SOME THINGS FOR SOME SENSES
Visual Delight, and some Aroma
I once grew a rose, Bibi Maizoon, that I considered to be as close to perfection as any rose could be. Its blooms, that is. They were cup-shaped and filled with loosely defined row upon row of pastel pink petals, nothing like the pointed, stiff blossoms of hybrid tea roses. Completing the old-fashioned feel of Bibi Maizoon blossoms is the flowers’ strong, fruity fragrance.
(In case you don’t know who Bibi Maizoon was, she was a member of the royal family of Oman. The Bibi Maizoon rose was bred by British rose breeder David Austin.)
The bush itself was as imperfect as the blossom were perfect. Where to begin? For starters, the thin stems could hardly support the corpulent blossoms. Couldn’t, in fact, so the blossoms usually dangle upside down. Upside down blossoms were not that bad because I considered Bibi best when cut for vases indoors to better appreciate her rare appearances and fragrance.
Top those deficiencies with the fact that Bibi Maizoon was also only borderline cold hardy in my garden and you would rightly guess that I no longer grow this rose.
I haven’t abandoned David Austin roses. I generally like them for their old-fashioned look: the bushes are, well, bushy and full; the blossoms have softer colors than those of traffic-stopping hybrid tea roses; and they are disease resistan and strong-growing.
I’ve previously praised the variety L. D. Braithwaite for its almost nonstop, dark red blossoms, red tinted leaves, and ability to laugh off any amount of cold. Three other varieties — Golden Celebration, Lady of Shallot, and Dame Judi Dench — came into my garden in the last year, their blossoms with varying degrees of yellow, the first a pure golden yellow, the second apricot-yellow, and the third apricot orange. Delicious. They all seem, so far, near-perfect.
Golden Celebration rose
Lady of Shallot rose
Organoleptic Delight, and also Beautiful
Ellison’s Orange is as unknown to most people as is Bibi Maizoon. It’s an apple, an old and very delicious apple, and, oddly enough, ripening right now. Everywhere else I read that this apple is supposed to ripen later in September and on into October, yet every year my Ellison’s Orange fruits ripen about this time of year.
Like Bibi Maizoon, Ellison’s Orange has its good and bad sides. On the plus side, it bears very well and at a young age. It also seems to be somewhat resistant to scab and cedar apple rust diseases, contradicting other sources on this point also. And what a beauty the fruit is, with its orange blush over a yellow background.
For me, the downside of this variety is the absolute necessity to pick it at just the right moment. One day an apple seems puckery underripe; the next day it might be sleepy and soft. If I harvest very carefully, I catch an apple at its delectable best, which is sprightly with an intense flavor that hints of anise seed.
I made my tree from a piece of stem whose cells trace back over a hundred years, to the garden of a Reverend Ellison in Lincolnshire in the east of England. The parents of the reverend’s new apple weren’t lightweights. One parent, Cox’s Orange Pippin, the king of British apples, has an intense flavor that sometimes hints of anise seed. The other parent, Calville Blanc, an old French apple popular in the court of King Louis XIII, has a spicy flavor with just a hint of banana. No wonder Ellison’s Orange tastes so good – as long as I catch it at the right moment.
Another Tasty Delight
If you buy corn at a farmstand or market these days, no need to have boiling water ready, as gardeners did in the past to stop enzymes from starting the conversion of kernels from sugary sweet to starchy bland. Two genes incorporated into modern corn varieties dramatically slow this flavor decline. They also ratchet up the sugars, making modern corns supersweet to begin with.
Call me old-fashioned, but my favorite variety of sweet corn, the only variety that I grow, is the old variety Golden Bantam, which lacks those modern corn genes. Although not nearly as sweet as modern hybrids, Golden Bantam has a very rich corny flavor with – to some tastes — just the right amount of sweetness.
Golden Bantam, a hit since 1906
Golden Bantam was introduced into the seed trade in 1902 by W. Atlee Burpee Company, who got their original 2 quarts of seed from New York farmer William Coy, who had tasted and enjoyed eating some ears at his cousin’s house in Massachusetts. Long story short: Everyone fell in love with Golden Bantam and it became the most popular corn of its day. An article in The Boston Transcript of 1926 states that “In the twenty-four years since [1902] it has made more friends than anyone else could make outside the movies. Which proves that popularity does sometimes follow real merit.” It’s an odd way to compliment but you get the picture.
Golden Bantam pre-dates hybrid varieties, the latter of which, in addition to other characteristics, ripen very uniformly. In a backyard garden, a whole bed of corn ripening at once isn’t necessarily a plus. I want to eat some corn every day, with a little extra each day for freezing.
My four beds of corn, the first planted in mid-May (around the date of our last-killing frost of spring) and the subsequent beds staggered every two weeks, provides just that. We’ve eaten corn almost every day since each mid-August and Golden Bantam shows no signs of slowing down or boring us.
A close eye is needed on cabbage and its kin because one day there’ll be no damage and next time you look, leaves are riddled with holes and poop.
The flavor hints of artichoke, a close relative. None the less, for me the flavor was awful and the stalks were tough. (Cardoon is usually covered to blanche them a few weeks before harvest. Blanching did not make mine more edible.)
I train my tomato plants to stakes and single stems, which allows me to set plants only 18 inches apart and harvest lots of fruit by utilizing the third dimension: up. At least weekly, I snap (if early morning, when shoots are turgid) or prune (later in the day, when shoots are flaccid) off all suckers and tie the main stems to their metal conduit supports.
I lop wayward shoots either right back to their origin or, in hope of their forming “spurs” on which will hang future fruits, back to the whorl of leaves near the bases of the shoots.
Newly planted trees and shrubs are another story. This first year, while their roots are spreading out in the ground, is critical for them. I make a list of these plants each spring and then water them weekly by hand all summer long unless the skies do the job for me (as measured in a rain gauge because what seems like a heavy rainfall often has dropped surprisingly little water).
Not only vegetables get this treatment. Buy a packet of seeds of delphinium, pinks, or some other perennial, sow them now, overwinter them in a cool place with good light, or a cold (but not too cold) place with very little light, and the result is enough plants for a sweeping field of blue or pink next year. Sown in the spring, they won’t bloom until their second season even though they’ll need lots of space that whole first season.
Every time I look at a weed, I’m thinking how it’s either sending roots further afield underground or is flowering (or will flower) to scatter its seed. Much of gardening isn’t about the here and now, so I also weed now for less weeds next season. It’s worth it.
This ancient variety, elongated and with a black skin, has been grown almost exclusively near the Pardailhan region of France. Why am I growing it? The flavor is allegedly sweeter than most turnips, reminiscent of hazelnut or chestnut.
Next year I can expect a vine growing 6 to 9 feet high and which is both decorative and tolerates some shade. What’s not to like? (I’ll report back with the flavor.)
Later in the season, cluster of bulbs form, similar to shallots, although forming larger bulbs. They can overwinter and make new onion greens and bulbs the following years.
The problem was separating the small tubers from soil and small stones. I have a plan this time around — more about this at harvest time.
Flowering meads of herbs, flowers, and grasses blanketed the ground beneath most of the orchards, providing — probably unknown back in colonial days — forage for beneficial insects to help protect crop plants.
My own home is brick; even a few four-foot-high walls around my vegetable garden and in other areas would improve the general appearance — and provide, warmer microclimates for cold-tender plants or early harvests. Not that the rustic locust fencing and arbors enclosing my vegetable garden look unsightly . . . but I’d like some brick walls.
Actually, that insidious blackness covering my beds is black vinyl. But that’s beside the point. Its purpose, like the black plastic against which I’ve railed, is to kill weeds. Not that my garden has many weeds. But this time of year, in some beds, a few more sprout than I’d like to see.
I had just dug my first garden which had a clay soil that turned rock hard as it dried, so I was especially awed, inspired, and admittedly jealous of the soft, crumbly ground in Scott’s garden. What a surprise when someone who had worked with Scott for a long period told me how tough and lean his soil had been when he started the garden. A number of giant compost piles were testimonial to what it takes to improve a soil.
The soil in my permanent vegetable beds is never turned over with a rototiller or garden fork; instead, every year a layer of compost an inch or so deep is lathered atop each bed, and no one ever sets foot in a bed. That inch of compost snuffs out small weeds, protects the soil surface from washing away, and provides food myriad beneficial microbes (and, in turn, for the vegetable plants).
Recent additions to that pile were an old soil pile from a local horse farm and soil from a hole I was digging to create a small duck pond. The latter was poorly aerated subsoil.
In practice, I mostly pay attention to rotation of plants most susceptible to diseases, which are cabbage and its kin (all in the Brassicaceae), cucumber and its kin (Cucurbitaceae), tomato and its kin (Solanaceae), beans and peas (Fabaceae), and corn (sweet or pop, in the Gramineae).
Root, leafy, and fruiting vegetables have somewhat different nutrient needs, so in the ideal garden these crops are rotated to make best use of soil nutrients.
A few years ago they stopped bearing well, collapsing with yellowing foliage not long after they bore their first pods.
Plants infected by aphanomyces have fewer branch roots and what roots there are lack the plump, white appearance of healthy roots.
My tea is nothing more than the liquid strained from compost soaked in water, then applied with a watering can at the base of the pea plants.