New Year Resolutions for 2011

          
        

It’s really hard to stick to one’s New Year’s resolutions, don’t you think? I’ve learned not to reveal my own in my columns as it’s painful to see them in print long after they’ve been abandoned. When I was at the impressionable age of 17, my minister preached a sermon on positive resolutions for the New Year – taking up a good habit instead of quitting a bad one. It’s a constructive idea, but one not many people follow. Almost everyone I know takes the negative route, trying to give up something – cigarettes, booze, chocolate.

If you’re a chocoholic who’s contemplating eliminating candy bars and Hershey kisses from your life in 2011, you can still safely read this column as I’m going to be talking about cacao’s horticultural life, not its final products.


No, you cannot grow a chocolate tree in your back yard. It requires a tropical climate, and must be raised within 20 degrees of the equator. Since it would be nice to be enjoying the balmy breezes of Brazil instead of the blustery blizzards of the Berkshires, let’s pretend we’re in South America right now tending our cacao orchard.


The cacao tree is medium-sized, similar in shape to a cherry tree, with cinnamon-colored bark and bright green leaves that are lance-shaped and smooth. Its wood is white and very fragile. The tiny pin, white or yellow blossoms are odorless and do not appear until the tree is 4 or 5 years old.


Our orchard here in Brazil is very tidy compared to those on the Ivory Coast where most cacao is grown. We plant in rows and keep the ground beneath free of brush and weeds. Aren’t the fruits weird? They look like orange footballs, sometimes striped with red, and grow right from the trunks of the trees as well as on the branches.


These gourd-like fruits take six months to ripen, but since blossoms appear year-round, they can be harvested continually. Cutting the pods from the trunks with a machete is relatively easy, but the ones growing high up in the trees must be cut with a cacao hook, as climbing among the delicate branches causes too much breakage.


The pods are soft compared to a coconut. An experienced worker can open about 25 in a minute. Inside there are as many as 40 ivory-colored seeds the size of olives, growing in uniformed rows. When a pond is first opened it looks just like a skull full of the bad teeth of a chocoholic, but once out in the air the beans acquire a purple tinge.

In three or four days the beans begin to ferment and begin to look and even smell a little like chocolate. Then they’re dried, bagged and shipped to the chocolate factory where Willy Wonka turns them into scrumptious delights – but not without a lot of work. First the beans must be washed and roasted, then hulled (the shells are ground up for cattle food,) and the “nibs,” as the inside kernels are called, are ground between heavy steel disks, resulting in a semi-liquid paste known as chocolate liquor.


There were no chocolate candies back in the 1700’s when Carl Linnaeus, the father of Taxonomy, chose to name the chocolate tree Theobromaw which means “food of the gods.” If you’re a chocoholic, why don’t you take up a good habit as your New Year’s resolution instead of giving up chocolate? What a shame to be deprived of something known as the food of the gods.                           


                              Happy New Year!

Christmas Gifts for Gardeners



A few garden gifts - a snickersnee, a kneeler, a Quick-connect and a clipper

 Those of you who are regular readers of Weeds and Wisdom are undoubtedly aware of how politically incorrect I am, so don't feel insulted if I talk about Christmas as if none of you were Buddhists or Jews or Muslims or Atheists. It's that time of year when I like to write a column about what to get your gardening friends for Christmas.


I’m a gardener who loves to weed, but I suspect most of your gardening friends find weeding a pain in the… back, so a container of Preen would make an ideal gift. Preen's little yellow pellets prevent weed seeds from germinating. The first time I bought Preen, I got a very small container, not trusting the advertisement. It worked beautifully. I filled all the cracks between my flagstones and they remained weed-free for the whole summer. What a treat! Preen really works, not on weeds that are already there, but on the weed seeds that want to pop up in undesirable places. That's a comforting thought when you know that a single dandelion can let 15,000 seeds fly through the air or that when lambs quarters grow into pigweeds they produces over 72,000 seeds. The second time I bought Preen I bought a VERY LARGE container. You can find this product in the gardening section of hardware stores or buy it online at www.preen.com.


I can’t live without my favorite ratchet tools, the small clipper, the medium clipper and the Maxi lopper. They’re all made by Florian Pruning tools. (1-800-2753618 www.floriantools.com). Florian holds the patent on the Ratchet Cut action, which is far superior to the ratchet tools made by other companies that may cost half as much, but don't even do half the job.


Hank gave me my giant snickersnee (his name for a lopper) about 30 years ago. It enables even old women like me to cut through really large branches. In case you're unfamiliar with the ratchet mechanism, let me explain how it works. Cut into a branch that's too big, move the lopper's green handle (there's one red, one green) back and the ratchet falls into another notch, allowing you to take a second bite, then if necessary, a third, and you find yourself cutting through a branch as big as your arm. Well, not quite, but you get the idea.


I used that lopper so much that it finally stopped ratcheting, so I sent it back to Florian this past August and then forgot about it until I needed to cut down this year’s Christmas tree, a small cedar growing in the lower sheep pasture. Having not heard from the company, I sent an email and got a nice email back saying yes, they had the lopper but didn’t know how to reach me. Sad to say, they also informed me that it was irreparable, but could be replaced for $94.50. I guess that’s a bargain since it retails for $130 and mine had held up for 30 years!


OOPS! I just realized that my Florian catalog was ancient so I went on the Internet to check Florian’s prices. The Maxi lopper (not included in the photo above) now costs $188.95. Well, you’re probably not as penny-pinching as I am, and that lopper is a bargain at any price. The mini lopper only costs $88.95 and the small pruner just $32.50 Either one would make a great gift. I plan to get my big lopper repaired in the spring, so I cut down my little cedar with a saw.


Another item I can't live without which has a very reasonable price is a kneeler, a waterproof foam pad. I am fortunate that although I have a bad back I have excellent knees. They're a must (good knees) for weeding, harvesting vegetables, opening bottom drawers, even making beds. All the garden catalogs have kneelers. I think even hardware stores carry them.


If you're looking for stocking stuffers, there's nothing quite as handy as the Quick Connect. These brass hose connections don't cost a lot, so get at least two so you can "mix and match" so to speak. Screw one end of a Quick Connect into your hose and the other end into a faucet or the sprinkler or another hose and you'll never have to screw around again as the Quick Connect needs just a little pull or push to attach or disattach.


A good garden book is always a treat for the holidays. My favorites are so old I thought they might be out of print so I went to Amazon and was delighted to find GARDEN SECRETS by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent and Diane E. Bilderback. This is by far the best book on raising vegetables so if your garden friends have vegetable gardens they will love this down-to-earth guide on planting, growing and harvesting them. It is chuck full of unusual facts and great suggestions. .


Amazon didn’t have my other favorite book, GREEN THOUGHTS by Eleanor Perenyi, an absolutely delightful writer, but they did have a newer version of GREEN THOUGHTS written not only by Ms. Perenyi, but also by Michael Pollen and Allen Lacy. These two authors are both fine writers but I don’t think they could possibly improve on Ms. Perenyi’s engaging style and humor.


Obviously I have to mention WEEDS AND WISDOM and MOTHER NATURE’S WIT AND WISDOM by yours truly which can be ordered on my Web Log (my preferred name for a blog) and selling for $15.00 each including shipping.


Have a Merry Christmas everyone!

Plant Evolution

                                 

            What incredible improvements have been made by plant breeders since the first brave caveman – possibly the adjective hungry would be better – nibbled on the bitter branching root of a wild carrot, or had the imagination to try eating a young thistle, the ancestor of our artichoke.

            Today’s vegetables have been derived from every single organ in the plant world.  Not just from roots and fruits, but from rhizomes, stalks, leaves, buds and blossoms.  Now you and I might have been bright enough to try eating leaves like lettuce and spinach, or fruits such as beans or squash, but would we have thought to chomp down on a stem, the part of a plant we eat in celery, leeks or asparagus?

We all know that the underground tuber of a potato plant is edible, but I bet quite a few folks died from thinking the potato’s  poisonous clusters of green fruits would make a tasty treat.   It must have been quite a while before they thought to try the knobby tubers hidden beneath the soil.  We can thank some innovative primitive for opening up a cantaloupe, peeling an onion to cook, or taste the immature flower of a broccoli plant.

The ancestors of today’s vegetables contained toxic substances needed to protect them from insects and foraging animals.  It wasn’t until plants were raised in cultivation that these toxins were no longer needed for survival and man could begin to eliminate them.

Actually it was undoubtedly man’s better half who bothered to plant the first seeds in her back yard.  She may have done it by mistake, dumping seeds along with the dinner leftovers, but when they sprouted, she had the smarts to nurture them.   She weeded and watered them, maybe even fertilized them.  All these efforts improved their quality, but even more important, it allowed her to save the seeds from the very best plants so they could be sown the next year.

The great debate over whether heredity or environment is more influential in forming a human being’s character may never be solved, and the same can be said about plant life.  I always thought environment was more important until the gene-splicers started manipulating flowers and vegetables faster than you can eat a fuzzless peach or peel a tearless onion.  Still, environment plays a large part in the changes occurring in nature.

Darwin’s theory – the survival of the fittest – couldn’t work without the effects of the environment as well as heredity.  The moth that avoids being spotted by a bird because her wings are camouflaged to look like the bark of a tree lives to pass along that gene to the next generation in the eggs she lays.  The flower that adapts itself to pollination by a different species of bee when its regular pollinator has died out, passes that trait on in its seeds.

One of the best examples of the changes created in the plant kingdom by both heredity and environment is found in Brassica oleracea.  It may seem hard to believe, but this single species has evolved into nine variations – broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, collards, cauliflower, kohlrabi and three different cabbages – savoy, red and green.  The cabbage family is not a family, not even a genus, but a species that has produced nine subspecies.

When you stop to think about the infinite variety of delicious vegetables available nowadays, say a little thank you, not just to the horticulturalists, but to Mr. and Mrs. Neanderthal. 

The Wicked White-faced Hornets

White faced hornets build the most amazing homes for themselves! Last year I discovered one in the apple tree by the pond. It was just beautiful, but as I watched the dozens of hornets that were flying in and out of this huge paper nest, I decided to stay clear of it until frost had killed its inhabitants. When at last there appeared to be only a few left buzzing lazily around the entrance I doused the nest with insecticide, cut down the branch it was attached to and carried it up to the guest house.


The walls of the guest house are decorated with lots of odd items - kids’ drawings, ancient tennis racquets, a collection of funny  hats, a polo mallet, old trophies, but nothing as unusual as this architectural marvel with its sculpted paper walls, so I hung its branch from a beam.

Had I known about the life cycle of these insects, I would have sprayed their nest with insecticide when I first found it.   No, if you're thinking the guest house later became infested with hornets, you're wrong.  Fortunately that did not happen. When I began reading about the royal queen and her workers however,  I realized my mistake. Each autumn up to twenty new queens are hatched  and by the following spring every one of them starts to build a new nest. So thanks to those industrious queens, there were three big fat nests in the yard this summer.

You’d think being a queen would result in a life of luxury, but that is not the case if you’re a hornet queen. When these ladies come out of hybernation in the spring they immediately starts building those amazing nests, and there’s no one around to help them. Each queen first makes a thick stalk that will hold the nest to a limb, then she creates what looks like a honeycomb about the size of an egg. She encloses it with two or three layers of paper which she makes by mixing chewed wood fibers with her saliva. Then she lays her first eggs in the cells of this little bedroom. They will hatch in approximately a week.


But there's no rest for the weary. The queen must feed these newborns,  not an easy job as they need a mash made up of finely chewed insects. Fortunately in less than two weeks the larvae are ready to pupate, and they spin their own cocoons. When they emerge, the queen finally has some help, for these hatched hornets are her workers, ready to enlarge the nest and provide her with a bigger bedroom full of cells so she can lay many more eggs, increasing the colony.

Toward the end of summer the workers instinctively know it’s time to build a few bigger better cells. How the workers know that these cells will be filled with future queens is Mother Nature’s secret, but the workers treat the larvae in them with extra care.  They supply them with large quantities of food so they'll grow strong, for they will be the only hornets to survive through the coming winter. By the time of the first frost, the old queen and all her workers are dead and their amazing home has disintegrated.



Unfortunately I didn't learn about all those healthy new queens until I started my research for this column. If I'd known I would have picked a dark summer night, donned some seriously protective clothing, and armed with insecticide, headed out to the three hornet nests. But it was too late.  The nests were gone and the new queens were safely hybernating underground.

Having read on the Internet that the stings of white-faced hornets can be deadly and one should hire a professional to exterminate them, I guess I'm glad I didn't try to tackle the job myself.  So next spring probably   half the trees on the property will be sporting new hornet nests. Oh, well, at least I got a column out of it.

Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving in the 1800s

                                               

                I hope you're all looking forward to a delicious Thanksgiving. Lots of turkey? Pumpkin pie? The Thanksgiving menu has been a tradition for so many years that I was really surprised to learn what was on the table at the first Thanksgiving. Reading in my tattered copy of Facts for Farmers, "A compost of rich materials for all Land-owners" published in 1866, I found that the Pilgrims did indeed have turkey, but I doubt it resembled the plump tender bird we enjoy. Most likely it was all dark meat and as tough as the acorns it had eaten.

The Pilgrims often cooked this less than scrumptious fowl in a "coffin." The term refers to neither a casket nor an oven, but a pie shell, sometimes edible, sometimes not. The bird was boned and stuck with cloves, well-larded, then sealed in the coffin with the breast downward. Although the word "vegetable" was not yet in use, there were edible plants on the table. They were called sallets or potherbs, and most were so unpopular they were rarely mentioned.

Turnips were boiled and then added to the stewed broth of the turkey along with chopped herbs - parsley, thyme, chervil and a bay leaf. Onions were often creamed as they are today, but the sauce was thickened with an egg yolk rather than flour, and seasoned with raisins, coursely ground pepper, sugar and salt. The corn grown by the Pilgrims and local indians was a flint variety - nothing like the sweet corn of today. Celery was unknown and only botanists knew about potatoes.

We like to think there would have been cider at that first Thanksgiving feast, but the newly planted apple trees were not yet bearing. Cranberries might have been used in "puddings in the belly" what we call stuffing, but sugar was too scarce to make jelly or preserves. There was no Indian pudding because, although there were plenty of Indians, there was no molasses.

There was probably pumpkin pie, but more likely it was made with squash. The most popular squash in Colonial times was an egg-shaped variety called Boston Marrow, which had a thin, salmon-colored rind and fine-grained orange flesh. I'm afraid my squash and pumpkin pie fillings come from a can nowadays and contain plenty of sugar.

In a different section of Facts for Farmers called "How eating affects the Health" I read the following - "To meet at table, father, mother, children, all well, ought to be a happiness to any heart. Let joy pervade your meals. Let this excellent advice be followed universally, and we shall hear less about dyspepsia."

What makes Thanksgiving delicious is not the food but the gathering of family and friends. Enjoy your turkey and be thankful the menu doesn't include much of the above. 

The Lowly Lichens

                                                            Clover                         Gottoo

Ah, we just got another Indian summer day. There’s no way I can stay in the house when November’s temperatures get into the 60s, so Clover and Gottoo, who are always begging to take a walk, and I, took a long beautiful walk up to the cow pasture and beyond. The pasture was at its most appealing, close-cropped and smooth except for rocks and a scattering of barberry bushes to add a touch of red here and there. The pussytoes lay perfectly flat against the ground, their leaves silver rosettes. The mosses were greener than the grass, showing off their myriad shapes and textures with no need to compete with taller vegetation.

The most prominent plants at this time of year, however, are the lichens. These unusual plants form a symbiotic partnership between a fungus and an alga. It's a very happy marriage as the fungus shares his house with the alga, who provides the food for the two of them. Neither partner has roots, stems, leaves or flowers, but a fungus doesn't even have chlorophyll, so he's delighted to give shelter to the algae who do.

The gray-green lace doilies growing on our pasture rocks are lichens. Reindeer moss, the wiry clumps of pastel green growing in open spaces in the woods, is another. The algae who live in these houses are often single-celled like the green scum found in stagnant ponds. Old man's beard (not to be confused with Spanish moss which is a flowering plant of the pineapple family) drips down in long flowing streams from the branches of trees in damp forests.Some of the most appealing lichens, British soldiers, also known as red cap moss, and fairy cups, are species of Claydonia.

                                              British Soldiers                           Fairy Cups

Lichens, though low on the totem pole of plants, have a pretty important job. They're the pioneers who build soil. Because they need no soil themselves, they can exist in inhospitable places, in arctic wastes and dry deserts and on bare cliffs. Their powerful acids eventually etch tiny cracks in a rock, loosening particles to let in the frost which disintegrates the rock further. In death the lichens' decayed bodies contribute additional material for higher level plants, mosses and ferns, to grow in.

Because most lichens contain strong acids, they're extremely bitter, but there are a few species that can be eaten. Even though reindeer moss isn't very tasty, moose and reindeer often make a meal of it. The "manna" eaten by the Israelites in ancient times was most likely one of the lichens.

I brought home several  lichen varieties from our walk to see if I could identify them. I got out The Lichen Book by G.G. Nearing, a book I'd never looked at since the day I received it as a birthday gift 39 years ago.  No wonder. The most necessary tool of a lichen lover is a microscope. I had no luck identifying my specimens, but I did have fun studying all the picturesque names - Pink Earth lichen, funnel lichen, mealy goblet, stringy name, rabbit, lemon, bristly, dark blister.

I then spent several hours playing around with my photo software making a picture to go with the following poem, one I wrote back in the days when I talked and sang about plants to school children.






Do you believe in fairies, who dwell within the wood?

They're very real, I promise you, and if you don't you should.

They have their parties with the moon when people are abed

They laugh and sing and drink the dew, the mushrooms are their bread.

But when the round and honest sun peeks o'er the hills at dawn

He find a field of sleepy cows, for all the elves have gone.

But once he caught them unaware - they'd had a rowdy night.

Their tiny gray-green drinking cups were scattered left and right.

And some had left their red wool caps behind among the moss.

When they got back to fairyland I'm sure the queen was cross.

So do believe in fairytales and never doubt yourselves,

Though all you'll find will be the signs, and not the elves themselves.

Tribute to the Sun

         

Oh, dear, the end of Daylight Saving always makes me feel as gloomy as a kid sent to bed without dessert. How bleak and colorless my perennial border looks as we say farewell to summer. I think I'm one of those people who go into a decline when deprived of sunlight. I've never been diagnosed with the syndrome known as Seasonal Affective Disorder (its wonderfully appropriate acronym is SAD) but supposedly it can be cured by sitting in front of fluorescent light tubes which emit the full spectrum of light found in sunshine.

I'm too cheap to buy one of these sun boxes, but by December 26th, the day with the year's least sunlight, I always wish I had. In January the sun's rays offer us nothing but bleak cheerless light as cold as moonlight, and by February that golden globe in the sky isn't much better, too weak to defrost an icicle. Finally things begin to look up in March. Even with temperatures hovering in the teens, the sun takes on the characteristics of a good kindergarten teacher, preparing the ground for spring growth, waking up the pussy willows, luring snowdrops into bloom and convincing masses of scilla to paint the landscape in a sea of blue.



                                   


Mother Nature and her sun perform all these miracles. Even those drab little gray birds that argue with each other at the thistle feeder all winter are magically turning back into goldfinches. I don't see how they manage that, do you? Are their feathers getting a sort of sunburn as spring returns, the way we humans get a tan as we work outside?

By summer the sun is not so benign. It can blister and shrivel anything it sets its eye on. Unprotected plants wither as it sucks moisture from their leaves and dries out the soil around their roots. In autumn the sun loses its power quickly, but because the earth has absorbed its heat for many months, it takes a suprising amount of time to lose it.

The sun is as vital an ingredient in making a garden as thread is in sewing a slipcover. Whether you're growing perennials, annuals, vegetables, shade-loving wildflowers or heat-loving cacti, you need sunlight. When you start planning next year's gardens, think about how and where and when the sun's rays will fall. Trees and shrubs that are too close on either the east or west side of a garden will create much longer shadows than those on the north or south.

The closer land is to the equator, the more vertical will be the light falling on the land. In the tropics where the sun shines down from directly overhead and vanishes in seconds at the end of the day, its light offers a dazzling brightness. It is often so brilliant that it destroys colors, turning the sky white and plants into mere black silhouettes. Such vertical sunlight creates small dark pools of shade beneath trees and shrubs, and highlights all perpendicular surfaces, sparkles the waves on water and accents the shadowed crevices in stone walls.

Our summer sunlight in New England comes from closer to the horizon, offering a more angled light. Even on June 21st, when the sun reaches its highest point in crossing the sky, its angle over New England is nowhere near 90 degrees. It's only about 45. As the sun reaches the equinox, its angle is even more acute, and by the winter solstice, a mere sliver. The shadows of our locust trees stretch all the way across the sheep pasture as we head into winter.

Before planting a landscape, it makes sense to think about the affects of sunlight and shadow on the area. When the air is moist, the sun gives a soft, filtering light which picks out the details and colors of plants. It creates patterns of foliage and slowly lengthening shadows as evening falls, and offers backlighting as it moves across the sky.

Sunlight can make an area warm and cheerful or dry and withering. It will turn the water in a birdbath silver or black, put diamond sparkles into the ripples of moving water. Lack of sunshine can mean a cool retreat or a dark cold corner. Having a sheltered spot which stays shady through the hot summer is as important as having one that is protected from wind and receives sunlight all winter. I wish I had a warm protected spot like that to cheer up the months ahead. Alas, the winter wind usually blows wickedly on Locust Hill.



                                  


Dear me! I didn't mean to write such a cheerless column. I wouldn't dream of moving to a warmer climate. I love the changing seasons and the infinite variety of New England's weather. The January thaw is such a treat, and seeing the soft pink of quince, one of the first harbingers of April. I don’t mind the August heat when the sweat runs into my eyes as I work in the garden, and of course who couldn’t love the fantastic display of colors as Autumn turns the leaves and gives us that little reprieve of Indian Summer. I even like the purity of a blanket of snow covering the earth when I curl up with the latest seed catalogs.

Lots of good things happen in New England, don’t they?

Quack Grass - Not for Ducks

                                       

     Believe it or not, the photo above is what my asparagus bed looked like this spring - a nightmare of very healthy quack grass. It was so thick that I couldn't find any asparagus until the stalks became inedible ferny little trees. The two raspberry beds looked equally horrible, another sea of quack grass.
     We planted both the asparagus and the raspberries in 1982 and for almost 30 years we mulched them with hay bales each fall. In early spring when I harvested the asparagus, I would pull the few bits of quack grass which appeared. This year the sight of all that wretched grass filling the beds was as upsetting as discovering a dozen snakes in the compost pile. How was I going to get rid of that grass without killing my lovely asparagus and raspberry bushes?
     I like to think of myself as an organic gardener, and do not like using chemicals, but I"m no purist and am willing to make exceptions when there's no alternative. Nowadays there are dozens of chemical products on the market to help gardeners solve vegetation problems, many of them selective, which means they only kill specific types of vegetation.
     Since we have a major problem with multiflora roses in our pastures, we use Crossbow, which kills these thorny monsters without harming the grass beneath them. Grass-be-Gone is another selective chemical, which obviously kills grass, but does not harm broad-leaved vegetation. GroundClear is a chemical used on driveways or similar areas that kills everything in sight and out of sight, as it poisons the soil and all vegetation for up to a year. Round-up is a systemic that is applied to undersirable vegetation. It travels down from the sprayed plant and kills the root but does not poison the soil.
     Quack grass, like a dozen other types of vegetation, clearly adored the combination of warmth and rain that spurred their growth these last two years. Being totally ignorant of how to solve the problem, I took the photo of my aspargus bed and went to see Crop Production Services in Amenia, NY. , the outfit that sells us Crossbow. They were extremely helpful, giving me explicit directions on how to treat the asparagus bed.
     "In the fall when the aspargus has finished growing, mow down the bed. When the new quack grass appears, spray the entire bed with Round-up, the systemic poison that kills whatever vegetation it covers by traveling down to the roots, but does not harm the soil. Just make sure all the asparagus is gone."
     And the raspberry beds? I actually was so concerned about the asparagus, I forgot to ask, but as the summer progressed the quack grass in the raspberries began to look very thick and healthy, and the raspberries started looking sick.
     Raspberries are biennials. Their first year they just come up. The second year they bloom, have berries and die. These dead stalks should be removed and only two or three new young stalks should be left on each plant. Since I couldn't do anything about the asparagus until late Stepember at the earliest, I decided to tackle the first raspberry bed at the end of August. I uprooted huge hunks of quack grass and old hay and cut down the summer's dead raspberry canes, filling the pick-up truck to overflowering 3 times.
     It was an exhausting job and I wasn't done. Within a week green blades of quack grass began to appear. I sprayed them with Round-up, carefully protecting the raspberries. I did this once a week. Then my wonderful yard man, Steve, brought a truckload of wood chips from the town dump and spread them on the bed.

                                      

     By the time we were done I just couldn't face the second bed. Why did I need two beds anyway? Steve took the cycle bar mower and cut down all the raspberries in the second bed. Then I took a trowel and dug up all their roots. Then I weeded, raked, seeded the bed with nice grass seed, watered and took a picture! There's no sign of new grass yet, but I plan to save the rest of this story for sometime next spring, including the success or failure of the asparagus bed.

Let's Elect Some Annuals

        Who can think about anything besides the coming election? I can't wait to see how many greedy congressmen lose their jobs.  I suppose the current crop of congressmen is no worse than previous incumbents but because I have a subscription to  the Wall Street Journal, I read about the latest political horrors every day.
         I wrote a column back in 1990 at election time reporting that Congress had just raised the legislative budget 16%, which included $33 million to pay for the previous year's franked mail.  I looked up the word "frank" and found "a pigsty, also the fattening of animals."  Perfect!  Franked mail could certainly be classified as pork!
        Politics hasn't much to do with gardening, but I'll see if I can weave a few flowers  into this column.  What comes to mind are all the new faces that I'm  hoping will appear in  the House and Senate come January.  I guess these freshmen could be compared to annuals, plunked down in a well-established bed of perennials.
        A flower bed full of perennials usually doesn't guarantee a riot of color all summer.  To have constant bloom, it needs annuals, the same way Congress needs new representatives.  Adding little mounds of white allysum, clusters of snapdragons or a sprawl of petunias to the front of a border promises blossoms from June through September, and with global warming, right through October. 
        These tender seedlings need help before being installed among the established perennials.   They must struggle in their race for space. Like freshmen congressment, newly planted annuals can be totally intimidated by the plants that have been soaking up the garden's perks for years.  If their roots have been cramped in a nursery container all spring, those roots need to be loosened and spread before planting.
        Most garden books refer to annuals as bedding plants.  I wasn't sure why so I looked up "bedding" in Webster's.  Obviously annuals are not bed clothes or material for animals to sleep on.  How about "something that forms a foundation or bottom layer"  since they're usually planted at the front of a flower bed.
       There is a huge selection of annuals to choose from as far as color and size, but I'm ashamed to say the ones I listed above are the ones this unimaginative gardener usually chooses.  White petunias planted at the front of a border show up through rain and fog and even as night falls in the garden.  They bloom all summer long if they're dead-headed frequently.
        Pansies don't last that long, even when dead-headed, but their little faces are so appealing I always grow a few in the Abitta garden.  Dusty Miller, that small gray plant with lacy leaves that makes a nice contrast to other annuals, doesn't require dead-heading as it doesn't set seeds.
        Oh, dear, my comparison of annuals and newly installed congressmen doesn't work very well with dead-heading.  I'd hate to see those freshmen ostracized if they were producing sparkling new legislation.  What an unattractive term "dead-heading" is!  But  it really is an important garden chore.  All plants have one big aim in life - to produce seeds.  If we bother to remove the spent flowers on our annuals before they manage this feat, the plants will continue to  flower, determined to succeed in producing the next generation.
        "Do as I say, not as I do," a motto my husband said often.  The petunias in my photo were never dead-headed, but despite that fact they are still blooming.  Their stems, lined with seeds,  extend for close to a foot in all directions.  Of course this has been a crazy summer when every sort of vegetation has had enormous growth, not just petunias.  Did you grow cleomes this year?  Also known as spider plant, these are one of the few tall annuals.  Mine reached six feet by August, but then fell over, probably for lack of water. 
        I just pulled a book off my library shelf I didn't know I owned, "All about Annuals."  It must include well over 200 plants. You would certainly have learned more about new and unusual annuals if I'd found it sooner.    I usually try to include a few helpful garden hints or fresh ideas in my columns, but I had too much fun playing with my election metaphores.
                                                      DONT FORGET TO VOTE!

End of Summer Thoughts

I’ve just been going through my Website’s Archives to see what columns I’ve already written about Autumn -  fall chores, Jack Frost, turning leaves, October’s flowers,  and a half dozen other appropriate subjects. I seem to have covered every aspect of what gardeners go through at this time of year.  Since I’ve been writing garden columns since 1982, I suppose that isn’t too surprising, but it does present a problem – what new and different feature of October can I write about that won’t be a repeat of an old column?

            As I reread some of those earlier columns, however, I found that I hardly remembered most of them, so why should you?  And since a gardener’s summer varies from year to year depending on the weather, I’m going to stop worrying and give you a review of Locust Hill’s  2010 vegetable garden.

            Talk about weather!  Global warming certainly turned New England into one hot summer, and every sort of vegetation grew fast and furiously, didn’t it?  Having ripe tomatoes in mid-July was a delicious treat. And no tomato blight to ruin the harvest. That warm weather turned everything in my vegetable garden to speed demons, which was both good and bad.  The peas climbed up the fence and toppled over to start down the other side. I’d much rather have had them put their energy into the peas. They had hardly any flavor at all.

The same sort of problem was caused by my string beans.  I planted a row of bush beans right between a row of onions and a row of radishes as I usually do.  A few weeks after they appeared they stopped sitting up and began looking around for their poles, at least that’s what it looked like. Did I buy pole beans instead of bush beans?? No, the packet of seeds had “BUSH BEANS” in large letters.  Stupid seed company!

I did not want pole beans shading my radishes and onions.  But what’s a gardener to do?  I gave each plant a pole to climb. I also gave each plant a demonstration of how to wind itself around the pole and climb. Not one plant took my advice. In a week they were sprawled over the ground and smothering my radishes. Obviously they were bush beans gone wild with the heat. They produced an adequate crop of beans, just a bit muddy from lying in the dirt.  Fortunately they left my onion row alone. As for the radishes, I planted another row in a safer spot.

The rest of my vegetables behaved normally.  As usual the zucchinis got as big as Goldie, the goldfish I wrote about in my last dozen cantaloupes column, before I could harvest them. I had two-foot long cucumbers, a crop of about a dozen canteloupe that were quite tasteless, three planting of delicious lettuce, and a row of zinnias that were really spectacular

Here it is almost the 10^th of October and still no frost.  I guess that’s another affect of global warming. I suspect it will be well worth covering tender crops for that first frost because it will probably be followed by many weeks of warm weather.  Predicting when or whether a frost will hit is tricky even for the weather man.  He probably uses the dew point to help him. The whys and wherefores of the evening dews and damps and that thing called a dew point can be pretty confusing, but very helpful in predicting frost. Dew is the result of water condensation.  As air cools it is able to hold less and less water vapor.  When it can hold no more, the water vapor condenses forming dew, and the temperature at that exact moment is the dew point.

When dew forms it releases energy and that energy keeps the temperature near the ground at the same level as the dew point.  Therefore if the dew point is hovering in the low 30s, prepare for frost.  If the humidity is high, so is the dew point. A night of dry air, no wind and clear skies indicates a low dew point and you'd be wise to cover all the tender vegetables with blankets or buckets.