Fruit – Page 21 – Lee Reich

SO MANY FRUITS, SO LITTLE . . . ?

July 23, 2015/5 Comments/in Books, Fruit, Gardening/by Lee Reich

How Can Something So Nutritious Taste So Good?

Black currants are a berry brimming with vitamin C (in comparison, oranges are like water) and other health goodies, with an intense, rich, to me resin-y flavor that pairs well with dark chocolate or, on bread, with peanut or any other nut butter. Not everyone enjoys the fresh flavor, but that’s okay. Not everyone needs to enjoy every kind of fruit.

Belaruskaja black currants

   What the doyen of horticulture, Liberty Hyde Bailey, wrote almost 100 years ago about apple varieties also applies to fruits in general: “Why do we need so many kinds of [fruits]? Because there are so many folks. A person has a right to gratify his legitimate tastes . . . There is merit in variety itself.”
   With that said, just about everyone does like black currants once they’ve been cooked and sweetened to make jam, juice, pie, and the like, or soaked in alcohol to make a liqueur (créme de cassis). My preference is for the raw berries, eaten straight up, in my cereal, or smooshed on bread as an instant jam.
   Black currants have more to recommend them than only good flavor. In contrast to most fruit plants, they fruit well in shade. Look down my row of pawpaw trees, and in the shade between every two of them you’ll see a black currant bush thriving. In contrast to just about every other plant, black currants are deer resistant. My ducks and chickens, as well as wild birds, leave the berries alone.

Row of pawpaw & black currant

In fact, few significant pests attack the plant or the fruit — except for a disease called white pine blister rust. This disease needs two different host plants to complete its life cycle, a susceptible variety of currant or gooseberry, and a white pine. Because the disease can kill white pines, an important timber crop, gooseberries and currants were once banned by federal law. That’s no longer the case, one reason being that most cultivated varieties of gooseberries and currents are not very susceptible to the disease.
Black currant is very susceptible to the blister rust disease — except for some rust-resistant or immune varieties. The first of these, Consort, Crusader, and Coronet, developed in the middle of the 20th century, were not very tasty just popped into your mouth raw. Newer rust-resistant varieties, such as Belaruskaja and Titania, are delicious any which way, and along with blueberry are my favorite fruits.

Bye, Bye, Black Currants

Sad to say, black currants are finished for the season. That’s their one deficiency: They come and go too quickly. Still, bags stuffed full of black currants are now in the freezer, not to be opened until Christmas.
And I can’t complain. Branches of blueberry bushes are bowed to the ground under their weight of fruit, and will continue to do so until almost the end of summer. And gooseberries still have a a week or so more of fruiting. Mulberries, too, have a few more weeks, except that the birds are eating most of them.

Red and white currants

Red, pink, and white currants started fruiting with the black currants, and will hang in good eating condition for weeks to come. Red, pink, and white currants are different varieties of the same fruit (like Red Delicious and Golden Delicious apples), a different species and quite different in flavor and bearing habit from black currants. Most of the reds, whites, and pinks will hang from the branches for weeks because the berries, looking like shiny, translucent chains of beads, the seeds visible seemingly floating within when backlit by the sun, are almost too pretty to harvest. Also, not being my favorite fruits, they get to hang without being picked, especially with the abundance of other, tastier (to me), berries, an opinion that might change if I had some skill in jelly-making.

Red currant espalier

I’m an Amateur, for Sure

Liberty Hyde Bailey would be proud of the abundance and variety of fruit here. That’s one great advantage of planting your own: You get to choose what pleases your palate as far as kinds of fruits and varieties of fruits, and you get a hedge against a poor harvest from one or a couple of fruits any year. Hence the Macoun and Hudson’s Golden Gem apples here, the grapes, and gooseberries (a dozen varieties of each), gumis, raspberries, kiwis, seaberries, and elderberries, among many other fruits.
Again, quoting Liberty Hyde Bailey: “We give the public indifferent fruits, and thereby neither educate the taste nor stimulate the desire for more . . . Just now [1922] we are trying to increase the consumption of apples . . . it cannot be accomplished by customary commercial methods. To eat an apple a day is a question of affections and emotions.”

Summer berries

Professor Bailey had great faith in the role of the hobbyist, the amateur (in the true meaning of the word, the lover) in fruit growing. Try it.
One route to cultivating a greater appreciation for fruit and know-how for growing them is to join North American Fruit Explorers, a band of fruit “nuts” drawn from both academia and backyards, but all amateurs. For more information about some lesser know fruits, including black currant, I recommend my own book, Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden.

BLUEBERRIES GALORE, COMPOST TEA REDUX

July 15, 2015/19 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Soil, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

On My Knees for Blueberries

For the last few years, my blueberries have had a problem. Perhaps yours also. Rather than grow upright, the stems arch downward, some so drastically that they actually rest on the ground.

Blueberries galore

   A few years ago, I pinned blame on the weather. Not that it was evident just how the weather could be responsible, but it’s always convenient, in gardening, to blame things on the weather. But this explanation is hardly convincing. Spring and summer weather have not been consistent enough over the years to be able point my finger at too much rain and/or not enough sunlight (the combination of which could lead to those bowing branches).
   How about pruning or fertilization? Too much of either could promote lush growth that couldn’t support itself. Except that my pruning has been consistent over many years. And Dr. Marvin Pritts, berry specialist at Cornell, confirmed that he and others saw the same problem, without definitive explanation, a couple of years ago.
   I like the green thumb explanation best: That is, that I’m such a good blueberry grower that the branches can hardly support the prodigious crops I’ve coaxed from them. So I’m not really complaining. Just curious. And having to get on my knees to harvest low hanging fruit.

Remember Fruit Flies?

    There is one fly in the green thumb ointment. A fly, literately. A tiny fruit fly called the spotted wing drosophila or, quicker to say, which is necessary for this fly that’s getting a lot of buzz lately, SWD. The fly attacks many small fruit, starting the season with honeysuckle berries, then moving on to raspberries, blackberries, and . . . blueberries.
   Most fruit flies lay their eggs in overripe, or at least ripe fruit. Not SWD. She lays her eggs in unripe fruit. The eggs are small and what hatches from them are small; their being “maggots” sort of takes the appeal from the berries.
   SWD is a new pest, so new ways of thwarting them are being tried. Covering the plants with fine netting very early in the season is effective but would be very bothersome, for my planting, at least. Various organic sprays are another possibility: Entrust, which is derived from a soil bacterium, is effective if used STRICTLY according to directions; horticultural oil might prove effective. Traps are also under test.
   One way to bypass the problem is to grow only earlier varieties of blueberries. SWD has not showed up here and at many other sites until early August. Plenty of varieties — Duke, Earliblue, Toro, and Blueray, for example — are finished before then.
   But I want fresh blueberries on into September. Harvesting blueberries (or raspberries or other berries) and whisking them into a refrigerator at 34 degrees for 72 hours will kill eggs and larvae. Freezing, the destiny of about half our harvest, also kills the eggs and any hatched larvae. A little egg and meat boosts the protein content of the berries.

I Backpedal, Sort Of

It may be time for me to eat pie. Not blueberry pie, but humble pie. Regular readers of my words probably realize that I take a certain amount of pleasure in iconoclasm. And one recipient of my eye-rolling has been compost tea, something that many gardeners and farmers love to love even though there’s little theoretical or empirical support for its efficacy.

Compost tea, quick mix

“Little” but not “none.” A number of peer-reviewed articles describe benefits from using NON-AERATED compost tea to thwart root diseases. (The relatively recent interest in compost tea is for AERATED compost tea, often sprayed on leaves. Aerated compost tea, the brainchild and business of Dr. Elaine Ingham, is compost tea that’s bubbled with air for en extended period, often with molasses or other additions. Generally, experiments have not supported touted benefits of aerated compost tea.)
   For the past number of years, my pea crops have been failures, the plants yellowing and dying soon after harvest begins. Fusarium or some other root disease is the probable cause.
   In desperation, five times this spring, at about weekly intervals, I put a shovelful of compost into a 5 gallon bucket and filled the bucket with water. After one day of steeping, the tea was strained, put it into a watering can, and drenched on the soil beneath of my thirty foot, double rows of peas.
   Lo and behold: The peas look healthy and have been yielding good crops!

A healthy row of peas

I won’t say for sure it was the compost tea or what in the tea, if it was the tea, did the trick. But nothing else jumps out this year as the savior of my peas. For a more definitive tea endorsement, next year I should grow a row or two without the tea, and a row or two with the tea. I might try that, although it presents the possibility of my ending up with a row or two of unproductive vines.
For now, I’ll just have humble pie. And tea.

SECRET BERRIES, CHERRIES FOR ALL, & WEEDS

July 2, 2015/17 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Pests/by Lee Reich

Shad, Service, June: All The Same Berry

I’m not saying where my juneberries — now ripe — are, except to say that they are not here on my farmden. If you don’t know juneberries (Amelanchier spp.), you’ll wish you did. Imagine, if you will, a blueberry look-alike with the sweetness and richness of a sweet cherry along with a hint of almond. The plant is also known as shadbush, shadblow, serviceberry, and, in the case of one of the species, saskatoon.

One bush of my “secret” juneberries, in bloom in April.

   I’ve planted and grown juneberries, but no longer do so. In the 15 years during which I had 6 plants, I harvested only a handful of berries. Juneberries, although look-alikes for blueberries, are pome fruits, related to apple and sharing many of the same pest problems. Here, apple has many problems, including plum curculio, apple maggot, cedar-apple rust, and black rot.
   But other sites are more friendly to apple and especially to juneberry. Juneberry is commonly planted as an ornamental; I’ve seen it doing well with the sun beating down on a strip of soil between a vertical wall of concrete and a concrete sidewalk near the entrance to a shopping mall, with passing shoppers unaware of the tasty berries dangling from the branches. (“My” secret juneberries are closer than the nearest shopping mall. Here’s a hint: Mine are within 4 miles of my farmden.)

Part of the juneberry harvest.

Juneberry is also a native plant (in every state, in fact) that, in good years, is laden with fruit. Except, as I said, here on my farmden. It’s well worth planting on the chance that it will thrive. I should have given up on mine sooner.
As an ornamental, juneberry is valued for it’s neat form in winter, that of a shrub or a small tree, for it’s white or pink blossoms, and, with a variety such as Autumn Blaze, for the crimson color its leaves turn in fall.
It would be nice to be able to just wander out my back door to pick juneberries, but I won’t complain. A 4-mile bike ride on an early summer morning isn’t too much to pay for the berries.

Nanking, The Easiest Cherry of All

Right now, I can walk out my FRONT door to enjoy another now-ripe, uncommon fruit. Years ago, I had planted forsythia along my driveway. The yellow blossoms fairly glowed with heat in April, but after that the row of bushes was just a blob of greenery. Not unattractive, but not necessarily attractive either.
I ripped out the forsythia and planted instead a row of Nanking cherries (Prunus tomentosa), a species of cherry from Manchuria that first made it to American shores — to great enthusiasm — at the end of the 18th century. Gardeners were not sure whether to praise it more highly as an ornamental or as a fruiting plants. When my plants are awash in white blossoms, bicyclists have stopped and asked for the identity of the plants.

Nanking cherry in bloom in April

Nanking cherry blossoms at about the same time as forsythia but does not subsequently recede into obscurity. Right now the greenery is punctuated by bright red cherries, their small (1/2 inch or slightly larger) size offset by their abundance. Enough to almost hide the branches. Enough so that birds can eat them, chipmunks can eat them, my ducks can eat them, and still there’s more than enough for us humans. The flavor varies from bush to bush, but they’re all good, tasting somewhere on the spectrum between sweet and tart cherry.

Note the profusion of cherries!

In contrast to juneberry, which once joined Nanking cherry in that row along the driveway, Nanking cherries have no significant pest problems. Sometimes branches die back a little but overall production is rarely impacted. In its native haunts, the plants tolerate winter lows of minus 50 degrees F. and summer temperatures soaring to 110 degrees F.
Mostly I just graze the fruits as I walk up or down my driveway. Last year I harvested enough at once to juice by squeezing them through a strainer. Straight up, one of the most refreshing and delicious juices I’ve ever had.

Pretty Weeds, But They’ve Got to Go

Warm temperatures and abundant rainfall are giving weeds a heyday. The row of Nanking cherries has become home to two prominent weeds, both ornamental in their own right, but not enough to justify their crowded presence.

A sedate, cultivated variety of Japanese knotweed

   Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica), sometimes called Mexican bamboo, has migrated from a solid stand across the road to the foot of the hedge. The arching stems, heart-shaped leaves, and foaming white flowers, the latter due at the end of summer, explain why the plant was introduced from Asia in the late 1800’s.
   The plants are either male or female, and female plants rarely set seed, making me wonder how the plant got across the street.
   The other weed, bindweed (Convulvulus arvensis), would be as welcome as its well-behaved cousin, morning glory, if, like morning glory, it was an annual, or at least a well-behaved perennial. The flowers look like pale morning glories. Beneath the ground is where bindweed shows its dark side. The perennial roots spread far far and wide, sending up new shoots likewise far and wide from the mother plant, and the plant seeds abundantly.

Bindweed flowers among Nanking cherries

Repeatedly cutting back or pulling either weed should eventually starve the roots of either plant, if not eliminating them at least keeping then from smothering the Nanking cherry bushes. That’s pretty much all the care the Nanking cherry hedge needs beyond some pruning every few years to encourage some young growth and keep the shrubs from growing too large.

HEATHERS & BARBERRIES & TICKS, OH NO!

June 25, 2015/7 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Pests, Soil/by Lee Reich

An Evil Beauty

Uh oh! I was pulling an odd weed here and there in my heath bed and came upon a seedling of Japanese barberry (Berberis thunburgii). Should I start checking myself for deer ticks? Are all the plants in the bed soon to expire?
Japanese barberry is a commonly planted ornamental that was introduced into this country almost 150 years ago. For decades upon decades, it sedately graced landscapes with its boxwood-like leaves (but not evergreen), yellow flowers, and bright red berries, all set off against a backdrop of dark brown, thorny stems.

Barberry in woods

   For some reason, the plant began to spread about 35 years ago. Perhaps it was the increased planting of barberries around homes, along highways, and outside shopping malls. Those plants spawned yet more plants as birds ate the berries and spread the seeds. Perhaps it was the surge in deer populations, a response to the creep of suburbia as well as to the decreased number of humans willing to take to the woods, rifle in hand, to fell a deer. All the while that deer were munching away on our roses, rhododendrons, yews, and other landscape plants, they rarely browsed barberry.
   Okay, so more deer means more Lyme disease. Deer blood is what nourishes adult ticks and, as they feed, they reproduce and hitchhike across the landscape on their deer hosts.
   But the Lyme bacteria actually get into the ticks only after feeding on the blood of small rodents, such as white-footed mice, that are harboring the bacteria. Recent research in Connecticut has shown that barberry also creates a very nice, sheltered habitat for mice.
   To make matters worse, barberry also makes things homey for the deer ticks themselves, mostly by providing humidity. A forest with barberry growing in it hosted 120 Lyme-carrying ticks per acre; without barberry, a mere 10 per acre.

Earthworms, Friends No More?

    So much for the threat of Lyme disease in my heath bed. What about the demise of the plants there?
   Turns out that barberry is also prime habitat for earthworms, which, at first blush, would seem like a good thing. After all, earthworms are a gardener’s friend, right? Maybe. North of where the last glacier descended, the southern extent of which cut into much of northern U.S., all native earthworms were wiped out. The natives have been very slow to re-colonize but earthworms from Europe and Asia that arrived here in ship hulls and soil, and as fishing bait, have not been shy. They’ve spread rapidly.
   Non-native earthworms thrive especially well in the soil beneath barberry bushes. It could be that barberry leaves are more digestible to them; it could be that barberry alters the soil chemistry to their liking.

My heath bed in autumn

These exotic earthworms are good at gobbling up raw organic matter, as in the leaf litter that blankets our forests — and my heath bed, to which I import leaves. The newcomers can actually gobble up forest litter faster than it is replenished, changing the soil habitat and exposing the soil to erosion. Plants in the heath bed, i.e. plants in the heath family, like that leaf litter; it keeps the soil cool and moist and, as it slowly decomposes, enriches the soil beneath with decomposed organic matter, or humus. There is some evidence that the makeup of our native forests, which includes rhododendrons, also in the heath family, is changing due to the work of exotic earthworms.
And all this from barberry!

Some Redemption

I’m not all that worried about ticks or the demise of my heath bed. The bed is small enough and watched closely enough so that all barberries can be ripped out — just like the one I saw yesterday. My cat keeps mice at bay, and my dogs do likewise for deer. And I import more leaves each year than earthworms, even exotic ones could gobble up.
The extensiveness of wild settings makes barberry control there difficult. Options there are cutting, pulling, fire, and/or herbicides.

Heath bed in June

No need for such drama In a home landscape. Here, barberry is easily controlled, if desired, by nothing more than being pulled out or repeatedly cut to the ground. One or a few bushes are not going to significantly impact mouse populations or Lyme hazard. Their greatest impact would be to make berries that, with the help of birds, would further the spread of this bush. Newer, sterile varieties offer ornamental mounds of greenery that don’t contribute to the plant’s spread.

Heather, and Friends

My heath bed, incidentally, has no heath plants. Heaths (Erica spp.) would die from in our cold winters. I call my bed a “heath bed” because in it I grow Heath Family (Ericaceae) plants in it: rhododendrons, mountain laurels, lingonberries, huckleberries, swamp azalea, and some heather (Calluna spp.). I group these plants together because all demand special soil conditions, conditions quite different from that of most cultivated plants.
Most heath plants need a soil that is very, very acidic, relatively infertile, well-aerated, consistently moist, and rich in organic matter. As mentioned above, these plants thrive where the ground also has a mulch of leaf litter, wood chips, or other organic matter, a mulch that disappears too quickly where soils harbor large populations of the non-native earthworms that thrive beneath barberry bushes.

MAKING THE MOST OF WET GROUND

June 18, 2015/6 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Soil/by Lee Reich

Have Fun, You Silly Ducks

Wouldn’t you know it: I write about the extended dry spell one week, and the next week, which is now, the rain comes and doesn’t let up. Not that all this rain makes me regret having a drip irrigation system watering my garden. Rainfall could come screeching to a halt and send us into another dry spell.

Ducks, off to work and play

     My five Indian runner ducks offer many advantages here on the farmden, not the least of which is affording me the pleasure of watching creatures that actually enjoy cool, rainy weather. The ducks also are entertaining and decorative, spend much of their days scooping insects and slugs out of the lawn and meadow and into their bills, and, especially when living on that diet of insects, slugs, and greenery, lay very tasty eggs. The downside to ducks is that they are dumb, and don’t know to stay out of the road.
   My four chickens offer many of the same advantages as the ducks, except they never seem as at peace with the world as do the ducks. Also, chickens scratch. Scratching at the bases of mulched trees and shrubs exposes roots; scratching elsewhere wrenches young transplants out of the ground.
   Chickens abhor rainy weather.

You ‘Shrooms, Also Enjoy This Weather

Mushrooms I “planted” last spring are, like the ducks, reveling in this rainy change. “Planting” these mushrooms involved nothing more than pounding short lengths of wooden dowels, purchased with shiitake mushroom spawn growing in them, into numerous holes drilled in freshly cut pin oak logs. A cap of hot wax over each plug sealed in moisture. The 4-foot-long by 4” diameter logs lay in a shady place through summer while being colonized by thin threads of fungal hyphae growing out from the plugs.

Shiitake logs fruiting

This spring was to be the start of a few years of “fruiting,” that is, making mushrooms, the spore bearing structures of fungi that taste so good sautéed with some onions and butter or olive oil. Dry weather of the past few weeks was slowing the mushrooms’ first appearance, so I decided to shock them. Just bouncing the end of a log against a hard surface, such as a sidewalk, sometimes wakes them up. I opted for a water shock treatment, giving the logs a 24 hour soak in a shallow kiddie pool.
Right on schedule, within a week of being soaked, mushrooms began popping out all over the logs. With their ends levered into the horizontal openings of a metal fence gate tipped on its side against a tree, the logs and their attendant mushrooms are cantilevered out, perched above slugs and other organisms that might have enjoyed nibbling the fruits of my labor.
The shock treatment has resulted in a mushroom tsunami. Excess go into the dehydrator, which has them crispy dry and ready for long term storage in about 4 hours. Once the tsunami ends, the fungi need to rest for a month and a half before they’re ready for another shock. Or I can do nothing, and let nature pump out mushrooms more slowly over a longer period of time. Of course, if this rain keeps up — 3 inches in the last couple of days — another tsunami might anyway be in the offing.

And I Can Plant . . . White Strawberries

With the ground thoroughly soaked, it’s a good time to get plants in the ground . . . except in wet, clay soils. Working a wet clay ruins the almost crystalline structure that develops when it is well managed. Then, instead of the small particles aggregating together to make larger particles with larger pores in between them, letting air into the soil, the structure is reduced to only small unaggregated particles. Spaces between these small particles are so small that they draw in water by capillary action, and there’s no room available for air, which plant roots need. Good for pottery, bad for plants. Wait for any clay soil to dry a bit before digging in it, until it crumbles between your fingers with just a little pressure.
My soil is a silt loam that’s been enriched with plenty of compost, which helps aggregation, so I can plant now, even right after rain.

‘Pineapple Crush’ strawberries

   Among the plants I’ll be setting in the ground will be strawberries, right in a garden bed. Strawberries, you wonder? Big deal. But these are alpine strawberries. Okay, many people grow alpine strawberries. But these are white alpine strawberries, white, that is, even when dead ripe.
   Alpine strawberries are different from common garden strawberries in that they are a different species (Fragaria vesca), they don’t make runners, and both the plants and fruits are small, the latter about the size of a nickel. Previously, I’ve put a few in pots sitting along my front path for a nibble on the way to the door, or a few at the foot of garden beds, again, for a nibble, here while working in the garden. I want to see how the plants do under the better growing conditions of compost-enriched soil and drip irrigation right in a garden bed.
   Alpine strawberries are small but have very intense flavor, which needs to be fully developed before being picked. I especially like the white ones’ flavor, which can develop fully because, being white when ripe, they’re ignored by birds. The variety name Pineapple Crush gives a good approximation of the flavor.

DRIP, DRIP, DRIP, WHERE’S THE AGUA?

June 12, 2015/8 Comments/in Flowers, Fruit, Gardening, Houseplants, Soil, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

I’m Dripping, So Why Am I Watering?

Up to a couple of weeks ago, little water had dropped from the sky this spring here in the Hudson Valley. But a drip irrigation system automatically waters many of my plants. So why have I been spending so much time with hose in hand?
   Not all my plants drink in the drips. Trees and shrubs are on their own except their first year in the ground when I religiously hand water them every few days initially, and then once a week throughout the season. These plants get 3/4 gallon per week for every square foot spread (estimated) of their root systems. That’s equivalent to an inch of rainfall which, if it does fall, exempts me from a few days of watering.
   A couple of inches depth of hay, leaf, or wood chip mulch around the trees and shrubs seals in moisture to make best use of my efforts. Also, I start with smaller plants — less than 4 feet tall — which become independent of my watering sooner because a larger proportion of their roots are soon foraging around in surrounding soil that those of larger plants.
   My flower beds also don’t get dripped. Although the soil surface is dry, moisture carried over from winter still sits in lower depths, into which established perennial flowers’ roots can tap. Annuals and newly planted perennials need to be watered on the same schedule as young trees until their roots reach that moisture.

My blueberries are my only dripped shrubs

It is my garden vegetables that drink in the benefits of my drip system. But even here some hand watering is needed these days. Down each bed runs 1 or 2 drip lines, with emitters along the lines spaced 6 inches apart. As water enters the soil, capillary pull from small spaces between the soil particles draws water sideways and, along with gravity, downward. The resulting wetting fronts have the shape, if you could look at a cross-section of the soil, of an ice cream cone. In clay soils, with small particles and, hence, a lot of capillary draw, that ice cream cone is very fat; in sandy soils, it’s narrow, a couple of feet wide at its broadest as compared with the 6 foot spread in a clay soil.
The wetting fronts start their sideways spread below the soil surface, deeper in sandy soils, more shallow in clay soils. In either case, the soil surface remains dry except right at the point of drip. So any vegetable transplants or seeds I set in the ground need to be hand watered until their roots reach the wetting front — except for seeds or transplants set right under or along the drip line.

Drip Irrigation Workshop June 20th; see “Workshops“, at this site, for more information.

A Statue of David

    My friend David was wondering why the leaves of his Romaine lettuce plants flopped down. I gave my usual response to most gardening questions: “Too little water.” (My other usual response is “Too much water,” often following my first response if the questioner tells of watering all the time.)
   So I asked David how much he watered, and he said he thoroughly soaked the ground by spraying it with water. Busted! It really was a water problem, too little in this case.
   In fact, thoroughly wetting the soil with the usual 4-foot-diameter, hand held spray is almost impossible. “Thoroughly wet” means soaking the ground to at least a 6-inch depth. For his hand held sprayer to do that, David would have to stand in place like a statue, sprayer in hand, unmoving, for about an hour to wet one 4-foot-diameter part of the garden before moving on to the next 4-foot-diameter area.
   When I’m watering plants in the ground by hand, I’m wetting only the small area beneath an individual plant, just enough to soak its roots as they establish themselves in the surrounding soil.

Probe the Soil

People find it hard to believe that that statuesque watering posture is really necessary. All you have to do is scratch the soil surface after a David-esque spraying of plants to see how deeply the water percolated, and you’d find only a thin layer of wet soil, at the surface.

Digital moisture probe.

Digging a hole in the ground is a good way to tell if watering was sufficient. But it’s also inconvenient.
For just a few dollars, I invested, years ago, in an electronic gizmo that bypasses all that hole digging. This soil moisture sensor has a metal probe that you plunge into the soil. Atop the probe is a dial or digital readout that tells whether the soil is “DRY,” “WET,” or something in between. More accurate sensors cost over a hundred dollars, but the cheap ones are fairly accurate and work well if coupled with observation.

Good for Pot(s) Also

The soil moisture meter is especially useful with potted plants, which might need watering every day when the weather is warm, sunny, and breezy. (With experience, lifting a pot to feel its weight is also a good measure of moisture level, as is just getting to know your plants better.)
I’m still hand watering the pots because I haven’t yet connected the drip tubes that will direct water to each of the pots.

MORE PRUNING, AN INVASIVE?

May 28, 2015/6 Comments/in Fruit, Pruning/by Lee Reich

Training Sessions

Anyone appalled at the apparent brutality with which I approached my grape and kiwi vines a few weeks ago, pruning shears, saw, and lopper in hand, would have been further shocked today. But no harm done. (The kiwis are “hardy kiwis,” that is, Actinidia arguta and A. kolomikta; fuzzy kiwis are not cold-hardy here.)
   Left to their own devices, grape or kiwi vines would, every year, grow larger and larger, eventually, if once coming upon something to climb, sending their fruits further and further out of reach. Or, if not out of reach, then increasingly tangled in a mass of stems. In the dank interior of that mass of stems, many a grape would have rotted rather than ripened.
   Most importantly, though, grape or kiwi berries on untended vines don’t taste that good. Self-shading cuts down flavor-producing photosynthesis. And the plants’ energies must be spread among too many fruits; pruning limits yield but lets the plants pack more flavor into what fruit remains.
   The first thing I did, when I began pruning a few weeks ago, was re-organize the vines. Both bear fruits on new shoots growing off one-year-old canes. I train these plants on T-shaped trellises, with 5 wires stretched from T to T. A trunk rises to the height of the wires, at which point it bifurcates into cordons — permanent arms — each traveling in opposite directed up and down the middle wire. The one-year-old fruiting canes are splayed out perpendicularly to the cordons.
   Both vines grow prodigiously every year, the fruiting canes too long and too abundant. So I shortened all the canes to 3 to 4 feet long, which was just beyond the outer wires, and cut off those super-vigorous ones having stratospheric aspirations.
   Still too many canes: So I reduced their numbers. A couple of weeks ago, I went over the vines again, aiming (ideally) for one cane on either side of the cordon every 6 inches or so.

Round Three, of Pruning Grape & Kiwi

The average date for the last killing frost here is around the third week in May. Evidently not so, this year, but I wanted to wait to do the final grape and kiwi pruning until after that date. The tips of the canes would be the first to grow and, hence, frosted, which is not a problem if the canes would anyway be shortened again.
Now that frost is probably just a memory, I thinned out the canes one last time — to almost a foot apart — and further shortened those that remained. The grape canes got shortened to two buds each and the kiwi canes to about 18 inches long.

Grapes, In the Bags

    The next order of business, for just the grapes, will be bagging the bunches. I’ll wait until the berries have begun to swell and then partially slit the folds of delicatessen bags so that they can be slid over a bunch with the stem holding the bunch sliding into the slits. Each bunch has a leaf or a tendril opposite the bunch which needs to be clipped off so the top of the bag can be tightly folded over the stem, then stapled shut on either side, just below the slit.
   To see rather than, or in addition to, read about bagging grapes, see my video.
   Why the bags? To keep diseases, birds, bees, and other insects at bay. With this protection, ripe bunches can be left hanging longer than usual to develop very rich, sweet flavor. Worst case scenario is that a bag is opened and there’s nothing inside. This sometimes happens. Best case scenario is peeling open a bag to reveal a perfect bunch of grapes with perfectly ambrosial flavor.

Hardy Kiwi, J’Accuse!

    I’m glad I planted the hardy kiwi vines many years ago because it may be illegal to do so in the future. Yes, illegal! No, not because you can smoke the plant, but because has raised eyebrows in certain invasive plant circles. Nonetheless, it’s a very attractive vine with very tasty fruits. And mine have remained well-behaved in the quarter of a century that they’ve been in the ground.
   In case fellow New Yorkers were not aware of this, as of March 10, 2015 it will no longer be legal to buy, sell or transport 126 species identified by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation as invasive. Sixty-nine of these species are plants; hardy kiwi vines are not one of them — yet.
   I don’t doubt that there are plants that threaten to take over the world. Well, not the world, but certain ecosystems. Which is why garlic mustard, Japanese knotweed, and autumn olive are on that most unwanted list, despite their qualities. Autumn olive, for example, enriches the soil with nitrogen garnered from the air by symbiotic microorganism at its roots. Its flowers sweetly perfume the air in spring. And the small berries that ripen in early fall, if harvested as soon as they have lost their astringency, are rich in flavor and super-rich in healthful phytochemicals known as lycopenes.
   Hardy kiwifruit has not been banned anywhere, but in 2012 Massachusetts Audubon Society published an Invasive Plant Pest Alert strongly urging people not to grow or propagate this plant. Their statement was based on apparently rampant growth that was documented at two sites in Massachusetts and one in New York.
   The findings don’t jive with the good behavior of numerous vines that have graced gardens, as ornamentals, in Eastern U.S. since the late 1800s. Perhaps most of those planting included only female or only male plants, in which case no viable seeds would be produced, although the vines could also have spread by climbing trees or rooting where they touch ground under the right conditions.
   Male and female kiwi vines do socialize when grown for fruit in commercial and research plantings. But again, plants hardly, if ever, have multiplied on their own at these locations, which concurs with my observations here on the farmden.
   As a general rule, only 10 percent of any introduced species are likely to become established on foreign ground, and only 10 percent of those plants are likely to become invasive. Let’s be very careful in our condemnations and not blow the threat of invasive species out of proportion.

Plant Sale Saturday

This Saturday, May 30, 2015, Permaculturesque Plant Sale at my New Paltz, NY farmden, from 10 am until 2 pm. Ornamental plants, edible plants, and ornamental AND edible plants such as 2 crop figs, hardy oranges (Poncirus), rosemary, dessert gooseberries, delicious and nutritious black currants, and much more.

BLUEBERRIES OUTSIDE, APHIDS INSIDE

April 23, 2015/12 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Pests, Pruning, Soil/by Lee Reich

Plant the Best-Tasting Fruit

My sixteen blueberry plants keep me in blueberries year ‘round, so I’m not planting any this year. But you are, or should be. The bushes are attractive in every season, with white blossoms in spring, foliage that looks spry all summer and turns crimson red in fall, and stems that shade to red in winter. The bushes are almost pest-free. And the berries are healthful and delicious.

   All you would-be blueberry planters out there: Pay attention to the soil for your plants, about which I’m going to offer advice. Too many people plunk a blueberry bush into a hole dug in their lawn and then wonder about the lack of berries. Poor growth, that’s why. The plants bear fruit on one year old stems. If shoots grow only a few inches one year, there’s little room on which to hang berries the following year.
   Taking a cue from wild blueberries, here’s what the bushes need, soil-wise: acidity (pH 4-5.5), organic matter, relatively low fertility, moisture, air, and no competition from weeds. For starters, check the soil pH with either a home testing kit or by taking a sample to a Cooperative Extension office or soil testing laboratory. If soil is not sufficiently acidic, add sulfur, preferable pelletized sulfur for ease of handling, 3⁄4 pound of sulfur per 100 square feet in sandy soils or three times this amount in heavier soils, for each pH unit the soil is above 4.5. Contrary to popular myth, adding oak leaves or pine needles will NOT do the trick. Spread sulfur over the ground as far as the eventual spread of the roots, which is about 3 feet in all directions.
   Then dump a bucketful of peat moss right where you plan to dig each hole. Dig the hole deep and twice as wide as needed to get the plant in the ground, mixing the peat moss with the soil. Peat moss provides a long-lasting source of organic matter, which also helps with aeration and water retention.
   Finally, plant and water.

My planting, 7 years later

Wait, you’re not finished yet. Right after planting, spread some organic mulch, such as wood shavings, leaves, or pine needles, a couple of inches deep and as wide a spread as the roots. Mulch keeps the soil moist and further enriches the ground with organic matter as its lower layers decompose.

Soil & Birds

Ongoing soil care for blueberry bushes is simple and necessary, mostly food and drink.
Assuage the bushes’ thirst with, barring rain, three-quarters of a gallon of water per week for each square foot spread of the roots. Satisfy their hunger by spreading a high nitrogen fertilizer late each fall. I use an organic fertilizer, such as soybean or alfalfa meal, at the rate of 1.5 pounds over every hundred square feet of root spread. These fertilizers offer nitrogen throughout the growing season in a form blueberries can use.

Blueberry temple in winter

Periodically re-check the soil pH and add more sulfur, if needed. Replenish the mulch each fall, laying the new mulch right on top of the old mulch.
For the future — harvest of first berries should begin within a couple of years — think about birds. Are you going to share? Are they going to share? I opt not to share, enclosing my whole planting in netting, to create a walk-in “blueberry temple.”

Aphid Attack & Counterattack

    Turning inward, not introspectively, but to the greenhouse, I see aphids getting a foothold. Their populations soared a few weeks ago as young and old feasted on aging celery and arugula plants beginning to send up seed stalks.
   My first counterattack was to cut down or dig up these old plants and whisk them to the compost pile before too many insects dropped off to take up residence on smaller plants and seedlings. Not that there weren’t plenty of stragglers fattening up on younger plants.
   My tack with the stragglers has been to set my watering wand on “fan spray” and blast the plants with water. Most aphids that get knocked off plants don’t return. I spray on mornings of sunny days so leaves dry relatively quickly, limiting potential disease problems. The temporary increase in humidity might increase the likelihood of aphids’ getting fungal diseases, to which they are very susceptible.
   Of less effect are the ladybugs I periodically introduce into the greenhouse, in large part because I don’t have enough of them. They used to enter my home in large numbers via leaks around an old, south-facing window and nearby crack in the wall. I’d merely vacuum them up as they clustered on the window pane and shake the contents of the hand-held vacuum among plants in the greenhouse late in the day. That window and the wall crack have been repaired, so few ladybugs end up indoors.
   I’m considering making a hole in the wall to let the ladybugs indoors again and hanging a ladybug live trap (available commercially or made from online plans at http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/br/lbeetle/001030.trap.pdf) right near the hole.
   Thus far, though, cleanup and water sprays have kept aphids under control, and plants are growing well. Once transplanted outdoors aphid problems vanish because of the weather and natural predators.

POPPING, PRUNING, AND EATING

April 16, 2015/3 Comments/in Fruit/by Lee Reich

Popcorn Gets Bigger, But Medlar Is Still Ugly (Not To Me)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about increasing the poppability of my home-grown popcorn by exposing the kernels to the vapor of a saturated salt solution. Pennsylvania Dutch Butter Flavored popcorn, a variety that usually pops fairly well, popped to 1/3 greater volume.
This week Pink Pearl, a variety that’s not usually a very good popper, underwent testing. The result: No effect of the treatment; both the treated and untreated batches popped pretty well. Was it the change in the weather, stronger hints of spring? Perhaps. (Previously, I pointed out how cold weather outside turns indoor air drier, perhaps too dry for good popcorn popping.) At any rate, Pink Pearl was tasty.

Medlar Teaches How To Prune A Fruit Plant

    The weather change also had the effect of drawing me outdoors more — for pruning. Looking at my medlar tree’s branches going every which way, I scratched my head (figuratively) wondering where to start, what to cut.
   Medlar is a fruit tree (more on medlar later), and the first step in pruning any fruit tree is attending to light. Light provides the energy for photosynthesis which translates into flavorful fruits. The goal is to let every branch bathe in sunlight, which also helps thwart potential disease problems.
   So I stopped scratching my head and started with a few dramatic pruning cuts, lopping some of the larger limbs back to their origins. Medlar has a naturally spreading growth habit, so cuts were aimed at removing limbs trying to fill in and shade the the center of the tree. I wanted a whorl of branches reaching up and out.

Medlar tree, after pruning

   Next to go were dead, diseased, and broken branches. I saw remnants of cicada damage from two years ago. Away with most of those stems also.
   For the next cuts, you have to know how a particular kind of fruit tree bears fruit. At one extreme are peaches. They bear only on one-year-old stems so need aggressive pruning each year to stimulate new shoots that become next year’s bearing, one-year-old stems. At the other extreme are apple and pear trees. They bear fruit on long-lived spurs, which are stumpy, branching stubs that develop on older limbs, so relatively little pruning is needed.
   Medlar’s bearing habit lies somewhere between those two extremes. I shortened a few very old branches to invigorate them with new growth.
   On most fruit trees, drooping branches make poorer fruit. Probably for medlar also. So off came the drooping branches, either back to non-droopy portions or to their origin.
   Finally, some detail work: shortening or removing those vigorous, vertical shoots called watersprouts; thinning out smaller areas of congested branches; removing stems growing too close to where major limbs exit the trunk; and lopping down root sprouts growing at or near ground level from the rootstock.
   Besides fruit, medlar offers beauty. Part of the beauty is the craggy shape of the tree, its muscular limbs clothed in golden brown bark. I stepped back to admire the tree and my work after pruning. If I’ve done a good job, the tree looks happily ready to bask in light and air and, because the major cuts removed limbs at the origin, hardly looks like it’s been pruned.

Medlar Teaches To Eat With Your Tongue, Not Your Eyes

Medlar is a fruit whose popularity peaked in the Middle Ages. Charlemagne was a fan, a big fan who demanded the tree be planted in every town he conquered.

Medlar, fruit in summer

Despite its popularity, even in the Middle Ages, the fruit has often been described disparagingly — for its appearance, though, not its flavor. The fruits resemble small, russeted apples, tinged dull yellow or red, with their calyx ends (across from the stems) flared open. “Open-arse” was the name Chaucer chose. A more recent writer described medlar as “a crabby-looking, brownish-green, truncated, little spheroid of unsympathetic appearance. “ (All recounted, along with information about growing, procuring, and eating medlars in the chapter on medlar in my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden.)

Medlar, after bletting

Oh, one more quirk about medlar: The fruit, rock hard at harvest, needs to be bletted before eating. This means gently setting it on a counter in a cool room for a couple of weeks, or more, depending to the temperature, during which time the fruit’s interior turns to brown mush. Ugly to look at, but the flavor has a refreshing briskness with winy overtones, like old-fashioned applesauce laced with cinnamon. Between the fruits’ appearance and their need for bletting, you’ll never find medlars for sale on a supermarket shelf.
Perhaps the fruit is ugly. The tree is not. I already mentioned the attractive form and color of the limbs. The white flowers, opening here in May, are like those of a wild rose, each one enhanced because its late opening gets a backdrop of a whorl of already unfurled, dark, green leaves. The tree grows only 8 or 10 feet high and wide and will fruit without another pollinator, so is perfect for a small yard. No need to decide whether to plant a fruit tree or an ornamental tree; medlar is both trees in one.

Medlar, tree in bloom

ELUSIVE AZURE AND FRUIT

April 8, 2015/2 Comments/in Flowers, Fruit/by Lee Reich

Too Hot Here For These Gems, But Maybe I Can Trick Them

   It was decades ago that Norman — gardener, orchid expert, one-time cattle farmer, and lawyer — described to me his first sighting of blue poppy, Meconopsis betonicifolia. He was traveling in England, and at this particular garden was a pond whose far side was electrified by the sky blue petals of blue poppy, perhaps the purest blue of any flower. The mirrored surface of the water stepped up the voltage, as do the frilly clusters of golden anthers trembling in the center whorls of petals.
   Since then, I’ve lusted for blue poppies but have yet to see the plant in bloom. Twice I tried to grow it, from seed. Each time the seedlings germinated and got off to a good start. Each time, in July, as temperatures here started to get steamy, the plants collapsed, dead. Blue poppy is native above 10,000 feet in the Himalayas and doesn’t like hot weather.
   I don’t feel compelled to grow the plant (although that would be nice); I just want to feast my eyes on those bluest of blue petals. To see the plant in bloom requires being somewhere: 1) in late spring or early summer, 2) with cool summers, 3) where blue poppy grows wild or has been planted. The second condition, cool summers, is found in North America in the Pacific Northwest, New England and adjacent parts of Canada, and Alaska. I like hot summers so I’m not relocating to any of these places in order to grow this plant. Also, my garden is particularly needy and entrancing in late spring and early summer, so I’m not leaving then.

I Almost Cross Paths With Blue Poppy, After 20+ Years

    As it turned out, I just missed an opportunity to see blue poppy in bloom at Longwood Gardens in Kennet Square, Pennsylvania. Not only is Longwood not far from here, but I happened to be in nearby Philadelphia two weeks ago, when the plant was in bloom. Who would have thought blue poppy could be grown in Pennsylvania?
   I had, at least, to find out how the plants are grown there. As described by Longwood horticulturalist Jim Harbage, each October Longwood has potted plants shipped from a nursery in Alaska. The plants are put into cold storage until early January, then brought into Longwood’s cool (50-60°F) conservatory to slowly awaken and, finally, blossom in March. After bloom, the plants, although perennials, are discarded.
   Most important is to keep temperatures below 70° F. Research at Longwood Gardens showed that respiration outpaces photosynthesis at warmer temperatures. The plant, essentially, starves. Warmer temperatures also cause some purpling of the petals, ruining the whole reason for growing the plant.
   Could Longwood’s prescription be mimicked in my greenhouse? Probably not. Longwood’s large, high-ceilinged conservatory, with dappled shade from tree ferns and citrus trees, perhaps also cooling mists of water puffed into the air as needed, is a lot cooler than my greenhouse. Here, greenhouse temperatures on sunny days in February and March soar, despite vent fans, into the 80s.
   How about a sunny window sill? Temperatures are cool in my house, more so the further you go from the woodstove. So that’s a possibility. But purchasing new plants every year could get expensive, especially plants that are good only for compost once their blossoms fade.
   How about starting the seeds in early or mid winter for planting outdoors to blossom before temperatures get too hot? Or starting the seeds in fall and exposing the young seedings to very cool temperatures for more assured earlier blossoms outdoors? Blue poppy, if it behaves like many other perennials, should blossom the first season if started very early or if tricked into thinking it’s been through winter before blossoming. I later learned that Chanticleer Garden, also in the Philadelphia region, gets outdoor blossoms from plants purchased in October, wintered in cold frames, then planted outdoors in March. Bloom is in April; composting is in June.
   The most important and most reliable route for me to eye blue poppy in bloom is to pencil in a trip to Longwood Gardens for early March next year.

King Red, For Fruit & Beauty, Also Elusive . . . Do Far

My blue poppy experience is reminiscent of my experience with another plant of western Asia, a plant variously called King Red Russian olive, iğde (in Turkey), botanically Elaeagnus angustifolia var. orientalis, or, erroneously, Trebizond date (which is a persimmon species).

King Red seeds, sprouting last spring

   King Red is invasive out West but definitely is not invasive here. As with blue poppy, I’ve grown the plant from seed only to have it collapse, dead, when steamy weather arrived.
   Beautiful blossoms are not the attraction of King Red, although they do sweetly perfume the air in spring. Rather, it’s the bright red fruit that is highlighted by the gray-green foliage and, when dried, is like sweet talcum powder contained within a cherry-sized, brittle shell. Even without the flowers or fruit, the tree imparts a soft, Mediterranean look to the landscape, much like an olive tree, a relative.
   I started some seedlings of King Red Russian olive last year, hoping for some genetic variability in heat tolerance. All the seedlings thrived, probably because of last summer’s relatively cool temperatures.

King Red branch that someone sent me

The seedlings are now dormant in 4 inch pots in my basement. I want 20 foot tall King Red trees so eventually the baby trees need to be planted out. I’m scoping out suitable locations with cooler microclimates. A spot receiving only morning sun is the current best candidate.
Perhaps in a few years I’ll be eating home-grown iğde while enjoying the sight of blue poppies.