I’m Prepared, Gardenwise, For Cold Weather

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I’m prepared, gardenwise, for cold weather. What’s more, I’ll know when it’s here. My quiver of thermometers stands ready.
Outdoors, I’m monitoring temperatures with two Taylor brand thermometers. The “Digital Wireless Weather System” sensor out in the garden beams temperature readings to the indoor receiver unit to keep me posted on the weather. In addition to the temperature, this thermometer shares the dew point and the maximum and minimum temperatures from whenever I last re-set those temperatures.
The other Taylor thermometer, an old, mechanical, mercury-filled, min-max thermometer keeps the digital thermometer honest. What it lacks in convenience (no beaming from this thermometer) it makes up for with accuracy. Good thing, too, because for all its convenience, the digital thermometer is often — perhaps always, I’ll have to check — 5 degrees out of whack. Five degrees is a lot when I want to know if frost descended on the garden some early spring night or want to brag honestly about how cold temperatures drop here in midwinter.
My mudroom is unheated but maintains relatively moderate temperatures by sharing a wall with the woodstove-heated living room. As such, it’s something like a giant refrigerator, a good place, certain times of the year to store potted plants, scion wood, and boxes of fruits, vegetables. But how cold, or warm, is it in there? Another old, mechanical, mercury-filled, Taylor min-max thermometer keeps me posted on conditions in there.
My basement is barely heated and has a Bilco door entrance that I re-built out of wood with a clear polycarbonate plastic cover to make a very cool (temperaturely speaking), bright place to overwinter plants. Gotta measure the temperatures there, of course, for the plants and, back from the bright area where I have stored home-made beer and boxes of apples. More thermometers.
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For all the pleasure, in food, fun, and ambience, afforded by a greenhouse, it does bring it share of nail biting.
One cold, winter night, I realized that the propane heater wasn’t kicking on; the gas company had forgotten to fill the tank. Now a weekly reminder pops up on my computer screen every Wednesday morning to remind me to check the gas level and call for a delivery if the level drops too low. Problem solved.
A bevy of thermometers –and that’s not all of them?
On another cold, winter night, I again realized that the propane heater wasn’t kicking on when needed; this time the tank was full but the pilot light was out. Strong winds had created an updraft in the chimney, snuffing out the flame. A couple of holes drilled low on the pipe let some air into it to decrease the updraft. Problem solved.
On yet another cold, winter night, I realized yet again that the propane heater wasn’t kicking on when needed; again, the tank was full and the pilot light was out, but this time it refused to be lit. The fault then was with the thermocouple, which turns off the gas if the pilot light goes out. I purchased a new thermocouple — and 3 more backups for future malfunctions — and soon a warm, tropical breeze was flowing from the heater.
As further insurance for gas problems, I installed an electric space heater wired to its own thermostat. The electric heater should take care of any gas problems unless outdoor temperatures drop into the single digits, which would be more cold than the heater could handle.
All the above precautions are for naught if the electricity fails — not a rare occurrence around here. The propane heater’s thermostat and fan gobble up a miniscule amount of electricity; miniscule though it is, the heater will not work at all without it. Got that covered now, with a deep discharge marine battery on a trickle charge that is wired to an inverter to convert the direct current to house current. 
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Even the electrical backup is for naught if I’m not aware that the gas is low, the thermocouple needs replacement, the gas heater isn’t working, or the electricity is off. Enter the newest addition to my quiver of thermometers: the “La Crosse Technology Wireless Temperature Station with Trends and Alerts.” This thermometer wirelessly beams the greenhouse temperature homeward. 
Even better, this thermometer will wail if the temperature drops below (or above) a certain amount, which I set at 32°F. in the greenhouse. Of course, I can check the honesty of that thermometer against yet another old mechanical, mercury-filled, Taylor min-max thermometer that hangs in the greenhouse on a post with the La Crosse sensor. The La Crosse thermometer is new; so far it’s honest.
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Not to place too much emphasis on temperature (did I mention my compost thermometer, with its 2-foot-long probe sunk deep in the innards of one pile, or the small probe thermometer that monitors temperature within a seedling flat?) but temperature is not the end-all for how plants fare in winter.
Temperature trends are important, as are temperature and moisture conditions going into winter. For instance, Asian persimmons grow in South Korea but not here; our winter temperatures are similar but the dry autumn weather of South Korea toughens plants up for the cold months ahead. My bamboo, Phyllostachys aureosulcata, came through last winter, when temperatures dipped briefly to -20°F., looking spry and lush. Single digit temperatures of the recent polar vortex burned all the leaves.
With my thermometers, I may not be able to do anything about the weather (outside the greenhouse). But at least I can complain about it with authority.

Help!

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For a little experiment I’m doing I need seeds of Thompson & Morgan’s ‘Gardener’s Delight’ tomato. This British company (http://www.thompson-morgan.com) sells those seeds on their British website, but not their U.S. website. T&M does not ship items from that site to the U.S. Can someone out there send me a packet of those seeds? (‘Gardener’s Delight’ seeds are also sold by some U.S. seed companies but, for the purposes of my experiment, I need T&M’s seed of that variety.) Please contact me through my website, which is linked to this blog (on your right, just below the photo of me). Thanks.

One Of My Favorite Things About Our Planet

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One of my favorite things about our planet is that the darkest and the coldest days don’t coincide. Wouldn’t that be depressing if they did? We cleared the hump for the darkest days back at the end of December but days and nights are, on average, scheduled to still grow colder and colder. 
  
For me, the longer days offset the increasing cold. Only partially, though, because November to March brings the most overcast days here in the northeast. The days, at least, are growing longer and longer by about a minute each day early this month to over two minutes from one day to the next by the end of the month.
 
It is at the end of this month that we plunge, on average, into our greatest depth of cold. My tack for making the most of cold weather is to enjoy it, by skiing and skating. And by going into my greenhouse. Inside, on sunny days, it’s a steaming, humid tropical retreat even if temperatures are in the ‘teens on the other side of the inflated double walls of plastic.
 
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I don’t get it, the undue attraction for baby leaves of lettuce, arugula, and other greens for fresh salads. Truman Capote said that the rich are not like you and me; they eat smaller vegetables. Perhaps, deep down, eating tiny vegetables makes us feel rich.
 
Not me. Right now, I’m thoroughly enjoying mature heads of fully grown Romaine and Buttercrunch lettuce picked fresh within a hour of being put into a salad bowl. The leaves are crunchy, sweet, and, in the case of Buttercrunch, also buttery. That’s the luxury of a home greenhouse, in addition to the virtual trip to the tropics it offers.
 
Not that getting those heads of lettuce — as well as kale, chard, parsley, celery, mâche, claytonia, and arugula — from the winter greenhouse takes no effort. Planning is perhaps the hardest part. The greenhouse

 might be tropical on a sunny day but light inside is the same as outdoors, except less because it needs to go through 2 layers of plastic film. Low light and, to a lesser extent, cool temperatures on nights and overcast days (the heater kicks on at 36°F.) make for little growth in the greenhouse in the dead of winter. My goal, then, is to fill the 400 square feet of space with plants that are just about large enough to harvest by early December.

 
A home greenhouse does feel luxurious.  So as not to be profligate, I eke everything I can from the space. In-ground fig trees there bear abundantly from August to October, then their leaves drop and they get pruned back, so they cast no shade in winter. On the benches I raise all my vegetable and flower seedlings. And melons and cucumbers sometimes trail on the ground beneath the figs all through summer. All this for only $680 per season, averaged over the past 11 years, as well as my labor (of love).
 
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 So how much sunlight does shine within my greenhouse, or into the sunny, south facing windows of my home? Not much this time of year.
 
Let’s quantify the light. One measure of light is the foot-candle (fc), which is the amount of light cast on a square foot area by a candle at one foot distance. You can get an estimate of this measure using a digital SLR camera. Set it on aperture priority with the aperture at f/8 and the ISO at 100. Hold a white sheet of paper so whatever light you’re measuring falls directly on it and measure the shutter speed reading the camera gives you (without a flash, obviously) for a good picture from about a foot away. Multiply the shutter speed times 4 for the approximate foot-candles.
 
(Shutter speed is usually expressed as a fraction of a second, so a speed of “500” is really 1/500th of a second; for foot-candles, you’d multiply 500 times 4 for 2,000 foot-candles. If light is very dim, the shutter speed might be more than a second; no need to measure, in this case, because in such light any plant will barely stay alive.) 
I recently took a few measurements. Outside, on a slightly overcast day, I measured 2,000 fc. Measurements were 1,000 fc righ right at a south-facing window and in the greenhouse, and 500 fc four feet back from the window. Light at a north facing window measured 100 fc, and beneath a 27 watt fluorescent table lamp, 60 fc.
 
A bright summer day bathes our beautiful planet with 10,000 fc of sunlight. No wonder plants indoors and out are just biding their time. Not to mention the cold.

COME TOUR MY FARMDEN

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Gardening Workshop

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Garden Extraavaganza

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A gardening extravaganza is soon to take place, on May 11th, at the garden of Margaret Roach in Copake Falls, NY. (Margaret is a great gardener and was editor of Martha Stewart Living magazine.) It is a Garden Conservancy Open Day at her garden, I’ll be doing a presentation on “Fruit Growing Simplified” as well as a hands-on “Grafting Workshop,” and Broken Arrow Nursery will be selling plants. For more information and registrations for any of these events, see http://awaytogarden.com/2013-open-days-in-my-garden-and-nationwide.

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Write in your heirloom favorites soon . . . the giveaway (see below) will end Wednesday, March 27th at 1 pm.

WORMS, WEEDS, AND BACTERIA

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Autumn weather has been stellar this year, with a welcome number of crystal clear, sunny days, balmy temperatures, and enough rain to keep plants happy. Imported cabbageworms are evidently also happy, judging from the holes with which broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage leaves are now riddled. Even worse, looking more closely I see dark, green caterpillar poop down in among the leaves. And even worse than that, all that feeding weakens the plants and — I think — ruins their flavors (even after they’ve been thoroughly washed).
Problems from imported cabbage worms, as well as two other leaf-munching caterpillars, diamondback moth and cabbage looper, are easily dispatched. All three pests are members of the insect order Lepidoptera, which includes moths and butterflies; the organic insecticide B.t., short for Bacillus thuringienses and commercially sold under such trade names as Thuricide and Dipel, kills them while doing essentially no harm to just about everything else, including humans.
So I got out my hand-pumped sprayer this afternoon, measured out enough B.t. to make up a couple of quarts of spray solution, and thoroughly spritzed the cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli plants. I didn’t bother spraying kale, collards, and Chinese cabbages, which the cabbageworms evidently find less tasty, surely not enough to warrant their spraying.
My other approach to keeping cabbageworms in check is, I find, useful for many perceived gardening problems: Don’t look too closely. This advice may sound counterintuitive because attention to detail and keeping a close eye on plants are earmarks of good husbandry. Perhaps the advice should be restated as “Don’t look too closely if you’re going to panic and think that every hole in a leaf warrants action.” Today, cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli plants had too many holes.
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B.t. is pretty much the only thing I spray on my vegetables and, as I said, only on cabbage and its kin. It’s derived from a naturally-occurring bacteria that lives in the soil, first discovered in 1901 in Japan and used since 1925. Once more potent insecticides, such as DDT, were developed after World War II, “lightweight,” highly specific killers like B.t. fell by the wayside.
B.t. became popular among organic gardeners in the 1970s and, unfortunately, among genetic engineers in the 1980s. During the latter period, scientists developed techniques with which to insert foreign genes into organisms. Insect-resistant tobacco, with B.t. built into its genetics, was developed in 1985 and the first genetically engineered crop plant, potato, was put on the market in 1995. Yummy. (Tobacco and potato — and tomato — fall prey to another lepidopterous caterpillar, the tobacco hornworm.) 
So what’s wrong with genetically engineering plants with built-in resistance to insects? A lot! First of all, pleiotropy. As Carol Deppe states in her excellent book Breed Your own Vegetable Varieties, “pleiotropy is a genetic version of the ancient Taoist understanding that you cannot do just one thing.” Inserting a foreign gene (that is, one that could never have gotten there through natural processes, such as the fish gene that was inserted into tomatoes for cold hardiness) into a plant can have effects beyond the desired primary effect. That secondary effect may be good (unlikely), bad, or neutral in terms of nutrition, health, flavor, and anything else.
But that’s not all. In some cases, plants with built-in B.t. experience increased attacks from insects other than those for which B.t. has effect. Commercially, this has resulted in increased pesticide use to control those other insect pests.
And finally, having whole fields of plants uniformly oozing B.t. to kill lepidopterous predators sets up a Darwinian experiment: A very few of those caterpillars are going to be somewhat resistant to B.t. and over time, they will be the ones that will thrive and multiply. Eventually, then, we’ll have whole armies of caterpillars that can laugh off B.t. and just keep munching away. Which will be bad also for us backyard gardeners.
Here on my farmden, I don’t spray B.t. at the first sign of caterpillar damage. That’s another reason I don’t spray all cabbage kin. I’d like to keep a healthy population of B.t. susceptible caterpillars alive.
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The warm, sunny weather has also been a boon to cool weather weeds, especially quackgrass and oxalis. I usually clear and cover with compost any vegetable beds just as soon as I am through with them for the season. Clearing a bed rids it of most perennial weeds and the 1 inch deep icing of more or less weed-free compost snuffs out any small annual or perennial weed roots or seedlings that try to grow. That’s the theory, at least.
This past spring, beds were weedier than usual. I reasoned that weeds were sneaking in during autumn’s warm spells, before weather turned frigid. So this autumn, I waited until this week to clean up most beds and ice them with compost, leaving little time before cold weather for weeds to sneak in. Finally, everything looks neat and pretty.
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Pepper, like tomato, cabbage, and some other vegetables, has its caterpillar predators, in this case the corn earworm which, as you may guess, also attacks corn. In decades of growing peppers, damage has never been severe enough to warrant spraying peppers or, for that matter, corn with B.t. for that pest.
My attention turned to peppers this week because a few plants were still green thanks to the blanket over them during recent severe frosts. The pepper plants’ days are numbered though, and the beds need cleaning up, so I pulled the plants but harvested any full-sized fruits. Green peppers are immature, not ripe. Some people enjoy them at this stage; I don’t. If sufficiently mature, though, sound green peppers will ripen, turning yellow, red, or purple, depending on the variety, on a kitchen counter. That’s where mine went.
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(Quoting from an old Jimmy Rushing blues song, “there’s a change in the weather, there’s a change in the sea”  . . . I’ll say. As I wrote this post, Hurricane Sandy was storming nearer. The weather was still balmy, but with lots of wind and, soon, rain. The landscape swayed. The hurricane took a left turn as it headed up the Hudson Valley and the farmden was spared, experiencing only fairly strong winds and a half an inch of rain. I was ready, though.)


Beans, Beans, . . .

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Lima beans are one of those things, like artichokes, okra, and dark beer, that people either love or hate. I love them. The problem is that this far north, summer temperatures usually hover below those in which lima bean plants thrive, at least those best-tasting varieties of lima having large seeds and dry, sweetish flesh something like chestnuts.
 
A few years ago, I grew the variety Jackson Wonder, which was billed as a “prolific, cold-hardy heirloom with bright nutty flavor.” It was cold-hardy and prolific, and it is an heirloom dating back to 1888, but the flavor was blah.
 
A long, long time ago, I grew what might be the best-tasting of all lima beans, a pole variety named Dr. Martin. Dr. Martin’s demand for warm summers resulted in a harvest that was too paltry to justify space for those long vines again.
 
The earth has warmed in the quarter century since I grew Dr. Martin. The growing season is longer and summer temperatures are hotter. So this spring I thought it was time again to try growing some big, fat, flavorful lima beans. King of the Garden was the variety at hand, a variety perhaps as good as Dr. Martin. I started the seed in spring in pots indoors and planted out the seedlings, 2 per bamboo pole with 3 poles tied at their tops to form a teepee, a the end of May, by which time hot weather had worked its way into both air and soil.
 
King of the Garden plants grew, and grew, and grew. And flowered, and grew, and grew. And occasionally, I noticed a little, very little, pod beginning to develop. But no flowers or mini-pods grew to become large pods filled with big, fat, flavorful lima beans.
 
Lima beans are a finicky lot. Not only do they shiver in cool weather; they also underperform in weather that’s too hot. Like the hot weather we had, at times, this summer. More recent, cooler nights should improve pod set. That is, unless something else is the roadblock to pod production. That “something else” could be stinkbugs. Stinkbugs and stinkbug problems are moving north from their more traditional southern haunts. There were plenty this summer. The buggers enjoy limas.
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Moving over to another bean, green beans, my third and last planting of which is now being feasted upon by Mexican bean beetles. (They also feed on the limas, but not enough to cause significant damage.) Mexican bean beetles are not something new that’s become more problematic with warmer summers and winters; they’ve been showing up in my garden for decades although few other gardeners with whom I speak seem to have problems with them.
 
Despite the beetles, I harvest plenty of green beans; my main beef with the beetles is that they keep me from being able to grow pole green beans. Pole beans, unlike bush beans, which get sequentially planted and then pulled out after a few weeks of harvest, are a long season crop planted in late spring to grow and bear until frost. That long season of growth offers a 24/7 dinner to bean beetles. Growing only bush beans restricts my choice of varieties and makes growing and harvesting the beans, for fresh eating and for freezing, more frantic.
 
This year, I tried to check bean beetle infestations with weekly sprays of neem, a relatively nontoxic pesticide derived from the Indian neem tree. It was ineffective. Another possibility is to elicit the help of a stinkbug! No, not any old stinkbug but one known as the spined soldier beetle, a predator a many plant pests. These bugs can be purchased as such or pheromone attractants can be purchased to attract them to the garden. I tried the traps many years ago to no good effect. Perhaps it’s time to import the bugs themselves.
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One bean that seems to be pretty much ignored by bean beetles and stinkbugs, and any other pest, is soybean, which I harvest green as edamame. The edamame harvest this season has, as usual, been excellent. I grow the variety Shirofumi, both for its flavor and good yields.
 
Edamame usually flower and ripen pods in response to daylength, and Shirofumi edamame harvest ends in early August. Then, I usually pull the plants to make space for late plantings of cabbages, radishes, lettuce, and other cool weather vegetables. This year, the space was not needed so I decided to leave the plants in place.
 
Soybeans, along with green beans, lima beans, and other beans, are legumes, which are plants that, with the help of symbiotic bacteria in their roots, can use nitrogen from the air as food. Much of that nitrogen becomes the protein in the soybean seeds; the rest is in the leaves, stems, and roots. Leaving my soybean plants in place is helping to enrich the soil with nitrogen, from old roots that slough off. The rest of the plants, once pulled, go into the compost pile to provide nitrogen there and, as the finished compost is spread, subsequently in the garden. My lima bean plants, even if they remain podless, provide those same benefits. The same goes for my green bean plants, from which I’ll get a little extra nitrogen from all the Mexcan bean beetles on their leaves.
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Do you want to grow fruit but think you don’t have room? I’ll be giving a workshop “Fruit for Small Gardens,” covering the fruits and growing techniques needed to reap delectable rewards from spaces as small as a balcony to as “large” as a small suburban yard. The venue is Stone Barns inn Pocantico Hills, NY on September 22nd from 1-3 pm. For more information, see http://www.stonebarnscenter.org/products/backyard-fruit-for-small-gardens.html