’s gone through a mild winter and can begin flowering. Imperial Star is more easily fooled than other varieties. Plants given to a friend did make a few small buds but my plants just grew. (Northern Star is another, newer possibility for northern gardens because it allegedly survives winter temperatures below zero degrees F.)
No need to throw in the towel in growing artichokes, though. Among my last activities in the vegetable garden is to dig up one artichoke plant, pot it up, and overwinter it in a bright window in my cool basement. I’ll give it a head start in the greenhouse in spring, then plant it outdoors again when the the weather warms. If the harvest is nonexistent or unreasonably small, I’ll abandon artichoke growing for another 15 years.
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Increasingly, my attention is turning indoors. It has to, with all the thirsty plants now sitting in sunny windows. One of the thirstiest, oddly enough, is rosemary. Too many rosemary plants towards the end of too many winters have surprised me by all of a sudden, when brushed against, shedding leaves, dried and dead, as were the plants.
As a Mediterranean plant, you’d assume it likes dryish condition. It does like its head dry, at least in summer. Stiff leaves make it hard to tell when rosemary is thirsty. They don’t wilt, they just dry up and die.
So now I err on the side of too much rather than too little water. With extra perlite, my potting mix is well-drained, making too much water hardly a problem as long as the saucer beneath the plant isn’t filling with water. The best way to tell whether or not a rosemary plant is thirsty is to feel the weight of the pot.
Except for one rosemary plant conveniently growing in the kitchen, the others are spending winter in the basement, along with the artichoke.
UNCOMMON FRUIT, COMMON FRUIT, CATERPILLAR HEDGE
With the economy the way it is, forget about any hedges against inflation. Anyway, I’m more concerned about hedges against poor harvests, and that hedge is to grow a diversity fruits and vegetables. I’ve never had a year of poor harvests of everything. Cabbage and broccoli will revel in a cool summer during which peppers or melons hardly ripen. Bean beetles that might ravage green beans won’t touch tomatoes, okra, and other vegetables; they won’t even nibble soybeans.
Besides offering a hedge, that diversity also usually presents me with a spectrum of flavors and nutrition.
In fruits, 2011 was a particularly good year for pears and hardy and super-hardy kiwifruit. These kiwifruis are grape-sized, smooth-skinned cousins to the fuzzy kiwifruit of our markets. The flavor is similar, but better, and you pop the whole fruit into your mouth, skin and all. The plants are strong-growing vines, so pretty that they were for decades planted strictly as ornamentals, their gustatory treasures lying hidden behind leaves and ignored. In contrast to fuzzy kiwifruits, hardy and super-hardy kiwifruits can be grown just about everywhere.
Super-hardy kiwifruits, Actinidia kolomikta (“super-hardy” because they tolerate cold to minus 40°), ripened back in early August and hardy kiwifruit, A. arguta (hardy to minus 25°F.), started ripening in mid September. You know these fruits are ripe for picking when the first berries just begin to soften.
I harvested all my hardy kiwifruits once the first ones ripened. Some were firm and some were ready to eat. Kept under refrigeration, the firm ones slowly ripen; at room temperature, they ripen faster. Ripened berries have been, and will be, for a few more weeks, a colorful, sweet-tart, flavorful addition to morning cereal.
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Apple trees have never borne well here. The reason is because I am trying to grow them “organically.” That means giving special care to the soil, keeping it nourished with compost, leaf mold, wood chips, and seaweed. That means maintaining a diversity of flowering plants to attract beneficial insects. And it means minimum or no spraying of pesticides which, if needed have minimum impact on everything but the target pest(s).
Admittedly, my farmden is not ideal for apple growing. Six-thousand acres of woods (not mine, Mohonk’s), overwintering home to many pests, lie within 50 feet of my trees. And cold air settles into this floodplain of the Wallkill River, so morning fogs and dews linger longer than on higher ground to fester disease problems. So I do spray my trees, many times each season, with Surround (a commercial formulation of kaolin clay) and sulfur (a naturally mined mineral).
The apple trees looked so hopeful in the spring. No late frosts. Exuberant, new growth. Pea-sized fruitlets rapidly swelling to marble-size, then golfball-size, and larger.
But something, some things, happened between those halcyon days of June and harvest. Fruits disappeared, dropped, became ugly with blotches and dimples. My farmden isn’t the only one to suffer such affronts. Basically, if you wanted to pick the hardest fruit to grow in eastern U.S., what fruit would that be? Apple! Why? Because of a very few, but very serious insect and disease problems. Plum curculio, codling moth, apple maggot, apple scab, fire blight, cedar-apple rust, and powdery mildew are the culprits.)
Still, I haven’t thrown in the towel yet with apples. I noted this year that more attention is needed to late summer diseases, such as black rot and bitter rot. And the apples I do harvest might be few, but their flavors are supreme, in large part because of variety selection and perhaps due to terroir.
Apples are not the only fruit worth growing around here. Even if the apple crop is poor, this year I had and have plenty of, in addition to pears and kiwifruits, medlars, raspberries, and grapes. And every year seems to be a good one for pawpaws, persimmons, and blueberries. I’ll be digging into the 40 quarts of blueberries in the freezer just as soon as the last of the kiwifruits are finished.
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And speaking of hedges, green ones, my yew caterpillar is going into winter looking better than ever. This hedge started out as 4 boring yew bushes planted about 25 years ago and needing multiple prunings each growing season to prevent their overwhelming nearby windows, or even the whole house.
Inspired by Keith Buesing’s (of Gardiner, NY) fabulous green sculptures, a couple of years ago I began re-forming the yews. Yew is an adaptable plant, amenable to pretty much all manners of pruning, and the reformation is now pretty much complete. (The smiling mouth is still under construction.)
Multiple prunings are still needed each growing season, but they are mostly light cuts to polish and maintain the form.
With the economy the way it is, forget about any hedges against inflation. Anyway, I’m more concerned about hedges against poor harvests, and that hedge is to grow a diversity fruits and vegetables. I’ve never had a year of poor harvests of everything. Cabbage and broccoli will revel in a cool summer during which peppers or melons hardly ripen. Bean beetles that might ravage green beans won’t touch tomatoes, okra, and other vegetables; they won’t even nibble soybeans.
 |
| One thing I like about my kiwis, besides great flavor, is that they don’t have those obnoxious plastictags on them. |
Besides offering a hedge, that diversity also usually presents me with a spectrum of flavors and nutrition.
In fruits, 2011 was a particularly good year for pears and hardy and super-hardy kiwifruit. These kiwifruis are grape-sized, smooth-skinned cousins to the fuzzy kiwifruit of our markets. The flavor is similar, but better, and you pop the whole fruit into your mouth, skin and all. The plants are strong-growing vines, so pretty that they were for decades planted strictly as ornamentals, their gustatory treasures lying hidden behind leaves and ignored. In contrast to fuzzy kiwifruits, hardy and super-hardy kiwifruits can be grown just about everywhere.
Super-hardy kiwifruits, Actinidia kolomikta (“super-hardy” because they tolerate cold to minus 40°), ripened back in early August and hardy kiwifruit, A. arguta (hardy to minus 25°F.), started ripening in mid September. You know these fruits are ripe for picking when the first berries just begin to soften.
I harvested all my hardy kiwifruits once the first ones ripened. Some were firm and some were ready to eat. Kept under refrigeration, the firm ones slowly ripen; at room temperature, they ripen faster. Ripened berries have been, and will be, for a few more weeks, a colorful, sweet-tart, flavorful addition to morning cereal.
———————————-
Apple trees have never borne well here. The reason is because I am trying to grow them “organically.” That means giving special care to the soil, keeping it nourished with compost, leaf mold, wood chips, and seaweed. That means maintaining a diversity of flowering plants to attract beneficial insects. And it means minimum or no spraying of pesticides which, if needed have minimum impact on everything but the target pest(s).
Admittedly, my farmden is not ideal for apple growing. Six-thousand acres of woods (not mine, Mohonk Preserve’s), overwintering home to many pests, lie within 50 feet of my trees. And cold air settles into this floodplain of the Wallkill River, so morning fogs and dews linger longer than on higher ground to fester disease problems. So I do spray my trees, many times each season, with Surround (a commercial formulation of kaolin clay) and sulfur (a naturally mined mineral).
The apple trees looked so hopeful in the spring. No late frosts. Exuberant, new growth. Pea-sized fruitlets rapidly swelling to marble-size, then golfball-size, and larger.
But something, some things, happened between those halcyon days of June and harvest. Fruits disappeared, dropped, became ugly with blotches and dimples. My farmden isn’t the only one to suffer such affronts. Basically, if you wanted to pick the hardest fruit to grow in eastern U.S., what fruit would that be? Apple! Why? Because of a very few, but very serious insect and disease problems. Plum curculio, codling moth, apple maggot, apple scab, fire blight, cedar-apple rust, and powdery mildew are the culprits.) Still, I haven’t thrown in the towel yet with apples. I noted this year that more attention is needed to late summer diseases, such as black rot and bitter rot. And the apples I do harvest might be few, but their flavors are supreme, in large part because of variety selection and perhaps due to terroir.
Apples are not the only fruit worth growing around here. Even if the apple crop is poor, this year I had and have plenty of, in addition to pears and kiwifruits, medlars, raspberries, and grapes. And every year seems to be a good one for pawpaws, persimmons, and blueberries. I’ll be digging into the 40 quarts of blueberries in the freezer just as soon as the last of the kiwifruits are finished.
——————————-
And speaking of hedges, green ones, my yew caterpillar is going into winter looking better than ever. This hedge started out as 4 boring yew bushes planted about 25 years ago and needing multiple prunings each growing season to prevent their overwhelming nearby windows, or even the whole house. Inspired by Keith Buesing’s (of Gardiner, NY) fabulous green sculptures, a couple of years ago I began re-forming the yews. Yew is an adaptable plant, amenable to pretty much all manners of pruning, and the reformation is now pretty much complete. (The smiling mouth is still under construction.)
Multiple prunings are still needed each growing season, but they are mostly light cuts to polish and maintain the form.
