THE WEATHER, AND BLACKCAPS

Dry Soil

    Digging a hole to bury an animal last week gave me new respect for the plant world. Each shovelful brought up dusty, light brown soil, even to a depth of more than two feet. That’s expected, since it hasn’t rained more than 1/4 of an inch here for the past five weeks.
    With their leaves flagging in midday, trees and shrubs don’t exactly look spry. Still, they are alive, even some spring-planted trees and shrubs which have had little time to spread their roots deep and wide.

Thirsty, young Asian persimmon

Thirsty, young Asian persimmon

    Appearance of a soil can be deceiving. There’s some water lurking within those pores, water held tightly by capillary attraction. After heavy rains or irrigation, all soil pores get filled with water, a situation as bad for plants, if it lasts too long, as dry soil. Plant roots need air as well as moisture; air gets sucked in once gravity drains water from the largest soil pores.
    From then on, capillary attraction is what holds moisture in the ground — a pleasant situation for plants because the roots can tap into the more loosely held capillary water while they breathe freely. I prepare for possible droughts when planting by digging relatively small planting holes, which minimizes the amount of ground loosened up, in turn, among other benefits, preserving capillary networks in the soil. (Mulching and watering, right after planting, also helps.)
    Eventually, more and more of the loosely held capillary moisture gets sucked out of the ground by plants and evaporation. At some point, there’s still moisture in the soil, but what’s left is in the smallest pores and right against soil particles. It’s tightly held capillary moisture, water that plants can’t access. They wilt. When moisture levels drop to what’s known as the “permanent wilting point,” plants die.
    We’re not there yet and now, toward the end of the season, woody plants do have a Plan B: They can just drop their leaves, reducing moisture loss from stems and roots, and segue into winter on stored energy and moisture. To a point.

Cold Air

    If it’s not one thing, weather-wise, it’s another. On September 26th, I woke to find parts of the lawn hoary with frost. I’m not complaining. Frost should be expected, on average, around that date around here. Except that I’ve been spoiled for the last few years by much later frosts, frosts, so late that I pulled out old tomato plants because chilly weather drained tomatoes of their flavor rather than frosty weather killing the plants.Endive, lettuce, and old tomato plants
    Also, no complaints because the September 26th brought only a light frost; temperatures just hit 32°F. and the hoariness was spotty, here and there. A light frost is a good thing this time of year. It signals plants to get ready for even colder weather. In preparing for cold, cell walls strengthen and permeability of cells to water is actively altered. Even subtropical plants like peppers and tomatoes toughen up, with some chilly preparation, so that they can now tolerate temperatures that drop even a few degrees below freezing.
    Tender vegetables, frost or no frost, on the wane, have left the door open to vegetables that enjoy the cool weather of autumn. Most of the garden now presents a verdant sight of beds lush with lettuce, Chinese cabbages, winter radishes, endive, turnips, cabbages, arugula, mustard greens, carrot tops, and leeks, all ready for harvest, at my leisure, over the next few weeks.

Fall Black Raspberries

    Segueing over to the fruit world, I’m still harvesting the last of the blackcaps (black raspberries) of the season. Blackcaps? Anyone familiar with this fruit, abundant in the wild and often cultivated, knows that they ripen in midsummer.

Niwot blackcap, now ripe

Niwot blackcap, now ripe

    Last year I planted two new varieties of blackcap, Niwot and Ohio’s Treasure. With most blackcaps, canes just grow their first year, then fruit their second year. (During the second year, new canes are also growing, to fruit the following year, so a planting bears fruit every year.) Niwot and Ohio’s Treasure bear fruit at the end of the canes’ first year of growth, in late summer and autumn. Those same canes — I think — then continue bearing the following year, in summer, just like most blackcaps.
    I haven’t yet decided whether Ohio’s Treasure or Niwot offer the better berry, but it’s nice to be harvesting fresh berries this late in the season.

SOME REFLECTIONS. . . NOT THAT IT’S OVER

Finish Squash

    “Zucchini bread is for people who don’t have compost piles.” That’s what I told Deb after she suggested, first ratatouille, and then zucchini bread, as vehicles for our excess zucchini.
    Most years I make an early, too large planting of zucchini (about 6 plants), and then, six to eight weeks later, make another sowing of only a couple of plants. The first planting puts enough zucchinis into the freezer for winter, as well as leaving enough for eating. The second planting is to yield an occasional zucchini for fresh eating through summer after plants of that initial planting have succumbed to squash vine borer, cucumber beetles, bacterial wilt, and any of the other maladies that usually do in the plants a few weeks after they begin bearing. Usually and thankfully do in the plants. But not this year.
    Almost every time I check that early planting of zucchini, a new fruit has swelled at the end of a vine now trailing beyond its bed beneath stalks of popcorn in an adjacent bed. I feel no obligation to eat zucchini, whether in zucchini bread, ratatouille, or any other concoction.

Where Are the Insects?

    In all my decades of gardening, I’ve never experienced a season with so few insect pests. A few Japanese beetles reared their ugly heads back in July; they were the only ones who showed up, except for an occasional straggler. Likewise for bean beetles. Eggplants hosted the few requisite flea beetles, but never enough for concern. (I did spray a few times with horticultural oil; judging from other gardeners’ flea beetle-less experiences this year, doubt that the effect was from the oil.)
    Cabbageworms, always requiring some late summer action on my part in the past in the form of one or two sprays of the biological insecticide Bacillus thurengiensis, have let me occupy that time with other things.
    Spotted wing drosophila, known non-affectionately as SWD, showed up, as usual, in sufficient numbers in early August to warrant a spray of spinosad, an extract from a naturally-occuring bacteria found in the soil of a defunct rum factory in the Virgin Islands. That one spray, along with some experimental traps from Cornell, was sufficient to keep the buggers from using my blueberries as nurseries in which to raise their young.
    As is so often the case with complex systems, in this case involving the vagaries of this season’s weather, the biology and the chemical and physical make-up of the soil, interactions between garden plants as well as between garden plants and weeds, timing of plantings . . .  what I’m trying to say is that I have no idea why the year was so auspicious, as far as insects.

Here Are the Diseases

    That was insects. Diseases are another story. Don’t look at my tomato plants.
    The tomato plants started the season neatly and decoratively trained as single stems up bamboo poles, soon clothing those poles in lush, green leaves and red or orange tomatoes. Now? Stems are pretty much bare from ground level up a couple of feet, with some shriveled, brown remnants of leaves dangling downwards. The disease is not fusarium or verticillium, to which so many modern tomato varieties are touted for being resistant.Diseased tomato plants
    The affliction is leaf spot disease, which is actually one or more of three diseases: early blight, septoria leaf spot, and/or late blight. The worst of the three is late blight, which makes us gardeners and farmers especially nervous after a severe outbreak ravaged a large swath of the Northeast a few years ago. Air currents and humidity have not been favorable this year for late blight to hitchhike up from the South, where it overwinters, and any that might have reached here couldn’t get footholds with this season’s hot, dry weather.
    Thorough cleanup of old leaves and stems, which house early blight and septoria leaf spot through the winter, and planting tomatoes where they haven’t been plant for the previous two years, was supposed to keep these diseases in check. Perhaps it did, but not enough.
    I have two vegetable gardens, and next year I’ll plant tomatoes in the one that housed no tomatoes for the past couple of years, putting more distance between overwintering disease spores and my plants. Clean up and distance should also quell one other disease, anthracnose, responsible for sunken, rotting areas that develop on some of the fruits.
    Diseases notwithstanding, plenty of glass jars filled either with sparkling red, canned tomatoes and dull red, dried tomatoes line shelves to bring some essence of summer into through the dark months ahead.

Pepper Heaven

    Tomatoes may be the essence of summer for their ubiquity in gardens; for me, though, ripe, red peppers more represent a summery flavor. My peppers rarely experience insect or disease problems. The challenge, this far north, is ripe, red peppers in abundance.

Italian Sweet peppers

Italian Sweet peppers

    My favorite variety for flavor, earliness, and productivity, especially this far north, is Italian Sweet. I put in many plants this past spring, and the harvest is prolific.
    Unfortunately, dried or frozen peppers offer only wan hints of the fresh peppers’ summery flavor and texture.

DRY WOOD, & AUTUMNAL AIR

 Passionflower to the Rescue

   When I began, many years ago, to heat my home with wood, I struggled to get the driest possible wood, finally building a 60-foot long woodshed beneath which a double row of logs basked in the direct hit of sunlight from the south. I more recently learned that firewood can be too dry, which is when moisture drops below 15 to 20 percent. Bone dry wood can’t get enough oxygen for a clean, efficient burn, so smoke, within which is locked the potential for rendering additional heat, is produced; pump enough oxygen into the mix, though, and you get an inferno that can damage a woodstove.
    So — and here’s the plant-related part — rather than tear down or put siding on my super-drying woodshed, I put some heat loving vines to climb and provide some shade on the south face. Sections of hog-fencing temporarily hung on hooks just below the roof in front of each of the 8 foot bays support the vines.
    Maypop, Passiflora incarnata, is an ideal candidate for this location. (Learn more about maypop — a whole chapter’s worth! — Uncommon Fruits For Every Garden.) It’s an herbaceous perennial, emerging early each June to grow vigorously into lanky vines 10 or more feet long. Maypop is a hardy species of passionflower, and a few weeks after emerging, the intricate blue or white blossoms unfold along the stems.White maypop flower
    Flowers would be enough, but there’s more. A few weeks later, those flowers morph into egg-shaped fruits: tropical passionfruits this far north.Maypop fruit
    In southeastern U.S., maypop, with its spreading root system, is considered a weed. This far north, maypop will enjoy the extra heat of the microclimate at the south face of the woodshed. The woodshed itself will contain the plant in its travel northward. The lawnmower will contain the plant in is travel southward. Let it spread all it wants east and west along the base of the shed.

Morning Glory & Kin for Quicker Effect

    In spring I planted a maypop plant at the foot of four of the woodshed bays. As a perennial, maypop needs time to get established. Because I went to the trouble of hanging a trellis from each of the bays, I wanted something to clothe even this summer.
    Enter the Convolvulaceae family, which counts morning glory among its kin. Less know, but also kin and vines with pretty flowers, are cardinal vine and moonflower.  I figured that some member of this family could accompany maypop in each planting hole.Morning glory against woodshed
    All three Convolvulaceae family members grow vigorously so could provide good coverage for the woodshed. They also integrate well with each other, design-wise. Morning glory wakes up early, its sky-blue flowers opening each morning to foreshadow the blue sky that lies ahead. (The flowers remain furled under overcast skies.) Once the sun rises high in the sky, fire-engine red flowers of cardinal flower take the torch for the remainder of the day. As night falls, moonflowers’ large, white trumpets open and emit their sweet scent.
    This year, those annual vines grew so vigorously that they stunted their companion maypops. Next year will be better. Also, a couple of plants of another vine, native and somewhat decorative, have tried to get a foothold in the planting. Poison ivy, you’re not welcome here.

Autumnal Readiness

    Morning glories have started lingering later into the mornings, a sign that autumn is approaching. I’m also getting signals — a softness in the air and an occasional chill, a slight chill — of autumn’s approach. Those signals do not have me lingering late in the morning, though.
    The imminence of autumn has me scurrying around making sure all is copacetic in the weeks to come and on into next year. Turnips and winter radishes have been thinned. Cabbages, Chinese and European, transplants are growing well, hinting at crocks of kim-chi and sauerkraut to come. Onions have been harvested and woven into ropes for storage, now in the garage, later in the basement.Winter radishes and Chinese cabbages
    Any cleared vegetable bed is given a thorough weeding and then an icing of an inch depth of compost. That compost will snuff out small weeds attempting to sprout below. Additionally, it will feed soil microbes which will, in turn, feed plants for at least a year. I’ll sow arugula, mustard greens, and “spring” radishes in the bed which I recently cleared of sweet corn, weeded, and composted.
    A couple of sites have been prepared for two new trees. “Prepared” is too fancy a word; all I did was pile mulch on the ground at both locations. The mulch will kill existing vegetation and leave soft, moist ground for easy planting in October.
    Autumn will be bountiful and next year will be a good year.

UNPERMACULTURE

Accusations,  (Mostly) not True

I’ve understandably been accused of being a “permie,” that is, of practicing permaculture.
    (In the words of permaculture founder, Bill Mollison, “Permaculture is about designing sustainable human settlements. It is a philosophy and an approach to land use which weaves together microclimate, annual and perennial plants, animals, soils, water management, and human needs into intricately connected, productive communities.” In the words of www.dictionary.com, permaculture is “a system of cultivation intended to maintain permanent agriculture or horticulture by relying on renewable resources and a self-sustaining ecosystem.”)
    Walk around my farmden and, yes, you’ll come upon Nanking cherry bushes where forsythia bushes once lined the driveway, an American persimmon tree where a lilac bush once stood, and other edible plants used also for landscaping. In the vegetable garden, I preserve soil integrity by never tilling it, and, in the south field, blackcurrant bushes make use of the space beneath pawpaw trees. There’s the requisite mushroom yard of shiitake-inoculated logs, free-range poultry, solar panels, a rain barrel . . .

Pawpaws interplanted with blackcurrants, and a row of hardy kiwis

Pawpaws interplanted with blackcurrants, and a row of hardy kiwis

    But no! I am not a permie. My vegetables grow in beds in parallel, straight rows (rather than keyhole plantings) and, despite that commingling of blackcurrants and pawpaws, most trees, shrubs, and vines here keep to themselves. Permaculture plantings of, say, hazelnuts in tall grass and rubbing elbows with elderberries, seaberries, apples, pears, and other edibles become, over time, an unproductive management nightmare with some plants drowning out others, productivity declining due to shade, and diseases increasing from tangled stems creating dank conditions. The paltry output of such planting are best left for wildlife, who can afford to spend all day foraging for a few tidbits of food.
    My hazelnuts are grown in a mown strip that, for easy gathering, is sheared low as nuts ripen.
    Low maintenance is a goal touted by permaculturalists; understandably so. But taken to the extreme, low maintenance means not giving the grape vine the pruning it needs to be a healthy vine yielding the most flavorful berries that are easy to harvest. (One book suggests, rather than troubling with a trellis, growing grape vines up trees; the vines do so in the wild, but such fruit, in partial shade and not easily accessible, can never be high quality.)
    Much of permaculture seems to me to be not only unrealistic, but also no fun. I enjoy caring for my plants, reaping the gustatory and other rewards for a job well done. I like the challenge of researching some pest or nutritional problem and finding a solution. I like watching how plants respond to my ministrations, whether I’m wielding pruning shears, a pitchfork piled high with compost, or my winged weeder hoe.
    Agriculture is about balancing Nature’s designs and human will. Too much of the latter is a losing battle. Too much of the former leaves nothing worth harvesting.

Big Bantam, an Oymoron

    My planting of sweet corn is very un-permaculture. It’s high-culture: 6 seeds per hill dropped into compost-enriched ground maintained weed-free, timely watering with drip irrigation, hills thinned to 3 stalks per hill, even stakes to keep the stalks standing soldier straight. I mentioned, last week, how my Golden Bantam variety of sweet corn isn’t bantam at all. The stalks soar over 10 feet high.
    Was it because of my green thumb? No. I now know that it is genetics.
    This year I made four plantings of Golden Bantam. The two later plantings are, in fact, bantam-size. Looking over my seed orders, I see that I had planted Golden Bantam Corn, Original 8-row Golden Bantam Corn, and Improved Golden Bantam Corn.
    Golden Bantam is an open-pollinated variety. As with any open-pollinated variety, various strains might arise, strains which might differ in some ways from the original. With any good variety, the hope is that progeny are monitored to eliminate any off-type varieties — or to look for something that might be better than the original.

Golden Bantams compared

Golden Bantams compared

    So the name Golden Bantam could be attached to the original Golden Bantam, from 1902, or any strain, which could also have “Improved,” “Original,” etc. attached its name. (Golden Bantam was also developed into a hybrid, Golden Cross Bantam, which, like other hybrids, would be genetically more consistent and ripen in a shorter window of time.)
    On the theory that bigger is better, “Improved” was tacked onto name of the strain of my early plantings. The original Golden Bantam was 8-row; Improved Golden Bantam is 10 to 14 row. I should have read the catalog more closely because Improved Golden Bantam casts too much shade, ripens too late for my intensively planted vegetables, and yields less, with but a single ear per stalk. The original also has better flavor, to me.

Permaculture, but not by Me

    Walking down the main path of my vegetable garden yesterday, you’d come upon a very permaculturalesque planting — in the path. The path was overrun with purslane, which I didn’t even have to plant. Purslane is a tasty, very nutritious vegetable enjoyed raw or cooked. But not by me.Hoeing purslane in path
    I grabbed my winged weeder and hoed the purslane loose from the soil. As a succulent, purslane can continue to grow — and seed! — even with its roots flailing in the air. So after hoeing, I scooped the plants up to feed to the compost file.

PROXIMAL THOUGHTS, PROXIMAL ACTION

Easy Access Water

I am reminded today of the importance — in a home garden — of proximity. Proximity of the garden to a door or, even better, a kitchen door. Proximity of the compost pile to a door, to the garden, and, if bulky materials such as manure or wood chips are hauled in, to a driveway. And, the spur for today’s rambling, proximity of the garden to water spigots.Trench for water hydrant
    The saying that “April showers bring May flowers” notwithstanding, supplemental water is usually critical in my garden in April. Just a few days of sunny, balmy weather is enough to dry out the surface of the ground, just beneath which lie in waiting, for moisture, my newly sown seeds. Or recent transplants, whose roots have yet to venture out and down into the ground.
    Once roots from sprouting seeds and transplants start growing in earnest, they’ll encounter plenty of residual moisture still sitting in the soil from winter’s rain and snow. Until then, I either have to carry watering cans (two cans at two gallons each) back and forth from the frost-free spigot against my house to the garden, or haul around hoses. The cans are top of the line Haw’s galvanized with good balance; even so, hauling water can get tedious, and the tendency to skimp a little on watering is unavoidable.
    Fifteen years ago I installed a frost-free outdoor hydrant near my secondary vegetable garden. What a luxury! Problem is that to get water to the main vegetable garden I have to unwind a hose and thread it through the garden gate. And then, if temperatures drop below freezing at night, common in April, nothing can be done till ice in the hose has defrosted. Again, watering is too often inadequate because I’m avoiding all this hassle.
    (Hot temperatures, dry weather, and plants feverishly sucking moisture out of the soil present no problem during most of the growing season — now, for instance. A few times each day, an inexpensive timer automatically opens a valve to let water flow through tubes to each vegetable bed and then out specially designed emitters to drip water into the ground at about the rate at which plants are drinking it up. But this automated, drip irrigation system can be damaged if put into service when temperatures drop below freezing.)My new hydrant
    So today I’m digging tenches and holes for two new, frost-free hydrants to bring the source of water right next to the main vegetable garden and to my compost bins. In the future, I’ll have no excuse to skimp on watering.

Free “Fertilizer”

    Too may gardeners shove their gardens in a far corner of their property, as if the garden was an eyesore. (Which it often is.) I suggest locating the garden as close to the house as possible, given constraints of sunlight; six or more hours of summer sun, daily, is ideal. And make it ornamental, with fencing, a nice gate, and shrubs and flowers around and in it. Keeping it weeded also helps, as far as appearance and productivity.
    There’s an old saying that “The best fertilizer is the gardener’s shadow.” Make it so that shadow conveniently falls on not only the plants but also spigots and compost piles.

Celeriac, What’s Up?

    Insufficient water in April could not be blamed for the poor showing of my celeriac plants. They weren’t even in the ground until early May, after the drip irrigation was up and running.
    Celeriac is a nice addition to the variety of root crops that can be left in the garden until late into fall and then stored for the winter under cool, moist conditions. The flavor, which comes from the swollen root (actually a hypocotyl, which is the portion of the plant above the roots and below the stem), is akin to celery, but smoother. It’s a botanical variety of celery.

Celeriac in old home

Celeriac in old home

    Last year, the first time in years that I grew celeriac, plants were stunted with nothing to harvest. Last year, I set the plants in a narrow bed on the west edge of the garden next to a full bed of tall corn. I blamed my failure on shade.
    This year celeriac got a sunnier spot. Still, the plants are puny. Some of the plants share the bed with kale which has spread its large leaves to create more shade than expected. Celeriac, according to reputable sources, allegedly tolerates a bit of shade.

Celeriac in new home

Celeriac in new home

    My plan is to slide a trowel into the ground beneath some of the puniest plants, lift the plants out of the soil, and plop them into more spacious, sunny environs.
    Next year I’ll pay even closer attention to celeriac and expect a better harvest. (Then again, this season’s plants may be gathering energy, readying themselves to swell their hypocotyls as autumn draws near.) All part of next year’s even better vegetable garden, to which my new frost-free hydrant will be a serious contributor.

A VERY GOOD YEAR, SO FAR

Bye, Bye Beetles

    So far, this growing season has been one of the most interesting ever. Could it be global warming? Perhaps. Perhaps it’s all a legacy from the relatively snowless winter with long periods of cold, but not frigid, temperatures. Perhaps it was spring’s two nights of plummeting temperature that followed a warm spell. Perhaps it was this summers extremes of dry and wet periods. Perhaps all that’s from global warming. Perhaps . . .
    All I know is that it’s all been pretty good. As I wrote previously, for the second year in a row, Japanese beetles made their entrance on time in June, and then, as if from stage fright, skittered away. Or never emerged from the soil. Or never hatched from eggs laid in the soil. Or the eggs never got laid last summer.
    For years, Mexican bean beetles would lay eggs on my bean plants, and those eggs would hatch into voracious larvae and then adults that would shred bean leaves. I was able to harvest enough beans for fresh eating and freezing only with succession planting of bush beans every couple of months.Mexican bean beetle
    For the past couple of years, only a few beetles show up here and there; nothing to worry about. So now an early sowing of bush beans provides the first plates of beans, and then passes the torch on to pole beans, which unlike bush beans, keep yielding till the end of the season. Bush beans peter out after a few pickings.
    (I did spray neem oil and the biological insecticide ‘Entrust’ a few years ago. Perhaps that broke the Mexican bean beetle cycle here. Perhaps it was the mere threat of a wall at the Mexican border . . . No, no, that can’t be it. Mexican bean beetles have established themselves north of the border for many generations, human and beetle. Throughout the country over many decades, this pest has waxed and waned in its severity, at times turning its taste to soybeans, sometimes to lima beans. My beetles never showed an appetite for my soybeans.)
    Two other pests that, I hope, can now be off my radar are scale insects on the greenhouse figs and flea beetles on the eggplants. That status comes with some effort on my part: weekly sprays, until recently, of “summer oil.” I expect to have to maintain those efforts every season. (Late update: I saw a few scale insects on the figs so did have to spray again.)

Skyrocketing Corn, De-Luscious Blueberries

    This season’s interests aren’t all about pests.
    Right now, corn stalks are as high — no, higher — than an elephant’s eye. (For journalistic accuracy, I looked up the height of an elephant’s eye. One report on the web, that fount of highly accurate information, reported the median height at 98 inches.) I just stepped away from my desk to measure the actual height of my corn, and it topped out at about 10 feet high. And that’s the variety Golden Bantam. I’ve grown it for many years, during which it always topped out at 6 or 7 feet.
    The first ears of this rich-tasting, old variety should be ready any day now. Will they also seem to be on steroids?Tall Golden Bantam corn
    No explanations for this corny behavior jump out. Year after year, the soil gets the same one-inch depth of compost, the 3-foot-wide corn bed is planted in two rows of hills, thinned to 3 stalks per hill, with each hill 2 feet apart in the row, and the bed is drip irrigated. Mislabeled seed can’t explain the phenomenon because this season’s popcorn (Dutch Buttered and Pearl) and polenta corn (Otto File) also have higher aspirations. Anyway, I’m not complaining.
    Apples never grow well here. This low lying valley is a sink for colder, moister air that, along with the backdrop of thousands of acres of forest, is a haven for apple pests. This season, with some spray assistance from me, the apple crop is relatively heavy and attractive. Apples, in those years when I do get a decent crop, are especially tasty here.Blueberry fruit cluster
    I have to tip my hat, once again, to blueberries, my favorite fruit and the most consistent performer among my many fruits. I have never not gotten a good crop of blueberries, come hell or high . . . 17 year cicadas, hurricane Irene, late frosts, etc. This season, canes are arching to the ground with a particularly heavy crop of berries.
    What will next year hold? An even better growing season?

GOOD FRUITS, ONE A VEGETABLE

World’s Best Fruit?

    Finally, I reap the fruits of one of my labors. Literally. The fruit is black mulberry, the species, that is Morus nigra, rather than any of the black-colored mulberries that grow all over the place around here. The latter are species and natural hybrids of white and red mulberries (M. alba and M. rubra).
    Black mulberry, native to the Mediterranean climate of western Asia, is not cold-hardy below temperatures in the ‘teens (Fahrenheit) so definitely not cold-hardy here. I first tasted it at a fruit conference in Davis, California and it wowed me even from among bowls heaped high with fresh-picked apricots, peaches, and other seasonal fruits.
    I had to get a tree to grow, which I did (from www.whitmanfarms.com). The tree went into a pot with potting soil. As it grew, I moved it on into larger and larger pots, stopping at an 18-inch diameter pot. I figured that would be the largest pot I could muscle down the basement steps for cool, winter storage along with my figs and pomegranates.
    The tree bore quickly, and the “east coast” black mulberries were delicious, what few of them I harvested. Problem was that birds also found them delicious, a problem compounded by the fact that the berries are not at their best until matte black and ready to be released from the plant at the slightest touch. The birds don’t wait that long.
    Dead ripe, the fruits are so soft that they can’t help but stain your fingers. (The stain was once used as a dye, called “murry.”)

A Cagey Solution

    My first solution to the bird issue was to plant the mulberry in the ground in my cool (as in temperature cool) greenhouse, which is also home to some in-ground fig trees. Since mulberry seedlings pop up all over the place around here, I just dug up a seedling, grafted onto it a stem from my black mulberry, and planted it in the greenhouse.Fruit cage
    Mulberry trees can grow big, bigger than my greenhouse. My plan was to espalier the branches against the west wall of the greenhouse. The espalier worked as far as training the branches in an ornamental candelabra. The birds were kept at bay. The espalier did not work as far as bearing fruit, the reason for which I have no idea why. I dug up the tree.
    My original mulberry still grows in a pot and, despite its small stature, still bears good crops of fruit. A few weeks ago I saw advertised a walk-in, temporary cage for protecting plants from birds (available from Gardeners Supply Co.).
    The cage arrived just as the first black mulberries were ripening. Within 20 minutes I had the various pole pieces joined to each other and to the corner brackets, and the net attached over the top and sides. At 4 feet by 4 feet and 6 feet high, the cage easily accommodates my mulberry. Even another plant or two.
    Every couple of days, now, I unzip the door, enter mulberry paradise, and carefully peruse the plant for dead-ripe berries. I exit with purple-stained fingers. Success.

Eggplant + Oil, A Good Combo

    Another success this year has been eggplant. I’ve gardened for many, many years, and for many, many years wasn’t able to grow eggplants well. Beginning gardeners are the ones who usually have greatest success with eggplant. Not exactly beginning gardeners, but beginning gardens.Eggplant plantEggplant, flea beetle damage
    Flea beetles love to eat eggplant (leaves). They pock the leaves with enough small holes so that only vigorously growing plants survive. But flea beetles rarely show up in a garden in its first year but by the second year they descend in hoards. Hence the successes of beginning gardeners in their beginning gardens.
    This year I tried controlling the beetles by spraying the plants weekly with “horticultural oil,” also called “summer oil,” which is a more refined and lighter version of “dormant oil.” I was mixing it up anyway to keep scale insects at bay on the greenhouse figs (more on that some other time). Long story short: The plants are only slight hole-y and I have a fine crop of eggplants on the way.   

TWO DELICIOUS ORBS, ONE BLUE & ONE WHITE

Soil is Key

    Last week I described my foray into the New Jersey Pine Barrens, culminating in a visit to the USDA research station there to experience many new, interesting, and tasty varieties of blueberry. The soils of the Pine Barrens, as I wrote provide ideal conditions for the rather specific and unique requirements of this fruit.
    That’s not to say that blueberries can’t be grown successfully beyond the Pine Barrens. In fact, they can be grown just about everywhere — if the right varieties are chosen and the soil is amended to suit the plants. The soil here at my farmden, for instance, is very different from that of the Pine Barrens. Mine is a naturally rich silt loam that is slightly acidic; the Pine Barrens are naturally poor sands that are very acidic.
    Both soils are well-drained, which is the first requirement for a blueberry soil. The way to make soils that are less than perfectly drained suitable is to plant the bushes atop mounds or carry water away in ditches or in buried, perforated pipes.
    Next, acidity. The pH for blueberries needs to be between 4 and 5.5, which is very acidic (and is what blueberry relatives such as rhododendrons and mountain laurels also demand). I acidifed my soil with elemental sulfur, a naturally mined mineral, before planting and do so periodically over the years, as needed. Many gardeners pile oak leaves or pine needles on their ground, or dig these materials into soil, to make a soil more acidic — that doesn’t do the trick; sulfur is what’s needed, 3/4 to 2 pounds per hundred square feet for sandy and clay soils, respectively, for each unit of pH change needed.Netted, healthy blueberries
    Blueberries like their roots coursing through soils that are high in organic materials, not rich organic materials such as manure or compost, though. Peat moss is good; I mixed a bucket full of peat with the soil in each planting hole when I planted. To maintain, even increase, levels of organic matter over the years, the ground beneath my bushes, every year, gets blanketed with a 3 inch depth of some weed-free organic material, such as autumn leaves, wood chips, wood shavings, sawdust, pine needles . . . whatever I can get my hands on.
    And finally, blueberries need water, especially when young. That initial dose of peat moss along with yearly, organic mulches, helps the soil hold moisture (in addition to many other benefits).
    Oh, one more thing: Ninety percent of blueberry roots are in the top 6 inches of soil. Hence their need for moisture. Those shallow roots also compete poorly with weeds. My 900 square foot of 16 blueberry plants is, essentially, a “no weed” zone, thanks to the mulch and occasional weeding.

Tastiest Turnips

    Pushing open the gate to exit the blueberry planting, I walk over and pull open the gate to the vegetable garden. There lies a beautiful (to me) row of sweet, succulent turnips. Not just any old turnip, but the variety Hakurei, the best (to me, and many others gardeners and farmers).
    Turnips are an underrated vegetable, perhaps because most that you can buy just don’t taste that good and because most that are grown in home gardens are not the best-flavored. The highest praise I know of for turnips is in the novel Tobacco Road, when Lov Bensey walks seven and a half miles to get a sack of winter turnips for fifty cents, which is half of his daily wage. (Admittedly, he was starving.)
    So here’s at least the second written accolade for the turnip. When a good variety is planted and it is well grown, it is a sweet, flavorful vegetable excellent raw, pickled, or cooked. The variety to grow is Hakurei and the way to grow them is in rich, well-drained soil with a steady supply of moisture, the latter of which mine get automatically via drip irrigation.

Hakurei turnip

Hakurei turnip

    In the past I planted turnips only in late summer for a crop that ripened during the cool weather of autumn. This year I planted an early crop in the greenhouse; that crop was harvested and eaten by mid-June. I had plenty of seed and space in later in spring, so I planted some outdoors then. We’re still harvesting that crop and, despite the hot days, the flavor is excellent. (Cool nights might be helping to maintain flavor.)
    Sometime in the next two weeks, I plan to sow seeds for fall harvest. Last year, that crop, harvested before the weather turned too bitterly cold and the soil froze, went into wooden boxes for cold storage, first just sitting outdoors, then carried into the garage, and, finally, carried down to the cool basement. The last of them, still tasty, were eaten March.

SUMMER WEATHER, PLANT THE GREENHOUSE

 Ginger on the Way

   Now that summer-y weather has blown in and is here to stay, it’s time to plant the greenhouse. Plant the greenhouse?! This time of year? Yes. No reason to let all that real estate go to waste through summer.
    Ginger plants that I started from supermarket tubers a couple of months ago were crying out to be released from the confines of their 4-inch pots. Warming their bottoms on the seed-starting heating mat pushed them along even when early spring skies were overcast and the greenhouse relatively cool. Ginger is a tropical plant that shivers even when temperatures drop below 55°F.Planting ginger
    I never could see the rationale for the current interest in growing ginger in northern regions. That is, until I tasted freshly harvested, baby ginger. This far north, ginger rarely has time to develop the mature, tan-skinned roots you see in supermarkets. No matter, because immature, or “baby,” ginger, which is ginger harvested before it matures, is better — a white, tender, tasty tuber. It doesn’t keep or ship as well as mature ginger, which is no problem for backyard growing or local sales.
    So 4 ginger plants went into two greenhouse beds. I’ll dig up the ginger in September, freeing up space for lettuce, celery, kale, and other cool weather salad makings that will inhabit the winter greenhouse.

Early Curcurbits

    One can eat only just so much ginger. (We’re still using last year’s harvest which, for long term storage, was sliced thin and put into jars with vinegar.) What about other greenhouse beds that are being vacated as the last of winter’s lettuce, celery, kale, and chard get harvested and cleared away?
 Greenhouse in June   Cucumbers and melons love heat, so a few extra plants that I started back in early May went into beds.
    The permanent fixtures in the greenhouse, the plants that really help the greenhouse earn its keep, are the four fig trees — Bethlehem Black, San Piero, Brown Turkey, and Rabbi Samuel — planted right in the ground. The largest of these has a trunk 7 inches in diameter. All yield bountiful crops daily in August and September, and less bountiful ones going into October.Figs growing, last of greenhouse lettuces

Tropicals and Subtropicals Summer Vacation

    In a reversal of fall, tropical and subtropical plants that had been moved into the greenhouse and house are now lined up outdoors, ready to offer fresh black mulberries, Pakistan mulberries, pineapple guavas, pomegranates, Golden Nugget mandarins, olives, dwarf Cavendish bananas (probably no fruit from this one, just a very tropical look), and a few other varieties of figs, in pots.
    (My black mulberry is the species Morus nigra, one of the best-tasting of all fruits, but is not cold hardy here. Black-colored mulberries that grow all over the place outdoors here are, despite black fruits, species of red or white mulberries, or their hybrids.)
    Any of my tropical and subtropical plants, given their druthers, would reach 8 feet, 10 feet, or even more feet skyward, and spread their roots many feet in all directions. Here, they can’t do that or they would be too big to move or to house in winter.
    So I mixed up a batch of potting soil, and started root pruning. It sounds brutal, and it is, but plants recover nicely and then happily have new soil to explore. Basically, I slide a plant out of its pot, stand it upright, and then start slicing off the outer edges of the root ball. Pruning shears take care of any roots too large to slice with a knife.
    The finished root ball is an inch or two smaller in diameter than it started out. How much to remove depends on the initial size of the root ball — larger plants get more removed — and, to a lesser degree, the kind of plant. Figs, for instance, tolerate especially brutal treatment.
 Root pruning   So much for the roots. To keep it manageable, the plant also needs stem reduction. Some stems get shortened, some are removed in toto, and some are left untouched. Who gets what treatment depends, for fruiting plants, on their fruiting habit — just where and how they bear fruit. Figs that bear on new shoots can be pruned rather severely; pineapple guavas bear on new shoots growing off older stems, so only moderate pruning is tolerated so that some older stems are preserved, etc.
    After root and shoot pruning a thorough watering, plants are ready for a year or two of good growth before they will again feel constrained.

WINTER’S LEGACY, STILL

Half a Pear, Tree

   Perhaps last winter’s weather — extended cold, but not frigid temperatures, and hardly any snow — is still playing games with us. Perhaps it is mischief from the early, extended, very warm weather in early spring that was followed by plummeting temperatures and our biggest snowfall (4 inches) of the year. Whatever the reason, some weird things are going on this growing season.Half dead pear tree
    Look at one of my old pear trees, for instance. This tree might be called my “sample” or my “first cut” pear tree. When I hear tell of a pear variety that might be worth growing, I get a scion and graft it onto this tree. The scion bears quickly, in theory, at least, and, if it passes the “first cut,” perhaps it will warrant its own tree. There’s not enough time or space to put every Tom, Dick, and Harry of a pear variety on its own tree.
    The tree now has about a dozen varieties of pear growing off various branches. That’s not weird, though. What is weird is that, right now, the top half of the tree is fully leafed out while limbs on the bottom half of the tree are leafless.
    A disease? Doubtful. A disease killing that much of a tree at once would probably originate in the trunk or roots, in which case the whole tree or only the upper portion would be leafless. And anyway, those leafless limbs are not dead. Cutting beneath the bark reveals living, green tissue.
    My hypothesis — a weak one — is that the cold snap in spring, where temperatures in the ‘teens followed a spate of temperatures in the 70’s, is the culprit. Warm temperatures in late winter and spring cause plants to rapidly awaken and lose the cold-hardiness they maintained through the coldest parts of winter. The pears seemed quite awake when that cold spell struck.
    But why was only the bottom portion of the tree affected? (Here’s the weakness in my hypothesis.) Windless, clear nights, such as during spring’s cold snap, bring a temperature inversion. Under such conditions, denser cold air can settle down near ground level. Even a few feet of elevation can make a difference, one that’s evident when riding a bicycle or motorcycle on a clear summer night on rolling terrain.
    So maybe the bottom half of the pear tree experienced temperatures just below the tipping point where enough damage occurred to delay leafing out.

Other Pear Trees, Still Whole

    No other plants, including other pear trees, experienced this bifurcation. Then again, the “sample” pear is all by itself where the microclimate might be slightly different.
    During that cold snap, the other pears were quite awake, seemingly just about ready to spread their blossoms. I was braced for a total crop loss. Weirdly, the trees went on to blossom just fine and now have what’s shaping up to be a decent load of fruit on them.

Seedling Troubles

    More weirdness: Every season I sow vegetable seeds according to a schedule I’ve developed over the years. I sow the seeds in mini-furrows in flats of potting soil or potting soil topped with a mix of peat moss and perlite. Every season I make my own potting soil from a mix of equal parts peat moss, perlite, compost, and garden soil, with everything sifted together through half-inch mesh hardware cloth.
 Sickly tomato seedlings   And every season I’ve had sturdy, lush green transplants to set out over the past few weeks. Not this season. Too many of the transplants are stunted, with flaccid leaves that are not uniformly lush green. Some have slight, interveinal yellowing of oldest leaves, some have slight reddening of veins, hinting, respectively, at insufficient nitrogen and phosphorus uptake .
    As usual, the weather could be blamed. Those auspicious, sunny days of late winter gave way to a long period of overcast days. Rain or not is not the issue because seedlings were in the greenhouse, watered as needed. Overwatered? Underwatered? Cool greenhouse temperatures could limit root growth, in turn limiting uptake of nutrients even if they are in the soil.
    The potting soil could be the culprit. Although ingredients of my mix are always proportionately the same, the compost isn’t exactly the same from year to year. Same goes for the “garden soil” that goes into the mix. I scrape it up from various places around the yard: the bottom of a finished compost bin, from my catch-all extra soil bin, from top layers of a pond I’m occasionally hand-digging.
    A couple of other gardeners and farmers have concurred with their seedlings’ poor growth this year. Perhaps it was the weather? Do you want to weigh in?

And the Winner Is . . .

    Very few people offered hypotheses on why only one limb of my plum tree was in bloom. Neither the weather nor any other environmental condition was to blame. In fact, I had grafted the tree a few years ago to four different varieties in order to spread out the harvest date and offer a greater variety of plum flavors.Plum, blossoming branch
    The bulk of the tree had already flowered.The one blooming branch was that of beach plum, the least reliable, smallest, and, to my taste, least flavorful of the lot. Perhaps I’ll graft that limb over to yet another variety.
    Congratulations to Tom, tkjazzer@gmail.com, on winning a copy of my book Grow Fruit Naturally.