[inter and succession planting, nasturtium, mulberries]

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In 1810, English essayist Charles Lamb wrote: “Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think of them.” Obviously, Charles was not a gardener. I spend a lot of time thinking about time and space in the garden, and out there this morning was particularly proud of one result of that “trouble.”

 
That source of pride is a bed 20 feet long by 3 feet wide that’s overbrimming with luscious greenery. I planted it back in April, 4 rows, one of radishes, one of mustard and arugula, and two of various varieties of leaf lettuce. The radishes are long gone and the mustard and arugula are just now going to seed, but the lettuces have a little more time left in them. The bed is packed so full of garden plants that hardly a weed peeks through anywhere.
 
As the lettuce passes its prime, all will not be over for that bed. I could wait, pull the lettuce, and then plant a later crop of, say, bush beans or endive. But, with a nod not to Mr. Lamb, I meshed space and time 3 weeks ago, removed a clump of plants every 2 feet down 2 rows in the bed, and planted sweet corn. Now, the sweet corn is looking tall among the waning other plants and, in a few weeks, the bed will be lush with only corn stalks.
 
The growing season here isn’t long enough to squeeze another crop in after the sweet corn in harvested in September. But maybe, if I plant some quick-maturing radishes in amongst the stalks in the beginning of September . . .
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Plants that are too easy to grow are sometimes not given their due, and nasturtiums are, I think, one such plant. Wherever you poke the pea-size seed into the ground, you get, just a few weeks later, a nice, sprawling patch of round, blue-green leaves and colorful flowers. That’s what I do here and there in the bed near my terrace and near my garden gates every year.

 

 
That small amount of effort gets me not only beauty but also something tasty to eat. The leaves and flowers are edible. Most edible flowers have a subtle flavor, if that; nasturtiums have a strong – a nice, zippy – flavor. The name nasturtium means “nose twist,” sort of like what horseradish does, a relative. Nasturtium flavor is more mellow and the plant doesn’t spread, at least not year after year. Nasturtium’s bright color also adds visual appeal to any salad or spread.
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Mulberry is another plant that’s not usually given its due. Sure, wild plants abound; except in deep woods, I could probably find at least one mulberry tree within a quarter of a mile from wherever you put me. (It’s the second most common “weed” tree in New York City.) And yes, the fruit is usually very sweet but lacking in character. But nobody’s knocking marshmallows, which are even sweeter.
 
Not all mulberries taste the same. Check out the taste of a number of wild ones and they’ll run the spectrum from almost pure sweetness to those with a bit of tang. They also vary in size. Both size and sweetness depend also on growing conditions.
 
Named varieties of mulberries, with bigger and/or better tasting fruits, exist although they are not well-known. I grow four of them. Illinois Everbearing has been around for over a half a century and is one of the best. I have on good authority that Oscar (a funny name for a mulberry) and Kokuso taste very good, and ordered (from www.whitmanfarms.com) a plant of each this past spring. I also ordered a Gerardi Dwarf tree, now with about a dozen fruits ripening on 2 foot tall plant still in its pot.

 

 
The flavor of Gerardi Dwarf fruits are said to taste almost as good as those of yet another mulberry, the black mulberry (Morus nigra) which, in my opinion and that of many other fruit lovers, may be the best-tasting of all fruits. Lest you believe that all black-colored wild mulberries you’ve seen are Morus nigra, they’re not. Fruit color and species names of mulberries are unrelated. Illinois Everbearing, which is a natural hybrid of white mulberry (M. alba), from eastern Asia, and our native red mulberry (Morus rubra), bears jet black fruits. (For more on mulberries, see my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden.)
 
Black mulberry is native to the mild climates of southwestern Asia and grows well only in Mediterranean climates. Unless, that is, it’s in a pot, which is how I grow black mulberry, bringing it down in winter to my cool basement, along with figs, pomegranates, and other fruits native to southwestern Asia.
 
I’m looking forward to tasting Gerardi Dwarf mulberries, which should make a cold-hardy, decorative plant that, like other mulberries, is easy to grow.

[caterpillar yew, grape training, prune bay laurel]

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The hardest part has been getting the caterpillar to smile. This caterpillar is about 20 feet long and 3 feet high, 5 feet to the top of its antennae, and it lives near a wall along the front of my house. It’s green. It’s a yew.
 
The caterpillar started out conventionally enough. Like so many gardeners and new homeowners, I succumbed to the enticement of inexpensive evergreens – in this case, 5 innocent-looking, small yew bushes – to dress up the bare front of my house. Once planted, they would contribute to the ubiquitous gumdrop school of landscape design. That was over 25 years ago.

 

 

Well, at least I decided not to shear them into exacting gumdrops. Pruning with a hand shears once or twice a year kept them informal. My plants never suffered neglect, a good thing because too many innocent-looking, small evergreens get neglected, outgrow their surroundings, and gobble up homes. I can still look out from my windows.

 
A couple of years ago, inspired by local plant sculptor and stone artist Keith Buesing, I decided to morph my informal gumdrops into a giant caterpillar. Repeated shearing has finally released a caterpillar from the mass of greenery. Not that my caterpillar is anatomically correct: I carved out two eyes from the foliage and am still working on the big smile, the latter to keep the creature looking friendly.
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After “smiling” and trimming the caterpillar today, I put away my hedge shears, reached for my pruning shears, and set to work on the grapes. With many varieties of table grapes – including seedless Vanessa, Mars, Jupiter, Somerset, and Glenora as well as seeded Lorelei, Briana, Alden, Swenson Red, Edelweiss, Swenson White, Campbell Early, and New York Muscat – there will be plenty of flavors. But I want to make sure each variety tastes its very best, for which pruning is key. Pruning balances the crop load so enough leaves pump each berry with flavor and keeps the plant bathed in sunlight.

 

 

In this part of the country, most grapes, including my own, are trained to the traditional 4-Arm Kniffin system, with a central trunk and two fruiting arms running off in opposite directions at 3 feet and 5 feet above ground level. My grapes got a makeover this year because of my visit, last summer, to Purdue University’s experimental grape plantings.

 
Now my grapes are emulating Dr. Bordelon’s “high-wire cordon” grapes, each of whose vines has a trunk rising to almost 7 feet, then splitting off into two permanent arms (“cordons”) running in opposite directions along a wire at that height. Fruiting shoots grow downward off those arms. (I train my plants with two trunks, each topped by a single cordon, as insurance against losing a trunk to our more severe winter cold.) My job is to position those shoots and prune them so that none originate closer that 6 inches apart along the cordon, so that they don’t tangle, and so that the bunches don’t get shaded by more than 4 layers of leaves. I’ve done that and everything looks tidy, airy, and drenched in sunlight.
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One more job with the pruning shears, and that is to get to work on the bay laurel. This tree is 20 years old this year and, if never pruned, would be 30, or more, feet tall. It’s only 5 feet tall.

 
Planted outdoors, the bay laurel would also be dead. Our winters are much too cold for this native of the Mediterranean region. My bay laurel calls an 18 inch diameter flower pot home so it can move indoors in autumn to spend winter near a sunny window in a cool room.
 
Every couple of years or so, I slide the root ball out of the flower pot and cut 2 to 3 inches off all around the ball to make room for new potting soil when I put the plant back into its pot.
 
Each and every year, though, I cut back the top. The plant is pruned as a “standard,” that is, in the shape of a small, idealized tree with a straight trunk capped by a ball of foliage. Sort of like a lollipop. I take my hand shears and shorten some branches and, where growth is too dense, completely remove other branches. A hedge shears is not the tool to use for this job because they would leave mangled the big leaves of a plant like bay laurel.

 
Besides looking very pretty, this lollipop of a tree offers fresh bay leaves, which have a delicate flavor that hints of olive oil, another Mediterranean plant.
 

[kiwiberry, corn 3, D. Austin rose]

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A trip through Pennsylvania last week, on the way back from a lecture at the Millersville Native Plant Symposium, finally afforded me a convenient opportunity to stop in for a visit with David Jackson at KiwiBerry Organics (www.kiwiberry.com). David was not easy to find, as he’s nestled deep in the hills and back roads of rural Pennsylvania near Danville. Finally, after driving past acres and acres of forest alternating with corn and soybean fields, I came upon a hillside beribboned with neatly trellised hardy kiwi plants (Actinidia arguta).

 
What’s a hardy kiwi, you wonder? These fruits are cousin to our fuzzy supermarket kiwifruits, with a few notable differences. Hardy kiwifruits – or “kiwiberries,” as David and his partner Holly Laubach call them – are grape-sized and have smooth skins, so can be popped into your mouth just like grapes. Inside, they’re green with black seeds, just like fuzzy kiwifruits, except that hardy kiwifruits’ flavor is much sweeter and more aromatic. (I know this from what others say and because I have about a dozen fruiting vines myself; I devoted a chapter to kiwifruits in my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden, available at https://leereich.com/.)
 
What really dazzled me on this visit was the beauty of the plants and the care that is lavished on each one of them. The beauty was no surprise because hardy kiwifruits, since their introduction into North America from Asia at the end of the 19th century, have been grown mostly as ornamental vines for clothing arbors and pergolas.
 
Lavish care further enhanced Kiwiberry Organics plants plants’ natural beauty, starting right at ground level with the neat, weed-free strips in which the plants were growing. Weeds were not kept at bay with herbicides, but with careful use of a grape hoe, pulled by a tractor, that rolls over the soil to bury weeds in the soil ridges beneath the plants. From the ground, each plant rose as a sturdy trunk up the the center of a T-trellis whose 8-foot-wide arms are joined by wires running down the length of the trellis. At trellis height, the trunks branch into two permanent arms that run along and are supported by the middle wire. Fruiting arms growing off the two fruiting arms reach perpendicularly out to the outside wires.

 
I’ve tasted David’s kiwiberries and can attest to their especially fine flavor, the result of careful training and pruning that lets the plants bathe in sunlight. Excess growth is pruned off throughout the growing season to reduce congestion. Fruiting shoots draping down over the ends of the outside wires are repeatedly shortened. Stems that will yield fruit-bearing shoots for the following year are positioned in readiness. All this pruning is in addition to dormant pruning in winter.
 
My only regret with this visit was that the plants were in flower – very pretty, but I would rather have been tasting fruit.
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June 6th: My third planting of sweet corn went into the ground this morning. Rumor has it that backyard gardens are too small to make sweet corn worth planting, especially when supersweet corn is so available at farmstands and markets. Not so!
 
This latest corn planting went in between lettuce plants in a bed that has been home to 4 rows of early season salad fixings, including arugula, radishes, mustard, erba stella, and 4 varieties of lettuce. That bed now yields more than can be eaten on a daily basis, plus I have other beds of greenery.

 
So I sighted out 2 rows in the bed and every 2 ft. in each row yanked out a clump of greenery to make space for a clump – a “hill” (cluster) of 8 seeds – of sweet corn. Once those corn seeds sprout, I’ll thin the seedlings out to the best 4 plants. Once those “best 4 plants” start growing strongly, the salad fixings between them will be well past their prime and I’ll just pull them out, leaving the corn to thrive alone in the bed.
 
All sweet corns are not created equal, and planting sweet corn lets me choose which varieties to grow. I’m partial to old-fashioned sweet corn. It’s not nearly as sweet as modern supersweets but has a rich, corny flavor. My favorite variety, Golden Bantam, was the standard of excellence for sweet corn a hundred years ago.
 
Not everyone is a fan of Golden Bantam today; my friend Kit says it tastes like “horse corn.” Still growing your own corn lets you seek out and grow whatever variety you like best.
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David Austin (http://www.davidaustinroses.com/american/advanced.asp), rose breeder extraordinaire, has done it again, with Strawberry Hill rose. Two plants of this variety went in last spring near two south-facing, brick walls. One of them, the one in more sun, is now drenched in soft, pink blooms. As with many of Mr. Austin’s roses, the flowers have the shape of old-fashioned, cottage garden roses and the bushes are full bodied and robust. I was a little disappointed in the lightness of the fragrance, “fine myrrh” for this variety. But “every rose (and even Strawberry Hill) has its thorns.” Everything else about the bush makes it a winner.

 

[poppies, hoeing]

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It’s poppy season! Oriental poppies and Shirley poppies and California poppies. Unfortunately, no Himalayan poppies. And no bread seed poppies, yet. Each species has similarly delicate petals, yet each species also has its own character.
 
The Oriental poppies (Papaver orientalis), the first to open in my garden, have enormous heads of tissue paper thin petals in traffic-stopping red. I visited a garden last weekend in which were growing Oriental poppies with petals in soft pink, with white petals, or with, even more traffic-stopping than my fire engine red poppies, orange-red blossoms.

 
Corn poppies (P. rhoeas) are waiting their turn right next to my Oriental poppies. They have similarly fuzzy foliage but the foliage is more upright growing. And the flower heads, still closed in bud, are hanging downwards from the ends of thin, upright flower stalks. They will soon open to an intense red suggestive of blood, which is why paper reproductions of them are passed out on Memorial Day in remembrance of soldiers killed in war. These are the poppies that naturally populated the World War I battlefields and cemeteries, as immortalized in John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields”
 
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
 
On to the more cheery California poppies (Eschscholtzis californica), which blanket California hillsides with yellow flowers having just a hint of orange. These poppies grows near ground level and also keeps their flowers there.
 
Like corn poppies, California poppies are easily grown from seed scattered on the ground in late winter. Growing either poppy requires faith because their seeds are almost as fine as dust. Yet the plants transplant poorly, so in situ sowing is the only way to grow them. I always get an abundance of Shirley poppies sprouting. The California ones also probably sprout but most get shaded out by the surrounding, more exuberant flowers and weeds.
 
Bread seed poppies (P. somniferum) are also annuals, but need no sowing. They self-sow profusely on their own, so this week I spent some time un-sowing them, i.e. weeding out excess. They grow quickly, rising to cap the 2 to 3 foot high flower stalks with what look like balls of crepe paper in pink, white, and lavender, with occasion flowers having only single rows of petals.
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I forgot to mention Welsh poppies (Meconopsis cambrica), which actually started to bloom a little before the Oriental poppies. I originally grew Welsh poppies only to try my hand with its genus, Meconposis. Welsh poppy is easy, even self-seeding to some degree.
 
Himalayan poppy (M. betonicifoliais) the Meconopsis I’ve really wanted to grow. Unfortunately, it needs cool summer temperatures. Both times I raised plants from seed, they grew well until July, when they collapsed, dead, from the heat and humidity.

 
Welsh poppy produces a whorl of gray-green leaves from the center of which rises a flower stalk capped by a flower whose pale salmon flowers stare straight ahead, right at you. They’re not as pretty as the clear blue of Himalayan poppies, but pretty enough, especially considering the non-effort needed to grow them.
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Black locust trees burst into bloom at the end of May, in a particularly profuse display this year. Much better than the show of the blossoms was their sweet perfume suffusing the air all over the countryside.
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Abundant rain and warm weather have made for a good crop of weeds this season. Their abundance was a little daunting, at first. (Yes, even to the guy that wrote a book titled Weedless Gardening. “Weedless” in, this case, means free from weed problems; I do do some weeding.)
 
The thing to do is to take a deep, calming breath, and do what you have to do: weed. In my garden, weeds release easily from the soft soil so I pull the few deep-rooted ones out, roots and all.
 
I use a hoe where a bunch of small weed seedlings are popping up, but – very important – a hoe with a sharp blade that I can skim along a fraction of an inch beneath the soil surface to separate the roots from the tops of small weeds. Being too small to have stored any energy yet, the plants die.

 
A number of hoes do this job well, including the colinear hoe, push hoe, scuffle hoe, pointed action hoe, stirrup hoe, wire weeder, and (the one I use) winged weeder. The thing all these hoes have in common is a sharp blade that sits parallel to the surface of the ground when you hold the handle in hoeing position. I recently realized a need for a hoe with a smaller blade that I could squeeze into the 4” row spacings in some of my vegetable beds so I bent the blade of a cheap steak knife at almost a right angle and taped and screwed its handle to a 5 foot length of bamboo.
 
Any of these hoes make quick and pleasant work of weeds if used regularly, which means before weeds grow big. Sometimes I’ll even run the hoe quickly down some rows before weeds even appear. This preemptive move snuffs out any weeds starting to germinate and keeps the soil surface loose.
 
As the season progresses, weeds will have a harder time of it because of drier soil and stiff competition from garden plants – if you and I keep on top of them now.
 
scything, beginning stroke
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Have I ever mentioned my fondness for my scythe? Of course I have, but it bears repeating, now that scything season is upon us. This scythe is not the heavy, picturesque tool with a curved handle that you often see, and is best used, for decorating an outdoor wall. And it’s also not a tool best suited to the gentleman farmer with acres of land and oodles of time.

No, the scythe of present interest is a sleek, lightweight, razor sharp – dare I say “modern” – tool that would be useful around many a home and garden. The blade is sharp and light because it’s hammered out thinly, rather than stamped out like the one on an old-fashioned scythe. The razor-sharp edge needs to be touched up, which means about 30 seconds of swiping with a whetstone, after about every 15 minutes of use, and a hammering out of the edge every year.

My scythe has a straight snath, or handle, although some modern ones have curved snaths. Making a curved handle would have required more expertise and time than I had available when the curved snath I once had needed replacement. Maple wood, rather than the previous hickory wood, keeps the tool lightweight.


I use my scythe for much the same purpose as most people use a weed whacker. After years of practice, I can trim grass and weeds right up to the bases of trees and rock walls, as well as neaten up the lawn at the edge of the flower and vegetable garden. The sharp blade makes cutting possible even when the tool has to be moved slowly on those occasions where care is needed as to exactly where the end of the blade is – right up against a young tree, for example.


In contrast to the weed whacker, the scythe is quiet and gentle. Earplugs and goggles are unnecessary, and scything can be done any hour of the day without disturbing neighbors. Larger patches of grass can be mowed in weather that would bog down a lawnmower. And finally, scything is a very pleasant (and useful) physical exercise.

(I get my scything goods at www.scythesupply.com.)
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The scythe has traditionally been used to mow whole fields of grain or hay. Besides using my scythe in a weed wackeresque manner, I do use it also for a little hay, which I mow from odd corners of the property where I let the grasses and wildflowers grow tall. Last week was my first scything of the season. Depending on rainfall, the grasses and wildflowers might grow tall enough for an addition 2 or 3 mowings.

My hay doesn’t feed a flock of cows or sheep or any other domestic animal; it feeds a flock of bacteria, fungi, and other creatures in my compost piles. With air, moisture, and time, this hay, along with kitchen waste, old garden plants, and an occasional load of manure from a local stable, metamorphoses into dark, crumbly compost. The resulting witch’s brew of goodies that makes up the compost includes friendly organisms that help feed my plants and fend off plant diseases, as well as compounds that help the ground hold both water and air for plant use.


By my calculations, a one-inch depth of ripe compost should provide sufficient nutrition to keep plants happily chugging along for a whole year. A couple of years ago, I finally had enough faith in my calculations to abandon use of any other fertilizer. The compost does it all.

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I’m keeping my eyes out for what flowers bloom around Memorial Day because someone I know (more on that some other time) will be getting married next year on Memorial Day and I, of course, will be growing the flowers. There’s surely no dearth of flowers – wild and cultivated – this time of year.


First to make their appearance for Memorial day were some alliums (ornamental onions) and, in the garden and in the wild, dame’s rocket. As I write, floppy stems of Oriental poppies are spreading their first of many bright red flowers with petals as fine as fairy’s shawls, and the pastel blossoms of bearded irises are unfolding in sequence along their upright stems. Columbines, wild and cultivated, are hovering above the plants on thin stalks like butterflies. Stems of cerastrium, aptly known as snow-in-summer, are spilling over a rock wall along with their small, white flowers and hoary leaves, and, at the base of another rock wall, pure yellow Stella d’Oro daylily blossoms open daily. (Individual daylily blossoms bloom for only one day.)


Moist fields are awash with yellow buttercups and pink geraniums stare out from the partially shaded edges of woods. (These geraniums are true geraniums in contrast to the potted plants which, despite being called geraniums, are really pelargoniums.)

Among shrubs, at least two of the viburnums are prominently in bloom: doublefile viburnum (Viburnum plicatum) and American cranberrybush (V. trilobum), both with starry clusters of white flowers, flowers. In the center of each flower cluster are nonshowy, fertile flowers and around the rim lie sterile flowers that open with broad, showy petals.

One of the best flowers for vases that is now open looks to me like bachelor’s buttons. It comes up spontaneously in my garden every year; perhaps it self-seeds, perhaps its a perennial.

I’m not sure what the flower is, but it’s clear blue and produced in abundance. If it is a bachelor’s button, it was so named because the flowers lasted so long in buttonholes when bachelors when a-courting. So it may be a good cut flower but perhaps not best in a wedding bouquet.
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I broke my own rule and planted tomatoes out in the garden on May 13th. The weather was warm, the tomatoes were ready to pop out of their containers, and the bare ground seemed to cry out to be finally clothed with plants.

The correct planting date for tomatoes around here is during the last week in May, not May13th. Warm weather before the end of May can be deceiving and often, in the past (last year, for instance, has been followed by night temperatures that plummeted. That’s why I try never to go with my gut as to when to plant.

But this year seemed different. The weather had been warm for days, so the ground was warm. The weather report (not that, judging from experience, it could be trusted) didn’t call for any day or night temperatures dropping below even 50° F. Rain was forecast for the following few days, which would spare me the need to water the young plants for the few days while their roots had reached out into surrounding soil. And if low temperatures did threaten, I could quickly throw a cover over the plants or, with extended cold weather, quickly erect a wire-hoop supported tunnel of plastic over the beds.

So the tomatoes have been in the ground for a few days. The rain fell — over 2 inches! With cloudy weather, temperatures have remained cool, in the 50s and 60s. Tomatoes are native to moderate elevations in the Andes mountains, so perhaps are enjoying this weather.
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As long as I was planting tomatoes, I got on a role and started planting myriad other seedlings – zinnias, cosmos, leeks, morning glories, and sunflowers – in the ground also. Yes, it was raining, which normally makes for goopy soil that if clayey, is unpleasant for planting. Digging around in goopy clay soil also can also ruin its structure so it becomes poorly aerated.


My appreciation for being able to plant in rainy weather sends me back decades, when I visited 90 year old Scott Nearing, radical economist, political activist, and advocate of simple living, and helped out in his coastal Maine garden. Although I had just begun my agricultural education, academic and hands-on, I marveled at the feel of his soil. Planting and weeding were sheer pleasure, in spite of the rain, in soil of such good tilth. I was told that the soil there used to be a goopy clay but was transformed into that heavenly stuff in which I was working with years of copious additions of compost.

If only, I thought, I could someday have garden soil like that. I do! Every year I have blanketed the ground with an inch or more of compost so that the surface, rain or shine, presents a soft, water absorbent yet workable, nutrient and biologically-rich home to hands and plant roots.
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May 16, I mark on my calendar the day that Korean mountain ash (Sorbus alnifolia) is blooming. This relatively rare plant is notable for its sprays of clear, white blossoms, for its warm, coppery-bronze autumn leaf color, and for it showy – perhaps the showiest of all plants! – display of small, flaming red berries. The fruits are also a tasty nibble (which warranted the plant a place in my recent book Landscaping with Fruits).


I first met this plant “in person” at the Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore College 5 years ago in October. As I stood there admiring the tree, I nibbled at the fruits. And, of course, I couldn’t bring myself to spit out the small seeds. Not because of propriety but I because each seed had such potential.

Long story short: I took the seeds home, mixed them with moist potting soil in a bag which went into my refrigerator for 3 months of stratification (fooling the seeds into thinking winter was over and it was safe to sprout), potted them up, and ended up with 2 good seedlings.

One of my two seedlings is now about 10 feet tall, and that’s the one now in flower. What’s amazing is that the plant bloomed at such a young age. Ten years might go by before an apple tree makes the physiological transition from juvenility to maturity – that is, reproductive and, hence, flowering age. Grafted trees, which are made by grafting mature stems onto rootstocks, bloom much quicker. Ten feet of growth and 5 years till first blossoming from seed is quick.

I’m looking forward to seeing and tasting the fruit of my own Korean mountain ash seedling in October.
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May 10th, an exquisite day with a slight breeze, temperatures in the 70s, and a limpid blue sky matching the blue on the backs of the resident pair of male bluebirds flitting about. What a day to be in the garden. So how come I’m not there? Because I’m building garden gates.

Having recently re-built the arbored gateways leading into and out of one of my vegetable gardens, building of gates themselves was the next order of business. Or, rather, has been for the past month or so. The original arbors and gates were cedar, everyone’s go-to wood for rustic garden structures. I hand cut and hand carried all the cedar out of the woods for those original arbors and gates, and fashioned them into what I thought were quite attractive structures – until they rotted.

The only rot resistant part of cedar is the heartwood, and 3 or 4 inch diameter posts such as I used have a red tube of heartwood running up their centers only an inch or so wide. The rest rots, which it did very thoroughly over the past 15 years.

The new arbors and gates are of black locust, a dense wood that vies with commercial pressure-treated wood for longevity. I grew most of the posts myself, in my miniature woodlot that’s about 50 feet long by about 15 feet wide. There, locust saplings swell up to the needed 4 to 6 inch diameter posts in 12 years. New sprouts develop at the base of cut stumps and from root suckers so the mini-woodlot offers an ongoing supply of locust posts. (This year’s construction necessitated supplementing my woodlot’s production with wood from my friend Bill Munzer, who has a bona fide forest of black locust trees in Gardiner and sells locust posts.)

So, yes, it would have been a nice day to have been in the garden. But it was also a nice day to be building garden gates. As with so many things in gardening, building the gates provided a satisfying commingling of art and function. One gate down, 3 to go.

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Dead or living, black locust is among my favorite trees. One other endearing feature of dead locust is its enormous heat output when burned. There are few other woods that provide longer and more warmth in the woodstove than black locust.

The living tree has a deeply furrowed bark and craggy form that reminds me of the trees along the yellow brick road that grabbed Dorothy on her way to Oz. In a couple of weeks, black locust branches will be dripping with chains of pale, blue flowers looking something like those of wisteria but more subdued. The flowers emanate a sweet fragrance that can be enjoyed from even a couple of hundred feet distance.

Another endearing quality of black locust is that the living tree improves the soil. It’s a legume, just like peas and beans, and like other legumes harbors a symbiotic bacterium in its roots that takes nitrogen from the air and puts it into a form on which plants can feed.

Black locust has the distinction of being classified as a “native invasive” plant, a tricky (goofy?) classification that’s not immediately clear. The tree is truly native to a small area in southeastern U.S. from which it has naturally spread.

As I wrote above, “new sprouts develop at the base of cut stumps and from root suckers,” Black locust also sometimes makes new plants from fallen seeds. I welcome this invader.

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I did take a break from gate-building to get into the garden. I had to because today is the day for my first planting of corn. We still have a week or two of possible frost, which shouldn’t hurt the planting. Corn is a grass, with its growing point sheltered beneath the ground, ready to push up new leaves even if they suffer cold injury above ground. The only requisite for planting is sufficiently warm soil, 55° and above, to promote germination rather than rotting.

This year’s plantings, like those of past years (pictured at right), is Golden Bantam sweet corn in one vegetable garden and Pink Pearl and Dutch Butter popcorn in the other. I isolate these plantings to prevent cross-pollination from making the sweet corn less sweet or the popcorn less poppable.

Into each 3 foot wide bed goes two rows of hills (“hills” as in “stations,” not mounds), with 18 inches between hills in the row. I drop 8 seeds into each hole, water, and, with my foot, push the soil back into the hole and firm it with my heel. Hills provide closeness for corn mating and withstand winds better than wider spaced individual plants. Once up and growing strongly, the seedlings get thinned to the sturdiest 4 plants per hill.

(grafts, alpine strawberries, money plant flowers)

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It’s amazing how exciting a little bit of greenery can be. And I do mean just a little, eensy-weensy bit. That exciting greenery is in the barely expanding buds of grafts I’ve made over the past couple of weeks.

 Backtracking as to why I made those grafts . . . I did it to change over some fruit trees to new varieties. The Blanquet Précoce pear tree, for instance, never did well so I lopped it off at about 2 feet high and grafted on some Collette pear stems. (I have another Blanquet Précoce tree anyway.)
 
I also grafted a Chief gooseberry onto a single-stemmed clove currant, again at a height of a couple of feet, to create a gooseberry plant that, rather than its usual sprawling self, becomes a miniature tree. Getting branches up off the ground may put the leaves beyond reach of the voracious imported currant worm and also makes a neat-looking plant.
 
A couple of stems of the Black Plum variety of cornelian cherry that I grafted up in a tree of Redstar cornelian cherry should, if the graft takes, provide cross-pollination and more variety from a single tree. Cornelian cherry is difficult to graft. I’ve failed every year for the past 6 years.
 
I also grafted a lot of apple and pear stems onto dwarfing rootstocks. I already have plenty of apple and pear trees so I’m not sure exactly why I made more. Grafting mania? I’ve grafted apples and pears for many years and typically have almost 100 percent success. They still elicit excitement as they begin to grow.
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Not to brag, but I it’s May 3rd and I just had my first strawberries of the season. Obviously, these are not your run-of-the-mill garden strawberries, which typically begin ripening around here in June. The strawberries I’ve just eaten are alpine strawberries, not-your-run-of-the-mill red alpine strawberries, but white alpine strawberries.
 
I’ve grown these plants for many years (and devoted a chapter to them in my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden). Mostly, I grow them in pots. In contrast to garden strawberries, alpine strawberries don’t make runners, so don’t sprawl out of the pots or all over the place planted in the ground. Alpine strawberries also are everbearing, pumping out thumbnail-sized berries all summer long. If they are in a pot in a greenhouse or at a sunny windowsill, they’ll fruit from early spring well into autumn, whenever temperatures and light permit. My potted alpine strawberries go into the greenhouse in March and spend summer decoratively poised on the ledge along the path to my front door, where ripe berries can be plucked in transit.
 
I prefer the white to the red alpine strawberries. That’s because all alpine strawberries taste like cotton soaked in lemon juice until they are dead ripe. Birds peck the red varieties at their first blush of red. Birds don’t notice ripe berries of the white varieties, which indicate their ripeness with darkened seeds and an ambrosial, pineapple-y fragrance.
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I didn’t realize a money plant could be so pretty. The plant is sometimes called “silver dollar“ plant, sometimes “honesty,” and sometimes “lunaria,” its botanical genus. The seed capsules – silvery, round, and flat – are how it’s most recognizable.
 
Never having grown the plant, I wasn’t prepared for the beauty of the flowers. Each blossom has four purple petals in the shape of cross, the shape indicating kinship with dame’s rocket and other members of the cabbage family, Cruciferae. (Cruciferae means “cross-bearing;” the newer family name is Brassicaceae, from the Celtic word bresic, meaning “cabbage”).
 
The “money” part of money plant more definitively identifies it as a Cruciferae. That’s what remains of the fruit (botanically, a silique) after it matures, and its two covers split off to leave a thin, round, silvery septum with imbedded seeds. The whole family bears siliques, but not leave that round, silvery membrane. Radishes, for example, bear long, thin siliques, which have a nice, spicy flavor and crisp texture when green and fresh. It’s worth letting a few radish plants go to seed.
 
I planted money plant late last summer. It’s a self-seeding biennial or short-lived perennial so silver dollars should be a permanent fixture here from now on.
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(locust, gates, corn planting)

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May 10th, an exquisite day with a slight breeze, temperatures in the 70s, and a limpid blue sky matching the blue on the backs of the resident pair of male bluebirds flitting about. What a day to be in the garden. So how come I’m not there? Because I’m building garden gates.
 
Having recently re-built the arbored gateways leading into and out of one of my vegetable gardens, building of gates themselves was the next order of business. Or, rather, has been for the past month or so. The original arbors and gates were cedar, everyone’s go-to wood for rustic garden structures. I hand cut and hand carried all the cedar out of the woods for those original arbors and gates, and fashioned them into what I thought were quite attractive structures – until they rotted.
 
The new arbors and gates are of black locust, a dense wood that vies with commercial pressure-treated wood for longevity. I grew most of the posts myself, in my miniature woodlot that’s about 50 feet long by about 15 feet wide. There, locust saplings swell up to the needed 4 to 6 inch diameter posts in 12 years. New sprouts develop at the base of cut stumps and from root suckers so the mini-woodlot offers an ongoing supply of locust posts. (This year’s construction necessitated supplementing my woodlot’s production with wood from my friend Bill, who has a bona fide forest of black locust trees in Gardiner and sells locust posts.)
 
So, yes, it would have been a nice day to have been in the garden. But it was also a nice day to be building garden gates. As with so many things in gardening, building the gates provided a satisfying commingling of art and function. One gate down, 3 to go.

 

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Dead or living, black locust is among my favorite trees. One other endearing feature of dead locust is its enormous heat output when burned. There are few other woods that provide longer and more warmth in the woodstove than black locust.
 
The living tree has a deeply furrowed bark and craggy form that reminds me of the trees along the yellow brick road that grabbed Dorothy on her way to Oz. In a couple of weeks, black locust branches will be dripping with chains of pale, blue flowers looking something like those of wisteria but more subdued. The flowers emanate a sweet fragrance that can be enjoyed from even a couple of hundred feet distance.
 
Another endearing quality of black locust is that the living tree improves the soil. It’s a legume, just like peas and beans, and like other legumes harbors a symbiotic bacterium in its roots that takes nitrogen from the air and puts it into a form on which plants can feed.
 
Black locust has the distinction of being classified as a “native invasive” plant, a tricky (goofy?) classification that’s not immediately clear. The tree is truly native to a small area in southeastern U.S. from which it has naturally spread.
 
As I wrote above, “new sprouts develop at the base of cut stumps and from root suckers,” Black locust also sometimes makes new plants from fallen seeds. I welcome this invader.
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I did take a break from gate-building to get into the garden. I had to because today is the day for my first planting of corn. We still have a week or two of possible frost, which shouldn’t hurt the planting. Corn is a grass, with its growing point sheltered beneath the ground, ready to push up new leaves even if they suffer cold injury above ground. The only requisite for planting is sufficiently warm soil, 55° and above, to promote germination rather than rotting.

 

 
This year’s plantings, like those of past years, is Golden Bantam sweet corn in one vegetable garden and Pink Pearl and Dutch Butter popcorn in the other. I isolate these plantings to prevent cross-pollination from making the sweet corn less sweet or the popcorn less poppable.
 
Into each 3 foot wide bed goes two rows of hills (“hills” as in “stations,” not mounds), with 18 inches between hills in the row. I drop 8 seeds into each hole, water, and, with my foot, push the soil back into the hole and firm it with my heel. Hills provide closeness for corn mating and withstand winds better than wider spaced individual plants. Once up and growing strongly, the seedlings get thinned to the sturdiest 4 plants per hill.
 

(seedlings on the move, flower sdlg, what is gardening, naturalized bulbs

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This time of year, more than ever, each of my plants gets its carefully allotted space. That’s because seedlings that will eventually be planted out in the garden have begun to overflow the greenhouse, which must also house grown-up lettuce, kale, celery, and other plants for eating right now. To economize best on space, I sow seeds in furrows in 4 by 6 inch seedling flats and prick out tiny seedlings a week or so after they sprout into individual cells in cell packs filled with potting soil. As temperatures warm and seedlings grow, seedlings in cell packs move outside and get acclimated to brighter sunshine, wind, and cooler

temperatures.
 
Who gets moved, and when, depends on the plant and the weather. Broccoli, kale, cabbage, and collard seedlings are cold-hardy and almost big enough to transplant. So they’ve been sitting on the table outside the greenhouse since earlier this month. The same goes for celery, artichoke, lettuce, and onion seedlings.

 

 
Inside the greenhouse, pepper seedlings are growing in cells and tomato seedlings are almost ready to lift out of their furrows in seedling flats for re-planting in individual cells. The tomato seedlings sprout and grow fast, so even though they were sown later, they’ll soon outstrip the peppers in growth.
 
A wrench is thrown into this orderly march of plants within and then outside the greenhouse whenever temperatures drop near or below freezing. Then everything gets hustled back into the greenhouse, which becomes overcrowded with cell packs lining up in paths, benches, and any unplanted space in beds.
 
Odds are that temperatures will plummet, and more than once, before warm weather settles in for good. The average date for the last killing frost around here is the middle of May.
 
For the last few years, that date has been pushed way back into early April – almost. “Almost” because every year for the past few years it’s been warm, warm, warm through April and then bam!, one or two nights in early May get downright frigid, as if to remind me about that average date of the last killing frost. Those evenings I run around throwing blankets over seedlings already planted in the garden and moving seedlings back into the greenhouse. And then it gets warm again, and stays that way.

 

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I’m realizing earlier this year than most years that I’ve started too many flower transplants. Usually that realization comes as I’m frantically looking around the yard trying to find a home for the plants in a tray of seedlings I’m carrying around.
 
The genesis of this problem is not hard to fathom. Pictures of colorful flowers, oozing forth from seed catalogs that arrive against the achromatic backdrop of late winter, make purchasing seeds irresistible. Each packet has so many seeds; why not plant them all? And then prick all the seedlings that sprout, or a good portion of them, into individual cells filled with potting soil? And then . . . and then, where to plant them?
 
It’s too early for that final dilemma. All I know is that I now have 40 carnation plants and almost that many each of Lemon Gem marigolds and three different colors of zinnia waiting to sprout. Oh yeh, also some heliotrope, nicotiana, and delphiniums. And I am going to throw some alyssum seed right out in the garden. And I have some butterfly weed and hollyhock plants from last year’s excess that never got planted. And . . .
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Sometimes I wonder just what “gardening” is. Sowing seeds is definitely gardening, as is transplanting seedlings, making compost, weeding, spreading compost, and pruning. But how about replacing the wood panels of my garden cart, something I should do now and will have to do soon? Or sharpening my grafting knife, also to be done soon, very soon? Or re-building my garden fence, something I am now in the throes of? Or sharpening and trying to start my chainsaw for cutting posts that will hold up that garden fence? It’s a busy time of year.

 

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Last week I wrote about looking for the small bulbs I had planted to naturalize in my lawn about 5 years ago. I feared they had petered out. Not so! They all appeared this week (except for the dwarf irises and crocuses marking my old dog’s grave). Cornelian cherry also finally bloomed, for some reason almost a month later than usual.