[grapes, hornets, bibi mazoon]
Hot and dry — what great summer weather we’ve had for grapes. Every morning for the past few weeks I’ve gone out and picked bunches for fresh eating, and I’ll continue to do so for weeks to come. The bunches aren’t those of just any old varieties; they are varieties chosen from among the 5,000 or so existing grape varieties.
Well, not really. I couldn’t choose from among all 5,000 varieties because many varieties would not grow here. The grapes that grow best here are those derived from fox grapes (Vitis labrusca) and other species native to this part of the world. Concord is the archetype fox grape, with a slip skin, a jelly-like flesh, and that distinctive, foxy flavor. Muscadine grapes (V. rotundifolia) are native to the Southeast, so aren’t hardy here. European wine grapes (Vitis vinifera) also can’t stand up to our winter cold, and if that doesn’t do them in, grape diseases (such as black rot) and insects (such as phylloxera, as bad as it sounds) found in the Northeast do.
Still, breeding and selection have resulted in plenty of grape varieties adapted here and everywhere, and, over the years, I’ve planted some of the best candidates, ripping out any that didn’t make the grade and planting new ones. Many of my favorites come from the amateur breeding work of Minnesota dairy farmer Elmer Swenson: Edelweiss (very foxy, and pictured at right); Swenson’s Red (crunchy, sweet); Swenson’s White; and Brianna. My garden is in a cold spot, so my Vanessa vine froze back this year, but this variety, which also happens to be seedless, is so delectable and beautiful, that I have the new sprouts in training again for, hopefully, return engagements. Campbell’s Early is similar to Concord, but much earlier, with robust leaves, stems, berry clusters, and flavor. And finally, Alden is a favorite for its sweet flavor and meaty texture. Just about all these varieties have some amount of European wine grape in their predominantly fox grape heritage.
This year was the last chance I gave Duchess and Winchell grapes. Both are reasonably good but Duchess died back this winter, and its new sprouts are not going to be back in training, Winchell berries are too small with seeds too large. Their space along my grape trellis could be better used by some better grapes.
I’m looking forward to next year, when some newer varieties should come into bearing. I have high hopes for Mars, Somerset Seedless, New York Muscat, and Reliance, and am hoping for a similar hot, dry, grape-friendly summer.
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Where there are grapes, there are bees, and bald-faced hornets have been having a grand old time with the grapes this summer. Every time I reach into the foliage to pick a bunch I’m also expecting to get stung. So I was relieved to discover yet another use for one of my pruning tools, the ARS Rose Pruner with Branch Grip.
I am generally a big fan of ARS pruners, both for their design and for the quality of their materials and workmanship. Their Rose Pruner with Branch Grip has a 2-foot-long handle that’s useful for reaching into a bed for a flowering stem — even if its not a rose — to snip it off and then hold on
to it.
That tool is, I’ve discovered, just what I need to pick and hold bunches of grapes without fear of getting stung. An added benefit is that I can more easily pick off bunches buried deep within the foliage as well as some of those on my arbor for which I would otherwise need a ladder.
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The hot, dry weather this summer has also been kind to plants other than grapes. One recipient of this heavenly beneficence has been Bibi Mazoon, a modern rose with old fashioned charm.
Bibi Mazoon has sat on the north side of the rustic arbor entry to my vegetable garden for over a decade and, in all honesty, hasn’t done much. Some years she hasn’t bloomed at all. Other years she coughed up perhaps 2 or 3 blooms.
I’ve kept Bibi Mazoon around because every bloom that does appear is so glorious. Each bud expands into a ball of petals that slowly unravels into a loose, open blossom in a soft shade of pink. The aroma is pure rose, leaving nothing olfactory to be desired. (I also keep Bibi because I subsequently planted a polyantha rose right against her, so even if Bibi does nothing, the polyantha fills the space with its abundant small leaves and pink blossoms.)
This week, 3 tall shoots of Bibi Mazoon reared their flowering heads above the polyantha rose. I might use my ARS Rose Pruner with Branch Grip to pluck off one of those blossoms for a vase indoors.
[best tomatoes, fruits ripening, knapweed and ny ironweed]
And the winner is . . . Cherokee Purple. At my recent tomato growing workshop, we also did a tomato tasting. I cut tomatoes, passed out slices, and everyone rated each variety on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being best. The rating was strictly for flavor, to me the most important quality in a home-grown tomato. I try to grow only the best-tasting varieties each year; we tasted some of these varieties as well as a few others I got from Four Winds Farm in Gardiner, NY, a farm that specializes in heirloom varieties.
Here are the ratings, representing a rough average of workshop attendees’ opinions with, I admit, a heavier weighting from me, because I plan to use the ratings to determine which varieties to grow and not to grow next year. Soldacki and Yellow Brandywine: 3; Carmello: 5; Goldie Yellow and Krim: 6; Blue Beech and Belgian Giant: 7: Black Brandywine, Prudens Purple, Rose de Berne, and Black Cherry: 8; and Anna Russian and Cherokee Purple: 9.
Next year, I am only planting 7s or better. Why 7s and 8s, and not only 9s? Because I know that Blue Beech (7) makes a very good sauce and the Belgian Giant (7) we tasted was perhaps not quite up to its usual snuff. As for the 8s, they might not be quite as good as the 9s but they are nonetheless excellent varieties. I’ll also grow Sun Gold cherry tomato, which is so good as to not even require testing, and San Marzano, which I know tastes awful fresh but is heavenly cooked. I’ve grown Amish Paste for years but, for some reason, forgot to include it in this survey. No matter, it’s a flavorful tomato both fresh and cooked.
This informal survey does, of course, reflect opinions. Interestingly, the testers were divided into those who enjoy sweet tomatoes and those who enjoy tomatoes with more of a bite. I’m mostly in the latter group.
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It’s becoming a fruitful time of year in the garden, literally. The second crop of Caroline “everbearing” raspberries started to ripen around the middle of this month. (So-called everbearing raspberries, in fact, bear two crops each ear, the first one on 2-year-old canes in midsummer and the second crop at the ends of new, growing canes in late summer and on into fall.) In the greenhouse, figs also have begun to ripen. This crop is the first and only one for Brown Turkey and Kadota figs, and the second, or main crop, for Green Ischia. Fig ripening will continue through September.
Everything got off to an early start this year, and ripening has been hastened by abundant heat and sunlight, so other fruits are ripening earlier than usual. Grapes, including Swenson’s Red, Alden, Briana, Campbell’s Early (of course), and possibly mislabeled Lorelei and Reliance, have begun ripening. We have even been eating our ripe first apples of the season, the variety Ellison’s Orange, which originated in England about 1890. The flesh is a bit mushy unless picked just before full ripeness but has a very pleasant, yet not overpowering, flavor of anise in amongst its sweet-tartness.
We also had our first good pear of the season, the variety Harrow Delight, which it is. (Harrow is an agricultural research station in Canada.) The flavor is very similar to Bartlett, which ripens 2 weeks after Harrow Delight. In previous years, we have had pears in July, from Doyenne du Juillet, but those pears were tiny and mostly of interest for ripening in July.
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(This) man cannot live by bread alone, so I was pleasantly surprised when mowing the lawn, something I haven’t had to do for weeks, to come upon some spotted knapweed (Centaurea maculosa). It was as if someone had dropped a large patch of fresh-looking, pale, pinkish purple blossoms with feathery petals right on top of the browned grass. Okay, it’s a weed, described as an “aggressive,
introduced weed species that rapidly invades pasture, rangeland and fallow land and causes a serious decline in forage and crop production.” But that description was from North Dakota and I’m not interested in forage and crop production from my lawn.
Nobody has anything bad to say about New York Ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis), which is not invasive here in New York or anywhere else. It’s a tall weed branching into many stems, each capped with pretty tufts of deep purple flowers. The plant is growing in a wet area home to another another purple flower, purple loosestrife, which is invasive. I’m proud to have New York ironweed growing here because although widespread, it’s not common, typically showing up in patches here and there across its native range throughout eastern U.S.
[cabbageworms, begonia seedlings]
I hate to spray. That’s why last week I wrote that I’d rather snap the ends off ears of sweet corn infested with earworms rather than spray the corn to avert damage. That, despite the fact that the spray, Thuricide, isn’t poisonous to humans and most other creatures besides corn earworms and related insects. Today I had to spray, using this very material on a different plant.
Thuricide, one trade name for the bacterial insecticide Bacillus thurengiensis karstaki, or BTK, is specific against lepidopterous caterpillars. Lepidoptera is the order of insects that includes moths and butterflies (which these particular caterpillars become). Some lepidoptera, such as the swallowtails, are very beautiful. Other lepidoptera, such as those white moths that flit about cabbage, broccoli, kale, and related plants, are mundane.
Those innocent looking white moths are the culprits du jour, laying eggs on cabbage and its kin. The eggs hatch into velvety green caterpillars, known as imported cabbageworms, with voracious appetites for these same plants’ leaves. Although the insects’ camouflage is almost perfect, they can be spotted in various sizes if you look closely, especially on the undersides of leaves.
This morning I checked kale seedlings to find that they had been stripped to their main veins. This damage might spell death to them. Then again, it might not. Besides eating leaves of larger plants, the caterpillars also typically work their way in among broccoli buds. The insects turn pale green when cooked, making them look too prominent on that plate of cooked broccoli — yuk!
Because I dislike spraying, I hold off as long as possible before spraying Thuricide. Large plants can, anyway, tolerate a certain amount of damage. Not the seedlings, though. Perhaps this spray will hold the imported cabbageworms at bay for the rest of the season.
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Last fall I wrote of an exciting tuft of leaves sprouting in a flowerpot. The plantlets were the result of sowing dust-like seeds from some Mandalay Mandarin hybrid begonia plants. Excitement mounted this spring when the frail seedlings started to grow robustly and, then, when only a few weeks old, began to flower.
The seedlings have now grown up into sturdy plants that are smothered with flowers among the attractive, lance-shaped leaves having wavy edges. Like the parent, a plant that I highly recommend growing, the offspring have been flowering nonstop all summer, and keep up a neat appearance by cleanly shedding spent flowers. The resemblance of the children to the parent extends to the appearance of the flowers, which are red with a tinge of orange and dangle downward from the stems.
How odd all this resemblance! Mandalay Mandarin is a hybrid, the result of a breeder’s deliberately bringing together the pollen and egg cells from two carefully selected parents, perhaps a number of generations of carefully selected parents. When you sow seeds of any hybrid, be it a tomato, a begonia, or any other plant, the hybrid’s parents are, of course, different from the children’s parents, so the children should be different from their parent. My seedling begonias’ parent was Mandalay Mandarin; Mandalay Mandarin’s parent were — who knows what?
Carol Deppe, in her excellent book Breed Your own Vegetable Varieties, points out that a similarity between children of a hybrid and the hybrid could come about if the hybrid was not really a hybrid or if the parents of the hybrid were very, very similar.
At any rate, I now am growing, in addition to Mandalay Mandarin hybrid begonias, some other topnotch begonias that are genetically different from Mandalay Mandarin. The two siblings that made it alive through last fall and winter, now that I look at them, also look identical to each other. How odd, but beautiful.
