[kelp, pawpaw flowers, south flower bed]
Today, with a nod to my ancestors, I’m going to spread dark green flakes over all the vegetable beds and beneath the fruit trees and bushes. That nod is not to my ancestors that came here from Poland, Austria, or Argentina, not even further back into the reaches of humanity from the savannahs of Africa. No, I’m referencing my – all of our – ancestors that first crept or waddled forth from the seas.
The dark, green flakes are kelp, a kind of seaweed; if the sea nourished our flippered progenitors, I figure it might also provide something nutritive to today’s iPod-appendaged humans. Kelp is rich in a grand array of trace minerals, many of which are known and some of which may become known as necessary to maintain health. So I’m spreading this stuff on my soil where its goodness can work itself up into my edible plants and, hence, my diet.
Spreading kelp here may be akin to “hauling coals to Newcastle.” After all, the ground in my vegetable beds has been beefed up over the years by annual dressings of compost an inch or two thick. Into that compost went not only all waste from my gardens and kitchen, but also manure, wood chips, and leaves that I’ve imported. Which is to say that my soil probably is already replete with a rich array of nutrients for my plants and me.
Emblazoned on bags or boxes of commercial fertilizers, organic and not, are three prominent numbers (such as 10-10-10 or 5-10-5) indicating the amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium – NPK, for short — they offer. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are macronutrients, needed in relatively large amounts by plants and humans. Kelp supplies little of those nutrients. Still, fish, humans, and everything in between, need much of what kelp has to offer. A mere one pound per hundred square feet should do the trick.
———————————————-
I’m spreading that kelp far and wide, and when I get to my pawpaw trees I stop to marvel at their blossoms (first open April 25th, which is at least a couple of weeks earlier than usual, and opening over a long period of time). Not that the blossoms would stop you in your tracks. They hang down from the bare branches like nothing more than dark blobs.
Looking a little closer, you see that they are dark, purple blobs. And then looking up into the downward hanging blossoms from below, you see that the petals brighten to a lurid purple. The center of the blossom is home to a ball of white, filamentous anthers that shimmy when the branch is shaken.
More than just appearance makes pawpaw blossoms interesting. For one thing, you won’t see any bees buzzing happily about. That’s because pawpaw blossoms are pollinated by carrion insects. The blossoms reputedly smell like rotting meat to attract those insects, although I don’t detect any aroma at all, good or bad, even sticking my nose right into the blossoms.
Pawpaw blossoms also have multiple ovaries. Depending on pollination, each blossom can give rise to a cluster of up to 9 fruits. And each fruit can be large, the size of a small mango.
The main attraction of pawpaw is the ripe fruits that follow successful pollination. (The fruits are what earned pawpaw a whole chapter in my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden.) Although native, the fruits are not what you’d expect to find in this neck of the woods. The fruit – the whole plant, in fact – seems to have tropical aspirations. The leaves are large and lush. The fruit’s flesh is creamy and white like banana and has flavor that’s a mix of vanilla custard with mango, pineapple, banana, and avocado.
———————————————-
In one of my flower gardens, the battle has begun. This garden started as nothing more than some pink and some red bee balm that someone gave me that I planted along a small section of south-facing wall of my house.
Along with the bee balm, some bearded irises that came along for the ride, and stayed. How nice. So did dayflowers. Not nice because the have spread well beyond that bed.
This garden was never a bona fide flower garden with a well-defined edge; rather, it’s always been nothing more than some flowers I planted near a wall. So the space is shared with resident grasses and invading wild grape vines, both of which I occasionally weed out to some degree. Garlic chives also makes appearances. I weed it out ruthlessly.
Then someone gifted me a peony, which went in off to one side of the “garden.” I had a trellis of sorts along the other side, at the base of which I planted hops vines. Hops themselves can become weedy as they spread by underground runners.
The white, stucco wall and clumps of flowers always seemed to cry out for some tall, thin pastel-colored hollyhocks. I started those from seed summer and put in 4 plants a couple of weeks ago.
Thus far, the flower plants and weeds maintain congenial, attractive coexistence with just a little help for me. Every time I introduce something new, I wonder how the balance may tilt.
(good king henry, black walnut, spruce pruning)
One thing that I like about gardening is that you get so much for your efforts; that said, it’s sometimes nice to get something for no effort. And that’s one thing I like about Good King Henry, a vegetable much like spinach.
I’ve grown Good King Henry, which few people know or grow, for over 20 years. I hardly grow it, though. It’s a perennial. I planted it from seed in a back corner of my garden and it’s come back reliably year after year. It’s a close relative of the weed lamb’s-quarters (both in genus Chenopodium) so I was afraid it might spread and threaten takeover. But it’s done nothing more than reach out a little here and there. The only care the planting has needed is every few years my digging out whatever plants grow too boldly errant.
More than “like spinach,” Good King Henry is close kin with spinach (Good King henry, spinach, and lamb’s-quarters are in the Goosefoot, or Chenopodiaceae, family). Good King Henry makes a tasty cooked, green leafy vegetable this time of year. Seed stalks poke up from the clumps of leaves and I’ve read, but never tried, of people cooking and eating those stalks like asparagus. Not that they would taste like asparagus, I expect, just that it’s another shoot to cook, just like asparagus.
One other thing that I especially like about Good King Henry is its name, both its common name and its botanical name: Chenopodium Bonus-Henricus.
—————————————–
About 50 feet from my south facing deck is a Norway spruce. That spruce could tower to 60 or 70 or more feet in height, blocking sunlight, and especially winter sunlight, from the deck and associated glass doors. But it doesn’t, even though that tree is at least 30 years old.
This Norway spruce, at the ripe old age of 30 plus years, remains a manageable 15 feet in height. It does so because every spring I shear back all its branches –no easy task, but one that has been made easier because of a few good tools.
First is my ladder, an orchard ladder with 3 legs that make it very stable. Next is a hedge shears, but not your ordinary hedge shears. This hedge shears (made by Remington) sits on the end of a pole to extend my reach by about 6 more feet. Shaping with the hedge shears gives the tree a fat, well-fed appearance. Done just as stems are putting forth new growth (now), shearing results in dense branching.
Still, occasional shoots escape me, especially near the difficult-to-reach top of the plant. Those shoots commonly thicken quickly and beyond the capabilities of the shear. Such shoots call for the next tool (also by Remington), a small electric chain saw, similarly on the end of a pole.
Some of those shoots are not easily accessible with the pole chain saw, in which case I get out the final tool, a pole saw, which is basically a hand pruning saw on the end of a pole. This Silky brand saw has a high quality, 3-edged blade sitting atop a pole that can extend as much as 12 feet.
Near the top of the tree, some mangling of branches occurs. No matter; no one can see them. My reminder to keep pruning that tree is my other Norway spruce, near the road in the front of my yard. That tree towers to about 70 feet in height.
———————————————-
There are black walnuts and then there are black walnuts. A lot of people neither know nor care about black walnuts. I value them for their dappled shade, their rich, brown wood, and the distinctive, delicious flavor of the nuts.
How nice that a tree so valued (by me and numerous others) grows all over the place. I could pick out a couple of dozen wild trees within a quarter-mile of my home. I’m lucky enough to have on my property 2 bearing trees from which I harvest the nuts.
But why write of black walnuts now, when the trees have hardly leafed out and the nuts are months into the future? Because I recently received from my friend Bill MacKentley (of St. Lawrence Nurseries in Potsdam, NY) some scions – young stems, that is – of named varieties of black walnut. Named varieties are selected for superior qualities as compared to the run-of-the-mill seedling trees that pop up here and there.
To make new trees of named varieties, they have to be cloned, by grafting in the case of black walnut. Squirrels have been planting black walnuts all over the place so I have plenty of rootstocks on which to graft those scions that Bill sent me. I used a simple whip graft to join rootstock to scion, then dug them up, put them in the greenhouse where the warmth will speed wound healing, and after a couple of weeks I’ll plant them back outside.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the dozen or so trees I made but if the grafts take and the trees thrive I’ll eventually be cracking out especially large pieces of tasty nutmeats from Centennial and Putney varieties of black walnut trees.
——————————-
It’s not to late to start or improve your vegetable garden. I will be holding a workshop, VEGETABLE GARDENING 101, at my garden 2:30-5:30 pm on May 22, covering where, when, what, and how to plant, how to nurture the soil, timely harvest, and more. The cost is $35 paid before 5/18, $40 thereafter. Space is limited, so pre-registration is necessary. Email me for more information.
[surround, grnhs ladybugs, nematodes}
This evening my apple trees were suddenly shrouded in a ghost-like pallor. It was all my doing and all for their own good. The transformation was the result of my spraying the trees with a suspension of white, kaolin clay.
That clay is a commercial product, marketed as Surround and made for organic control of various pests. The pest that I’m targeting is a cute but devastating little creature called the plum curculio. As you might guess from its name, plum curculios also attack plums, as well as peaches, nectarines, apricots, and cherries. Do nothing to thwart the ‘curc’, and, depending on the season, you could end up with no apples. Zip. Nada. Rien.
I’ve used Surround unsuccessfully for many years. The stuff has to be applied repeatedly in order to be effective, every 7 to 10 days, more if it rains. Done. What I didn’t learn until recently, though, is that the trees need their dusty, white coating to be thick and in place before the first curculios poke their heads out of nearby woods. Today was the third time I layered a coating on each tree from top to bottom.
Around here, plum curculios are little threat after the third week of June, so that’s about when I will stop spraying Surround. Then other pests awaken to threaten the crop. I have other organic tricks up my sleeve for them.
———————————————–
On the pest front in the greenhouse, ladybugs are happily at work gorging on aphids. These are the ladybugs that were clustering on warm days on the inside of one of the windows in my house. Daily, I dust-busted them up and then tipped them out of the Dust-Buster all around the inside of the greenhouse.
The ladybugs have also been happily at play. I caught a couple in flagrante delicto on the water spigot in the greenhouse. The result, of course: a lot of baby ladybugs. Baby ladybugs have themselves been foraging in the greenhouse for aphids and other delectables.
Young ladybugs are cute and look nothing like the adults. They have the same red and black colors but painted on in a different pattern. And their shape is more like that of crocodiles. Bon apetit young ‘uns.
——————————————-
I’m enlisting yet other creatures – nematodes — for natural pest control out in the garden.
Most gardeners find radishes are quick and easy to grow. Not me. Mine typically get attacked by root borers that riddle too many of the crunchy, white roots with disgusting, brown tunnels. These same borers attack some of my turnips in autumn.
Enter nematodes, tiny worms that are barely visible to the naked eye, to the rescue. Some nematodes attack plants and some attack plant pests. Some that attack plant pests are not practical to press into service because they’re too hard or too expensive to mass produce, or they attack insects of little importance as pests, or they’re just not sufficiently virulent. Steinernema, which arrived in the mail last week in a sealed paper cup, kills many plant pests and is relatively easy to mass produce, ship, and apply.
Insect death by Steinernema nematodes is indirect. The nematode wiggles its way into whatever opening it can find in an insect’s body and, once there, releases a symbiotic bacteria from its gut. It’s that bacteria that does the killing, and it does so quickly. The nematode then feasts on the bacteria and liquefying host insect and everyone is ready for another round.
In the next day or two, I’ll be opening my nematode package, mixing the contents with water in my sprinkling can, and watering a bed in which I’ll plant radishes, followed by bush beans, in turn followed by turnips.
With luck, conditions will be just right for the nematodes to get rid of my “boring” problems.
—————————————-
It’s still not to late to start a vegetable garden. I will be holding a workshop, VEGETABLE GARDENING 101, at my garden 2:30-5:30 pm on May 22, covering where, when, what, and how to plant, how to nurture the soil, timely harvest, and more. The cost is $35 paid before 5/18, $40 thereafter. Space is limited, so pre-registration is necessary. Contact me through my website for more information.
