(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.
 
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Winter cold is all too evident, right now. Or maybe it’s just that spring is later than usual. Here it is, the first week in April, and cornelian cherries (Cornus mas) have yet to bloom. Yet one reason I grow this tree is because its blossoms are among the first to awaken in spring. The stems are typically drenched in a profusion of small, yellow flowers in early spring, just after the middle of March, and blossoming goes on and on for weeks.

Everyone else is blossoming on time. Witchhazel has been in bloom for a few weeks, hellebores have opened, and buds seem ready and on time on forsythia, lilacs, and clove currants.

Cornelian cherry blossoms might have been killed by winter cold, although they’ve survived colder winters in the past. Teasing open one of the fat flower buds reveals the makings of yellow flowers, so perhaps they are just late this year.


I hope the flowers are merely still resting because, if so, they will be followed by fruits that look and taste like tart cherries. Like the flowers, they’re also borne in profusion, and decoratively hang from the branches for a long time unless harvested. Unlike tart cherries, cornelian cherries fruit very reliably with little bother from any pests.
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Other evidence of this past winter’s cold – unrelated to the lateness, or not, of spring – is bamboo. Today was overcast and rainy, and driving back from having my truck inspected, I couldn’t help but note patches of winterkilled bamboo in various yards. The clumps of upright stalks draped with now-tawny leaves, very attractive as a muted prelude to the exuberance of spring blossoms, really jump out in the landscape once you start looking.

Soon bamboo will shed its dead leaves and become unattractive, a brief phase that ends as soon as new shoots poke through the ground. They grow very quickly – I’ve measured 6 inches a day of growth – and are quickly clothed in fresh, green leaves.

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Particularly welcome and, I think, on time are some blossoms that are not even colorful. Those blossoms are the catkins on my filbert bushes. They are brown but drape decoratively down from the branches like the tails of cats (actually kittens, the origin of the word from the old Dutch word katteken).

Catkins are spikes of flowers, all male in the case of filberts. The female flowers are hardly noticeable until they start developing into clusters of nuts.


My filberts are European hybrids, the nuts of which are large and tasty. Years ago I grew some native filberts (Corylus americana), which bear nuts that are really too small and not tasty enough to be worth eating. The reason I planted them was because they are resistant to filbert blight disease, a disease indigenous in eastern U.S.. European filberts (C. avellana) are grown commercially in the U.S. in the Pacific northwest, where the disease was absent.

Note the phrase “was absent.” Filbert blight started showing up in those parts in the 1980s so breeders there started looking for and developing resistant varieties of European filberts. Actually, some eastern filbert enthusiasts had bred some fairly resistant varieties, such as Graham Hybrid, Gellatly, and Hall’s Giant, all of which I planted almost 15 years ago. They bore well but got some blight. The breeders in Oregon came up with some new varieties that are immune to the blight.

Long story short: I’ve been enjoying large, tasty filbert nuts in autumn and the-catkin draped branches early each spring for a number of years. The varieties I now have are Lewis, Clark, Yamhill, Jefferson, and Santiam. That’s a lot of nuts!
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More nuts. Hickories are delicious (a close relative of pecans) but a hard nut to crack and, once cracked, yield little nutmeat. I recently read an article about improved varieties of this native tree, varieties whose nutmeat crack out in halves. I just ordered trees of the varieties Selbher and Henning.
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[tomato sdlg, small bulbs, cacao]

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Finally, after a couple of weeks of restraining myself, I’m sowing tomato seeds. Every bit of warm weather and bright sunshine made it harder to hold back, but the time has come.
 
The problem – if it could be called a problem – is that tomatoes grow pretty much like weeds. The seeds germinate quickly and the seedlings grow fast. So what typically happens is that seeds are sown too soon and the seedlings get too big for their pots before transplanting time. Too big, that is, unless you keep repotting them. Repotting becomes a space issue when you grow 50 or more tomato plants, as I do.
 
I grow my plants in my greenhouse but for anyone who raises tomato seedlings on a windowsill, plants seeded too early tend to get too leggy. It’s hard to grow nice, stocky seedlings in the limited light of even a sunny window. Not impossible, though, if the room is kept cool (mid 60s), if the plants are near the window, which is south-facing and unobstructed, and if you pet the plants daily.

 

 
Yes, pet the plants! Running your fingers or a short length of plastic pipe gently over the tops of the plants a dozen times or so daily does the same thing that wind does to plants on wind-swept, craggy, cliffs: It stimulates release of a plant hormone, ethylene, which inhibits stem elongation. Breezes from the ventilation fan and bright sunlight in my greenhouse keep my plants stocky; I still occasionally pet them.
 
April 1st is my tomato-seed-sowing date, which allows 6 to 7 weeks of growth before transplanting time. The plants start off slowly, then pick up steam quicker and quicker as temperatures warm and sunshine grows brighter. Last year, I grew 80 plants, which provided plenty of tomatoes for fresh eating, sauce, salsa, and ketchup (the last item a failure, but it did use up a lot of tomatoes). This year, 50 plants should suffice.
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What could be cheerier than the flowers of crocuses, dwarf irises, and other small bulbs popping up out of the ground now? These flowers, no matter how small, are really appreciated after a colorless winter.
 
Five years ago, I planted a slew of these small bulbs, also including species tulips, chionodoxa, muscari, puschkinia, galanthus, and scilla. Some went into mulched ground beneath the apple trees, others went into the soil in beds where I’ll soon be planting vegetables, and still others were planted right into lawn.
 
The bulbs that went into vegetable beds and mulched ground have, as expected, grown most vigorously and are now tight clumps of flowers. Plants “plugged” into lawngrass are less vigorous because of competition for nutrients. Water is not a factor because the soil stays plenty moist during the few weeks in spring that these small bulbs are flowering and then growing leaves to feed next year’s flowers.
 
A number of bulbs seeded in lawn have died out. Perhaps it was the competition. In the front yard, our annual floods, which have been deeper than usual over the past few years, probably snuffed out already weakened plants. Especially missed is the rectangular planting of Iris ‘George’ (a hybrid of Iris histrioides and I. reticulata) and crocus ‘Clothe of Gold’ (a variety of C. angustifolius dating back to 1587) that marked the grave of our old dog Stick.
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Turning to warmer thoughts . . . Joining me on my return from last week’s trip to Puerto Rico was a chocolate pod. The orange pod dangling from a branch at the USDA research station was too irresistable to leave hanging. After much effort climbing branches and whacking at the pod, I finally landed it on the ground.

 

 
I’ve cut the pod open to reveal the seeds, some of which I planned to sprout and others of which I planned to process into a primitive chocolate. Now I’m having second thoughts.

 
The trees are truly tropical, needing constant heat, ideally over 68° F. Neither my house nor my greenhouse temperatures remain consistently that high. The plants do, at least, tolerate some shade. Even if I got the seedlings to grow to their 5 foot fruiting height, making chocolate involves a rather complicated process of fermentation, drying, cleaning, roasting, and pressing. I think I’ll just buy some finished chocolate instead. But what to do with this intriguing pod and seeds?
 
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Night temperatures are still usually dropping well below freezing, as they will for the next few weeks. No matter, because where I am, it’s like summer. Puer-r-r-r-to Rico! Here day temperatures hover in the low 80s, night temperatures in the 70s. Gentle breezes rustle the leaves of palm trees and make these temperatures even more comfortable.


It’s the dry season, especially here in the southeastern portion of the the island, with daily chances of thundershowers meaning nothing more than brief cloudbursts after which beaches, roads, plants – everything – dries quickly. Still, grasses in pastures have that bluish, dry look. Majestic mango trees weighed down with unripe fruit await wet weather in coming months to burst into flowers in preparation for another load of fruit.
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This winter’s low of minus 20° F. killed off the tops of my bamboo so I expect this year’s growth from the roots, which do survive, won’t match the 20 foot culms that grew last year. Even at 20 feet, these tall culms don’t hold a candle to some of the tropical bamboos down here in Puerto Rico. A tour of the U. S. Department of Agriculture research station in Mayaguez let me see a number of tropical bamboo species all in one place.

Most dramatically impressive were a couple of the larger species. I’m happy with inch-thick culms from my Phyllostachis aureosculcata plants, a species that is among the hardiest of what I call “timber bamboos.” What a joke, my calling these “timber bamboos.” Bambus vulgaris and Guadua angustifolia culms reach about a half a foot across here in P.R. I would estimate their culm height at about 60 feet.

Ah, the things I could do with such plants. I use my P. aureosculcata canes for some building projects such as lightweight fencing and poles for climbing beans or tomatoes. With those tropical bamboos, I could build a whole house, or, at least, a very decorative garden hut. In fact, Guadua angustifolia is used for construction.


Bamboos generally are fast growing plants. A major difference between most tropical bamboos and most temperate bamboos is that the temperate species spread aggressively via underground runners that scoot along horizontally just a couple of inches or so beneath the ground. I’ve seen culms pop up from runners that have spread 5 feet away from my plants in just a few weeks. Thoroughly digging up these runners is not easy because they are as tough as the culms. I contain my bamboo with a plastic barrier that extends from a couple of inches above ground to 2 feet down into the ground. Still, the runners sometimes creep over the top of the barrier after which I have to pull and dig up the tough lacework that quickly develops just beneath the ground surface.

These topical species would be downright frightening if they spread like the temperate species. Instead of spreading, they grow in well behaved clumps. Clumping makes that impressive Bambus vulgaris even more impressive, the culms soaring skyward and then fanning out like a fountain. As if that wasn’t enough, the variety Vitatta that I saw has yellow culms with forest green lines seemingly brush-stroked – one, two, or three of them – vertically between some of the nodes.
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The U. S. Department of Agriculture research station here in Mayaguez also houses the collection of temperate zone bamboo species, including my own Phyllostachis aureosculcata. What a sorry site! The culms were 8 to 10 feet high and looked somewhat piqued. These bamboos, like most other temperate plants – perhaps even some people – don’t thrive with perennially hot weather. They (and we) need their (and our) dose of cold weather each year. Easy for me to say, down here in La Isla Encantada.
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PRUNING WORKSHOP, April 3rd, at my garden!!

Contact me thru my website for more details.
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Summer cole slaws, steaming plates of broccoli, and kale cooked and drizzled with some olive oil, lemon juice, and toasted sesame seeds are now on their way. Seeds are sown, sprouts should be up within a few days, and a few days after that I’ll lift enough sprouts from their mini-furrows in a seed flat to fill a 40 cell tray. By May 1st, the seedlings will be big enough and will be planted out in the garden.

An early start is important with most of these plants in the cabbage family, the so-called cole crops, or crucifers. (“Crucifer” because everyone in the family bears 4-petalled, cross – “cruc” – shaped flowers.) These are plants that thrive in and taste best with cool, moist weather. The one exception is kale, which to me has a rich, sweetish, nourishing flavor even in the heat of summer. I see some still out in the garden now that the snow is receding, and will harvest it the first chance I can get through the garden gate, which, as I write, is still locked close with snow.

The cabbages and broccolis I just sowed are for early summer; the kale for spring, summer, fall, and, as long as I can get to it, winter. Fortunately, I grow backup kale, a dozen plants that enjoy the cool temperatures of the greenhouse all winter long.

Kale for this year is Dwarf Blue Scotch and Winterbor. For cabbage, I’m growing the tasty, small and pointy-headed, heirloom variety Early Jersey Wakefield. With broccoli, I’m hedging my bets. I bought a packet of mixed seed, including varieties with different harvest times, some notable for making large main head, and some notable for prolific side shoots.
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Receding snow makes it easier to get to some low bushes and see what to prune. Like my currant and gooseberry bushes, which will be the first to get pruned. The reason they are first in line is because they are the first to begin growing. A few days of warm weather and their buds will all of a sudden turn green with nascent leaves about to unfold.


I prune most of these plants by a renewal method. Being shrubs, they’re always sending new sprouts, called suckers, up from ground level. Old stems do not stay virile very long, typically not bearing well after about 3 years. With renewal pruning, all stems more than 3 years old get lopped back to ground level or to low-growing vigorous, upright side branches. The stems that are the oldest are obvious because they are fattest and have the peelingest bark.

Next, I turn to the suckers. Each year, these bushes typically send up a lot of new suckers from ground level, too many, so many that they would crowd each other with age. So the other pruning needed is to reduce the number of new suckers to a half-dozen or so, saving those that are most vigorous, healthy, and upright. Finally, I shorten lanky stems that would otherwise droop to the ground, especially when loaded with a crop of berries.


What’s left after pruning, then, are a half-dozen new suckers, a half-dozen 1-year-old stems left from last year, a half-dozen 2-year-old stems form the year before last, and a half-dozen 3-year-old stems from the year before that. That’s about how the bush looks every year after being pruned, in theory, at least. Nothing’s too old and the young ‘uns have room to grow.

Pruning gooseberries is a thorny affair that demands use of leather gloves.
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Most people on this side of the Atlantic (excepting Canada) don’t really know gooseberries. If they’ve experienced the fruit, they consider them all to be small, green, and tart, which, unfortunately, those most commonly offered are. In fact, gooseberries come in a wide spectrum of flavors, colors, and size.

For starters, and most importantly, gooseberries can be divided into culinary and dessert varieties. Many dessert varieties can be used for cooking, for which use they’re harvested slightly underripe.


Dessert varieties have a sweet or sweet-tart flavor. My Hinnonmakis Yellow berries are small, yellow, and sweetly reminiscent of apricot. Black Satin gooseberries are wine-red in color with a flavor much like a sweet, rich wine. Colossal, which I’ll be planting again after a 15 year hiatus, has humongous fruits with a cracking texture: the skin is firm but explodes into your mouth with an ambrosial, sweet juice when you bite into it.

Generally, gooseberries are tough plants that are easy to grow. They’ll tolerate any amount of cold and deer leave them alone. I’m looking forward to enjoying fruits of the dozen varieties I grow in July.

[carnations]

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Don’t be surprised if you see me sporting a pink carnation in my buttonhole this summer. I want big, fat, fragrant, florists’ carnations, and I think I finally found one: Enfant de Nice. I’ve grown many “pinks,” another name for carnations, in the past, but they were always too demur. Enfant de Nice, from its descriptions, should have corpulent blooms in white and various shades of pastel pink. The fragrance, billed as “intoxicating spicy-sweet clove perfume,” sounds heady enough that it might have me unable to walk a straight line with one of those in my buttonhole.
 
For now, the practical must be dealt with: sowing seeds 1/2 inch deep in seed flats kept cool and moist, then moving sprouted seedlings to individual cells, and finally, after the last average frost date (mid-May), out to the garden. Pruning back stems after blossoming should keep me in boutonnières through July and August.
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I just checked my maple syrup buckets. They were all full.
 

[seaberry, wheat, spring indoors]

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The garden is winding down so I’ll look into the freezer and see what I’ve got. Hmmmm. A couple of jars of frozen, small, yellow-orange berries. Sea berries! I forgot all about them. I’ve had the bushes for a few years and each year nibble a few of the tart berries. This year I decided to use the berries in earnest.
 
Native to Russia, China, and northern Europe, sea berries are relative newcomers to this part of the world. And even then, they’re often planted strictly as ornamental shrubs. Their silvery leaves make the perfect backdrop for their bright and abundant orange, yellow, or red berries. As a fruiting or ornamental plant, sea berry is easy to grow, needing only abundant sunlight and well drained soil. A (nonfruiting) male plant is needed to get fruit on nearby female plants; each male can sire up to 8 females.
 
Years ago someone sent me some sea berry juice, the flavor of which was something like very rich orange and passionfruit juices. Some people liken the flavor to pineapple; hence “Siberian pineapple,” another common name for the fruit.
 
The reason I only nibbled on sea berries up to this year is because harvesting the small berries can be a problem. They press closely to the stems, and the stems are armed with intimidating thorns. Someone suggested freezing the branches and then shaking off the frozen berries. That’s what I tried back in September, cutting berry-laden branches into foot long sections and and putting them in a large, plastic tub with a tightly fitting lid. Once everything was well frozen, I shook the tub with the lid still on. A lot. The berries fell off and settled to the bottom of the tub and after winnowing what was left in front of a fan outdoors, I had a couple of quarts of clean berries.
 

The fruit allegedly makes excellent sauces, syrups, and jellies; my plan was to replicate that delicious Siberian pineapple juice. After heating the berries in a saucepan with a bit of water, mashing them with a potato masher, and straining, I had 3 cups of a beautiful, but nose wrinkling, tart, juice. I added about a half a cup of water along with a half a cup of sugar, mixed well, and was ready to try out the juice on some dinner guests. Served before dinner in apéritif glasses, the juice was a hit. Everyone asked for more.
 

 

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I next turned to the bowl of tawny stems and grains that’s been sitting on the kitchen table for a couple of months. That bowl represented the sum total of my wheat harvest, planted in spring into 3’ by 3’ of garden bed.
The cut stalks of wheat, with their fat heads of dry grain, had been hanging upside down from the kitchen ceiling up to a few weeks ago. The contents of the bowl — chaff, grain, and bits of stalk — represented the results of putting the stalks into a pillowcase and beating them up vigorously, and then removing long stems remaining. That was a couple of months ago.
 
Yesterday, as long as I had my winnowing fan set up outdoors for the sea berries, I thought I might as well also winnow the wheat grains. As with the sea berries, slowly pouring the grains and other debris in front of the fan sent most of the debris flying away, leaving with the crop, the grain in this case, settling into a waiting bowl below.
 

My crop was relatively paltry, about a half a cup of grain. This half a cup per 9 square feet translates to about 16 bushels per acre. Average wheat yields are 30 to 50 bushels per acre, with some farmers harvesting over 100 bushels per acre. I guess I’m not much of a wheat grower — yet. I’ll try again next year, perhaps planting more densely or earlier.
 
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With the shortest day of the year past, it’s time for hints of the sights and smells of spring — indoors. Paperwhite narcissus, potted up back in November, is already blooming and perfuming the air. And I’ve brought up a jasmine plant (poet’s jasmine, Jasminium officinale) from the basement. That jasmine plant, along with a few others, was outdoors this past fall through a few light frosts, then has sat in front of a sunny window in my cool basement. The cool temperatures, perhaps also short days and occasionally dry soil will contribute to abundant bloom in weeks ahead. I’ll extend the bloom by bringing up a new jasmine plant every few weeks.
 

[pomegranates, greenhouse lettuce, bad black walnuts]

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I oversee, in all probability, the biggest pomegranate farm in Ulster County, perhaps New York State, even the Northeast. My planting recently expanded by 200 percent with the 4 new plants that arrived at my doorstep a couple of days ago. My farm is biggest because so few people in this part of the world grow pomegranates and, if they do, they might have one plant.

 

Pomegranates are an up and coming plant. Their health benefits have been highly touted, perhaps with some hyperbole. They are beautiful shrubs or small trees with traffic-stopping red (sometimes white or pink) blossoms. Best of all is the fruit’s flavor, combining the richness of berries with the tang of citrus.

 

Unfortunately, pomegranates are not adapted to growing in this part of the world. They hail from the Mideast, much the same region as figs, where winters are mild and moist, and summers are hot, dry, and sunny. Yet, I, along with many other gardeners, do grow figs, coddling them through winter by growing them in pots brought indoors, in a greenhouse, or swaddled in the ground or, where winters aren’t bitterly cold, in various insulating blankets. Why not do the same with pomegranates? Stems of both plants tolerate temperatures down to about 15° F.

Well, not exactly the same. Figs bear fruit on new wood so you can harvest a crop even if the stems die back, as long as they don’t die back too much. Pomegranates bear fruit on older wood, which needs to survive winter to bear fruit. Pomegranates also need a long season to ripen. And they don’t like humidity, and especially rain near harvest, or the fruits burst open.

 

All of which is why 12 to 18 inch diameter pots are what my pomegranates call home. I move these pots to my cool basement for winter. I move them outside as soon as the weather warms in spring to get them started early, and inside temporarily if frost threatens. I can move them under cover when rains threaten.

 

Commercial pomegranates in the U.S. are of varieties from warmer parts of the Mideast. The varieties I am growing are from colder regions — central Asia and Russia — so should better tolerate colder winters. With global warming, I may eventually try overwintering some of these plants outdoors. These varieties also ripen their fruits in shorter seasons. My plants — with exotic names like Kazake, Salavatski, and Sverkhranniy — have yet to flower and fruit. I’m looking forward to harvesting a selection of pink, red, sweet-tart, and sweet pomegranates in the next couple of years.

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A few more years of greenhouse gardening and I may get the hang of it. Up to a few weeks ago, I was so proud of all those beautiful lettuce seedlings I had transplanted into the greenhouse in September, as they swelled up into beautiful buttery and crunchy heads. Now, though, a number of them have telescoped out their once-compact heads in preparation for flowering and going to seed.

 

Lettuce typically switches to this flowering mode when days are 12 hours, or more, long. Around here, daylight hours through most of September are a bit more than 12 hours long. Still, I couldn’t wait too long to plant because, planted after September, lettuce grows ver-r-r-r-r-y slowly.

 

And daylength isn’t the only player here; temperature also plays a role, with hotter temperatures coaxing forth those flower stalks, especially when coupled with long days. On sunny days in early autumn, temperatures in the greenhouse did soar to 90°.

 

There is consolation. When lettuce starts to flower outside during hot, long days of summer, the leaves take on a slightly bluish cast and turn tougher and bitter. Leaves of my bolting greenhouse lettuces are still deep green, succulent, and flavorful.

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Another disappointment, one without a saving grace, are the black walnuts. Back in September, we harvested as usual. Deb took off the husks, I laid the de-husked nuts out to dry, and then packed them away in baskets for a few months of curing. So far, just about all the nutmeats I’ve cracked out are thoroughly dried out or rotten, black, and inedible.

 

Why? Perhaps it was the summer’s drought. Perhaps the newly husked nuts stayed too wet before being packed away. Perhaps something’s amiss with our old tree. I’ll check some walnuts a friend harvested from a different tree to see if the problem is widespread. Perhaps the late frost affected early nut development. Next September, I’ll check a few nuts when we harvest them.

 

As consolation, I turn to the words of Charles Dudley Warner (My Summer in a Garden, 1871), “The principle value of the garden . . . is to teach . . . patience and philosophy, and the higher virtue – hope deferred, and expectations blighted, leading directly to resignation, and sometimes to alienation. The garden thus becomes a moral agent, a test of character, as it was in the beginning.”

 

[cool bot]

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Man can’t live on greens alone. But I still have no need to go to a store to round out my vegetable fare. Much of what grew in last season’s garden is in storage, on tap for when I need it. Besides the usual frozen green beans, corn, okra, and edamame, steamed, cooled with a fan, then packed into freezer bags, and the usual canned tomatoes, a lot of vegetables are in cool storage.

That cool storage could have been my refrigerator, except that no refrigerator is spacious enough for a winter’s worth of turnips, winter radishes, beets, and leeks, and a few heads of cabbage. A couple of years ago I built a walk-in cooler. Saving money and energy, I cool this cooler with CoolBot (www.storeitcold.com), a nifty device that tricks a window type air conditioner in believing it has not reached its pre-set minimum temperature of 60°F. I set the indicator on my CoolBot to 40°F., and there it stays. I also have some boxes of apples and pears in there, as well as, up to a couple of weeks ago, pawpaws.

As temperatures continue to drop outdoors, the CoolBot will no longer be needed. Then I’ll move all the boxes to my unheated mudroom. As temperatures drop even more, the boxes will go down into my basement, the temperature of which should by then have dropped into the 40s.

It’s amazing, if you sleuth around your house with a thermometer, especially a house built more than 50 years ago, how many different temperature zones you find. Below 40°F but above freezing is ideal for most fruits and vegetables, except for tropical fruits, sweet potatoes, and winter squashes, which like slightly warmer temperatures.