[squash and melon vines, same on compost, cucumber tp]
Growing winter squashes and melons has always been an iffy proposition for me. I try to keep my vegetable garden intensively planted and neat, so the question is where to direct these plants’ long, wandering vines.
In the past, I’ve grown squashes inside the garden along the fence, up which the vines could climb. That’s if they wanted to. Some stems would invariable make a break away from the fence and scoot into the garden proper. Other stems would start the climb and then poke through the fence to start running along the ground outside the fence. I would grab some of the delinquent stems and tie them up to the fence, along with well-behaved stems that just needed help in their upward climb. Other delinquent stems just got lopped back.
Nature always wins, and the squashes usually got the better of me, overrunning their corner inside and outside of the garden.
Melon vines are not as wild as squash vines, but still need some restraint in my garden. Some years I’d grow them on inclined trellises. Other years, they rose — with some help from me — as spiraling towers of greenery in tomato cages. Each hanging melon had its own mesh bag, attached to the trellis or cage, to prevent premature separation from the vine, and dropping. The reality wasn’t so neat; in real life, melon vines also always got the better of me.
The necessary growth restrictions of the squash and melon vines severely limited their output, and even with low yields, they required much attention.
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The outlook on squashes and melons changed this year with a suggestion from my wife, Deb. First, let’s backtrack to the rear of my property. Along the west border are compost bins, a lot of them, each about four feet square and of varying heights. They are straight sided boxes built up of interlocking real or composite wood. Most of the piles were built last year and stirred up this spring with my pitchfork to ripen until late summer. Then I’ll dig into them and spread the “black gold” over the vegetable beds and beneath fruit trees.
Deb suggested planting melons and squashes right into the compost bins. Perfect! Just like a mini-garden with the roots of each squash or melon plant in moist, very rich soil — compost, actually. Elevated above the ground, the young vines would be safe from rabbits and, over time, could ramble to their hearts’ content over the tops of the bins, even down to the ground and beyond.
At the end of May, melon and squash plants started in flats were ready to be planted out, and in they went into small holes I cut in the cardboard that covers each pile to keep moisture in and weeds out. I even put some tall tomato cages up against the back of the bins in case the vines felt like playing up and down them also.
Growth in these “compost gardens” has been, as would be expected, phenomenal. Besides abundant nutrients and moisture, residual heat in the bins was also enjoyed by these heat-loving plants.
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This year, of course, I’m making compost to spread next year. First year piles get quite hot: A few weeks ago, temperature within one completed piles registered 155°F. at an 18 inch depth. It has since cooled down to a balmier 130°F.
With inevitable invasions of yellow-striped cucumber beetles and bacterial wilt, cucumbers will soon peter out. They do so every year, so I always start some new plants in early July. This week I had second-crop cucumber transplants as more compost garden candidates, and I’m wondering if the new piles are still too hot for planting. I’ll find out soon enough because I did transplant a few of the seedlings into two of the piles. The plants’ roots will perhaps find temperatures to their liking in the surface layers of the pile, dipping lower as temperatures cool over the next few weeks. Or the plants might just get cooked.
I transplanted a few of the cucumber seedlings out into the vegetable garden, along the fence which I’ll coax the vines to climb.
When I weed a section of my garden, I leave no proverbial stone unturned – unless I can’t identify the weed and it looks, for one reason or another, like like one that has garden potential. Such has been the case with the mounds of moss-like leaves that sprouted and have been slowly growing at the ends of some beds in the vegetable garden.
The plant hardly seemed menacing. And it wasn’t.
The plant graduated out of the “weed” or “potential weed” category as a scattering of lemon-yellow flowers opened atop the mounds. Aha! I looked back on my early autumn notebook entry of last year and identified this year’s plant as Goldilocks Rocks (Bidens ferulifolia), one of a few annual flowers that I received last year for testing. The plant bloomed nonstop all last summer, and has returned for an encore.
The plant is sometimes billed as an annual, blooming from “planting until hard frost,” yet last fall, my plant kept blooming until temperatures dropped to 24° F. Sometimes the plant is billed as a warm climate perennial, hardy to 30° F., yet temperatures dipped to -18° F. in my garden last January. For one reason another, the plant returned without my doing. Snow cover may have kept the plant warm enough to act like a perennial that overwintered from last fall. Or new plants sprouted from self-sown seeds. In the latter case, which is more likely, I will add Goldilocks Rocks to my list – along with mache, dill, cilantro, breadseed poppy, dame’s rocket, cleome, and bush balsam – of friendly volunteers that annually show up in my garden.
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Pears in July? On July 11th, I was weeding around the base of a pear tree and came upon a few small pears on the ground beneath Blanquet Precoce (an old pear variety probably originating in Germany about 200 years ago). And they were ripe, overripe, in fact.
I gathered them up from the ground and picked the few that remained on the tree. The worst of them was mealy, with pear flavor that was on the “sleepy” side. The best of them had firm texture and more lively pear flavor.
Even at its best, Blanquet Precoce is not a very flavorful pear. Surely not one that would be worth growing if it ripened in late summer of fall, when other pear varieties are abundant. And, did I mention the fruit size? Very small, the size of a very small plum.
Still, Blanquet Precoce is notable for, if nothing else, being a pear that is ripe in July. The flavor would probably be improved if it was picked at just the right moment. That moment is before it is fully ripe, after which it can finish ripening in a bowl indoors, off the tree. Some pears – and perhaps Blanquet Precoce is one of them – need a period of cool, refrigerator temperatures before they can be ripened at room temperature. Skill is needed to harvest and ripen a pear to perfection, and then, to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.” I’ll give Blanquet Precoce another chance, next year.
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Diligence in weeding the vegetable garden throughout spring and early summer has paid off. The garden has few weeds now, and just a few minutes pulling a weed here and there now and then is all that’s needed to keep the garden free of weed problems.
Without weed problems, the garden looks nicer, is more productive, and – very important – is ready to fill baskets, salad bowls, and the freezer with fresh vegetables from late summer on into autumn. As tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and other warm-weather vegetables of summer exit stage left in a couple of months, lush leaves of cabbage, kale, endive, and lettuce, and crisp roots of turnips, winter radishes, and beets enter stage right. The change is gradual, like a developing photographic film with the late summer and fall vegetables gradually coming into focus from among the fading tangle of summer vegetables.
Enjoying the late summer and fall vegetable garden is like having a whole other vegetable garden with little more effort and no additional garden area; but it takes planning and planting. Endive, broccoli, kale, and cabbage seedlings are on their way, ready for planting out in couple of weeks. At that time, I’ll also be sowing turnips and winter radishes and, a couple of weeks later, spinach and small (spring) radishes. From now until early September, I’ll also be sowing and transplanting lettuce.
I will be spreading the blueberry gospel with a BLUEBERRY GROWING WORKSHOP at my farmden on July 30th, from 9:30 to 11:30 am. This workshop will cover everything you need to know to be on your way to picking your own blueberries, including soil preparation, obtaining plants, watering, fertilizing, pruning, and, or course, eating (and tasting). The cost is $40. Space is limited so reservations are a must. Contact me through my website “contact” (at right) for more information.
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One small, red flower caused quite a bit of excitement last week. It was a pomegranate blossom, which is quite flamboyant in and of itself, but the real excitement was because I’d been waiting for this one for 6 years.
Pomegranate would normally freeze, dead, in our cold winters. It’s a Mediterranean plant that calls Western Asia home, just like figs. And, like figs, it can be grown in pots that can be carried to a cool place (a barely heated garage, an unheated room, or my cool basement) in winter, and then put outside during the growing season to bask in sunlight and warmth. One big difference with figs is that many fig varieties bear fruit on new shoots each season. So figs bear well even if old stems are cut back by pruning shears or winter cold, as long as the growing season is sufficiently long. Pomegranates stems need to be 2 to 3 years old before they’ll bear fruit.
So every spring and early summer for the past few years I’ve been anxiously eyeing the stems, looking and hoping for signs of blossoms. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a red swelling and finally, last week, that swelling unfolded into a beautiful, fire engine red blossom. Such beauty! Pomegranates are sometimes grown as ornamentals for their blossoms alone.
Not here, though. I want fruit. I dabbed an artist’s brush into the blossom just to make sure it got pollinated, and it soon started swelling into the beginnings of a fruit. Or, so I thought. Today, I touched the fruitlet, and it dropped to the ground.
No matter, because a few other blossoms have also begun to form and open on that and my three other pomegranate plants. Last week’s bout of rainy weather – very un-Mediterranean-like – could have been responsible for the poor fruit set. I have high hopes with this week’s dry, sunny weather.
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Another delectable fruit of Mediterranean climates, pineapple guava, has been in bloom for the past couple of weeks. This plant is native to South America but I’ve seen it planted and thriving as an edible, ornamental shrub in California and Italy. The leaves, silvery green on their upper sides and almost white on their undersides, look right at home under intense Mediterranean sunlight, and also look pretty good on the plants at the end of my driveway.
Like my pomegranates, my pineapple guavas are in pots so they can be carried down to the basement for winter. In years past, I’ve harvested a few of the torpedo-shaped, velvety green fruits; they are delicious, with a minty pineapple flavor and smooth, soft-gritty texture.
The flowers are as much a culinary treat as are the fruits. The fleshy petals are intensely sweet with a refreshing hint of mint. I’m careful to pinch off the petals without damaging the rest of the flower so that the flower can then go on to become a fruit. I also brush my fingers from the bottlebrush of carmine stamens to the central stigma to effect pollination since the petal-stripped flowers will no longer be attractive to insect pollinators (although I’ve never seen any insects playing on the flowers anyway).
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Once fruits begin to swell on the pomegranate and guava plants, the race begins for the fruits to ripen before the growing season ends. Both fruits require a long season from the time they first set until they mature. I may have to bring them indoors to finish ripening. Even better would be to move them into the greenhouse so that warmth and bright sunlight there can bring out the best flavor in these fruits. Sunlight should be adequate in the greenhouse because the latitude here in the Hudson Valley is about the same as that of Tuscany, Italy.
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Hanging on the brick wall near my Mediterranean fruits is a Mediterranean flower, or one that also thrives in climates with hot, dry summers. The flower, moss rose (Portulaca grandiflora), is, in fact, native to Argentina. It’s powdery seeds germinate quickly and easily and the plants are as care-free as any plant can be as long as given sun and well-drained soil.
An old pair of Crocs garden shoes that I no longer wear seemed like they would be a perfect home for a few of the moss rose seedlings I grew in spring. So I lined the inside of the hole-y footwear with coir (coconut fibre) and filled it with potting soil. I also embedded a small loop of wire near the heel so the Crocs could be hung. Soil drainage: Taken care of. The brick wall near my front door bathes in unobstructed sunlight from early morning until about 2 pm, and that’s where the portulaca-ed Crocs now hang. For the occasional watering the plants require, I get day after day of the cheeriest, colorful blossoms you can imagine.
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