Happy “Nose Twist,” Sad Tomatoes
Nasturtium In Its Element
It’s nice to see that at least someone or thing enjoys the current cool, wet weather. My eight ducks, for instance. As I open the door to “duckingham palace,” each duck pads out onto the slurpy ground as happy as a lark (a lark on a sunny day, I assume). 
Also enjoying this awful weather are the oat cover crops that I’ve sown in some of my vegetable beds. The oats are especially lush and green, as is your and my lawn grass. The same goes for beds I recently planted with lettuce, radishes, arugula, turnips and other cool weather vegetables.
Nasturtium flowers, which I planted back in May, went hardly noticed all season long. But now they are lush, their red flowers boldly staring out against the background of their round disks of bluish green leaves.
The plants’ present prominence comes, first, from the weather. Native from the cool highlands of Mexico down into Chile and Argentina, the plants feel right at home, and show it with their luxuriant growth, when I’m beginning to feel chilly. They also have come into prominence because some of their neighboring plants — marigolds, cucumbers, and tomatoes, for example — are waning.
Nasturtium offers a lot of bang for the buck, so for many years, each May, I’ve dropped the seeds into holes I poke into the ground. Mostly I plant them near my garden gates but also, some years, along the wide, main path at the head of each of the vegetable beds. The latter planting was an emulation of painter Claude Monet’s well-known nasturtium plantings that softened the wide path beneath his long arbor. The plant isn’t really a climber, but may be called a clamberer; that’s how it makes its way partway up nearby gates and wire fences.
Nasturtium seeds germinate readily once the soil warms sufficiently and then are care-free all summer long. The large size of the seeds and their quick germination make them fun for children to plant and watch.
Sometimes the plants are so care-free as to need some discipline. The ones I planted along my path required pruning to keep them from meeting in the middle and obliterating the path.
Nasturtium offers more than just beauty. All parts of the plant are edible. The leaves add a pungent pizazz to a sandwich, the flowers add pizazz and eye appeal to a salad. The immature seeds can be pickled as stand-ins for capers. One nasturtium species, called mashua in some parts of the world, is a perennial producing edible tubers. This one is an actual climber rather than a clamberer.
And Now, for Nose Twist
Nasturtium got its common name because of its similarity in taste to watercress, which is botanically Nasturtium officiale. The word “nasturtium” comes from the Latin words nasus, meaning “nose,” and torqueum, meaning “twist,” which is what the peppery flavor of watercress or nasturtium does.
Despite one plant sharing its common name with the botanical name of the other, nasturtium and watercress are not in the same family. They do, however, share certain flavor profiles (which is why both are nose twisters). So much so that the cabbage white butterfly will feed on nasturtium as well as its namesake, cabbage. But not with great enthusiasm. The caterpillar phase of the cabbage white butterfly will only feed on nasturtium if it did so from birth; try feeding it to the second or third instar of this insect, and it would rather starve, literally!
The genus for nasturtium is Tropaeolum, the “trop” part related to the word “trophy.” Founder of plant taxonomy, Carl von Linnaeus, assigned this name because the clambering flowers and leaves reminded him of the helmets and shields of the vanquished which were draped on tree branches following battles in his day.
Tomatoes Exit
In contrast to the nasturtiums, my tomato plants are not at all happy with the weather now — or for much of this summer. Humid conditions have fostered diseases, the usual leaf spotting diseases (early blight, late blight, and septoria leaf spot) as well as anthracnose.
Anthracnose is particularly vexing because apparently sound tomatoes develop the sunken, rotting lesions from this disease after only a day or so on the kitchen counter.
A thorough cleanup of all tomato leaves, stems, and fruits, covering the ground with compost, and moving tomato plantings to new locations should help limit disease next year. Also, wearing red shoes and clicking my heals together three times before planting might help.
The passing of tomatoes isn’t all that bad because they don’t taste that good in this weather. And we do have a reasonable amount broadcasting their richness through the sparkling clear glass of canning jars.
Goldenrod gets the blame for its showy, yellow blossoms during this allergy season. But the true culprit is ragweed, which goes unnoticed because it bears only small, green flowers.
All papyrus have a very distinctive and attractive appearance. The base of the plant is a clump of grassy leaves from which rise tall, leafless stalks which are capped by grassy-leaved mopheads looking something like the ribs of an umbrella. A houseplant relative of papyrus, Cyperus alternifolius, is commonly called umbrella plant.
The definitive identifier for this weed is the way the stems spread out, flat, on top of the ground. In sun, no part of the plant rises more than a half an inch above ground level.
As a cosmos fan, I figured I’d try Rose Bon Bon in spite of the fact that the flowers are double, which means they have multiple rows of petals. More complex and, hence, less cosmo-ish.
More than I have ever seen in the wild. (In Chanticleer Garden outside Philadelphia is a wet meadow planted thickly with cardinal flowers.)
(Compost is all my vegetables get.) And perhaps focussing more on what food really tastes like. Does Sugarbuns supersweet really taste like corn. Or a candy bar?
Descriptions of Rose de Rescht tell how it blossoms repeatedly through the season; not my rose. I finally honed down my rose’s identity from among the choices suggested by a number of rose experts based on photos and descriptions I had sent them.
And the fragrance! Intense, and my favorite of all roses. Rose d’Ipsahan is a variety of Damask rose and has the classic fragrance of that category of rose.
More important, Italian arugula tolerates heat better. As my rows of common arugula are sending up seed stalks, the Italian arugula just keeps pumping out new leaves.
The plants were autumn olives (Elaeagnus umbellata), shrubs whose fine qualities I’m reluctant to mention for fear of eliciting scorn from you knowledgable readers.
Those fruits are very puckery until a little after they turn red, but then become quite delicious, and healthful.
forsythia, mockorange, hydrangea, and any other informal shrub. This technique is known as rejuvenation pruning because, over time, the above ground portion of the shrub is annually rejuvenated. In the case of blueberry, the roots live unfettered year after year but the bush never sports stems more than 6 years old. A perennially youthful blueberry bush can go on like this, bearing well, for decades like this.
, rose-of-sharon, climbing roses, and flowering quince. These shrubs are among those that perform well year after year on the same old, and always growing older, stems. They also grow few or no suckers each year. The upshot is that thesis shrubs are the easiest to prune: Don’t.
An exhaust fan keeps temperatures from getting too high, which, with lows in the 30s, would wreak havoc with plant growth, at the very least causing lettuce, mustard, and arugula to go to seed and lose quality too soon.
Though not related to clover, oxalis (Oxalis deppei, sometimes called the shamrock plant) leaves are dead ringers for clover leaves — except that all oxalis leaves have four leaflets. And better still, oxalis can be grown as a houseplant, affording you “four-leaf” clovers for year-round proclamations of affection.