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COMPOST, KALE, A FLOWER, AND AN ODD ONION

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Ins and Outs of Compost

Mostly, what I’m doing in the garden these days is making or spreading compost. Lots of good stuff — old vegetable plants, hay, weeds, rotted fruits — is available to feed my compost “pets.” And compost spread now has the ground ready for planting in spring.

Do you have any questions about composting? Want to know how to make best use of cocompost pile being wateredmpost? Interested in details about how to make gourmet compost? This is a reminder that on Wednesday, September 23, 2020 from 7-8:30pm EST, I’ll be hosting a webinar about composting. For more information and registration, go to https://leereich.com/workshops.

A recording of the webinar will be available for a limited time period to anyone who registers but can’t make it to the live presentation.

Kale, You’re More than Beautiful

I’m lucky enough to have a French window of two big, inward swinging panels out of which I can look over my vegetable garden every morning. Oddly enough, the garden bed that is catching my eyes these mornings for its beauty is the bed mostly of kale plants.

No, it’s not a bed of colorful, ornamental kale, not even a reddish kale such as Russian Red. I grow just plain old Blue Curled Scotch kale, which is no more bluish than any other kale, or any other member of the whole cabbage family for that matter. What catches my eye each morning is the way the curly leaves flow together like an undulating wave of verdant frilliness.
Kale, from upstairs window
My vision could be swayed by my knowing that kale is such a healthful vegetable, being especially rich in calcium and vitamin A. Or the fact that it’s so easy to grow. I sowed the seeds in early March, set out transplants out in early May, have been harvesting it since the end of May, and will continue to do so probably well into December. (Another bed of kale, which I seeded right out in the ground at the end of May, is also looking good.) 

Unlike broccoli, whose prime is past once buds open into flowers, or cabbage, which splits if left too long, kale doesn’t need to be harvested at just the right moment. It just keeps growing taller, with more leaves, if left alone.

The only thing kale needs protection from is rabbits and woodchucks, like most vegetables, and from cabbage worms. A fence and two dogs keep rabbits at bay. One or two sprays of the biological pesticide Bacillus thurengiensis, sold commercially under such trade names as Thuricide and Dipel, is all that’s needed for the worms (they’re actually caterpillars, not worms). Or nothing. Some years, damage is light enough so that no control is necessary.

What more could I ask for from a plant: good looks, good health, and good flavor?
Row of kale

Kiss Me Over the Garden Gate

I take it upon myself to personally promote the revival of an old-fashioned flower: kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate (Persicaria orientalis). It’s big, it’s beautiful, and it’s distinctly old-fashioned.

If you know the weed called smartweed, you have a hint of what kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate looks like. Smartweed is a trailing weed, usually no more than a foot or so high, with what look like small droplets of pink dew at the ends of its stems.

Kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate looks like smartweed on steroids, the “droplets” the size of bb’s and, rather than trailing, the plant rises with robust arching stems to more than seven feet high. It’s just the right height and form for growing next to a garden gate, which is where my plants sometimes grow.
kiss me over the garden gate
Kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate is a little hard to get started because the seeds germinate slowly and erratically. My plants thankfully live up to their reputation of being self-seeding annuals. The self-seeding plants come up more robustly than the coddled few seedlings I used to transplant each year.

Kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate’s self-seeding habit is restrained enough to keep it from being frightening. All I do each spring is weed out the few extra plants, as well as those that stray too far from my garden’s gate.

Evergreen Onions

For many years, in addition to starting onions from seed, sown in February, I also would go the more conventional route and bought a few “sets” for planting. Sets are those small bulbs that grow first to become scallions, which are mostly leaf, then go on to fatten into bulbs that can be harvested and stored.

Nowadays, instead of planting sets for scallions, I grow bunching onions, yet another type of onion, one that never ever makes fat bulbs. I’ve sown them in February for later transplanting, or directly in the garden. They always remain scallions, never bulbing up, and multiply by growing new baby plants at their bases.
Evergreen onion
The variety I grow, Evergreen Hardy White, can allegedly live through winters here. Come spring, the plants can be divided to make more scallions for eating and for growing. (I’ve always eaten them all; this year I’ll leave some to challenge their winter hardiness.)

Tops of my bulbing onions dried down and were harvested weeks ago, but these bunching onions never cease to maintain their fresh, green scallion-y character.

GOOD LOOKS, GOOD TASTES

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Kale’s Delights

I’m lucky enough to have a French window of two big, inward swinging panels out of which I can look over my vegetable garden every morning. Oddly enough, the garden bed that is catching my eyes these mornings for its beauty is the bed of kale plants.
Kale plants
No, it’s not a bed of one of the so-called colorful, ornamental kales, not even a reddish kale such as Russian Red. I mostly grow just plain old Blue Curled Scotch kale, which is no more bluish than any other kale, or any other member of the whole cabbage family for that matter. What catches my eye each morning is the frilliness of the leaves and how neatly they line up along the stalk. It’s pretty.

My vision could be swayed by the fact that kale is such a healthful vegetable, being especially rich in calcium and vitamin A. Or the fact that it’s so easy to grow. I sowed the seeds in March, put out transplants in early May, have been harvesting it since the end of May, and will continue to do so probably well into December. (Another bed of kale, which I seeded right out in the ground at the end of May, is also looking good.)

Kale is unlike other members of the cabbage family. Broccoli is past its prime once buds open into flowers. Cauliflower is over the hill once the florets sidle apart from each other. Cabbage splits if left too long. Brussels sprouts needs sowing in early spring but aren’t ready for eating until touched by frost at the other end of the growing season.

Kale doesn’t have a small window of time for optimum harvest; actually, no window. It just keeps growing taller, with more leaves, still tasting good at all stages.

The only thing kale needs protection from is rabbits and woodchucks, like most vegetables, and from the various cabbage worms. One or two sprays of the biological pesticide Bacillus thurengiensis (sold under such trade names as Thuricide and Dipel) is all that’s needed for the worms, or nothing, especially in a year like this when worms were pretty much absent.

What more could I ask for from a plant: flavor, health, and beauty?

Free Kisses

I take it upon myself to personally promote the revival of an old-fashioned flower: kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate (Polygonum orientale). It’s big, it’s beautiful, and it’s distinctly old-fashioned.

If you know the weed called smartweed, you have a hint of what kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate looks like. Smartweed is a trailing weed whose flowers look like small droplets of pink dew at the ends of its stems. Kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate looks like smartweed on steroids, with “droplets” the size of bb’s. Rather than trailing, the plant rises with robust arching stems to more than seven feet high. It’s just the height and form for growing next to a garden gate, which is where my plants grow.
Kiss me over the garden gate
Kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate is a little hard to get started because the seeds germinate slowly and erratically. My plants thankfully lived up to their reputation of being self-seeding annuals, and those self-seeding plants come up more robustly than the few coddled seedlings I used to plant out each spring.

It’s self-seeding habit is sufficiently restrained for me. All I do each spring now is to weed out the few extra plants, as well as those that stray too far from the garden gate.

Ever Green Onions

For many years, in addition to starting onions from seed (sown in February!), I also went the more conventional route and bought a few “sets” for planting. Sets are those small bulbs that grow first to become scallions, which are mostly leaf, then go on to fatten into bulbs that can be harvested and stored.
Vegetable face
This year, instead of planting sets for scallions, I grew bunching onions, yet another type of onion, one that never ever makes fat bulbs. During the growing season, slender new scallions are produced around the bases of older ones. Left outdoors, they will perennialize and multiply by offsets year after year. 

I set out transplants back in early summer grown from seeds sown in spring. Even now, these scallions still look like scallions, some larger, some smaller, depending on how crowded they are to each other. No matter their size, they’ve all been flavorful right through summer and on into fall, maintaining all the time their scallion character.

STEPPING INTO SPRING

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Cleanup Time Re-Starts in Veggie Garden

Warmer weather, even if it’s not all that warm, makes me feel like spring is just around the corner. The ground — in my vegetable beds, at least — isn’t even frozen, no doubt because water doesn’t linger long in the well-drained soil and because the dark-colored compost blanket I laid down in autumn sucks up the sun’s warmth.

So yesterday seemed like a perfect time to continue the garden cleanup that screeched to a halt when frigid weather struck, and some snow fell, a couple of months ago. Old cabbage heads that never quite ripened were laying on the ground like ratty, pale green tennis balls (with stalks attached). The four-foot-high stalk of one Brussels sprouts plant, stripped in autumn of its sprouts, stood sentry like a decrepit soldier in the same bed.Kale in winter

Of course, kale also still stood, except for those that flopped to the ground under their own weight. The latter were mostly the variety Tuscan (Lanciata). The Dwarf Blue Scotch plants, which I think taste better, stood more upright and compact, helped along, I’ll admit, with some bamboo stakes pushed into the ground next to them back in summer. I dug up the Tuscan kale plants and stripped yellowed and flaccid leaves from the Dwarf Blue Scotch plants. My guess is that by April they’ll be unfolding new, tasty leaves.

Stepping over to another bed, I twisted or coaxed out, with the help of my Hori-Hori knife, stumps from harvested lettuce and Chinese cabbage. A row of arugula in that bed showed enough life to awaken in spring with fresh, new leaves. I left it.

All this cleanup gets a jump on spring and removes debris that might harbor insect or disease pests that could infest or infect this season’s plants. The debris went into my garden cart and thence to the compost pile. The winter pile doesn’t heat up, so I’ll give the bacteria, fungi, actinomycetes, and earthworms two years to get their jobs done, killing off any “bad guys.”

Cursed Voles!

Stepping over to the remains of the endive bed that I planted towards the end of last summer and began harvesting in October — what havoc has been wreaked!

The bed had been covered with a tunnel of clear plastic and row cover to provide extra warmth to the plants in cold weather. Extra warmth also to some furry creatures, it seems.

Taking off the cover, I saw a bed riddled with tunnels along with the scattered remains of unharvested endive plants. This has happened in the past; something about endive seems particularly attractive to the furry creatures (and to me), which I assume are voles, which are mouse-like creatures.Endive with mouse damage

My garden must be vole heaven. The cat rarely hops the garden fence to hunt because she has to cross the DMZ zone to get to the garden, and she’s scared of our dog, Sammy. The compost-enriched soil has plenty of earthworm for good eating, as well as all the tasty, organic produce. So far, though, the voles have been satisfied with just the endive.

Short of planting the cat in the garden, which Sammy can’t enter, my plan is to do extensive trapping. One web site recommendation for a small garden is for twelve traps baited with oatmeal and peanut butter, or with apple.

As consolation, vole populations are said to decline after 3 to 5 years. It’s almost time, although the declined population might still be too many for me. And all is not bad with voles; they help stir the soil to distribute nutrients.

Pre-Season Warmup

While in the garden, I also did some pre-season weeding. Creeping Charlie, which enjoys cool weather, is always sneaking in here and there once I turn my attention away from the garden.

All this garden cleaning and straightening up isn’t all for practicality. It makes the view of the garden each morning from my second floor bedroom window prettier.

 

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.

Tales of Kale

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The season’s first peas and potatoes are such a taste treat, radishes are fun, and everyone pines for the first tomatoes. But kale, I think, is the vegetable most worthy of praise. Here I am in the greenhouse, watering kale transplants for the garden even as, right behind me, kale in beds planted last August are still yielding mature leaves for salads and cooking.
Kale is one of the few vegetables that tolerates heat in summer, cold in winter, and every temperature in between. You can just keep picking the lower leaves as new ones keep growing up top. Neither broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, nor other members of kale’s family can keep up production like that. And other greens, like lettuce, arugula, and mustard, send up seed-stalks and lose their flavor when days get long or hot. The kale in my greenhouse is now sending up seedstalks but the leaves taste as good as ever. Even the flower-heads themselves, which are like small, loose heads of broccoli, taste good.

Although one sowing, in early spring, could keep me in leafy greenery almost all year long, I do three sowings. The first, in early spring, is for planting out in a few weeks for eating from late spring on through summer. Sometimes, usually, I’ll sow again in July for even more greenery well into autumn and, depending on winter temperatures, into winter. The shorter plants of this later sowing are more apt to be covered by snow, which insulates the leaves and keeps them fresh all winter. In August I sow again for planting in the greenhouse, which gives us fresh kale until spring.
If I had to grow only one vegetable, kale might be the one. (I have a friend who does grow only one vegetable, and it is kale.) Besides its ease of growth and its longevity, kale packs a powerhouse of nutrients: vitamin C, vitamin K, calcium and all those other good things found in cabbage kin, and vitamin H (I made that last one up, but kale no doubt contains a lot of not-yet-known goodies also).
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Seakale (Cramb maritima) is another “kale” I grow. This one might be good eating; I have yet to taste it even though I had it in the garden for over a decade. Besides being a different plant from kale, it is functionally different in that it has a short season of edibility, in early spring, and it is a true perennial, so potentially never needs replanting. Mine needs replanting this year because, for no apparent reason, it died last year.

Seakale is a salt-tolerant plant native to coastal regions of northern Europe, and it was in those regions that it was first moved into gardens for cultivation as a vegetable. Young shoots need to be blanched (grown in the dark) — by being covered with an upturned clay flowerpot, for example — to make them palatable. The blanched shoots are very tender, so you might never see them in markets. They should make a nice garden or farmden vegetable, though.

I have yet to taste seakale because each spring I’ve never got around to blanching it. Blanching can’t continue too long or the roots will be starved for energy, which comes from sunlight.
Seakale pulled its weight in my garden in other ways than putting food on the table. Its livened up one corner of the perennial flower bed with its silvery green leaves from which arose, in early summer, loose sprays of small, silvery white flowers, almost like the ocean spray in seakale’s native haunts. I never ate the plant because I didn’t want to weaken it and possibly tone down its spring and summer show.
I sowed new seed this week.
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Continuing the “kale” theme brings me to another vegetable, a close contender with kale for ease of

growth, longevity, flavor, hardiness, and nutrition. Seakale beet, as it is known in Britain; known as Swiss chard here. I plant chard just as I do kale, except less of it because it is less nutritious than kale (high oxalate concentration limits its availability of calcium), slightly less cold-hardy, and I happen not to like its flavor as much.

Seakale beet, or chard, is closely related to beet. In fact, both are the same genus and species. Chard is a beet with extra large leaves and an extra small storage root. But beets are another, story, an underground one.
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