looking ahead
to catalog plant lust. Always useful to remember they have to be interesting in context.
The Black Pearl pepper is in a tall urn that’s set in the middle of a clump of Artemisia Silver King. The sedum is good old Autumn Joy.
seasonal alerts
The Rhododendrometer
No need for a digital measurement ( or the morning weather report) when you look out and see this.
rhododendron leaves in self-protective mode; it's 20 degrees F.
Could be a cold truth about global warming: 15 below normal means nothing when normal itself is up for grabs.
Wild Mushrooms of Mid-fall – Wine Caps, Shaggy Manes and More
It may be bundle up time ( we’ve had temps in the mid-20’s on several nights at this point) but there are still delicious wild mushrooms to be found. Here’s the latest from our resident expert.
THE MUSHROOMS OF AUTUMN
After The Leaf fall
story and photos by Bill Bakaitis
As the days shorten the trees shed their leaves, openings begin to appear in the canopy, and more light penetrates to the understory. Mild frosts will have singed the outer tips of the garden plants and the edges of the forest, but mushrooms such as Honeys can still be found poking through the thin cover of leaves under the thickest forest canopies.
Light frost on Maple Leaves
By mid-Autumn, a month after equinox, It’s a different story. Read More…
Frost on the Pumpkin
Well, the summer squash actually, because that’s all we plant in Maine.
cousa squash plant hit by frost
The winter squash is – or more accurately was – down in the much larger Hudson Valley vegetable garden. Bill got it all harvested before frost descended, reminding me yet again that the (once) well-known poem, The Frost is On the Punkin, by James Whitcomb Riley, makes absolutely NO sense unless “squash” means “squash vines.” If you let frost land on the fruits themselves, rot will spread from the frosted part and the squash won’t keep. Click here for more about winter squash, including recipe tips, here to read the poem, relic of another time in many ways yet not without its virtues. The second stanza gives you the flavor:
Free Dahlias! (if you move in the right circles)
Catalogs and garden centers sell you dahlias in the spring, at planting time. Friends and neighbors give you dahlias in the fall, at dig-up-the-tubers time.
Could the red and white one be dahlia 'Mary Eveline'?
This dahlia surely has an official name (might be ‘Mary Eveline’), but as far as I’m concerned it’s ‘Carol’s Wine,’ because my dear friend Carol gave me the start tubers now many years ago.
Like potatoes, dahlias multiply. First one tuber becomes two or three, which is nice. Next spring you can plant them all together and get a big fat bush. By fall the bush has made seven or eight. Not so convenient but still ok; dahlias are easy to divide and there’s usually room for another plant. Read More…
Edulis Alert! It's Porcini Time
I know, I know. Enough already with the mushrooms. And just as Bill is confident I’ll want to weigh in with recipes for hen of the woods (see below), I’m reasonably sure he’ll have guidance on finding porcini.
This is just a reminder that if you already know a good place, now would be a good time to check. We found a bunch the other day in a favorite Hudson Valley spot and this morning, my first back in Maine in a week, look what was growing in Lois’ lawn! I’d normally pick everything, to forestall insect infestation. But even the big ones were – amazingly – almost bug free, so I’m leaving the little guy to get bigger.
Boletus edulis, from porcino grosso to porcinettino. Button in the middle is dime sized, honker on the lower left weighed 3/4 pound, after I cut off the base.
The Mushrooms of Autumn (hen of the woods)
OK, mushroom fans, another guest post from Bill Bakaitis, on another of the all time great delicious wild mushrooms, the hen of the woods ( Grifola frondosus), now appearing on an oak tree – or on a shelf at a high end market- somewhere near you.
time to look for hen of the woods
by Bill Bakaitis
September. The days grow shorter. For mycologists, gone are the languid days of summer when we would slowly, patiently, and gently try to identify those interesting mushrooms that grow singly here and there. The photographs, spore prints, the keys, the chemical and microscopic analysis, the process that might take hours or days for us to determine even the genus are luxuries we can no longer afford. The sap that now flows through our veins and that of the world around us cries out for haste. There is so much to do in so little time: the garden, the house and yard, the movement of game in the forests, fall migrations of fishes in the ocean. Each claims its hegemony over our lives and the dwindling hours available. As for mushrooms, we have not time for the tiny, the new, the tantalizing odd; we long instead for the truly substantial. Enter frondosus!
Polyporus (Grifola) frondosus
Frondosus – call it Polyporus frondosus, or Grifola frondosus, Maitake, Sheep’s Head, or Hen of the Woods. Here is the mushroom that answers the question, “Where’s the meat?” It is large in size and fruits reliably in the same locations year after year, allowing us to take a twenty minute detour from our hectic lives to collect a year’s supply. And it is one of the best tasting of all wild mushrooms, appearing on every mycologist’s top ten list. Read More…
Collecting Wild Mushrooms Part 2 , Chanterelles
As the recipes – more to come! – suggest, my job is to have a great time collecting, followed by having a great time cooking and preserving. HIS job is to know where and how to look, so here’s another guest post from mushroom expert Bill Bakaitis.
Finding Chanterelles
by Bill Bakaitis
Mention ‘summer mushrooms’ around here and someone is sure to say “Oh yes, Chanterelles! They are the only mushroom I collect.”
And for good reason. They are delicious, they resist insect damage, clean up easily, are distinctive and easy to identify, and are found in beautiful locations. Oh, did I mention that they are delicious?
Inconvenient Frost, The Cold Side of Global Warming
The frost I feared last week (see below ) was a doozy all right; 25 degrees at 5AM on April 30th. Theoretically, that’s normal. Frost-free date for this area is supposed to be May 10th. What’s abnormal was the whole rest of April, which had very few frosty nights and many days with temperatures in the high 70’s to low 80’s.
That heat produced a premature explosion of new growth, tender young succulent stems, leaves and flowers defenseless against cell bursting ice.
Result? The magnolia of course got trashed – what was left of it. But the plum and apple blossoms were spared and to my everlasting surprise and delight, the Viburnum carlesii came through unscathed, every perfumed petal intact.
However. Carnage was visited upon: a large clump of trumpet lilies, wisteria almost in bud, the Miscanthus ‘giganteus’, which was already going great guns, and a beautiful Japanese maple, new last year, that has been my pride and joy.
It also made mush of the bleeding hearts,
Before frost, under the viburnum.
and heaven help us a peony. Just one, and not too badly, but still. A PEONY! Is nothing safe?
The answer, unfortunately is no. Most of the worry about global warming is focussed on droughts, floods and overhot summers, but there’s more to it than that. Unwanted warmth followed by VERY unwanted cold is going to be a fact of life from here on out. To deal with it:
* Plant new spring bloomers as though they were fruit trees: on a north slope, so heat comes late and frost drains away.
* When you remove winter mulch to avoid smothering fresh shoots, keep the mulch material nearby, so you can rake it back over them if/when frost threatens.
* Resist the temptation to prune the roses. You don’t want to encourage the new growth, and leaving the dead and weak stems in place helps keep frost-produced dieback above the wood you want to keep.
* be sure you have a supply of floating row cover aka spun-bonded crop-protector. It’s much lighter than bedsheets, far easier to use, and although it’s ungreenly made of plastic, it lasts practically forever if you take good care of it. Sources include Pinetree Garden Seeds and Johnny’s Selected Seeds
This doesn’t mean you can turn those sheets to rags; the row cover is only good down to about 28 degrees; if you fear even greater misery, use sheets. Either way, remember the purpose is mostly to trap ground heat; a hat that simply keeps frost from touching tops won’t help unless the frost is very light.
For more tips, see the advice posted last fall; a lot of it is useful at planting time.
New Year Portfolio Analysis ( Garden Division)
( For the pizzelle recipe, please scroll down)
It’s hard to think coldly about the garden just now, when the catalog stack is approaching tilt and there’s not much else to think about warmly, but this is an ideal time to take a hard look at your return on garden investment. A little abstract evaluation helps ensure high-performing options are not overlooked, and that the resources locked up in losers will be re-allocated to something more profitable.
And we will stop here with the analogy; finance not being my long suit.
Nevertheless. It really helps to list assets and liabilities before you plunge in, and it helps the most to write it down, however roughly, instead of just thinking about it in the shower for a couple of mornings. Unless your garden is confined to 3 or 4 containers, human nature more or less ensures you’re not counting everything. (Think how few calories most of us think we eat and how wrong we are about it almost all the time).
Items It’s Useful to Reassess Yearly:
Space: Not only is there never enough, what there is is not usually tabula rasa. For instance, there’s a 3 X 10 foot strip in the front shade garden completely open for something new, but that something must remain no more than four feet tall without any help from me. By writing this down, I am reminded that it’s not happening with witch hazels, and that time spent mooning over Fire Charm (brilliant red fall leaves, copper-red winter flowers) and the super-fragrant Moonlight should be devoted to the hunt for plants that will actually fit.
You probably have a rough layout of the annual/vegetable garden – or so I hope – so the allocational trick here is simply to fill it all in, in as much detail as possible, before looking through the saved seeds or ordering any new ones. Our roughly 4000 square feet sounds huge, but given how much of it must support tomatoes, corn, garlic, greens, etc. ( including flowers) there’s only a rather small area for the winter squash. As most of it will be filled by super-sweet, long-keeping Cha Cha, from Johnny’s, and Tetsakabuto, from Pinetree, it would be better if I didn’t even LOOK at the Baker Creek catalog (85 winter squash and 80 even more tempting – and space-hogging – melons).
Time: it’s not that writing the truth on paper reveals anything new about “not enough,” but rubbing it in can be bracing. Almost all our new plantings have been and will be shrubs because last year I finally inventoried the gardens, assigning each the time it should have to be at its best. Duh of the week? Even under ideal conditions, it’s impossible for someone with a day job to have more than one complex tapestry of annuals, perennials, vines, grasses, bulbs and shrubs and small trees.
Mulch keeps weeds down and drought at bay; healthy plants resist pests and disease. But some weeds always make it through – that’s why they’re weeds; baby vegetables must be watered by us if nature is disobliging; resistant doesn’t mean immune and anyone who says organic pest control takes no more time and attention than blanketing everything with noxious pollutants is lying. Plus if you don’t formally assign some time to simply enjoying the damn thing, you may find when you look back at season’s end that all you did – however enjoyably – was work.
The bed that used to hold these cheerful perennials now features a dwarf Chinese Elm (Ulmus parvifolia), with white-edged leaves on lacy branches and patchy bark that will grow more and more lovely with time. It is nicely surrounded with mulch and very little else. The carefree echinaceas went to the rough edge of the field, where they’ll be fine, and the yellow Asiatic lilies have been consigned to the compost. They were nice, but not THAT nice, and getting rid of them makes it easier to keep the evil lily beetles from doing in the far rarer L. henrii (barely visible at the far right and slightly more visible below).
Money: a yacht is famously defined as a hole in the ocean into which one pours money. A garden is a hole in the ground which serves the same purpose – except that you have to dig the hole before throwing the money in. Less than romantic necessities like pest control products, compost, twine, fertilizer(s) and gloves are inexpensive individually but they do add up. Add them up before the season starts and you may be unpleasantly surprised, but you’ll also have a better idea of when it’s time to start saying “ I really shouldn’t, ” when visiting the nursery.
When it comes to impulse purchased winter orchids, my advice is to buy ‘em in bloom and then throw them out when they’re done, a great saving of space and time if not, admittedly, money. But I don’t always listen to me. This cymbidium came home with the groceries in February last year, and when it finally finished flowering 2 months later went into the enclosed porch we keep at about 40 degrees to use as a walk-in refrigerator. Come spring, we stuck it in the vegetable garden. In fall it returned to the porch, where it remained until a couple of weeks ago and thereby hangs the tale. With these increasingly common orchids, finding a winter home that’s cool enough is often harder than finding one with enough light, so if you have a reasonably bright spot that stays between 45 and 55 degrees you might as well give it a shot, especially if the spot is somewhere out of sight. Non- blooming cymbidiums aren’t as ugly as non-blooming phalaenopsis,but they’re not all that lovely, either.
