Design – Page 6 – Lee Reich

GOOD BOOKS, GOOD LECTURES

January 29, 2015/3 Comments/in Books, Design, Gardening, Planning, Tools, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

One Book = Years of Experience

    I’ve been gardening for over 30 years. Don’t be impressed. The number of years spent with hands in the dirt doesn’t necessarily confer any particular expertise in the field (pun intended). Some gardeners do the same foolish things year in and year out, or never sufficiently investigate other, perhaps better, ways of doing what they’ve been doing. Or not appreciate cause and effect. (Was it really the compost tea spray that led to bountiful yields last year, or was it reliable rainfall interspersed with bright, sunny days? The tendency is to hold the former responsible.) Or, the wizened, old gardener’s wealth of knowledge might not extend beyond what they’ve grown on their own “back forty,” severely limiting the benefit of any wisdom passed on to others with a shorter history of gardening.
   Reading is a efficient way to squeeze wisdom of others, reflecting decades of digging, pruning, and seed-sowing, into just a few years, for yourself — depending, of course, on the weight of the words. The fact that so many gardeners have always gotten by with little or no reading is testimonial to millions of years of evolution that makes every pea seed naturally want to grow and every apple tree naturally want to bear fruit.
   So, in the spirit of becoming better gardeners, especially this time of year with nothing to do in the garden, let’s thumb through the pages of three worthy books that recently found a place on my desk.

Good Tools are a Help

    Did you know that the hose was invented by Jan van der Heijden in the 17th century? Tarred canvass, linen, and hand-stitched lengths of leather pipe were all predecessors of the modern garden hose, all of which I learned from Bill Laws’ A History of the Garden in Fifty Tools. It wasn’t until near the end of the 19th century that technology and marketing brought hoses into more general use in gardens.
   Just imagine having to water your garden with repeated trips to the spigot with your watering can, another of Mr. Laws’ “Fifty Tools.” Not that the garden hose has displaced watering cans, which have been around in various incarnations for hundreds of years and may have reached their peak in functional and visual elegance with the work of John and Arthur Haws. Haws cans are still made; my 2 gallon, galvanized Haws watering cans have served me and my plants well for over 20 years.
   . . . Fifty Tools will not, admittedly, make anyone a better gardener. Instead, it’s a very interesting history of 50 gardening tools with — okay, this might be some help in the garden — sidebars, “Tools in Action,” telling of the best use of each tool.

Haws watering can

Some listing are a stretch of the word “tool:” a radio, a scarecrow, separate entries for plant container, terracotta pot, and stoneware urn? I would have included the garden cart, pitchfork, and hori-hori knife as necessary garden accoutrements.

Inspiration from Paris

    In and Out of Paris: Gardens of Secret Delight by Zahid Sardar, with photographs by Marion Brenner is slightly more practical than A History of the Garden in Fifty Tools, even if I’m not planning to garden in Paris or like a king. The first section, eye candy, has the usual gardens of a literally majestic scale: Versailles, the Tuileries, Vaux-le-Vicomte, etc.
   Sections on private gardens are more inspirational for us non-royalty. Most of the gardens, whether majestic or small, are typically French, with long views or symmetric arrangements. Not one of the gardens, though, the 1000 square foot Japanese garden near the Bastille, with carefully placed, but not seemingly so, boulders nestled into mosses, lichen bordering a koi pond. Walls shield the garden from the sight and sound of the surrounding city, the effect softened with clumps of bamboo and a mix of evergreen and deciduous trees.
   One of the most interesting gardens is the Experimental Parc Méry-sur-Oise, which started life as the historic Renaissance-era Chateau de Méry-sur-Oise. More recently, in 1999, the grounds were re-done, this time with water features, not traditional fountains, but misty, hot, cold, brackish, and mineralized water that rains down from above or tumbles over waterfalls. Long-term goals, the “Experimental” part of the garden, include observations of the effects of the various waters on plants and the ecosystem over time. Elsewhere are free-standing gabion walls planned for vertical gardens. That never happened. Money ran out and the gardens have been neglected since 2003 — a modern, neglected garden!
   In all honesty, I mostly just looked at the beautiful photographs of In and Out of Paris: Gardens of Secret Delight.

Grow Vegetables? Study this Book

    Even if you are a backyard gardener rather than a market gardener, The Market Gardener, by Jean-Martin Fortier, will have you harvesting more and better tomatoes, and with less effort. Two themes of this book, as I see it, are planning and record-keeping. The author is a successful market gardener in Quebec, grossing over $100,000 from a mere acre and a half of land.
   The growing units on Jean-Martin’s farm are raised beds 100 feet long by 30 inches wide. Having all beds the same makes it easy for him to calculate the amount of compost needed and keep track of yields. The latter are spelled out in a handy chart showing days to maturity and yield of individual vegetables per 100 foot bed. I haven’t calculated yields from my 17 foot by 36 inch wide beds, but do know that I need to plant 4 beds at two week intervals to harvest our fill of sweet corn to enjoy during summer and, frozen, through winter.
   Another useful table spells out spacing of transplants, in flats and in beds, and another lists dollars reaped per bed from various vegetables. The only other gardening book that quantifies small-scale vegetable growing so well, in this case strictly backyard growing, is Burrage on Vegetables, from 1954, by Albert Burrage. How times have changed: Burrage is pictured in his garden in sport coat and bow tie; farmers in Jean-Martin’s book are pictured dressed as, well, farmers.

1950s vs the present: Different look but 2 good gardeners

The book also has the requisite listing of each vegetable along with growing information as well as useful chapters on soil care (generally good but with some misconceptions) and microclimate. One particularly simple, cheap yet innovative technique described for weed control after harvest, between plantings, is covering a bed for 2 weeks with a reusable 6mm thick, black silage tarp.
Jean-Martin emphasizes that it is possible for farming and gardening to be, at the same time, productive and bucolic only with planning and organization to avoid wasting time. In so doing, he can be a farmer who can put in a workday from a reasonable 8 to 5. Charles Dudley Warner wrote in his 1870 classic My Summer in the Garden, “Blessed be agriculture! If one does not have too much of it.” I agree.

Talks in Pennsylvania & Vermont Coming Up

Some good conferences and lectures coming up. I’ll be in Pennsylvania and Vermont talking about espalier fruits, weedless(!) gardening, growing hardy kiwifruit, pawpaws, and blueberries, the efficacy of compost tea, and pruning fruits. For details, see my “Lectures” page.

HOME-MADE TOOLS, GOOD, BAD, AND SOMETIMES IMPOSSIBLE

November 14, 2014/3 Comments/in Design, Flowers, Gardening, Tools/by Lee Reich

Needed Now, A Hay Rake, Garden Line, & Bulb Planter

The small meadow that stretches south of my vegetable garden is more than just a meadow. It also provides mulch for my trees and shrubs, and food for my compost “pet.” All this necessitates moving the greenery — or brownery, when it’s old — from the field to the trees, shrubs, and compost bins. I cut the hay with a scythe, gather it together with a rake, scoop it up with a 4-tine pitchfork, then pile it high in the garden cart for transport.

The tools needed seem straightforward enough, except for the rake. An ordinary garden rake would not do. It’s too small for so large an area and its heavy, short, sharp teeth would too readily tangle up in the mown hay without reaching deeply enough too grab a sufficient amount with each pull. A leaf rake likewise would not do; the fine teeth would merely skim the surface layer of hay or break off.

Years ago, rather than purchase a bona fide hay rake, which may or may not have worked as expected, I thought I’d save some money and get just what I wanted by making one. A quickly made homemade rake would tide me over until I felt like purchasing one or made a new one, improved by my experience using the original. That was years and years ago! The old wooden rake, originally with dowel teeth, later upgraded to teeth of metal spikes, and handle made from a long tree branch, served me well. Eventually, sun, rain, and use tore it apart.

My homemade kay rake of aluminum, PVC plastic, and bamboo

Recently, after looking over all the options — including an antique wooden hay rake, a “professional” rake, a “grading rake” — and not knowing which might work best, I decided, once again, to make one.

And proud I am of my new rake, both in function and beauty. Four-inch lengths of aluminum dowels, rounded at their bottoms with a grinder, are evenly spaced and firmly anchored with small screws at their tops and the upper part of their sides to a 40 inch wide piece of aluminum angle stock to make up the head. A short piece of aluminum angle stock in the middle of the head provides an anchor for the handle, which starts out as an 18” length of 1” diameter PVC pipe. To complete the handle, I slid into the PVC pipe a 7 foot long, straight, strong piece of bamboo, home grown. The rake is a meeting of universes, two corners of the high tech, embodied by aluminum and plastic, with the natural, bamboo. They seem happy together.

Bad Home-Made

With all that’s available in stores and online, it may seem archaic to fashion one’s own tools. But doing so — as is the case with my new rake — can get you a custom-made implement, exactly to your particular specifications. I had the luxury and job of choosing the length and spacing of my rake’s teeth as well as the width of its head, even its weight, depending on the materials I chose. The finished product works well and everything, from lining up drilled holes as I seated the teeth into position to choosing a bamboo handle to fit securely into its PVC sleeve was very satisfying work.

Garden line, a design failure for me

Such is not always the case with homemade. Years ago I needed a garden line that could be wound up quickly and easily, and mounted on a spike that could be stuck in the ground. I made one. Not a very good one in form or function. It’s time to finally cannabalize it for its string which I’ll just wind up around a piece of wood — for now.

Good Bought or Borrowed

Okay, some gardening tools cannot be homemade so are better bought. Case in point: I’m hoping for a dramatic planting of ornamental alliums in part of the meadow. Dramatic, as in 125 bulbs, 100 of which (Purple Sensation) will make purple globes 4 inches across, and 25 of which (Ambassador) will have purple heads 7 inches across, all these heads sitting high atop 3 to 4 foot high stalks. The hope is that their leaves will be up, do their photosynthetic job, and be out of the way before the surrounding grasses and herbs pick up enough steam to choke them out. If so, allium flowers will brighten the meadow year after year.

Sammy the Dog inspects the powerful B&D drill and bulb auger.

Pushing a shovel through dirt and roots 125 times would be an arduous task indeed. So I borrowed an earth auger from my friend Bill and inserted it into the chuck of my Black & Decker 20 volt cordless drill. If it seems as if, by explicitly naming it, I’m promoting this Black & Decker product, I am. The tool has power, longlasting power, enough to muscle the auger 6 inches deep into the soil. (Full disclosure: No rocks here.) In one hour, all the bulbs were planted.

No, I’m not about to cobble together a cordless drill. Same goes for the earth auger. This particular one, borrowed, was an antique, cast from solid steel.

The humongous Ambassador alliums were too large for the auger holes so I did have to dig those 25 holes by hand.

Farmdening, Not Too Much

Earlier, I mentioned using a scythe to mow the vegetation. The scythe is an archaic yet very useful and enjoyable tool, but, as Charles Dudley Warner wrote in his 1871 classic My Summer in the Garden, “Blessed be agriculture! If one does not have too much of it.”

At one time I did mow the whole, one acre meadow with a scythe — 3 times each season so that the vegetation would not get too long to be mowed. No longer. That much scything got tedious, and I got tennis elbow. So now the scythe takes care of my mowing enough hay for my mulch and compost needs, and a Kubota tractor with a brush hog, once a year, takes care of the rest.

FIGS UP NORTH

November 7, 2014/16 Comments/in Design, Fruit, Gardening, Pests, Pruning/by Lee Reich

Who Says I Can’t Grow Figs? A Mouse?

Crisp weather notwithstanding, almost every day I can reach up into the branches of my fig trees and walk away clutching a handful of soft, dead-ripe fruits. That’s because the trees, the ones bearing fruit, are in the greenhouse, where nights are chilly but daytime temperatures, especially on sunny days, are balmy or hot.

I’m not gloating. Those greenhouse figs take some work beyond normal routines of keeping heating, cooling, and watering systems chugging along harmoniously in the greenhouse. Earlier in the season I battled cottony cushion scale insects with toothbrush and soapy water, with oil sprays, and with sticky band traps (for ants, which “farm” scale insects) on trunks. Now I see the insects are staging a comeback at a time when the trees are too big to scrub with a toothbrush and too big, too laden with fruit, and surrounded too closely by lettuce, celery, and other winter edibles to spray oil. I’m hoping natural conditions keep scale insects in check until cold weather and lack of leaves or fruit finally puts them asleep for a few months.

A few weeks ago, some creature — a mouse is my guess — discovered the figs, and liked them. He, or she, chewed the bottoms of some fruits as they hung from branches and gathered others to cache in shallow tunnels. Traps, poison bait, and wide girths of sticky Tangle-Trap returned fruits to their rightful owner, me.

All this effort is worthwhile. Especially on sunny days, the figs are delectable, soft and sweet like dollops of jam hanging from the branches.

So Many Varieties, So Little Space

A bowl of figs, Rabbi Samuel, Millrock, San Piero, & Black Bethlehem

Growing a few varieties of figs makes fig-eating even more pleasurable. People wonder, on hearing that I grow figs, whether I grow “brown figs or white figs,” at which point I bring attention to the fact that there are hundreds of varieties of figs, with many of each color.

I keep trying to pare down my collection to the best. Instead, I seem to be adding varieties either deliberately or gifted. It’s hard, virtually impossible, to tell what variety you have until it fruits. Figs have been cultivated for thousands of years, along the way of which an older variety may have picked up many names. For instance, I have a variety I purchased as Verte (syn. Green Ischia); with brown fruit, I knew it was mislabeled. Its bearing habit and the appearance of the fruit nailed it down as San Piero, also known as Negro Largo, Douro Black, Aubique Noir, Large Blue, Lee’s Perpetual, and California Brown Turkey, among other names. The name California Brown Turkey distinguishes it from Eastern Brown Turkey, a totally different variety that I also grow and which itself is also known as English Brown Turkey, Everbearing, and Texas Everbearing,.

Espalier fig in greenhouse in July

A few years ago, a woman on Millrock Road here in town, offered me her potted fig tree; she was moving and didn’t want to take it with her. (Understandable: I also didn’t take all my 35 varieties of fig from my garden in Maryland when I moved up here to the Hudson Valley.) Still hers was an offer I could not refuse; perhaps that potted plant would bear the best fig ever. In a pot in the greenhouse this year, the tree finally bore fruit, greenish yellow and round, with the insides bursting to split the skin. It’s a keeper, and I’m adding to the nomenclature confusion by calling it Millrock fig until I learn otherwise.

Another fig, this one named by Jack Algiere, the farmer at Stone Barns farm, is bearing heavily and looks to keep doing so for weeks to come. I have espaliered this tree, Rabbi Samuel, against a greenhouse wall in the form of a permanent, low T. Fruiting shoots rise vertically about 6 inches apart from the upper side of each arm. This variety bears best on new shoots so my plan is to each winter cut all vertical stems down near the arms and then thin out new growth so vertical shoots are no closer that 6 inches apart. The Rabbi’s fruits are humongous, as big as small apples.

Subtropical, But Thankfully Adaptable

What makes figs so popular a fruit, even in climates far removed from the hot summers and mild winters it calls home? Perhaps a love for this ancient fruit, whose provenance is in one cradle of civilization, is coded into our DNA. And, of course, the flavor, sweet and juicy without being cloying.

Espalier fig in October, with ripe fruits

Although a subtropical plant, fig is accommodating to colder climates. You can hack back its roots — useful when providing new potting soil for pot-grown plants. It’s deciduous, so doesn’t need light in winter — useful in northern climates when looking for a cold, but not too cold, place to store the dormant plant. Most varieties do not need pollination to set fruit. And figs bear quickly and propagate easily.

Most important, in contrast to most temperate-zone fruits, fig plants can bear on new wood. Some varieties bear on one-year-old wood and some bear on both old and new wood. Bearing on new wood — as does Rabbi Samuel — makes it convenient to cut back a potted plant when maneuvering it indoors for winter. Or if winter cold kills part of the top of an outdoor plant. In either case, a plant that loses too much of its top requires a longer growing season before fruits start ripening.

Fruits keep ripening along new shoots, as they grow, until arrested by cold. Hence, my prediction for a few more weeks of fruit from Rabbi Samuel in the greenhouse. Those fruits hang in stark contrast to the scene outdoors, where leaves of tomato, pepper, and other tender plants have been blackened by the first killing frost here of 25°F, on October 19th.

FLOWERS FOR THE VEGGIE GARDEN

October 16, 2014/11 Comments/in Design, Flowers, Gardening/by Lee Reich

Zinnias In and Colchicum Outside

And the winner is . . . Every year boxes of plants arrive at my doorstep, sent by nurseries and seed companies hoping to wow me with their products which I will then praise and induce you all to purchase. Most of the plants turn out to be ho-hum, perhaps new but not necessarily better than what’s been around for decades. Not so this season, for a charming yellow flower that’s been blooming nonstop all summer long and offers no indication as yet of expiring.

That plant is . . . unfortunately I lost the label so have been sleuthing for days now to give this winning plant a name. It looks much like a zinnia, a single flowered zinnia, that is, one with a single row of petals. The plants are compact, a little more that a foot high and wide, and — very un-zinnia-like — show no signs of powdery mildew.

My first guess for the plant was creeping zinnia, which actually can be one of two different plants. The first is a true zinnia, Zinnia angustifolia, and the second is not really a zinnia; it’s Sanvitalia procumbens. After getting out my botany books (books!) and magnifying glass and staring at the peduncle, receptacle, and disk and ray flowers of a flower from my plant and comparing it with written descriptions, I was still scratching my head to give my plant a name.

In frustration, I went to the garage to my “miscellaneous” bucket into which I sometimes toss plant labels that I might need to reference again at a later date. Digging down deep amongst all shapes and sizes of labels, I came upon one printed “Zahara Yellow Improved Zinnia.” Back inside, on the web, comparing descriptions and photos verified that — yes — that’s the plant.

The botanical name listed for Zahara zinnias, which also come in other colors, is Zinnia Marylandica. That species name looks and is fake. Zaharas are interspecies hybrids, with some creeping zinnia (the Z. angustifolia c.z.) in their blood. So my guess at their being creeping zinnia was not far off.

Looking over at my conventional zinnias (Zinnia elegans) for comparison, they appear gawky witI their large flowers, both new and faded ones, prominently perched atop long stalks. Their many petalled blossoms look too full of themselves. Zahara buries its spent blossoms out of sight amongst new flowers and foliage of the compact plants.

Next year, I’m planting Zahara Yellow Improved Zinnias again.

A Vegetable Factory Functionally, But Not Visually

Those Zahara zinnias, planted along the main path of the vegetable garden joining arbored gates at either end, create two golden ribbons to draw you along the path. As I walk the path and glance left, north, I see, just outside the garden fence, another ribbon, this one a broad brush stroke of purple with not a hint of green. (More on that later.)

Yellow zinnias line the main path in the vegetable garden

A vegetable garden need not be a vegetable factory. Too many look as if dropped from the sky, plopped down in the middle or far corner of lawn and enclosed with a strictly functional fence. Why not make the vegetable garden pretty and cozy it up near the house? Beds paint a two-dimensional design on the ground. A nice fence helps; even better if it integrates with the style of the home.

Vegetable gardens often look stark because of the abrupt transition between the vertical fence and adjacent, horizontal lawn. Decades ago, I regularly rototilled around the outside of my fence to keep weeds away from the fence line. I decided that was wasted space, so planted it with shrubs, flowers, and vegetables that didn’t need fencing. It was a good decision, softening the transition from garden to lawn.

So gussy up your vegetable garden with ornamental plants inside and out, with decorative fencing and arbors, perhaps an herb-lined path drawing you within, or perhaps with a bench, bird bath, or gazing globe as a draw.

And A Stripe of Purple to Gussy Up the North

That purple brush stroke north of my vegetable garden are the petals of autumn crocus, Colchicum autumnale. In contrast to the Zahara zinnias, autumn crocus has been cultivated hundreds of years, and my plants are run-of-the-mill species rather than any hifalutin variety.

Purple autumn crocuses, in a row

Like Zahara zinnias, autumn crocus has nomenclature issues. To whit, it is not a crocus. Further complicating things, there are true crocuses that bloom in autumn, sometimes called autumn-blooming crocuses, among them the saffron crocus, Crocus sativa. Colchicum autumn crocus, my purple brush-stroke, is poisonous.

The purple of my autumn crocuses is so bold because leaves don’t accompany the flowers (again, in contrast to autumn-flowering crocuses, whose leaves appear with the flowers). Autumn crocus leaves are big and bold, appearing in spring and looking something like ramps, the edible wild onion species. In Europe, where both autumn crocus and a ramp-like relative, grow, people have been poisoned for mistaking one plant for the other.

But toxicity isn’t what keeps more people from planting autumn crocus. Daffodils, after all, also are toxic. The problem is timing: Autumn crocus bulbs are ready for planting in late summer, before daffodils, tulips, and other fall planted bulbs are ready. It’s hard for nurseries to get people excited about yet another bulb planting season, and only for this single species. If not planted soon enough, autumn crocus bulbs grow, even without soil. The bulbs multiply quickly and when I divided and replanted them last summer, I kept a few out, three of which now sit naked in a bowl on the dining table, blooming.

Eerie White to Golden Flowers, with Some Fungi Helping Out

August 11, 2014/3 Comments/in Design, Gardening, Soil/by Lee Reich

White Indian pipes, mycorrhizae, and a golden flower

I do occasionally tear myself away from the farmden. So into the woods I went last Friday and as I was hiking along and glancing down at the trail, I came upon one of my favorite flowers. It’s a favorite not for its beauty but for what it hints at of goings-on beneath the soil surface.

The flower was indian pipes, Monotropa uniflora, an eerily white plant that looks like a upright tobacco pipe whose stem has been poked into the ground. Yes, it’s white. All white. You might rightly wonder how the plant synthesizes carbohydrates for energy and for structure. Photosynthesis, which makes carbohydrates, requires chlorophyll, which is green. Indian pipes don’t need chlorophyll because they get their carbohydrates from neighboring trees.

Join me while I go below ground. Stopping for a look at the roots of indian pipes, we see that they are infected with the fine threads of fungal hyphae. Now, if we follow the fine threads of the fungal hyphae out of the roots and through the soil, we eventually come to the roots of a nearby tree whose roots also are infected by one and the same fungus. A continuous connection exists from the tree to the fungus to the indian pipes.

The tree does have green leaves and, as with other plants, some of the products of its photosynthetic labors are channeled down to its its roots. Some of those products travel out the roots and into the fungal hyphae, and some of that is drawn out of the hyphae into the indian pipes for the latter’s sustenance and growth. Sounds like a one-sided relationship, a pretty good deal for the indian pipes. It is. The plant is a parasite, taking but offering nothing in return.

The relationship between the fungus and the tree, however, is symbiotic and called mycorrhizae (my-co-RYE-zay, which means fungus-root). Yes, the fungus sucks up some of the tree’s photosynthates, but in return it sucks up nutrients from the soil, then channels them back to the tree’s roots. The network of fungal hyphae in the soil is much more extensive than that of the roots, so, with fungal hyphae as “extenders,” the effective volume of soil “grazed” by roots is increased. Mycorrhizae are especially important for uptake of nutrients such as phosphorus, which roots (or their fungal extenders) must go out and find because it moves but little in the soil.

Myco . . . say what?

Wouldn’t mycorrhizae spur growth of garden plants? Yes. But look out your window; most of the plants you see are naturally mycorrhizal already. Still, deliberate inoculation might benefit young transplants. You can purchase inoculum, but the problem is that purchased inoculum often is not of fungal species best adapted to a particular location.

A better approach would be to keep your indigenous fungi happy. Limit tillage, which discombobulates the hyphae, grow a variety of plants, especially those that form mycorrhizal associations, and avoid pesticides. Also limit phosphorus fertilizers because they suppress mycorrhizae.

Another approach would be to grow your own mycorrhizal inoculant of local fungal species. Basically, you mix up a big batch of potting soil that has some indigenous soil in it and is not too high in nutrients. In this potting soil you grow a suitable host plant. (Not spinach, beets, or any plant in the cabbage family, none of which ever form mycorrhizae.) After the host plant dies at the end of the season, what’s left in the pot is indigenous fungal inoculum that can be added to a potting soil for growing seedlings. For more details, see http://rodaleinstitute.org/a-complete-how-to-on-farm-am-fungus-inoculum-production/. I use garden soil and compost in my potting mixes and assume there’s sufficient inoculum already present.

Grow Some Gold

As I rounded the bend at the back of my garden after my woodland hike, I came face to face with a flower I had planted temporarily back there, giant knapweed (Centaurea macrocephala), also known as Armenian basket flower, globe centaurea, and yellow hardhat. Plants with too many common names are usually suspect to me, and none of this plant’s names have a particularly nice ring to them — yet this plant is a showstopper.

From the whorl of rather coarse leaves at the base of the plant rises a sturdy flower stalk. At almost 4 feet high, a big fat bud forms atop the stalk, a bud that looks like a globe artichoke that has been gilded. Nice enough even then, but a couple of weeks later — which is now — a bottlebrush of lemon yellow petals spills forth from the top of the bud.

Globe centaurea, the name most euphonious to my ears, tolerates heat and cold (USDA Hardiness Zones 3 to 8), and is relatively carefree. No need to prop the flower stalk up with a stake. The blossoms put on their show for about a month, not counting the gilded opening act, and hold up well as cut flowers, or can be dried.

Globe centaurea deserves more attention over much of the country, except perhaps in the Pacific Northwest, where it’s considered invasive. I grew it years ago, and it disappeared. Nice to have it back.

Serendipity Strikes!! & Join Me in Seattle

July 16, 2014/2 Comments/in Design, Tools/by Lee Reich

Join me in Seattle on August 10, 2014 for a talk I’ll be giving on “Luscious Landscaping — With Fruiting Trees, Shrubs, and Vines!”. Luscious landscaping is the way to beautify your yard and, at the same time, to put (very) local, healthful, flavorful food on the table. Following the lecture, we will explore the gardens at Magnuson Park. For more information about this event, go to http://leereich.brownpapertickets.com.

Ice Cream for Poppies

I first learned the word “serendipity” when I was in junior high school; it was the clever name of an ice cream shop that my parents had come upon in New York City. I’ve been on the lookout for it ever since: the word, not the shop. And I find it, occasionally, in the garden.

Like yesterday, for instance. Last March I sprinkled corn poppy (Papaver rhoeas) seeds on a flower bed that’s also home to espaliered Asian pears and a plum tree. Looking down at the dust-like seeds in the palm of my hand, it would have been hard to imagine that they could ever amount to anything. Especially since I did nothing more than sprinkle them on top of the ground, the whole packet.

But the seeds did amount to something, to more than just something, to oodles and oodles of two-foot-long stems capped by orangish red blossoms. The color is similar to that of Oriental poppies (P. orientale), but corn poppy flowers are smaller and more delicate, “all silk and flame,” to quote John Ruskin. Not exactly a serendipitous planting because I did, after all, sow the seeds. But I could hardly have predicted the exuberant response.

In amongst other plants, the flowers are held high. At the front edge of the bed, though, the dainty heads flop down on the lawn. Which would be okay, except that it would be a shame to mow those silky blossoms when mowing the lawn at the bed’s edge. Likewise, it would be a shame to let the grass grow unfettered up around and hiding the blossoms. Too messy.

So yesterday I propped the floppy plants up with a fence. Nothing fancy or permanent, just five short bamboo canes pushed into the ground about eight feet apart as posts. The crosspieces, four long bamboo canes each slid along the lawn beneath the flowers, were then lifted and lashed to the short canes a foot above the ground.

Serendipity. Not only are the flowers up off the ground but the bamboo “fence,” simple as it is, greatly improved the appearance of the bed, visually defining it to better highlight the plants.

Tea Crabs into a Tea Hedge, with a Doorway

My most serendipitous planting was many, many years ago, of tea crabapples (Malus hupehensis). I was using these plants for research when I was working for Cornell University. I needed clones, and tea crabapple has the quirk of apomixis, which means that its seeds do not reflect the sexual union of pollen with egg cells; the seeds are formed only from mother tissue so grow into clones of each other and the mother plant.

Privet hedge melding into tea crabapple hedge

Starting many tea crabapples from seed left me with extra plants, so I took eight home and planted them in a tight row, with only a couple of feet between plants, along and about five feet from the back edge of my garage/barn. What was I thinking? Tea crabapple can grow 40 feet high and wide!

As the plants grew, I sheared them into a hedge 10 feet high and 4 feet wide. After a few years, I put a rear, sliding door on the back of the garage/barn. Rather than walk out that door into a tree, I cut out one of the crabapples, and sheared a living doorway through the row of remaining trees.

I subsequently planted a privet hedge that runs perpendicular to the north edge of the crabapple hedge. Because the privet hedge is only about 3-feet-high, I decided to meld it with the crabapple hedge by letting it swoop upwards at their meeting. Access was needed through the privet hedge also, so another arch was created, this one higher and wider to let my tractor pass through.

It’s all very playful and, to me, pretty. And it all started with a mindless planting of extra tea crabapples.

Shearing Easily

The height and length of these hedges present maintenance challenges. Years ago, scissoring hedge shears made the work pleasant but very slow. The top of the crab hedge demanded my climbing a ladder and swinging a shearing knife — a dangerous proposition.

Shearing my tall hedge with Black & Decker pole pruner

Black & Decker pole pruner makes me taller

Technology has come to the rescue. Nowadays both hedges are kept trim and neat with two tools, both powered by 20 volt lithium batteries. What I can reach gets clipped with a Black & Decker battery powered hedge trimmer. Thanks to my Black & Decker battery powered pole hedge trimmer, the 10-foot-high hedge no longer demands a ladder. The trimmer’s articulating head makes it easy to give the upper sides a 45 degree cut and then, after repositioning the blades at 90 degrees, to make a flat cut along the top of the hedge.

The pole trimmer is especially important for making it convenient to cut high up on a hedge, the part most likely to be neglected especially on tall hedges. Hormones within every plant favor most vigorous growth highest up in the plant. So the top of the hedge, left to its own devices, would naturally overgrow the lower portions, leading to shading and bare branches lower down. Keeping the upper part of the hedge narrower than the bottom counteracts this tendency.

SALAD TUNNELS & COLDFRAMES, AND INDOOR “PINE”

January 6, 2012/1 Comment/in Design, Gardening, Vegetables/by Lee A. Reich

Cold has yet to throw a wrench into salads fresh from the garden — even though December 16th saw a night-time low of 12°F. Yes, the lettuce would be mush if unprotected but under the sheltering clear plastic and wooden sides of my 5 foot square cold frame, the plants are barely scathed. Just a few leaves wilted at their edges. Spinach that I sowed between the lettuce plants, for harvest after the lettuce is finished is still looking spry.

Plastic tunnels supported by wire hoops are offering almost as much cold protection over 3 garden beds. Beneath them, mustard greens, endive, and arugula don’t exactly thrive, but do survive.

A few fresh greens are even surviving out in the garden without any sort of protection whatsoever. That would include some arugula that was never covered as well as kale, what’s left of it, and mâche, the most cold-hardy of all salad greens.

Once temperatures plummet or the ground is blanketed with snow, fresh salads will come from the greenhouse, which, with night temperatures never allowed to drop below 37°F., is packed with lush greenery as if it were May.

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Update: Lettuce in the cold frame is flagging after a night-time low of 8° a few days after that 12° low. Unprotected out in the garden, only mâche and kale survive.

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The holiday tree, only a half a foot tall and ornamented with 3 silver balls, is cute as a button. It’s a Norfolk Island pine (Araucaria heterophylla), a free gift I received a couple of weeks ago from a mail-order nursery. This tree will green up the darkest days of the year for year after year because it’s a tropical species that does well in the eternal warmth and somewhat dry air, in winter at least, of any home.

Over the years, the tree will lose its impishness and develop a straight, upright trunk off of which will grow relatively widely spaced, whorled tiers of horizontal branches, all clothed in green needles. With age, the plant becomes quite majestic. Too majestic, in fact, for any home. I have seen the spreading branches of this tree towering 40 feet or more over the tiled roofs of homes in tropical climates.

So what’s a gardener to do with such a plant, after years of nurturing it and watching it grow? One option, of course, is to bite the bullet and walk it over to the compost pile. Or it could be gifted to a friend with a higher ceiling, but that just shifts responsibility and puts off the inevitable. How about giving it to grandma for her front lawn in Florida?

A natural inclination for any real gardener in this situation would be to try to keep the plant going, not as its original self but in the form of a cutting. The rooted cutting, then, is genetically the same as the original plant, only a smaller version. Norfolk Island pine does root from cuttings especially, as with many conifers, if the cuttings are taken from young growth.

This plan has one problem: fixed plagiotropism. This botanical mouthful signifies the tendency for a horizontal shoot of certain plants to always retain its horizontal growth habit. Put more simply, if a cutting is rooted from one of Norfolk Island pine’s horizontal stems, that stem will always grow sideways to creep along a windowsill or wherever else the plant is growing.

The solution to this problem is to take a cutting from the leading, upright stem. It the mother plant isn’t destined for composting, though, cutting out that leading stem does ruin its form. Also, because young cuttings root best, you might end up with only one cutting, perhaps two, from that short length of young, leading stem. Not much insurance for a plant that doesn’t root all that easily.

The leading, upright stem, of a plant can have the opposite inclination: fixed orthotropism, a permanent, upright growth habit. With other plants, their plagiotropism or orthotropism may be temporary.

Not so for Norfolk Island pine’s plagiotropism. I’ll figure out how to cross that plagiotropic bridge, or not, when I come to it.

(For further discussion of topophysis, which encompasses plagiotropism an orthotropism, and related topics on plant growth, see Plant Form: An Illustrated Guide to Flowering Plant Morphology by Adrian Bell and Alan Bryan.)