Summer pruned black raspberries

TWO BLACK BRAMBLES

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Good Stuff

What an unexpected treat this year. Black brambles galore. I choose my words carefully. 

Over twenty years ago I grew blackberries, the variety Chester because it was the most cold-hardy variety of the thornless varieties, available at the time. Chester blackberryI finally gave up on Chester because winter cold would snuff out many of its canes down to ground level. If I remember correctly, surviving canes bore fruit that was too late in the season to ripen fully or in sufficient quantity. Read more

Lake, mountains, and sky

BACK TO THE FUTURE

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What’s Not to Like About Gardening

If there’s one thing that irks me about gardening, it’s the necessity for too often having to think to the future. Always living in the moment just doesn’t cut it if you want to garden well.

Yesterday, as I was swimming in a local lake enjoying, each time I turned my head for a breath of air, the sun beaming down on me and the view of cottony cumulus clouds hovering above green, forested mountains, my thoughts turned to autumn. I was reminding myself that now, in the summery middle of August, it was time to sow certain vegetable seeds.Lake, mountains, and sky

Soon after getting back to the farmden, I filled a couple of small flats with potting soil. In the first, I made four mini-furrows, and sprinkled in seeds of Little Jade, Purple Express, and Blues napa cabbage, and Shuko Pac Choi cabbage, one variety per mini-furrow. Into the other flat went a mini-furrow each of Cos, Buttercrunch, Pirat, and Outredgeous lettuce seed.

Except for the lettuce, none of those Chinese cabbages appeals to me right now. But much of gardening entails not going with your gut (literally and figuratively in this case). Read more

Me scything

SPRINGTOWN FARMDEN, INT’L HEALTH SPA

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“Ancient Japanese” Exercise(?)

Welcome to Springtown Farmden, the international health spa. Allow me to show you around for a tour of our exercise offerings. The techniques and equipment used come from all reaches of the world (or at least can sound like they do).

The first couple that can get your blood pumping “come from” across the Pacific, Japan. The first of these, sīth-ing (translation: scything), does require development of some technique and access our more specialized equipment, a sīth (translation: scythe).

The sīth has a single pole with two handles attached, one at the upper end and one about halfway down. The metal weight attached at the bottom of the sīth is a couple of feet long, curved, and sharpened on its inside edge. Muscle tone and strength is created by putting the left hand on the upper handle, the right hand on the lower handle, flexing the spine to the right and then unwinding yourself counterclockwise while trailing the metal weight just above ground level. (The best of these sīths come from Austria, but are available in the US here.)Me scything

Sīth-ing can be made more rigorous by passing the sharp metal through tall grass or meadow plants. The taller the plants, the denser the plants, and the older the plants, the more the resistance. Read more

Two pigs

A WISE WISH?

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Plants, All Plants, Love it Here

You’ve got to be careful what you wish for. Nonetheless, the naturally rich, well-drained but moisture retentive soil here has made me, especially this season of abundant rainfall, heat, and sunlight — okay I’ll say it, wish I was gardening on poor soil. Then I could earmark my cultivated plants for compost, fertilizer, and other goodies that make for good soil. Weeds, except those that made their way beneath the limited areas beneath these plants, would languish.Weedy flower gardenThe naturally excellent soil here is weed heaven. Seems if I turn my back for a day, these interlopers, which stand waiting from outposts in field and woods, jump forward in among my cultivated plants. Quackgrass moves stealthily in from garden edges, pushing its pointy runners underground. Thistles pop up from lateral root and seeds. Read more

Me with bad carrots

CARROTS, YUK!

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Lack of Green Thumb, Or Something Else?

I just sunk my teeth into a carrot pulled mere minutes ago from the garden; the taste was not good! I’m not surprised, because that’s often the case with my carrots. For the reason why, I might turn to a book, one of my books, The Ever Curious Gardener, the last chapter where I talk about the senses, including flavor.Me with bad carrots

In that chapter I delve into various influences on flavor, things such as soil, light, moisture, day length, and temperature. They’ve all been studied, but mostly each by itself. Quoting myself, 

With light, moisture, temperature, day length — so many variables — making their mark on flavor, a more additive approach to growing flavorful crops might be more useful rather than trying to parse out individual, interacting, influences. 

This kind of attention has been lavished on studies with carrots by raising them in phytotrons, where light duration and intensity, day and night temperatures, and humidity can be manipulated, in pots of various types of soil. Testing soils and growing conditions mimicking those of Wisconsin, California, Florida, and Texas, the best flavored carrots…drum roll…were those grown in mineral, especially loam, soils as compared with muck soils (drained swamplands rich in organic matter) under mild winter conditions (such as in California). I’m not ready to relocate to be able to grow the most perfect carrot, and no need. Variety choice was still the most important determinant of flavor. 
Read more

The garden in fall

A SECOND “SPRING”

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Pricking Out and Growing On. Whaa?

Make believe it’s spring. That’s what I’m doing this time of year as I drop seeds into minifurrows of potting soil in seedling trays. It’s as if I’m getting ready to plant a garden — and, in fact, I am. The fall garden.

Having a fall garden is like having a whole other garden with no additional space needed. That’s why I’m sowing in seedling trays rather than elbowing my way into the present garden’s valuable real estate.The garden in fall

Today I sowed lettuce, endive, cabbage, kale, and cauliflower seeds. After a week or two of growth in a seedling tray, those seeds should have sprouted and seedlings will be large enough to “prick out” and carefully lift for “growing on” in individual. small pots or cells of multicelled flats of potting soil. Read more

Peony with powdery mildew

FOR THAT UNWELCOME MEDITERRANEAN LOOK

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One Name for Many Diseases

The powdery white coating I notice on leaves of my peony and lilac plants gives them a very Mediterranean look. Not attractive, though, at least to me, because that’s a sign of a disease, appropriately called powdery mildew. If I look around the garden, the disease is probably showing itself, or soon to do so, on a wide variety of plants, including phlox, zinnia, squash, gooseberry, and many more. (This blog post is excerpted from the chapter about plant stresses in my book The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Much Better Garden.) Peony with powdery mildewEven though powdery mildew is pretty reliable in showing up each season on certain plants — this is important! — the disease doesn’t necessarily spread from one kind of susceptible plant to the next. Many different fungi are responsible for the disease we collectively call powdery mildew, and each of these fungi have specific plant hosts. Thus, the fungus that causes powdery mildew on lilac (the fungus is Microsphaera alni) cannot cause powdery mildew on rose (caused by the fungus Sphaerotheca pannosa). Read more

Golden Bantam corn

WORTH GROWING

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Rumors Against Sweet Corn

My fourth and last planting of sweet corn went in a few days ago. I grow sweet corn despite reading years of advice that backyard gardens are too small to make sweet corn worth planting. In the last few decades, that advice has been reinforced by the fact that supersweet corn — which can be more than four times sweeter than heirloom (traditional) sweet corn, and holds that sweetness much longer after harvest — is so readily available at farmstands and markets. I strongly disagree on both counts!

Golden Bantam corn

Golden Bantam corn

Backyard gardens are too small? My vegetable beds are three feet wide and about 20 feet long. I plant corn in “hills,” which actually are not at all hilly. In gardening, a “hill” is a station, a location where you grow a clump of plants. Read more

Pakistani mulberry

SOME LIKE IT HOT

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Exotic Grapes

You’d think that I’d be over and done with the greenhouse this time of year. Spring vegetables and flowers have been germinated, pricked out, grown on, and all established in their homes in the garden.

But no, the greenhouse is still chock full of goodies, plants that tolerate heat. The first plant to jump out at you (visually) as you pass through the greenhouse door is a grape vine. Not just any old grape vine, but a vinifera grape vine (Vitis vinifera). “Vinifera” is the species of European wine and table grapes. They’re generally neither cold-hardy here, nor can they fend off attacks of our native insects and diseases, so have been hybridized with hardier and tougher American grape species, such as the fox grape (V. labrusca).

Point is, the grapevine in my greenhouse could not survive outdoors here. The variety I’m growing is Perle de Csaba, a table variety, which first fruited here a couple years ago; it’s seedless and sweet, with a strong aroma.Greenhouse grape

I grew it in a large pot, then didn’t move the pot, so it’s roots have sneaked out the pot’s drainage holes and into the moist, compost-enriched soil below. That’s fine. It’s in a good place, it’s stem now trained to climb up a chain to one of the greenhouse rafters. Short, fruiting shoots grow off up and down on either side of that permanent stem, a perfect bunch of grapes dangling from each of those shoots. Read more

Fruit in hand and on stem

EASY CHERRIES

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Sweet, Juicy, & Tolerant

Nanking cherries (Prunus tomentosa) are now at their peak of perfection, sweet and sprightly flavored, brilliant red in color, still firm, and, as usual, abundant. Nanking cherries are very juicy and not stingy to release the juice. Straight up, it’s the most refreshing juice imaginable.Picking Nanking cherries

You’ve never heard of Nanking cherries? Understandable since they are an uncommon fruit. (And warranted a whole chapter in my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden, now out of print but in the works for updating and expanding.) As the name tells you, they are native to China, more generally to the cold, semi-arid regions of Asia. This provenance tells you something about the toughness of the plant, where it weathers winter temperatures below minus 20 degrees F. and summer temperatures as high as 110 degrees F. Read more