How Pesky And Interesting

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

Snowflakes? No.

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

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

Cabbage whitefly

Cabbage whitefly

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

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

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

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

Peach Harvest

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

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

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

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

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

Ladybugs to the Rescue

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

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

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

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

Cabbage whitefly & ladybug larvae

Cabbage whitefly & ladybug larvae

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

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

Whoosh!

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

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

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

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

A Whole New Garden, Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frederick Clapp pear tree

Frederick Clapp pear tree

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

Pears, A Book

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

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

The Destroyer To The Rescue

/5 Comments/in , , , /by

Predatory Helpers

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

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

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

Mealybug destroyer

Mealybug destroyer

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

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

Help From The Queen

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bad and the Good

/6 Comments/in , /by

Winecaps, Not For Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seaberries For Me

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

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

Seaberry, Titan

Seaberry, Titan

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

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

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

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

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

Permaculture-esque

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

Seaberry bush

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

Fruit Tasting and Workshop!!

/0 Comments/in /by

Picked At Peak Of Perfection

/7 Comments/in , , /by

Tomatoes Vs. Sweet Corn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watermelon, Are You Ripe

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

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

A ripe watermelon?

A ripe watermelon?

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

Tomatoes, You Are Ripe

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

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

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

Making Sense

/1 Comment/in , , , /by

Lilies, More Than Just Pretty

I’m triply thankful for the lily stems in the vase in the kitchen.

First, for their beauty. The large, lily-white (of course) petals flare out into trumpets, from whose frilly throats poke groups of rust-red anthers and single tear-capped stigmas. The petals spread about 8 inches wide from one side to the other, and the single stalk I plunked into the vase sports six of them!Lilies in vase

Second, I’m thankful for the lilies’ fragrance. The heady, sweet fragrance fills the whole room.

And third, I’m thankful that the plants, cut from outdoors where they share a bed with staked Sungold tomato plants, are alive. They’ve been threatened by a relatively new pest, the lily leaf beetle (Lilioceris lilii). This European pest made its North American debut in Montreal in 1945, and its debut on my farmden in 2015.

Lily leaf beetle can be controlled by sprays, even organic ones such as Neem or spinosad. But I’m not keen on spraying anything on plants rubbing elbows with edibles, in this case my Sungold tomatoes.
The beetles’ bright red color makes them easy to spot, at which point they can be crushed. Battling the beetle mano a mano is a viable control for a backyard planting. This was my approach a couple years ago. With other garden distractions and many crown imperial (Fritillaria) plants, which also are attacked by the beetle, I abandoned any efforts to control the beetle.

Yes, I saw some beetles on the lilies this season; yes, the plants are still doing well. Plants can tolerate a certain amount of pest damage and still do fine.

Play It Again Sam

My awesome lilies aren’t just any old lilies. They’re true lilies (Lilium species), not daylilies (Hemerocallis species). Once we’ve narrowed down “lily” to the genus Lilium, there are about 100 species within that genus from which to choose.

My lily is one of many varieties of Asiatic hybrid lilies. Its name: Casa Blanca. I highly recommend growing it.

Casablanca lily in the garden

Casablanca lily in the garden

Popeye’s Delight, Later

With eyes and nose taken care of, let’s move on to another of the senses, taste. I’d like some spinach. But I can’t have it — yet. I can plant it very soon, though, and then in a month or so I can be eating it.

So why didn’t I plant it a month ago so I could be eating it now? The reason is that spinach is a long day plant, which flowers (aka “goes to seed”) during summer’s long days. Planted a month ago, even two months ago, and after making a rosette of a few leaves the plant would pump its energy into flowers and seeds. Besides yielding a paltry harvest of leaves, that whole “going to seed” thing also ruins the flavor of the leaves.

Actually, it isn’t long days that make spinach gustatorily morph from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde; it’s short nights. (Photoperiodism, the name for this response, was originally though to be the response to daylength; calling it a response to “daylength” stuck even after it was discovered that the response was to the length of the the night.) Beets, gladiolas, lettuce, and radishes are also “long day plants.”

Photoperiod doesn’t work alone in prodding plants to grow or flower. Temperature, either before germination or while the plants are growing, also figures in, as does light intensity and soil moisture. Spinach usually flowers when days are 14 or more hours long (more correctly, short nights that are 10 or less hours long), but will also do so following 8 hour days (16 hour nights) if the seeds are chilled.

Nights are now just over 10 hours long so I can plant spinach. While the plants are growing, cooler temperatures, which are coming this way, and adequate water, which my plants will get thanks to drip irrigation, also factor in to keep spinach from going to seed. So the spinach that I sow today will put all its energy into growing large and tasty leaves.

Peas, Please

A taste of peas would also be nice. The spring harvest was good. Still, some gardeners successfully plant peas in summer for an autumn harvest. Not me.Peas in pod

Daylength isn’t what messes up late sown peas, for me, at least. Heat is. Peas languish during hot weather, common through August and even lingering into early autumn. So the peas grow poorly, and if they do weather the hot weather, they are apt to be struck down by the first frost of autumn.

I’ve heard that Wando is a pea variety that can take some heat. I haven’t tried for an autumn harvest for many, many years. With climate change, perhaps autumn peas are worth another try.

Fruit, Again, With Nod To Michael Jackson

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

Blackcaps Redux, This Season

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

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

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

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

Rotten Plums

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

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

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

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

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

Plumquest Begins

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

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

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

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

A Cardinal And A Jewel

/8 Comments/in , /by

And This Year’s Winner Is . . .

Organizations annually tout their “plant of the year.” There’s the Perennial Plant Association’s 2017 plant of the year butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa); Proven Winners 2017 Landscape Plant of the Year is Yuki Cherry Blossom Deutzia; American Conifer Society Collectors’ Conifer of the Year is Primo Eastern Arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis ‘IslPrim’); Assembly magazine’s 2016 Plant of the Year is Bosch Rexroth . . . whoops, the last is an assembly plant (hydraulic motors and pumps). Anyway, you get the picture.

How about a new category, the Weed of the Year? Here on my farmden, I nominate and elect jewelweed (Impatiens capensis). This weed is all over the place this year, even far from where it’s been in the past. For this weed, being all over the place is its only flaw.

On the positive side, jewelweed is a pretty plant with very succulent stems sporting orange, sometimes yellow flowers. jewelweed blossomIt’s also been called touch-me-not for the way its seed capsules burst open with the slightest touch to project their seeds many feet — a useful characteristic for helping a weed spread although it doesn’t explain jewelweed’s spreading here in one season over a hundred feet and to the other side of my house. It’s close relative, the widely planted annual flower, impatiens, does the same thing without becoming weedy; both plants also enjoy and flower in either sun or deep shade.

Jewelweed often grows as a neighbor to poison ivy, which perhaps by some odd reasoning (to me) gave it a reputation for use as a treatment for poison ivy. My friend Bob, usually a clear thinker and very susceptible to poison ivy, decided to treat his rash, one year with jewelweed. He reported a success, as an afterthought mentioning that he applied it in conjunction with cortisone. (I’ll expect a lot of feedback, testimonials for jewelweed.)

Jewelweed’s main asset is how easy it is to remove. Even large stalks lift easily out of the ground, roots intact, with minimal soil disturbance. A machete or scythe slices easily through the stalks without the slightest resistance to decapitate the plants.

Each year in the garden is different. Jewelweed’s plans for next year won’t be evident until next June.

Red In The Shade!

Cardinal flower I planted

Cardinal flower I planted

Slicing through a stand of jewelweed with my scythe in the deep shade along the seasonal, small stream (a ditch) in front of my property, I was taken aback by a 3-foot-high spike of fire engine red flowers. More scything, and then another spike appeared. I thought back to spring, and remembered planting cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis) along the stream/ditch this past spring.

Cardinal flower never ceases to take my breath away. Deep shade is not usually home to lots of showy flowers, and especially not flowers in traffic stopping colors. Only a few times in my life have I come upon cardinal flowers in the wild, and — you guessed it — each time they took my breath away.

Wild cardinal flower

Wild cardinal flower

Each time they were also in deep shade alongside water. Hence my choice of site for last spring’s planting.

Cardinal flowers are easily grown from seed, and no need to have a lot of them for bold effect. The plant to grow is the species, not one of the “improved” varieties. Many varieties have been bred or selected, including Alba (white flowers), Heather Pink, Angel Song (salmon and cream flowers), Ruby Slippers, and Twilight Zone (pink flowers). Color of the straight species is usually red, a very pure red, untainted by a hint of blue as are so many other red flowers.

Two Weeds(?)

Jewelweed and cardinal flower have much in common: both are native, both grow in shade, and both are pretty plants. Jewelweed is a self-seeding annual.

Cardinal flower is a perennial, unfortunately a short-lived perennial. It does self-seed to some degree for new plants to replace dead ones, but not enough for my needs. I grew my originals from seed, which is not at all difficult, and intend to do so again. If only cardinal flower could learn some reproductive habits from its neighbor in the shade.

Savin’ Seeds, Killin’ Weeds

/3 Comments/in , , , /by

 

Bolting Plants

Last week I was admiring a vegetable garden where just about every lettuce plant was reaching skyward, with flower buds about to cap the tops of the spires. Isn’t that the wrong way to grow lettuce?

Bolting lettuce plantsLettuce that flowers — “goes to seed” — becomes bitter and tough. In my own garden, I aspire to have no lettuce spires by sowing lettuce seeds every couple of weeks for a regular harvest of mild-flavored, succulent leaves or heads. The plants don’t have time to bolt.

Those bolting lettuces I was admiring were in a garden in Iowa, one of the gardens at the Seed Savers Exchange (www.seedsavers.org), an organization that every gardener should know about and a garden that I should have not waited so long to visit. The mission of Seed Savers Exchange is to save and preserve heirloom seeds, which are varieties that have been passed on down among generations of farmers and gardeners. Taste some heirloom tomatoes and it’s understandable why these varieties have been saved and passed on. Belgian Giant tomato may not have the smooth, round shape of a modern Big Boy tomato, but this heirloom is well worth growing for its complex, sweet-tart flavor.

One way that Seed Savers fulfills their mission is by growing and saving many varieties of seed. Hence the bolting lettuces I saw there. Some varieties of vegetables, such as most squashes, tomatoes, and cucumbers, spread their pollen too freely. To keep these varieties seed “true,” contamination from foreign pollen is prevented by growing all plants of a particular variety in fine-mesh, insect-proof enclosures.Seed growing at SeedsaversNetted enclosure to prevent cross-pollination

The Seed Saver mission is also fulfilled by so-called “participatory preservation.” An over 13,000 member network of gardeners grow seeds and share them — to the tune of over 23,000 varieties — through an online seed exchange. Anyone can browse the listings but only members can request the seeds.

Not that non-members don’t have access to any of these seeds. Every year, Seed Savers Exchange publishes a seed catalog, from which anyone can order seeds. The names of the old varieties themselves make some of the seeds irresistible: Tolli’s Sweet Italia pepper (better name than flavor), Green Arrow Pea (excellent flavor and high yielding), Jelly Melon cucumber (very interesting name and appearance, but I have yet to try it).

What To Do With Weeds

Ten days absence from my garden, with warm, sunny weather interspersed with rainy days adding up to two inches of rainfall, wrought big changes. Sweet corn and polenta corn reached well over 5 feet in height, flopping stems of staked tomatoes were in desperate need of tying, blueberry stems bowed down with their weight of plump, ripe berries, and  . . . weeds were abundant.

Ninety percent of the weeds were Canadian thistle, crabgrass, purslane, Purslanepigweed, common yellow wood sorrel (Oxalis sricta) and — my worst weed —  creeping woodsorrel (Oxalis corniculata). I’m jerking each thistle out with a gloved hand. Yes, roots left in the ground will resprout. I’ll just keep jerking them out until they expend all their stored fuel and before new shoots can start pumping new fuel down to the roots, and the plants will die. I poke my hori-hori knife right at the roots of crabgrass and toss the severed tops into the compost bucket.

Yellow wood sorrel is easy, and sort of fun, to remove; pull the plant and the whole thing comes out easily. Creeping woodsorrel is another story: With brittle stems that creep just below ground level and dirt-colored leaves, it’s hard to see and hard to remove. Most effective is a spray of household vinegar, repeated each time new stems grow.

The way to remove purslane and pigweed is to harvest it — yes, for eating. Unfortunately, I don’t like purslane, so I weed it. But pigweed is a delicious cooked green. I wish I had more of this weed; it cooks down a lot and the harvest was over after two dinners.

Bye, Bye Black Currants

Belaruskaja black currants

Belaruskaja black currants

I mourn the passing — okay, “mourn” is a bit too strong — of fresh blackcurrants. The harvest was bountiful and long lasting,  but now is over. Over twenty quarts of them are in the freezer but those are for eating through the winter.