Gardening – Page 25

PROXIMAL THOUGHTS, PROXIMAL ACTION

August 25, 2016/4 Comments/in Design, Gardening, Planning, Tools, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Easy Access Water

I am reminded today of the importance — in a home garden — of proximity. Proximity of the garden to a door or, even better, a kitchen door. Proximity of the compost pile to a door, to the garden, and, if bulky materials such as manure or wood chips are hauled in, to a driveway. And, the spur for today’s rambling, proximity of the garden to water spigots. Trench for water hydrant
   The saying that “April showers bring May flowers” notwithstanding, supplemental water is usually critical in my garden in April. Just a few days of sunny, balmy weather is enough to dry out the surface of the ground, just beneath which lie in waiting, for moisture, my newly sown seeds. Or recent transplants, whose roots have yet to venture out and down into the ground.
   Once roots from sprouting seeds and transplants start growing in earnest, they’ll encounter plenty of residual moisture still sitting in the soil from winter’s rain and snow. Until then, I either have to carry watering cans (two cans at two gallons each) back and forth from the frost-free spigot against my house to the garden, or haul around hoses. The cans are top of the line Haw’s galvanized with good balance; even so, hauling water can get tedious, and the tendency to skimp a little on watering is unavoidable.
   Fifteen years ago I installed a frost-free outdoor hydrant near my secondary vegetable garden. What a luxury! Problem is that to get water to the main vegetable garden I have to unwind a hose and thread it through the garden gate. And then, if temperatures drop below freezing at night, common in April, nothing can be done till ice in the hose has defrosted. Again, watering is too often inadequate because I’m avoiding all this hassle.
   (Hot temperatures, dry weather, and plants feverishly sucking moisture out of the soil present no problem during most of the growing season — now, for instance. A few times each day, an inexpensive timer automatically opens a valve to let water flow through tubes to each vegetable bed and then out specially designed emitters to drip water into the ground at about the rate at which plants are drinking it up. But this automated, drip irrigation system can be damaged if put into service when temperatures drop below freezing.) My new hydrant
   So today I’m digging tenches and holes for two new, frost-free hydrants to bring the source of water right next to the main vegetable garden and to my compost bins. In the future, I’ll have no excuse to skimp on watering.

Free “Fertilizer”

Too may gardeners shove their gardens in a far corner of their property, as if the garden was an eyesore. (Which it often is.) I suggest locating the garden as close to the house as possible, given constraints of sunlight; six or more hours of summer sun, daily, is ideal. And make it ornamental, with fencing, a nice gate, and shrubs and flowers around and in it. Keeping it weeded also helps, as far as appearance and productivity.
There’s an old saying that “The best fertilizer is the gardener’s shadow.” Make it so that shadow conveniently falls on not only the plants but also spigots and compost piles.

Celeriac, What’s Up?

Insufficient water in April could not be blamed for the poor showing of my celeriac plants. They weren’t even in the ground until early May, after the drip irrigation was up and running.
Celeriac is a nice addition to the variety of root crops that can be left in the garden until late into fall and then stored for the winter under cool, moist conditions. The flavor, which comes from the swollen root (actually a hypocotyl, which is the portion of the plant above the roots and below the stem), is akin to celery, but smoother. It’s a botanical variety of celery.

Celeriac in old home

Last year, the first time in years that I grew celeriac, plants were stunted with nothing to harvest. Last year, I set the plants in a narrow bed on the west edge of the garden next to a full bed of tall corn. I blamed my failure on shade.
This year celeriac got a sunnier spot. Still, the plants are puny. Some of the plants share the bed with kale which has spread its large leaves to create more shade than expected. Celeriac, according to reputable sources, allegedly tolerates a bit of shade.

Celeriac in new home

My plan is to slide a trowel into the ground beneath some of the puniest plants, lift the plants out of the soil, and plop them into more spacious, sunny environs.
Next year I’ll pay even closer attention to celeriac and expect a better harvest. (Then again, this season’s plants may be gathering energy, readying themselves to swell their hypocotyls as autumn draws near.) All part of next year’s even better vegetable garden, to which my new frost-free hydrant will be a serious contributor.

A VERY GOOD YEAR, SO FAR

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

Bye, Bye Beetles

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

Skyrocketing Corn, De-Luscious Blueberries

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

ROT AND FLOWERS

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

Brown Rot Strikes Again

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

The Disease Triangle

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

Flowers to the Rescue?

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

GOOD FRUITS, ONE A VEGETABLE

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

World’s Best Fruit?

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

A Cagey Solution

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

Eggplant + Oil, A Good Combo

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

FRUIT EXPOLORING

July 24, 2016/0 Comments/in Gardening/by Lee Reich

Screen Shot 2016-07-24 at 7.04.37 PM

TWO DELICIOUS ORBS, ONE BLUE & ONE WHITE

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

Soil is Key

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

Tastiest Turnips

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

Hakurei turnip

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

HEAVEN AND(?) SOME HELL

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

The Blueberry Capital

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

New Blues

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

Sweetheart blueberry

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

Pink Champagne

Nocturne blueberry

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

Beatlemania — I Hope Not

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

EDEN’S GARDENS

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

Eden’s Start with Good Soil

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

Web Soil Survey, opening page

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

Tax Dollars at Work

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

Area of Interest defined

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

A Tree of Eden

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

Pakistan mulberry fruit

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

Pakistan mulberry tree in pot

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

SMALLER IS BETTER

June 22, 2016/12 Comments/in Flowers, Fruit, Gardening, Pruning, Soil/by Lee Reich

Small Plants

Weeding. Planting. Harvesting. Making compost. Spreading compost. Staking. Pruning. Mowing. These are some of the activities I share with my plants this time of year. But, as Charles Dudley Warner wrote in his 1870 classic, My Summer in a Garden, “Blessed be agriculture! If one does not have too much of it.” Which prompts me to weed, plant, harvest, etc. most efficiently.

Bush cherry, 1 month after planting

   Let’s take a look at some of the trees and shrubs I’ve planted this spring: Romeo and Carmen Jewel bush cherries, aronia, Grainger shellbark hickory, Great Wall Asian persimmon, Rosa canina, and Hidcote St. Johnswort. Just getting all those plants through their first season could entail lugging around many buckets of water. But it doesn’t.
   Large plants of any of these could possibly be sourced but I chose small plants. And that was the first step to making sure that, paraphrasing C. W., I wasn’t overburdened with my agriculture.
   With smaller root systems, small plants establish more quickly than large plants. In fact, establishing more quickly, smaller plants usually outgrow their larger counterparts after a few years.
   A tree or shrub with a two-foot diameter root ball might require 3 gallons of water weekly until enough roots foraged out into surrounding soil to make the plant self-sufficient water-wise. Two cups of water weekly is enough to keep my newly planted Romeo bush cherry alive since its move from the 4-inch-diameter pot it previously called home.
   By the end of this growing season, all these small plants will be firmly established and pretty much water independent. They’ll get supplemental water only if there’s any extended dry spells in their second season.

Small Planting Holes

Water for these young plants isn’t all about watering per se.
Site preparation is also important. Not that, as older gardening books used to suggest, it’s “better to dig a $50 hole for a $5 tree than a $5 hole for a $50 tree,” the dollar amounts reflecting the size of the tree and the hole. No need for such heroic measures. Digging that large a hole breaks up the capillary channels in a large volume of soil, leaving large air gaps in the soil through which water just runs down and out. Capillary channels can move water, down, up, and sideways.

Shellbark hickory, 1 mo. after planting

Better — and easier — is to dig a hole only twice as wide as the spread of the roots or root ball (if potted), and only as deep as needed so a plants sits at the same depth as it did its pot or the nursery.
   With few exceptions, no need to add compost, peat moss, fertilizer, or anything else to the soil in the planting hole. After all, the expectation is for roots to eventually extend well beyond the planting hole. Create excessively posh conditions in the hole and roots have no incentive to leave. Then roots grow only in their planting hole, not beyond.
   All soil goodies are best lathered on top of the ground. My first choice is for compost. Nutrients and beneficial soil organisms within the compost, over time, meld with the soil below. Compost also softens impact of raindrops so that water can percolate down into the ground rather than running off in rivulets — lessening my need for watering.
   A mulch is the final icing on this layer cake. I’ll top the compost with wood chips, leaves, straw — any weed-free, organic material. This top layer further softens the impact of raindrops, keeps compost moist and vibrant, and slowly decomposes to nourish soil microorganisms and then the tree or shrub.
   Yesternight’s rain or 1.25” did a week’s watering for me. A good rule of thumb is to apply one-inch of water once a week, or, equivalently, three-quarters of a gallon per estimated square foot spread of the roots. Potted trees and shrubs need that one-inch of water spread over 2 or 3 days of the week for a couple of weeks after being planted, until their roots begin to spread into surrounding soil. Larger tree and shrub transplants need more water, more frequently, for a longer period of time.

Followup on Drastic, and Less Drastic Pruning

I recently wrote of “renovating” my old lilac shrub, a no-brainer as far as pruning. You just lop each and every part of the plant right to the ground. My fears that such drastic pruning might also kill the plant were unfounded. Already, new sprouts are growing from the sawed off remains of the plant as well as from some distance away. All that’s needed now is to choose which sprouts to keep to grow into a whole new shrub.

Lilac regrowth from stump

My blueberry shrubs also received more drastic pruning than usual. To lower their height and to encourage and make space for younger, more fruitful stems, I lopped a few of the oldest stems of each bush right to ground level. Like the lilac, new sprouts soon rose from ground level.

Blueberry, new sprouts

Late next winter, I’ll save the most vigorous of these new sprouts and lop the rest of them all the way to the ground. And, of course, again lop to ground level some of next year’s oldest stems.
Such pruning (covered in my book The Pruning Book) keeps blueberry and lilacs perennially renewed, without any stems that are too old to flower or fruit well as well as plenty, but not too many, young replacement stems for the future.

MIX POTTING MIX

June 16, 2016/21 Comments/in Gardening, Soil/by Lee Reich

Coconutty Coir

For a couple of years, a block of coir has sat atop my bale of peat moss.
   Peat moss, the product of slow, anaerobic decomposition of organic materials, accumulates, at a snail’s pace, in bogs: an inch or so depth per thousand years. To mine peat, the bog must be first drained. Besides upsetting bogs’ unique ecological habitats, draining the bogs aerates them, sending some of the carbon wafting into the air. Peat and coir
   But peat is good stuff for potting mixes. My mixes are made up of equal parts peat moss, soil, compost, and perlite, along with sprinklings of soybean meal (for nitrogen) and kelp (for insurance against lack of any trace elements). Peat’s contribution to the mix is a long-lasting source of organic matter that helps cling to moisture and to nutrients, important in the relative confines of a flower pot.
   Coir is marketed as a substitute for peat in potting mixes. A sustainable substitute, made from the fibre left around coconut husks after they’ve been cracked open to remove their meat.
   This spring it was time to put that block of coir to the test, with a head to head comparison to peat. (I’ve tried this comparison before, but more casually.) The block, after slurping up a large volume of warm water, was ready to mix with the same ingredients as I mixed with the peat moss.

Some potting soil components

Both mixes went into their separately labelled , 5 gallon buckets. Each mix then was used to fill one-half of a few GrowEase Seed Starter Kits. Into one of the kits went lettuce seedlings, another got tomato seedlings, and a third got pepper seedlings. The 24 cells of each kit are automatically watered via a capillary mat that sits atop a water reservoir, providing very uniform moisture to all cells within a kit and from one kit to the next.

Peat, Coir Standoff

Drum roll . . . and the winner is . . . well, as I recently wrote, some of this year’s seedlings grew very poorly, perhaps, I’ve hypothesized, due to the soil I used, or the compost, both of which vary some from batch to batch. The overcast, cool conditions in the greenhouse during critical growth periods also could be to blame.
Differences in growth between coir and peat based mixes were not great, but tipped slightly in favor of the peat based mix. This, incidentally, jives with my previous, more casual observations. It also jives with more rigorously planned and executed, published research.

Coir Still in the Ring

    The results of all this testing don’t spell continued destruction of peat bogs. Coir might still be a viable alternative.
   Peat and coir are not the same material. I perhaps should not have used the same ratio for coir as I’ve long used for peat in my mix. There’s some evidence that coir, as it slowly decomposes in a potting mix, can suck up nitrogen at the expense of plants. If so, more soybean meal in my mix could solve that problem. Other nutrients, or lack thereof, could also come into play, as could anti-growth factors, such as phenolics, known to be present in coir.
   More playing around is needed with coir.

Peat and Coir Substitutes

    No need to put all our eggs in one coir basket. Other organic materials can and have fulfilled the niche of peat (and coir). And our culture has no lack of organic “waste” products. Composted bark has been used in commercial mixes for many years, as has sawdust. More exotic, around here, at least, would be rice hulls.
   Home-grown and readily available “organics” for a potting mixes would be compost and leaf mold, both of which I’ve used in rougher mixes, such as for temporarily repotting small trees. Mixing potting soil
   The point is that any of these organic materials, including coir, could make a good potting mix if ratios and amounts of other materials are adjusted accordingly.
   Gardening (and farming) should be, and could be, sustainable; even the potting mixes used to raise seedling or grow potted plants.

Now Perlite, Hmmmm

The other major component of any potting mix is some aggregate, for providing good drainage. My mixes use perlite. Not sustainable. More on that another time.