Planning – Page 10

I WAS WRONG

September 9, 2015/0 Comments/in Design, Flowers, Fruit, Gardening, Planning, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Hog Peanuts, Groundnuts, Whatever

I was wrong. A few weeks ago I wrongly dissed groundnut (Apios americana) for invading my flower garden. Yes, I planted it; that was 30 years ago, and it’s resisted my attempts at eradication for the past 28 years.
The worse culprit, this year at least, is related to groundnut. Like groundnut, it’s a legume, it’s native, it’s edible, and it’s a vining plant with compound leaves. But each leaf of hog peanut (Amphicarpaea bracteata), has 3 egg-shaped leaflets, as compared with groundnut’s 5 lance-shaped leaflets.

Hog peanut leaves

Hog peanuts produce flowers both above ground and below ground. Below ground is where the goodies are. Pods that form there enclose peanut-sized seeds that allegedly are tasty raw or cooked. I’ll see if I can dig some up in a few weeks. Like groundnuts, hog peanuts provided food for Native Americans; the plants were among the four sacred plants of the Osage.
So what can be bad about a plant that tolerates some shade, adds nitrogen to the soil, and yields an allegedly tasty seed below ground? The problem is that it’s run wild over the flower bed, the fine stems and leaves attempting to smother, sometimes successfully, every plant in its path. Even non-native, invasive Japanese stilt grass and garlic mustard can’t hold their own against hog peanuts.

Permaculture Reality

Low maintenance, protection and enrichment of soil, and edible parts recommend hog peanut and groundnut to permies (permaculturalists). As with so much in permaculture, these plants perform better in theory than in practice.

Hog peanut & groundnut strangling crocosmia

In humid climates, plant growth — and not just groundnut and hog peanut — can run rampant. Growth needs to be controlled and balanced, a job made more difficult in a permaculture “guild” of groups of plants working together. I’m all for interplanting different species to make best use of light, water, and soil resources, and form communities that resist pests — to a point.
   I’ve had the opportunity, over the years, to visit the permaculture garden planted by students at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Now in its 5th year, the garden pays tribute to the compost, mulch, and sweat students put into soil preparation. The plants have grown very well. Too well, perhaps. One could say that the plants have commingled nicely; from another perspective, one could say that they are overunning each other. A blackcurrant bush or bushes has swelled into a mass of unapproachable stems 10 feet deep and wide. Chives and oregano have each taken over their areas. (How much chives or oregano can you eat? I’d rather eat tomatoes.)
   Not that I’m immune to such errors. A few years ago I created a very permaculturesque planting that included elderberries, seaberries, and rugose roses almost elbow to elbow. It all looks very nice but these three shrubs all spread by suckers. I keep everything in check with elbow grease and a scythe . . . for now, but Mother Nature is relentless. Am I?
   The most productive and accessible parts of the UMass garden are the beds of kale, beets, and other vegetables — straight rows in cultivated soil. How un-permaculturalesque.
   Oh, I forgot to mention the groundnuts at UMass. Stems of those plants are twining around and overpowering others in their guild in an ever-widening circle. Even if the groundnuts could peacefully coexist with their neighbors, grubbing up the golf ball size tubers will require an inordinate amount of time and soil discombobulation.
   My memory fails me. Perhaps it was hog peanut rather than groundnut vines threatening their neighbors. Perhaps it was both plants. Hog peanut has been suggested for erosion control, and as a groundcover, a livestock forage, and a food for humans. My suggestion: Hog food. Turn some hogs loose in a patch, and they’ll fatten as they clear the ground of this pernicious weed. Does anybody have a small hog for rent?

Elderberry Wine — No, Syrup

    Elderberry looked to be one of the most successful plants in the UMass permaculture garden. It grows fast and it grows high. My two plants, now in their third year, yielded more than four gallons of berries. And harvest, last week, was quick and easy; aggressively tickling the umbels had the berries quickly filling a basket.
   Elderberries can also be recommended for their flowers and the berries’ deep, blue color. Flowers open in June to dinnerplate size umbels of small, white blossoms. They’re good for tea, fritters, or to flavor wine.
   The berries impart their good color, but little flavor, to wine, pie, and juice. (They should not be eaten uncooked or unripe.) There’s a bit of scientific evidence than an extract or syrup of the berries can help fight flu, perhaps other ailments also. I’m good at growing fruit, not cooking it, so I gave my crop to Dina Falconi who concocted a syrup using the recipe from her book Foraging & Feasting. I look forward to tasting the benefits of my horticultural and her culinary skills.

GOLDEN REWARDS, NOW & FUTURE

September 3, 2015/0 Comments/in Gardening, Planning, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Why Grow Sweet Corn?

With all the supersweet, tender ears of corn readily available at farms, farmers’ markets, even supermarkets these days, why do I bother to grow my own sweet corn? Because it tastes better, much better. Corn can be too sweet, and too tender for many of us maizophiles.
   I grow the variety Golden Bantam, which was the standard of excellent in sweet corn a hundred years ago. Its fat, golden kernels are toothsome, giving you something to chew on (but they’re not too chewy), with a rich, corny flavor. And yes, they are also sweet, just not supersweet.
   Corn is a relatively pest-free vegetable that warrants space in any garden. I grow corn in hills (clusters) of three plants each with 2 feet between hills in the row and two rows of hills down each 3-foot-wide bed. With each stalk yielding one to two ears, I reap 30 to 60 ears for each ten feet of bed! That’s a lot of ears, and it’s in space in which I sow early lettuce or spinach before planting the corn, and late turnips or, again, lettuce, spinach, arugula, or other cool season vegetables to follow the corn harvest.
   Of course, I plant more than just one 10 foot bed of corn and I spread the harvest season with successive sowings, 4 of them 2 weeks apart.
   There is one limitation to backyard corn: raccoons. Given the opportunity, they will harvest every ripe ear. Trapping is one way to keep them at bay. My dogs, Sammy and Scooter, spend day and night frolicking outdoors — and convincing raccoons to search for greener pastures.

GMO and Crap Shooting

    Golden Bantam corn, because it originated in 1906, is, of course non-GMO, that is, a “non genetically modified organism.” (As of now, almost all commercial sweet corn is still non-GMO; just about all field corn, which makes its way into animals, corn syrup, and more packaged products than you can imagine, is GMO.) This is my lead-in to clearing up some basic misconceptions about what GMO means.
   When the pollen from any plant lands on the female part of a flower of another plant, cross-pollination occurs. The resulting seeds and the plant growing from those seeds carry genes contributed from each of the two parent plants. As a result, the offspring are similar to, but not genetically identical, to the parents. The offspring is a natural hybrid.
   Enter Homo sapiens . . . Since the dawn of civilization, we humans have sought certain traits in our plants. To get plants with such traits, we chose plant parents having qualities to our liking and deliberately mated them in the hopes that their offspring would pick up only the parents’ good traits. The more offspring that are grown, the better the chance of finding a hybrid — one produced with human assistance, in this case, possessing desirable traits.
   Besides the crapshoot of traditional breeding, success is further limited by our only being able to choose from among plant parents that are related closely enough to breed. For instance you could not mate a tomato plant, which is not frost tolerant, with, say, a flounder, a fish very tolerant of freezing temperatures, in an effort to make a frost tolerant tomato. Tomatoes and fish are not even distant kin and could never breed with each other under natural conditions.
   About 30 years ago, scientists developed methods for circumventing the capriciousness of natural or human-assisted breeding. Laboratory methods were developed for teasing a desirable gene out of a cell of one organism, then injecting the gene into cell of another organism to create new organism — a GMO. And I do mean a “new organism,” because it contains genetic material that need not have come from a related organism.
   That “fish tomato” was, in fact, created by incorporated the so-called antifreeze gene from winter flounder into a tomato. It turns out that gene expression is not as straightforward or as predictable as once imagined. The fish tomato was a commercial flop in its frost tolerance and other agronomic characteristics; perhaps it would have been a good swimmer.
   Since that fish tomato came and went, other GMOs have been developed. Many have been commercial successes.
   Just to be clear: While it is true, as is often stated in support of GMOs, that hybridization or cross-breeding has been going on in nature for eons, that cross-breeding has always been between closely related species. Humans intervened, but nature could also have produced those traditional hybrids.
   All the above involves, in some sense, genetic modification. You are a genetic modification of your parents. But the term “genetically modified organism,” or GMO, genetically engineered, or transgenic organism, signifies an organism that has picked up genes via manipulation in a laboratory, often genes that never could have showed up naturally in the organism.

Some Summer in Winter

I awaited my first taste of this season’s Golden Bantam with more anticipation than my first taste of tomato. Finally, we’re awash in sweet corn, more than we can eat.
But six weeks of sweet corn will not satisfy, so we’re packing away some for winter. Steaming or boiling the shucked cobs arrests enzymes that change kernel’s sugars to starches. With sweetness retained, we slice kernels from cobs, then either freeze them or dry them. Either way, they are a flavorful addition to soups, stews, and breads on dark, cold, winter days. But nothing like biting into a freshly steamed cob in the heat of summer sun.

For More, Live . . .

Check out my upcoming lectures for the weeks and months ahead at https://leereich.com/lectures

HOT DAYS, BUT PREPARING FOR FALL

August 14, 2015/7 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Planning, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Ignoring My Gut

Like other parents, I don’t hold back preparing for fall just because of hot, sun-drenched sunny days. But my preparations don’t entail trips to the store for notebooks, pencils, rulers, and other school gear. My daughter is old enough to gear up for herself. Instead, I’m preparing for a garden that becomes lush with ”cool weather” vegetables just as tomatoes, peppers, okra, and other warm weather vegetables are fading OUT.
Much of gardening entails NOT going with your gut. If I went with my gut, I’d be planting more tomatoes and sweet corn and, perhaps, if I was really going with my gut, even banana trees on today’s ninety plus degree, bright, sunny, humid day.

Sprouting seedlings, planting seeds, and transplants

Although tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers presently have more appeal, fall vegetables will have their day. I have to remind myself how a lowering sun and cooler weather make more appealing the lush green leaves of cabbages, brussels sprouts, endive, lettuce, kale, celery, and, below ground, radishes, turnips, carrots, and celeriac. And anyway, I’ll have no choice because summer vegetables will have waned by then.
That lush fall garden, almost like a whole new garden, comes about only if I do something about it now!

To Every Thing There is a Season, a Time to Plant, A Time to…

    Timing is (almost) everything for a productive fall garden. Planted too early, some leafy fall vegetables bolt — send up tough seed stalks — because of heat and long days. Right now, I’m sowing turnips and winter radishes, the especially tasty varieties Hakurei and Watermelon respectively. Among leafy, salad vegetables, lettuce, mustard (the variety Mizuna), and endive, with repeated sowing of lettuce every weeks until early September.
   It’s still a too early for spinach, arugula, mâche, short season Chinese cabbages, and spring radishes. Some time later this month would be about right for these vegetables. My book, Weedless Gardening, gives a detailed schedule for when to plant what vegetables for specific regions.
   For a truly bountiful fall garden, more advance planning was needed. For instance, I won’t be harvesting brussels sprouts until October, but for sprouts lining stalks three to four foot tall, I sowed those seeds indoors in March. Celery and celeriac seed got sprinkled in mini-furrows in seed flats way back in early February.

Zero Tolerance for Weeds, Almost

    Almost as important as timing for my fall garden is weeding. The enthusiasm of many gardeners peaks in spring and then slowly wanes as summer heats up. Not mine.
   Every time I see a lambsquarters weed, the thought of the eventual 100,000 seeds it might sow prompts be to bend down and yank it out. Same goes for purslane plants, whose seeds remain viable in the soil for decades. And spotted spurge; each plant not only spreads thousands of seeds, but those seeds sprout quickly to mature new plants that make even more baby, then adult, spotted spurges. How could I bring myself not to pull these weeds. (Yes, I know, lambsquarters and purslane are edible — if you like their flavor.)
   With weeds kept in check through June, much less effort has been needed to maintain the status quo. Mostly, this is because drier weather has limited weed growth and seed germination, and because any watering in my garden is with drip irrigation. Rather than coaxing weed growth in pathways (and also wasting water), as do sprinklers, drip irrigation pinpoints water to garden plants.

Fresh Figs Bring Me back to Summer

Back to enjoying summer . . . we’ve been enjoying the first crop, known as the breba crop, of figs from the ‘Rabbi Samuel’ fig tree espaliered in the greenhouse.

Rabbi Samuel fig, espaliered in greenhouse

Most fruit plants bear fruits on one-year-old, or older, stems. Figs, depending on the variety, can bear on one-year-old stems, on new, growing shoots, or on both one-year-old stems and on new, growing shoots. ‘Rabbi Samuel’, I have found, bears on both.
The tree is trained to a T, with two horizontal arms growing in either direction from atop an 18” high trunk. New shoots spring up vertically at about 6 inch spacing along the arms. Late each fall, I cut all those shoots almost back to the arms to make room for and coax new fruiting shoots for the following year.

Early, breba fig crop not ripening on old stub

The stubs left after cutting back the season’s shoots are one year old, and that’s where brebas have been borne. This fall, I’ll leave some a few inches long, for a larger breba crop next July; the next year I’ll shorten them more drastically and leave others a few inches long; and so on, year after year.
The main crop, on new, growing shoots, should begin ripening not to long after the last of the brebas have been harvested. With sufficient sunlight and a bit of supplemental heat in the greenhouse, harvest of the main crop will continue until November’s days grow too short, soothing the transition from the summer to the fall garden.

HOW TO FEED THE WORLD

February 12, 2015/4 Comments/in Gardening, Planning, Soil, Uncategorized, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Perennial Wheat to Save Our Soil, But What About Compost?

   We — that is, almost all of humanity — get all our sustenance from the thin skin that covers out planet, the soil. In appreciation of this, the United Nations has declared 2015 “The Year of Soil.” “Soil is more important than oil,” stated Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, in his keynote at this year’s recent NOFA-NY conference. Like oil, soil is a nonrenewable, or only slowly renewable, resource. Centuries go by before rainfall, freezing, thawing, and microbes and plants eat away at rocks to make new soil; on average, it takes a thousand years for the creation of a mere half-inch of new soil.
   The problem is that, as with oil, we humans are using up soil faster than new soil is being created — 10 to 40 times faster! Also, as with oil, that soil, as it is used, releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Tillage exposes carbon stored in the ground to air, burning” it up, and annual crops, which are represented by sweeping fields of corn, soybeans, wheat, and other staples of civilization, put little of the carbon that they take in from air below ground. Agriculture is the second highest generator of greenhouse gases.
   Whew, what to do? Dr. Jackson’s tack, for the past half century, has been to focus on shifting our staples from annual to perennial crops. Wheat, for instance. Kanza, a hybrid, perennial wheat under development at the Land Institute, would sequester carbon by not requiring annual tillage and by packing carbon compounds into its long-lived root system. Perennial crops also decrease opportunities for soil erosion (another source of soil loss), grow with less added fertilizer and water, and have the potential to increase biodiversity for a healthier ecosystem.

Organic Materials: Wasted Fertilizer

What about vegetables, how are they treating our resources? Up to the podium stepped Tim Crews, director of research at the Land Institute, to give the roomful of organic and aspiring organic vegetable farmers and gardeners bad news: Our soil care is not sustainable. All that manure hauled onto our fields or piled high into compost piles is bedded with hay or comes from animals that have been fed grain. The grain or hay was grown in fields that were fertilized, most of it with commercial fertilizer which is mostly made from atmospheric nitrogen via the Haber-Bosch process which requires — you guessed it — fossil fuel for energy.
Still, the fact that organic farming and gardening wastes less energy than conventional farming and gardening should assuage some of the guilt that resonated through the room. The soil of a good organic farmer or gardener will, in general, be higher in organic matter (5.4% vs. 3.5%) and, hence, carbon. Said plot will require less water, less pesticide, and less manufactured nitrogen for fertilizer.

Compost, Garden — and Small Farm — “Gold”

    Compost, and compost alone, is how I maintain fertility in my vegetable beds. I do haul in some horse manure for that compost, and, as Dr. Crews pointed out, somewhere way back in that manure’s history, fossil fuel needed to be burned.
   But civilization, and especially industrialized civilizations, generate many waste products, of which horse manure is one. Picture also all the food waste from restaurants and supermarkets, autumn leaves and grass clippings that are considered “garbage,” even sewage effluent. All these organic materials contain carbon, some of which could be sequestered in the ground, to the benefit of agriculture and the environment, and some of which feed soil organisms and, in turn, plants.
   Better to recycle as much of those organic materials as possible into agriculture than let them go to waste or cause pollution. The bottlenecks here are cultural and political rather than agricultural.

Grow Your Own Fertilizer

Another way, as I suggested at the conference, to make vegetable farming more sustainable would be to grow your own carbon and fertilizer. A perennial grain or hay field could be harvested for the grain or hay for the animals or, even more efficiently, just for hay to use either as mulch or for composting. Running hay or grain through animals burns up carbon to grow and fuel the animal to the tune of, on average, about 6 times more needed in terms of calories. That is, for every 6 calories we grow and feed to a cow, we get only one calorie back when we eat the cow.
Left to its own devices, any field will naturally build fertility. Bacteria, free-living bacteria and symbiotic with the roots of legumes, harvest atmospheric nitrogen and put it in the ground, and the combined action of myriad soil organisms slowly chew away at a soil’s rocky matrix to release other nutrients for plant use. Plants grow, their roots oozing substances that further stimulate microbial activity and soil fertility.

Nodules from nitrogen-fixing bacteria on soybean roots.

The key word in the previous paragraph is “slowly.” In order to be able to harvest fertilizer in the form of hay from a field year after year, sufficient time must be allowed between harvests for fertility to be garnered from the air and rocks. For that you need either more land or less harvest. The big picture, then, is to have more land, to make better choices in how the land is used, to utilize organic practices, and have fewer people.
With the problems of soil improvement, global warming, sustainability, and agricultural production solved, I’m going to sow onion seeds. Planted in flats in potting soil at 7 seeds per inch, I should have plenty of pencil-thick seedlings ready to poke into holes in compost enriched beds in early May.

LECTURES THIS WEEKEND

February 8, 2015/2 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Planning, Soil, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Feb. 14, 2015
Gardener’s Supply Co.,Burlington, VT
“Espalier Fruits”
“My Weedless Garden”

Feb. 15, 2015
Northeast Organic Farming Association of VT, Winter Conference,
Burlington, VT
“Hardy Kiwifruits”
“Compost Tea: Snake Oil or Plant Elixir?”

GOOD BOOKS, GOOD LECTURES

January 29, 2015/3 Comments/in Books, Design, Gardening, Planning, Tools, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

One Book = Years of Experience

    I’ve been gardening for over 30 years. Don’t be impressed. The number of years spent with hands in the dirt doesn’t necessarily confer any particular expertise in the field (pun intended). Some gardeners do the same foolish things year in and year out, or never sufficiently investigate other, perhaps better, ways of doing what they’ve been doing. Or not appreciate cause and effect. (Was it really the compost tea spray that led to bountiful yields last year, or was it reliable rainfall interspersed with bright, sunny days? The tendency is to hold the former responsible.) Or, the wizened, old gardener’s wealth of knowledge might not extend beyond what they’ve grown on their own “back forty,” severely limiting the benefit of any wisdom passed on to others with a shorter history of gardening.
   Reading is a efficient way to squeeze wisdom of others, reflecting decades of digging, pruning, and seed-sowing, into just a few years, for yourself — depending, of course, on the weight of the words. The fact that so many gardeners have always gotten by with little or no reading is testimonial to millions of years of evolution that makes every pea seed naturally want to grow and every apple tree naturally want to bear fruit.
   So, in the spirit of becoming better gardeners, especially this time of year with nothing to do in the garden, let’s thumb through the pages of three worthy books that recently found a place on my desk.

Good Tools are a Help

    Did you know that the hose was invented by Jan van der Heijden in the 17th century? Tarred canvass, linen, and hand-stitched lengths of leather pipe were all predecessors of the modern garden hose, all of which I learned from Bill Laws’ A History of the Garden in Fifty Tools. It wasn’t until near the end of the 19th century that technology and marketing brought hoses into more general use in gardens.
   Just imagine having to water your garden with repeated trips to the spigot with your watering can, another of Mr. Laws’ “Fifty Tools.” Not that the garden hose has displaced watering cans, which have been around in various incarnations for hundreds of years and may have reached their peak in functional and visual elegance with the work of John and Arthur Haws. Haws cans are still made; my 2 gallon, galvanized Haws watering cans have served me and my plants well for over 20 years.
   . . . Fifty Tools will not, admittedly, make anyone a better gardener. Instead, it’s a very interesting history of 50 gardening tools with — okay, this might be some help in the garden — sidebars, “Tools in Action,” telling of the best use of each tool.

Haws watering can

Some listing are a stretch of the word “tool:” a radio, a scarecrow, separate entries for plant container, terracotta pot, and stoneware urn? I would have included the garden cart, pitchfork, and hori-hori knife as necessary garden accoutrements.

Inspiration from Paris

    In and Out of Paris: Gardens of Secret Delight by Zahid Sardar, with photographs by Marion Brenner is slightly more practical than A History of the Garden in Fifty Tools, even if I’m not planning to garden in Paris or like a king. The first section, eye candy, has the usual gardens of a literally majestic scale: Versailles, the Tuileries, Vaux-le-Vicomte, etc.
   Sections on private gardens are more inspirational for us non-royalty. Most of the gardens, whether majestic or small, are typically French, with long views or symmetric arrangements. Not one of the gardens, though, the 1000 square foot Japanese garden near the Bastille, with carefully placed, but not seemingly so, boulders nestled into mosses, lichen bordering a koi pond. Walls shield the garden from the sight and sound of the surrounding city, the effect softened with clumps of bamboo and a mix of evergreen and deciduous trees.
   One of the most interesting gardens is the Experimental Parc Méry-sur-Oise, which started life as the historic Renaissance-era Chateau de Méry-sur-Oise. More recently, in 1999, the grounds were re-done, this time with water features, not traditional fountains, but misty, hot, cold, brackish, and mineralized water that rains down from above or tumbles over waterfalls. Long-term goals, the “Experimental” part of the garden, include observations of the effects of the various waters on plants and the ecosystem over time. Elsewhere are free-standing gabion walls planned for vertical gardens. That never happened. Money ran out and the gardens have been neglected since 2003 — a modern, neglected garden!
   In all honesty, I mostly just looked at the beautiful photographs of In and Out of Paris: Gardens of Secret Delight.

Grow Vegetables? Study this Book

    Even if you are a backyard gardener rather than a market gardener, The Market Gardener, by Jean-Martin Fortier, will have you harvesting more and better tomatoes, and with less effort. Two themes of this book, as I see it, are planning and record-keeping. The author is a successful market gardener in Quebec, grossing over $100,000 from a mere acre and a half of land.
   The growing units on Jean-Martin’s farm are raised beds 100 feet long by 30 inches wide. Having all beds the same makes it easy for him to calculate the amount of compost needed and keep track of yields. The latter are spelled out in a handy chart showing days to maturity and yield of individual vegetables per 100 foot bed. I haven’t calculated yields from my 17 foot by 36 inch wide beds, but do know that I need to plant 4 beds at two week intervals to harvest our fill of sweet corn to enjoy during summer and, frozen, through winter.
   Another useful table spells out spacing of transplants, in flats and in beds, and another lists dollars reaped per bed from various vegetables. The only other gardening book that quantifies small-scale vegetable growing so well, in this case strictly backyard growing, is Burrage on Vegetables, from 1954, by Albert Burrage. How times have changed: Burrage is pictured in his garden in sport coat and bow tie; farmers in Jean-Martin’s book are pictured dressed as, well, farmers.

1950s vs the present: Different look but 2 good gardeners

The book also has the requisite listing of each vegetable along with growing information as well as useful chapters on soil care (generally good but with some misconceptions) and microclimate. One particularly simple, cheap yet innovative technique described for weed control after harvest, between plantings, is covering a bed for 2 weeks with a reusable 6mm thick, black silage tarp.
Jean-Martin emphasizes that it is possible for farming and gardening to be, at the same time, productive and bucolic only with planning and organization to avoid wasting time. In so doing, he can be a farmer who can put in a workday from a reasonable 8 to 5. Charles Dudley Warner wrote in his 1870 classic My Summer in the Garden, “Blessed be agriculture! If one does not have too much of it.” I agree.

Talks in Pennsylvania & Vermont Coming Up

Some good conferences and lectures coming up. I’ll be in Pennsylvania and Vermont talking about espalier fruits, weedless(!) gardening, growing hardy kiwifruit, pawpaws, and blueberries, the efficacy of compost tea, and pruning fruits. For details, see my “Lectures” page.

NOTHING TO DO? SEQUESTER CARBON?

January 22, 2015/2 Comments/in Gardening, Planning, Soil/by Lee Reich

Agriculture: Good or Bad for Our Planet?

I’m enjoying this farmdening interlude, with essentially nothing to do, farmdenwise, for a few weeks. No planting, no pruning, no weeding. Seeds have been ordered and the greenhouse, full of lettuce and kale and chard and other fresh stuff, is cold enough to require no more than weekly waterings, if that. Even then, watering involves nothing more than a quarter turn of the mechanical timer to start water running through the drip irrigation lines.
I’m going to use this lull as an opportunity to ruminate — on rumens and other relationships between agriculture and global warming.

Deb, first time herding some very big cattle

    Let’s get started right away with the rumen, that part of the digestive system of a cow, steer, or other ruminant where cellulose is fermented. With a capacity of more than 50 gallons, a cow’s rumen is a veritable factory, one whose byproduct is a lot of gas, more than 200 gallons a day, belched out by the cow. No small thing, that collective burp of agricultural ruminants. It’s good for the cow (when you consider the alternative) but not so good for the environment. A significant portion of the effluvia is methane, a carbon compound which is 20 times more heat-trapping in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
   Let’s leave the cows alone and drop down to the soil. Global warming from the agricultural soils? Yes. Harvest a crop, any crop, and you’re removing nutrients from the site. So those nutrients need to be replaced, and that’s usually done with fertilizer. Fertilizer, unlike money, does, or can, grow on trees (such as honeylocust and others in the pea family, which garner nitrogen from the air a put it in the soil) but most fertilizer is synthetic. Synthetic fertilizer must be cobbled together using energy derived from fossil fuels, which then release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
   That’s not all. The soil itself is a large reservoir of carbon tied up in complex, organic compounds as well as in living and dead organisms. Stir that soil up with a plow, a tiller, or a garden fork, and you charge it with oxygen, just what bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms are waiting for so that they can gobble up that carbon, grow and extract energy, then release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Of Tillage and Biochar

“Sequestration” isn’t only something done with our money by a bunch of mostly men in a big room (Congress) in Washington. It’s also done by farmers to save, not money, but carbon. The idea is to keep carbon in the soil rather than letting it “burn” to carbon dioxide, waft into the atmosphere, and contribute to global warming.

Me, a long time ago, burning carbon

Minimizing, or eliminating, tillage is one way to sequester carbon, something that can be done on a home or small farm scale, even on a large scale. I haven’t tilled my garden in over 20 years, and 22 percent of Midwestern farmland is no-till. Minimal tillage or no-till also brings other benefits, such as reduced weeds, a friendlier environment for earthworms and fungi, more efficient plant water use, more organic carbon in the soil for livelier biological activity and improved soil aeration, and, of course, the benefit of not having to till.
Biochar is another proposed savior in these carbon-burning times. Biochar is, basically, charcoal, which is mixed into the soil. Charcoal starts out as wood which, when left in or on the ground, rots, the carbon within turning to carbon dioxide. Charring the wood drives off much of what makes up wood, leaving only black carbon, a poor food for soil microorganisms, so it does not rot. The wood’s carbon has been locked up, sequestered, changed from organic carbon to inorganic, or elemental, carbon.

Hold that Carbon, But Not Too Tightly

   When it comes to agriculture, keeping too tight a grasp on carbon is not a good thing. Agriculture, whether farming or gardening, isn’t Nature, or else my garden and yours would be all weeds (some of which would be edible and, hence, technically not “weeds”).
   Carbon is energy, fueling growth of fungi, earthworms, and other creatures, and as it’s “burned,” nutrients associated with it are released into the soil in forms that plants can use. That’s a good thing, to a degree. Fermentation microorganisms within cattle rumen make cellulose available for energy and growth even as they release methane. That’s also a good thing, to a degree.
   Good gardeners and farmers strike a congenial balance, emulating Nature without giving her a free hand. Too many cows belching methane is not good for the planet. Too much tillage “burning” up soil organic matter and releasing carbon dioxide also is not a good thing.
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   A final word, about radishes, for no reason except that I am enjoying them right now. Winter radishes are large, variable in shape and color, and store well. Today, as I’ve done every few days since late fall, I sink my hand into a cold, wooden box full of wood shavings to pull out yet another Watermelon radish. Sliced open, this variety of winter radish looks much like watermelon and tastes — no, not like watermelon — but crisp, sharp, and slightly sweet. Highly recommended; sow seeds July 15th.

NOTES TO MESELF

January 2, 2015/9 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Pests, Planning/by Lee Reich

Of Mice, Disease, To Grow, and Not To Grow

Despite rain, some snow, and temperatures that dipped below 10°F, the whole bed of endive was lush and green. A low tunnel of porous, light fabric and clear plastic held aloft by wire hoops kept the worst of the weather at bay. As I reached in to harvest a head, no knife was necessary; the head lifted, unattached, off the ground. Mice have been at work again!

If it’s not one thing, it’s another. A timely sowing of endive seeds (early July) gave sturdy seedlings that were transplanted (early August) into compost enriched soil to present (by September) a beautiful bed of wall to wall greenery. The beds were covered for cold protection in November.

What a cozy home that bed became for mice. The tunnel provided not only food and lodging but also cover from the hungry eyes of local hawks. The mice ignored endive’s leaves, instead devouring the stout, fleshy portions of root and stem at the base of almost every plant.

Note to myself: Next fall pre-empt mice by getting a supplemental cat or two and/or setting traps within wooden boxes having mouse-sized entry doors.

Rip Out the Clem’s, Plant New Ones

Another note to myself: Replant clematis.

Over the years I’ve accumulated a number of varieties of clematis. The vines barrel up and over fences and trellises clothing them in sumptuous blooms. Blossoming has diminished over the years, the culprit being clematis wilt, a fungal disease that turns leaves and stems black. It doesn’t usually kill the plant but a clematis without flowers and with blackened leaves and stems is not a pretty site.

Clematis and I are not finished. In the next few weeks I must sit down and seek out sources for native clematis species and their hybrids. Their flowers are smaller but they are resistant to wilt. Scarlet Clematis (Clematis texensis) is definitely on my list, as is Rock Clematis (C. columbiana, sometimes listed as C. occidentalis var. columbiana), and the hybrids Betty Corning and Étoile Violette. The choices don’t stop there because two breeders on the other side of the Atlantic have come up with a whole series of wilt-resistant clematis, known as Evison-Poulsen series.

To Grow or Not To Grow, That is the Question(s)

More notes to myself on plants to grow and not to grow next year.

Zahara Yellow zinnias in last summer’s garden.

My zinnias looked a little unusual this year, unusually pretty, each flower with a single row of yellow petals radiating from a brown eye. Also unusual in being very compact, long lasting, and not marred by the powdery mildew of most zinnias. Last year I had just a few of these hybrid Zahara Yellow Improved zinnias in the vegetable garden; next year I’m planning for enough to make a bold, yellow line along each edge of the main path.

It was a great year for peppers, and the greatest, for flavor and production, were Carmen, Sweet Italia, and Pepperocini. Great for production but not so great for flavor was King of the North, which won’t be invited back. In its place, I’ll be inviting Bridge to Paris pepper, recommended by a knowledgable friend.

Cardoon, the variety Hunchback of Nice, was better than expected but not good enough to justify the growing again of last season’s 10 plants. Each plant is bold and striking with upright, to 3 feet or more, blue-green leaves, so my plan is to grow only 2 or 3 as ornamentals from which I’ll steal occasional leaves for eating.

Meserve holly bushes that I planted many years ago have grown large to create a solid wall of lustrous, spiny leaves. That’s nice. Even nicer would be red berries against that verdant backdrop. Close inspection of the flowers last spring indicated that all the plants, contrary to what was ordered, are females. One male, which I will order, can sire them all so that in a few (very few, I hope) years, red berries will liven up the scene in winter.

I completely forgot to plant ginger this year. Yes, ginger, that tropical plant which has captured the interest of many small farmers. I could never understand the big deal about ginger until I experienced the tenderness of freshly harvested, red blushed baby ginger. Not that mature ginger could anyway be harvested in the short growing season this far north. My plan is to buy a ginger root in March, divide it up and pot up each section, then keep the pots warm and moist to give the roots an early start for a good harvest of baby ginger.

Brussels Sprouts, the variety Gusto, were a rousing success, perhaps too rousing because we still have 6 stalks perched in a bucket in the cool mud room and awaiting dinners. Four to six plants will be plenty for next year.

Not every vegetable needs to be loved by everyone. Next year, and in years hence until I forget what they taste like, I will not be growing broccoli or beets.

STILL SOME FRESH FRUIT, and GENDER STEREOTYPING

December 18, 2014/3 Comments/in Flowers, Fruit, Gardening, Houseplants, Planning/by Lee Reich

Fruit for My Mouth, Flowers for My Eyes

As I write this, on December 1st, the Rabbi — that’s the Rabbi Samuel fig — is still ripening fruit in my barely heated greenhouse. That’s commendable. Not so commendable, however, is the flavor; cooler temperatures and sparse sunlight have taken their toll. The drooping fruits look ripe and ready to eat, inside and out, but they are no longer worth eating.

End of the fruiting season for Rabbi Samuel fig.

On the other hand, another fruit, Szukis American persimmons, hardly look edible but still have rich, sweet flavor. Outdoors, fruits of this variety of American persimmon cling to bare branches. Their orange skins once stretched almost to the point of breaking over the soft flesh within. Now, alternate freezing and thawing temperatures and drier air have sucked moisture and temper from the flesh, so the skins have shriveled and barely cling. Their darkening does nothing to increase the fruits’ visual appeal.

Szukis persimmons, starting to look ugly, but still honey sweet

The ripe fruits are hard to distinguish, by eye, from the almost ripe fruits. The latter still retain some mouth-puckering astringency which has given American persimmons a bad name. An unripe persimmon “will draw a man’s mouth awrie with much torment” wrote Captain John Smith 400 years ago. I give Szukis’ branches a slight shake and only ripe fruits come raining to the ground, at which point the Captain’s further words ring true: “When [persimmon] is ripe, it is as delicious as an apricot.”

Can’t Help Wanting African Violets

New leaf cuttings

Man can’t live by bread alone; a feast for the eyes is also in order. Well, maybe not a feast, but an appetizer, some winter flowers. Probably the easiest and most longlasting of winter blossoms are those of African violet. Okay, okay, I know that African violets have been mostly associated with doilies, lace curtains, and other appurtenances of old ladies (nothing against old ladies).

Generally, I don’t even like the color violet. But African violet’s flowers do brighten up a windowsill that looks out upon a gray and brown landscape.

Plantlets forming at bases of leaf cuttings

Now that I’ve gotten my secret attraction to African violets off my chest, let’s talk horticulture. African violet’s whorl of leaves, like those of many low-growing perennial flowers, is actually a compressed stem, one that has been telescoped down so that each leaf and associated node originates just a fraction of an inch above the next lower leaf. But there is some distance between those nodes, so over time the stem does slowly elongate, rising higher and higher out of the ground. And side branches occasionally sprout forth from the leaf axils. The result of all this is that the potted plant becomes, over time, so overgrown with layer upon layer of leaves that the plant no longer can gather enough energy to flower well.

African Violet in all its glory.

The solution to this problem is to make new plants and then chuck the old ones. All that’s needed to make a new plant is a leaf from an old plant and patience. So a few weeks ago I plucked a few leaves (a few, for insurance) from my old, overgrown African violet and plunged their stalks into a moist mix of peat moss and perlite. A plastic bag covering and held above the leaf cuttings by some twigs provided the needed humidity until roots could develop to keep the leaves turgid. Bright but indirect sunlight fueled, via photosynthesis, new root growth, and within a few weeks, resistance to a gentle tug on the leaves told me that roots had developed.

I removed the cover and now little plants are poking up through the ground alongside the leaf stalks. I’m going to transplant my rooted cuttings into larger pots and should, in a few weeks, be enjoying flowers. By then, I’ll have my knitting also ready.

11th Hour Apple Tree Planting

On to less gender stereotyped gardening: tree planting. Picture the day before Thanksgiving, November 26th. A wet snow is falling and beginning to whiten the ground. In my garage are two sturdy, bare root apple trees, a Hudson’s Golden Gem and an Ashmead’s Kernel, recently arrived from Cummins Nursery and needing planting.

Fortunately, I prepared the plantings site a couple of weeks previously with a 4-inch-deep, broad circle of leaf compost, the most immediate purpose of which was to keep the ground from freezing. Rushing to beat out the snow, I pulled enough compost aside to make space to dig holes, spread tree roots out in each hole, backfilled the soil, sifting it around the roots by pressing with my fingers and bouncing the tree up and down, and then settled all into place with a couple of gallons of water per plant.

I like autumn for tree planting. Roots have opportunity to grow in still warm soil (especially if mulched) while stems won’t grow and need water until spring. The soil is crumbly and soft, in good condition for digging and planting. And autumn planting leaves one less thing to do in the flurry of spring gardening.

However, winter temperatures and furry creatures can be a hazard to autumn-planted trees. The first line of defense, to fend off mice and rabbits and moderate temperatures on the trunk, is a spiral plastic tree guard. An 18” high cylinder of 1/2” hardware cloth provides further defense against mice and rabbits. Beyond that, a higher and wider cylinder of 2×4 fencing should fend off deer and my puppy Sammy. (Past puppies considered newly planted trees as playthings, fun to tug out of the ground.) And finally, the well-furnished, new tree goes into winter with some perfume, a deer-repellant spray, any of which is effective if applied before the plant gets nibbled and renewed monthly.

I expect to harvest the first apples from the new apple trees expected in 3 years.

A Harvest of Mediterranean Transplants

December 3, 2014/5 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Planning, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Mediterranean Delectables & Not So Delectables

Figs thrive in heat and sunlight, nothing like the cold and frequently overcast days we now have, with only a few hours of sun when it does show itself. Still, my figs keep my attention.

In the greenhouse, heated only enough to keep temperatures above 35°F, the fig trees still have plenty of hard, unripe fruits splayed along their stems. Nothing odd about that. Figs, unlike apples and most other fruits which ripen during a narrow window in time, keep developing and ripening new fruits all along their growing stems.

But only one of my varieties, given the name Rabbi Samuel, seems able to tap into what little sunlight and heat are still at hand. The flavor of fruits that ripen on the heels of a spate of cold, rainy weather falls flat. But whenever sunlight fuels enough photosynthesis in the leaves and warmth in the greenhouse for at least a couple of days, a few fruits will swell and soften, their rosy insides then sweet and richly flavored.

Next Year’s Fig Crop is Readied

Next year’s fig crops are also on my mind.

Greenhouse figs no longer bearing good-tasting fruits get lopped back to 3 to 4 feet high. That dramatic pruning will coax vigorous growth next spring on which new fruits will be borne. More dramatic pruning would coax even more vigorous growth, but the figs on that new growth would begin ripening too late.

Potted figs have also been pruned and moved to my barely heated basement where temperatures below 50°F will restrain growth until outdoor temperatures in spring warm enough so that the pots can be moved back out. Figs are subtropical plants that, when dormant, tolerate temperatures down into the 20s, or lower. If kept too warm in winter, new growth begins indoors. That new growth is tender and easily burned by slight frost or even bright sunlight when moved outside.

Potted figs are difficult to muscle around; mine need to be carried through three doorways and then down narrow stairs to the basement. So a potted fig needs to be kept in a reasonably sized pot even though that allows for only a reasonable amount of growth which, in turn, allows for only a reasonably sized crop.

Kadota fig, dug up in November

I worked my way around this problem by taking one of my potted figs, a Kadota, out of its pot and planting it directly in the ground in spring. Theoretically, eager roots reach out into the surrounding soil, enough to support more growth — and larger crops — than if restricted within a pot. Another plus with this method is that no watering is needed beyond an initial drenching.

My success, thus far, has been limited. Kadota may requires too long a season to begin ripening any fruit outdoors here. Still, success might come once the plant gets used to its routine, or I’ll use this method with a shorter season variety such as Brown Turkey.

The time to dig up a planted out fig is anytime before temperatures dip below about 20°F. Or sooner, if the plant has lost its leaves and gone dormant.

Kadota fig stored in cold basement

The Hunchback of Nice Vindicates Cardoon

Continuing the Mediterranean theme (is this some primal attraction to a Garden of Eden?), I wrote back in May about growing, with reservations, Gobbo di Nizza (Hunchback of Nice) cardoon. In my garden many years ago, cardoon proved to be an enormous, spiny, bitter-tasting vegetable. But that wasn’t Gobbo di Nizza cardoon.

First off, Gobbo di Nizza is not spiny. It looks spiny but the soft “spines” don’t bite. This is an impressive-looking plant, something like a giant thistle (which it is, as is the closely related artichoke, botanically speaking), a whorl of gray-green leaves (very Mediterranean) soaring almost 4 feet high.

I tasted Gobbo di Nizza a month or so ago and was very unimpressed with its bitter flavor.

Blanching, which is blocking out sunlight, is a way that the flavor of vegetables such as endive and chicory is mellowed. Some folks blanche cardoon. So I gathered together Gobbo’s leaves, secured them in a tight bundle with a wrapping of twine, and waited a few weeks. Once I had harvested the leaves, removed the blades, and pared away the stringy flesh, I was left holding large, pale leaf stalks, the stalks looking much like celery on steroids.

Chopped into 1” pieces, and drained after being boiled for 15 minutes in salted water, Gobbo di Pizza had a smooth, artichoke-y flavor, quite good. Perhaps it was the olive oil and home-grown sun-dried tomatoes I drizzled over them.

Earthy Flavor: What am I, a Worm?

Beets are too earthy in flavor for my palette, and it’s not my imagination. That earthy flavor is from geosmin, a substance that is actually also present in soil! I like my earthiness in the soil, not my food.

Varieties differ in their geosmin concentration, with cylindrical varieties and the striped variety Chioggia being highest. This past season I was duped into growing beets again. I grew the old, low geosmin variety Detroit Dark Red, but still found it too earthy. Most were given away. The few left await vinegar, horseradish, or mustard to tone down their earthiness.