Preparing for Jack Frost



It’s been such a weird summer weather-wise that there’s no way anyone can predict how soon Jack Frost will return from his summer vacation.  I’ve known him to arrive as early as August and as late as mid-October.  A frost, unlike a freeze, doesn’t necessarily reach every nook and cranny of a property, so smart gardeners pay attention to which areas of the yard are prone to a rime of white in the early morning and try to plant their vegetable garden in a protected spot unlikely to be plagued by those early undeserved frosts.

One night last week frost was predicted so I got out the old sheets and bedspreads to cover my tomatoes and peppers, the only vegetables worth saving.  With global warming, it really makes sense to cover things since early frosts are often followed by weeks of warm weather. My spider plants were still blooming, but I'd used all the pink and white ones and the purple were too tall to cover up.  As it turned out we didn't get a frost that night anyway.

Keeping track of the dewpoint is a good way to be forewarned about the possibility of frost. Frankly, I find the whys and wherefores of the evening dews and damps very confusing, so I’ve been reading up on the dewpoint.  I’m still confused, but here’s what I’ve learned. Dew is the result of water condensation.  The earth absorbs heat during the day and loses it through radiation at night. Over 80 percent of this lost heat is taken in by water vapor and carbon dioxide in the air. If the air is dry, the drop in temperature is increased through evaporation, which has a cooling effect the same way sweat does.

As air cools, it is able to hold less and less water vapor.  When it can hold no more, it condenses, forming dew, and the temperature at that moment is the dewpoint.  So?  What’s that got to do with frost??

When dew forms it releases energy and that energy allows the temperature near the ground to remain at the same level as the dew point. Therefore if the dewpoint is hovering in the low 30s, one should prepare for frost.  If the humidity is high, so is the dewpoint, and the chance of frost will be minimal.

A night of dry air with clear skies and no wind indicates a low dewpoint.  That’s when we should scurry around with the old sheets and bedspreads, bushel baskets and anything else we can find to cover up tender vegetables - bush beans, tomato vines, pepper plants, melons. I doubt if many gardeners bother to protect their zucchini, having had enough. 

I have very few vegetables left in my garden, except the Brussels sprouts which are no bigger than peas and are just waiting for Jack to arrive.  My tomatoes, the golf ball-sized ones, are still producing, so I plan to go out today and gently uproot their vines and hang them upside down in the garden shed where they will continue ripening. 

I hope Jack Frost hasn’t blown his cold breath across your gardens before I post this column.  When I look across the meadow at the forest’s edge I only see a single maple tree making a splash of orange, but quite a few trees with leaves that have turned a dreary brown, as if we’d suffered a severe drought.  With all the water Irene drenched us with, that doesn’t seem possible. 

As it turns out  those brown leaves have actually been caused by Irene.  The vast amount of water she dumped on New England has produced horrible fungus and mold, sickening the leaves. Poor Vermont!  Let’s hope the leaf peeping tourists don't find that state's autumn colors a dismall beige and brown instead of a rainbow of gold and scarlet.  Irene has given Vermonters enough trouble.

A Vine for Beer Drinkers



        New England is such a jungle of wild vines at this time of year I find it almost scary.  Just look at that bindweed (I refuse to call it a morning glory!) It is positively strangling my bank of flowering shrubs. The lacy cucumber vine that makes beautiful ladders was too delicate to withstand Hurricane Irene, but the woodbine is still walking the tightrope of telephone lines overhead, and the grape vines are covering roadside trees and shrubs in  heavy shrouds of greenery.

Many years ago one of my readers, Mrs. Thomen, called to ask if I was familiar with the hop vine.  She described it as “a prickly, rambunctious rambler,” and invited me to come and dig up a section of her plant so I could learn firsthand about its growth habits.  She also warned me that it could grow 30 feet in one summer.

Locust Hill has many vines – clematis, euonymus, ivy, akebia, and a silver lace vine hiding the propane tank.  They are all well-behaved. The one that behaved badly, a bittersweet vine, I got rid of. Did I really want such a poorly behaved vine hopping all around like a rabbit? Well, yes, if it could provide me with a new garden column.

Mrs. T’s plant was a member of the hemp family, Humulus lupulus, a perennial.  Two other varieties, the Japanese hop and the one with variegated leaves, are both annuals.  After much thought I planted the vine at the foot of the deck at the back of the guest house where it wouldn’t matter if it misbehaved.

Despite poor soil and only morning sun, the hop vine climbed up the netting I’d hung down from the second story deck and clambered right over the railing.  In its second year it produced flowers.  They weren’t very pretty, resembling small burdock burrs, and were soon followed by the hops, papery pale yellow cones with a pinkish tinge that soon turn brown.  They have a very distinctive smell.

Because I’m not a beer drinker, I didn’t realize until I began reading about hops, that beer contains a very important ingredient from this vine.   “Magic and Medicine of Plants,” published by Reader’s Digest, informed me that the glands in the female fruits are what give beer its “pleasantly bitter taste.”

“The Complete Book of Fruits and Vegetables” by F. Bianchini and F. Corbetta, published in 1975, offered me some even better quotes. “Hops have an estrogenic action, feminizing and anaphrodisiac, so that besides serving as a sedative, it is believed by some to be the cause of disorders afflicting hard beer drinkers.”

They went on to say,“Beer drinkers suffer from obesity, sterility and hepatic degeneration, or more simply put, a corroding liver.” Wow, you never know what tidbits you can dig up when you start researching a plant.

The young shoots of the hop vine can be boiled in a little salted water and lemon juice and eaten as a vegetable.  I’ve never tried them, but supposedly they have a taste similar to asparagus.  The spent hops (I’m assuming that means the ones from which the feminizing qualities have been extracted) can be used as a mulch, and when mixed with dried blood encourage phenomenal tree growth.

The leaves of the hop vine are three-lobed, bright green and do not turn color in the fall.  The stems contain almost microscopic prickles that help to hold the plant in place as it climbs.  It makes an excellent summer screen, and the distinctive odor of the cones might just mask that pail of unemptied garbage on the back porch.

The new shoots climb by twining, continually revolving clockwise.   Darwin actually measured the speed at which the hop shoot twines. It makes a complete revolution every 2 hours and 8 minutes.  Think of that!  Do you suppose Darwin sat and watched a hop shoot twining for 2 hours and 8 minutes?

One April daughter Trum took home to Oregon a piece of my hop vine and planted it to shade her south porch.  I flew out to visit in late June and saw that just one shoot had begun climbing the string Trum had provided.  Each day we measured its growth.  Phenomenal! In that one week it grew so high we could no longer reach high enough to measure it. 

Well, I guess by now you know more than you wanted to about the hop vine.  Except where to buy one.

Hurricane Irene



I hope all of you survived Irene better than I did.  Because Locust Hill Road was totally blocked by live wires, I was stuck at the top of the hill. No power, no water, except in the cellar where there was enough to float my freezer full of freshly frozen vegetables from the garden and about fifty pounds of beef, part of the Fords’ “rent” for hay fields and pastures.  

A celler full of water                   And a floating freezer

I was the only house on the road without a generator, busy mopping up leaks, pulling spoiled food from the freezer and lugging water to the bathrooms from the pond. Missing the entire first week of the U.S.Open was painful for this tennis enthusiast, but trying to read by flashlight at my age was even more painful.  Irene dropped enough large limbs from my dying sugar maple to keep the wood stove going for a month, and I picked up so much bark and dead branches that I'll have enough kindling  for the entire winter. 

 I can remember being without electricity off and on over the years when a night or two without light  was an adventure  – getting out the kerosene lanterns and the candles, playing games with the kids,  naming all the things we couldn’t use -  the TV, the toaster, and the telephone, just to name the T's.   And with a gas stove to cook on, it was almost fun. Irene's devastation was  not fun, but I'm not complaining.  Compared to all the folks whose houses Irene destroyed, I was lucky. I got power back in six days, and water in seven when the drowned water pump in the cellar got repaired.

Without a working computer, writing to keep busy meant the pencil and that big yellow pad of paper, which didn't appeal, so I never gave a thought about a subject for my next column.  So here I am, with nothing but my thoughts on Irene.  I trust I'll come up with a garden topic by the weekend.  In the meantime, I wish you all luck in whatever clean-up you're facing. 

A Weekend Treat



                                                                The Norfolk Library

 

In just three days the Norfolk Library will hold its Book Sale Weekend. I have been so busy sorting the donated books I haven’t had time to even think about writing a column, so instead I’d like to tell you about this grand event.

It will begin on Friday the 26th at 6pm with “The Hidden Treasure Evening” Admission Fee - $25.00.  The  Litchfield County Auctions will be appraising your treasures at no charge, so bring that crazy lamp that’s been in your attic gathering dust or that beautiful clock your grandmother gave you or whatever treasure you’d like appraised so you can find out what it’s worth.

There will be a Wine Bar featuring a special drink of the evening, plus extensive hors-d’oeuvres and finger food. All the Books of Special Value, usually sold at the book sale, will be on display to be previewed and purchased. There will also be tables displaying about thirty different items ready to be bid on at a silent auction – jewelry, wine, dining certificates, movie tickets, pottery, even massages.

       So please join us -  eat, drink and be merry on a beautiful summer evening.



I absolutely love my job sorting books into the various categories in preparation for the book sale.  Sorting goes fast when I can pick up a book and see the word “Novel” or “Memoir” right on the cover, or read a title like “Earth Science”  so I know right away what category to put it in, but this year there were constant puzzles to solve. I couldn’t have done it all with daughter Bridget, my assistant, pictured below. 

Very few of this year’s donated books were easy to pin down.  Which category would you pick for a title like “The Bottom Line Year Book of 2001” or “The Nothing Book – Want to Make Something of it?”  How about this title – “Tractatus Logico – Philosphicus”? 

Besides puzzling over categories I have to admit I got waylaid whenever I picked up an unfamiliar garden book.  The Garden category has 8 large boxes this year.  It not only has books on flowers and vegetables, trees and shrub and vines.  It also includes books on the Environment, Land matters and Farming,

As always the Children’s category has boxes and boxes of beautiful books, many of them selling for as little as $.50.  There’s a large selection of Health and Medicine, and an even larger one of Social Science, which contains books on Philosophy, parenting, marriage, etc.  

As usual, the Fiction category is the biggest, with 210 boxes.  History, including politics and war is the next biggest with 56 boxes.  Art, music, theatre and film, has some really beautiful books. 

Then there’s Literature, Biography, Travel, Sports, Science and a big category of Videos, CDs, Cassettes, etc.  and two new categories, Religion, which includes witchcraft and myths as well as God,  and Education, which is loaded with books on writing, teaching, schools, etc. 

Book prices will range from $.50 cents for paperbacks to handsome “Cocktail books” for $5.00.  So hop in your car and drive through the countryside to this delightful small town in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut and feast on all this good reading. 

A Mishmash of Garden Thoughts



Most of the garden knowledge I’ve gained over the years has been learned through my mistakes as I tried to turn Locust Hill from an abandoned farm into an attractive landscape.  You might not be familiar with a few things I’ve discovered so this column will be a sort of mishmash.

First, because I like to put a photo at the top of my columns,  let’s talk just briefly about the incredible weeds we’re all coping with this summer.  I weeded the little garden in the photo above about a month ago, and now it is once again drowning in weeds.  If only it were drowning in rain water!  The ground has been rock-solid  which makes getting a weed’s root impossible. Thoroughly watering an area early in the morning or late in the day when the sun isn't busy baking the soil helps, but I am very stingy about watering as I have a dug well.  One summer when the well got plugged up and we were without water, I was  the one to decend the ladder and solve the problem, a very unpleasant experience.

With global warming making everything grow so fast, I’ve discovered that buying a flat of Brussels sprout seedling from the nursery means they will start to produce sprouts long before cold weather arrives. That results in sprouts totally lacking in flavor.  I now start my sprouts from seeds directly in the garden in mid-June so they mature in October and have the great flavor that cool weather gives them.

Are you having trouble husking your corn this summer?  I don’t grow corn as I get the most delicious corn for free from the Fords who rent my cow pasture and hay fields, but I’ve noticed a big difference this year in husking it.  The husks have grown so thick and strong that it takes a professional wrestler to pull them off.  Since I am a weak and weary widow at the end of the day it takes me forever to husk my corn!

The warm weather is affecting lots of vegetables.  Imagine having juicy ripe tomatoes in early August, a real treat.  My bush beans are acting like pole beans, sprawling in all directions so it's hard to find the beans.   My peas... turns out my peas were one of my latest mistakes.  I always eat my peas right there in the garden, but the peas I've grown this year have pods that just wouldn’t split open.  It was so frustrating having to dig at each pod, bit by bit and getting a single pea at a time. 

Guess what.  I’d forgotten that I’d ordered a variety of snap pea called Cascadia, the kind you eat pod and all.  Pinetree Seeds doesn’t tell you much on their seed packets and I’d forgotten that for a change I’d ordered edible pod peas.  I’m afraid my mind is getting as dim as a flashlight with a weak battery!

Many years ago I planted pieces of rooted quince in my perennial border, thinking their early blooms would compliment the daffodils that bloom at that time. They did just that, but I definitely don’t recommend this idea.  Quince is a bush and every year it gets bigger and bushier and sends new shoots up in all directions.  They’ve become a real pain as their branches are full of thorns and require clipping every summer.  So just remember if you’re thinking of planting a quince that you can’t talk these shrubs into staying small and beautiful. 

No other tips, but some news.  Remember Golda Meir, my 25 year old goldfish who died last summer?  Many readers have asked if I’ve gotten a new fish for the pond to replace this amazing old lady, and last week I finally got around to it.

Golda Meir

Several readers suggested I get a Shubunkin, a fish that adapts well to new environments.  When I went to the pet store I saw that these fish have dark splotches and might be very hard to see in my pond.  Another fish swimming around in the tank was silvery white. The pet store lady said it was a Comet and should adapt to a new home just as well as a Shubunkin, so that's what I bought. 

 

Many readers sent me suggestions of names  for my new fish, but unfortunately I can’t remember any of them but the one that I decided to use, Ben Hur.  When I'd aclimated him to the water and let him slip into the pond, he dove down to the bottom and disappeared.  He probably won't be big enough to see for several years, and of course I may never see him again if his changed environment is too much for   him.    

Enjoy the rest of the summer and when cold weather comes enjoy seeing the weeds die!

Good and Bad Fences

A blog has such a different format than my old website that it wasn't until this past week that I read all the nice comments various readers have  made.  Thank you all so much.  In future I will respond to them.

All that talk about gates in my last column got me thinking about fences and how important they are, especially around a vegetable garden.  Having grown vegetables without the protection of a fence for 12 years, I know just how much heartbreak it can eliminate.

My first vegetable garden was way up behind the barn, which meant chickens scratching eagerly for grubs in my newly seeded rows, rabbits crunching merrily on my Buttercrunch or fat Mr. Woodchuck inviting his wife to dine on fresh broccoli.  Periodically the sheep or the heifers would escape from their pastures and trample through the garden, but we’ve always been lucky that the deer do not bother us, probably because the dogs live outside.

I felt so strongly about good fences that I had no trouble writing a song about them (to the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “There is nothing like a Dame”) for one of my garden programs.

That’s the kind of fence we put around the vegetable garden when we moved it down to the backyard.  Planting the peas and cukes next to it meant they had something nice to climb, and made staking the tomato plant next to it much easier. It also elimintated the varmint problems.  Ooops, that’s not quite true.  When I grew strawberries in the vegetable garden, I had a real problem with chipmunks who adore strawberries and had no trouble getting over or through the fence.

I must have caught four or five of those little rascals in my Hav-a-Hart trap before I realized it was a hopeless solution.  I now grow my strawberries in a long row covered with netting just in back of a stone retaining wall which makes picking the ripe fruits a joy for someone with a bad back. 

I never raised strawberries in my first garden and don’t remember any chipmunks.  The most notable varmints back then were my dogs. Dogs are great companions and can’t really be considered varmints, but without a proper fence, ours were always lying down on the lettuce or searching through the rows for the rabbits they could smell. 

Hank’s Irish water spaniel, Bog, was the worst.  He loved radishes.  He’d go to the radish row, pull one up, set it between his paws and  consume it. I wish I had a picture of this crazy dog, foaming at the mouth from eating red hot radishes. 

Bog was a great retriever, so I had to be careful when preparing the soil for planting. If I found a rock and tossed it into the bushes near the garden, he would quickly find it and proudly bring them back to me.  That was bad enough, but when he discovered that if he put a rock in front of the lawn mower it would throw it for him I actually had to tie him up when I mowed the lawn.



Gottoo                          Clover

These are the two dogs I have now, Gottoo and Clover.  They often stand at the garden gate, obviously longing to join me while I’m working.  Clover is a rescue dog from Puerto Rico, a well-behaved lady who would probably just sit on the steps to the garden shed if I invited her in while I was planting or harvesting.  She never gives me any trouble. 

On the other hand, Gottoo is an incorrigible Basenji, who would cause infinite harm should I be stupid enough to leave the gate open.  Are you familiar with this breed of dog?  They’re as independent as a cat, cannot bark, but yodel when upset.  It was more than a year before Gottoo wagged her tail at me.  She has destroyed eye glasses, mail, pill bottles, in fact anything left within reach, and loves to tip over waste baskets and trash cans.



Apologies.  I guess I got waylaid from my subject, but I thought you’d rather see pictures of my dogs than pictures of fences.

Great Gates

                                      

Do you have a fence on your property? We have a lot of fences on Locust Hill.  The upper and lower sheep pastures are fenced, as well as the cow pasture and the vegetable garden. How to get over, under or through all those fences requires a variety of solutions.

The gate pictured above is two-sided so it is wide enough to accommodate a truck or tractor.  It has good hinges and opens and shuts with ease.  The other gates wide enough for a truck or tractor to go through are another matter.  We call them Texas gates.  A Texas gate is just a continuation of the barbed wire fence that encloses a pasture, its end post slipped through loops at top and bottom of the gate post.  It’s awkward and difficult to shut as the barbs get tangled together and the poles sag, making it hard to reach the loops. Much to my amusement, I recently discovered that in Texas this sloppy gate is known as a Yankee gate. In Maine it’s a Canuck gate, and in Bavaria a Prussian gate.  Obviously no one wants to take credit for this lazy man’s gate. 

The cow pasture is very large and its barbed wire fence has four different gates, but the section that stretches between our house and daughter Bridget’s cottage on the other side of the meadow has no gate, having been put up long before there was a need for one.  In the first few years after Bridget and John’s little house was built we crawled under this fence every time we went back and forth, all too often catching our rumps on a barb.

  

It took Hank a while, but he finally found the perfect way to solve this problem. From the old house foundation in the upper cow pasture, he found a large flat rock about a foot and a half high.  He maneuvered it onto the stone boat and dragged it over to the fence. Once he’d positioned it half way under the bottom barbwire, it became a stile.  Step up on the rock, swing a leg over the top strand of barb and step down on the other side.  Since grabbing hold of the wire could be nasty, Hank slit pieces of black plastic tubing and slipped them over the wires to make a pleasant handhold.





The gate to the vegetable garden is the one I really want to tell you about.  We call it the “No Wait Gate.”  I probably go through it twenty times a day in the summer, and even when I’m pulling the garden cart, carrying a bushel basket of compost, or balancing a grandchild on my hip, I can open and shut this gate with my foot.

The No Wait Gate consists of a light wooden frame 4 ½ feet wide and 3 feet high.  It has a diagonal support and is covered with light fencing.  Instead of hinges it has screw eyes, screws with circles at their ends. The gatepost has a matching pair of screw eyes, so that a piece of doweling can be slipped through the top and bottom pairs to create a loose hinge.  The lower pair are placed 3 inches above the ground so the gate hangs clear of the ground.  The gate is easily removed in the fall before snow can block it. 



The edge of the gate opposite the “hinged” side rests on the latch, a notched piece of wood rounded on the end and nailed to the fence post. Because the doweling hinge has enough “give,” it allows me to lift the gate up and over the notch with my foot to open the gate, or slide it over the rounded end to slip back into the notch when closing it.  “Look, Ma! No Hands”

Anyone could build the No Wait Gate, so I’ve tried to give you very clear directions.  Neither our dogs nor our sheep can figure out how to open it, but our grandchildren learned to lift it with their hands at about the same time that they learned how important it is to SHUT THE GATE, and how they delighted in slamming it.!