Fruit – Page 17 – Lee Reich

FRUIT HARVEST, WHEN?

September 29, 2016/7 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Pests/by Lee Reich

Easy to Grow, Hard to Harvest

Of all commonly grown tree fruits, pears are the easiest, mostly because they succumb to fewer pest and weather problems than do other common tree fruits. Of all commonly grown tree fruits, pears are the most difficult to harvest.
Timing is what makes pears so difficult to harvest, a skill I’m ashamed to admit I have yet to master. You can’t time when to pick by taste because pears are among the few fruits that will not ripen well on the tree. They start ripening from their innards outward so by the time the outside of the fruit looks and feels ripe, the innards are brown mush.

Concorde European pear, ripe?

   No need to refer me to the guidelines of experts: The skin should undergo an almost imperceptible change in color, lightening or yellowing. The fruit softens ever so slightly, going from the firmness of a basketball to that of a softball. The fruit stalk separates readily from the stem when the fruit is lifted and given a slight twist. And finally, in my opinion the most obtuse indicator, lenticels (small pores on the skin) change from white and raised to brown and shallow. Yadda, yadda, yadda, . . .
   I grow about 20 varieties of pear, and each of those very subtle indicators are slightly different for one variety to the next.
   Another of my excuses is that most of my varieties are just beginning to bear so I don’t have a lot of fruits from each tree to play around with. I am adept at harvesting those varieties — Magness, Seckel, Harrow Delight — that have borne the most fruit for the most years.

Easy to Grow, Easy to Harvest

Ah, but my horticultural shortcomings don’t extend to all pears. I also grow a few varieties of Asian pears, which differ from the aforementioned and more common European pears in being usually round and of a few different species. Most significantly, Asian pears will ripen to perfection on the tree. In fact, for best flavor, they must remain hanging until dead ripe, at which point they have a “cracking” texture, that is, they are crisp but explode in your mouth with their sweet, ambrosial juice.

Yoinashi Asian pear

The skin of Chojuro, the earliest of my Asian pears, started changing from brown russet to golden yellow russet earlier this month. As a further check to ripeness, I picked a fruit and sunk my teeth into it. Delicious! They’re ripe and hang in good condition to be plucked from the branches, as needed, for a week or two, or they can be harvested in toto and refrigerated. The varieties Yoinashi and Seuri Li will follow shortly here, with Korean Giant following these two varieties next year, when it comes into bearing.
Asian pears are as easy, perhaps even easier, to grow than European pears. They bear at a young age and heavily, often too young and too heavily, which is why it’s necessary to grit your teeth and aggressively thin the fruits. Too heavy a crop stunts young trees or spells small, less flavorful fruits on grown trees. (I devote a whole chapter to Asian pears in my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden.)

And Then There are Grapes

Grapes . . . they’re easy to harvest ripe. Except that most people don’t. Color is but one indicator that a bunch wants to be harvested and eaten (that is, after all, fruits’ raison d’être). But like some other fruits — blueberries, for example — grapes turn their ripe color before they are dead ripe.

Concord grape

So I also pull off a berry or two to taste. The difference in flavor between just ripe and dead ripe is dramatic. And especially so with my bagged grapes, which can segue to the dramatic stage within their bags without threat of predation by birds and bees.
The variety Concord presents an exception to that last statement; birds don’t like the flavor and leave the berries alone. This means the berries don’t have puncture holes that attract bees and wasps, so they also are not a problem. The deterrent in Concord grapes is the chemical methyl anthranilate, which has been formulated as a spray to keep birds at bay. My wife also doesn’t like Concord.

BACTERIA AND FUNGI, AND GRAPES, OH MY

September 15, 2016/7 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Pests/by Lee Reich

Upcoming Fall Fruit Workshop

See web page https://leereich.com/workshops for details.

The River Runs Green

    Crossing the bridge over the Wallkill River on my way home, I glance to my right to admire the river itself. What a beautiful color it has turned, a bright turquoise. Ponds I pass also have taken on this bright complexion, for which we can thank, or curse, organisms known as blue-green algae (heretofore referred to as BGA).
   Algae, they are not, though. BGA are bacteria known as cyanobacteria. “Algae” generally refers to eukaryotes, organisms with distinct nucleii and specialized organelles. BGA are prokaryotes, lacking such features. Green river, from cyanobacteria
   BGA can be toxic, which is good reason to curse them. Drinking or swimming in contaminated waters can cause problems to humans and other animals, including dogs, who seem to be otherwise able to drink almost any water without ill effect. The “cyan” in the name and the criminal cyanotoxins are not at all related to cyanide. The name come from “cyan,” which is the color blue-green.
   Many kinds of BGA are found throughout the world, often in extreme conditions. Not all produce cyanotoxins; some produce them only under certain conditions. Not all are even blue-green; the Red Sea gets its color from Trichodesmium erythraeum, a species of BGA. Certain conditions cause “blooms,” such as those I was admiring in the river and ponds. Here, it’s probably a combination of relatively dry conditions resulting in shallow and calm waters along with the usual influx of nutrients, mostly phosphorus and mostly from farms, septic systems, and lawns.
   BGA are photosynthetic organisms, just like plants, imbibing carbon dioxide during the day and spewing out oxygen. These primitive organisms, “in the beginning,” were important for oxygenizing the Earth’s atmosphere, thus stimulating biodiversity. We could praise them for sequestering carbon.
   Agriculturally, some cyanobacteria are important because they can convert atmospheric nitrogen into forms of nitrogen that plants can use. Although these cyanobacteria are especially important for maintaining fertility of rice paddies, they are present, to some degree, in virtually all soils. Some research even points to benefits of inoculating soils with these organisms.

Bags vs. Fungi

    So now I’m home, my head out of the soil, and admiring my grape vines. The dry weather has been almost as good for the grapes as it has been for the cyanobacteria. Dry weather minimizes grape diseases and abundant sunlight puts flavor and sweetness into the berries. With annual applications of mulch around the grapes and their far reaching roots, I never worry about my established vines being thirsty. Bagging grapes earlier in the season
   Back in early summer, we went to the trouble of affixing paper “delicatessen” bags around 100 bunches. Now is the payoff. Peeling back the paper usually reveals perfect, full, bloom-dusted bunches of especially delectable grapes. “Especially delectable” because I can let these protected bunches hang longer on the vines than unbagged bunches, which do have some disease and are prey to bees, wasps, and birds. These bagged grapes get dead ripe before being harvested. Unbagging grapes for harvest
   The bagging isn’t really all that troublesome. We just select downward hanging bunches, made easier because I train fruiting canes horizontally across a 5-wire, flat trellis, and remove any tendrils or leaves opposite the bunches. After making a slit down each side of a bag, the slitted opening is slid up the cane on either side of the bunch, the top of the bag is folded over, and then the flap stapled down on either side — well worth the minute or so it takes from selection to finish bagging a bunch.

Grapes to Keep

With many varieties of established grapevines, I can cut down any whose flavor is not up to snuff or that don’t produce well without having to bemoan waiting for new ones to start bearing. The “keepers” tide me over. Variety choice is somewhat limited here because of winter cold and because cooler, damp air collects in this valley, promoting disease, abetted by inoculum from all the wild grape vines grappling high into neighboring trees along the forest edge.

Glenora and Vanessa seedless grapes

   I’ll be doing a Henry IVth on Mars and Concord.
   Some of my current favorite varieties are Vanessa, Somerset Seedless, and Glenora, all seedless varieties. Of the three, Glenora has the best flavor, Vanessa the best texture, but they’re all very good. Some of my favorite seeded varieties are Alden, whose corpulent berries hang in large bunches, and Brianna, which isn’t quite ripe yet, but every year has rewarded us with foxy-flavored, pale green berries.
   Still to come for this season are Edelweiss, which has a rich, very foxy flavor but has not been very productive the last few years, and Brianna, with its own rich flavor not so dependent on foxiness.
   A few more years of tasting and watching will dictate whether New York Muscat, Cayuga White, Bertille Seyve 2758, Lorelei, Reliance, Swenson White, and Wapanuka keep their home here. They’re all good grapes, but why grow good grapes when I could grow great grapes from among the 5,000 or so varieties (not all adaptable here, of course)?
   (That “foxy” flavor I kept referring to is characteristic of many American grapes, and is typified by the variety Concord. No one is sure how “foxy came to describe that flavor.)

UNPERMACULTURE

September 1, 2016/0 Comments/in Design, Fruit, Gardening, Pests, Soil, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Accusations, (Mostly) not True

I’ve understandably been accused of being a “permie,” that is, of practicing permaculture.
(In the words of permaculture founder, Bill Mollison, “Permaculture is about designing sustainable human settlements. It is a philosophy and an approach to land use which weaves together microclimate, annual and perennial plants, animals, soils, water management, and human needs into intricately connected, productive communities.” In the words of www.dictionary.com, permaculture is “a system of cultivation intended to maintain permanent agriculture or horticulture by relying on renewable resources and a self-sustaining ecosystem.”)
Walk around my farmden and, yes, you’ll come upon Nanking cherry bushes where forsythia bushes once lined the driveway, an American persimmon tree where a lilac bush once stood, and other edible plants used also for landscaping. In the vegetable garden, I preserve soil integrity by never tilling it, and, in the south field, blackcurrant bushes make use of the space beneath pawpaw trees. There’s the requisite mushroom yard of shiitake-inoculated logs, free-range poultry, solar panels, a rain barrel . . .

Pawpaws interplanted with blackcurrants, and a row of hardy kiwis

   But no! I am not a permie. My vegetables grow in beds in parallel, straight rows (rather than keyhole plantings) and, despite that commingling of blackcurrants and pawpaws, most trees, shrubs, and vines here keep to themselves. Permaculture plantings of, say, hazelnuts in tall grass and rubbing elbows with elderberries, seaberries, apples, pears, and other edibles become, over time, an unproductive management nightmare with some plants drowning out others, productivity declining due to shade, and diseases increasing from tangled stems creating dank conditions. The paltry output of such planting are best left for wildlife, who can afford to spend all day foraging for a few tidbits of food.
   My hazelnuts are grown in a mown strip that, for easy gathering, is sheared low as nuts ripen.
   Low maintenance is a goal touted by permaculturalists; understandably so. But taken to the extreme, low maintenance means not giving the grape vine the pruning it needs to be a healthy vine yielding the most flavorful berries that are easy to harvest. (One book suggests, rather than troubling with a trellis, growing grape vines up trees; the vines do so in the wild, but such fruit, in partial shade and not easily accessible, can never be high quality.)
   Much of permaculture seems to me to be not only unrealistic, but also no fun. I enjoy caring for my plants, reaping the gustatory and other rewards for a job well done. I like the challenge of researching some pest or nutritional problem and finding a solution. I like watching how plants respond to my ministrations, whether I’m wielding pruning shears, a pitchfork piled high with compost, or my winged weeder hoe.
   Agriculture is about balancing Nature’s designs and human will. Too much of the latter is a losing battle. Too much of the former leaves nothing worth harvesting.

Big Bantam, an Oymoron

    My planting of sweet corn is very un-permaculture. It’s high-culture: 6 seeds per hill dropped into compost-enriched ground maintained weed-free, timely watering with drip irrigation, hills thinned to 3 stalks per hill, even stakes to keep the stalks standing soldier straight. I mentioned, last week, how my Golden Bantam variety of sweet corn isn’t bantam at all. The stalks soar over 10 feet high.
   Was it because of my green thumb? No. I now know that it is genetics.
   This year I made four plantings of Golden Bantam. The two later plantings are, in fact, bantam-size. Looking over my seed orders, I see that I had planted Golden Bantam Corn, Original 8-row Golden Bantam Corn, and Improved Golden Bantam Corn.
   Golden Bantam is an open-pollinated variety. As with any open-pollinated variety, various strains might arise, strains which might differ in some ways from the original. With any good variety, the hope is that progeny are monitored to eliminate any off-type varieties — or to look for something that might be better than the original.

Golden Bantams compared

So the name Golden Bantam could be attached to the original Golden Bantam, from 1902, or any strain, which could also have “Improved,” “Original,” etc. attached its name. (Golden Bantam was also developed into a hybrid, Golden Cross Bantam, which, like other hybrids, would be genetically more consistent and ripen in a shorter window of time.)
On the theory that bigger is better, “Improved” was tacked onto name of the strain of my early plantings. The original Golden Bantam was 8-row; Improved Golden Bantam is 10 to 14 row. I should have read the catalog more closely because Improved Golden Bantam casts too much shade, ripens too late for my intensively planted vegetables, and yields less, with but a single ear per stalk. The original also has better flavor, to me.

Permaculture, but not by Me

Walking down the main path of my vegetable garden yesterday, you’d come upon a very permaculturalesque planting — in the path. The path was overrun with purslane, which I didn’t even have to plant. Purslane is a tasty, very nutritious vegetable enjoyed raw or cooked. But not by me. Hoeing purslane in path
I grabbed my winged weeder and hoed the purslane loose from the soil. As a succulent, purslane can continue to grow — and seed! — even with its roots flailing in the air. So after hoeing, I scooped the plants up to feed to the compost file.

A VERY GOOD YEAR, SO FAR

August 17, 2016/5 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Planning, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Bye, Bye Beetles

    So far, this growing season has been one of the most interesting ever. Could it be global warming? Perhaps. Perhaps it’s all a legacy from the relatively snowless winter with long periods of cold, but not frigid, temperatures. Perhaps it was spring’s two nights of plummeting temperature that followed a warm spell. Perhaps it was this summers extremes of dry and wet periods. Perhaps all that’s from global warming. Perhaps . . .
   All I know is that it’s all been pretty good. As I wrote previously, for the second year in a row, Japanese beetles made their entrance on time in June, and then, as if from stage fright, skittered away. Or never emerged from the soil. Or never hatched from eggs laid in the soil. Or the eggs never got laid last summer.
   For years, Mexican bean beetles would lay eggs on my bean plants, and those eggs would hatch into voracious larvae and then adults that would shred bean leaves. I was able to harvest enough beans for fresh eating and freezing only with succession planting of bush beans every couple of months.
   For the past couple of years, only a few beetles show up here and there; nothing to worry about. So now an early sowing of bush beans provides the first plates of beans, and then passes the torch on to pole beans, which unlike bush beans, keep yielding till the end of the season. Bush beans peter out after a few pickings.
   (I did spray neem oil and the biological insecticide ‘Entrust’ a few years ago. Perhaps that broke the Mexican bean beetle cycle here. Perhaps it was the mere threat of a wall at the Mexican border . . . No, no, that can’t be it. Mexican bean beetles have established themselves north of the border for many generations, human and beetle. Throughout the country over many decades, this pest has waxed and waned in its severity, at times turning its taste to soybeans, sometimes to lima beans. My beetles never showed an appetite for my soybeans.)
   Two other pests that, I hope, can now be off my radar are scale insects on the greenhouse figs and flea beetles on the eggplants. That status comes with some effort on my part: weekly sprays, until recently, of “summer oil.” I expect to have to maintain those efforts every season. (Late update: I saw a few scale insects on the figs so did have to spray again.)

Skyrocketing Corn, De-Luscious Blueberries

    This season’s interests aren’t all about pests.
   Right now, corn stalks are as high — no, higher — than an elephant’s eye. (For journalistic accuracy, I looked up the height of an elephant’s eye. One report on the web, that fount of highly accurate information, reported the median height at 98 inches.) I just stepped away from my desk to measure the actual height of my corn, and it topped out at about 10 feet high. And that’s the variety Golden Bantam. I’ve grown it for many years, during which it always topped out at 6 or 7 feet.
   The first ears of this rich-tasting, old variety should be ready any day now. Will they also seem to be on steroids? Tall Golden Bantam corn
   No explanations for this corny behavior jump out. Year after year, the soil gets the same one-inch depth of compost, the 3-foot-wide corn bed is planted in two rows of hills, thinned to 3 stalks per hill, with each hill 2 feet apart in the row, and the bed is drip irrigated. Mislabeled seed can’t explain the phenomenon because this season’s popcorn (Dutch Buttered and Pearl) and polenta corn (Otto File) also have higher aspirations. Anyway, I’m not complaining.
   Apples never grow well here. This low lying valley is a sink for colder, moister air that, along with the backdrop of thousands of acres of forest, is a haven for apple pests. This season, with some spray assistance from me, the apple crop is relatively heavy and attractive. Apples, in those years when I do get a decent crop, are especially tasty here. Blueberry fruit cluster
   I have to tip my hat, once again, to blueberries, my favorite fruit and the most consistent performer among my many fruits. I have never not gotten a good crop of blueberries, come hell or high . . . 17 year cicadas, hurricane Irene, late frosts, etc. This season, canes are arching to the ground with a particularly heavy crop of berries.
   What will next year hold? An even better growing season?

ROT AND FLOWERS

August 11, 2016/0 Comments/in Flowers, Fruit, Gardening, Pests, Planning/by Lee Reich

Brown Rot Strikes Again

   The plan was for me to be now sinking my teeth into the soft, juicy, rich flesh of my Oullins golden gage plums. The tenuous start this past spring, with a freak late freeze that sent temperatures plummeting into the low teens, had me worried. The trees shook off the cold and, when warmer weather returned, burst into snowballs of white blossoms. Tiny fruitlets that followed those blossoms have swelled to the bountiful crop now dangling from the branches.
   The plan has been foiled — by brown rot disease. Almost every plum, just as its skin starts to shade towards ripeness, becomes spotted with fuzzy, gray droplets that, with good weather (good for the fungus, that is), soon covers the fruit. Brown rotted plum fruit
   Brown rot was not unexpected, and a counterattack was planned. All through spring, before blossoms even unfolded, I doused the plant with insecticide and fungicide sprays. Insecticides help control brown rot by preventing insects, most notably plum curculios, from laying eggs in the developing fruitlets. Even if the egg-laying itself doesn’t cause the fruit to drop, holes left behind provide easy entrance for the brown rot fungus.
   Perhaps I was too lenient, using relatively benign (to us humans, that is), organically approved sprays. ‘Surround’, a commercial formulation of kaolin clay for the insects. And sulfur, a naturally occurring mineral, for the brown rot fungus. Brown rot mummy
   That’s not all. Gathering up infected fruits cuts back the number of new disease spores that waft among the branches looking for new fruits to infect. In fall and winter, those infected fruits are easily recognized as blackened, dry “mummies.” They lose their dryness and come to life, fungal life, with spring’s warmth and moisture. I’ll gather them up also. I’m hoping my ducks develop a taste for the fresh, dropped, rotten fruit; so far, they seem to be picky eaters.
   My late winter pruning of the trees should also have helped reduce brown rot disease. Removing enough stems and limbs to allow those that remain to bathe in light and breezes allows for quicker drying from dew or rain.

The Disease Triangle

    Three conditions must be satisfied for any disease, whether in animals or plants, to take hold: inoculum must be present, the host must be susceptible, and the conditions must be suitable for disease development. Check, check, check for my Oulin plum (a susceptible host plant) getting brown rot here in the Hudson Valley, throughout most of the humid eastern U.S., in fact. We have plenty of wild and cultivated plums and related plants here to provide brown rot inoculum from infected fruits, and the weather is usually just about perfect (for the disease, that is).
   But Oullin isn’t the only great-tasting plum. How about a less susceptible host variety? Fungi are picky eaters, and varieties of plants vary in their susceptibility to specific diseases.(Unfortunately, most gage-type plums, which are heart-shaped, with greenish flesh, are very susceptible to brown rot.) Infected plums on tree
   My plum trees are grafted to multiple varieties. The variety Shiro also finds a home on the tree grafted to Oullin. This year, and in years past, Shiro seems to be somewhat resistant to this disease. And I see that Cummins Nursery has a variety called Jam Session that also is resistant. This past spring I also planted the varieties Alderman and Superior, which are American hybrids with some alleged resistance.
   As consolation, plums are, at least, less susceptible to this scourge than are peaches and apricots.

Flowers to the Rescue?

    I’m planning and planting for flowers for next season and for years to come, with perennials.
   I could, of course, just purchase some potted plants to plug into the ground now or next spring. I could buy seeds and sow them next spring. Instead of those two options, I’m sowing seeds now, a time when, admittedly, there’s not that frenzied urge to plant seeds as in spring. Black-eyed Susan Purple coneflower
   One packet of seeds can — should — result in oodles of plants, plenty to plant and to give away. Sown now, the seeds should grow into plants that will be large enough to weather autumn, then winter’s, cold. Plants should also be large enough to flower next year. Their experience of cold, known as vernalization, will further coax them on to flower. Spring sown perennial flower seeds often don’t flower their first season, no matter what their size, because they have yet to be vernalized. Liatris
   I’m sowing purple coneflower (Echinacea), black-eyed-susan (Rudbeckia), and blazing star (Liatris). They’re all in the daisy family, a family known not only for its good looks but also for providing nectar to attract and help support beneficial insects. If I plant enough, perhaps the increased number of beneficial insects will significantly decrease the number of plum curculios and other plum fruit insects resulting in, because of less insect scarring of fruit, significantly less brown rot of my plums.
   It’s a stretch but the flowers, anyway, are very pretty.

PESTS, INCLUDING ME(?)

August 4, 2016/0 Comments/in Fruit, Pests, Planning, Soil/by Lee Reich

Watch Out, for Black Walnuts

Citizen scientists (that could be you and me), look up! At black walnut’s leaves. At the recent meeting of the New York Nut Growers Association (www.nynga.org), Karen Snover-Clift of Cornell University went over the ins and outs of “thousand cankers disease of walnut.”
   Like Dutch elm disease — it pretty much wiped out American elms, once valued for creating a cathedral effect as their branches arched over tree-line streets — thousand cankers disease is spread by an insect. But the walnut twig beetle is only part of the problem. When it bores into the bark, it spreads a fungus that clogs up a tree’s “tubes.”
   With Dutch elm disease, once a tree is infected, the fungal culprit spreads within the tree to kill it. Not so with thousand cankers disease. With this disease, death comes from fungal infection that follows thousands of dark, dead cankers of insect feeding.
   Who cares about black walnuts? I do. Each fall the trees bear an abundance of nutritious and delicious nuts. (Not delicious to everyone; the strong flavor does not appeal to everyone. But no reason any food should appeal to everyone unless you’re MacDonald’s.) And, quoting from The Tree Book, written in 1914 by Julia Rogers, “The black walnut is majestic as a shade tree — a noble ornament to parks and pleasure grounds. It needs room and distance to show its luxuriant crown and stately trunk to advantage. Then no tree excels it.”

Walnut twig beetle

And finally, black walnut yields among the most beautiful of woods for furniture and gun stocks. Again quoting Ms. Rogers, the wood has “silvery grain, rich violet-purple tones in the brown heart wood [and] exquisite shading of its curly veinings.”
Thousand cankers disease moved into southwestern U.S. from Mexico (would a wall keep them out? will Mexico pay for it?) and has remained mostly in that region. Black walnut is native to eastern U.S., but the tree has occasionally been planted out west. More importantly, the disease has recently reared its ugly head at a few locations in the east. If infected trees can be identified, the disease can be contained to check its spread.

Thousand cankers

   Any tree with an infected branch is usually dead by the end of the season!
   So look up, scan the tops of any black walnut trees for limbs that are dead or show flagging foliage. Your job, and my job, is to look for these trees and then report them.
   For a more thorough treatment of thousand cankers disease, as well as reporting guidelines, see www.thousandcankers.com. A good start in confirming the disease would be to take some good digital photos and send them to the state diagnostic laboratory, the county Cooperative Extension office, or department of environmental conservation.

Chipmunks, Still Cute Here

I find chipmunks cute, as I’m sure everybody would — except for anyone for whom chipmunk is a garden pest. This year, for some reason, an especially good crop of chipmunks are scurrying about. I see them everywhere, except on my farmden. Their absence here could be attributed to my dog friends Sammy and Scooter, and my cat friend Gracie.
I would not tolerate chipmunks if they were to eat my blueberries, my filbert nuts, my . . . pretty much anything I’ve painstakingly planted and nurtured. Besides dogs and cats, traps also are effective.

No, I’m Not a Strawberry Pest

    As if plants didn’t have enough pest problems. I recently attacked my strawberry bed with my scythe, swinging the sharp blade low enough to cut off every last leaf from the plants. No, I’m not just another plant pest, trying to kill plants; I was “renovating” the bed, preparing it for next spring.
   Shearing off the leaves not only removes leaves, but also disease spores on the leaves that inevitably find their way into any strawberry bed. Obviously, I raked up the old leaves and carted them over to the compost pile.
   The next step in renovation was to pull out any weeds in the bed. The major weed in the bed was . . . strawberries. Strawberries spread by creeping stems along which grow new plants that take root, making them usually their own worst weed. Each plant needs about a square foot of elbow room to realize its full potential of one quart of berries per plant.
   So I ruthlessly ripped out enough plants so that my 3-foot-wide bed was left with a double row of plants spaced a foot apart. Older plants get decrepit with age, so those were the first to go. Spreading compost in strawberry bed
   Finally, icing on the cake. I laid a 1 inch depth of compost all over the bed and tucked up to each of the remaining, leafless strawberry crowns. A little fertilizer and straw, pine needle, wood shavings, or any other weed-free organic material would be almost as good.
   It’s been a few weeks and already new leaves are sprouting. The plants are on their way to a healthful and healthy crop of sweet, juicy berries next spring. Strawberry plants, a few weeks after renovation

GOOD FRUITS, ONE A VEGETABLE

July 28, 2016/6 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Pests, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

World’s Best Fruit?

    Finally, I reap the fruits of one of my labors. Literally. The fruit is black mulberry, the species, that is Morus nigra, rather than any of the black-colored mulberries that grow all over the place around here. The latter are species and natural hybrids of white and red mulberries (M. alba and M. rubra).
   Black mulberry, native to the Mediterranean climate of western Asia, is not cold-hardy below temperatures in the ‘teens (Fahrenheit) so definitely not cold-hardy here. I first tasted it at a fruit conference in Davis, California and it wowed me even from among bowls heaped high with fresh-picked apricots, peaches, and other seasonal fruits.
   I had to get a tree to grow, which I did (from www.whitmanfarms.com). The tree went into a pot with potting soil. As it grew, I moved it on into larger and larger pots, stopping at an 18-inch diameter pot. I figured that would be the largest pot I could muscle down the basement steps for cool, winter storage along with my figs and pomegranates.
   The tree bore quickly, and the “east coast” black mulberries were delicious, what few of them I harvested. Problem was that birds also found them delicious, a problem compounded by the fact that the berries are not at their best until matte black and ready to be released from the plant at the slightest touch. The birds don’t wait that long.
   Dead ripe, the fruits are so soft that they can’t help but stain your fingers. (The stain was once used as a dye, called “murry.”)

A Cagey Solution

    My first solution to the bird issue was to plant the mulberry in the ground in my cool (as in temperature cool) greenhouse, which is also home to some in-ground fig trees. Since mulberry seedlings pop up all over the place around here, I just dug up a seedling, grafted onto it a stem from my black mulberry, and planted it in the greenhouse. Fruit cage
   Mulberry trees can grow big, bigger than my greenhouse. My plan was to espalier the branches against the west wall of the greenhouse. The espalier worked as far as training the branches in an ornamental candelabra. The birds were kept at bay. The espalier did not work as far as bearing fruit, the reason for which I have no idea why. I dug up the tree.
   My original mulberry still grows in a pot and, despite its small stature, still bears good crops of fruit. A few weeks ago I saw advertised a walk-in, temporary cage for protecting plants from birds (available from Gardeners Supply Co.).
   The cage arrived just as the first black mulberries were ripening. Within 20 minutes I had the various pole pieces joined to each other and to the corner brackets, and the net attached over the top and sides. At 4 feet by 4 feet and 6 feet high, the cage easily accommodates my mulberry. Even another plant or two.
   Every couple of days, now, I unzip the door, enter mulberry paradise, and carefully peruse the plant for dead-ripe berries. I exit with purple-stained fingers. Success.

Eggplant + Oil, A Good Combo

    Another success this year has been eggplant. I’ve gardened for many, many years, and for many, many years wasn’t able to grow eggplants well. Beginning gardeners are the ones who usually have greatest success with eggplant. Not exactly beginning gardeners, but beginning gardens. Eggplant plant Eggplant, flea beetle damage
   Flea beetles love to eat eggplant (leaves). They pock the leaves with enough small holes so that only vigorously growing plants survive. But flea beetles rarely show up in a garden in its first year but by the second year they descend in hoards. Hence the successes of beginning gardeners in their beginning gardens.
   This year I tried controlling the beetles by spraying the plants weekly with “horticultural oil,” also called “summer oil,” which is a more refined and lighter version of “dormant oil.” I was mixing it up anyway to keep scale insects at bay on the greenhouse figs (more on that some other time). Long story short: The plants are only slight hole-y and I have a fine crop of eggplants on the way.

TWO DELICIOUS ORBS, ONE BLUE & ONE WHITE

July 21, 2016/2 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Soil is Key

    Last week I described my foray into the New Jersey Pine Barrens, culminating in a visit to the USDA research station there to experience many new, interesting, and tasty varieties of blueberry. The soils of the Pine Barrens, as I wrote provide ideal conditions for the rather specific and unique requirements of this fruit.
   That’s not to say that blueberries can’t be grown successfully beyond the Pine Barrens. In fact, they can be grown just about everywhere — if the right varieties are chosen and the soil is amended to suit the plants. The soil here at my farmden, for instance, is very different from that of the Pine Barrens. Mine is a naturally rich silt loam that is slightly acidic; the Pine Barrens are naturally poor sands that are very acidic.
   Both soils are well-drained, which is the first requirement for a blueberry soil. The way to make soils that are less than perfectly drained suitable is to plant the bushes atop mounds or carry water away in ditches or in buried, perforated pipes.
   Next, acidity. The pH for blueberries needs to be between 4 and 5.5, which is very acidic (and is what blueberry relatives such as rhododendrons and mountain laurels also demand). I acidifed my soil with elemental sulfur, a naturally mined mineral, before planting and do so periodically over the years, as needed. Many gardeners pile oak leaves or pine needles on their ground, or dig these materials into soil, to make a soil more acidic — that doesn’t do the trick; sulfur is what’s needed, 3/4 to 2 pounds per hundred square feet for sandy and clay soils, respectively, for each unit of pH change needed. Netted, healthy blueberries
   Blueberries like their roots coursing through soils that are high in organic materials, not rich organic materials such as manure or compost, though. Peat moss is good; I mixed a bucket full of peat with the soil in each planting hole when I planted. To maintain, even increase, levels of organic matter over the years, the ground beneath my bushes, every year, gets blanketed with a 3 inch depth of some weed-free organic material, such as autumn leaves, wood chips, wood shavings, sawdust, pine needles . . . whatever I can get my hands on.
   And finally, blueberries need water, especially when young. That initial dose of peat moss along with yearly, organic mulches, helps the soil hold moisture (in addition to many other benefits).
   Oh, one more thing: Ninety percent of blueberry roots are in the top 6 inches of soil. Hence their need for moisture. Those shallow roots also compete poorly with weeds. My 900 square foot of 16 blueberry plants is, essentially, a “no weed” zone, thanks to the mulch and occasional weeding.

Tastiest Turnips

    Pushing open the gate to exit the blueberry planting, I walk over and pull open the gate to the vegetable garden. There lies a beautiful (to me) row of sweet, succulent turnips. Not just any old turnip, but the variety Hakurei, the best (to me, and many others gardeners and farmers).
   Turnips are an underrated vegetable, perhaps because most that you can buy just don’t taste that good and because most that are grown in home gardens are not the best-flavored. The highest praise I know of for turnips is in the novel Tobacco Road, when Lov Bensey walks seven and a half miles to get a sack of winter turnips for fifty cents, which is half of his daily wage. (Admittedly, he was starving.)
   So here’s at least the second written accolade for the turnip. When a good variety is planted and it is well grown, it is a sweet, flavorful vegetable excellent raw, pickled, or cooked. The variety to grow is Hakurei and the way to grow them is in rich, well-drained soil with a steady supply of moisture, the latter of which mine get automatically via drip irrigation.

Hakurei turnip

In the past I planted turnips only in late summer for a crop that ripened during the cool weather of autumn. This year I planted an early crop in the greenhouse; that crop was harvested and eaten by mid-June. I had plenty of seed and space in later in spring, so I planted some outdoors then. We’re still harvesting that crop and, despite the hot days, the flavor is excellent. (Cool nights might be helping to maintain flavor.)
Sometime in the next two weeks, I plan to sow seeds for fall harvest. Last year, that crop, harvested before the weather turned too bitterly cold and the soil froze, went into wooden boxes for cold storage, first just sitting outdoors, then carried into the garage, and, finally, carried down to the cool basement. The last of them, still tasty, were eaten March.

HEAVEN AND(?) SOME HELL

July 15, 2016/10 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Pests/by Lee Reich

The Blueberry Capital

    A few turns after Exit 38 on New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway and I, a blueberry nut, soon entered what a visit to Bristol, Virginia would be to a country music nut, what Tupelo, Mississippi would be to an Elvis Presley nut, what Springfield, Massachusetts would be to a basketball nut, what . . . A big, blue sign declares Hammonton, New Jersey the self-proclaimed “Blueberry Capital of the World.” Literally millions of pounds of blueberries are picked and then shipped from this region of New Jersey each summer.
   A few more miles and a few more twist and turns through the New Jersey Pine Barrens brings you to Whitesbog, New Jersey, “the birthplace of the domesticated, highbush blueberry.”
   Let’s parse that last accolade.
   “Domesticated:” Blueberries are a native American fruit that up until the early part of the last century were harvested only from the wild. No one cultivated them! Then Elizabeth White, a cranberry grower in Whitesbog, teamed up with Dr. F. V. Coville of the USDA to study and improve the blueberry. Ms. White instructed her pickers to search out the best wild blueberry bushes, which were moved to her farm. Dr. Coville investigated the rather specific soils (such as those of the Pine Barrens) enjoyed by blueberries (such as those of the Pine Barrens), and further evaluated and bred Ms. White’s selections. And the rest is, as they say, history.
   “Highbush:” A number of blueberry species exist but the large berries for fresh eating that you see on market shelves are highbush blueberries, botanically Vaccinium corymbosum. Canned blueberries are usually another species, lowbush, botanically V. angustifolium. Dr. Coville and subsequent breeders have mated these two species as well as a number of other species with the goal of producing the elusive perfect blueberry. (Elusive to blueberry breeders, not to me; I like just about all of them.)

New Blues

    After passing field after field of cultivated blueberries alternating with dense woodland, I turned into the parking area of the Marucci Center for Blueberry and Cranberry Research & Extension to meet with USDA research geneticist Dr. Mark Ehlenfeldt. Blueberry field at USDA
   We looked at the fields of sandy soils formed into caterpillar-like, mulched mounds atop which were planted the bushes. We talked about the various species — V. constablaei, V. darrowii, V. ashei, in addition to the previously mentioned highbush and lowbush — that parented the various bushes.
   Best of all, we plucked fruit to taste from many different varieties, some of which I grow and others of which are new to me. A few new ones that really stood out for me were:
•Sweetheart, for its medium-size that ripen early with excellent flavor

Sweetheart blueberry

•Cara’s Choice, also with excellent flavor, in addition to pinkish flowers; ripening mid-season
•Razz, a soft berry with a hint of raspberry flavor, and
•ARS 00-26, a small blueberry with a sweet, wild blueberry flavor.
Another blueberry variety that was very interesting, and perhaps tasty, was Nocturne, whose fruits, as they ripen, go from pink to bright red to blue black, making them very ornamental.

Pink Champagne

Nocturne blueberry

Nocturne fruits are supposed to have a unique flavor, sweet and somewhere between that of highbush and rabbiteye (V. ashei); they weren’t yet ripe so I wasn’t able to taste them. I did get a plant last year that is now ripening fruits so I can soon vouch, or not, for their flavor.
Two hours and many blueberries eaten later, I was on my way home.
Note: Not all the varieties mentioned are currently commercially available.

Beatlemania — I Hope Not

    On a negative note, I saw here today (June 29th) the first Japanese beetles of the season, three on some grape leaves and four on some black raspberry fruits. I could just throw up my hands and brace myself for the few weeks of attack. Spraying pesticides is not an option; the beetles feed on hundreds of species. I’d have to spray just about everything here, including fruits ready to harvest, which is a no-no. Japanese beetles
   I’m hoping the beetles take the same tack they have for the past two years, a few showing up, and then, shortly thereafter, doing about faces and leaving for the season. I have no idea why.
   Worst case scenario is that they descend in hordes, in which case I’ll remind myself that plants can tolerate a certain amount of damage, with remaining leaf area working harder to compensate for leaf area chewed away. Also, the beetles make their exit in August.
   I pulled the seven beetles I saw off their respective plants, threw them on the ground, and stomped on them. Not out of anger or meanness, though. Beetle feeding attracts more beetles. I didn’t want any invitations for their friends and relatives.

EDEN’S GARDENS

June 30, 2016/0 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Soil/by Lee Reich

Eden’s Start with Good Soil

G, as I’ll refer to him, has a blank canvas, about 10 acres of mostly open field. His vision is, essentially, for a Garden of Eden, with fruit trees, bushes, and vines, vegetables, nut trees, and flowers. Before he even thought about digging his first planting hole, I suggested he learn something about the soil beneath his blank canvas.
Your and my tax dollars have contributed to a most useful soil resource for G (and you and me), the Soil Web Survey, put out by the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) of the USDA. This survey provides soils maps of more than 95% of the counties in the U.S., each map delineating what lurks beneath the surface.

Web Soil Survey, opening page

Soils are distinctive, as different from one another as robins are from blue jays. These differences are harder to appreciate, of course, because soil is mostly underground, hidden from view. But if you were to dig some holes a few feet deep and then look carefully at their inside surfaces, you would find that soils are made up of layers of varying thicknesses — called horizons. And one soil might differ from the next not only in the thicknesses of its various horizons, but also in just how the various horizons look and feel. There might be horizons as white as chalk, as red as rust, or as dark brown as chocolate. A horizon might be cement hard, gritty with sand, or stuff for sculpture. And if you were to tease the dirt along one edge of the hole so it falls away naturally — wow! — each horizon would reveal its particles clumped together in such arrangements as plates, blocks, or prisms. Such information, and more, has allowed soils to be classified, much as birds, flowers, and living things are.
Armed with this information, G can know what will thrive in his future paradise and what might need to be done to better accommodate what he wants to grow.

Tax Dollars at Work

The Web Soil Survey is an easy-to-use online resource. Either google it or go directly to http://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/HomePage.htm. The big green button labelled “START WSS” gets you started.
The first step is to define your “Area of Interest (AOI)”, that is, your own back forty. Reading down from the AOI tab, you come to the “Address” line, in which, after clicking, you can fill in your own street address. Hit “Return” and, to the right, you’re zoomed into an aerial photo centered on the specified address. Click on one of the two boxes labelled “AOI” (which one depends on whether your AOI is going to be a rectangle or a random polygon) just above the map to delineate, in red, your AOI. Double click the last point and the map enlarges around the defined area.

Area of Interest defined

   Back to the tabs at the top of the screen, and click on “Soil Map.” Now you know what to call your soil. Yes, its name. If more that one soil exists within the AOI, squiggly lines will delineate their names and extent.
   From there, all sorts of useful and not so useful (for you) information are at your fingertips. Click on the soil name and you get a slew of information on that soil, including the all-important drainage class, depth to a restrictive layer, depth to water table, and its ability to hold onto water. Other clicks get you to the soil’s potential use for recreation, construction materials, building site, even military operations.
   Most important is soil depth and drainage. G’s is fine, facilitating his first step towards Eden.

A Tree of Eden

Speaking of Gardens of Eden reminds me of fruit and western Asia. Which brings us to a mulberry now ripening in a pot sitting on my front terrace. This mulberry is quite different from those trees now ripening their fruit practically every few hundred feet around here.

Pakistan mulberry fruit

   For one thing, this mulberry comes from western Asia, Islamabad, Pakistan, so is not cold-hardy here in New York’s Hudson Valley. Hence the pot, in which the plant resides during winter in my basement, along with figs, pomegranates, and other subtropicals.
   The hardy mulberry trees that pop up here and there throughout most cold regions of the U.S. include Asian white mulberries (Morus alba) and out native red mulberries (M. rubra), and their natural hybrids. Note that fruit color has nothing to do with the species. White mulberry is a very variable species, in hardiness, fruit color and flavor, even leaf shape.
   Pakistan mulberry is also unique for the size of the berries. Each is a couple of inches long. In warmer climates, the berry can elongate to over 3 inches.

Pakistan mulberry tree in pot

I wouldn’t trouble myself with a potted fruit tree just because it’s exotic and large-fruited; the flavor makes the effort worthwhile. They have a heavenly flavor, among the most delicious of all mulberries, on a par with the world’s best fruits: a rich berry flavor fronting a congenial background of sweetness offset with just the right amount of tartness.
Pakistan is sometimes listed as a variety of white mulberry, other times as a variety of yet another mulberry species, M. macroura. Outdoors, it can grow to 60 feet. In my Garden of Eden, the potted tree will be restrained to 5 or 6 feet.