TASTING AND TIDYING, OR NOT

Fruit Heaven

Hudson's Golden Gem apple

Hudson’s Golden Gem apple

I remember a few years ago of having a most fruitful — and I mean this very literally — experience visiting one of the USDA’s germplasm repositories. “Germplasm repository” doesn’t sound like the kind of place anyone would want to be, but these USDA repositories are, in fact, sunny, colorful places, often redolent with enticing aromas. In the case of the one I visited, the aroma was of ripening apples.

Germplasm is the stuff that gives rise to an organism, and the USDA has set up repositories around the country to house various kinds of plants. Each repository is situated where a particular group of plants grows well. So Davis, California is home to the repository for figs, pomegranates, and Asian persimmons; Corvallis, Oregon is the repository for pears, gooseberries, and mint; and Geneva, New York, where I visited, houses the collections of apples and American-type grapes. (My own gooseberry collection helped build the gooseberry collection at Corvallis about 30 years ago.)

Taking into account seed collections and other, related work, these repositories maintain over 20,000 accessions of plants representing over 300 species. Germplasm from these collections is available to scientist and other interested citizens, which is how I obtained grafting wood to make most of the rare varieties of apples and pears that I grow.

So there I was — a fruitophile — standing with clipboard in hand and camera in pocket in in a field of apple trees, each one a different variety. My mission: Photograph and collect 3 to 4 samples of a couple of dozen varieties. What sweet labor! (I had previously contacted the repository staff and received permission).

Up and down the rows I went, photographing, collecting, and, of course, tasting. Apples have been cultivated for so long and are so popular a fruit that it’s no wonder that such great variation exists in the fruits’ appearances and flavors. Flavors include anise-flavored Ellison’s Orange, sweet Mollie’s Delicious, spicy-tart Cox’s Orange Pippin, and everything in between and beyond. The range in color goes from gray-brown Pomme Grise to cheery red-splashed yellow King of the Pippin. And then there are variations in fruit size and shape and, less obvious, characteristics such as pest resistance, productivity, and cold tolerance.

Ashmead's Kernel apple

Ashmead’s Kernel apple

Most important, to me, is flavor. I should have brought a palate cleanser because after a while all the varieties were beginning to taste like . . . well . . . apples. Nonetheless, two varieties that I did not grow did stand out for flavor; I ordered grafting wood of Hudson’s Golden Gem and Pitmaston Pineapple to graft onto trunks of my Ingrid Marie trees once I lop their tops off.

After the apples, there were grapes to photograph and sample.

Tidy Not

Boy, would I love to tidy things up with some pruning now. The Golden Celebration rose bush would look nicer in coming months with those couple of tall, gawky stems cut off or back.
Golden Celebration rose
Grape and hardy kiwi stems are reaching out all over the place, grabbing onto each other and anything else they can wrap around.
Kiwi vines
The pear trees have a nice spreading form — except for watersprouts shooting vigorously skyward from the uppersides of some of the spreading branches. How nice it would be to cut these plants back now rather than in spring.

But I’m going to restrain myself from doing any pruning. As stated in The Pruning Book (by me!), “Although immediate regrowth rarely occurs after late summer or autumn pruning, cells right at the cut are stirred into activity to close off the wound. Active cells are liable to be injured by cold weather, which is a reason to avoid pruning in late summer or autumn except in climates with mild winters or with plants that are very hardy to cold.”

Gooseberries and currants are super cold hardy plants and begin growth relatively early in spring. All of which makes a good case for pruning those plants now.

And a Case for Not Tidying

Rather than prune, a good place to re-channel that “tidy everything up” urge is in the vegetable and flower garden.

Cleaning up is one way to lessen pest problems next year. As I pulled out spent bush bean plants, I gingerly placed them into the garden cart and, from there, onto the compost pile, trying not to disturb the resident bean beetles. Those bean beetles had hoped to spend the winter on site, to emerge next spring and lay eggs on next year’s bean plants. I’m hoping to “cook” as many of them as possible in the compost pile.

Tomato plants are looking a bit ragged even though they’re still bearing some tomatoes for fresh eating. Gathering up all stems, leaves, and old fruits and composting them reduces the inoculum load of diseases such as early blight and septoria leaf spot. Left in place, they would spend winter out in the garden ready to infect next year’s plants. It’s not a question of eradication, which isn’t possible, but of balance.
Tidy vegetable garden beds
Cutting down old peony stems and composting them takes inoculum for next years botrytis disease off-site. Left to infect plants next spring, botrytis could keep peony flower buds from unraveling.

As Charles Dudley Warner wrote over a hundred years ago (in My Summer in the Garden, which I highly recommend and is much more than a gardening book), “the closing scenes are not necessarily funereal . . . a garden . . . goes into winter-quarters . . . neat and trim . . . so that its last days shall not present a scene of melancholy ruin and decay.”

Battle for Figs: Victory

Some History

I don’t know the score over the years, but this year’s victory is mine. The battles have been with scale insects, both armored scales and their cousins, mealybugs (but rarely both in the same year), on my greenhouse fig plants.
Eating a fig
Those fig plants are planted in the ground in a minimally heated greenhouse, where winter temperatures can sink to about 35°F. The oldest of these plants have trunks 8 inches in diameter. They thrived for years without any pest problems, scale of otherwise. A few years ago, the insects made their appearance, sometimes ruining almost the whole crop.
Mealybug
Over the years I fought them in various ways. One year it was spraying the dormant plants with alcohol. Another year it was, more aggressively, scrubbing trunks and stems of dormant plants with a toothbrush dipped in alcohol. Ants herd and protect scale insects, so another year I fenced the ants off the plants with a band of masking tape coated with forever (almost) sticky Tangletrap around the trunk of each plant.

An expensive but short-lived success was the two releases of the predatory ladybird beetle Cryptolaemus montrouzieri and the parasitoid wasp Anagyrus pseudococci.

Mealybug destroyer

Mealybug destroyer

These biocontrol helpers ended up valuing each fig at about a dollar, still worth it. I screened all openings in the greenhouse, hoping to perennialize them inside. (It was not effective.)

Battle Plan, Done

So this year I tried a multipronged approach.

The biggest change was, rather than growing the figs as bushy trees, training them as espaliers. Espalier is the training of plants to an orderly, usually two-dimensional form both for beauty and, in the case of fruit plants, for good production of high quality fruit. For my figs, an additional benefit would be that each plant would only have one point of contact — its trunk — with the ground. IA band of masking tape coated with Tangletrap would be a roadblock on the ant highway. (Plus the look of the plants always elicits a “Wow” from visitors.)
Rabbi Samuel fig, espaliered in greenhouse
The fig plant growing near the greenhouse endwall has a short trunk that, after rising to about 18 inches from ground level, bifurcates into two, self-supporting horizontal arms extending parallel to the wall in opposite directions. At the head of each of the south beds, a fig tree is planted each of whose trunk is terminated by just a single, self-supporting, horizontal arm reaching down the bed to the sidewall. With just a trunk and one or two arms, thoroughly scrubbing down the dormant plant with alcohol is a relatively quick job. Quick enough to prevent 2 or 3 scrubbing before plants resume growth in early spring from becoming tedious.

Another nice feature of this training system is that pruning the plants at the end of the season is a no-brainer. Vertical shoots that rise up from the horizontal arms are thinned to keep neighboring shoots 8 inches apart and helped along in their vertical growth by being trained to pieces of bamboo attached to the greenhouse roof. (Yes, an ant could walk up the wall and across the roof of the greenhouse and then down the bamboo to get at the plants but they are either not that smart or energetic; it hasn’t happened.)
San Piero fig
A little later in the early part of the greenhouse growing season I gave the plants some dowsings with neem oil. I’m not sure how effective the neem component is but “horticultural oil” itself is effective in fighting off scale insects.

A ring of cinnamon around the base of each plant provided further disincentive to the ants, who will not cross a cinnamon line. The cinnamon and the Tangletrap did need renewal once per season.

As new fig shoots soared skyward near the greenhouse roof, I used a pole pruner to prune out the top of the growing shoot. Side branches, of course, then grew, and I periodically had to to hack them back also.

Uh Oh, But All Still Good

Everything was copacetic and we were harvesting figs, which formed along the vertical stems at the juncture of almost every leaf. Then, in late August I noticed some mealybugs on one plant. Time for Cryptolaemus montrouzieri again. I released them in early September and we were back in business, harvesting large handfuls of three different varieties of delciously sweet figs — San Piero, Brown Turkey, and Rabbi Samuel — daily.

And then, just today, I noticed armored scales on the plants, and a few ants! I’m not sure how the ants are getting onto the plants, but one possible “benefit” of the armored scales is hardly any mealybugs. Perhaps they can’t coexist.
Fig scale
All the measures I took against mealybugs should also be effective against the armored scales, except for the Cryptolaemus montrouzieri. Their predator Aphytis melinus, also known as the Golden Chalcid, has been effective against armored scales.

I’m not taking action. With less sunlight and cooler temperatures the figs trees have slowed down, running out of new stems on which to hang fruit. No matter; it’s been a good season of fresh figs.

TWENTY-TWENTY FORESIGHT

North Vegetable Garden

I’m stepping outside this sunny afternoon for a walk around the farmden, pad and pen in hand to evaluate some of this season’s goings on to make notes for next season. Not that the season is anywhere near over yet. I expect to be out and about with pitchfork, harvest basket, and garden cart at least into December. But no surprises are expected at this point.

Starting in the north vegetable garden: tomatoes. Over the years I’ve honed the number of varieties here from too many to our half-dozen or so favorites.

Valencia tomato

Valencia tomato

The goal is top-notch flavor and reasonable productivity. San Marzano, which is very productive, might taste like cotton fresh but it’s a must for the best-tasting cooked tomatoes. The San Marzanos get their dedicated canning jars, but also good canned is Blue Beech and, great for fresh eating also, are Amish Paste and Anna Russian.

Three more, mostly for fresh eating next year, are Paul Robeson, Belgian Giant, and Valencia. Valencia has year after year proven to be a very good, very beautiful, and productive tomato. Pretty also, round, smooth, and pale orange. Cherokee Purple hardly produced this year, and hasn’t in years past, so it’s scrapped from the list for next year.

I consider Sungold to be the best-tasting cherry tomato, and it’s still bearing a daily abundance of persimmon-orange fruits. I put in 8 plants; next year, I’ll plant a few more.

That makes a total of only seven tomato varieties — unless someone twists my arm into trying any other variety.

I’ll try for a repeat abundance of peppers next year by again growing Carmen and Sweet Italia.

Italian Sweet peppers

Sweet Italia peppers

Sweet Italia tastes better but Carmen bears a little better, especially now. The non-hot hot pepper Habenada, is billed as having hot pepper flavor minus the hotness. More like no hotness and no flavor, a no-go for next year.

South Vegetable Garden

Walking over to the “south garden,” the highlights this year were cauliflower, beans, and squash. Cauliflower is allegedly a challenge to grow. I don’t like it so grew it just for the challenge, and because Deb likes it. I was successful, and she can eat it all.

Blue Lake and Kentucky Wonder pole beans keep pumping tender new beans, as pole beans are wont to do. Or is it Blue Lake and Romano? Or Kentucky Wonder and Romano? The row label is buried deep in a wall of foliage so I won’t know until the end of the season. Pole beansI guess two plants per pole, with poles about a foot apart, is too crowded. Next year: one plant per pole.

Pole beans begin bearing late so I also grow bush beans (bush Blue Lake and bush Romano), which peter out after a couple of weeks but yield an early crop for the freezer. I usually put in a second planting also, which is — note for next year — not needed. We didn’t have to harvest any of them because the pole beans kicked in soon enough.

It’s been a banner year for winter squash. I usually plant squash out in the meadow in the cleared strip of land between the dwarf apple trees. And usually, deer or my poultry eat the vines or the fruit so the harvest is usually nil. This year I planted squash in the rich soil along and inside the back fence of the south garden, which backs up to the poultry run. The squash climbed up and over the fence and onto the fenced roof of the run; now there’s plenty to harvest, perhaps too many!Winter squash on poultry run

South Vegetable Garden

Two flowers were standouts this year: On a whim I purchased red buckwheat seed from Baker’s Creek (www.rareseeds.com). With no place special in mind about where to plant it, I ended up sprinkling the seed in a bed just outside the north vegetable garden.
Red buckwheat
For the past couple of months it’s been a 4-foot high cloud of pale red beauty, which, along with how easy it is to grow, earns it a place in next year’s garden. But where?

One other flower stood out also, delphinium. Not a five foot spire of pale blue — I also have them, the Pacific Giant hybrids — but a spire less than two feet tall with dark blue flowers.
Delphinium, Blue Mirror
It’s Blue Mirror Chinese delphinium (www.reneesgarden.com) and it surprised me by blooming its first year from seed. Let’s see how perennial this perennial turns out to be. Around here, its giant cousins typically die out after a  couple of years.

All in all, it’s been an excellent growing season. Spring frost hazard was minor for tree fruits. Rainfall and sunshine were balanced well. Pest problems were minor. Pears are still challenging to harvest at just the right moment so that they can ripen indoors to that delectable window between underripe grassy and overripe sleepy. I did get Concorde at the right moment this year. The ripe fruits are delectable, combining some of the smooth buttery sweetness of Magness pear along with a dash of vanilla.

SOME THINGS FOR SOME SENSES

Visual Delight, and some Aroma

I once grew a rose, Bibi Maizoon, that I considered to be as close to perfection as any rose could be. Its blooms, that is. They were cup-shaped and filled with loosely defined row upon row of pastel pink petals, nothing like the pointed, stiff blossoms of hybrid tea roses. Completing the old-fashioned feel of Bibi Maizoon blossoms is the flowers’ strong, fruity fragrance.
Bibi Maizoon rose
(In case you don’t know who Bibi Maizoon was, she was a member of the royal family of Oman. The Bibi Maizoon rose was bred by British rose breeder David Austin.)

The bush itself was as imperfect as the blossom were perfect. Where to begin? For starters, the thin stems could hardly support the corpulent blossoms. Couldn’t, in fact, so the blossoms usually dangle upside down. Upside down blossoms were not that bad because I considered Bibi best when cut for vases indoors to better appreciate her rare appearances and fragrance.

Top those deficiencies with the fact that Bibi Maizoon was also only borderline cold hardy in my garden and you would rightly guess that I no longer grow this rose.

I haven’t abandoned David Austin roses. I generally like them for their old-fashioned look: the bushes are, well, bushy and full; the blossoms have softer colors than those of traffic-stopping hybrid tea roses; and they are disease resistan and strong-growing.

I’ve previously praised the variety L. D. Braithwaite for its almost nonstop, dark red blossoms, red tinted leaves, and ability to laugh off any amount of cold. Three other varieties — Golden Celebration, Lady of Shallot, and Dame Judi Dench — came into my garden in the last year, their blossoms with varying degrees of yellow, the first a pure golden yellow, the second apricot-yellow, and the third apricot orange. Delicious. They all seem, so far, near-perfect.

Golden Celebration rose

Golden Celebration rose

Lady of Shallot rose

Lady of Shallot rose

Organoleptic Delight, and also Beautiful

Ellison’s Orange is as unknown to most people as is Bibi Maizoon. It’s an apple, an old and very delicious apple, and, oddly enough, ripening right now. Everywhere else I read that this apple is supposed to ripen later in September and on into October, yet every year my Ellison’s Orange fruits ripen about this time of year.

Like Bibi Maizoon, Ellison’s Orange has its good and bad sides. On the plus side, it bears very well and at a young age. It also seems to be somewhat resistant to scab and cedar apple rust diseases, contradicting other sources on this point also. And what a beauty the fruit is, with its orange blush over a yellow background.

For me, the downside of this variety is the absolute necessity to pick it at just the right moment. One day an apple seems puckery underripe; the next day it might be sleepy and soft. If I harvest very carefully, I catch an apple at its delectable best, which is sprightly with an intense flavor that hints of anise seed.
Ellison's Orange apple
I made my tree from a piece of stem whose cells trace back over a hundred years, to the garden of a Reverend Ellison in Lincolnshire in the east of England. The parents of the reverend’s new apple weren’t lightweights. One parent, Cox’s Orange Pippin, the king of British apples, has an intense flavor that sometimes hints of anise seed. The other parent, Calville Blanc, an old French apple popular in the court of King Louis XIII, has a spicy flavor with just a hint of banana. No wonder Ellison’s Orange tastes so good – as long as I catch it at the right moment.

Another Tasty Delight

If you buy corn at a farmstand or market these days, no need to have boiling water ready, as gardeners did in the past to stop enzymes from starting the conversion of kernels from sugary sweet to starchy bland. Two genes incorporated into modern corn varieties dramatically slow this flavor decline. They also ratchet up the sugars, making modern corns supersweet to begin with.

Call me old-fashioned, but my favorite variety of sweet corn, the only variety that I grow, is the old variety Golden Bantam, which lacks those modern corn genes. Although not nearly as sweet as modern hybrids, Golden Bantam has a very rich corny flavor with – to some tastes — just the right amount of sweetness.

 Golden Bantam, a hit since 1906

Golden Bantam, a hit since 1906

Golden Bantam was introduced into the seed trade in 1902 by W. Atlee Burpee Company, who got their original 2 quarts of seed from New York farmer William Coy, who had tasted and enjoyed eating some ears at his cousin’s house in Massachusetts. Long story short: Everyone fell in love with Golden Bantam and it became the most popular corn of its day. An article in The Boston Transcript of 1926 states that “In the twenty-four years since [1902] it has made more friends than anyone else could make outside the movies. Which proves that popularity does sometimes follow real merit.” It’s an odd way to compliment but you get the picture.

Golden Bantam pre-dates hybrid varieties, the latter of which, in addition to other characteristics, ripen very uniformly. In a backyard garden, a whole bed of corn ripening at once isn’t necessarily a plus. I want to eat some corn every day, with a little extra each day for freezing.
Corn hills
My four beds of corn, the first planted in mid-May (around the date of our last-killing frost of spring)  and the subsequent beds staggered every two weeks, provides just that. We’ve eaten corn almost every day since each mid-August and Golden Bantam shows no signs of slowing down or boring us.

Mmmmmmmm

Genetics, Timely Harvest, and ?

As I led my nephew Jeff, his wife, and their two kids around the garden a couple of days ago, I plucked fruits and vegetables here and there for them to sample. They could compare them with what New York City, where they live, has to offer. They were blown away by the flavors here.
Delectable fruits & vegetables
Okay, I cheated a little. They got to sample some of the best of the best: figs so soft they were drooping from their stems, white alpine strawberries, Sungold cherry tomatoes, Golden Bantam sweet corn, and Kentucky Wonder green beans, all picked on the spot and at their peak of perfection. The Golden Bantam corn, you won’t find that offered for sale pretty much anywhere these days although it was the standard of excellence in sweet corn 100 years ago. The white alpine strawberries (Pineapple Crush) are too small and too soft for anyone to market commercially.

But genetics isn’t the whole story. Timely harvest is as important. Commercial considerations aside, it takes a certain skill to know just the right moment to do the deed.

With some plants, especially vegetables, timely harvest is easy. You pick such vegetables as lettuce, beans, and okra as soon as they’re big enough to suit you. You pick tomatoes when they’re red, which is also when I pick sweet peppers; red peppers taste quite different and, to me, a lot better than green peppers.

I haven’t grown eggplants that much over the years. This year they are particularly abundant and I’m still learning how to pick them. Full size? Glossy?

Sweet corn can also be tricky. It took me a few years to get the knack of picking it at its best. I first look for dried up silks and then, taking a tip the vegetable extension specialist at the University of Wisconsin passed on to me many years ago, I wrap my fingers around the ear and feel for fullness. That’s when it’s time to snap the ear down and off the stalk. Gauging that fulness does take practice.
Golden Bantam sweet corn, non-hybrid

Test for Ripeness

Fruits are a little trickier than vegetables, especially some fruits. Easiest of all are raspberries and blackberries. Tickle the clusters and let the truly ripe ones drop off, as they are wont to do, into the palm of your hand. Too many people tug at blackberries to get them off the plants; flavor suffers. Blueberries are similar to blackberries in that color doesn’t tell of full ripeness; the tickling method does.
Black raspberry fruit
I grow a number of varieties of two vining fruits: grapes, of course, and hardy kiwifruits. The kiwifruits, which will begin ripening in a couple of weeks, retain their fresh, green color right through ripeness. What they do do when ripe is to soften. But not all together. Fortunately, when sufficiently mature on the plant, these fruits can finish ripening after harvest. As soon as the first kiwis ripen, I pick them all. They ripen to perfection in a few days at room temperature, longer under refrigeration.
Hardy kiwifruit
Blue or red grapes seem ripe when they turn their final color. Ripe for commercial purposes perhaps, but not perfectly so. When truly ripe the whole bunch will snap easily from the cane to which it is attached. I sometimes leave the bunches (the ones I enclosed in paper bags in early summer) even longer and, to a point, their flavor just gets better and better.
Edelweiss grape
Most fruits, in fact, taste best if harvested when ready to part with the plant. That’s why for fresh eating, not storage, I sometimes harvest my apples from the ground, daily, the morning they drop. This might not be the best method for all varieties but makes for the very best Macoun apples.
Hudson Golden Gem apple
Generally, with tree fruits, I look for a change in color, especially background color, before considering harvesting a fruit. If there’s any green, I let it be. If color tells me that a fruit is potentially ready to be picked, I cup the fruit in hand, then lift and twist. If ripe, the fruit stalk readily separates from the plant. If that doesn’t happen, the fruit needs more time on the plant.

Tricky, for Me at Least

Two fruits whose harvest moment I’m still honing are watermelon and European pears.

I’ve tried all the methods with watermelon: thumping for a sound not too hollow and not to dull (the sound of knocking your knuckles against your chest as opposed to your forehead or stomach); a dried tendril opposite the fruit; a yellow-bellied fruit. They’re all guides but none are the end-all to timely harvest. I never had that problem with my large watermelon crop from my garden in southern Delaware.

Magness pear

Magness pear

European pears ripen from the inside out so become mush if left on the plant to thoroughly ripen. They need to be harvested mature but not yet ripe as indicated by some fruits dropping, a slight change in skin color, and readiness of the fruit stem to part from the branch. Fruits brought indoors to finish ripening are ready to eat when the flesh at the stem end gives with slight finger pressure.

Still, it takes a certain je ne sais quoi. And again, I’m adept at timely harvest of those varieties I’ve grown the longest and of which I have the most.

Climacterics

One reason pears and kiwifruits can ripen to perfection after harvest is because they are climacteric fruits, which undergo a burst of respiration and ethylene (a plant hormone) production as ripening begins. Some of these fruits, which also which include banana, apple, tomato, and avocado can, if sufficiently mature, ripen following harvest. Soon after their climacteric peak, these fruits start their decline.

Citrus, fig, strawberry, plum, and raspberry are examples of non-climacteric fruits, whose ripening proceeds more calmly. Non-climacteric fruits will not ripen at all after they’ve been harvested. They might soften and sweeten as complex carbohydrates break down into simple sugars, but such changes are indicative of incipient rot rather than ripening or flavor enhancement.

For more about flavor, ripening, and climacteric, see my latest book The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Much Better Garden.

Midsummer “To Do” List

Maintenance, Pruning

For many gardeners, spring is the critical gardening season, what with preparing the soil, starting seedlings, setting out transplants, pruning, watching and staying prepared for late frosts and . . .  In my view, right now is just as crucial, and for an equal number of reasons.

True, a 90 degree day with high humidity doesn’t exactly pull you out to the garden to putter around in blazing sunlight. But early mornings around here are mostly cool, calm, and beautiful.

Much of what needs to be done is regular maintenance. Pruning tomatoes, for instance.Tomatoes, staked, July I train my tomato plants to stakes and single stems, which allows me to set plants only 18 inches apart and harvest lots of fruit by utilizing the third dimension: up. At least weekly, I snap (if early morning, when shoots are turgid) or prune (later in the day, when shoots are flaccid) off all suckers and tie the main stems to their metal conduit supports.

Espalier is the training of trees to two dimensions whereby the tracery of the stems is as decorative a plant feature as are the leaves, flowers, and/or fruits. To maintain that tracery of branches, my espaliered Asian pears need frequent pruning. Espalier Asian pearI lop wayward shoots either right back to their origin or, in hope of their forming “spurs” on which will hang future fruits, back to the whorl of leaves near the bases of the shoots.

The response of the pear trees depends on the weather, which is unpredictable. Dry sunny weather is conducive to spurs. Rainy weather coaxes, instead, new shoots pop out right where I cut back old shoots. I think.

Maintenance, Water

Whether or not the weather is dry, rampant growing plants quickly suck the soil dry. So I also keep attentive to watering this time of year. The vegetable garden and potted plants are the neediest in this respect; fortunately, they demand little from me to do because a timer turns its drip irrigation system on and off automatically. All I have to do is to periodically check to make sure drippers are all dripping. Drip tubes to potted plantsNewly planted trees and shrubs are another story. This first year, while their roots are spreading out in the ground, is critical for them. I make a list of these plants each spring and then water them weekly by hand all summer long unless the skies do the job for me (as measured in a rain gauge because what seems like a heavy rainfall often has dropped surprisingly little water).

A one-inch depth of water is needed to wet a soil about a half a foot deep. I provide this with 3/4 gallon of water per estimated square foot spread of the roots.

Fall preps

Sowing seeds and setting out transplants isn’t only a spring gardening activity. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, and other summer vegetables peter out during the shorter, cooler days of late summer and early fall. But there are plenty of vegetables that enjoy growing conditions that time of year.

Some of the fall vegetables need to be sown now to be large enough to mature in fall. No need to provide space for them by digging out tomatoes, peppers, or any other summer vegetables. I sow endive, kale, lettuce, Chinese cabbage, and, if I could stomach it, cauliflower seeds in midsummer in seed flats. Once they sprout I “prick them out” into individual cells of automatic watering GrowEase trays for later transplanting. Autumn seedlingsNot only vegetables get this treatment. Buy a packet of seeds of delphinium, pinks, or some other perennial, sow them now, overwinter them in a cool place with good light, or a cold (but not too cold) place with very little light, and the result is enough plants for a sweeping field of blue or pink next year. Sown in the spring, they won’t bloom until their second season even though they’ll need lots of space that whole first season.

Cuttings are another way to propagate plants this time of year. Early this morning, when cells were plump with water, I made cuttings of hardy kiwifruit and begonia.

And, Yes, Weeds

Weeds can make all this pruning, watering, and seeding for naught. Clear ground is needed in which to eventually set my cabbage and kale transplants. Weeds stealing water and nutrients, even sunlight, won’t let plants grow at their best. They’ll also promote disease by preventing free flow of air; fungi fester under damp conditions. Weedless corn & lettuce bedEvery time I look at a weed, I’m thinking how it’s either sending roots further afield underground or is flowering (or will flower) to scatter its seed. Much of gardening isn’t about the here and now, so I also weed now for less weeds next season. It’s worth it.

Of Roses and Berries

Roses Come and Go

I once grew a beautiful, red rose known as Dark Lady. For all her beauty, she was borderline cold-hardy here. Many stems would die back to the graft, and the rootstock, which was cold-hardy, would send up long sprouts. Problem is that rootstocks are good for just that, their roots; their flowers, if allowed to develop, are nothing special.Dark Lady roseAfter a few years of watching the weakened plant recover each season, I made cuttings from some of the stems. The cuttings rooted and the new plants, rather than being grafted, were then growing on their own roots. Even a cold winter wouldn’t kill the roots, living in soil where temperatures are moderated. If the stems died back to ground level, new sprouts would still sport those dark, red blossoms.

I planted my new Dark Lady in a bed on the south side of my house. There, with the brick wall of the house adding a few extra degrees of warmth in winter and spring, Dark Lady might better survive winters coldest nights and get a jump on spring. What’s more, the roots had ample soil to explore rather than being restricted within the narrow, dry bed along my terrace where the mother plant had grown.

The new Dark Lady grew reasonably well in its new bed, but still not as well as I had hoped. Dark Lady is one of the many “English roses” bred by David Austin to have the blowsy look and fragrance of old-fashioned roses coupled with disease resistance and repeat blooming of contemporary roses.

Dark Lady eventually petered out. She’s been superseded by some newer creations from David Austin: L. D. Braithwaite and Golden Celebration are standouts as far a hardiness and beauty, and I expect the same of Dame Judi Dench and Lady of Shalott.

L D Braithwaite rose

L D Braithwaite rose

Global warming has, no doubt, also been a help.

No Sharing of My Highbush Blueberries

Pity the poor birds. My fat, juicy blueberries have been ripening and now there’s a net between them and them.Blueberries galorePutting up the net always brings the words of fruit breeder Dr. Elwyn Meader to mind. When I visited him back in the 1980s, the old New Englander, still active in his retirement and growing about an acre of blueberries, among other crops, recounted in his slow, New Hampshire accent, “It takes a patient man to net an acre of blueberries.” Covering my two plantings encompassing a total of about a thousand square feet always creates a little tension.Netting blueberriesI now feel like a captain setting sail on an old sailing vessel, with all the sails trim and masts set. Except rather than sails and masts, it’s a blueberry net that’s spread tightly over the permanent, 7-foot-high perimeter of locust posts and side walls of anti-bird, plastic mesh. That netting covers 16 bushes within a 25 foot by 25 foot area. Rebar through holes near the tops of the locust posts keeps that side wall mesh taught and 18” high chicken wire along the bottom keeps rabbits, which love to teethe on that plastic mesh, from doing so.Netted blueberriesDon’t worry about the birds. They get their fill of berries elsewhere. I don’t net my lowbush blueberries, nor my mulberries or gumis. Birds don’t usually share the mulberries or gumis with me. This year, for some reason, they are sharing.

Juneberry, a Blueberry Look-alike

Birds also have free access to a blueberry look-alike, juneberries, the plants of which are sometimes called serviceberry, shadbush, and, in the case of one species, saskatoon. The bushes are common in the wild and, because of their pretty flowers, fall color, and neat form, also planted in landscapes.

Juneberries are small, blue, and dead-ringers for blueberries but have a taste all their own: Sweet with the richness of sweet cherries, along with a hint of almond. The birds seem to enjoy them as much as they do blueberries.Juneberries, fruit in handJuneberries are related to apples and pears, not blueberries, and share some of their kin’s pest problems. Especially in my garden. They’re one fruit that didn’t grow well for me so, years ago, I finally dug the plants up.

Neither I nor birds need go far to find wild juneberries or bush or tree types planted for landscaping. They usually bear pretty well because of growing in microclimates more suitable than here on the farmden. In this low-lying valley, the air is too humid, cool, and conducive to disease.

With all the rain this spring, I’ve noticed that the crop on wild and cultivated juneberry plants has been hit hard by rust disease. I hear tell, though, that plants were bearing well at a nearby shopping mall: There, sunlight beating down on nearby concrete and, perhaps, less rust spores wafting about, create a microclimate conducive to good crops of berries.

—————————————— 

Any gardening questions? Email them to me at garden@leereich.com and I’ll try answering them directly or in this column. Come visit my garden at www.leereich.com/blog.

A New, Old Twist on Strawberries

Strawberries White and Early

Awhile ago I plucked some ripe strawberries and handed them to Rachel for a taste. Her ho-hum reaction told me that I hadn’t picked carefully enough. Yes, the berries were white, but that’s their color when ripe — and also when not ripe.You should be scratching your head by now. Strawberries that are white when ripe? Strawberries perhaps ready for harvest in early May here in the Hudson Valley?

The berries I handed Rachel were alpine strawberries (Fragaria vesca), a different species from our usual garden strawberries (F. X ananassa). They are a kind of “wood strawberry” (often going under their more upscale-sounding French moniker fraises de bois) first encountered about 300 years ago near Grenoble, France. These strawberries are different from garden strawberries in many ways.

For one thing, alpine strawberries are everbearing. They’ll pump out fresh berries as long as given sufficient warmth, water, and nutrients. Mine are bearing now because they’re planted in the ground in my greenhouse. In my pre-greenhouse life they fruited for me in early spring in 3” diameter pots in a sunny window.And no, the plants hadn’t resided in my home and aren’t now in my greenhouse to protect them from winter cold. I wanted an earlier crop. I also grow them outdoors.

'Pineapple Crush' strawberries

‘Pineapple Crush’ strawberries

Alpine strawberry plants are adapted from where winter temperatures plummet below minus 30°F. to regions that hardly experience winter.

These strawberries also part ways with garden strawberries in not producing any runners. I consider this a plus because the worst weeds in a garden strawberry bed are often the plants themselves. As runners strew about and take root, they crowd each other out. The resulting shade and higher humidity make for lower yields and plants more prone to disease.

About 40 years ago, alpine strawberries were hybridized with garden strawberries, with the resulting plants showing typical hybrid vigor with larger fruits and more robust growth. The variety Florika was one of those hybrids, billed as having very good flavor and sufficient vigor and disease resistance so that it can be planted to create a fruiting meadow. Sara and Rebecka are two other hybrids. (Unfortunately, all are red-fruited.)

I’ve never grown any of these hybrids, but will — very soon. Stay tuned.

Small, But Very Easy to Grow

Alpine strawberries are not the strawberries to grow to fill your freezer for winter. Unless you have a lot of patience, that is, because the berries are small, typically about the size of a dime. (The hybrids bear larger fruits, measuring over an inch long.)

You also will rarely, if ever, find the ripe fruits for sale. If they are truly ripe, they are very, very soft, and very, very perishable. The only way to truly experience these berries them is to grow them yourself (easy) and then harvest them dead ripe (pretty easy).

The plants thrive in moderately rich, well-drained soil in full sun or partial shade. In pots, any basic potting mixture will suffice. Potted alpine strawberriesA planting can be started from plants or seeds, the latter started just as are tomatoes. Plants grown from seeds planted in spring will begin bearing their first season.

New plants can also be made by dividing old plants, cutting the crown into pieces along with their attached roots. As with many herbaceous perennials, division or starting new plants is a necessity as plants age and their centers become woody and decrepit.

As far as timely harvest, one way is to follow your nose; the berries are extremely fragrant when ripe. Look at the berries: Ripe ones turn from white to creamy yellow, and their seeds darken to brown. Just the gentlest coaxing removes a ripe fruit from its stem.

Scrumptious!!

A number of gardeners grow alpine strawberries, the red-fruited kinds, which come in a number of varieties. There are, likewise, many varieties of white-fruited alpine strawberries. One year I decided to see just how different these varieties are from one another.Red and white-fruited alpine strawberriesIt turned out that all the red-fruited ones were similar, as were the white-fruited ones. For me, the white ones definitely had better flavor. And the flavor could be enjoyed. Why? Because until they are dead ripe, alpine strawberries have taste somewhat akin to cotton soaked in lemon juice. Problem is that birds are very attracted to, and eat, the red fruits no care as to whether or not the berries are dead ripe.

Birds don’t notice the white fruits when they are ripe so leave them alone for our enjoyment.

A few days ago, when I again saw Rachel, I offered her some more carefully picked fruit. She put them in her mouth, blinked and then open her eyes wide, and exclaimed, “Wow!” That’s the usual reaction to the fruit. Ripe, the white fruits are sweet and richly aromatic with a commingling of scrumptious flavors of strawberry and pineapple.

———————————————

Any gardening questions? Email them to me at garden@leereich.com and I’ll try answering them directly or in this column. Come visit my garden at www.leereich.com/blog.

Grape Futures

My Rationale for Pruning so Late

Today I put the finishing touches on pruning my grapevines. Yes, it’s late: The buds have already swollen and expanded into clusters of small leaves. But there’s “method in my madness,” or, at least, my tardiness.

Vanessa grapes

Vanessa grapes

My vines often experience some winter damage, some varieties — New York Muscat, Reliance, and Vanessa, for instance — more than others. Waiting to prune until I see some green saves me from cutting off too many living canes and saving too many dead canes. In winter it’s not so easy to tell them apart.

So I do mostly rough pruning in winter, lopping back canes that have to go whether they’re living or dead. Canes also need to be shortened, even those that are to be eventually saved.

Which brings me to another reason I left the final pruning until today. Plants generally make their earliest growth in the season starting at the tips of shoots or canes. So when I shortened the remaining canes in winter, I didn’t cut them all the way back to their final length. Then if a late frost nips or kills early growth, it’s no problem. The canes are going to be shortened even further — today — to where buds were not as fully awake and susceptible to cold.

But waiting too, too long to prune can be problematic because those swollen buds flick off their resident canes with very little coaxing. Leave too much to prune this time of year and a lot of buds fly off as pruned canes are pulled down off the plant.

Why Prune? How?

A grapevine bears fruit near the bases of shoots that grow off one-year-old canes. Left to its own devices, the vine might grow 50 feet up into a tree, bear so heavily that it can’t provide sufficient energy to pump optimum flavor into each berry, and become a dark, dank, tangled mess of stems — perfect conditions for fungal diseases.
The goal of various methods of training and pruning grapes are the same: to leave a suitable number of canes conveniently positioned for harvest; to provide buds to grow into new, well-placed shoots for fruiting the following season; and to create a form that allows for good light and air circulation. As might be expected of a plant that’s been cultivated for thousands of years, many ways have been devised for training grapes.

The Four-arm Kniffin System is a kind of “cane pruning,” a traditional method of training in eastern U.S.. For support, a two-wire trellis, with one wire 6 feet and the other wire 3 feet above ground, is needed. The mature plant consists of a trunk with four canes growing from it, two trained in opposite directions along the upper wire and two similarly trained along the lower wire.

Pruning begins as four canes to carry the season’s fruits are selected. These canes should be moderately vigorous and originate close to the trunk and near the wires. With this year’s fruiting canes selected, plans for the following season’s crop are made by cutting back some stems to two buds each; these renewal spurs, as they are called, provide points of origin for new shoots (which will become fruiting canes in a year) near the two wires and on either side of the trunk.

Next, lop away all growth except for the four renewal spurs and the four saved canes. Finally, shorten each of the canes to about 6 ft. in length, leaving about 10 buds per cane (not counting bud clusters near the bases of the canes). This leaves ten times four, or 40, fruiting buds on the plant.

Many Methods with the Same Goal 

At the other extreme in pruning is “spur pruning,” where all that’s left is many 2-bud canes (now called “spurs”) from which grow fruiting shoots. “Head training” would be the most basic spur pruning, with the pruned vine left with nothing more than a trunk capped by a number of spurs.
A spur-pruned vine might instead sport a permanent trunk topped by two arms — permanent arms, called “cordons,” in this case — that run in opposite directions along a trellis wire.

Instead of leaving 4 long canes on which to bear fruit, many short, 2-bud canes are left along the cordons. To get the same number, 40, of fruiting shoots on a spur-pruned vine as on a Kniffen-pruned vine, twenty 2-bud spurs are left. All excess are cut away so that those that remain are 6 to 12 inches from their neighbors. Over time, some spurs will stretch, even after being shorted to 2 buds of one-year-old shoots, further away from the cordon. Lopping these back nearer the cordon puts them back in order.

Where to put all those fruiting shoots growing from the spurs? With “midwire” cordon training, cordons are trained along a wire at 3 foot height, and new shoots are trained upward by weaving them into 3 rows of wires strung at one foot above the cordon wire.
With “high-cordon” training, a trunk rising to about 6 feet is capped by two cordons trained in opposite directions along a wire. Fruiting shoots droop downward.High wire double cordon spur pruned grape
My grapes grow as high cordons, with a wrinkle; their fruiting shoots spread horizontally, rather than droop down. Wooden cross pieces provide this support on my arbor. Although this rigorous pruning puts off how soon the arbor offers relief from early summer sun, the arbor never becomes a tangled mess of stems and disease-ridden berries characteristic of many helter-skelter pruned grape arbors.

The trellis for my other high-cordons have two sets of wires running parallel on either side and one and three feet from the cordon’s wire. These wires provide a ledge on which fruiting shoots can rest, with clusters of grapes dangling just high enough for me to reach for easy harvest.

TIME TRAVEL

18th Century, Here I Come!

Is that me playing the fife? No.

I just returned from time travel one month forward and a couple hundred years backward. Both at the same time! I did this with a trip to Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, where black locust trees were in full bloom, which is about a month ahead of when they will be blooming up here in New York’s Hudson Valley.

The impetus for this time travel was Colonial Williamsburg’s Annual Garden Symposium, at which I was one of the presenters. (I did presentations on espalier fruit plants and on growing fruits in small gardens.)

Williamsburg is a magical place anytime of year, and especially so, for me, in spring. (I first fell in love with the place on a family trip when I was 7 years old; on subsequent visits, I’ve forgone the three-cornered hat I wore on that first trip.)

The governor's garden

The governor’s garden

The Symposium included tours through many of the colonial gardens, where we  could see, in action, “colonial” gardeners caring for their plants — in many cases using some of the same techniques we use today. Glass cloches, for instance, covered portions of some gardens to hasten warming of the soil for earlier sprouting of seeds. Colonial vegetable gardeners at workFlowering meads of herbs, flowers, and grasses blanketed the ground beneath most of the orchards, providing — probably unknown back in colonial days — forage for beneficial insects to help protect crop plants.

The flowers and vegetables — and fruits in the orchards — are the kinds and varieties grown in colonial times: cardoon, cornflower, chives, cockscomb, pot marigold, nasturtium, hollyhock, Johnny-jump-up, Tennis Ball lettuce, Yellow Crookneck squash, chard, and, of course, corn. Field corn, probably, but also, possibly, sweet corn, which was first given by the Iroquois to settlers in the late 18th century.

Espalier apple trees border vegetable plots

Espalier apple trees border vegetable plots

The gardens in Williamsburg provided and provide more than just sustenance. As in the orchards, flowers mingle with crop plants, in this case, vegetables. Most yards in the reconstructed town are one-half acre, with the land separated into sections with white wood fencing. The whole effect is très charmante. Couple that look with the lack of automobiles within the reconstructed town, and the quiet nights illuminated by the soft glow of fire and candle light (supplemented by electric lights with a candle-like glow), and I think I may want to move back into the 18th century.

Wall Envy

One problem I had with Colonial Williamsburg was wall envy. The church on Duke of Gloucester street, the governor’s mansion, and some other public spaces were enclosed by beautiful brick walls capped with functional and decorative rounded brick.

Most of the homes were covered with white-painted, wooden clapboards. The church and the governor’s mansion were made of brick, which, obviously, harmonized well with their brick walls. Brick wallsMy own home is brick; even a few four-foot-high walls around my vegetable garden and in other areas would improve the general appearance — and provide, warmer microclimates for cold-tender plants or early harvests. Not that the rustic locust fencing and arbors enclosing my vegetable garden look unsightly . . . but I’d like some brick walls.

Incidentally, bricks are made on site at one of the many trades demonstrated within the reconstructed town. I stopped in at the gun shop and stayed soaking up history I never learned in school — how most colonists owned relatively inaccurate muskets which were good enough for hunting and keeping varmints out of gardens, and the real sharpshooters were those with “long rifles,” that is, firearms with rifled barrels that spun their lead shot. But winning a battle wasn’t all about sharpshooters. Long rifles took much longer to reload than muskets, and which side threw the most lead in the air often was what decided who won.

(As part of my immersing myself in 18th century life, I signed up to go to a shooting range to actually fire a flintlock musket. This event, as recorded with 21st century technology, a phone, is documented Musket shooting1, Williamsburg, Musket shooting2, Williamsburg.)

Bricks, rifles, furniture: all these trades are practiced as they would have been in the 18th century. The rifle maker begins his work with nothing more than a block of wood and a block of iron. Four-hundred  hours later, he has in hand a finished rifle. Fabric artisans begin with a sheep or flax seeds and some natural dyes. Cabinetmakers begin with trees or rough cut wood. Their tools are the same as those that to which their 18th century forebears had access.

Plant Envy

In addition to my wall envy, I also experienced the usual plant envy that afflicts me when I go south. Southern magnolia tree reach majestic proportions in Williamsburg; I would like to, but cannot, grow them in this cold climate. Crape myrtle is another, for its flowers and its bark mottled in pastel shades; too cold here for this one also.

I did come upon a number of specimens of fringe tree (Chionanthus spp.), with which I’m only vaguely familiar. The fringes of white blossoms dangling in profusion from the branches made me want to become more familiar, i.e. to plant, this shrubby tree. It turns out that I could — and will — grow fringe tree.Sheep and a barn