Propagation Mania

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And the winner of my book giveaway from last week is  . . . (drum roll) . . . reader Meg Webb. Hey Megg, send me an email with your mailing information and I’ll get the book to you. Thanks to everyone else for their feedback.

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I have to admit a certain addiction for propagating plants. You would think that, what with sowing cabbage and Brussels sprouts seeds for transplants last week, starting tomato transplants in early April, grafting to make new Korean mountainash and apple trees and . . . ., any appreciation for propagation would be fulfilled.
But no. The seeds within a freshly eaten kumquat; why not plant them? Some of the seeds within a just eaten hardy passionfruit (Passiflora incarnata); plant them also. Not that every seed gets planted. Just some of the more unusual ones or just a few of those that are more usual. Without any restraints, a forest of apple and pear trees would have long ago inundated me.
My mania came to the fore again yesterday as I was neatening up some houseplants. The rose geranium had grown very leggy, with three or four lanky shoots, almost leafless except near their ends,

stretched out to a very unattractive 2 foot length. All that was needed to bring the plant back to its visual glory was to cut everything back to some tufts of leaves sprouting near its base. Which I did.

But those pruned stems; could I really just toss them into the compost pile? No. “Make new plants,” whispered the devil on my left shoulder. Which I did.
All that was needed to make more of this relatively easy-to-propagate plant was to cut the pruned stems into 4 inch lengths, with each bottom cut just below a node and each top cut just above a node. Best wound healing is at nodes, so such cuts avoid dead stubs with poor healing.
All but 2 or 3 leaves were removed from the 4 inch stem segments at the ends of the stems in order to strike a balance between cutting down water loss from the as yet unrooted stem pieces and allowing for some photosynthesis to feed the stem. To grow new leaves and roots, the leafless stems segments will have to rely on their stored energy reserves. To save space, I filled a flowerpot with potting soil and poked each stem segment about two-thirds of its length deep into the soil, then watered.
A clear plastic cover over the planted pot increases humidity to further reduce transpiration of water from leaves until roots form.
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Pruning shrubs, which generates a lot of stems, could be a real test of my restraint.
Shrubs are shrubs because they generally don’t have long-lived permanent trunks, like trees. Every year, new stems arise from at or near ground level. The way to prune shrubs, then, is to capitalize on this characteristic, by so-called renewal pruning, each year removing some oldest stems and excess youngest stems (suckers). Pruning is done near or at ground level. In so doing, the roots get older and older but no stem ever gets very old, and youngest stems have room to develop.
Easy enough. The wrinkle in renewal pruning is knowing when a stem has overstayed its welcome. If you know the plant, you can just look up the information — in my book, THE PRUNING BOOK, for instance, in which I group all shrubs into one of four pruning categories.
Easiest of all is to prune is the category of shrubs that includes witch hazel and tree peony. These shrubs perform well on old stems and make few suckers so no annual pruning is necessary to keep them looking prim and proper.
Lilac and forsythia are in the category of shrubs that flower on one-year-old stems originating up in the plant off older stems. So individual stems need not be cut back until they are a few years old. Each year, though, many new sprouts originate at ground level, too many. Their numbers need to be reduced enough so that those that remain have sufficient elbow room as they age to replace older stems that will be cut away.
Kerria is in the category of shrubs, along with snowberry, abelia, and rambling roses, that blossom best on one-year-old wood growing up right from ground level. Prune them by cutting away all stems 2 years old (and older, if a shrub has not been or is not being pruned annually).
The final category, counting butterfly bush and Hills-of-Snow hydrangea among its members, perform best on each season’s new, growing shoots. They’re also very easy to prune: Just cut the whole shrub down in spring. That’s a lot of stems for propagating. Still, restraint is easy with butterfly bush because the stems anyway are typically dead here by the end of winter. The roots survive, though, giving rise each spring to shoots that flower in summer.
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Pruning one of my filbert bushes

My filberts present one more wrinkle in shrub pruning. Filbert can be trained as a tree or as a shrub. But consider: filberts are susceptible to a disease, filbert blight, which can eventually kill a stem. This makes a good case for renewal pruning, i.e. growing them as shrubs. On the other hand, squirrels love filbert nuts, and one way to keep them at bay is with metal squirrel guards, feasible only on filberts trained as trees.
For now, dogs, cats, traps, and high grass have kept squirrels at bay, so I’m opting for filbert shrubs. The stems are very difficult to root so today’s prunings don’t even tempt me.

Book Giveaway, and Trees Large and Small

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A book giveaway, a copy of my book GROW FRUIT NATURALLY. Reply to this post with what fruits are most and least successful in your garden or farmden. Also tell us what state you are in (as in NY, OH, CA, etc., not happiness, wistfulness, etc.). I’ll choose a winner randomly from all replies received by March 23rd.
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A coming bout of colder weather notwithstanding, my weeping fig (Ficus benjamina) knows and shows that spring is around the corner. Buds along and at the tips of stems are stretching and showing some green of new leaves beneath their folds. I’m called to action.
The reason for this call is that my weeping fig, although it could soar to 75 feet outdoors in tropical climates, is in a small pot being trained as a bonsai. Now that the plant is just about ready to grow is the time to cut it back so that new growth remains proportional to the size of the pot, the roots, and the dictates of design.
At three and a half years old, my tree is only 6 inches high — and I want to keep it that small. Its pot, after all is only 4 inches long by 3 inches wide, and an inch deep.
Before I even get to the stems, I cut off all the leaves. True, this is not good for a plant, but my plant is healthy so can tolerate the stress. I go through the trouble of snipping off each leaf because that dwarfs, to some degree, new leaves that are about to emerge, keeping them more in proportion to the size of the plant.


Whoops, I just checked a book (The Pruning Book by Lee Reich) which states that the leaf pruning is best done after new leaves fully emerge. Oh well, I’ll leaf prune again as soon as the next flush of growth finishes. (Tropical plants, in contrast to plants of cold climates, typically have multiple growth flushes each year.)
With leaves pruned off, time to move on to the roots. Since the plant was last re-potted, a year ago, roots have thoroughly filled the soil in the small pot. There’s little or no room for new root growth, and new roots are the ones that drink in water and what few nutrients are left in the old soil.


The only way to make room for new soil and root growth is to get rid of some old soil and roots. I tease out old soil from among the roots and then prune away about a third of the old roots. With that done, I pack new soil into the pot, just enough to put the plant, with its surface mat of moss still in tow, sitting at the same level as before the root pruning.
The stems need little pruning. I snip off a crossing stem here, one reaching too far over the edge of the pot there, and another that threatens to extend too far skyward. Although stems made little growth over the past year, they, and especially the trunk, did thicken, helping to give the little tree an appearance venerable beyond its years.
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I haven’t looked, but my guess is that my fruit trees are also beginning to feel the effects of impending spring. Bouts of warm weather are the driving force in this case. One week we have highs in the ‘teens or twenties, another week highs are in the 40s or 50s. Back and forth through winter.
Plants went into winter well able to resist enticements of warm weather. That’s because until they’ve experienced a certain number of hours at chilly, not frigid, temperatures, they remain dormant and unwilling to grow. Once reaching about 1,000 hours total accumulated exposure to temperatures between 30 and 45°F., they begin to de-harden, that is, become less resistant to cold and more ready to grow.
Plants vary in the number of hours they need to fill their “chilling” bank, some needing a couple of hundred hours, others needing over 1,000 hours. The gut reaction would be to surmise that plants from colder climates would naturally require more chilling hours before they would begin to grow. That’s generally

true, but it ain’t necessarily so. In some very cold regions, spring comes on quickly without looking back, and the growing season is short. Fruit plants adapted to such regions must be ready to grow at the first breath of spring if they’re going to have time to ripen their fruits within the growing season. Just a little chilling at the beginning and/or end of the season is all they need.

With most fruit trees, flowers are the first evidence of awakened growth. But if they open too early, subsequent cold turns their colorful petals to brown mush. Dead flowers also cannot go on to become fruits.
I admit to being somewhat foolish for planting an apricot tree, a tree native to Manchuria, a region that experiences those cold winters and quick, steadily warming springs. The climate here in the Hudson Valley (and over most of continental U.S.), and especially at my less than perfect site for fruit-growing, has a good chance of fooling apricot trees into acting as if cold weather is past long before it actually is. My foolishness won’t be in evidence this year, though, because the tree is still too young to flower.

Brrrr, Good Thing It’s Cold.

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The sound and feel of crunchy snow underfoot are reminiscent of cold, snowy winters past. Pity poor trees and shrubs; they can’t stomp their limbs or do jumping jacks to get their sap moving and warm up. The sap has no warmth anyway. Still, except for garden and landscape plants pushed to their cold limits, plants do survive bitter cold.
Peonies, delphiniums, and other herbaceous perennials opt for the easiest survival route, letting their tops die off each winter. Anticipating frigid weather way back in late summer, they pumped nutrients in their stems and leaves down to their roots. What’s left of these plants spend a mild winter underground, especially mild beneath a blanket of snow.
Low growing plants whose stems and leaves stay alive in winter have it almost as good as those survived only by their roots. Near the ground, these plants aren’t exposed to the full brunt of winter winds or cold. And when Mother Nature decides to throw down a powdery, white insulating blanket, all the better. Just in case Mother Nature wasn’t going to cooperate with that blanket, I took it upon myself to throw a blanket of pine needles over my strawberry bed to protect them from cold.
Think about it: Water freezes at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit — not a particularly cold temperature for a winter night — and plants contain an abundance of water. Water is unique among liquids in that it expands when it freezes, so you can just imagine the havoc that would be wreaked as water-filled plant cells froze and burst. Yet plants that hold their heads high and upright all winter do weather the cold.
One tack is to shed those parts most likely to freeze — leaves. That still leaves water-filled cells of trunks and stems having to stand up and face the cold.
Water doesn’t necessarily freeze as soon as temperatures drop below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. To freeze, water molecules need something to group around to form ice crystals, a so-called nucleating agent. Without a nucleating agent, water “supercools,” remaining liquid down to about minus forty degrees, at which point ice forms whether or not a nucleating agent is present. All sorts of things can serve as nucleating agents — bacteria, for instance — so plants may not be protected all the way down to minus forty degrees by having their water supercool, but just a bit of supercooling may be all a plant needs to survive winter cold.
Plants have another trick for dealing with cold, one that is effective well below that minimum supercooling temperature. That trick is to gradually move water out of their cells into the spaces between the cells, where the water can freeze without causing damage. Cell membranes are permeable to water, so as temperatures drop ice crystals that form outside plant cells grow with the water they draw out of the cells. As temperatures drop, then, the plant is now threatened more by dehydration than by freezing.
One other thing at work for the plants here is something called freezing point depression, which is why antifreeze keeps the water in your car radiator from freezing and salt melts ice. Basically, whenever you dissolve something in water, you lower the resulting solution’s freezing point, more so the more that’s dissolved. Plant cells are not pure water, and as the liquid in those cells losing water becomes more and more concentrated in sugars and minerals, their freezing point keeps falling. Plants toughest to cold are those that are best at reabsorbing the water outside their cells when temperatures warm.
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What’s a gardener to do in cold weather? Ski, of course. Which this year is going to greatly improve my gardening.
Skiing brought me to Vermont. Vermont, besides skiing, brought me to the Gardener’s Supply (www.gardeners.com) retail store in Burlington, which brought me to their “Push Button Multi-Watering

Wand.” I contend that paying attention to and ministering to plants’ water needs goes a long way to good gardening. I’m expecting this watering wand, with options for everything from misting water, to gurgling it to making a soft shower, and more, to keep my plants even happier than they’ve been. I also like the sturdy, metal construction and, especially for watering hanging baskets, the articulating head with extensible reach.

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This year’s longer and colder reach of Old Man Winter’s fingers could help with pest problems.  Over the past few years, associated but not necessarily the result of warmer winters, the likes Japanese beetle, marmorated stink bug, spotted wing drosophila, late blight of tomatoes and potatoes, and black rot of apples have become bigger problems.

Perhaps winter cold will knock out these problems or set them back. For those that hitchhike north from warmer, more southerly locations, cold might drive those problems further south to make travel here more difficult or, at least, take longer. We’ll see.

Bananas, No, Yes.

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Yes, we have no bananas. We do have a banana tree.
Decades ago I was in a similar situation. How could I resist a catalog ad for a dwarf banana tree, one that wouldn’t grow more than 6 to 8 feet high, so could be accommodated within the confines of a standard room? I bought the small pup, which is what small, plantable offshoots from the mother tree are called, and planted it in a large pot. The pup grew. And grew. And grew. The plant topped out at 6 to 8 feet but the developing leaves, rolled up and pointing skyward before unrolling and flopping down, reached a lot higher. Banana isn’t really a tree; it’s a giant herb whose “trunk” is, in fact, made up of concentric layers of rolled up leaves that don’t flop down to a more horizontal position until they unroll.
“A mature tree only gets 6-8 feet tall, but provides up to 90 bananas per year!” states a contemporary web ad for Cavendish dwarf banana. As for the 90 bananas, yes, I had no bananas. Bananas are tropical

plants, thriving best in full sunlight with average annual temperatures around 80°. A sunny room in winter is no home for a banana. The room was cool, not tropical, and, though bright, its light paled against a sunny day in the tropics.

Besides delaying or voiding any possibility of fruiting, indoor conditions left my plant looking forlorn, even if it did perk up each summer outdoors. Upon my return from a winter trip to the tropics where I had seen banana plants reveling in sun, heat, and humidity, I took pity on my Dwarf Cavendish and granted it eternal afterlife in my compost pile.
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Last spring, my friend Sara (of last week’s grafted tomato fame) stopped by with a gift: A banana plant, evidently another a Dwarf Cavendish Banana judging from the decorative reddish splotches on the leaves. How could I refuse such a plant, recently removed from a greenhouse, in all its lushness.
In the decades since my old banana’s passing, banana plants have become more popular as ornamentals. The plants grow rapidly, so a non-dwarf variety, once summer heat kicks in, will soar quickly to 10 feet or more to create the focal point of a tropical oasis. You’d need a big pot to fuel such growth. Or you could plant Mekong Giant Banana (Musa itinerans var. xishuangbannaensis) or Golden Lotus Flower (Musella lasiocarpa), both closely related to the edible banana but — and here’s a big difference — very winter cold-hardy (for bananas). Either plant (available from www.onegreenworld.com and www.raintree.com) could remain outdoors, with mulch, through winters with temperatures well below zero degrees . The tops die back but the roots survive to resprout each year. Who wants to see a tropical oasis in the snow anyhow?

Dwarf Cavendish is not a hardy banana and does not reach proportions to create anything more than a mini-oasis. Still, my new one is weathering winter well. My original plan was to bring the potted plant down

to remain semi-comatose in the cold basement. But it started out in autumn near a sunny window in a cool room and never made it down the steps. It looks forlorn but ready to perk up after conditions change. And small, because it’s cramped into an undersized pot. I haven’t watered it for months! I don’t want it to grow — yet.

Come spring, Dwarf Cavendish will get repotted, pups removed and potted, and given good growing conditions. One pup will get planted outdoors to get as big as it can before cold weather, then dug up and put in the basement. Even if “Yes, we have no bananas,” there will be leaves aplenty for cooking, wrapping, serving food, and general tropical lushness.
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Not that New York bananas are an impossibility without a old-fashioned, energy-guzzling  hothouse. Given an early start in my barely heated greenhouse, a short-season banana might actually ripen its fruit this far north. A guy in Georgia has found that the variety Veinte Cohol (www.logees.com) will ripen its fruit in October if it’s 2 to 3 feet tall going into summer. My greenhouse is something like Georgia, without the drawl.
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All this talk of bananas is admittedly odd with morning temperatures here hovering below zero degrees. This winter has been interesting, seemingly cold but only in comparison with the relatively warm winters of the past decade or so.
The low here, so far, has been minus 14 degrees. The effect is already evident on my bamboo, Phyllostachys aureosulcata, whose leaves, though still attached, are dry and muted green. They were

supposed to remain alive, looking shiny and lush green, down to minus 20°. But the cold came on quickly this season, before plants had a chance to acclimate, and there were extended periods of it. Rainfall, snowfall, and humidity also have direct and indirect effects on how well plants face cold. For plants “it’s not how cold it gets, it’s how it gets cold.”

Graft, the Good Kind

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My friend Sara had a question about graft, which made me immediately think of a recent news item stating that, for the first time, more than half of the members of Congress are millionaires. You rarely hear about graft these days, perhaps because dollars are so ubiquitous a lubricant for our political machinery. No need anymore to elevate the practice with a special word.
But Sara was talking about grafting, not graft, and it was for tomatoes. Apples, peaches, and other fruit trees have been grafted for centuries. Tomato grafting is relatively recent, at least in this country. Sara wanted to know my thoughts about grafting tomatoes and whether we should pool our resources to get some plants.
Grafted tomatoes might grow more vigorously, might be resistant to soil-borne diseases, and/or might be more tolerant of salty, wet, or cold soils. A grafted plant has a specially chosen rootstock — Maxifort, Beaufort, and Emperador are some common ones — upon which is grafted a good-eating variety, often an

heirloom variety. Whether or not, and which, positive traits the resulting composite plant possesses depends on the choice of rootstock. Grafted plants have allowed farmers to keep growing tomatoes in greenhouses and soils where the plants would have otherwise petered out from nutrient problems or buildup of disease.

With decades of grafting fruit trees under my belt, I’d feel confident grafting tomatoes. There are a few differences, of course: tomatoes are grafted when small (with 2 to 4 leaves); they are succulent and in leaf so need to be kept in high humidity until the graft heals; and, best of all, you see results quickly, within a week or two. You start by sowing seed of the rootstock variety followed, a week later, by sowing the scion (eating) variety. Once rootstock and scion plants are large enough to graft, you lay their stems side by side and make an angled cut into both at the same time with a straight-edge razor. Set the bottom cut of the scion atop the top cut of the rootstock and then hold the stems aligned with a tomato grafting clip or piece of tape. After a week or so of warmth, high humidity, and indirect light, the graft should be healed and the composite plant ready to acclimate to brighter light, cooler temperatures, and lower humidity and — eventually — outdoor growing conditions.
An easier but more expensive route would be to purchase grafted tomato plants. Sources such as http://territorialseed.com and http://www.johnnyseeds.com sell grafted plants as well as rootstock seeds and grafting clips.
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Do I want to grow grafted tomatoes? Yes, I’d give the plants a try — if grafted plants of an heirloom variety landed in my lap. Which is to say that I’m not ready to spend much money or effort on grafted tomatoes.
One reason is vigor. Grafted tomatoes grow more vigorously, but my ungrafted, staked  tomatoes always start to grow out of reach by the end of August. More vigor? No thanks. Also, there’s often an inverse relationship between vigor and fruitfulness.
As far as diseases, I avoid planting tomatoes where they’ve grown for the past three years, clean up old stems, leaves, and fruit thoroughly at the end of the season, and mulch each year. In so doing, buildup of soil pests is avoided, overwintering inoculum at the beginning of each season is reduced, and spores of overlooked diseased tissue are buried.
When asking me about grafted tomatoes, Sara probably had in mind late blight disease, which has devastated tomatoes in recent years. Grafted tomatoes offer direct protection only against soil-borne diseases, such as verticillium and fusarium wilt. Around here, at least, early blight, septoria leaf spot, anthracnose, and late blight are what strip plants of leaves and pockmark the fruits. Grafted plants would not be resistant to these diseases.
Increased vigor might help a plant pump out extra fruits in spite of disease — or not. I’m not going to any special efforts to plant grafted tomatoes.
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Apples are another story, one for which I am turning to rootstocks and grafting.
First, a little background: I have an especially poor site for growing apples. Cold or cool, moist air collects in this low spot, making plants prone to disease and frost, and the 6,000 acres of woods fifty feet away provide haven for insect pests. The site is also wetter than I realized. Still, when I do get to harvest apples, their delectable flavor makes them worth the effort.
As with tomatoes, an apple rootstock can impart certain desirable characteristics to the resulting composite tree. My present planting is a row of superdwarf trees. These small trees, although early bearing and productive, need codling with perfect soil. My plan is to make new trees that are more tolerant of less-than-perfect soil conditions and, being taller, might hold their heads in slightly more buoyant air to reduce disease pressure.
Apple has been grown so widely and for so long that many rootstocks have been developed. Thus far in

A young pear graft

my research, a rootstock named G.30 seems the best option, creating a mostly self-supporting (except with certain varieties and heavy crop load when young), medium-sized tree tolerant to wet soil and fire blight disease. Best of all, it promotes of early bearing of the scion variety grafted on it.

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I’ll be lecturing at the NOFA-CT winter conference on March 1st in Danbury, CT. The topics? “Growing Figs in Cold Climates” and “Multi-Dimensional Vegetable Gardening/ Farming.”

The Season Begins

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Gentlemen (and ladies, and kids), start your engines. The 2014 gardening season has begun, here on the farmden, at least.
The day began with my lugging the big pail of potting soil from the cold garage to a warm spot near the woodstove. My home-made potting soil — equal parts peat, compost, garden soil, and perlite, with some soybean meal thrown in — is moist when I make it, so was frozen solid. Not usable or suitable for germinating seeds.
Once the potting soil defrosts and warms, I scoop it into a seed flat and a small plastic tub into which I’ve drilled drainage holes. Firming the soil in place with my Furrow Maker, a small board with spaced out,
The Furrow Maker in action

1/4-inch dowels glued to its underbelly, creates a miniature farm field. Into the tub’s “field” go rows of fresh onion and leek seeds (fresh is important with these seeds, which lose viability after a year or two), about 7 seeds per inch, which is enough to well populate the “field” without causing crowding. After the seeds are covered with soil and gently and thoroughly watered, the tub gets covered with a pane of glass and placed on a heating mat that provides gentle warmth of between 70 and 80 degrees F.

I could sow onion seeds outdoors in early spring. The onions I’m growing, and the ones all northern gardeners should be growing, are so-called long day (in fact, short night) varieties. Their leaf growth comes screeching to a stop in early summer’s 15 or

16 hour days. The plants shift gears and redirect their energy into pumping up growing bulbs. More leaves at that time means more stored energy available to swell up sweet, juicy bulbs. That’s what I want and why I go through the trouble(?) of early, indoor sowing. I’ll plant out the seedlings in early May.

The small seed flat gets similarly filled with potting soil and sown with seeds, lettuce seeds in this case. Greenhouse lettuce is still going strong but I want to have some transplants ready for when the older stuff peters out. A 4 by 6 inch flat with four furrows of lettuce seeds should provide all the lettuce transplants I need for many weeks.
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A greenhouse full of only lettuce could get boring. Other sorts of edible greenery currently share the space, and will continue to do so in the coming weeks. Some has been planted, and some has planted itself.
Among the planted greenery is a whole bed of kale and Swiss chard livened up with a couple of fennel plants. Also mâche, which usually plants itself except that overly diligent weeding in the greenhouse
Fennel, chard, lettuce, and kale in this bed

necessitated transplanting self-sown mâche from outdoor garden beds into the greenhouse last September.

Self-sown greenery includes claytonia (miner’s lettuce), minutina, and — more familiar to most people — celery. Claytonia doesn’t have much flavor but adds texture and color to a winter salad. The same goes for minutina, which is actually an edible species of plantain (the common lawn weed, not the banana relative). Celery plants are in various stages of growth. We’ve been eating the mature ones for months and the smallest seedlings will be ready for transplanting out into the garden in early May.
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So my friend Bob is over for a visit. It’s near lunchtime and he beelines for the freshly baked loaf
Celery for eating and celery babies for transplanting

of bread sitting innocently on the kitchen counter. Bob grabs a knife and already has a sandwich in mind. “Do you have any tomatoes,” he says. What? Tomatoes? It’s midwinter!

I guess he’s made the link gardening-greenhouse-tomatoes. Never mind winter. Sorry, not in my greenhouse in winter, for a few reasons.
Fruiting demands a lot of a plant’s energy. That energy comes from the sunlight. Even though the sun has been rising higher in the sky and for longer periods daily, its light is still paltry compared to midsummer sunlight. A bright summer day bathes the garden with about 10,000 foot-candles of light. My greenhouse, according to measurements taken at high noon on this crystal clear day, is bathed  with about 6,400 foot-candles of sunlight.
Natural sunlight could be supplemented with artificial light. Not a table lamp or even a bank of fluorescents, though. Light intensity falls off as the inverse square of distance from the light source; double the distance and you’ve got only one-quarter the intensity. So plants need to be close to the light source, which then will shade natural sunlight. Special high intensity bulbs are needed to make a dent in winter’s relative darkness.
And then there’s the temperature needed to raise a crop of tomatoes in February. For tomatoes, I wouldn’t want temperatures lower than in the 50s. My greenhouse heater kicks on at 37°F. Each degree of warming increases heating costs about three percent.
Winter tomatoes don’t seem worth the extra cost in dollars and to the environment from increased usage of gas or electricity. And they don’t taste that good. I can wait.

Thank You.

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Thank you to everyone who offered to send me seeds of ‘Gardener’s Delight’ tomato from Britain. I have some seeds, and will of course, post the results of my little experiment — in August.

The Capillatron & A Bit of Alyssum

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Alyssum’s problem may be that it’s too easy to grow. Sprinkle some alyssum seeds on the ground or plug in some transplants, water, and forget about them. Soon you have a mound of tiny, white flowers. That also might be alyssum’s problem. No traffic-stopping colors or humungous or odd-shaped blossoms.
But why think about alyssum (Lobularia maritima) this time of year? Because my alyssum just opened the first of its tiny blossoms. Let’s backtrack, to last spring.
As usual, I was going to sprinkle alyssum seeds on the ground to fill in some areas along the edge of a flower bed where, in all honesty, the plants would probably go unnoticed. Then I realized how much I actually like alyssum if I stop to look at it, and I especially love the blossoms’ honey-like aroma. So instead of

sowing seeds in the ground, I sowed them in a pot. And I placed said pot on the low wall along the walkway leading to my front door. All summer and well into autumn, I’d stop and admire the potted mound of tiny, white blossoms and bend down to drink in their aroma. (Angel’s trumpets, Maid of Orleans jasmine, rose geranium, and mint were among other potted, olfactory delights sharing that low wall.)

Alyssum is a cold hardy annual or short-lived perennial. Winters here are too cold for it to survive outdoors but rather than be sacrificed to winter’s fury, the potted plant found a new home indoors near a sunny window. The plant, native to beaches and fields of the Mediterranean, the Canary Islands, the Azores, and France’s Atlantic coast, tolerates heat, drought, and some shade. Perhaps my indoor plant could be coaxed to flower through winter.
Annual plants expend a lot of energy flowering nonstop through summer. They need periodic rests. My alyssum was pretty much spent by the time I brought it indoors. I should have sheared it back in late August, which would have stimulated and allowed some time for new growth while the growing was good. Because I neglected to do this, not having planned on bringing the plant indoors, it just sat in a state of suspended animation through late fall and early winter. 
“Desperate times call for desperate measures.” Okay, the times weren’t particularly desperate, just short days and cool, indoor temperatures. And the measures weren’t that desperate. I sheared back the alyssum about a month ago.
And now came the first of many white blossoms. Unless the plant decides to show its annual-ness and just peter out.
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Clay. Plants. Soil. Pots. Depending on perspective, some of these associations are positive; some negative. Clay, soil. Although many gardeners bemoan having such soils, most clay soils are fertile. Clay, plants. The organic spray called ‘Surround’ is nothing more than kaolin clay, which turns out to be a very effective at convincing pestiferous insects to go elsewhere.
Clay, pots. Nice. Sculpted and then fired in a kiln turns even the stickiest, most infertile clay into an object of utility and beauty. Lucky for me, my wife Deb is a potter (http://www.goldmanceramics.com), so I occasionally reap marital rewards in the form of pots for plants.
More recently, ceramic marital rewards went further, with the fabrication of an idea I had for an automatic pot watering device, which I’m calling a capillitron. Picture an upside down soda bottle with its bottom end (now up) closed with a removable lid and its top end (now down) tapering to a narrow cone closed off at its end. The whole thing is glazed except for the bottom few inches of tapered cone.
The unglazed portion of the capillatron gets pushed into the soil of a potted plant. The capillatron

reservoir is filled with water, then covered with the lid to prevent evaporation. As the potting soil dries, it draws moisture through the capillary channels of the unglazed, tapered portion of the capillatron, the water in which is continually replaced with the water within the reservoir. The reservoir portion, up out of the soil, is glazed to cut short any capillary migration of water from there to the outside of the pot where it would evaporate.

Within the flower pot, any portion of potting soil that dries will draw moisture from elsewhere in the pot, eventually leading back to right around the capillatron. Theoretically, then, the entire volume of potting soil remains consistently moist as long as the capillatron reservoir holds water. The capillarity within the potting soil, which moves moisture up, down, or sideways, as needed, comes from the organic matter in the mix (compost plus peat moss or coir in mine) and — you guessed it — clay in the garden soil that I add to the potting mix.

I’m Prepared, Gardenwise, For Cold Weather

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I’m prepared, gardenwise, for cold weather. What’s more, I’ll know when it’s here. My quiver of thermometers stands ready.
Outdoors, I’m monitoring temperatures with two Taylor brand thermometers. The “Digital Wireless Weather System” sensor out in the garden beams temperature readings to the indoor receiver unit to keep me posted on the weather. In addition to the temperature, this thermometer shares the dew point and the maximum and minimum temperatures from whenever I last re-set those temperatures.
The other Taylor thermometer, an old, mechanical, mercury-filled, min-max thermometer keeps the digital thermometer honest. What it lacks in convenience (no beaming from this thermometer) it makes up for with accuracy. Good thing, too, because for all its convenience, the digital thermometer is often — perhaps always, I’ll have to check — 5 degrees out of whack. Five degrees is a lot when I want to know if frost descended on the garden some early spring night or want to brag honestly about how cold temperatures drop here in midwinter.
My mudroom is unheated but maintains relatively moderate temperatures by sharing a wall with the woodstove-heated living room. As such, it’s something like a giant refrigerator, a good place, certain times of the year to store potted plants, scion wood, and boxes of fruits, vegetables. But how cold, or warm, is it in there? Another old, mechanical, mercury-filled, Taylor min-max thermometer keeps me posted on conditions in there.
My basement is barely heated and has a Bilco door entrance that I re-built out of wood with a clear polycarbonate plastic cover to make a very cool (temperaturely speaking), bright place to overwinter plants. Gotta measure the temperatures there, of course, for the plants and, back from the bright area where I have stored home-made beer and boxes of apples. More thermometers.
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For all the pleasure, in food, fun, and ambience, afforded by a greenhouse, it does bring it share of nail biting.
One cold, winter night, I realized that the propane heater wasn’t kicking on; the gas company had forgotten to fill the tank. Now a weekly reminder pops up on my computer screen every Wednesday morning to remind me to check the gas level and call for a delivery if the level drops too low. Problem solved.
A bevy of thermometers –and that’s not all of them?
On another cold, winter night, I again realized that the propane heater wasn’t kicking on when needed; this time the tank was full but the pilot light was out. Strong winds had created an updraft in the chimney, snuffing out the flame. A couple of holes drilled low on the pipe let some air into it to decrease the updraft. Problem solved.
On yet another cold, winter night, I realized yet again that the propane heater wasn’t kicking on when needed; again, the tank was full and the pilot light was out, but this time it refused to be lit. The fault then was with the thermocouple, which turns off the gas if the pilot light goes out. I purchased a new thermocouple — and 3 more backups for future malfunctions — and soon a warm, tropical breeze was flowing from the heater.
As further insurance for gas problems, I installed an electric space heater wired to its own thermostat. The electric heater should take care of any gas problems unless outdoor temperatures drop into the single digits, which would be more cold than the heater could handle.
All the above precautions are for naught if the electricity fails — not a rare occurrence around here. The propane heater’s thermostat and fan gobble up a miniscule amount of electricity; miniscule though it is, the heater will not work at all without it. Got that covered now, with a deep discharge marine battery on a trickle charge that is wired to an inverter to convert the direct current to house current. 
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Even the electrical backup is for naught if I’m not aware that the gas is low, the thermocouple needs replacement, the gas heater isn’t working, or the electricity is off. Enter the newest addition to my quiver of thermometers: the “La Crosse Technology Wireless Temperature Station with Trends and Alerts.” This thermometer wirelessly beams the greenhouse temperature homeward. 
Even better, this thermometer will wail if the temperature drops below (or above) a certain amount, which I set at 32°F. in the greenhouse. Of course, I can check the honesty of that thermometer against yet another old mechanical, mercury-filled, Taylor min-max thermometer that hangs in the greenhouse on a post with the La Crosse sensor. The La Crosse thermometer is new; so far it’s honest.
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Not to place too much emphasis on temperature (did I mention my compost thermometer, with its 2-foot-long probe sunk deep in the innards of one pile, or the small probe thermometer that monitors temperature within a seedling flat?) but temperature is not the end-all for how plants fare in winter.
Temperature trends are important, as are temperature and moisture conditions going into winter. For instance, Asian persimmons grow in South Korea but not here; our winter temperatures are similar but the dry autumn weather of South Korea toughens plants up for the cold months ahead. My bamboo, Phyllostachys aureosulcata, came through last winter, when temperatures dipped briefly to -20°F., looking spry and lush. Single digit temperatures of the recent polar vortex burned all the leaves.
With my thermometers, I may not be able to do anything about the weather (outside the greenhouse). But at least I can complain about it with authority.

Help!

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For a little experiment I’m doing I need seeds of Thompson & Morgan’s ‘Gardener’s Delight’ tomato. This British company (http://www.thompson-morgan.com) sells those seeds on their British website, but not their U.S. website. T&M does not ship items from that site to the U.S. Can someone out there send me a packet of those seeds? (‘Gardener’s Delight’ seeds are also sold by some U.S. seed companies but, for the purposes of my experiment, I need T&M’s seed of that variety.) Please contact me through my website, which is linked to this blog (on your right, just below the photo of me). Thanks.