In the dampy doldrums of March, when all is dirty snow and mud, when snowdrops, skunk cabbage and tiny bulb shoots are more or less it for new green, it’s easy to forget that deer, like rust, never sleep.
But right now they’re hungrier than ever; they’ve already nibbled all the easy wild stuff; the leftover acorns are still buried… and your tender roses, hydrangeas, etc. are just starting to swell.
‘nough said. Get out there and spray before it’s too late, i.e. before they take the first nibble.
Deer are often boldest in spring; hunting season is long over and so is their easy access to wild food. This group was right next to the road until I was 50 feet away, and they only ran about 50 yards before figuring that was enough.
Most gardeners know how it is with lilies – you have enough; you definitely have enough. And then it’s March and it’s extremely dreary and here – surprise! – is a pile of summer bulb catalogs with extremely yummy pictures of lilies and you think, well, there’s always room for a few more in the cutting garden and they do make such effortless bouquets
And then, in an increasing number of cases, you think: well, nah; the wretched lily beetles will just get these too and make me feel terrible.
Gilles Gonthier
The scarlet lily beetle, Lilioceris lilii, is marching across New England, laying waste to all lilies in its path. Not everybody has them yet, but everybody who does has gone through the same dispiriting sequence: First there are only a couple and you hand pick them and it’s no big deal. Then there are a dozen or two and a combination of picking and neem sprays seems to do the trick. Then it’s many dozen and pyrethrin, and then it aint pretty.
It’s hard to think of anything good to say about these voracious creatures, but there is in fact one Giant Ray of Sunshine: they don’t travel far on their own. Unlike, for instance, Japanese beetles, which can fly considerable distances, lily beetles spread mostly by way of infected soil, and that means control is possible.
Our Lilioceris Strategy:
1. Prevention: No new ones! We don’t buy potted lilies (or fritillarias, their preferred host). When new bulbs arrive, we throw all the packing material in the trash and gently rinse the roots in tepid water if there is soil clinging to them. There shouldn’t be – and haven’t been – any of the oval, yellow eggs, which are deposited on the leaves, but we always check, just in case.
2. Constant Vigilance: overwintered adults are supposed to emerge from the soil in June. We assume ours might be precocious and start expecting them as soon as the lilies come up. I try to stay ever-alert for beetles or signs that they’ve been chewing, and a couple of times a week I scrunch down and look up. Eggs are deposited on leaf undersides and the black larvae tend to stay there until they’ve oozed out to the leaf tips and started chomping inwards. (Ragged leaf tips are a dead giveaway) .
3. Paranoiac Vigilance: They aren’t always on the lilies. Kristi found the very first one we saw on a tomato leaf. Alas, it was not the first one we had, and thus we come to
4. Kill, Kill, Kill:
a) Adults drop from the plants when disturbed, teach yourself to grab upward so they don’t get away. Crush thoroughly or drop in a jar of soapy water.
b) Larvae are disgusting – gooey and black because covered in their own shit, to keep predators at bay ( aint nature grand?), and they do much more damage than the adults. Removing them is unpleasant but easy; just wipe them from the plants with a rag or a glove covered hand. If you start at the base of the stem, wrap your hand around it under the first set of leaves and stroke gently but firmly upward, you can usually get most of them with one or two passes. People who make lewd remarks may be approached with the working hand, which will shut them up in a hurry. Be sure to revisit affected plants frequently, new larvae are likely to show up.
c). Don’t slack off. Many descriptions of L. lilii say there is only one generation per year. Hah! There are at least two, even in Maine.
5. Perseverance Furthers. It’s probably impossible to eradicate them, but our experience suggests you can keep them to small numbers without working too hard. Reducing them to small numbers from large ones does take a season of of all-out war, but after that it’s easy.
6. Oh, did I mention? The price of lilies is eternal vigilance.
Late July Addendum: When it became clear my torn knee would keep me from Maine all spring, I asked Kristi to put some diatomaceous earth on the leaves as well as on the ground ( see comments), and it looks like Peggy is on to something. It didn’t get rid of them completely and it did look horrible; but allied with the stuff on the ground it kept the population in check until I was back on patrol.
Some couples disagree about when to turn on the furnace in fall, others about the proper time to ask for directions or –– if partnered, you can no doubt fill the blank. With us, it’s a long-standing difference of opinion about when to prune the rescued old fruit trees in the New York yard. Bill wants to do it in late winter, when farmers have always pruned their trees. I want it done in summer, because I know there will be more flowers, less regrowth and fewer water sprouts.
He has the weight of tradition on his side; I have nothing except being right. And as “want it done” suggests, I have ( and should have) zero say, because he’s the one who does it.
If you’re serious about summer pruning, trying to produce good fruit or a well-behaved espalier, you follow some modified form of the Lorette system, developed in the early 20th century by Louis Lorette, a professor at the Lycee Agricole in Wagnonville, France. The process is briefly described by NAFEX member Mark Lee, gone into more deeply by a publication from New Mexico State University. M. Lorette’s book itself is out of print, but there are copies – both English and French – available through Bookfinder.
The climate of the Northern US having little in common with that of the Department du Nord, modified is the operative word; you can get into trouble treating your trees as though they were in France. But assuming you’re managing mature trees, not encouraging young ones, there’s much to be said for pruning that tends to stay put.
See all those useless, non-flowering water sprouts sticking straight up? That’s a present from last year’s dormant pruning. It’s not so bad on trees that have been kept in check from infancy, but it can still be a pain in the pruner.
The Argument, Short Version:
Advantages of dormant pruning:
Leafless branch structure is clear; you can see what you’re doing
Fungus diseases are dormant too, so there’s less danger of transmission
Tree is just about to start the active growth that promotes wound-healing
You are not doing the 30,000 other agricultural things that claim your time in midsummer
Advantages of summer pruning:
Vegetative growth is restricted. Tree stays smaller.
Tree does not send up a gazillion water sprouts that must in their turn be pruned.
Fruiting spurs develop closer to main branches, and there are often more of them.
It’s ( usually) more pleasant to be working outdoors
It was 4 degrees and quiet when we woke at 6:30. Now at noon it’s up to 10 and blowing like a bandit, with merry tinkling of ice pellets against the windows and the occasional loud whoosh of something that would be granita if it had flavoring.
Inside, two harbingers of spring:
Iris reticulata is easy to force and unlike tulips, daffodils and I. versicolor (old-fashioned blue flag) it’s seldom sold by florists. This is Clairette, which is not like its picture both because it’s much more purple and because it’s much more fragrant. Catalogs seldom mention the perfume of these little charmers, but it’s definitely there and far easier to appreciate when the garden is on the tabletop.
The beans in the bag are Dr. Martin limas. !Delicious! Sweet and lima-beany and creamy, not mealy even at full huge size of over an inch wide. Didn’t used to be able to grow them in the Hudson Valley. Would cheerfully trade them for less global warming but let’s not forget the ill wind part … Seed is comparatively rare and well-worth saving; we got the original batch from Rohrer’s
For a delicious, versatile, inexpensive vegetable that has “winter” right in its name, hard-shelled squash gets surprisingly little seasonal respect. Dedicated foodies who can wax eloquent over the respective merits of yellow-eye beans and Jacob’s cattle seldom discuss the much larger differences between, say, the dry-fleshed, nutty-flavored Tetsukabuto and the creamy, well-named Sweet Dumpling.
The sign-squash is a rejected pumpkin. No stem, no sale.
Think I’m exaggerating? Have a squash tasting, using at least 3 varieties and preferably 3 species. That might be delicata (Cucurbita pepo), buttercup (C. maxima ) and butternut (C. moschata), but if you range beyond the supermarket, you can probably put together a more exotic assortment. Either way, you will be amazed, and unless there are a lot of you you will also wind up with quite a bit of extra cooked squash. Terrific! Just freeze it in meal-sized packets and you’ve got a stockpile of nearly-instant great food.
When the basic ingredient is ready to roll, it’s only minutes to warming cream of squash and orange soup, with or without a sprinkle of Aleppo pepper; baked squash under a blanket of crisp crumbs flavored with olive oil and lemon zest; or utterly simple broiled squash, spread in a shallow buttered pan and broiled until the top is dotted with flavorful, caramelized brown spots. This is also tasty with store cheese grated over it at the last minute. Also salsa. Also parsley pesto… you get the drift; if you want it even sweeter, the thing to make is pie.
To Prepare Squash for a Tasting ( or almost anything else): Heat the oven to 375 degrees. Rinse any clinging dirt from the squash and whack off the stem with the back of your heavy knife. Cut squash in half as evenly as possible and scrape out the seeds. Oil the cut surfaces with olive oil and put the squash cut side down on a sheet pan or jellyroll pan. Bake until a thin-bladed knife sides in easily, anywhere from a half hour (Sweet Dumpling) to about an hour and a half ( Marina di Chioggia), depending on the thickness of the squash meat and the variety of squash. Turn it right side up and use a sharp-edged spoon to scrape the squash meat away from the rind.
This did not start out as a project – it was just one of those idle irritations. Bill, who eats granola for breakfast, came home with some that was truly dreadful, up to and including the very strange pink bits of freeze dried raspberry. We will not discuss why he bought it; suffice it to say that even he didn’t want to eat it and of course then we got talking about the old days when you made your own and then the very next Wednesday there was Mark Bittmann in the Times with a recipe for crunchy granola.
Rather than simply following it, I decided to look at some of the competition, always a danger now that we are in the age of Google. When I asked it to find “granola recipe”, it came back with “Results 1 – 10 of about 1,420,000. ”
Uh huh. But when would it stop being granola recipes or literary references to granola recipes and start being the usual outer reaches: strings of words that start with g; science fiction pornography; entries in what looks like Chinese but isn’t.
Plunged in, leaping the longest intervals offered. On page 30, there was a lowcarb granola, a thought too scary to explore further. On page 46, an excerpt suggesting that nuts “should be rinsed in cold tap water to which vitamin C powder has been added”. Page 65 was still recipes, including one for a “vegan fusion ” version called Marley’s Hemp Granola, which I should have looked at, I guess, since what I remember about cooking with hemp is that the results were generally – how shall I put this? – more functional than delicious.
The plan was to stop at page 100 but google’s ” that’s it, nothing after this but repetition” kicked in after only 810 hits, on page 81.
Give or take a few, I think 81 is about the number of granola items sold by my local Stop and Shop. They have granola stocked in 3 places: the health/ organic (pay more here) area; next to the whole nutmeats and rice cracker snacks at the end of the produce aisle; and of course in cereal, which had the smallest number of granolas but the largest number of granola bars: 60 running feet of shelf space. Not wishing to piss away the time required I didn’t count varieties, but did notice that many were chocolate covered and one contained m&m’s. The one with the m&m’s was not, by the way, on a low shelf where small children would be enticed by it.
I could go on, and probably will, since there is a food-historical black hole between J.H. Kellogg’s Granola, which sold by the ton in the 1880s , and the tidal rise of the 1960’s product that made “crunchy” an adjective applicable to human beings.
For today, I will only say it’s surprising, once you start tasting alertly, how many variables there are, that plenty of salt certainly helps, and that so far the Corsican special is my favorite but Bill prefers good old Honey Nut.
GOOD OLD HONEY NUT GRANOLA
1 cup whole almonds
1 cup pecans, whole or in large pieces
6 cups old fashioned rolled oats
1/3 cup sunflower seeds
¼ cup toasted wheat germ
½ cup mild honey
3 tablespoons walnut oil (or peanut oil, if there’s no walnut already in the fridge)
2 teaspoons vanilla
½ teaspoon salt
1. Heat the oven to 325 degrees. Spread almonds and pecans in separate pie tins and toast until a broken nut is very pale gold; about 12 minutes for pecans, 15 or longer for almonds. When nuts are done, reduce heat to 300.
2. Spread oats and sunflower seeds on a large jellyroll pan and parch in the 300 degree oven, stirring occasionally, for about 15 minutes. Oats should crisp while scarcely coloring.
3. Turn oat mixture into a large bowl and stir in the wheat germ. Combine honey, oil, salt and vanilla, heat just long enough to liquefy/thin honey, give it stir and pour it in. Stir until all dry matter is coated, then add nuts and stir again ditto.
4. Turn the whole works out onto the oat pan, spread to the edges and return to oven. At 5 to 8 minute intervals, use a flat pancake turner to lift the brown edges into the middle and spread the paler material. Keep it up until the granola is a rich dark gold and a cooled nugget is properly crunchy, anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes, depending on pan, oven and sugar content of honey.
5. Store airtight. If you want raisins or other dried fruit , the time to add it is right before eating. There’s no reason to pre-mix something you want to keep moist with something you want to keep crisp unless you’re going camping.
Variation: The Corsican Special, aka Double Chestnut
(which was originally known as Italian recipe fanatic – there’s no way you’d have these ingredients handy unless you were really into it)
5 cups rolled oats
¼ cup sunflower seeds
3 tablespoons chestnut flour
2 tablespoons wheat germ
scant half-cup chestnut honey
3 tablespoons grapeseed oil
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla
scant ½ teaspoon salt
1 ½ cups coarsely chopped pecans
1. Heat oven to 300 degrees and toast oats and seeds as in 2., above.
2. In a large bowl, mix oats and seeds with flour and wheat germ, then add remaining ingredients as in 3, above.
3. Very slowly toast the living bejeeziz out of it, lowering the heat if it starts browning before the first half hour is past. It’ll be done in 40 minutes to an hour.
Our bright lights chard is still going strong in the cold room, and last time I went shopping the commercial stuff looked pretty good ( for a change), so if you have become tired of cabbage, consider
Rainbow Slaw
Every measurement in this so-called recipe is “about,” “to taste,” “use what you’ve got,” ” fiddle,” because all three of the vegetables vary enormously in sweetness and flavor-strength. Plus it would be a shame not to enjoy it just because you were almost out of celery and didn’t realize it until a half-hour before dinner.
For 6 servings
Toss 1 ½ cups each julienned celery, fennel, and rainbow chard stems with a dressing of
¼ cup rice vinegar
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1 teaspoon sugar
½ teaspoon salt
let it sit about 5 minutes, then taste and adjust.
At this point, you’ll have a very light, clear-flavored salad that goes well with almost everything, especially winter’s rich brown braises and stews. To jazz it up, add finely-minced jalapeno and coarsely-chopped cilantro. Shreds of Peking duck from the Chinese grocery are a nice addition, if you happen to have it ( either the duck or the grocery) handy.
On Sally Spillane’s freewheeling Garden Show our topic was (mostly) the joys of winter garden reading , and in the course of the proceedings I mentioned several favorite publications.
Then when we hit the usual frantic time crunch at the end I promised to list the access info. here , so:
The Flower and Herb Exchange yearbook
The Garden Conservancy open days directory
Pomona, quarterly journal of the North American Fruit Explorers
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
The Pepper Gal – seeds
Select Seeds-Antique Flowers – seeds and plants
Totally Tomatoes – seeds, not plants
At Seed Savers, it’s 5 Color Silverbeet. At Johnny’s, which got an AAS award for it in 1998, it’s Bright Lights. At our place, it’s just rainbow chard, a must-plant delight: easy to grow, easy to cook, beautiful all summer long and long into the fall.
Bill insists it’s sweeter after frost; I think he’s simply confusing it with cole crops like kale and collards, which are sweeter, because temperatures below 40 destroy sulfur compounds. Sweetened or not, rainbow is slightly less frost hardy than regular chard, so we dug it up when temperatures started going way down – way back in early November there actually were a couple of nights when it hit the mid-teens.
The plants were set upright in a big pot lined with a thick plastic bag, with no more dirt than what was left clinging to the substantial roots. The pot was stored in an unheated enclosed porch , aka our well-lit walk-in. Every once in a while, I pour some water over the bases, but not very much.
chard plant, out of pot for photographic purposes
We have been harvesting regularly, breaking off leaves as needed as though the plants were still in the ground. When all have been eaten, we’ll compost the stumps. They could be replanted in mid-spring, if we wanted to save seed, but we’re not that dedicated. (Colors cross, so the pros grow each one in isolation and mix the seeds at packaging. )
Some say the different colors taste different, a lot to assert given that the colors include pink, red, purple, magenta, orange, yellow, white, white with pink stripes and some extremely zingy mixtures of pink and tangerine. All I can say is that none of them are as good as plain old white-stemmed Lucullus. But gorgeousness counts, even if the colors don’t stand up all that well when cooked.
Cooking Swiss Chard
is sort of like cooking chickens and turkeys – it helps to remember that cooking the thing whole is likely to be unkind to one part. Instead of light and dark meat, chard has stems (petioles) and leaves.
Chard Stems appear almost celerylike, very sturdy and crisp when raw. But at least when the chard is freshly harvested, they get tender quickly and tend to end up unpleasantly flabby if cooked for more than a few minutes. Most recipes say the stems are tougher than the leaves and should be cooked longer, but when we cook the chard from the garden we add the chopped stems near the end, shortly before the leaves have cooked through.
In Europe , stems are as highly prized as the leaves and those from varieties like Blonde de Lyon and Monstruoso are frequently cooked solo. Standard advice is to cook them like asparagus , which I take to mean “like asparagus the old-fashioned way: briefly blanched, thoroughly drained, then finished with a rich sauce such as browned butter or hollandaise.” You’d think boiling would be ill-advised with something so watery, but in my experience it works as well or better than steaming and stir-frying.
The alternative, especially when you want to preserve the bright colors of Rainbow types, is not to cook the stems at all. Just slice thinly crosswise (longitudinal julienne can be stringy) and sprinkle over hot cooked greens, toss into salad or add to a slaw of fennel and celery.
Not much needs saying about the Chard Leaves, except that they’re delicious prepared any way you’d prepare spinach and most of the ways you’d prepare stronger greens like kale and broccoli raab. Also nice stuffed and stewed, just sub pairs of them for the single cabbage leaves in your favorite stuffed cabbage recipe.
Christmas day: Breakfast consumed, presents opened, the tree not twinkling ( we’ve given it a bye this year) and Baby, it’s warm outside – time for a cookie-redemptive walk.
Never mind the cliches about perpetual November, our bit of the mid-Hudson Valley is eerily like March. At the suet feeder, the usual crew of woodpeckers ( downy, hairy and 
red-bellied, one of the worlds more misleadingly named birds, photographed here by Edward Russell)
has a visitor, a Carolina wren.
The wren is not mind-bendingly out of place – our 1980 Peterson field guide says “fluctuating in north; cut back by severe winters” – but personally myself I get a chill when I see Carolina in New York on Christmas day.
The forsythia at the top of the hill has been blooming for the last month, so the flowers are no longer a surprise, and neither is the clump of blewits that came up 2 weeks ago in the oak leaves by the roadway. They’re multiply frost-walloped but still hanging on, only slightly the worse for wear.
The weeds never were surprising; cold-resistance is one way biennials like wild phlox, garlic mustard and verbascum get such a jump on everything else. But we’ve seldom seen so much greater celandine , Chelidonium majus, even though, being a poppy , it’s perfectly happy to wax fat for next year in low light and cold-but-not-frozen soil.
The deeply scalloped greens were lovely, and a reminder of how close some weeds are to relatives on the approved list. This one looks a lot like our native woodland poppy, Stylophorum diphyllum, a rarer plant with larger flowers and less aggressive habits.
It’s easy to tell them apart when they’re blooming – C. majus has small, pale yellow flowers; S. diphyllum has good sized, deep gold ones – or when you see seed pods (C. majus = long skinny sticking up; S. diphyllum = sort of football-shaped, drooping ) but at this time of year the best way to know what you’re seeing is to simply assume the worst, especially if the plant is by the roadside or in some other highly disturbed ground.
Greater Celadine is a present from the New England colonists, who brought it as a medicinal herb, primarily for digestive complaints and to cure skin diseases. A brief google suggests the medical theory is hair-of-doggish; the bright orange sap of C. majus is very irritating to the skin and extracts of the plant have been implicated in liver disorders. It’s also supposed to help with sneezing, which I can testify it causes bouts of if you break the stem while pulling it up.
Greater celandine. The sap is as orange as the roots
