Garden
In spite of the persistent cold, the annual annual fever is on me: can’t resist mop-headed China asters, tall snapdragons (I love old fashioned black prince, the one with the black green leaves and deep, velvety red flowers), fragrant little yellow Lemon Gem marigolds, cosmos, petunias – and let’s hear a good word for petunias, hey. Not the doubles that look squirted out of a can, like the whipped cream on a cheap sundae, but those like the Wave hybrids that have decently small, simple flowers with some of the old fashioned petunia fragrance but not the old fashioned petunia tendency to collapse utterly at the first raindrop. And…
You know how it goes: take a quick trip to the garden center to get a new pair of gloves or a half-pound of grass seed and the next thing you know you’re wandering down the aisles, drawn by that patchwork carpet of bright colors, each teeny plant in its tiny cell putting out flowers that call, “buy me, buy me, buy ME!”
It can be hard to ignore them, but it’s better to buy the ones that are still more potential than performance, stocky little guys with multiple stems and healthy-looking leaves. And when I say little I do mean little. Best trick is to mutter “roots, roots” while shopping . After all, with constant water and fertilizer an annual can grow 8, 10 inches – a foot and more – tall in a pot the size of an ice cube, but that plant is going to have major adjustment problems when it moves into the garden.
And while we’re on the subject of seedlings, I see to my horror some places are selling baby sunflowers. SUNFLOWERS! There are gazillions of terrific sunflowers – classic yellows with one huge flower, like Russian Giant, not classic dark reds like Velvet Queen, that makes a huge, flower covered bush, and just about everything in between although as yet none are purple ( thank heaven for small mercies).
Point of rant: all of them will make MUCH better plants if you start them from seed. Nasturtiums , too, which are also more and more sold as seedlings but phooey on that, and here are a few more
Things that should be started from seed: poppies, evening-scented stock (Matthiola bicornis) coriander, annual phlox (Phlox drummondii), larkspur, annual lupine, morning glories… I’d say sweet peas , too. But those should be in by now.
Is easy, asparagus being a crop that offers fabulous returns for very little work. Admittedly, it’s a project to plant, involving the preparation of a deep trench and lots of good soil to fill same. But you only do THAT once every 15 to 20 years; in between there is nothing but semi – yearly maintenance: spring mulching; fall cleanup and fertilizing. That’s it, unless you count harvesting.
I don’t. Picking asparagus is not work. Neither is cutting the beautiful tall ferns to enhance summer bouquets.
In short, assuming you plan to stay put for a while, there is just one thing about asparagus that can be a deal breaker: It isn’t small. A row generous enough for 4 people to pig out all season takes about 30 x 3 feet and that’s a substantial chunk of real estate.
On the other hand, asparagus needn’t be in the vegetable garden. The ferns are handsome enough to make it a suitable background for roses, say, or you could use it to mask a pool fence… or
Anything that lets you grow your own. Truly fresh asparagus is right up there with truly fresh peas, a vegetable apart.
Variety also matters, though this is one case where just about all of them are tasty – differences mostly come in looks , yield, and disease resistance. Only one, the new(ish) Purple Passion, is substantially sweeter than the others. It’s also reputed to contain less of the compounds that some smell in urine ( Not everyone pees asparagus pee; and of those who do, not all of them can smell it. )
I asked Bill what kind he planted when he set ours, 13 years ago. “Whatever they were selling at the Agway,” he said. “Jersey King, maybe, or maybe it was Martha Washington.” So much for being fussy about varieties. Whatever we have is plenty tasty enough, but it is highly variable… and there are so many female plants I think it’s probably old standard Martha, even though early releases of J. King were not as all-male as promised.
More serious truck gardeners would have dug up and discarded the less spear-productive females – easy to distinguish because they have berries – but we have so many plants (about 75 feet of row; it’s a long story, mostly about greed) that we haven’t bothered. Even now when I’m getting ready to plant some Purple Passion, I’ll just put it at the end of one of the rows we already have.
We’ll get our Purple Passion from Nourse Farms , the same place we got the strawberries extolled back on May 1st. An alternative source is Pinetree Garden Seeds. The Nourse website has good planting instructions, complete with diagrams.
Our neighbor Dan’s Purple Passion, just starting
He offered to weed when he saw the camera, but I told him the unexpurgated version was probably more inspiring. Once it gets well established, asparagus is not easily discouraged by a little competition.
When it comes to Foods the Americas Gave the World (as the Smithsonian once described them), the Americas in question are mostly South and Central, original homes of tomatoes, potatoes, corn , chiles, chocolate and vanilla, just for starters. Once you head North, there aint much shakin’ except wild rice and maple syrup.
But there are the world’s best strawberries, tiny wild strawberries, Fragaria virginiana, the ones that Roger Williams was talking about when he said, in 1643 “…this berry is the wonder of all fruits growing naturally in these parts. It is of itself excellent so that one of the chiefest doctors of England was wont to say, that God could have made, but never did make a better berry. …”
Still true – and one of the wonderful things about them is their subtle variation: color, shape and sweetness all depending on the soil, the shade, the weather of the season. Always delicious but never predictable, the best are so intensely fragrant it takes just a handful to lift a whole quart of garden berries into the sublime.
A mercy, that, because picking wild strawberries is – let us not say a pain – but certainly not a task for the time pressed. The biggest one I’ve ever found was about the size of a nickel, though plumper, and you do have to know a good spot; thickly carpeted with plants – each one bears just a few fruits – and undercarpeted with grass, leaves or some other barrier to sand and dirt. (washing any strawberry is bad, washing the wild ones is criminal – and usually ineffective. )
It would be easier if you could move some into the garden, but for some reason you can’t. Or rather, you can move the plants; but they will remain just as shy bearing and the fruit won’t taste the same.
Enter fraises de bois, wood strawberries, F. vesca, often called wild strawberries by the wishful thinkers who write menus. Slightly larger than the wild ones and very easy to grow in gardens, they are dependably delicious — if you believe the catalogs.
Over the years, I’ve grown several varieties, including Alexandra and Baron Solemacher, each of which is often touted as tastiest. Every one of them, to a strawberry, tasted exactly like fake grape flavoring – the kind in cheap candy and gum. ( should say they taste the way this flavor smells on the breaths of others. I must have consumed some when a child but that was quite a while ago).
I am not alone in this opinion. A brief supporting quote – from Eleanor Pereny’s garden classic, Green Thoughts, is on the May 4th podcast from Virtual Hudson Valley.
Perenyi, who attributes the whole fraise de bois phenom to savvy marketing, starts out by quoting Alice B. Toklas, another authority to be reckoned with: ” The small strawberries, called by the French wood strawberries, are not wild but cultivated. It took me an hour to gather a small basket for Gertrude Stein’s breakfast, and later when there was a plantation of them in the upper garden our young guests were told that if they cared to eat them, they should do the picking themselves.”
I wouldn’t add these words (from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook) if it weren’t for the next paragraph, forgotten until I went back to find the strawberries:
” The first gathering in the garden in May of Salads, radishes and herbs made me feel like a mother about her baby – how could anything so beautiful be mine. And this emotion of wonder filled me for each vegetable as it was gathered every year. There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown.”
(Green Thoughts and Ms. Toklas’ Cookbook have languished out of print from time to time but both are now readily available as inexpensive paperbacks..)
More on strawberries – and cream – shortly. Meanwhile a bit of garden serendipity. Was just weeding under the plum trees and came across this souvenir of late last year who knows when. Leaf is a bit of garlic mustard – evil weed! Beetle genus and species a mystery but if you take that metallic blue and pump it up tenfold you’ll see what I saw – tiny and shining in the shifting shade.
When it comes to strawberries, I’ve been a yoyo gardener for years. They do come under the heading of “one more thing,” and the Northeast is gratifyingly full of pick your own farms that grow decent varieties. Result: the patch languishes and by and by I take it out. Then I taste something delicious, or write a story and remember how easy they are to grow. Next thing you know, I’m out there setting a small bed – just enough to, you know, make sure there are enough to nibble on.
Any more, all we grow is Tristar, best tasting of the day neutrals, varieties that can bear from spring to fall because they don’t depend on day length to trigger flowering. ( This year I was going to try Everest, supposedly even better. But by the time I got around to ordering, they were all sold out…
Many strawberry connoisseurs feel about day neutrals the way I feel about “early” tomatoes, namely: ” so what? I’d rather just eat great ones in season and let it go at that.” But early tomatoes are always followed by more wonderful tomatoes, whereas day neutral strawberries just keep coming, long after the spring wonderfuls are gone. With day neutrals, the smallish spring crop starts a season that runs through summer, peaks in early fall, then continues at a modest pace until stopped by hard frost.
That said, the fussbudgets are right about flavor – the tastiest action is all in old fashioned June bearers, original fruit of the 18th century cross between tiny, super sweet North American Fragaria virginiana and bland but big F. chiloensis, from the continent to the south.
There are several hundred named June bearers, though you’d never know it by shopping – whether for fruit OR for plants. Strawberries are still 2 or 3 decades behind tomatoes in the heirloom awareness/ variety savvy department.
Yet – let’s all fall over with surprise – there are umptillion kinds of home garden strawberries that beat out most commercial fruit, for the usual home garden reasons: no need for durability, no need to turn red before ripening, no need to whap out large crops all at once to cut down on field labor…
June bearers that have been delicious for us include ‘Northeaster’, somewhat shy bearing but very flavorful; ‘Fairfax’, which spoils in less than a day from the plant – too juicy! – and is close to wild strawberries for the fragaria part, and good old fashioned ‘Sparkle’, on the small side but otherwise yummy and grown by several pick your owns, the fact that frees us to focus on Tristar.
For more – far far more – about garden strawberries, check out the excellent strawberry site put up by let’s hear it for a GOOD use of tax dollars! the National Agricultural Library
I get my plants from Nourse Farms
Strawberries in the kitchen to come – after they’re better in market.
Meanwhile, possibly under the influence of the buzz about “Feeding Desire” the Cooper-Hewitt’s new utensil show (new show, old utensils), I started hankering after an – I confess, second – silver berry spoon, for the ultimate in dishing ’em out. On eBay: 12089 “strawberry” items; 542 in home daécor; 1 – one! – silver berry spoon. At google: 11,600 responses to a request for “silver berry spoon.” In the garden, fortunately for my budget: 11,600 things that need planting/weeding/mulching… and picking. The asparagus is up! (while you’re cruising the Victorian silverware, get a load of all those nifty asparagus tongs)
I hate to gush – ok, I don’t hate to gush – only giving fair warning that paragraphs are about to be spent swooning over the forsythia. It’s spectacular in the Hudson Valley, friends tell me the same is (was) true at least as far south as Pennsylvania and if the buds are any indication; it’s going to be amazing in Maine, any minute now.
Every spring is wonderful – how can a plant be so blindingly sunny – but I think this is the best I’ve ever seen it… seems like every single bud came through the winter unscathed.
Forsythia as a plant is tough, but the buds often get frozen; that’s why after a hard winter you often see bushes with only a skirt of flowers, all the color close to the ground where it was protected by snow.
Common Forsythia (F. x intermedia), unknown cultivar from a friend
In theory, forsythia can be attacked by bugs and diseases, but the only problem I’ve ever seen is age. Best bloom comes on 2nd, 3rd and 4th year stems , so when the bush is choked with ancient trunks that can’t manage much in the way of new sprouts, total bloom begins to decline. The standard rule is to prune yearly, after the 4th year, by removing the oldest stems at the base, but I’ve never been that fanatical. It’s easier to just look at the bush and see what’s blooming well and what’s not. Unbranched young shoots won’t be flowering, but their youth is obvious, so there’s not much chance of making mistakes.
There is, however, a chance to make a great many more plants: common forsythia is as easy to propagate as willow. Just keep the stems in water – changing it every week or so – until root initials form along the submerged part.
Forsythia spreads like a weed, and a lot of ’em ARE weedy, but there are at least seven species and more than 40 cultivars, including many dwarf types, several that are variegated, and one : Forsythia viridissima var koreana ‘Kumson,’ that has white veins in its dark green leaves and looks like a real stunner. It’s rated hardy to zone 6, so it ought to be ok in the mid and lower Hudson Valley, and I intend to give it a try in Maine, too…
The widest choice is by mail-order , from sources like Rare Find Nursery and Forestfarm, but the more alert local nurseries also offer good selections, and many of them will special order if you ask, especially if you ask when they aren’t crazy-busy. Wholesalers sell far more
goodies than retailers have room to display
Department of Just in Case You Were Wondering: There is a European species (from the Balkans), but most forsythias are native to Asia. Plant hunter Robert Fortune is credited with bringing them to the West, in 1844, but the botanical name honors Scottish botanist William Forsyth (1737-1804), a major player in British horticulture who ran the Chelsea physic garden, started an international seed and plant exchange, and wound up as King George 3rd’s chief superintendent of the royal gardens at Kensington and St James’s.
That’s chervil on the left, nestled up against dandelion, another delicious weed (harvesting and recipe tips below – in the entry for April 3rd). No pic of the coriander – yet. It’s too windy every time I think of it…
The first seeds we planted (peas) have barely broken the surface, but the coriander and chervil that planted themselves are off and running; chervil vinaigrettes have been on the menu for several weeks now and we had the first guacamole with homegrown cilantro about 10 days ago.
Having these two in abundance after a winter of pallid store cilantro* and no chervil at all, what a thrill!
The flavors are very different; clean-spicy anise-y chervil has nothing in common with the funky richness of cilantro except a penetrating greenness, but in the garden they are almost twins:
Both are cool weather plants that sprout early, go to flower in the summer and make a second crop in fall.
Both are rampant self-sowers; just let a few of those flowers ripen and drop seeds and you can have truly delicious weeds.
Both are easy to remove if they do show up in the wrong spot, in part because both are tap rooted, which means
Both will either die or bolt ( send up flower stalks) if you try to transplant seedlings. Same goes for dill, another annual herb that should always be grown from seed. Parsley is tap rooted, too, and often presents the same problem, but because it’s a biennial it’s tougher. Parsley seedlings can move successfully as long as they are still very small and young.
The not-twin part is in the seeds:
Chervil seed should be very fresh, it doesn’t keep well from year to year. Cilantro seed is much longer lived. Also much cheaper to buy in bulk as spice. It won’t germinate if it’s been irradiated, but it usually hasn’t, so there’s no reason to buy those little dinky packets. Seeds cost less than a dollar an ounce when they’re sold as flavoring – for chili / sweet yeast breads/ gin…
Chervil seed is no special culinary delight, but coriander is not only great dried ( the classic spice use), it’s also delicious when green and soft. The flavor is right between funky leaf and sweet-flowery dried , wonderful in sauces for fish, in potato salad…
*cilantro is the most common US name for the leaves of the coriander plant, and is used here for convenience.
I know this is the age of instant gratification, but – this being the season – let’s hear it for planting young trees. The rewards ( I speak from experience) are huge: a personal forest – or great big hedge, or both – isn’t simply a visual treat and haven for Our Friends The Birds, it’s also shelter from road noise, wind, and whatever lies next door. And as long as you don’t go overboard, trees are a terrific investment. Deposit a 4 to 6 footer now, enjoy a major increase in property value when it hits the 14 foot mark – or, of course, soars beyond.
Our hemlock hedge, for instance, is about a hundred trees long, so it had to start out as young ‘uns. We paid 5 or 10 bucks apiece – this being 12 years ago, more or less – for an assortment of rather spindly 4 to 5 footers. Two years later, when the tallest had barely hit 6 feet and were still more promise than performance I got antsy. Bought a bunch of 10 footers, at about 40 bucks a pop, to plant in front of the most grievous eyesore.
Sure enough it DID make an immediate difference, but the little guys only took 2 or 3 more years to catch up, and once they did that was it for the benefit – annual pruning evened it all out. Now that every tree in the hedge is 14 to 16 or more feet tall, you can’t tell which is which.
That’s Bill with the electric pruner, on a 12 foot ladder.
Other benefits of starting small:
* small trees suffer less damage when taken from the field, so they recover more quickly when planted ( big trees usually stay the same height for at least a couple of years ; they’re too busy repairing their roots to do much of anything else.).
* small trees are DIY, which matters huge when you’re talking about a lot of them. You can pick up a 4 footer without serious consequences for your back. You can dig a hole for it without taking all day, and you can keep it watered … even a skinny 8 foot tree needs about 20 gallons of water each week – more if the weather is hot and windy.
The alternative, if you’re planning to stay put for a long while or have truly extensive tree needs, is a whole bunch of the tiny trees sold super-cheaply by many soil and water conservation districts and slightly less cheaply but still bargainish by mail order tree-nurseries. These’re little sticks, about 18 inches tall… it’s gonna be a long time to glory; and you do have to spray ’em against deer for at least the first couple of years. But they’re certainly easy; one stroke of the shovel is all it takes. And the price is right: here in Dutchess County, NY, it’s $16.50 for a bundle of 10 Norway spruce, each of which will ( or more properly, can) grow 50 or more feet tall.
The pre-order period is over so there are no guarantees, but leftover bundles are usually available at the yearly plant sale at the Farm and Home center on Rte. 44 in Pleasant Valley. It’s April 21 and 22 ; be there early or be disappointed. For further details call 845 677 8011, extension 3, or see the website.
For the last 5 or 6 years, I’ve been building a crocus carpet in the narrow strip of lawn that leads from the kitchen door to a grape arbor in front of the tall hemlock hedge. Every fall, in go a couple of hundred bulbs, which is about what I have money and time for, idea being that they’d keep spreading and by and by before I was too ancient, there the thing would be, a glorious tapestry of mixed colors, shining in the spring sunlight. For maximum punch and longevity, there are as many threads as possible : mostly early, small species types like chrysanthus and tomasianus, but always with a few giant Dutch gobsmackers, just so it doesn’t get too tasteful.
For years, the plan worked great … every spring there were more little clumps of yellow and white and purple cheerfully popping through the brownish green, looking sort of like willing wildflowers, and every year a few of the clumps were a little bigger, crocus puddles instead of crocus clumps. But this year we’ve hit tilt. It’s finally a carpet all right, but it looks moth-eaten. There are now more flowers than lawn but not enough to cover it, so the patchiness is backward.
It would take at least three more years to really pave the place at the present rate, at least two ugly springs too many. It’s either spend the whole bulb budget on the stupid thing and plant about 600 this fall or else it’s elimination time. Removing instead of adding would restore the wildflower-popping through effect, which may turn out to be prettier anyway.
In terms of effort , it’s more or less a wash, so I’m kind of inclined to just go for it, and that brings us to today’s homily:
* Don’t forget to take snapshots of your bulb plantings. Put a few identifying markers in, too, like yardsticks or little signs that say “10 feet from porch door at 90 degree angle.” While you’re at it, make want/need lists. In June, when the fall catalogs start coming, offering tempting discounts to those who order by July 15th , you’ll be glad you did.
SNOWDROPS: Back when I was gassing on about how great snowdrops are ( on February 9th) , I promised instructions for how to divide them when the time came. The time has come – or is about to. Ideal moment is after flowers finish but before seedpods have started to harden.
* best planting sites are sheltered from high winds, in partial sun or light shade, in soil that retains some moisture in summer (but not heavy clay).
* Soil should be very moist on transplanting day; if the weather has been dry, water both the clumps to be divided and the destination sites several hours before the job.
* Working in the late afternoon, Use a digging fork to pry up established clumps. Separate ’em. Big bulbs and their leaves can move as onesies; if you have lots of threadlike seedlings all root-intertwined, move them in groups of 3 to 7 ( depending on just how threadlike they are).
* Replant at the same depth, keeping bulbs 2 bulb-widths apart, keeping clumps separated even more. Be sure the roots are well spread out.
* Clipping off seedheads is optional. It may help the plants re-establish, since roots can concentrate on the job at hand. But usually, they’ll be happy – or not – without this additional aid, so you might as well not bother.
* Don’t forget to keep the transplants watered until the leaves start dying down.
Enough. For this post let’s just say a tomato “canned” in glass is 300,000 times tastier than a tomato canned in a can and that’s partly because the home canned tomato is (usually) a tastier variety to start with. Be sure to leave room in the garden for plenty of plants.
Can’t say I never met a plant I didn’t like – there are hundreds you couldn’t pay me to grow – but I do love far too many. Plus I’m a patsy for garden porn, easily swayed by catalogs that look like Frederick’s of Sissinghurst. As a result, spring around here is a constant struggle, a tug of war between loving plants and loving the garden itself.
Recall the gardens that struck a chord and it’s likely you’ll think first of a long view, framed but unobstructed, or a wide slice of sky between trees, a smooth lawn bordered with flowers, or maybe a waving hedge of tall grasses next to a flagged patio – nary a blossom in sight … in all these cases, place trumps plants: great gardens are always edited .
Even crammed-in cottage gardens, famously places where plants are “riotous,” that riot has harmony and rhythm. One or two orange lilies popping up in the middle of a small bed filled with a haze of bluish perovskia and pale purple verbena would look great. But if in addition there were also a couple of white phlox, a magenta coneflower, and 2 or 3 red and white roses …
Well, trust me. No.
In other words, the mantra for today is: take out the things that stuck out last year, and try to think of where that sexy new black elderberry, red monarda or gold-leafed heuchera is going to go before you plonk down your money.
This week’s garden tips:
* Weed. Weed , and then weed some more. Roots come easily out of cool, wet soil, and if you get evil actors like garlic mustard now, before they get a chance to flower, you’re well on the road to control… at least in selected spots.
* Have you cut down your big grasses yet? Removed all the artistic dead stuff you left last fall to add winter interest? If you do it NOW, you can just use hedge shears to slice everything off at the base, a couple of inches from the ground. Wait two weeks – or one – or maybe five minutes, and the new growth will be in the way.
In theory, you should have a wheelbarrow with you, so you can haul away the debris, but screw that. It’s more important to just leap out there and get stuff done whenever you can spare a few minutes. The world is largely one big debris pile at the moment anyway, it’s not going to make much difference if there’s a bit more of it lying around for a few days.
Of course, you don’t want to leave it around for long, any more than you want to let blown leaves sit on the new grass and kill it. First non-windy day, get out there and rake.
* This is also a good time to renew what I call fountain-growers, pliable-stemmed shrubs that are prettiest when allowed to grow tall and drape over gracefully. Standard wisdom advises pruning in late spring or early summer, after whatever-it-is has bloomed, so you don’t lose any flowers. But that’s just when you have about 40,000 other things to do; and you won’t “lose” any of the flowers if you bring the pruned branches indoors and let them bloom in the vase.
Forsythia is the best-known fountain-grower, but this group also includes kerria, mock orange, wiegela, deutzia, and spirea. They all bloom on year old stems and on year old stems that grow from trunks that are 2 to 4 years old. Trunks older than 4 or 5 no longer send out much new growth, so you have to keep new trunks coming if you want fountains of flowers. ( Simply pruning part way back makes a bristly thicket with polka dots. Not pretty.)
*To manage an old, established shrub, simply cut one trunk at the base each year. Allow 2 or 3 strong new shoots to rise from the ground, choosing those that are reasonably close to the one you’re cutting. Remove the other sprouts so things don’t get crowded.
To manage younger plants, do nothing for the first 3 years, then start the oldest trunk routine.
* To force pruned branches indoors: In addition to those listed above, magnolia , apple, crabapple, flowering cherry, and plum ( which in bloom smells just like cheap incense) are all likely bets. When you get the branches indoors, use a sharp pruner or heavy knife to split the stems several times, then immerse in a bucket of room-temperature water and store in a cool – not cold – place, out of direct sun, until the buds swell and start to open. Change the water every few days.
When the branches are ready to display, rinse the stems and recut them before arranging. It is almost impossible to go wrong with these, big blowsy bunches in pitchers look great, small twigs in tiny bud vases look nifty too. But it’s hard to beat the Japanese effect, if you have those heavy, shallow flower-holders with the spikes on the bottom. One blooming branch arching upward therefrom is almost too beautiful to bear ( also too tempting to the kitten; this year all our branches are in – and then pulled from – the biggest, heaviest vases we’ve got.)
