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

Payday Here, Beginning with Pears and Persimmons

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Sept 6, 2012 #35
A GARDENER’S NOTEBOOK
by Lee Reich
 
It’s payday here on the farmden. The first Magness and Beurrée d’Amanlis pears dropped to the ground, signaling that it’s time to harvest those varieties. Immediately, before the chickens peck at the fallen fruit, which will then get hollowed out by this year’s abundant yellow jackets. The crop is pretty substantial considering last spring’s wide swings in the weather.
My Seckel pear, ready to harvest
 
Actually, the real payday — eating the pears — needs to wait a couple of weeks. European pears, such as Magness and Beurrée d’Amanlis, need to be picked underripe to finish ripening off the tree, or else their insides are mush. These two varieties are early ripening, and early ripening pears ripen best if chilled for a couple of weeks before being brought to room temperature for ripening. 
 
The pears must achieve a certain degree of maturity before they can ripen to perfection off the tree. The easiest way to tell when that magic moment has arrived is when the fruit stalk separates readily from the tree as the fruit is gently lifted and rotated. That’s after a few fallen fruits call attention to the tree. Not all fruits reach that lift-twist-separate stage simultaneously so I’ll go over the trees again 2 or 3 more times. (A refractometer, which measures sugars, also can indicate when to harvest, although the fruit must be cut so then can’t ripen for eating; most pears can be picked if sample fruits show refractometer readings greater than 10°Bx.)
Magness, one of the best of the European pears
 
Color on my Asian pears, the varieties Chojura and Yoinashi, is becoming more vibrant, which is their way of telling me that they’re near ripening. Unlike European pears, Asian pears don’t taste their best unless plucked from the tree dead ripe. When ready, they’re at that lift-twist-separate stage. They’ll need especially careful picking because as a result of last spring’s frost, less than a dozen of the golden gems hang from the branches, making each fruit all the more prized.
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The tree fruits highlight what a strange growing season it has been. Besides the dramatic early warming last spring and the dramatic freezes that followed, the growing season got started early and has been unusually hot. The upshot is that everything, fruitwise, is advanced ahead of its usual schedule. Magness pears typically ripen for me around the middle of September, with Chojura beginning soon after. This year, all these fruits are ripening about 2 weeks early.
 
A hot season and early ripening could effect fruit quality, especially of pears. Some varieties taste best following warmer summers, others during cooler summers. Temperatures during ripening also have an effect on quality. It’s known that hot temperatures in the two months preceding harvest bring out the best flavors in Bartlett and Bosc pears, and that Anjou pears like it cool. The effect of temperature on the more obscure pear varieties, which are what I grow, is not well elucidated. Time, beginning in 2 weeks, when tasting begins, will tell.
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This morning I was scything some tall grass and weeds beneath my persimmon trees in anticipation of their ripening. Mowing exposed a ripe, orange persimmon couched softly among stems and leaves on the ground. And then another one, and then another. I looked up and confirmed that Mohler persimmons are ripening.
Szukis persimmon
 
Mohler is one of a number of varieties of American persimmon that are cold hardy and will ripen their fruits this far north. My persimmons have survived winter lows below minus 20 degrees F.; Asian persimmons, which you find in the markets, are not nearly that cold hardy. The flavors differ also. American persimmons are drier, with richer flavor, the best varieties having taste and texture something like a dried apricot that’s been soaked in water, dipped in honey, and given a dash of spice.
 
 
Mohler is not available from nurseries. I made my tree by grafting a stem of Mohler, which I got from someone named Mohler in Pennsylvania, onto an American persimmon seedling. I was able to hook up with Mohler through North American Fruit Explorers (www.nafex.org), a fun organization of fruit nuts who write about their fruit adventures, home and afield, and exchange plants.
Mohler, as well as my Szukis, Dooley, and Yates, American persimmons (the others are available from specialty nurseries) are very reliable and easy to grow. Mine have never succumbed to late spring frosts and the mature trees require no spraying, pruning, or any other care. They’re among the fruits highlighted in my books Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden (Timber Press, 2004) and Grow Fruit Naturally (Taunton Press, 2012).
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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 in 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
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To experience firsthand the possibilities in home-grown fruits, come to my workshop BACKYARD FRUITS: A TASTING AND A WORKSHOP, which will be held here at my farmden. Learn how to grow delicious fruits organically and then taste some that are in season, such as pears, grapes, pawpaws, persimmons, and kiwifruits. The workshop is Oct. 6th, 2-5 pm. Contact me for more information and registration.

Seedy Visions, Some Hard, Some Eeasy

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What a perfect time of year to plant seeds. Yes, seeds! There’s no rush as to timing, with flower seeds, at least; there’s no worry about the soil being warm enough for germination; there’s no need to squeeze seed flats together near sunny windows; and there are plenty of empty seed flats. 
Right now I have seedlings of endive, lettuce, kale, cauliflower, and cabbage growing in seed flats. The seedlings call the flats “home” for a month or more before they’re transplanted into beds now housing early corn, early bush beans, and other vegetables soon to be cleared away. Timing for these plants is critical if they’re going to be ready for harvest during the cool days from late September on into November. Cabbage and cauliflower were sown in early June, endive in early July, and lettuce, for a continued harvest through summer and fall, every two weeks or so all summer.
 
I’ve also sowed seeds with next year in mind. Flower seeds, in this case. Perennial flowers usually don’t flower their first year from seed. Ones that I sow this summer should make enough growth to put on a good show next year.
 
The flower bed undergoing renovation is crying out for black-eyed Susan plants (Rudbeckia hirta ‘Indian Summer), oodles of them. I could buy the plants but almost as easy and a lot cheaper and more satisfying is to buy a packet of seeds. One packet is going to provide many times the number of plants I need. Another bed needs more oriental poppies. Again, a packet of seeds is the more satisfying and economical way to go.
 
I have visions of blue spires of delphiniums rising up in the space between black currant plants and the fence to my south vegetable garden. A packet of ‘Pacific Giant’ delphinium seeds fills the bill, although these seeds are more difficult to germinate and the plants more difficult to grow than the poppies and black-eyed Susans. Delphinium seeds germinate best if fresh and some sources suggest chilling them awhile before or right after sowing. My plan is to plant them in a seed flat and set the covered flat on a bench that sits along the north side of my house — along with all the other seeds I am germinating. Another secret to germinating most seeds is patience.
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Patience surely has been the secret to my success with cyclamen seeds. Many years ago I purchased seeds of hardy cyclamens. Besides hardiness, these plants offer dainty blossoms that hover above the ground like small, pink butterflies. And when the plants aren’t in bloom, the speckled leaves earn the plants’ keep.
 
With the original batch of seeds came exacting instructions of temperature and time requirements for germination. I ended up with two seedlings from the whole packet of seeds, but those two seedlings have given rise to many more plants. A couple of weeks ago, the seed capsules, which are attached to a squiggly stalk, flared open to offer their ripe seeds, which I collected and sowed. 
 
The flat of cyclamen seeds now sit on that same bench on the north side of my house. My only jobs now are to make sure the flat never dries out, which is unlikely, given the pane of glass that covers it, and to have patience.
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The most challenging seed of those I planned to sow this summer was chamomile, not because it’s at all hard to grow but because it’s hard to figure out just what is “chamomile.” Mostly, what people grow for tea is annual chamomile, but there’s also a perennial chamomile that’s been used medicinally. But just what is “annual” or “perennial” chamomile?
 
Usually, we garden nuts can fall back on botanical names to help out with such confusions. The fallback is not so easy with chamomile. Chamaemelum  would seem an appropriate genus for chamomile and, in fact, C. nobile is a botanical name for perennial chamomile, which has also gone under the monikers of garden chamomile, Russian chamomile, and Roman chamomile. Not to confuse things, but this plant has also paraded under the botanical name Anthemis nobilis. Anthemis plants generally are referred to as dog fennels and, of course, chamomiles. Not to further confuse things, but I must mention A. tinctoria, golden marguerite, a wonderful ornamental in this genus, especially nice trained as a small tree with a head of white, daisy flowers.
 
Getting back to my tea, with annual chamomile . . . that’s Matricaria recutita, which, oddly, has the common name “sweet false chamomile.” It’s also gone under the botanical name of Tripleurospermum maritimum subsp. inordorum. And not to be confused with Matricaria matricarioides, pineapple weed, which grows all over the place and differs from any of the other chamomiles in that the flowers lack prominent, white petals. It has a pineapple-y aroma.
 
Bottom line: For my tea, I need annual chamomile, Matricaria recutita. Because it’s an annual, I’m going to wait until next year to sow it.