Garlic mustard leaf

MY BRIEF AFFAIR

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What Could Be Bad?

Like most brief affairs, this one ended without rancor. A friend had introduced me to garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), our meeting coming at a time when I could look fondly upon any wild edible plant. That was many years ago, yet after a few years tensions between us escalated. 

In retrospect, I can’t really understand the attraction I had for garlic mustard. True, the name was appealing: you would think that any plant combining the flavors of garlic and mustard would have elicited affection that would linger, even grow, over the years.Despite the enticing name, I can now reminisce with a clear mind and remember finding the taste ho-hum at best, biting at worst.Garlic mustard

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All from a seed like this sprouting one

I PLANTED MY FIRST SEED

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My Plant Stalled

Growing tomato plants from seed is fun, interesting, and, of course, useful. Perhaps even more fun and interesting is growing a tree from seed. And then you also get a perspective in a potentially long span of time, and a chance to reflect on your place in that spectrum.

I planted my first tree seed many, many years ago, when I had just dipped my toes into the wide ocean of gardening. I was living in a small apartment and, having just finished eating a McIntosh apple, took a look at what was left. A core and seeds. I removed one seed from the core and buried it an inch deep in a 6-inch diameter flower pot, then gave it a drink and moved it to a sunny window.

Hackberry seedlings

Not my first apple seedlings, but my hackberry seedlings in 2013

To my delight, the seed actually sprouted and grew to a few inches height. My vision of an old apple tree sometime offering me bushels of fruit stalled when growth of the seedling also stalled, still at a few inches height. And stayed there. Read more

My favorite bark. Can you guess what it is?

WOOF, WOOF, BUT NOT A DOG

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More than Meets Your Eye — So Look Closely

The transition from fall to winter brings many trees and shrubs from their most ostentatious to their most subtle beauty. Like a developing photographic image, the textures and colors of various kinds of bark come slowly into view against the increasingly stark winter landscape.

If you were to choose one plant for its bark, what would it be? Paper birch (Betula papyrifera) usually comes to mind, of course. But there are so many other trees and shrubs with notable bark, some as striking as birch, others with a subtle loveliness best appreciated during a winter stroll or viewed through a window from a comfortable chair.

My favorite bark. Can you guess what it is?

My favorite bark. Can you guess what it is? Read on.

Whole books — Bark, by G. T. and A. E. Prance and Bark: A Field Guide to Trees of the Northeast, by Michael Wojtech — have even been devoted to bark. They are useful adjuncts, in addition to other features such as tree form and remnants of autumn leaves on the plant or ground nearby, to winter plant identification. Read more

Sugar maple in fall

A WONDERFULLY FIERY FALL

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The Glory of the Hudson Valley Unfolds

Here on the farmden and beyond, this growing season is exiting with perhaps the most gloriously colored fall I’ve seen in decades. Standouts right around here this year are Korean mountainash, red oak, stewartia, huckleberry, and blueberry. Even Norway maple, usually with unsightly splotches of yellow, this year have been turning a fairly attractive pure yellow before dropping.

Korean mountainash

Korean mountainash

Knowing what puts color in leaves opens up the possibility for ratcheting it up. It might even increase appreciation for the various hues. To best do that, I’m going to plagiarize . . . from my own book, The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Much Better Garden.

Yellow and Orange

Green is from chlorophyll, most welcome in spring and through summer, but not what interests me in fall. Chlorophyll must be continually synthesized Read more

Deep container for long tapped rooted persimmon tree

TREES & SHRUBS FOR ALL

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Taking Root

Fall is my favorite time to plant trees and shrubs — it’s the best time, in fact, for most of them. Here in cold hardiness Zone 5 of New York’s Hudson Valley, the specific date is October 17th. No, no, just kidding. Anytime around the middle of fall is good.

And that’s one reason I like fall planting. With plant growth ground to a halt and the soil generally in good condition for planting, fall planting is a relaxed affair. In spring, plants are raring to grow so want their roots nestled in their permanent home as soon as possible.

But enough about timing. Let’s see what form trees and shrubs, whether in fall or spring and whether purchased through the mail or locally, are available. You can buy trees and shrubs in one of three different ways.Tree at nursery

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Spreading wood chip mulch

ANTI-SOCIAL WEEDS

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Best Worst in my Gardens

Do your weeds socialize? Mine mostly do not. That’s at least true for summer’s worst weeds. Each has seemingly staked out its territory in various of my gardens or parts of gardens, and keeps there mostly to itself.

The all-time biggest offender has been Canadian thistle (Cirsium arvense). Its bristly stems and leaves have insinuated themselves all over the place to the west of our main vegetable garden, in among a hogepodge of berry plants. How clever of them, especially getting in there among the gooseberries, where it’s hard enough to pull them from amongst the clusters of berrty stems, and made moreso by gooseberry’s spines.

One control — not cure, though — for the thistle invasion is mulch. Because of thistle’s deep, energetic, errant roots, just any mulch will not do.Spreading wood chip mulch So I’ve resorted, hopefully just for this year, to laying down corrugated cardboard topped with arborist wood chips, a technique beloved to permaculturalists and historically loathed by me. Read more

Bed of lettuce and Chinese cabbage in fall

PLAN(T) AHEAD

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A Whole ‘Nuther Garden

It’s hard to imagine that the weather will eventually turn cool, then cold. But of course it will, I’ve been planning what vegetables to grow late in the season after cool temperatures have sapped the vitality from tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. You might also consider it, because growing fall vegetables is like having a whole other garden, but in the same space.

Cool weather brings out the best flavor from vegetables such as kale, broccoli, and carrots. And the harvest season is long; fall vegetables just sit pretty awaiting harvest at your leisure.Bed of lettuce and Chinese cabbage in fall I hew to three commitments I make every summer in planning for fall vegetables.

The first is to maintain soil fertility. Getting another growing season out of my garden means more fertility is needed, so fertilizer and/or liberal amounts of compost or other organic matter needs to be added to the soil. Fall’s predominantly leafy vegetables are heavy feeders.

My fertility system used to be Read more

Varieties of paste tomatoes, labelled

AND THE BEST PASTE TOMATO IS . . .

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Is a Tomato a Tomato

If a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, then a tomato is a tomato is a tomato. Or surely a paste tomato is. After all, paste tomatoes are rarely eaten fresh; they are mostly just cooked.

Each summer in my garden, we grow and put up enough canned tomatoes to keep us in soup, stew, and sauce for at least a year. Canned tomatoesA couple of summers ago, I sorted through some of the paste tomato varieties available, planting, growing, and evaluating flavors of the reputed best. These were varieties highly touted by seed purveyors, some gardeners, and on the web.

I admit to entering this foray with prejudices. Read more

Clear dome maintains humidity in the propagator

FINDING MY ROOTS

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FINDING MY ROOTS

Totipotent Cells

Take a look at new shoots growing on a favorite shrub or vine and you’ll see that the bases of these shoots may be beginning to toughen up, becoming woody. Such shoots, snipped from the mother plant as so-called half-woody cuttings, can be rooted to make new plants. Two other types of stem cuttings are softwood cuttings, taken while shoots are still green and succulent, and hardwood cuttings, taken from thoroughly woody, often leafless, shoots.

You can make whole, new plants from any of these cuttings; I’ve done it for years. But be careful because rooting cuttings to make new plants can become addictive. And then you have to figure out what to do with all your new plants. (Hence, my annual plant sales.)Propagator for softwood cuttings

Cuttings are one of many ways to clone plants, that is, produce new plants that are genetically identical to the mother plant from which the stems were taken. Read more

Mexican "truffles"

SWEET CORN: OLD VARIETY, MODERN GROWING

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Genetics: Up, Up, Up with the Sugar

I plan on eating sweet corn almost daily from about the middle of July until early autumn. I know the arguments against growing sweet corn in a backyard garden: It’s cheap at the farmstand and space-hungry in the garden. What’s more, the most modern, “supersweet” varieties hold their sweetness for days.

The supersweet varieties are truly supersweet. But “supersweet” is too much of a catchall term. Old-fashioned corn, the Papoon corn developed around 1750 by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and still available today, is noted for its creamy texture and 9 percent sugar due to its SU gene. Unfortunately, those sugars start changing into starch as soon as an ear is harvested.

Golden Bantam sweet corn

Golden Bantam sweet corn

In the latter half of the 20th century, “Sugary enhanced” sweet corn came on the scene. The SE gene incorporated into sweet corn varieties jacked sugar levels up to 17 percent. More Sugar meant more time for sweetness to hold following harvest. SE kernels are very tender.

Soon after, another gene, SH2 or “shrunken-2,” was found, which pushed that sweetness even higher, up to 35 percent! Read more