[indoor shiitake,snow on tunnels, endive in tunnels
The 3-foot-long logs resting against the wall near my front door are not for firewood; they’re for eating. Not the logs themselves, of course, but what’s growing inside of them. As I write and as you read, thread-like fungal mycelia are spreading within, digesting wood and growing bigger and stronger. Sometime next fall, delicious shiitake mushrooms should start popping out of the bark.
Any old rotting log will not produce delicious, or even edible, mushrooms. A couple of weeks ago, I inoculated these logs with spawn of selected strains of shiitake mushrooms. The spawn originally came from www.fieldforest.net, via my friend Bill Munzer, who had some spawn left over from a shiitake growing workshop he recently held. The spawn arrives as inoculated plugs which get hammered into holes drilled into the logs. A coating of wax seals in moisture.
The logs would, in fact, make excellent firewood. Bill uses oak but I only had access to Norway maple, an invasive tree that anyway is better dead than alive. The oaks should pump out mushrooms for a longer period of time, as long as 5 years, but first mushrooms might show up sooner on the maple.
Not much fungal growth occurs during cold weather. On the theory that more growth sooner leads to mushrooms sooner, I’m keeping one of my logs in my cool, damp basement. An occasional dowsing with water will make sure the log stays plump with moisture.
Come spring, Bill will be hosting another shiitake growing workshop and I’m going to inoculate a few more logs. I’ll report back on the progress of production from outdoor, fall inoculated logs vs. outdoor, spring inoculated logs vs. basement, fall inoculated logs. Most important is my remembering not to accidentally saw up the logs near my front door for firewood.
*****************************
Those 3-foot-long logs by the door are now nearly buried in snow, as is the rest of the garden. This recent snow has brought my outdoor salad pickings to a screeching halt.
Not that the endive, lettuce, radicchio, radishes, parsley, and arugula protected beneath tunnels of clear plastic are necessarily dead. It’s just that I can’t get to them. The snow became heavy and later turned to a freezing mist that effectively sealed the edges of the plastic tunnels right to the ground. The weight of snow has bowed down the plastic along the rows between the metal wire supports, making it look like the garden is being colonized by giant, white caterpillars.
It’s probably nice and cozy in those tunnels, though, and I am confident that everything is fresh and ready for picking despite December 13th’s morning reading of 7 degrees Fahrenheit.
As soon as the snow thaws and some of it begins to melt away, I’ll peek beneath the plastic and, if everything inside is cozy, as expected, pull away more snow to make the salad pickings more accessible before truly bone-chilling weather establishes itself for the season.
**********************************
After writing the above, I became more curious about what was happening beneath the plastic so I bundled up and went outside for a look. After breaking chunks off large chunks of snow and tossing them elsewhere in the garden, I finally was able to peel up the plastic and assess the situation.
And since it was nearing supper time, I thought I’d see what kind of salad I could harvest for dinner rather than just taking a peek. Frisée endive was, as expected, turning a bit mushy. Note to myself: Don’t grow Frisée again; it doesn’t stand up well to cold and it’s hard to find dirt and slugs among the frizzy leaves. Escarole (Broad Leaved Batavian endive), on the other hand, looked a little weather-beaten but otherwise fine. The only lettuce still out in the garden is New Red, which stood as proud and as fresh as it would have any day in spring or early fall. Arugula likewise seemed not to acknowledge that temperatures had been and were quite cold.
The salad, supplemented by celery from the greenhouse and whisper thin slices cut from turnips in cold storage in my mud-room, was freshly delicious.
Late news flash: The thermometer on morning of December 18th reads 3 degrees! Outdoor salad pickings? Hmmmm. Perhaps no more.
[poinsettia, winterize trees, dead gardenia]
Time for the next step in hunkering down for winter – not by caulking around windows, not by propping snow shovels next to the front door, not by waxing up the skiis. What winter will need is flowers. Or, at least, I need flowers to make winter more pleasant.
Poinsettias and jasmines are the flowers du jour. Not that either is blooming yet. As I said, it’s time for the “next step” in preparing for winter. Both these plants would naturally bloom sometime in spring but I need them blooming in the depths of winter.
I began planning for both plants’ winter bloom back in September’s balmy days. Not much was required. All the plants needed were nights of uninterrupted darkness and cool temperatures. And, for the jasmine, also being kept on the verge of thirst.
With more than enough neglect behind them, these plants should be ready to bloom. The poinsettia came up from the cool basement window where it resided since October, and the jasmine came in from the cool greenhouse, where it resided since early November. Both plants are now sitting in warm rooms basking in the sun of south-facing windows, and will hopefully blossom within a few weeks.
I could have – should have – brought the plants to those warm, sunny windows a few weeks ago. Then, they might have been in bloom for the holidays. November sped by too quickly.
*************************************
Winter preparations are also going on outdoors. I’m winterizing – not my car, but my trees. First comes a 2 to 3 inch layer of wood chips beneath the plants. Rather than the conventional, tight landscape ring around the base of the tree, which does little more than keep mowers at bay, my young trees get mulched out at least as far as the spread of their branches. Older trees’ roots fend for themselves in mowed ground without mulch.
Next comes protection from rodents. Mice revel in that soft layer of mulch around trees so I keep it back a few inches from trunks. Then, mice may have lodging but at least no ready food. To further keep them and rabbits at bay, each young tree gets a 2-foot tall cylinder of quarter- or half-inch mesh hardware cloth at its base.
The hardware cloth cylinder is thoroughly effective until a foot or two of snow accumulates, at which time the rabbits perch on top of the snow and casually munch on small trunks and branches. To thwart such bad behavior (from my perspective), above the cylinders I swaddle trunks and main branches with plastic spirals (sold for protecting trunks).
And then there’s winter cold. Actually, cold and warmth, which together is what drive trees crazy. Imagine a bright, cold, winter day: The sun shines on dark tree bark, warms it, then, abandoning the tree, drops below the horizon. Temperature of that warmed bark immediately plummets, to the tree’s dismay. To prevent see-sawing temperatures, I either paint trunks white with latex paint diluted half with water, or wrap trunks with white Dewitt Tee-Wrap, which also protects trunks from borers.
*********************************
Back indoors, one plant that won’t be brightening winter with its blossoms will be my gardenia. The foliage has collapsed, dried and shriveled. Yellowing of a few leaves a few weeks ago made me suspect that the plant was hungry for some nitrogen. Perhaps a more acidic soil was needed, or iron. Not. Not. Not.
I finally gave up the ghost on the plant, tipped it out of its pot, and performed an autopsy. The roots looked surprisingly healthy. Not so, the stems. Slices into it at various points revealed grayish brown flesh indicating the plant was thoroughly dead at least down to its roots.
Despite the healthy appearance of the roots, I suspect that the problem was too much water. (Or too much fertilizer?) Especially in cool weather, gardenias get sick and often die from excessive water.
Gardenias are amongst the most challenging of houseplants to grow. Yet I remember a beautiful, large gardenia plant basking in a sunny window in the house of my friend Mike’s mother, who otherwise had no particular interest or skill with plants. I’m not giving up. I’m getting a new plant.
********************************************
[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.
***************************************
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.
******************************************
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.
*******************************************
