Tips for Growing Great Garlic
Posted on Tuesday, October 9, 2018 · Leave a Comment
Now is the time to buy garlic for planting – unless you have some from your own garden that you saved for that purpose, as I do. You’ll want to get your garlic planted a month before the ground freezes, so depending on where you live, you may want to plant some soon. Garlic needs to establish roots now, and is not generally planted in the spring.
Of all the veggies I plant, garlic is the easiest to grow, and a good harvest is guaranteed if follow my instructions. But please don’t sue me if something goes wrong with yours. I’ve never had a bad year in the past 25 years or so of growing garlic.
Garlic clove
There are two categories of garlic: hard neck and soft neck. Both will grow in New England, but hard neck is the type grown by most farmers, and the most cold-hardy. It produces a stiff scape or stem each summer that is edible. Soft neck garden generally comes from California, and is good in the kitchen; it is also the type braided and hung from the ceiling in Italian restaurants as decoration. Hard neck garlic generally has more flavor, and a wide variety of flavors are possible, depending on the type you grow.
Garlic does best in rich soil that drains well. If you have a heavy clay soil (one that is sticky when wet), you will want to add plenty of compost to your soil. Adding sand will not help, as sand added to heavy clay produces something like concrete that hardens up in dry times.
If you have poor soil, you may want to build a wood-sided raised bed, and add plenty of compost and topsoil that you purchase in bulk or in bags. I find Moo-Doo brand composted cow manure and topsoil are a good soil additives that are sold in bags in many garden centers.
When making a wood-sided bed, do not use treated lumber. Even though most treated lumber is safe to handle and much less toxic than 20 years ago, I don’t want any chemicals leaching into my soil. I use rough-sawn lumber from a local sawmill, preferably hemlock. It generally lasts about 10 years. Eight-inch wide planks are wide enough to make a nice box.
Plain pine boards will work, too, and metal corners are readily available at garden centers or from catalogs like Gardeners Supply and Lee Valley Tools. The corners make constructing a garden box easy even for non-carpenters. All you need is a cordless drill to drive the screws. Carrots and other root crops do well in garden boxes, so you can alternate them with garlic in subsequent years if you build 2 or more boxes.
The long handled CobraHead weeder makes nice furrows without having to bend over
Once the soil is loose and weed-free, I plant. I take my long-handled CobraHead weeder, a nice single-tined weeder, and make furrows in the soil of my raised bed. I keep the furrows about 8 inches apart. I sprinkle some organic bagged fertilizer into each row, and stir it in.
I generally use my own garlic for planting, as it has adapted to my soil and climate over the years. But if I see big, fat bulbs of garlic at a farmers market, I sometimes buy some. I don’t recommend buying garlic for planting at the grocery store as most has been treated to prevent it from germinating, and so it will last longer.
Where can you get garlic for planting? If there is none at your local farmers market, you can get organic garlic from Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Maine (877-564-6697 or www.johnnyseeds.com). But don’t wait too long – they sell out most years.
Place your garlic cloves on the soil to establish spacing before planting
I break the garlic bulbs apart, separating the cloves – there are usually 5 to 10 cloves per head. I push the cloves into the loose soil, pointy end up, about 3 inches deep, and 4 inches apart. I cover with soil, and then pat it gently.
The last step is key if you want a weed-free garlic bed: put a foot of fluffy mulch hay or straw over the planted garlic. The straw will pack down over the winter and make a nice mulch that will keep most weeds from growing, but the garlic will push through it. It will be ready to harvest next July.
Depending on when you plant, the soil temperature, and when real cold weather comes, your garlic may send up a few green shoots this fall. Don’t panic! It won’t hurt your garlic. When cold weather comes, it will go dormant and do just fine next spring.
I believe that garlic is a healthy and tasty addition to my diet. It may even be medicinal – it has been used that way for centuries. Some believe that if you crush your garlic and then wait 10 minutes before cooking, it will generate cancer-fighting compounds. Who knows? Certainly it can’t hurt.
And this winter if you chew on a clove of garlic before going to the store, you’ll never get a cold – because people will stand back from you if they cough!
Henry lives in Cornish Flat, NH. He is the author of 4 gardening books and is a UNH Master Gardener. His e-mail is henry.homeyer@comcast.net.
Seven Fall Gardening Chores
Posted on Tuesday, October 2, 2018 · Leave a Comment
For many years I was in denial. Yes, I refused to accept that fall and winter were on the way by October. I didn’t start fall clean up until November, and by then it was cold, raw, often wet and unpleasant out. Now, having reached a certain age, I prefer to work when it is warm and sunny – so I start fall clean up in September, and try hard to finish by the end of October. I recommend you do so, too. Here’s my list:
- Clean up the vegetable garden. This means pulling plants – and weeds – and covering the bare soil with mulch. I put things that might harbor disease or insect pests on my burn pile, everything else goes in the compost. So tomato and potato plants and all vine crops go on the burn pile.
As to mulching the soil, I do this for two reasons: First, I don’t want hard rains to wash away my topsoil. That is true everywhere on my property – bare soil invites erosion. Second, bare soil is open to receive wind-blown weed seeds. They would germinate next spring before I plant my tomatoes, if I let them.
What do I use for mulch? In the vegetable garden, I use fall leaves that I have chopped up with my lawnmower. They are great for improving the soil, too. I rarely have bare soil in my flower beds – they are full of perennials.
- Cut back perennials. Cleaning up the beds now, and doing a good weeding, will save me a lot of time in the spring – when I am busy with other spring tasks like planting my vegetables. I don’t cut back everything. I leave flowers with seeds that the finches and other seed-eaters will enjoy. Black-eyed Susans and purple coneflower are two they love. Sunflowers will get eaten in place, and most have already been eaten; if so, I cut down the stalks.
- Blackberries and raspberry plants need to be cut back now. Cut off the stems that produced berries this year and leave the new growth. These berries produce on second year growth.
This 5 foot pole pruner will cut and grab
I have a cut-and-grab pole pruner which helps me to avoid getting scraped by thorns. I just cut the plants at ground-level and the tool grabs on to the cut stem, allowing me to pull it out and place it in the wheelbarrow without getting bitten by the thorns. It is available from The Wildflower Seed & Tool Company (www.wildflower-seed.com or 800-456-3359). These tools come in various telescoping lengths.
- Add fuel stabilizer to your gas can now, so that your lawnmower and other power tools will go into winter with gas that will not go flat. Chain saws, rototillers and such need it too, and you may need to drain out the existing fuel, re-fill and run them for 10 minutes to avoid having gunky gas in the machines in spring. Ask at your local garage or auto part store.
Fuel stabilizer will help your small engines start in the spring
After you have tended to your power tools, take a few minutes to clean up and oil your hand tools, too. Before you put away your shovels and rakes, wipe the metal clean of soil and apply a little light machine oil to prevent rusting. Wooden handles benefit from an application of boiled linseed oil. I have one tool with a wood handle that has been in my family for over 60 years. I don’t leave it outside in the rain, and I oil it once a year. It’s as good as new – and has a lovely patina.
- Divide daylilies, iris, phlox, asters and other large clumps of perennials now. Cut the stalks to the ground, and then lift the clump with a garden fork by going around the clump and loosening the soil on all sides. Then pry it out and divide into 2, 3 or 4 pieces with a shovel or a hand tool. Don’t worry about cutting the roots, they will not be damaged. You can do this in the spring if you prefer. This is also the time to move peonies, if you must.
- Feed your soil and lawn. Fall is a good time to add compost, fertilizer and limestone to your soil and lawn. I test my soil pH with a little kit that costs just about $5. I aim to have my soil pH between 6.2 and 6.8, which is just slightly acidic. If the pH in your soil is lower than 6.0, you should add limestone to raise the pH (except for blueberries, hollies and rhododendrons, which like acidic soil).
Add compost now and work it into the soil
Adding compost will improve almost any soil. I added it to my vegetable garden for 30 years, and now have a soil so rich and black I need not add any more. Fertilizer? I only add organic fertilizers as they add all the micronutrients plants need, but that are not in chemical fertilizers. And organic fertilizers are slow-release.
- Lastly, mow your lawn before the snow flies. Bring the blades down lower, as a shorter cut will help to minimize risk of fungal diseases. Rake it if need be, so there are not clumps of grass left on the lawn.
Getting ready for winter is satisfying for me. It’s like tucking a child into bed. And I like looking out the windows and seeing a tidy garden, all ready for spring. Have at it!
Send comments or questions to Henry at henry.homeyer@comcast.net. Henry is a UNH lifetime Master Gardener, and the author of 4 gardening books.
Fall Mums and Asters: Joys of the Season
Posted on Tuesday, September 25, 2018 · Leave a Comment
Summer is over, officially, and the garden knows it. Tomatoes exist only in the kitchen, many flowers are looking lackluster, and trees are losing their leaves. What’s a gardener to do? I buy color in the form of chrysanthemums and fall asters. And I also enjoy wild asters that appear along the roadside and the edge of my woods.
Wild woodland aster
Let’s start with asters. My most comprehensive wildflower reference, The Illustrated Books of Wildflowers and Shrubs by William Carey Grimm, lists 29 native species of wild asters. Walking along a country road recently I spotted at least 5 of them. Some were tall and white or purple, others shorter and pink, purple or mauve. Some had wide rays in their flowers, others had delicate rays close together. And I wouldn’t begin to try to assign names to them. They were all lumped together in my mind as just asters. I like them all.
At garden centers there are nice purple asters for sale, short ones, either bright purple or pink. Their tags will say they are perennials, and they are. What the tags do not say is that yours won’t have a hundred blossoms or more next year and hug the ground. They will be taller, probably much taller, and have fewer blossoms.
The asters you buy that have been cut back repeatedly in the early summer so that the stems will fork, making them bushier, wider and shorter. Each little stem is capable of producing a blossom. If you want to get something next fall that resembles this year’s purchase, you will need to cut back the plants at least twice in early summer. Me? I leave that to the professionals.
Monarch on New England Aster
Of the tall perennial asters, I have some that are 5 to 6 feet tall and produce huge numbers of flowers. These are New England asters, a native species. They produce large amounts of pollen and nectar and are important to our butterflies and bees. Monarch butterflies often feed on mine.
In recent times those people who provide us with the botanical names of plants have changed the genus name of asters from Aster to Symphyotrichum . The species name of the common New England aster still remains novae-angliae. Why do they do that? I suppose because they can, and to show that they know a lot more than we do about certain things. Huh.
Another aster I love is the bushy or rice-button aster (Symphyotrichum dumosus). Its lower leaves don’t seem to be affected by the fungal disease that so often turn New England aster stems brown. Its leaves and stems are shiny and a very dark green. It is usually the last aster to bloom for me, only starting in late September or early October. The variety I purchased is known as ‘Wesley Williams’. It is 4-6 feet tall, with intensely purple-blue flowers about an inch across. Like many tall things, it needs to be staked to prevent flopping, particularly in rich soils where it grows tallest.
Each fall I treat myself to some chrysanthemums. The genus name of mums, by the way, has now changed to Dendranthema. I don’t buy them at the grocery store in an effort to get the cheapest price. I go to my local farm stand and buy the biggest, most beautiful pots of mums I can. I like to support local farmers and garden centers – and I believe I get better quality flowers from them. Mums that have traveled on a truck from New Jersey aren’t necessarily of bad quality, but those that were grown near home are less likely to have been stressed or damaged by too little (or too much) water.
Chrysanthemums
Sometimes I just plunk those mums down, pots and all, on the front steps. Doing so means I will have to water them every hot sunny afternoon, particularly if the mums are growing in peat pots instead of plastic ones. I like peat pots – they don’t use any petroleum products – but they do dry out more quickly than plastic. This is true even if you plant the pots in the ground. The lip of a peat pot will let moisture evaporate and dry out the roots unless the ground is pretty wet. So tear off the lip of the peat pot, or remove it entirely if popping them in the ground.
Mums, like the asters, are sold after extensive grooming and pruning throughout the summer. I once estimated that there were 300 blossoms on one 8-inch wide pot of mums. Left to come back next year, you might get a tenth as many blossoms. What you see when you buy your mums is what you’ll get: they will not grow anymore blossoms, but the buds should all open.
Other fall perennials currently in bloom for me include various black-eyed Susans, turtlehead, fall anemones and snakeroot (Cimicifuga ramosa). So I shouldn’t be lamenting the lack of color – besides, it won’t be long before the maples and other trees start their annual show.
Henry is the author of 4 gardening books, and a regular blogger at www.dailyUV.com. He lives and gardens in Cornish Flat, NH. Reach him at henry.homeyer@comcast.net or PO Box 364, Cornish Flat, NH 03746. If you want a letter response, please include a SASE.
Fall Is a Good Time to Plant (Some) Seeds
Posted on Tuesday, September 18, 2018 · Leave a Comment
Most of us think about planting seeds in the spring, but there are lots of plants that can be planted by seed now, especially wildflowers.
Jack-in-the-pulpit seeds
One of my favorite wildflowers is Jack-in-the Pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum). In the spring it produces a single well-hidden blossom beneath its large leaves. The plants are either male or female, and it is only the females that produce seeds. Right now in my woods and shade gardens the bright red seeds are visible in nice clumps and are ready to harvest and plant.
The seeds of Jack-in-the Pulpit contain calcium oxalate that can be an irritant to your skin. So you may want to wear latex gloves to handle the seeds. The easiest way to prepare seeds for planting it to put them in a blender with a cup of water and give them a quick whirl. The red mushy part comes right off, leaving clean white seeds. Once the seeds are clean and dry, they are fine to handle with bare hands. Removing the pulp on seeds removes compounds that inhibit seed germination.
Pat the seeds dry with a paper towel and plant immediately. Don’t let them dry out. I use my CobraHead weeder to loosen the soil, then place the seed on the surface and lightly cover with soil and forest duff. Next spring each seed will produce just a single round leaf, and it will be 3 years before a plant will blossom.
If you like eating ramps or wild leeks (Allium tricoccum), you should start a patch of your own. Go out now to the forest where you have harvested wild ones in the spring to see if you can recognize the plants and harvest seeds.
These tasty onion-family wildflowers show their leaves in early spring, then after the leaves die back they flower with dainty white clusters of blossoms just 5 inches above the ground. When the seeds turn black and the stems start to turn brown, they are ready to harvest in August to September. By now, most of my plants have dropped their seeds, but I found a few still good to pick this week.
I plant them by raking off the leaves of the forest floor, scratching the soil surface, and sprinkling the seeds. I pat the soil, and put leaves over the seeds. That’s roughly what Mother Nature would do (except the part about scratching the soil with a CobraHead weeder).
An old fashioned blender is good for cleaning seeds
Blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides) seeds are ready to harvest and plant now. I have one big clump that I transplanted a decade or more ago, and it has gotten bigger every year, but no new plants have shown up. This year I decided to get proactive. The deep blue seeds are ready to pick.
According to my wildflower bible, Growing and Propagating Wildflowers by William Cullina, what appears to be a berry is actually just a seed with the fruit being the extension of the seed coat. He advises removing that by cleaning in a blender or to ferment the seeds in water for a few days until it falls off. The advantage to the blender is that it will nick or scratch the hard seed coat, making germination easier. Like Jack-in-the-pulpit, blue cohosh will produce just one leaf the first year, as it uses its energy to develop its roots.
Other wildflowers that I am collecting seeds from now include Japanese mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) and false Solomon’s seal (Smilacina racemosa). I bought my Japanese mayapple from The Fells, a nice non-profit garden and historic estate in Newberry, NH on Lake Sunapee. They offer a good variety of unusual plants each summer.
Japanese mayapple fruit with seeds
I particularly like the Japanese mayapple because, unlike our native mayapple, the blossoms appear above the foliage instead of hidden below the large leaves. By collecting and planting seeds I may be able to significantly increase my display with no added expense – so long as I have patience. Most wildflowers take 3 years from germination to flowering.
Wildflowers often require a period of “vernalization”. This means that they need a cold period between the time they are planted and when they germinate. This ensures they don’t start growing now, when winter is just around the corner.
Aside from wildflowers, this is a fine time to plant seeds from annual poppies and foxgloves. Just harvest the seed pods of poppies and check to see if they still have tiny black seeds – just tip a pod upside down and the seeds should fall out into your hand. I sprinkle them now, or in mid-winter, and they always produce some flowers the following summer.
At this time of year I often pick foxglove stems and shake them over bare soil where I would like more plants. Since foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) are biennials, it’s a two-year process. Next year a few of the hundreds of seeds I disperse will produce rosettes of leaves, and the following year they will flower.
Starting flowers by seed does take patience, and knowledge about how and when to do it. For more on the techniques and requirements of growing wildflowers I highly recommend Bill Cullina’s book, mentioned above. He notes that you should be careful not to harvest too many seeds of rare wildflowers, just gather a few. Good luck!
Henry is the author of 4 gardening books and is a UNH master Gardener. His e-mail is henry.homeyer@comcast.net.
Red-Leafed Trees and Shrubs
Posted on Monday, September 3, 2018 · Leave a Comment
Everyone seems to go wild for sugar maples trees in the fall because, here in New England, their leaves turn wonderful colors – yellow, orange and, best of all, red. But some trees and shrubs have reddish or purplish leaves all summer, and these, too, are very popular. Let’s take a look at a few of these.
My all-time favorite is the Japanese red maple. I grew up with a huge one in Connecticut, a great climbing tree for a young boy. The leaves are a deep wine red all summer and into the fall. It was probably 50 feet tall and wide.
Young Japanese Red Maple at my house
In 1970 I dug up a small specimen from under my parents’ tree and brought it to my newly-purchased home in Cornish Flat, NH. Now, 48 years later, I still have the tree, but it is only about 10 feet tall and 8 feet wide. Our cold winters have kept it small – less than a quarter the size of the parent tree.
The Japanese red maple does best in full sun and rich soil, but will survive in part shade and less than perfect soil. Mine now gets just a few hours of sun each day as other trees nearby have grown tall. The hardiest variety for northern gardens is one called ‘Bloodgood’.
So what else can we grow? I like the copper beech (Fagus sylvatica purpurea). This is a variety of European beech and starts out in the spring with deep purple leaves. As the summer progresses, its leaves become more green. It is hardy in Zones 4 to 7, and is much more tolerant of poor soils than the American beech, our native species of beech. I do not have one, but wish I did.
Red Majestic curly hazelnut
I do have a wonderful red-leafed curly hazelnut or Harry Lauder’s walking stick. It’s a variety called ‘Red Majestic’ of the European filbert (Corylus avellana). In the spring the leaves or a deep red-purple but develop a greenish tinge as the summer progresses. I have mine in a flower bed, and have been able to keep it to an 8-foot wide and 6- to 8-foot tall tree by annual pruning. Even in August it has wonderful color – all this year’s growth is a rich purple-red.
As beautiful as my Red Majestic hazelnut is, it is even better in winter against the snow. It has curled and contorted branches that stand out wonderfully against the snow. But it does not produce hazelnuts: these trees are either male or female, and both are needed to produce nuts. Mine is a male, lonely and unfulfilled. Sigh.
I have a purple smokebush (Cotinus coggygria) that I planted one in memory of a friend, Fritz Hier, who passed away in 1999. It is still small, and I often cut the branches to the ground in late winter. This stimulates it to send up long shoots with more colorful leaves than normal extensions. It does best in well-drained loam and sunny locations, but is tolerant of crummy soils.
Smokebush is named for the flowers, which are quite ethereal. Actually, the flowers themselves are not remarkable, but the pedicles and peduncles (stems of the flowers) develop hairs which create an open, airy mass of pink or purple haze. Because I cut mine back, I have never seen it blossom, but the leaves are wonderful.
Ninebark Diablo
Common ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius) is a fast-growing multi-stemmed shrub that has a cultivar, ‘Diablo’ with deep purple leaves. I had two, but got rid of one because they grow so fast, and it was blocking a view I liked. They can easily send up stems 3 to 5 feet in a year. It blooms in June, so don’t prune it in the early spring or you will lose the blossoms.
Ninebark does best in full sun but will tolerate some shade and will grow in any soil – acid or alkaline, wet or dry. Do not give it any fertilizer – ever! It is so vigorous it does not need any help. I understand there is a miniature form of ‘Diablo’ called ‘Little Devil’ that only grows to 3- to 4-feet tall and wide. I haven’t tried it yet, but plan to.
Another nice reddish-leafed tree is a crabapple called ‘Prairie Fire’. It starts in the spring with prolific pinkish-red blossoms, followed by purple-maroon foliage. Later in the summer the foliage fades to a reddish green. The fruit persists into winter, bright red “berries” that are good food for birds.
I have not grown old fashioned weigela (Weigela florida), a medium-sized early summer shrub, but I know it comes in varieties with reddish or purple-tinged leaves. ‘Wine and Roses’ is one variety; other include ‘Fine Wine’ and ‘Midnight Wine,’ both compact varieties. In general old fashioned weigela is a Zone 5 plant that can get 6 to 9 feet tall, with a spread of up to 12 feet wide.
Last but not least is a purple-leafed rose, Rosa glauca. I had one years ago, but something happened to it – I’m not sure what. It is said to be hardy to Zone 2, much colder than where I am. The single pink blossoms in June were nice, but the real attraction was the foliage which was almost a gray-purple. The orange rose hips were nice in the fall.
So if you crave purple or red leaves, visit a garden center and see what they have. Fall is a good time to plant trees and shrubs because they extend their roots then, and the climate is less hot and dry.
Henry is a UNH Master Gardener, and the author of 4 gardening books. He is away this week and not responding to e-mail.
It’s Time to Harvest and Store Root Crops
Posted on Saturday, September 1, 2018 · Leave a Comment
I sometimes wonder if I’m part squirrel. No, I don’t bury acorns for winter, but I do love putting up food for winter, especially potatoes. They’re the ultimate “comfort food” as far as I am concerned, and I rarely have too many. If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to harvest and store your potatoes for winter.
If you haven’t dug your potatoes yet, don’t worry. Potatoes store well in on ground right up to frost, and even after frost. But don’t try to overwinter them in the ground – they’ll get soft and unappealing. By now the leaves on my potato plants have yellowed and begun to die back, so there is no point in waiting- they won’t get any bigger. And if I wait too long, the mice may find them.
Kennebec Red Pontiac and Magic Molly potatoes just harvested
It’s important to be careful when digging potatoes so that you don’t damage any. I use a potato fork that has been in my family for decades. It’s like an ordinary garden fork, but the tines are at a right angle to the long handle, and are sharp and long. To harvest I pull the soil to one side with the potato rake. Then I plunge my fingers into the loose soil to find the spuds. If I spear a potato it goes into a pile destined for immediate consumption.
It is generally accepted that one should not wash potatoes fresh from the soil. Their skins are soft and easily damaged right after digging them. Most experts suggest hardening the skins by spreading them out in a cool place out of the sun for about a week. I do this on a north-facing deck, and turn over the potatoes after 2 or 3 days so both sides get hardened off.
Storing potatoes is best done by keeping them in a dark location with high humidity that stays between 35 and 50 degrees. Storing them in a warmer place will turn some of the starches in the potatoes into sugars. This will cause the potatoes to burn easily if you make French fries, so commercial growers keep them cool.
Potatoes need to breathe while in storage. They are living organisms that respire, so putting them in a sealed plastic bag will suffocate them, ruining them. Traditionally potatoes were stored in a cool basement with a dirt floor, but losses to mice or rats was often a problem.
Cool box storage bin
I have a cool basement with a cement floor, and I have built a box there to contain buckets of potatoes and other root crops. It consists of two layers of blocks arranged in a rectangle, three blocks long and two wide. On top I have a piece of half-inch plywood. I call this my cool box, or root cellar. It will hold 6 buckets at a time. And so far, the rodents have not found a way in.
Carrots store well in my cool box. Like potatoes, they need a cool humid location for storage. I put an inch of moist sand in the bottom of each bucket to keep up the humidity.
Unlike potatoes, however, carrots will store well in the ground. In the past I have covered my carrots in the garden with a layer of straw or hay, then leaves. This acts as insulation and keeps the ground from freezing, allowing me to go out, shovel away the snow, and dig carrots in winter. Mice or voles have been an occasional problem, however. I put a stake in the ground at each end of the carrot bed so that I can find it in deep snow.
What else stores well in my cool box? Rutabagas, kohlrabi and celeriac – three less common root crops that I like – all store well cool, with high humidity. But onions do not store well in my cool box. They like a cool environment, but low humidity.
Orchard rack from Gardener’s Supply Co.
I store my onions and garlic in an area near the mudroom that stays cool but dry. I use a wooden “orchard rack” that I got from Gardener’s Supply many years ago. I also use it for winter squash. It has 6 large slatted drawers that pull out, allowing me to select what I need for dinner. It has excellent air circulation.
An old Vermont farmer I knew stored his winter squash upstairs under the bed in the guest room. He said he kept the radiator turned off so the room stayed cold, but above freezing. The humidity is naturally low in winter in most houses.
Last but not least, I have an ancient General Electric refrigerator in the basement that is not “frost-free”. This vintage fridge does not remove the moisture the way modern ones do, so ice will sometimes build up, requiring me to defrost it. But any vegetable that stores well in high humidity will do much better there than in a modern fridge which creates low humidity except in the two drawers at the bottom.
Part of my joy in gardening is spending time outdoors growing flowers and vegetables. Each fall I get busy putting up the vegetables for use in the kitchen all winter. And each time I make a stew with food I grew, I know my food is chemical-free and it tastes better to me because I grew it.
Henry Homeyer is a UNH Master Gardener and the author of 4 gardening books. See his blog posts at https://dailyuv.com/henryhomeyer.
Espalier Fruit Trees
Posted on Sunday, August 26, 2018 · Leave a Comment
When traveling in France and England I have often admired the fruit trees that have been pruned and trained to stay low and follow a wall or building. Their branches, like the extended arms of a scarecrow, travel horizontally – and are often loaded with fruit. I have wanted to try training a tree like this, a form called “espalier”. The word espalier is French, and comes from Italian meaning “something to rest the shoulder against”. It has come to mean not just the support, but the tree itself.
Trees in the espalier form are, essentially 2-dimensional. The branches are usually tied to wires or bamboo poles, often a foot or so in front of a wall. Branches growing towards or away from the wall are pruned off, as are most vertical branches. They save space and keep fruit low for easy picking. Walls protect the trees from high winds, and often reflect sunshine and heat to hasten ripening.
I was delighted to find an espalier apple tree for sale at Gardeners Supply Company in Lebanon, NH. Someone had already done a lot of the work training it for me, though it had many small water sprouts (shoots) that needed to be cut away.
My Espalier apple needs much pruning
My tree stands about 6 feet tall and has 3 pairs of parallel horizontal branches. Not only that, the branches are from three different varieties of apple – Zestar, Sweet 16 and Honey Crisp. That’s right, the branches were grafted on to the main stem so that, if all goes well, the tree will produce 3 different flavors of fruit.
Soon after planting my tree I heard about a workshop on espalier techniques, and I decided to go. Margaret Roach, a well-known author and blogger (www.awaytogarden.com) in Copake Falls, in upstate New York, was opening her gardens to the public through the Garden Conservancy, and she had asked Lee Reich, a well-known garden writer, to teach a class on espalier fruit trees. Lee is also the author or many books, including the best book on pruning that I have seen, The Pruning Book.
Lee began by explaining how plant hormones control growth and fruiting. It is essential to understand this if you wish to create an espalier, or even to prune a fruit tree to the size and shape you want.
Espalier apple with 3 kinds of apples
The tallest branch on a tree produces plant hormones called auxins that control growth, branching and flowering (and hence fruit production). If you cut off the tallest part of the tree, the apical tip, a tree is more likely to produce side branches, and these tend to be more fruitful and less vigorous. Vertical branches such as watersprouts rarely produce fruit. They seem to want to grow fast and tall, competing with the leader, or tallest stem on the tree. In general, the horizontal branches of espalier trees should produce lots of fruit.
Lee Reich explained that some fruit trees do better than others when creating an espalier tree. Asian pears do wonderfully, and are almost always a success. But we are much farther south than England and northern France where espaliers do so well. We are at about the level of Madrid, and creating espalier is tougher for us. No, we can easily shape our trees in the form of espalier, but getting them to flower and fruit is tougher- our length of day is different.
There are apple trees that bear on fruit spurs – little gnarly branches just 2 or 3 inches long. Others produce fruit mainly on the tips of branches. Spur-type varieties are the best candidates for espalier. Macintosh is a spur-type apple, and there is one that is even better, MacSpur. Anything with “spur” in the name is good, according to Lee Reich. But other spur-type apples include Zestar, Red Delicious, Honeycrisp, Jonagold, Fuji, Jonathan, Chieftain and Winesap.
The tree I bought has no fruit spurs as yet. And when I bought it, it had lots of watersprouts growing straight up. I was afraid to cut them all off now, as a tree needs leaves to support the roots, and to create the energy the plant needs in the spring to grow new leaves and flowers. According to Lee Reich, an apple tree needs 40 leaves to bring an apple to maturity.
Asian pear espalier at Margaret Roach garden
You can create an espalier starting from a whip – a simple bareroot plant with no side branches. Get one in the spring, plant it, and cut off the top third of the whip. That should stimulate it to set out at least two side branches in its first year. You can tie these to a bamboo, or along a horizontal wire. But in my opinion it is easiest to buy a tree that someone else has already shaped in the espalier form. Then all you have to do is cut off vertical sprouts, and keep the “arms” out to the sides.
Red currants and gooseberries work very well as espalier plants, according to Lee Reich. They are fast growing and flower well on horizontal branches. But not everyone is fond of their fruit. You can’t beat an apple.
I don’t know if my espalier will produce much fruit. But it is going to be fun trying to train it, and I look forward to winter when I will take off the rest of the vertical watersprouts that, right now, somewhat obscure the shape I’m hoping for.
Henry lives and gardens in Cornish Flat, NH. He is the author of 4 gardening books. His website is www.Gardening–Guy.com. He is away this week and not responding to e-mail.
Tomatoes: Getting the Best from Your Harvest
Posted on Tuesday, August 21, 2018 · Leave a Comment
This is my favorite time of the year. Tomato time. Tomato sandwiches for breakfast and lunch, Tomato, basil and cucumber salads with dinner. Tomatoes in stir fries. Tomatoes going in the freezer, dehydrator and jars of sauce. Oh my, I do love my tomatoes. I grew 35 plants this year, as I usually do.
Many gardeners complain that blights are reducing their harvests. It’s true that 30 years ago we had little blight. We covered our plants against the frost, and they kept on producing until October. Now tomato leaves turn yellow and brown in July, and by August many plants are pretty much bare of leaves. Why, people ask, do the early blossoms produce fruits, but then the plants just stop producing?
I don’t know all the reasons. I do know that most common tomato diseases are caused by soil-borne fungi that winter-over, coming back year after year. You can minimize the problems by rotating your tomato patch each year, or by planting in a new garden space that was lawn. Usually a new garden in full sun will have few problems, but in the following years, the blight will find your tomatoes.
Dehydrated Tomatoes
I have had a good, but not perfect tomato season. I spaced my plants farther apart than I have done in the past, centering them 30 inches or more apart. I planted in the sunniest part of the garden. I cut off diseased branches early and often. And Mother Nature cooperated: June and July were relatively hot and sunny, with low humidity. I had to water early on, but diseases were inhibited by the weather. But now, in August, humidity is high and rain is common. Sigh. My tomatoes are getting blight.
So what do I do with the fruit from 35 plants? For starters I should explain that the trees around my garden have gotten bigger every year, and now my garden only gets sunshine from around 10am to 5pm. That’s considered full sun, but 12 hours is a lot better for production.
The easiest, quickest way to save tomatoes is to freeze them whole for winter. Wash them, make sure they are dry, and put them in gallon freezer-rated zipper bags. I suck the air out of the bags with an ordinary drinking straw. The frozen tomatoes can be used in soups and stews just like canned tomatoes. If you wish to remove the skins, just run the frozen tomato under a stream of hot water and rub off the skin.
Excalibur dryer
Tomatoes also store well if you dry them in a dehydrator. I plant 6 or more Sun Gold cherry tomatoes each year that produce a lot of fruit. I cut them in half and place them on the racks of a dehydrator and dry them at 130 degrees for 18 hours or so. When they are dry I stuff them into quart zipper bags and keep them in the freezer, though freezing is not really needed. I use the dried nuggets of summer in soups, stews and stir fries. I have even put them in winter sandwiches.
You can also dry full-sized tomatoes. Slice them about 3/8 of an inch thick and place them in a dehydrator. I have two kinds of dryer: the Excalibur, a $300 deluxe model that blows warm air sideways equally over all 8 trays, and the NESCO American Harvester, a serviceable machine that pushes air up or down through a stack of trays.
The downside to the NESCO model is that you must rotate the trays to get equal drying. And it uses 1000 watts of energy per hour, and the Excalibur uses only 660 watts. Still, at about $125 for the basic machine, it is more affordable.
A sandwich is not really a sandwich, for me, without slices of tomato. One way to save slices of tomato for winter use is to roast them. I do so in the oven at low heat until they are caramelized and soft, not tough and dry. Then I place them in zipper bags and freeze them – but just one layer of tomatoes per bag. When I crave a tomato in my sandwich, I pull out a few slices and heat in my toaster oven until warm. Not a fresh tomato, but better than most sold in the grocery store in January.
I also make tomato paste. Lots of paste. I store it by freezing it in ice cube trays, and then putting it in zipper bags when frozen. No more half-used cans of purchased paste going fuzzy in the fridge for me.
Freeze tomato paste in ice cube trays
To make paste I use imperfect tomatoes, of which I have plenty. I cut out the bad spots, then core them. I squeeze the cored tomatoes in the sink, which gets rid of most seeds and lots of juice. Then I quarter them and place in a food processor. I puree them, then add to a large enameled iron pot and cook them slowly for hours. I know they are done when I can literally stand up a spoon in the pot. I let it sit all night, uncovered, to cool and lose some more water. In the morning I spoon the paste in the ice cube trays.
Canning tomatoes is the old fashioned way. I still put up a few jars of sauce each year, but it’s a lot of work and must be done just right in order to avoid getting sick. Mostly now I make a big batch of sauce and freeze it in plastic freezer containers. But I like seeing jars of canned sauce lined up on a shelf in the pantry- and it connects me to my mom and grandmother.
Henry is the author of 4 gardening books. E-mail him at henry.homeyer@comcast.net. Read his blog posts at https://dailyuv.com/henryhomeyer
Creating a Pollinator Garden
Posted on Tuesday, August 14, 2018 · Leave a Comment
I recently helped prepare and plant a pollinator garden. Bees, butterflies and other insects need pollen and nectar for food, and suitable native plants on which to rest and lay their eggs. Unfortunately, many landscape plants have been introduced from foreign shores, and the plants may be less interesting to our native pollinators, or have less food value. A good pollinator garden is stocked with native plants for best results.
There certainly are plenty of seed mixes available to plant a “Meadow BURSTING WITH COLOR all summer long!” Unfortunately, seed mixes are not as easy to use as you might think. I know people who have rototilled or plowed a space, spread seed and been disappointed after year one.
After the first year, a few plants will dominate, and some of your favorites will disappear – because you often get a lot of annual flower seeds in a mix that will bloom in year one, but depend on self-sowing to come back in later years, and that doesn’t always happen.
So if you wish to have a healthy pollinator garden with plants that come back year after year, buy perennial plants from a knowledgeable source of native pollinator plants. This can be expensive, but doesn’t have to be. Most perennials at a garden center cost $8 to $15 a pot – and true natives are often hard to find.
We bought a mix of first-year perennial wildflowers in flats, each plant in a peat pot that is about 4 inches deep and 3 inches wide – for less than $5 a plant. We got ours from Northeast Pollinator Plants (NEPP) in Fairfax, Vermont. (www.northeastpollinator.com). They also sell individual plants, including common milkweed for monarch butterflies.
Why pick true natives? They co-evolved with our native insects. A named perennial cultivar often has brighter colors or more petals than a native of the same species – which may affect how our insects are attracted to it, or what they get from it. Timing is important to pollinators, too, and cultivated plants may bloom earlier or later than true natives.
A potato rake is good for pulling turf and weeds
I don’t recommend trying to rip out all your lawn and turning it into a pollinator garden all at once. That’s too much work. Four hundred square feet is a good size to start with – roughly 20 by 20 feet. We didn’t want a square, so we used 80 feet of garden hose (which would enclose a 20 foot square) and created an irregular, curvy shape with the hose. Then, using an edging tool, we cut the border of the space.
We removed all the grasses and weeds in that 400 foot garden space. It took 4 of us about 4 or 5 hours. We sliced through the grass and weeds with shovels, tipping the shovels back and loosening the soil. Then we used either a CobraHead hand weeder, or an old fashioned potato rake to pull out the chunks of sod. For big tap-rooted weeds, we used a garden fork to loosen the roots before pulling. Because the soil was sandy, weeds pulled relatively easily.
Spacing wildflowers 2 feet apart is about right
Then came the fun part: planting. I spoke recently with Jane Sorensen of Northeast Pollinator Plants and River Berry Farm. Jane is co-owner of NEPP and a professor at UVM. According to Jane, it is important to resist the temptation to add compost, manure and especially fertilizer, even if the soil is very lean – devoid of the dark organic material that our veggies and cultivated flowers are given for best results. The wildflowers in our selection from NEPP do well in poor soil and get too tall and flop if given fertilizer or much compost.
We got 84 plants for the 400 square foot garden – roughly one plant for each 2 foot-by-2 foot space. I cut 2-foot sticks to remind us how far apart to space our plants. These little plants were mostly just a foot tall, but some will end up being 4 to 6 feet tall, and creating large clumps in the future.
Watering is important for the first 2 weeks
We planted 10 species of perennials and one grass. Early plants included penstemon, purple cone flower and baptisia. Mid-season plants were anise hyssop, wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa, a relative of the beebalm we all know), boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum) and blazing star (Liatris spicata). For late blooming flowers we used NY Ironweed (Vernonia noveborancensis), sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale) and New England aster. We planted little bluestem, a grass beloved by pollinators. Most all of those are good for full sun to part shade.
Jane suggested planting wildflowers in groups of 3 to 5 plants. Many native bees, she said, like to work one species of flower before moving on, so don’t spread them out too far.
Although we love to clean up our gardens in the fall, Jane said it is best to let the wildflower stems stand all winter, then clean up in the spring. That allows native pollinators, or their eggs, to overwinter in the plant stems. She credited that idea to Annie White in a talk for the New England Wildflower Society. She also said to save the stalks, setting them aside after clean up – so that eggs can hatch. Wait until you have had at least 3 consecutive days over 50 degrees in the spring before cleaning up.
Think about adding native wildflowers to your property, even if you don’t dedicate a huge swath to it. Plants used for pollinators may not be as showy as peonies and roses, but the bumblebees and butterflies they attract will be the icing on your cake.
Read Henry’s blog at https://dailyuv.com/henryhomeyer Henry is the author of 4 gardening books.
Growing Lesser-Grown Vegetables
Posted on Tuesday, August 7, 2018 · Leave a Comment
Each year I try to grow some new things in my vegetable garden, varieties that I’ve never tried before. Sometimes my efforts are a bust, and I never grow them again. Then sometimes something new becomes an instant favorite, as happened this year.
Romanesco Cauliflower
This year I grew Romanesco cauliflower, a plant that I absolutely love! This is something like a pointy cauliflower, but with a different taste: it has overtones of broccoli. In fact, some call it a Romanesco broccoli or just plain Romanesco. Some say it has a nutty flavor.
The tiny florets spiral around in something described by a mathematical relationship called a Fibonacci sequence. That sequence is 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 42…. Do you see the relationship between the numbers? Each number is the sum of the two previous numbers. It is a gorgeous, spiraling pointy vegetable. When I picked my first one it was 5 inches across and weighed 9 ounces. Perhaps I could have let it get bigger, but I was afraid it might spoil if I waited too long.
I cooked my Romanesco by slicing it in half and steaming it for 6 minutes. At that point I could poke a fork into it without difficulty. I served it with butter, though a little Parmigiana cheese might be good on it, too.
Unlike broccoli, most cauliflowers don’t usually produce any more food after the first head is picked – though some purple ones will produce small florets as an afterthought. Will my Romanesco produce anything else? I don’t know. If you know, please e-mail me (henry.homeyer@comcast.net). If it shows no side shoots in 2 weeks, I shall pull the plants.
Rutabagas were once an experiment for me, but now I grow them almost every year. They are mild-flavored and store for months in the fridge or a cool basement. I’ve never had trouble with diseases or pests – and they are a good substitute for potatoes, which are sometimes plagued by beetles and fungal diseases. Flea beetles can bother them, I’m told, but I’ve never had the problem.
Kohlrabi is another lesser known vegetable that I grow. It looks like a root crop, but grows above the soil line as a big, fat round ball. The leaves come off the top of the ball, and some people say it looks like a space alien.
This year I grew purple kohlrabi only. These are best eaten soon after being picked, though there are some green ones, most notably Kossak, an F-1 hybrid that will store for 4 months or more with no loss of flavor or texture. And they get to be 8 inches in diameter!
Bear Necessities Kale
Of the leafy greens, I tried a new variety of kale that I love. I got seeds from Fruition Seeds in Naples, NY for a kale called Bear Necessities Kale. That’s right, bear, not bare. It is a frilly kale and very tender. What it has to do with bears is a mystery to me, but Petra Page-Mann, the founder of the company, is a young woman with a good sense of humor, so I guess it’s just a pun. I use the leaves in my breakfast green smoothies, and they’re delicious. Fruition Seeds offers many unusual and organic seeds including heirlooms.
Magenta spreen is another unusual leafy vegetable that I tried some years ago, and it shows up like a weed every year. I let some grow, and pull some out. It is in the scientific genus Chenopodium which includes quinoa and a weed known as lamb’s quarters. What I love about it is that it has top leaves that are, indeed, magenta – one of my favorite colors. It can be steamed as a green, added to a salad or added to a smoothie. Seeds are available from Johnny’s Selected Seeds.
This year I had some extra space, having reduced my potato plantings, so I planted watermelons, cantaloupe and luffa (or loofa). All spread like crazy, and like hot weather. They were slow getting going, but now, with the current heat wave, they are growing so fast I have to step back to avoid being run over when I visit them.
Magenta Spreen
Unlike tomatoes or beans, it’s not obvious when your watermelons or cantaloupe are ready to pick. Melons require one to use all senses, including hearing. Yes, I thump on watermelons and listen for a hollow sound to see if they are ready to pick. Watermelons that are white where they sit on the ground are probably not ready – they should be yellowish. Size counts, too. Bigger is riper.
Cantaloupes are sometimes a little soft at the attachment point when fully ripe, and should smell slightly sweet at the flower end (opposite the attachment point) when dead ripe.
I have never grown luffa before, but it’s not an edible, so I imagine I’ll just let it grow until it stops growing. I’ve read that when it gets lighter in weight and color, it’s ready to pick. Peel off the skin, which should be loose by the time you pick it, and knock the seeds out. Dry until it’s ready to use as a scrubby. Some people smash the gourds against the ground, and then peel off the skin.
Let me know if you have grown something weird and wonderful. I’m always looking for new garden adventures.
Read my blog posts at https://dailyuv.com/gardeningguy. E-mail me, or write me the old fashioned way at P.O. Box 364, Cornish Flat, NH 03746. Send a SASE if you want a reply.
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