I broke my own rule and planted tomatoes out in the garden on May 13th. The weather was warm, the tomatoes were ready to pop out of their containers, and the bare ground seemed to cry out to be finally clothed with plants.
The correct planting date for tomatoes around here is during the last week in May, not May13th. Warm weather before the end of May can be deceiving and often, in the past (last year, for instance, has been followed by night temperatures that plummeted. That’s why I try never to go with my gut as to when to plant.
But this year seemed different. The weather had been warm for days, so the ground was warm. The weather report (not that, judging from experience, it could be trusted) didn’t call for any day or night temperatures dropping below even 50° F. Rain was forecast for the following few days, which would spare me the need to water the young plants for the few days while their roots had reached out into surrounding soil. And if low temperatures did threaten, I could quickly throw a cover over the plants or, with extended cold weather, quickly erect a wire-hoop supported tunnel of plastic over the beds.
So the tomatoes have been in the ground for a few days. The rain fell — over 2 inches! With cloudy weather, temperatures have remained cool, in the 50s and 60s. Tomatoes are native to moderate elevations in the Andes mountains, so perhaps are enjoying this weather.
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As long as I was planting tomatoes, I got on a role and started planting myriad other seedlings – zinnias, cosmos, leeks, morning glories, and sunflowers – in the ground also. Yes, it was raining, which normally makes for goopy soil that if clayey, is unpleasant for planting. Digging around in goopy clay soil also can also ruin its structure so it becomes poorly aerated.
My appreciation for being able to plant in rainy weather sends me back decades, when I visited 90 year old Scott Nearing, radical economist, political activist, and advocate of simple living, and helped out in his coastal Maine garden. Although I had just begun my agricultural education, academic and hands-on, I marveled at the feel of his soil. Planting and weeding were sheer pleasure, in spite of the rain, in soil of such good tilth. I was told that the soil there used to be a goopy clay but was transformed into that heavenly stuff in which I was working with years of copious additions of compost.
If only, I thought, I could someday have garden soil like that. I do! Every year I have blanketed the ground with an inch or more of compost so that the surface, rain or shine, presents a soft, water absorbent yet workable, nutrient and biologically-rich home to hands and plant roots.
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May 16, I mark on my calendar the day that Korean mountain ash (Sorbus alnifolia) is blooming. This relatively rare plant is notable for its sprays of clear, white blossoms, for its warm, coppery-bronze autumn leaf color, and for it showy – perhaps the showiest of all plants! – display of small, flaming red berries. The fruits are also a tasty nibble (which warranted the plant a place in my recent book Landscaping with Fruits).
I first met this plant “in person” at the Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore College 5 years ago in October. As I stood there admiring the tree, I nibbled at the fruits. And, of course, I couldn’t bring myself to spit out the small seeds. Not because of propriety but I because each seed had such potential.
Long story short: I took the seeds home, mixed them with moist potting soil in a bag which went into my refrigerator for 3 months of stratification (fooling the seeds into thinking winter was over and it was safe to sprout), potted them up, and ended up with 2 good seedlings.
One of my two seedlings is now about 10 feet tall, and that’s the one now in flower. What’s amazing is that the plant bloomed at such a young age. Ten years might go by before an apple tree makes the physiological transition from juvenility to maturity – that is, reproductive and, hence, flowering age. Grafted trees, which are made by grafting mature stems onto rootstocks, bloom much quicker. Ten feet of growth and 5 years till first blossoming from seed is quick.
I’m looking forward to seeing and tasting the fruit of my own Korean mountain ash seedling in October.
May 10th, an exquisite day with a slight breeze, temperatures in the 70s, and a limpid blue sky matching the blue on the backs of the resident pair of male bluebirds flitting about. What a day to be in the garden. So how come I’m not there? Because I’m building garden gates.
Having recently re-built the arbored gateways leading into and out of one of my vegetable gardens, building of gates themselves was the next order of business. Or, rather, has been for the past month or so. The original arbors and gates were cedar, everyone’s go-to wood for rustic garden structures. I hand cut and hand carried all the cedar out of the woods for those original arbors and gates, and fashioned them into what I thought were quite attractive structures – until they rotted.
The only rot resistant part of cedar is the heartwood, and 3 or 4 inch diameter posts such as I used have a red tube of heartwood running up their centers only an inch or so wide. The rest rots, which it did very thoroughly over the past 15 years.
The new arbors and gates are of black locust, a dense wood that vies with commercial pressure-treated wood for longevity. I grew most of the posts myself, in my miniature woodlot that’s about 50 feet long by about 15 feet wide. There, locust saplings swell up to the needed 4 to 6 inch diameter posts in 12 years. New sprouts develop at the base of cut stumps and from root suckers so the mini-woodlot offers an ongoing supply of locust posts. (This year’s construction necessitated supplementing my woodlot’s production with wood from my friend Bill Munzer, who has a bona fide forest of black locust trees in Gardiner and sells locust posts.)
So, yes, it would have been a nice day to have been in the garden. But it was also a nice day to be building garden gates. As with so many things in gardening, building the gates provided a satisfying commingling of art and function. One gate down, 3 to go.
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Dead or living, black locust is among my favorite trees. One other endearing feature of dead locust is its enormous heat output when burned. There are few other woods that provide longer and more warmth in the woodstove than black locust.
The living tree has a deeply furrowed bark and craggy form that reminds me of the trees along the yellow brick road that grabbed Dorothy on her way to Oz. In a couple of weeks, black locust branches will be dripping with chains of pale, blue flowers looking something like those of wisteria but more subdued. The flowers emanate a sweet fragrance that can be enjoyed from even a couple of hundred feet distance.
Another endearing quality of black locust is that the living tree improves the soil. It’s a legume, just like peas and beans, and like other legumes harbors a symbiotic bacterium in its roots that takes nitrogen from the air and puts it into a form on which plants can feed.
Black locust has the distinction of being classified as a “native invasive” plant, a tricky (goofy?) classification that’s not immediately clear. The tree is truly native to a small area in southeastern U.S. from which it has naturally spread.
As I wrote above, “new sprouts develop at the base of cut stumps and from root suckers,” Black locust also sometimes makes new plants from fallen seeds. I welcome this invader.
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I did take a break from gate-building to get into the garden. I had to because today is the day for my first planting of corn. We still have a week or two of possible frost, which shouldn’t hurt the planting. Corn is a grass, with its growing point sheltered beneath the ground, ready to push up new leaves even if they suffer cold injury above ground. The only requisite for planting is sufficiently warm soil, 55° and above, to promote germination rather than rotting.
This year’s plantings, like those of past years (pictured at right), is Golden Bantam sweet corn in one vegetable garden and Pink Pearl and Dutch Butter popcorn in the other. I isolate these plantings to prevent cross-pollination from making the sweet corn less sweet or the popcorn less poppable.
Into each 3 foot wide bed goes two rows of hills (“hills” as in “stations,” not mounds), with 18 inches between hills in the row. I drop 8 seeds into each hole, water, and, with my foot, push the soil back into the hole and firm it with my heel. Hills provide closeness for corn mating and withstand winds better than wider spaced individual plants. Once up and growing strongly, the seedlings get thinned to the sturdiest 4 plants per hill.
(grafts, alpine strawberries, money plant flowers)
It’s amazing how exciting a little bit of greenery can be. And I do mean just a little, eensy-weensy bit. That exciting greenery is in the barely expanding buds of grafts I’ve made over the past couple of weeks.
Backtracking as to why I made those grafts . . . I did it to change over some fruit trees to new varieties. The Blanquet Précoce pear tree, for instance, never did well so I lopped it off at about 2 feet high and grafted on some Collette pear stems. (I have another Blanquet Précoce tree anyway.)
I also grafted a Chief gooseberry onto a single-stemmed clove currant, again at a height of a couple of feet, to create a gooseberry plant that, rather than its usual sprawling self, becomes a miniature tree. Getting branches up off the ground may put the leaves beyond reach of the voracious imported currant worm and also makes a neat-looking plant.
A couple of stems of the Black Plum variety of cornelian cherry that I grafted up in a tree of Redstar cornelian cherry should, if the graft takes, provide cross-pollination and more variety from a single tree. Cornelian cherry is difficult to graft. I’ve failed every year for the past 6 years.
I also grafted a lot of apple and pear stems onto dwarfing rootstocks. I already have plenty of apple and pear trees so I’m not sure exactly why I made more. Grafting mania? I’ve grafted apples and pears for many years and typically have almost 100 percent success. They still elicit excitement as they begin to grow.
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Not to brag, but I it’s May 3rd and I just had my first strawberries of the season. Obviously, these are not your run-of-the-mill garden strawberries, which typically begin ripening around here in June. The strawberries I’ve just eaten are alpine strawberries, not-your-run-of-the-mill red alpine strawberries, but white alpine strawberries.
I’ve grown these plants for many years (and devoted a chapter to them in my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden). Mostly, I grow them in pots. In contrast to garden strawberries, alpine strawberries don’t make runners, so don’t sprawl out of the pots or all over the place planted in the ground. Alpine strawberries also are everbearing, pumping out thumbnail-sized berries all summer long. If they are in a pot in a greenhouse or at a sunny windowsill, they’ll fruit from early spring well into autumn, whenever temperatures and light permit. My potted alpine strawberries go into the greenhouse in March and spend summer decoratively poised on the ledge along the path to my front door, where ripe berries can be plucked in transit.
I prefer the white to the red alpine strawberries. That’s because all alpine strawberries taste like cotton soaked in lemon juice until they are dead ripe. Birds peck the red varieties at their first blush of red. Birds don’t notice ripe berries of the white varieties, which indicate their ripeness with darkened seeds and an ambrosial, pineapple-y fragrance.
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I didn’t realize a money plant could be so pretty. The plant is sometimes called “silver dollar“ plant, sometimes “honesty,” and sometimes “lunaria,” its botanical genus. The seed capsules – silvery, round, and flat – are how it’s most recognizable.
Never having grown the plant, I wasn’t prepared for the beauty of the flowers. Each blossom has four purple petals in the shape of cross, the shape indicating kinship with dame’s rocket and other members of the cabbage family, Cruciferae. (Cruciferae means “cross-bearing;” the newer family name is Brassicaceae, from the Celtic word bresic, meaning “cabbage”).
The “money” part of money plant more definitively identifies it as a Cruciferae. That’s what remains of the fruit (botanically, a silique) after it matures, and its two covers split off to leave a thin, round, silvery septum with imbedded seeds. The whole family bears siliques, but not leave that round, silvery membrane. Radishes, for example, bear long, thin siliques, which have a nice, spicy flavor and crisp texture when green and fresh. It’s worth letting a few radish plants go to seed.
I planted money plant late last summer. It’s a self-seeding biennial or short-lived perennial so silver dollars should be a permanent fixture here from now on.
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