[rosemary, black walnuts, frost]
Looks like another of my rosemary plants has bit the dust. And this one did so very early in the season. Too bad, because it was a very elegantly trained tree form rosemary.
I brought this rosemary plant indoors a couple of weeks ago. With outside air streaming in through frequently opened windows and flames dancing in the woodstove only occasionally, the plant, along with other newly moved houseplants, would – should – have had time to gradually acclimate to the drier, warmer air indoors. I paid careful attention to watering, even filled the saucers beneath the pots with water to raise the local humidity and supply some water from below by capillary action.
The photo at left is of my rosemary plant pre-death.
I evidently didn’t pay enough attention to the rosemary tree. The problem with rosemary plants is that their thin, stiff leaves never wilt to show that the plants are thirsty. My plant finally showed its thirst by suddenly raining desiccated leaves to the floor as I brushed by it.
I seem to lose a (nicely trained) rosemary every few years. Fortunately, experience has taught me to always have one or more young plants in the wings awaiting just such a calamity.
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I could have such fun with this horticultural treat. My garden is going “nuts.” I’m feeling “nutty.” I’m “squirreling away” food for winter.
In this case, some of that food is actually “nuts.” Right now we have 6 half-bushel baskets filled to the brim with husked, washed, dried black walnuts. Squirrels and many of us humans are extremely fond of this nut’s rich flavor, different and much more distinctive than the English walnuts found in markets. Black walnuts are all over the place, free for the taking.
Allow me to backtrack to a week or so ago . . . That’s when black walnuts, nestled in their soft, green, tennis-ball-sized husks, started dropping in earnest. They shed heavily each year when the trees are just about leafless. Strong winds helped, of course.
The first step in preparing the nuts is to de-husk them, which my wife Deb does with the aid of rubber gloves and a light, one-hand sledge hammer. The gloves are to keep the juice, used to stain wood and clothe, from staining her hands. She dumps a few nuts on the ground, hits them with the hammer to loosen the husks, then twists the husks off, dropping the husks into one bucket and the golfball-sized nuts into another.
My job is to clean the husked nuts. I spread them on a screen and hose them off.
Then the nuts need to be dried, which we do by spreading them on a cloth on our sun-drenched deck. The danger here is pilfering by squirrels. Fortunately, the deck is also where Leila and Scooter, our two squirrel-hungry dogs, spend a lot of time in half sleep. We gather the nuts up into half-bushel baskets to bring indoors each night and on rainy days. The nuts are sufficiently dry, and not prone to mold, after a few sunny days.
Once the nuts are dry, it is very important NOT to eat them. At least not yet, because they taste too “green.” Instead, we put them away somewhere cool and squirrel-proof to cure until January, at which point they are delicious. That is, once you get to the meat, which you can do with a hammer or – much, much more easily and with less finger trauma– with a special nutcracker. I use the “Master Nut Cracker.” Come January, I look forward to re-visiting those “nutty” baskets now in storage.
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I envy nongardeners and my pre-gardening life after nights like last night, October 14th. Everyone feels the weather generally cooling, but temperatures around freezing are critical to us gardeners. Last night, temperatures dropped to 28 degrees in my garden.
That temperature definitively signals the end of peppers, basil, summer squash, and other summer vegetables. That temperature also tells me to start readying cold weather vegetables, such as lettuce, cabbage, radishes, and arugula for even colder weather in the offing. My goal is to continue picking fresh vegetables from the garden for salads and for cooking on into December.
Today I draped floating row covers, which are lightweight fabrics permeable to water, light, and some air, over beds of cold weather vegetables. Floating row covers offer about 4 degrees of cold protection. I’ll do more when temperatures drop further.
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[broccoli, uncommon fruits, nuts]
A few months ago I wrote that I once saw eye to eye with ex-President Bush – that was H. W. Bush, and we saw eye to eye about broccoli. Neither of us thought much of broccoli, in my case, it was my own, home-grown broccoli that failed to please.
This year I thought I’d make a real effort to grow good broccoli to see if perhaps I could effect an about face. The crop from my first planting was awful. I persevered with a second planting, sown in seed flats in June, for a fall crop. I gave each plant adequate spacing (2 feet apart in the row, 2 rows per 3 foot wide bed), planted them in soil enriched with soybean meal and an inch depth of compost, and kept an eye out for cabbage worms. The heads have been ripening in this cooler weather, and I’ve been making sure to harvest while the buds are still tight.
All this effort has paid off: The broccoli is delicious. Bush, you’re wrong.
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Home-grown apples can be quite delicious. That is, if you get to harvest any decent fruits, which you likely will not do if you grow apples east of the Rocky Mountains. Over much of the eastern U.S., apples have a few but very serious pest problems. If you don’t spray appropriate materials at just the right moments (note the plural), you usually do not get anything worth eating.
Which brings me to the workshop I held last weekend on backyard fruits. I suggested growing fruits that have few or no pest problems, preferably those that don’t even need the precise, annual pruning demanded by apple trees. To whit: For some easy to grow tree fruits, consider pawpaw, American persimmon, and/or medlar. They all have unique flavors reminiscent of, respectively, banana, apricot, and applesauce. Plus, they require no spraying and little or no pruning. All are quite ornamental, so do double duty as landscape plants also.
A couple of other fruits were also ripe for discussion and tasting. Hardy kiwifruits, everyone agreed, were delicious, similar to but sweeter and more flavorful than the fuzzy kiwifruits of the market. They’re grape-sized with smooth skins and you just pop them, whole, into your mouth. They are also easy to grow except that they must be pruned religiously unless you don’t mind them smothering an arbor or trellis, with the subsequent fruit becoming hard to pick.
Another tasty fruit now ripe, this one on a shrub, is – dare I mention it – autumn olive. Yes, I know it’s very invasive. On some bushes, the pea-sized fruits have lost their astringency and are very tasty. With silvery leaves, autumn olive is also quite ornamental.
All these fruits are among those dual purpose “luscious landscape” plants I describe in my book Landscaping with Fruit.
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We also saw some beautiful nuts – trees and shrubs, that is – at the workshop. First were filberts, also known as hazelnuts. I’ve grown both the American and European types. I no longer grow the American types, which are native to eastern U.S., because, although resistant to filbert blight, the nuts are small and somewhat bitter. However, their leaves turn a beautiful color in autumn.
European filberts bear large, tasty nuts. Blight resistant varieties of European filberts were recently developed, and they grow to make large shrubs whose stems arch out from the base of the plant like a fountain of water. I grow the varieties Santiam, Hall’s Giant, Lewis, and Clark, all bearing within 3 years of planting.
And finally we came to chestnuts, another nut with its own blight. This blight was introduced from Asia. American chestnuts are killed back by chestnut blight but resistance and tasty nuts are found in Asian chestnut species. I grow a few varieties of Asian hybrids, including the variety Colossal and a seedling, both of which bore within 5 years of planting, and the varieties Peach and Eaton, which are still young.
Chestnuts are beautiful, spreading trees with healthy looking, glossy green leaves that will soon turn a rich, golden color. Every day now I pick up golfball-sized, buffed brown nuts that drop from Colossal’s branches.
[commonground fair, eliot coleman, pawpaws]
Along with tens of thousands of other people, I descended this past weekend upon the small town of Unity, Maine, population 555. The attraction that drew all of us to this little town a half hour inland from the coast was the Common Ground Fair, sponsored and on the grounds of MOFGA, the Maine Organic Farming and Gardening Association (www.mofga.org).
The Common Ground Fair is a real old-time country fair focusing on farming, gardening, and rural skills such as timber frame construction, weaving, and tanning hides. No glitzy midway or bumper car rides at this fair. Instead, there are horse-drawn rides and demonstrations such as mowing with oxen, natural hoof care, and border collies herding ducks and sheep. Garden and farming talks covered everything from starting a vegetable garden to growing grain to – my own presentations – landscaping with fruit plants and weedless gardening.
When night falls at the Common Ground Fair, no stings of bare bulbs come to life. Instead, darkness descends, save for the flickering light of a few campfires and or the searching beams from headlamps of those who camp at the site. The sound of crickets is punctuated by occasional sounds of home-made music.
Just about everything at the fair is produced in Maine. You can buy everything from a silky soft alpaca sweater to a buttery croissant (Tuva Bakery’s croissants – note the plural — were my favorite food there) to a split ash basket to seed packets and gardening tools from Johnny’s Selected Seeds or Fedco. The signature offering at the fair, and the aroma that is most pervasive, is that o f the fragrant herbsweet Annie, bunches of which were available from many farm stands.
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After a day at the Fair, I wended my way along a back road off a back road on one of the Maine’s coastal peninsulas to visit Four Season Farm, the small farm of Elliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch. Eliot is an innovative farmer perhaps best known for techniques he developed for growing vegetables year ‘round in northern climates with minimal artificial heating.
Too many gardeners believe that lack of sunlight limits winter growing in the north. One look at a world globe, though, shows that the latitude even the northern parts of the U.S. is on a par with that of southern Europe. In southern Europe, vegetables that enjoy cool growing conditions are planted in late summer and fall. So all we have to do, as Eliot has shown, is capture some extra heat with various heat-retentive coverings over our plants. Hence the plastic covered tunnels soon to be sprouting in my garden.
This visit was my fourth visit to Eliot’s farm, the first one dating way back to June of 1973! Back then, I had just dug my first garden and had entered graduate school to study soil science and horticulture. The visit reminds me of the passage of time; it’s been a long row to hoe, a most interesting, pleasurable, and fruitful one.
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Upon my return from the Common Ground Fair, I was inundated here on my farmden with a crop of “northern bananas.” Not really bananas, of course, but pawpaws (Asimina triloba), a cold-hardy fruit with many tropical aspirations (not to be confused with papayas, a truly tropical fruit that sometimes also is called pawpaw).
These northern bananas are about the size and shape of mangoes except that inside is a creamy, pale yellow flesh with flavor and texture reminiscent of banana and vanilla custard along with hints of avocado and mango. The fruits dangle from the branches singly or in clusters of up to nine fruits and they can finish ripening and softening after picking. Like bananas – those tropical aspirations again.
Dropped fruit is usually perfectly ripe and ready to eat. A few fruits dropped before I left for Maine; many more were on the ground upon my return. So into cold storage go fruits I’ve been picking up from the ground as well as those from trees those whose slight change in color and softening shows they’re ready to begin ripening.
Pawpaw is among the easiest of all tree fruit trees to grow. Pretty much the only care my trees get is mulch and removal of suckers that sprout from the spreading roots. And the trees don’t even need that, as evidenced by a tree I gave my cousin. Her tree grows in her front lawn and bears good crops without any spraying, pruning, mulching, or anything else.
My cousin constantly gets compliments from passersby on her tree’s appearance. That’s because pawpaw trees also show their tropical aspirations with large, lush leaves, which look very attractive and maintain their healthy appearance all season long.
All these tropical aspirations are not just show: Pawpaw is a native fruits that is, in fact, the northernmost member of the tropical custard apple family.
