Ducks

[ducks and plums, bug baffler, rethinking doyenne de juillet]

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My ducks are as useful as they are humorous. I’ve always appreciated their fast-paced, duck walk patrol of the grounds for various insects on which to feast. But this year I’ve had a bumper crop of plums, and the ducks are being a big help with them also.

 
The thing about plums is that a lot of them drop to the ground. Some of them – not too many, I hope — drop because they ripened before I got to them. Some drop because they have an insect developing in them, such as larvae of the dreaded plum curculio. And some drop because some disease has taken hold. With all the rain this year, quite a few are gray and fuzzy with brown rot disease.

I merely bemoan the loss of plums that drop before I get to them; my loss is the duck’s gain. Fruits that dropped because of some insect or disease, however, could provide the beginnings of next year’s insect or disease problems. Plum curculio larvae exit dropped fruits, burrow into the soil, and emerge a month later as adults ready for some more feeding until they find some place to hibernate for winter. So you can imagine how glad I am to see the ducks gobbling up whatever they can get at beneath the plum tree.

Brown rot infected plum fruits shrivel up to become brown “mummies.” On the ground or stuck on the tree, these mummies provide spores for infections next spring. Again, thank you ducks for cleaning up fallen, infected plums.

The ducks make a beeline for the plum tree as soon as they’re let out each morning, their heads and necks racing so far forward that the birds look like they’re about to lose their balance. Go at it ducks. Enjoy and entertain.

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What a joy it is to be out in the garden in the early morning. Humanity is quiet, the birds are singing, air is cool, and a mist softens the brightness of rising sun.

Then come the insects, which are especially bothersome this year because of incessant rain. After the 15 minutes or so it takes them to pick up my scents, the bugs are swarming all around my head. They can definitely take the fun out of early morning play.

No problem. I could just douse my skin with either 2-(2-hydroxyethyl)-1-piperidinecarboxylic acid 1-methylpropyl ester) or para-Menthane-3,8-diol. Despite their horrendous sounding names, both these chemicals are quite safe to use, much safer that the commonly used DEET, whose real name, N,N-diethyl-m-toluamide or N,N-diethly-3-methyl-benzamide, is equally horrendous. Those two products I mention are not, of course, sold under those names, but as Picaridin (in, for example, ‘Natrapel’ and ‘Cutter Advanced Insect Repellent’) and Oil of Lemon Eucalyptus (in, for example, ‘Repel Lemon Eucalyptus Insect Repellent Lotion’). Both these products compare favorably with DEET in effectiveness and longevity.

Still, I’d rather not goop anything onto my skin, unless necessary, in the freshness of the morning air. So what I more frequently turn to, and also highly recommend, is Bug Baffler, a mesh suit you just slide on quickly over clothes. A cap keeps the soft mesh away from my face.

Bug Baffler does have two drawbacks. One is that when the mesh is used to cover your face, it slightly obscures vision, especially if bright sun is shining directly on it from the front. And second, Bug Baffler makes me look ridiculous.

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I’m beginning to rethink the value of my Doyenné de Juillet pear tree, about which I wrote last week. The pears do not really taste good, although waiting for the first drop before harvesting any could have caught her when she was already over the hill. La Doyenné gets one more chance, next year, and then if she’s not up to snuff, off with her head, and onto the waiting stump I’ll graft a different variety.

As for the remainder of this year’s harvest, the ducks, to whom I throw a few pears every day, seem to enjoy them as much as the much more delectable – to me, at least – plums.

[hibiscus tree find, doyenne de juillet, MICROWAVE SOIL]

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Smith & Hawkens’ loss is my gain. That’s Smith & Hawkens, the upscale gardening store that sells . . . actually, I’m not exactly sure just what they do sell. They used to sell some very high quality, or at least very expensive, gardening tools, such as stainless steel digging forks and spades that were very decorative on garage walls even if never used. They also used to publish some excellent gardening books, such as Carolyn Mayle’s 100 Heirloom Tomatoes for the American Garden and Elvin McDonald’s 100 Orchids for the American Garden. And then they sold gardening clothes. And then they sold furniture for the garden. And then they sold “flaming pots” for decorating your terrace.

Which is why I ended up poking my head in at a Smith & Hawkens retail store last weekend. Smith & Hawkens is going out of business and signs proclaimed that everything was discounted by 25 to 30%. No, I didn’t return home with a fire pot for my terrace. My sole purchase was 4 packets of “Renées Garden” seeds for a total of $6.13.

The real find, though, was a tree-form hibiscus with a braided trunk, an almost leafless specimen spotted by my wife as it was being walked out to the dumpster by an S & H employee. I retrieved the plant, noted its dearth of leaves and thirsty state, and walked it to our car for the trip to its new home.

Repotting and timely watering will, I am confident, bring that hibiscus back to its former glory. As for S & H’s fate, perhaps it was the economy, perhaps they wandered too far afield.

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She really is the doyen, or most respected member, the dean, of the group. I refer to Doyenné de Juillet pear, also known as Summer Doyonné, and the group of which she is dean is, of course, July (Juillet, in French) pears. I picked over my tree just after the middle of the July and the fruit should be ready to ripen when I get it out of the refrigerator, soon.

(European-type pears, such as Summer Doyonné, ripen from the inside out, so if picked when fully ripe, they taste “sleepy” inside; they taste best if picked fully mature then allowed to finally ripen off the tree, preferably at cool temperatures. A short cold period gets ripening started.)

As described in U. P. Hedrick’s 1921 classic The Pears of New York, Doyonné de Juillet pears are “extremely early and highly flavored . . . borne in prodigious quantities . . . small . . . unattractive . . . do not keep well . . . as free as most of its orchard associates from blight.” All of which makes it a good backyard variety but an awful commercial variety. Mr. Hedrick did go on to say that the quality is variable, which is why I picked all the fruits and whisked them into the refrigerator as soon as I saw the first one on the ground.

This pear is perhaps the Doyonné de Juillet because it’s the only pear that ripens in July. Mine haven’t been particularly tasty. I still grow it, in part, for its history: It represents the handiwork of Belgian plantsman Jean-Baptiste Van Mons, who lived 200 years ago and was the most prolific pear breeder known. Van Mons was responsible for the now familiar pear varieties Bosc and d’Anjou. Doyonné de Juillet originated around 1800.

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[jap beetles, rains and weeds, paper and chips]

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Friends have made sightings and I’m braced for an onslaught. I even saw a couple of Japanese beetles myself a few days ago but now they seem to have gone underground. (Figuratively, that is. They won’t be laying eggs in the soil and living underground as grubs for at least a month.) I’m sure I’ll be seeing the metallic green beetles again soon.

I’m at a loss for what to do. Spraying pesticides is out of the question. I have too many plants, too many of which are edible. Poisons on edibles sort of takes the enjoyment out of eating them. I guess if I had one or two prized plants struggling along under attack from Japanese beetles, I might resort to sprays. Then again, I could just wrap them in some fine mesh material such as Remay.

I’m not planning to put out the beetle traps I positioned around my yard for the past few years. Up until a few years ago, beetles were never a problem and when they became just a little problem, the traps captured what few beetles ventured here. But last year, the traps’ bags were bulging with masses of fidgeting beetles every day during beetle season. The traps probably attracted more beetles than would have made their way here in the absence of the alluring scent of the traps.

I am taking some action on some of the beetle’s favorite plants: grapes, hardy kiwifruit, and filberts. That action is a spray of kaolin clay, sold as the commercial insect repellent called Surround. Research suggests some effectiveness, hopefully enough for me to make it to the end of beetle season without doing anything else except tolerating some lacy leaves.

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Each year’s garden has its themes, and this year – I hate to admit it – the theme is weeds. (I hate to admit it because I wrote a book entitled Weedless Gardening.)

Rain is the reason for all this weed growth. It’s like a rain forest here. Turn your back on the garden for a few minutes, or stand in place for a while, and the garden or you get are likely to be swallowed in vegetation.

In seasons past, especially dry seasons, drip irrigation would pinpoint water to quench the thirst of all my vegetable without coaxing weed growth where vegetables were not, such as paths. Mulch would seal moisture into the ground for my other plants, which I would coddle with supplemental water only their first season.

I’m not complaining, though, because all my vegetables and flowers and shrubs are also growing well. I finally have returned me garden to sufficient weedlessness. It just took more weeding and mulching to get it to that stage.

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One savior in this war with weeds has been a building product variously known as red rosin paper or standard dry sheathing, perhaps other names also. It’s a thick, absorbent paper that comes in long rolls and is often used as underlayment for floors.

Not here, though. I’m using the paper as an underlayment for mulch. I’ve used newspaper the same way except this year I had 30 foot long paths to cover. Those paths have had year after year of wood chip mulch but the covering was getting thin and, with all the rain, too many weeds were beginning to appear.

So all I did was roll out the paper, then top it with just enough wood chips to hide the paper. Water can get through the chips and the paper but the combination smothers weeds for lack of light. Paper is an organic material so will eventually decompose. As long as the soil is not disturbed, which awakens seeds buried within, few weeds should appear especially as I replenish the chips every year or two. And if things get bad again, I’ll just re-paper the paths.

[berries, strawberries, aps]

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For me, berries are the essence of summer. So summer has officially begun: Just before the end of June I began eating blueberries and blackcurrants, and now there are plenty.

Blueberries are familiar, blackcurrants are not, but deserve to be better known. With a strong, distinctive flavor and not a whole lot of sweetness, blackcurrants are a fruit that only some of us enjoy fresh. Apply a little heat and some sweetener, perhaps a pastry shell (or not), or just squeeze the berries to make juice, sweetened or mixed with other juices, and you have a fruit that just about everyone enjoys. I’m much more adept at growing fruits than cooking fruits, but I’ll bet blackcurrants would be heavenly paired in various ways with dark chocolate.

Blackcurrants are very easy to grow. They fruit well even in shade and pretty much the only care they need is relatively straightforward annual pruning. Deer are not particularly fond of the bushes and birds are not fond of the fruits.

Lest anyone thinks I’m talking about those dried fruits sold as “dried currants,” those are totally different creatures. They are dried “Black Corinthe” grapes whose name has been bastardized to “black currant.”

Ever since I started growing berries, blackcurrants have been among my favorites. These berries are generally unknown in this country because they can host a disease of white pines, a valuable timber crop, so were banned until recently, when disease-resistant varieties where developed. Consort is one such variety, which I liked fine, but a few years ago I got my hands on some Russian varieties, which are disease resistant and have much finer flavor. Eating fruits of the varieties Kirovchanka, Belaruskaja, and Minaj Shmyrev moved blackcurrant up the scale to my favorite fruits, along with blueberries.

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“What about strawberries?” you might ask. They’ve been ripe for weeks now. They’re berries also.

I like strawberries but they are not among my favorite fruits. I don’t like crawling on the ground to harvest fruits, and, although strawberries are technically perennial plants, a bed starts to decline after 5 years or so due to encroachment of weeds and diseases. Even before that 5-year mark, a bed needs annual renovation if it’s going to remain healthy and productive.

Take a look at my strawberry bed today and you’d think that I didn’t like the fruits at all. I renovated the bed, something that looks brutal and is needed every year soon after the harvest is over. Step one is to go through the bed and thin out the plants so that each has almost a square foot of space all to itself, with preference given to younger plants. Two rows of plants run the length of each 3-foot-wide bed. While thinning plants is also an opportune time for thorough weeding and pulling off runners.

Next, I used grass shears to shear all leaves from all the plants, then gathered up all the cut leaves to cart off to the compost pile. This step lessens disease buildup.

And finally, the bed got blanketed with an inch-thick icing of compost or, alternatively, some organic mulch such as straw, pine needles, or wood shavings along with a bit of fertilizer. This mulch feeds the soil, enriches it with humus, conserves soil moisture (not needed this year! – yet), and keeps roots cool.

There are other ways to manage a strawberry bed but the system described, called the “hill system,” works well in intensive, closely managed gardens. No matter what growing system is used, though, any strawberry bed needs weeding, thinning, periodic rejuvenation, and eventual replanting.

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We can’t forget about vegetables in our (very) local harvest backyard harvesting. Looking ahead to autumn, I sowed seeds of endive and radicchio along with more broccoli and cabbage, recently sown seedlings of which got flattened during a recent deluge. I also sowed my biweekly pinch of lettuce seeds to keep us in big salads right through summer.

Once up, all these seedlings can grow in self-watering APS seed flats (from Gardener’s Supply Company) for about a month before being planted out in the garden. Then there will be space available from which peas and early beans and corn have been harvested and cleared away. Later, harvested onions will free up more space.

Looking ahead to two springs hence, small spears are now appearing in the flat in which I sowed asparagus seed a couple of weeks ago. They’re so cute; they look like miniature asparagii.

[bean beetles, seed sowing for fall]

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A reader wrote asking if I had any suggestions for thwarting Mexican bean beetle, a voracious pest of beans that resembles a ladybug except for being larger and yellow, rather than red, with black spots? The reader “tried ignoring them” (doesn’t work well) and then resorted to a spray made from pipe tobacco “tea” with a few drops of dish detergent added. She wrote that it “may have helped a little, but the bean plants eventually succumbed. It did smell good though.”

First off, nix on tobacco tea sprays. Tobacco tea sprays, like their commercially available pesticide counterpart, sold under the name Black Leaf 40, are highly toxic.

I deal with bean beetles by growing successive crops of bush beans. The beetles don’t cause much damage until after a couple of weeks of harvesting beans, at which point I just move on to harvesting from another bed that I had planted a few weeks after the first bed. I usually do three plantings a season, each sown as far from each other as possible and about a month apart. I thoroughly clean up infested beds once I start harvesting from a younger bed, packing the old plants into the compost pile and then piling on a layer of some other material, such as straw or manure, to get the bean leaves, stems, and old pods composting as fast as possible.

Because of the beetles, I no longer grow pole beans, which would stay in place to bear — and feed bean beetles — all season long. I don’t grow the usual pole beans, that is. I grow Scarlet Runner beans, which are a different species that is unappealing to the little buggers, and which bear beautiful, scarlet blossoms. The edible pods are fat, hairy, and ugly — but delicious.

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I’m now in a flurry of seed planting. And no, it’s not because I forgot to plant everything beginning about two months ago.

Some of the seeds I’m now planting are for the fall vegetable garden. That would be Scotch kale, Fiesta broccoli, early Jersey Wakefield cabbage, beets, and Swiss chard. Other fall vegetables also need to be sown, but not yet.

I’m also sowing asparagus seeds for asparagus harvest the year after next and then for decades to come. Most people plant asparagus roots but the plants are very easy from seed, requiring mostly patience for the seed to sprout and then for first harvest. Growing from seed rather than from purchased roots adds a year until first harvest. If you decide this time of year to plant more asparagus, you anyway have to wait until next spring to get roots for planting, then another year until the first harvest, so it all comes out the same.

Last night’s soaking of asparagus seed in a small cup of water will speed their germination and today I’ll sow the seeds in a flat of potting soil, where the seedlings will grow through summer. Next spring, it’s out into the garden with them.

Some of the seeds I’m sowing this week are for perennial flowers for next year and beyond. Sown now, perennial flowers probably won’t flower this year but they’ll be poised and ready to flower beginning next year. Perennials are available in much greater variety in seed than plants, especially if the seed search includes mail order companies. And for the mere cost of the packet of seeds, I can grow more plants of any perennial than I could possibly find a place to plant.

I already count 56 seedlings, sprouting and ready to “prick out” into individual cells, in the flat of butterfly weed seeds I planted on June 1st.

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[mockorange, watering can, poppies]

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Up until last week, every time I looked at my mockorange, I wondered why I would have planted such a bush so prominently right next to the greenhouse door. The bush looked like nothing more than a blob of greenery, a not especially graceful blob of greenery.

This week I did an about-face on my mockorange; I’m enthralled with it as it sits there draped in large, lily-white, semi-double flowers. And if those flowers weren’t enough just to look at, they fill the air with a most delicious, fresh scent that is vaguely reminiscent of orange blossoms.

Mine is not just any old mockorange. It’s a named variety, perhaps Flora Plena. Blossoms on run-of-the-mill mock oranges open earlier and are smaller and have single rows of petals.

It’s sad, but I know I won’t be looking fondly upon my mockorange again in another week or so. Until next year.

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You’d think it was a simple enough question from my brother: “I want to get a good watering can. What would you recommend that’s reasonable?”

Let me begin by stating that I own, not one but two (one for each hand), of what I consider to be the Cadillac (Prius?) of watering cans: The Haw’s Classic Long Reach Galvanized watering can. Each has a nice balance, holds a reasonable amount of water, and has a rose – the thing that breaks the stream of water into many, gentler streams – from which water falls like a gentle rain, but not too slowly.

Yet I wouldn’t recommend this watering can to my brother. I paid

about $60 twenty or so years ago, but now they cost more than twice that! You can get a similar plastic watering can for about $20. I had one. It only lasted a couple of seasons. So what would I recommend? First and foremost: No plastic. Plastic watering cans don’t last.

No sooner had I started asking whether the can was for houseplants or outdoor plants than my brother rolled his eyes and suggested that perhaps he should have started with a simpler question, like what kind of pencil I’d recommend for keeping garden notes. Ha, ha. But if a watering can is for watering just houseplants, you don’t want it to have a rose. For general watering, indoors and out, a watering can should have a removable rose. (My Haw’s does.)

Okay, I’ll make it simple. For general, outdoor use, I suggest a can that holds about 2 gallons of water, is made of heavy metal (hot-dipped galvanized ones usually are), and, unless decoration is also to be one of its functions, is not in the cutesy shape of a snail, elephant, pig, or other animal.

A good hardware store might have what’s needed, as well as web retailers, for 20 or 30 dollars. Haws does makes “SlimCan Galvanized Watering Can” that sells for about $70. It that might work a tad better than the others.

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I may have gone overboard with poppies this year. But can any garden have too many poppies?

The overboarded poppies to which I refer may seem, at first glance, to be the usual Oriental poppies (Papaver orientalis). But no, these poppies are corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas). Both poppy species have petals that are as delicate as fairy shawls and usually vivid red, but the red of corn poppies is more pure. And rather than unfolding on the ends of sprawling, clunky stems like Oriental poppies, corn poppy flowers perch high on the ends of delicate, upright, 3-foot-high stalks. A most significant difference between the two species is that corn poppies are annuals, while Oriental poppies are perennials.

Like most poppies, corn poppies transplant poorly so are best sown where they are to grow. The seeds are almost as fine as dust so there’s a natural tendency to doubt that they could amount to anything, especially just sprinkled on bare ground. With such doubts in mind, in early April I sprinkled two packets of the fine seed over a bed soon that I knew would be dense with various fritillaria and allium species, as well as licorice mint (Agastache), snow-in-summer, soapwort (Saponaria), and espaliered Asian pears.

I should have had faith. After all, corn poppy is called corn poppy because it once dotted (i.e. was a weed in) Europe’s corn fields, “corn” meaning any “grain” in the Queen’s English. My corn poppies sprouted with vigor, as did some seeds from last year’s corn poppies, so that now parts of that bed are happy riots of scarlet blossoms.

I had also sprinkled on that bed seeds another annual poppy, California poppy, a low-growing plant with ferny leaves and buttery yellow flowers. There’s no sign of these poppies, which were evidently overrun by the corn poppies.

[broccoli, interplanting]

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Looks like I’ve already failed with broccoli this spring. And this was the year that I was going to grow it really well so that, parting ways with broccoli-hating, ex-president Bush (the better Bush), I might actually enjoy eating this vegetable.
The plants are making buds already, too soon and too small, not surprising considering that the plants are only about 8 inches high. This runting out occurred in spite of my starting seeds on time, transplanting the seedlings into extra large containers, and moving the seedlings out into the garden at the end of April into ground made richer with extra nitrogen.
I know what the probable problem is: dry weather. I watered the plants religiously after transplanting, but soon tapered off. Neglect perhaps resulted from the broccoli’s being planted in a part of the garden furthest from my back door. Perhaps neglect was inevitable: Broccoli, after all, is not (yet) a vegetable I like to eat. Perhaps that’s why it ended up planted so far away.
I haven’t given up mastering the art of broccoli growing and possibly enjoying this vegetable. Broccoli, kale, cabbage and their kin all taste best in the cool weather of autumn, and the time to sow broccoli seeds for autumn harvest is very soon. I’m poised and ready for another try.
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All is not lost in that bed with broccoli. Few vegetables get beds all to themselves, and that broccoli had to share space.
So it was broccoli up the center of the bed at 18 inch spacings flanked on either side by two rows of lettuce. The near lettuce rows were only about 6” out from the broccoli row, which was plenty of space because the lettuces were transplants and the broccolis could rise up in the offset 1 foot of space between lettuces. The next row out of lettuce transplants was only about 6 inches out from the inner row, but staggered again so these offset lettuces could fill some of the space between lettuces in the inner row.
Not to leave well enough alone, I decided to also squeeze some popcorn into that bed. In early May, I dropped 6 seeds of Pink Pearl popcorn every 2 feet into the shrinking open spaces between the lettuces on either side of the bed about a foot in from the bed’s edges. By the time Pink Pearl poked up through the ground, the sprouts were being shaded by lettuce leaves that were almost touching between adjacent plants. Tonight’s salad, as well as those for the last few and coming nights, cures the shading as I selectively harvest lettuce leaves to allow the corn sprouts to bask in light and soon rise up above everything else.
 
The plan was for lettuce to be harvested first, then the broccoli, then give over the bed to popcorn. Not bad for a 3 foot wide bed, even if the broccoli was a failure.
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