Winter’s Comin’

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Ready of Ol’ Man Winter

October 31st, was slated to be the first hard frost of the season, later than ever. That afternoon, I went down my checklist of things to do in preparation for the cold.

Drip irrigation needed to be shut down so that ice wouldn’t damage the lines. I opened up the drains at the ends and at the low points of the main lines. I also  opened up the valves on all the drip lines so water wouldn’t get trapped anywhere. Some people blow out all the lines with compressed air.

The only parts of the drip system that ever need to be brought indoors are the parts near the spigot: the battery-powered timer, the pressure reducer, and the filter.

But I wasn’t yet finished with water. All hoses got drained, with any sprayers or hose wands removed from their ends. Hoses were also removed from frost-free hydrants to let the water drain freely out their valves. (The hydrants are frost free because water drains and enters the hydrant’s pipe four feet below ground, where temperatures, even in winter, remain at a balmy 50° F. or so.)

Tropical plants indoors

Tropical plants indoors

Moving on to plants . . . Tropical houseplants had all been brought inside, but outside still remained subtropicals, including some potted figs, pomegranates, bay laurel, olive, and an angel’s trumpet (Brugsmansia). Subtropical plants can tolerate, even enjoy, temperatures below freezing, even down as low as 10°F. for some of them. My pomegranates, the varieties Kazake and Salavatski, both from western Asia, are reputedly cold-hardy to below 0°F! All these subropicals will enjoy the great outdoors for a few more weeks, barring a drastic change in the weather.

Some vegetables remaining out in the garden can likewise weather cold weather well. Just to make sure, though, I laid “floating row covers” over beds of endive, mustard greens, and lettuce. These diaphanous coverings keep plants beneath them a few degrees warmer while letting light and water filter through. The soil retains enough heat to protect roots of turnip and winter radishes, which are further protected beneath their leafy canopies.

I forgot to pick and eat Sungold tomatoes, which would be done for after a freezing night. Any red peppers still left on the plants had been harvested; those plants would also be dead on the morrow. I can’t complain; the Sungolds and the peppers bore well and for a longer time than ever before.

The final cold prep was to check the greenhouse, making sure window, sidewalls, and doors are closed up tight, and the heater is functional.

I’m ready for Ol’ Man Winter.

Not So Cold

The morning after: The cold turned out to be not nearly as dramatic as expected. A little before sunrise a cloud cover crept over the sky, tucking in the earth’s warmth rather than letting it radiate out to a clear sky. The low temperature for the night was 28°F. Even the pepper and tomato plants had toughened up enough by then to tolerate that amount of cold. Not to keep ripening good-tasting fruit, though.

Temperatures aren’t predicted to drop near freezing for many days after that night, but I didn’t consider my scurrying around to move or cover plants, and drain water lines, to be wasted effort. Endives and other greens still out in the vegetable garden transpire very little water in cool weather, and even less so when covered with floating row covers.

The only watering needed from then on would be of the compost pile, easily accessible from one of the frost-free hydrants and a short length of hose, connected as needed.

“Trip” to the Mediterranean

Greenhouse temperatures dropped only to 40°F, the temperature at which I set the thermostat. Cloudy days in there are like today are akin to winter days along the Mediterranean: Very cool and somewhat dreary. On sunny days, I open the greenhouse door to bathe in a tropical paradise of sunlight, heat, and high humidity, with lush plants of lettuce, mustard, arugula, celery, chard, claytonia, and parsley blanketing the ground. Greenhouse fig and greens

Fig trees in the greenhouse have slowly eased their way into dormancy. I hurried them along by lopping them back — except for the few branches still ripening a few fruits. Those figs, ripening in low sun and cooler weather (even in the greenhouse), aren’t as tasty as those of summer and early autumn. I wonder how tasty November figs are in Italy and Greece?

 

Grapes And Onions

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So Many Choices, In Grapes

With over 5,000 varieties of grapes from which to choose, how can anyone decide which to grow? For better or worse, that choice is naturally limited by climate and pests in each part of the country. Here in the northeast, major limitations are humid summers that spread indigenous disease and frigid winter temperatures.

There’s still plenty of grape varieties from which to choose, which I’ve done over the years, weeding out varieties that would succumb to cold or disease. My varietal possibilities are further limited by my low lying land close to acres upon acres of forest. Cold, moisture-laden air sinks into this low spot, and the abundance of wild grapes clambering up forest trees provide a nearby reservoir of insects and disease spores.

With all that, I want to grow varieties that taste good to me (fresh, not for wine). I have dairy farmer-cum-grape breeder Elmer Swenson to thank for many of the delectable varieties that bear well here, and that I would recommend to others. His Somerset Seedless was ripe back in August, as was his seeded Swenson Red. Right now, the seeded variety Brianna — one of my favorites for flavor — is just finishing, just after Edelweiss and Lorelei.

Swenson Red Grape

Edelweiss has the strong, “foxy” flavor characteristic of American-type grapes, so is not for everyone. That flavor is most familiar in the well-known variety Concord, originated by Ephraim Bull in Concord Massachusetts over 150 years ago. I finally got around to planting a Concord vine a few years ago, and finally decided this year, despite my affinity for grape foxiness, that I didn’t like Concord’s flavor.

Edelweiss grape

Edelweiss grape

Mr. Swenson isn’t responsible for all my favorite grapes. There’s Alden, with a nice, meaty texture to go with its distinctive flavor. And two excellent, seedless grapes: Glenora and Vanessa. I’m going to rip Concord out of the ground, as well as Cayuga White, which also didn’t make the flavor cut, and Mars, which gets too much disease, and replace them with additional vines of Glenora and Vanessa. The jury is still out on Wapanuka, Reliance, and NY Muscat.

Concord grape

Concord grape

All my “keeper” varieties bear reasonably well and are bursting with distinctive, delicious flavors such that I cannot, even when grape season has passed, bring myself to eat the relatively flavorless varieties generally offered from supermarket shelves.

Rotting Onions

How are your onions holding up? Mine, not so well. I knew that the giant Ailsa Craig onions weren’t keepers. But they shouldn’t be already turning soft and smelly.

Some sleuthing uncovered the culprits: the bacteria, Pantoea agglomerans and/or its cousin P. ananatis, both of which can be lumped together in the affliction called “center rot.” The symptom is rotting of one of the rings (scales) somewhere between the center and the outside of a bulb.Onion center rot

Most plant diseases are caused by fungi rather than bacteria, and fungal diseases are generally easier to control. Even pesticide sprays are not very effective against either onion pathogen. Warm, moist conditions are what have allowed the Pantoea cousins to thrive this year.

Which is not to say that I plan to sit back and watch my onions spoil in future years, or give up growing onions. I already rotate my onion plantings, which would have been my first plan of attack. Although now that I think of it, though, I do often stick a few of various types of onions and excess seedlings here and there around the garden. No more.

The environment can be made less friendly to the bacterium. Mulching the plants would keep the soil cooler. Especially a few weeks before harvest, any watering should cease. Nitrogen fertilization also needs reining in, which would be hard to do in my garden because I fertilize only with compost. Perhaps mulching would cool the soil enough to slow the compost’s mineralization of soluble nitrogen that plants could absorb.

Onion varieties vary in their susceptibility to center rot. Generally, it is the sweet, European type varieties, such as Sweet Spanish, Candy, and Ailsa Craig, that are most susceptible.

Harvest can play a role also. Too early, before leaves have sufficiently dried and flopped down, and the bacteria might be able to edge its way into the bulb. I normally harvest when tops flop down and bulbs easily roll out of the soil (good), then leave them in place to cure in the sun (bad). Next year, I’ll roll them out of the soil and then move them to a shaded, airy place to cure. Or lay them out in the garden so each onion’s leaves covers its neighboring onion’s bulb.

All these measures are worthwhile even if your onions have always looked fine. Center rot bacteria are pretty much ubiquitous, just waiting for good enough conditions to ruin your (and my) onions.

Some Good, Some Bad

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Picking Pecks and Pecks of Peppers

Warm — no, hot — weather going on and on keeps tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers chugging along, restrained only by diminished sunshine. Still, before real autumn weather rolls in and decimates these warmth-loving plants, it’s time to do some evaluation of this season before it fades into memories that meld with previous seasons.

As usual, there are successes and failures. Good — no, great — are this year’s peppers. I credit the rousing success mostly to My choice of two varieties. The first was an old variety, Sweet Italia, aka Sweet Italian or Italian Sweet. Other varieties are available with similar names; the names are similar, but not the same, as are the fruits.

Sweet Italia has two problems: The seed is hard to find; and the plants flop over under their weight of fruit. Both problems are easily solved: Save seed (Sweet Italia is not a hybrid, so seeds come “true” as long as the plants are sufficiently distant from other pepper varieties); stake the plants. Sweet Italia is especially notable for bearing large and relatively early crops of deliciously sweet red peppers even under northern growing conditions. It’s much, much tastier than Sweet Ace, which is often grown commercially as an early ripening, sweet red pepper.Italia, Escamillo pepper

The other pepper variety of note is Escamillo, larger than Sweet Italia and also delicious, in a different way. Escamillo, bred by Johnny’s Selected Seeds, ripens yellow. Like Sweet Italia, Escamillo is a corno di toro, shaped like the horn of a bull.

Blight!!

Balancing my peppery successes are two failures celery and celeriac. Plants looked healthy from the time I sowed seed, indoors in February, until the transplants went out in the garden, in early May. It was downhill from there.

Plants are stunted and their leaves are spotted by disease. The spots are very distinctive, tan with black edges, and angular in outline. The tan areas lacked pycnidia, small, black propagules visible with the naked eye, so the disease is not one of the fungal diseases that afflict celery and celeriac.Celery bacterial blight

A web search of symptoms and images identified the problem as bacterial blight (Pseudomonas syringae pv. apii). Cool, wet weather exacerbates the condition, and we did have some of that this summer. The fungus can also spend the winter in the soil, which makes a good case for crop rotation, not planting any member of a family of plants in the same place oftener that every 3 years. I did move my celery and celeriac far from previous two locations, though.

I’m pinning the blame on seedling flats that were not sufficiently cleaned. Usually, I just give them a rinse after use; next year they’ll also get a spritzing with alcohol. 

Infected seed could also have been the culprit — doubtfully in my garden. The celeriac seed was from a reputable nursery. What’s more, the celery seed comes from my own plants, in the greenhouse. Those plants also self-seed in the greenhouse, and the volunteer plants that come up in the greenhouse look fine. (I thin them out, letting the best ones grow to provide celery all winter, and then self-seed again in spring.)

If infected, seed could be de-contaminated with a hot water treatment, 122°F for 25 minutes. Or with time. Seeds more than two years old don’t carry disease.

Other plans for next year are to be even more thorough with end-of-season cleanup of beds and to rip out of the ground any plants suspected of harboring disease as soon as noticed.

As a last resort, copper sprays, which are approved for organic use, could be applied. I probably won’t do that; it takes the fun out of just popping fresh vegetables into your mouth in among the beds. I have plenty of other good stuff to eat out there.

A Fruitful Season

In fruits, pears have been outstanding this year. Not because of any greenness of my thumb; everybody around here had good crops of pears. Must be something about the weather.

Also outstanding have been grapes. Again, not because of the greenness of my thumb, but because I have so many vines and so many different varieties. Despite weather conducive to diseases, there were — and still are — plenty of good grapes for eating.

Flowers did fine this year, except Lemon Gem marigolds, one flower that I try each year to sow enough of to define the leading edges of the beds in the vegetable garden.Lemon Gem in path They typically germinate poorly for me, but they occasionally self-seed. I couldn’t bear to remove the few that popped up in the main path near the leading edges of the beds. Their general absence makes those few all the more outstanding.

Taste And Aroma

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Old Peaches

The peaches on a friend’s tree were small, marred with bacterial spot disease, and still showed some green on their skins. So burdened with fruits was the tree that it had burst asunder from their weight, splitting one of the main limbs.

Still, the friend insisted that the peaches tasted good. As further enticement, the tree had a history, having sprouted on the grounds of a nearby 18th century house that had an orchard. The tree was evidently cold hardy also. So I twisted one fruit off and took a bite. In spite of being not quite ripe, the fruit was delicious, quite sweet — as is usual with white peaches such as these — and with an old-fashioned, intensely peachy flavor.Heirloom peach

I took up the offer to take a small bag of them home with me. And not only for eating. My plan is to save the seeds from many of them for planting and for making into new trees that should taste very much like their mother tree. Peaches are self-pollinating, in contrast to apples and pears, so progeny often resemble their parent. Peaches also bear within just a few years from seed so I could weed out some or all plants whose fruits were not up to snuff.

The first step to a peachy future was to crack open the shells surrounding each seed, and then drop the seeds into a plastic bag filled with potting soil on the workbench in my unheated garage.

In their natural environment, peach seeds ripen in summer but wouldn’t sprout until spring. If they sprouted immediately, winter cold would likely kill the very young seedling. Hormones within the seeds sense when winter has ended by the number of accumulated hours at cool (30 to 45°F) temperatures.

The number of hours depends on the genetics of the tree but for most hardy fruit trees, about 1000 hours, or about a month and a half, does the trick. And I do intend to trick them, to give them an early start on the season, indoors. The more they grow each season, the sooner they bear.

I’d like them to sprout in early March, so will put the bag of potting soil and peach seeds into my refrigerator in early December. Once they sprout, I’ll pot a few up and, once they emerge from the soil, move them to the sunniest window or the greenhouse, then, when weather warms, outdoors.

It’s a Weed, It’s a Garden Plant, It’s a . . .

Some plants straddle the fence of being defined as a weed. Case in point is Sweet Annie. On looks alone, the plant could easily fall to one side of the fence, qualifying only as a weed. It’s nothing more than a nondescript, upright plant — until it bends over from it’s own weight — that’s green, clumps of them sprouting all over the place. Despite being a member of the Daisy Family of plants, Sweet Annie’s flowers are small, pale green, and not notable.Sweet Annie

I, and many other gardeners, grow the plant for its rich, resiny aroma. Bundles of them are for sale from many farms at Maine’s Common Ground Fair; it’s the signature aroma there. So I also grow Sweet Annie to bring me back, olfactorily speaking, to my good times at the Fair.

As a sometime weed, Sweet Annie is, of course, easy to grow. I first planted it 3 years ago, sowing it, unnecessarily, in pots for later transplanting. No need to plant it again; it self-seeds enthusiastically, my job now being to contain that enthusiasm. 

Amazing how that plant can move around. It managed to find its way from the back of my house to the front of my house without going around either side. It manages to sprout in spaces between the bricks of my terraces holding the thinnest slivers of soil.

Sweet Annie is sometimes cultivated as a row crop for harvest and extraction of artemisinin, which has some medicinal uses. As for me, I just weed out plants in the wrong place (as defines a weed), and harvest a few bunches to hang near the door for an olfactory treat as I brush past it.  

How Pesky And Interesting

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Snowflakes? No.

Gardening never ceases to be interesting, even if the current object of interest is a pest. Not just any pest, but a NEW pest! And not just for me.

I was alerted to this pest when pulling a few weeds near my Brussels sprouts plants. Brushing against their leaves brought a cloud of what looked like fine snowflakes. They were, in fact, whiteflies, tiny (1.5 mm) fluttering insects, immediately recognizable to me from their common occurrence on houseplants.

Cabbage whitefly

Cabbage whitefly

Whiteflies rarely show up on outdoor plants; in my experience, never. Easy enough to discover on the web, my whiteflies are appropriately named cabbage whiteflies (Aleyrodes protella). This native of Europe first turned up in the U.S. in 1993, but is rare in the Hudson Valley. It’s fond of all cabbages relatives, with a preference for kale. Not in my garden, though; kale, sharing the bed with the Brussels sprouts, is hardly attacked.

The attack seems mild, most evident, besides the snow clouds, as some black, sooty mold on the plants. Sooty mold is a fungus that feeds on the sweet exudate the insect drips on the plant. It’s only on the surface of the leaf so is harmless unless it becomes so dense that the leaf is shaded.

Cabbage whitefly isn’t easily controlled with chemical pesticides. I’m not worried, though, because the level of damage doesn’t warrant my lifting a finger against them.

If some control is needed before the season ends, sprays of either insecticidal soap or horticultural oils are effective — and won’t disrupt the whiteflies’ natural insect and fungal enemies, of which there are plenty. Cleaning up the bed at the end of the season also helps, for next year. Yellow-colored cards coated with something sticky, like Tangletrap, also could offer some control. For now, though, I’m just watching them flit about each time I draw near.

Peach Harvest

The peach crop got harvested a few days ago, all two of them. The tree is small, but not that small; it could have supported a couple of gallons of peaches.

This was a good season for peaches. Unfortunately, my farmden is not a good site for fruit. Insect pests can move in from the woods only 50 feet from the trees, and the low lying ground acts like a basin into which cold air can collect. That cold air brings late frosts (not this year), and moister air in which fungal diseases fester. Those are my excuses for my two-peach harvest.

On the other hand, my investment in the tree has been minimal. The tree grew from a peach pit. Sow an apple seed and the tree might take 10 years before it yields its first fruit. And then, after that long wait, the chance of that fruit tasting good is only about one in 10,000.Sprouting peach pit

Sow a peach seed, and the tree might bear in 4 years. The fruit on that tree is likely to taste quite good, perhaps great. Peaches are self-pollinating, so there’s no foreign genes introduced into the resulting pit. Not so for apples, which don’t bear fruit unless pollinated by a different variety.

My peaches, by the way, tasted great. And, with gracefully drooping leaves that retain their shiny green color all season long, the tree is very attractive. I am hoping for a larger crop next year.

Ladybugs to the Rescue

Aha. Checked back with the whiteflies on the Brussels sprouts, and what do I see? Some ladybugs dining, moving up and down the leaves. The young larvae are likewise at work along with their parents.Ladybug on cabbage leaf

(The “lady” in ladybug is, by the way, the virgin Mary. The German word for them, Marienkafer, translates also as Marybeetle.)

Among the many species of ladybug, all in the family Coccinellidae, are some that specialize in devouring mites, others specialize in mildews, still others on mealybugs (I mentioned last week purchasing and using them for fig mealybugs), some for scale insects, and so on. Some members of the family feed on plants: squash beetles and Mexican bean beetles, for instance.

I don’t know which species of ladybug is at work on my Brussels sprouts, but I’m happy to have them.

Cabbage whitefly & ladybug larvae

Cabbage whitefly & ladybug larvae

It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, and Pears

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Whoosh!

Whew! How quickly this growing season seems to have scooted by. I am putting the last plants of the season into the vegetable garden today. These were transplants of Shuko and Prize Choy bok choy, and Blue napa cabbage. I’m eyeing some lettuce transplants, and if I decide that they’re sufficiently large to transplant, they’ll share a bed with the cabbages.Chinese cabbage transplants

Reconsidering, the end of the gardening season isn’t really drawing nigh. The cabbages won’t be large enough to make a real contribution to a stir fry or a batch of kim chi for at least another month. And then, with cool weather and shorter days slowing growth, the plants will just sit there in the garden, doing fine, patiently awaiting harvest.

Other plants awaiting harvest into autumn from plantings over the past few weeks are Hakurei turnips, crunchy, sweet, and spicy fresh in salads, daikon and Watermelon radishes, for salads or kim chi, and, also for salads, lettuce, spinach, arugula, and mustard greens. The last salad stuff will be endive, sown back in early July, and transplanted in early August in a bed previously home to the first planting of bush beans.

The season’s various plantings mesh together nicely. Those bok choy and napa cabbages went into a bed just cleared from the first planting of sweet corn. The bed previously planted with of lettuce, arugula, and spinach seed followed on the heels of onions sown indoors in February, transplanted into the bed in May, and harvested a few weeks ago.

A Whole New Garden, Now

In addition to good timing, the autumn garden — which is like having a whole other garden, except it’s in the same place as the summer garden — demands good soil. That soil has to support this whole other wave of plants.

Through summer, I looked upon any weeds I encountered as potential factories for making more weeds, via spreading seeds and/or roots. Left alone, that weed and its progeny would rob food and water meant for my cabbages and lettuces, and shade my plants into submission.

With that in mind, when I cleared the beds of spent corn or bean plants, I pulled out every weed in addition to the spent vegetable plants. I tried to get roots and all for each weed, which isn’t that difficult if you keep up weeding all summer.

After clearing a bed of weeds and vegetable plants, down went a carpet of compost. Spreading compost on bedA one to two inches deep layer smothers most weeds sprouting from seeds as well as provides nourishment for multiple waves of vegetable plants — for a whole year! (Also provides food and habitat for beneficial soil organisms, protects the surface from washing, and increases the soil’s ability to hold on to both air and moisture.)

So the season hasn’t scooted by; the autumn season is just beginning. There’s still some room for reflecting on the season up to this point. Most notable has been this year’s pear crop.

Pears: Easy To Grow, Hard To Harvest (Correctly)

Among the common tree fruits, pears are the easiest to grow. They’re a bit slow to come into production but are often free of significant pest problems. They’re also pretty trees, all season long, especially the Asian pears.

It’s not all smooth sailing from planting to flowering to harvest to eating for European pears, which includes Bartlett, Bosc, Anjou, and other pears with which most people are most familiar. The problem is knowing when to harvest them. Pears ripen from the inside out, so need to be harvested when mature (whenever that is), then ripened in a (preferably cool) room indoors. Left hanging on the tree too long, and the fruit tastes sleepy, at best, or has turned mushy; harvested too soon and the fruit never loses a grassy flavor. (Asian pears are easy to harvest. When they taste good right off the tree, they’re ripe and ready.)

Frederick Clapp pear tree

Frederick Clapp pear tree

Appearance of the fruit, calendar date, and ease of separation from the stem when lifted with a twist are all indicators of ripeness. I’m finding that few fruits dropping from a tree are a good sign that it’s time, or almost time, to harvest.

Pears, A Book

The Book of Pears
As luck would have it, a beautiful new book, The Book of Pears, by Joan Morgan, arrived in the mail just as pear harvest was beginning (with the variety of Harrow Delight). Replete with old and new illustrations depicting the history of pear cultivation, a large portion of the book offers intimate descriptions and history of many varieties. Beurrée d’Amanlis, for instance, which I grow, originated in a small village in Brittany, but became popular after 1826, when Louis Noisette, a Paris nurseryman, received some fruit from his son, director of the Nantes Botanic Garden.

The book devotes a little space to growing and cooking the fruit. I, of course, immediately looked to see what Ms. Morgan has to say about harvest: “ . . . the next challenge is when to harvest the crop . . . Once they begin to drop from the tree it is time to harvest . . . Experience with your own trees will tell you when to pick.” How true. I’ve grown the variety Magness longest, and usually can pick them to ripen off the tree to perfection. And perfection for Magness means biting into one of the best tasting of all pears.

The Destroyer To The Rescue

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Predatory Helpers

Some of the figs — the varieties Rabbi Samuel, Brown Turkey, and San Piero — started ripening last week. With their ripening, I am now in a position to claim victory over the mealybugs that have invaded my greenhouse fig-dom for the past few years.
Mealybugs look, unassumingly, like tiny tufts of white cotton, but beneath their benign exteriors are hungry insect. They injects their needle-like probiscis into stems, fruits, and leaves, and suck life from the plants, or at least, weaken the plants and make the fruits hardly edible.

Over the years I’ve battled the mealybugs at close quarters. I’ve scrubbed down the dormant plants with a tooth brush dipped in alcohol (after the plants were pruned heavily for winter). I’ve tried repeated sprays with horticultural oil. I put sticky bands around the trunks to slow traffic of ants, which “farm” the mealybugs. And I’ve rubbed them to death with my fingers when I came across them on the stems. All to no avail. The mealybugs always made serious inroads into the harvest.

Mealybugs finally have been quelled this season thanks to another insect, the aptly named “mealybug destroyer” (Cryptolaemus montrouzieri), available from www.insectary.com. To soldier along with the mealybug destroyer, I also ordered some green lacewing (Chrysoperla rufilabris) eggs. Besides attacking the mealybugs, the lacewings prey on aphids, seizing the aphids in their large jaws, injecting a paralyzing venom into them, and then sucking out their body fluids. With good reason, lacewings are also called aphid lions.

Mealybug destroyer

Mealybug destroyer

I ordered the first batch of predators in early summer. After recently noticing a buildup of mealybugs again, I ordered another batch. The mealybug destroyer and aphid lion populations may have plummeted after they ate all the bad guys, or they may have found their way to greener pastures via the many openings in the greenhouse.

The smallest amount of either pest that could be purchased could have policed a greenhouse much larger than mine, so the predators were relatively expensive: about $80 per shipment, with shipping. Still, I estimate the potential ripening of about 160 figs, which brings their cost to $1 per fig. Not bad for a dead ripe, juicy, ambrosial fruit that, with each bite, transports me back thousands of years to the Fertile Crescent, where figs originated.

Help From The Queen

A visitor to my greenhouse might have thought it looked weedy this summer. Tall flower stalks of Queen Anne’s lace grew with abandon, cilantro flowered and then their seed heads flopped down willy nilly, lettuce grew bitter as the plants bolted, and mustard greens shot up stalks capped with yellow flowers. There was reason for this wild wantonness.
The purpose of all these flowers was to encourage the adult mealybug destroyers and aphid lions to stick around. Flowers of plants in the Carrot Family, such as Queen Ann’s Lace and cilantro, the Daisy Family, such as lettuce, and the Mustard Family, such as, of course, mustard, provide nectar and pollen that the predators enjoy.Queen anne's laceThe Carrot Family Helps Out

I also encouraged beneficial insects outdoors, in my vegetable gardens, by growing or, at least, letting grow, some of these same plants.

Add to that list dill, another member of the Carrot Family, which I always let flower and set seed in the garden. Those seeds become next year’s dill plants with no extra effort on my part except to weed out excess self-sown seedlings.

For some reason, dill did not self-seed in the garden the past two years, so this year I bought and planted seed. “Planted” might be too specialized a term for what I did. In fact, I just tore open the packet of seeds, poured them into my hand, and waved my hand as I let the seeds fly. Like magic, seeds sprouted a few weeks later.
This season’s dill not only encouraged beneficial insects and provided some ferny leaves and seed heads for flavoring, but also provided beauty. The variety was ‘Fernleaf,’ which grows dwarf, compact plants that also are slower to make flower heads. Perhaps it was the compactness of the flat heads of greenish yellow flowers or the denser backdrop of green leaves, but the plants captured my attention every time I walked by them. Still do, because they’re still blooming.Fernleaf dill

Queen Anne’s Lace also appeared in my garden with no extra effort on my part. Not only from self-seeding, as a weed. But also from an occasional rogue carrot seed from those I planted. Queen Anne’s Lace and carrot are the same genus and species, carrots having been selected and bred to make fatter, juicier, tastier, and orange-er (or, these days, purple-er) roots.

Here, at least, this season was particularly welcoming of QueenAnne’s Lace. The meadow next to the vegetable gardens has been dotted white with an abundance of their flowering heads.

The Bad and the Good

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Winecaps, Not For Me

My successes with growing shiitake mushrooms emboldened me, this past spring, to venture further afield, to wine cap mushrooms (Stropharia rugosoannulata). After all, it’s been billed as “prized, delicious” and “edible when young.”

Their quick production also prompted me to give them a try. As a matter of fact, my spring “planting” started bearing a couple of weeks ago. A bed can also be refreshed or a new bed can be inoculated from an old bed for repeat performances.Stropharia mushroom

Let’s go back to spring, to my planting. Wine caps grow very well in wood chip mulch, something that’s aplenty on my farmden. My berry bushes are mulched, my pear trees are mulched, as are the paths in my vegetable gardens. Why not do double duty with those mulches?

A few years ago, I attempted just that, laying a thick mulch of chips atop my asparagus bed in spring. Two problems: The thick mulch almost killed the plants, and the weather was very dry for weeks on end. Mushrooms need moisture.

This past spring, I pulled back twigs and other debris from a patch of ground beneath a Norway spruce tree and laid down a few inches of hardwood chip mulch. After sprinkling the purchased spawn over the mulch, I topped everything with another inch or two of, this time, wood shavings.

For this spring’s planting, I also decided to water, so set up a sprinkler. Rain fell pretty consistently all season long, obviating the need for further watering.

The tasting: To me, the mushrooms were tasteless. Sure, I could have sautéed them with butter and garlic; then they would have tasted like butter and garlic. (Disclaimer: Your results may differ from mine.)

My taste for wine cap mushrooms went down another notch when I more recently read a caution to eat them moderately and not more than two days in a row. My yard abounds with plenty of other good tasting, healthful food, so I’ll pass on the wine caps.

Seaberries For Me

On to more tasty items. Seaberries (Hippophae rhamnoides). The harvest is in, the first harvest from my 2013 planting. I wanted them for juice and, on the recommendation of seaberry expert Jim Gilbert of www.onegreenworld.com, planted Titan, Leikora, and Orange Energy.

Seaberry plants are either male or female. Only female plants bear fruit; to do so, they need pollen from a nearby male, which I also planted. One male can sire up to 8 females.

Seaberry, Titan

Seaberry, Titan

In addition to yielding very healthful berries, seaberries further earn their keep as landscape plants. (I’ve seen them planted as ornamentals in New York City’s Battery Park.) The bush’s thin, olive green leaves are the perfect backdrop for the bright orange berries, clustered thickly right along the stems.

And there’s the rub. Long, sharp thorns also cluster along the stems, making harvest a potentially painful proposition.

I used the method Jim recommended for harvest, and that is to cut stems heavily laden with berries into 6 inch long pieces, put them into a covered plastic tub, and then freeze them. The frozen berries came off the stems when the tub was shaken vigorously. All I had to do then was to pick out the stems, and then winnow the leaves from the fruit in front of a fan.

The berries are now back in the freezer, to be made into juice at my leisure. That’ll involve cooking them in a little water, mashing them with a potato masher, and then straining. My previous planting yielded a delicious juice once diluted with 1/8 part water and sweetened with 1/8 part maple syrup or honey.Seaberry juice

This season’s juice should be even better because the berries taste better than the previous varieties I planted. Especially good — even straight from the bush — in the new planting is the variety Titan. Seaberry generally tastes, to me, like very rich orange juice with the addition of pineapple or passionfruit. Titan has more of a tangerine-y flavor.

Permaculture-esque

Wine cap mushrooms and seaberries are both plants beloved by permaculturalists. The mushrooms for the little care they need, and their use of mulched ground. The seaberries, also for their low maintenance, their beauty, and their enrichment of the soil with nitrogen.

Seaberry bush

My seaberries are in a permaculturalesque planting, along with elderberry, highbush cranberry, nannyberry viburnum, rugose rose, Korean pine, and aronia. They’re all easy to care for. They’re all very ornamental. The only ones that taste good or yield anything are the seaberry and the rugosa roses.

Picked At Peak Of Perfection

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Tomatoes Vs. Sweet Corn

Some gardeners sit tapping their fingers waiting for the first tomato of the season to finally ripen. I don’t. I’m waiting to sink my teeth into my first-picked ear of sweet corn.

Not that my tomatoes don’t taste really good, but they’re also good all winter dried or canned, as is or as sauce. Or just frozen.

An ear of sweet corn, though, captures the essence of summer. Not just for flavor and texture. It’s the whole ritual of peeling back the husks and snapping them off at their bases, brushing away the silk before steaming the ears, and then, holding an ear at each end, biting off kernels from one end to the other like an old fashioned typewriter carriage. (An image perhaps unknown to readers below a certain age.)

An art to harvesting corn at the just-ripe stage, and anxiousness for that first taste, make harvesting, especially early in the season rather tenuous. I do early planning for that first taste by counting the days-to-maturity from when I planted. Problem is that the days listed on seed packets vary: One seed company lists days to maturity for Golden Bantam, the variety I grow, at 75 days; another lists it at 85 days; another at 78 days; and yet another, more realistically, at 70 to 85 days. It depends on where the variety is grown and how the season develops.

The real countdown begins when tassels first appear atop the stalks. Harvest will be about 3 weeks hence.

Then it’s time to keep an eye out for drying tassels at the end of an ear. Once that happens, the time is near. That right moment is critical because harvested too soon, and the kernels have little taste. And this is among those fruits — yes, corn is a fruit, botanically — that will not ripen at all following harvest. Harvested too late, and the kernels are tough and starchy.

That exact right moment for harvest is when the ear feels “full” when grasped in my hand and a kernel on the peeled-back husk, with the ear still attached to the stalk, oozes a milky fluid when pressed with the thumbnail. If all these systems are go, it’s time to snap off the ear and whisk it to the waiting pot of steaming water.Corn, testing for ripeness
Golden Bantam is a non-hybrid variety. Like other non-hybrids, a planting does not ripen all at once, which is not a good commercial characteristic. It’s fine for me, though, because between staggered plantings and a wide window for harvest for each planting, I intend to be eating Golden Bantam corn, a favorite for many gardeners since its introduction in 1906, for weeks to come.

Watermelon, Are You Ripe

Besides the first harvest of Golden Bantam, which I’ll be enjoying by the time you read this, I’m also eagerly awaiting the first harvest of watermelon, which, according to days-to-maturity listed on the seed packet, 65-75 days, I should have already been eating. (I sowed seeds indoors in pots in mid-May but it’s been a relatively cool growing season.)

While I’m confident in harvesting sweet corn at just the right moment, not so for harvesting watermelon, another fruit that will not ripen at all once harvested. Yes, I know all the published indicators of ripeness: drying up of the tendril closest where the fruit is attached to the vine; a dull thud, rather than a tighter, ringing or hollow sound, when rapped with my knuckles; and a yellow or cream-color of the fruit where it rests against the ground, and a toughening of the skin there, enough to resist indentation with a thumbnail. (The thumbnail is evidently a useful harvest tool.)

A ripe watermelon?

A ripe watermelon?

Still, I’m not confident about harvesting watermelons on time, and not even just the first ones to ripen. The trial and tribulation is worth it. I hope to be harvesting and eating ripe watermelon also by the time you read this. (Update: I did and it was.)

Tomatoes, You Are Ripe

In contrast to harvesting Golden Bantam corn and watermelon (I grow the variety Blacktail Mountain), tomatoes are cinch to harvest. Except for some green-ripe varieties, which I don’t grow, tomatoes turn their characteristic shade of red when ripe.

Tomatoes can even be harvested underripe to ripen off the vine. Research has shown that when a tomato is about half green and half pinkish-red on the vine, a layer of cells form across the stem of the tomato sealing it off from the main vine. Then nothing that can move from the plant into the fruit, so the fruit can ripen to perfection.Ripe tomatoes

I came across some older research (J. Amer. Hort. Soc. 102:724-731. 1977) showing that the best-tasting tomatoes are those thoroughly vine-ripened. Duh. I knew that, and will harvest only vine-ripened tomatoes.

Fruit, Again, With Nod To Michael Jackson

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Blackcaps Redux, This Season

I took a cue from Michael Jackson today when pruning my black raspberry (a.k.a. blackcap) plants. Not that I had to prune them today, or even this time of year. But I couldn’t stand looking at the tangled mass of thorny canes. And, more importantly, the tangled mass would make harvest, slated to begin in a couple of weeks or so, a bloody nightmare.

(Most blackcaps bear only once a year, in early summer, so tidiness would be the main reason to prune conventional blackcaps now. Pruning would also let remaining canes bathe in more light and air, reducing the threat of diseases. My blackcap plants, though, are the two varieties — Niwot and Ohio’s Treasure — that bear twice a year; hence, my pruning now to make picking the soon-to-ripen second crop less intimidating.)

All blackcaps have perennial roots and biennial canes. Typically, the canes just grow their first year, flower and fruit their second year, then die. Niwot and Ohio’s Treasure differ in bearing on both one-year-old canes and on new canes. I picked the early summer crop from canes that grew last year. And now my mouth is watering as I look forward to the late summer crop, which will be borne on canes that just started growing this season.
Pruned blackcaps
Pruning is straightforward. I started by lopping right to ground level all the canes that bore the early summer crop; they’re dying anyway. Step two is reducing the number of new canes, selectively keeping the fattest and healthiest-looking ones, and lopping all others to ground level. Even then, I reduce their number to the best six of them. That’s it. Easy, as long as the thorns are avoided.

My blackcaps are in a row, three feet apart. An iron pipe sunk into the ground next to each plant provides support for each plant’s clump of stems. With pruning finished, I tied a piece of rope to the pipe and then around the clump of stems, a gloved hand cozying the thorny stems into position while my ungloved hand tied the rope, à la Michael Jackson.Tying blackcap with gloved hand

Rotten Plums

I wish that pruning was all that my plum trees needed. With this being such a good year for fruits generally, I was very hopeful for a good crop. And they looked fine up until a week ago, when the fruit started ripening — and rotting.

Brown rot is the culprit, mostly the handiwork of the fungus Monolinia fruticola. Characteristic powdery, gray masses of spores form on the surfaces of rotting fruits, which eventually dry to become “mummies.” Brown rot is not new to me; I’ve experienced it on peaches, nectarines, and plums in the past. It also attacks apricots, cherries, and other “stone fruits” (Prunus genus). Typically, a plant bears well for a couple of years while the fungi are building up, and then full-fledged, annual attacks begin.Brown rot

The usual recommendation to hold the fungus at bay is, first, to remove sources of inoculum by cleaning up all infected fruit in summer and mummies in winter, and pruning away dead, infected twigs. That’s quite a job on a big plum tree.

I sprayed my trees with sulfur many times this past spring. Sulfur is an organically approved fungicide, used by gardeners and farmers for thousands of years, that is effective against brown rot. But only for a few days. Hence my repeated sprays, evidently not repeated enough.

The easiest approach would be for me to grow brown rot resistant varieties.

Plumquest Begins

So now I am embarking on a plumquest, my search for plums that taste good and are resistant to brown rot. Resistant genes must lurk somewhere — actually right in my yard, on the wild plums. They hardly ever show fuzzy grayness; they also don’t taste very good.

I now remember a pertinent page I photocopied many years ago. Shuffling through piles of papers on my desk, I come across the page, from a scientific-looking paper, entitled “Range of known genetic traits in Plum cultivars.” That’s a start, and the list on the page includes one of my favorite plums, the Green Gage, also known as Reine Claude Verte, as resistant. Shiro, which I grow with some success, is only listed as “tolerant.”

My next queststep is on the web, bringing me to a publication entitled “The Cultivated Native Plums and Cherries,” authored by Liberty Hyde Bailey in 1892. I immediately ordered a reprint to make it easier to sort through the many varieties and their gustatory and pest potentials.

Once suitable varieties are identified, the next queststep is to locate trees or, more likely, stems for grafting, to bring here to the farmden. I will report on my plumquest as events unfold.