Gardening

I may have committed sacrilege with the “stinking rose” last week: I planted it. The stinking rose is another name for garlic, and the recommended time for planting is around the time of autumn’s first frost, which hasn’t yet happened and isn’t in the immediate offing. In fact, to my way of thinking, I got my garlic in a little too late this year, only because I couldn’t decide where to plant it.

Once a garlic clove is planted, it starts to grow roots and usually pushes a few leaves up out of the soil. Come winter, those leaves might die back; then again, with snow cover, they might not. Other gardeners fear that dieback of leaves in winter will hurt the plants but I’ve never noticed any such bad effect. A little mulch over the plants in early winter should allay any such fears.

The more leaf growth you get from garlic before long summer days initiate bulbing, the bigger the resulting bulbs. And the more root growth that garlic makes, the more nutrients can be taken up to fuel more leaf growth. That’s why I plant garlic as early as possible, often in August. I want my plants to get started making roots as soon as possible.

Come spring, roots are in place and ready to nourish new leaves. The earlier I plant the year before, the more roots the cloves have in spring and the bigger the bulbs I harvest in summer.

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Speaking of hardy bulbs possibly brings me to amaryllis, that gaudy, humongous flower more correctly called by its true botanical name, Hippeastrum, and so popular around Christmas-time. About now is when we are directed to let our potted amaryllises (I might as well use the common name) dry out and experience some cool temperatures for a few weeks. Kept thi way for a few weeks, the bulbs can be awakened in a couple of months with warmth and water to bloom again for Christmas.

Amaryllis Myth Number One is that the leaves dry out once watering ceases. The leaves never dry down, despite the assertion of so many “authorities.” I’ve let my amaryllises go without water for weeks; the leaves become flacid but remain as green as ever.

I learned what seems to be Amaryllis Myth Number Two when another gardener recently showed me his lush-growing amaryllises growing as perennials amongst other greenery blanketing a slope. Amaryllis is not supposed to be hardy outdoors where winter temperatures drop lower than zero or 10 degrees F. These were (and true Amaryllises, as opposed to Hippeastrum, definitely are). Ground cover, whether snow, mulch, or other vegetation, as well as microclimate can have great influence on how cold temperatures plummet to just a few inches below the ground.

I’m not a big fan large-flowered amaryllis so am more than willing to risk planting mine outdoors. I have a bed along the sunny, south wall of my house which has become a dumping ground for miscellaneous plants. Perhaps I’ll plant it there. Perhaps I’ll plant it in my blueberry bed in which also allegedly non-hardy gladiolus bulbs have been coming back year after year for over two decades. Either way, I won’t be seeing those gaudy, large amaryllis blooms at Christmas-time; if they survive, they’ll bloom in spring.

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I had pretty much given up on fresh blueberries for the season — after all, it’s past the middle of September. And especially this year, since everything began early, with the first blueberries ripening about the middle of June. Yet Deb came strutting into the kitchen this morning, especially proud of the overflowing bowl of blueberries and raspberries she was carrying.

The blueberries were of the variety Elliot, and they were delicious. The secret to nonstop blueberries all summer long is to plant a few varieties ripening at different intervals throughout the season.

I’ve sometimes asserted that anyone with some sunny ground who does not plant blueberries is a fool; I’d like now to extend that assertion also to raspberries. Like blueberries, the raspberries you can grow taste better than any you can buy because they can be picked truly ripe and can be of varieties selected for flavor rather than for commercial attributes. My favorite varieties are Caroline, Fallgold, and Cuthbert. Another plus for backyard raspberries and blueberries is that they needn’t be doused with the pesticide sprays to which most commercial raspberries and blueberries are exposed.

One more reason to grow raspberries and blueberries: They’re easy. Mine get mulched in autumn and pruned in spring. To fend off birds, I also cover my blueberry planting with a net, which I’ll remove within a couple of weeks, by which time I expect the blueberries really will be finished for the season.

And the winner is . . . Cherokee Purple. At my recent tomato growing workshop, we also did a tomato tasting. I cut tomatoes, passed out slices, and everyone rated each variety on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being best. The rating was strictly for flavor, to me the most important quality in a home-grown tomato. I try to grow only the best-tasting varieties each year; we tasted some of these varieties as well as a few others I got from Four Winds Farm in Gardiner, NY, a farm that specializes in heirloom varieties.

Here are the ratings, representing a rough average of workshop attendees’ opinions with, I admit, a heavier weighting from me, because I plan to use the ratings to determine which varieties to grow and not to grow next year. Soldacki and Yellow Brandywine: 3; Carmello: 5; Goldie Yellow and Krim: 6; Blue Beech and Belgian Giant: 7: Black Brandywine, Prudens Purple, Rose de Berne, and Black Cherry: 8; and Anna Russian and Cherokee Purple: 9.

Next year, I am only planting 7s or better. Why 7s and 8s, and not only 9s? Because I know that Blue Beech (7) makes a very good sauce and the Belgian Giant (7) we tasted was perhaps not quite up to its usual snuff. As for the 8s, they might not be quite as good as the 9s but they are nonetheless excellent varieties. I’ll also grow Sun Gold cherry tomato, which is so good as to not even require testing, and San Marzano, which I know tastes awful fresh but is heavenly cooked. I’ve grown Amish Paste for years but, for some reason, forgot to include it in this survey. No matter, it’s a flavorful tomato both fresh and cooked.

This informal survey does, of course, reflect opinions. Interestingly, the testers were divided into those who enjoy sweet tomatoes and those who enjoy tomatoes with more of a bite. I’m mostly in the latter group.

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It’s becoming a fruitful time of year in the garden, literally. The second crop of Caroline “everbearing” raspberries started to ripen around the middle of this month. (So-called everbearing raspberries, in fact, bear two crops each ear, the first one on 2-year-old canes in midsummer and the second crop at the ends of new, growing canes in late summer and on into fall.) In the greenhouse, figs also have begun to ripen. This crop is the first and only one for Brown Turkey and Kadota figs, and the second, or main crop, for Green Ischia. Fig ripening will continue through September.

Everything got off to an early start this year, and ripening has been hastened by abundant heat and sunlight, so other fruits are ripening earlier than usual. Grapes, including Swenson’s Red, Alden, Briana, Campbell’s Early (of course), and possibly mislabeled Lorelei and Reliance, have begun ripening. We have even been eating our ripe first apples of the season, the variety Ellison’s Orange, which originated in England about 1890. The flesh is a bit mushy unless picked just before full ripeness but has a very pleasant, yet not overpowering, flavor of anise in amongst its sweet-tartness.

We also had our first good pear of the season, the variety Harrow Delight, which it is. (Harrow is an agricultural research station in Canada.) The flavor is very similar to Bartlett, which ripens 2 weeks after Harrow Delight. In previous years, we have had pears in July, from Doyenne du Juillet, but those pears were tiny and mostly of interest for ripening in July.

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(This) man cannot live by bread alone, so I was pleasantly surprised when mowing the lawn, something I haven’t had to do for weeks, to come upon some spotted knapweed (Centaurea maculosa). It was as if someone had dropped a large patch of fresh-looking, pale, pinkish purple blossoms with feathery petals right on top of the browned grass. Okay, it’s a weed, described as an “aggressive,

introduced weed species that rapidly invades pasture, rangeland and fallow land and causes a serious decline in forage and crop production.” But that description was from North Dakota and I’m not interested in forage and crop production from my lawn.

Nobody has anything bad to say about New York Ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis), which is not invasive here in New York or anywhere else. It’s a tall weed branching into many stems, each capped with pretty tufts of deep purple flowers. The plant is growing in a wet area home to another another purple flower, purple loosestrife, which is invasive. I’m proud to have New York ironweed growing here because although widespread, it’s not common, typically showing up in patches here and there across its native range throughout eastern U.S.

Almost everyone, upon taking their first step out my back door, glances upward and says, “What are those bags for?” They’re looking at my grape arbor from which dangle bunches of grapes as well as white paper bags. To me, the purpose of the bags is obvious: to enclose some of the bunches. Perhaps the fact that not all the grapes are bagged is confusing. Perhaps people are thrown off by the inscription “Fresh Delicious Wholesome Baked Goods” printed ini bold letters on the bags, which I bought in bulk from a bakery supplier.

Grapes are a luscious treat not only to us humans, but also to birds, bees, and some furry creatures. And disease organisms, such as black rot and powdery mildew, enjoy “eating” the berries as well as the leaves. The bags keep birds and furry creatures from eating the grapes or, at least, makes these creatures first figure out what is inside the bags and then work to get at the fruit. (I don’t think the bakery inscription throws them off.) The bags also keep the bunches dry and less susceptible to diseases that need moisture to flourish.

Bagging grapes fends off all these threats to let grape bunches be harvested when they are thoroughly ripe. And I mean thoroughly ripe, which is usually after the recommended harvest date for a particular variety. What a treat to tear open a bag to reveal a perfect bunch of grapes, dusted with their natural bloom, very sweet, and very rich in flavor! In autumn’s cool weather, ripe grapes hang in prime condition, bagged, for weeks.

Bag a bunch of grape by first making slits a couple of inches down each side of the open end of a paper bag. After snapping off the leaf or tendril opposite where a bunch attaches to the vine, a bag can be slipped up over a bunch and then its top folded back down over the stem and itself to seal out water and insects. Two staples, one on either side of the bag, hold it in place.

So why are aren’t all my grape bunches bagged? Because bagging all the bunches on the dozen different grape vines here would be too tedious a job. And anyway, not every unprotected bunch gets pilfered or diseased so we just eat the unbagged ones first.

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Squirrels seem to have receded back into the woods, and not because I played bagpipe music at them (which, I reported previously, was found to scare or otherwise keep rats away from tourists in Vienna’s historic sewers).

I still may resort to bagpipe music. For now, I have live traps ready, baited with peanuts and wired open for a few days so that any errant squirrels feel more at home wandering into them for a meal.

A few weeks ago, squirrels cleared green fruit from my one old apple tree, which was the one apple tree that did not get sprayed with Surround, a commercial clay product for organic insect control. Perhaps squirrels left my other trees alone because they don’t like the taste or feel of the clay. Just in case, today I gave all the trees still laden with apples another spray of Surround.

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Today, July 20th, we ate our first ripe fig, a Green Ischia, picked from the greenhouse and almost the size of a tennis ball. Halving the fruit reveals a glistening deep red, juicy, sweet flesh.

This first fig is of the so-called breba crop, the crop that ripens on stems that grew last summer. My Green Ischia breba crop is always light because I had to cut back many of the stems late last fall, as I do every year, to keep the plants from overgrowing the greenhouse.

The main crop should start ripening in about a month, and fresh figs will continue ripening well into fall. Main crop figs form and ripen on new stems, a bearing habit that makes it easy to keep a fig tree from growing too large and makes it possible to harvest fruit well north of fig’s subtropical origins. All that’s needed is a season long enough and hot enough for new stems to grow, develop, and ripen fruit. The more drastically a plant is cut back (or freezes back), the longer the season needed to ripen fruit.

My other two varieties — Brown Turkey and Kadota — bear only main crop fruits. Their large crops of fruits, nearing ripeness soon, are different from each other and from Green Ischia, but are equally delicious.

Summertime and the livin’ is easy, fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high . . . I don’t know about the fish in this hot weather, but, yes, the cotton is getting high. High for New York’s Hudson Valley, that is. My cotton is now about 10 inches high.

The yellowing, old pages of my Farmer’s Encyclopedia of Agriculture, published in 1914, states that cotton “is successfully cultivated in the United States as far north as Southern Virginia.” I’m banking on today’s hotter and longer summers for a cotton harvest this far north. Not that I’ve invested much in my crop; only 4 plants, started from seed sown in April and each now in its own 2 gallon pot.

Any cotton would be special grown around here but I’m growing the especially special variety ‘Earlene’s Green Cotton’ (from www.reimerseeds.com). With a 150 day maturity, the bolls — naturally olive-green! — should be ready for picking sometime in September. Neither the boll weevil, made famous in song and sculpture, nor any other major cotton pest should be a problem around here, so count my production in with the more than quarter of a million bales of organic cotton now being grown worldwide.

If yields are sufficient, I’ll perhaps try to process the harvest into a small handkerchief. At the very least, I’ll enjoy the pretty flowers, which look similar to okra and hibiscus, two of its relatives. And I’ll be carrying on an agricultural tradition that stretches back thousand of years with the growing of various species of cotton in Central and South America, Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and India and Pakistan.

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The thermometer reads over a hundred degrees F. The forecast is for days of almost the same. It’s hard to believe the weather will ever cool off. But it will, and I’m planning on it. So much of gardening is not living in the moment!

The peas finally petered out. They’ve been cleared away and their bed sprinkled with soybean meal, mostly for nitrogen, and topped with an inch of fresh compost, for other nutrients and all sorts of other good things. In the relative cool of morning, tomorrow, I’ll plug into the ground broccoli transplants that I started from seed about a month ago. The plants should grow large through summer and then explode into giant, tight buds ready for harvest during cool weather that brings out the best flavor in this vegetable.

Planting also continues in other beds. I pulled up all the turnips, which, for the first time this year, I planted in spring. Turnip is another vegetable that thrives in cool weather but I figured it would be nice to have some in early summer also. We had plenty. They tasted awful. They are in the compost pile. Carrots, from seed, or kale, from transplants, will make better use of that space. I’ll put off planting turnips until the middle of August, which experience tells yield delectable roots in October.

Without any basis at all, I’m banking on warm weather now boding for warm weather into September. One more planting of bush beans, from seed, and cucumbers, from transplants sown early this month, will capitalize on that late summer warmth.

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Every garden year has its themes. Last year’s themes were late blight of tomatoes and rain, which — with cool weather, which we had — go hand in hand. This year’s themes are shaping up to be heat, drought, and squirrels.

There’s nothing to be done about the heat and drought except garden early morning and late afternoon, and water as needed.

As for the squirrels: Don’t they know they’re supposed to eat acorns and other nuts? They enjoyed many of my peas and almost all my gooseberries and cleared one old apple tree of green apples. Now they are working on the raspberries and eyeing the blueberries. Other gardeners have been similarly lamenting their losses to squirrels. In desperation, I may investigate a remedy that goes beyond the usual and obvious remedies of dogs, cats, traps, artillary, and chickenwire enclosures.

Rats, according to recent news reports, were keeping tourists from exploring the historic sewers of Vienna until someone came up with the idea of having bagpipe players accompany tour groups. The bagpipes, the sound of which keeps away the rats, might do the same for our “tree rats.” I am no fan of bagpipes but, as I said, I’m desperate.