December 2009
Cold Tolerant Garden Annuals
Click on December link to the right to see photos.
12/14
Cerinthe lives with snow and ice cover, although not well. Perhaps it is semi-evergreen here. It bears more thought on its usefulness. Its tiny purple flower is, as one grand dame put it, insipid, but maybe in the right place, wherever that is, it’s worth growing.
Rainbow Swiss chard is beautiful. For that I am grateful.
11/15
Cerinthe may be a hardy perennial or annual. Today it blooms in the garden despite being mid-November. Its pale aqua foliage appears in prime condition.
Swiss chard is happy after being released from the grip of pumpkins and tomatoes and Florence fennel bulbs appears firm and perhaps larger.
While pulling soggy thunbergia vines off the wrought iron fence and yanking the first “dead” plant out of the soil, I discover the plant has begun to send out new vines at soil level or just below. I cut top growth off the rest to see if the plants will make it through winter and send out new shoots next spring.
All this after several hard frosts and quite a few lesser ones.
by Mary Jasch
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October 2009
First Frost - Good-bye Garden
Today it snowed like crazy. Some global warming! I’m with physicist Freeman Dyson on that one.
For the past two days, while there has been no frost, everything is beginning to die. It makes me sad because I wanted more time to enjoy it and I didn’t accomplish all the things I wanted to. But at least the bones and hardscape of the garden are there so I can get a big early jump in the spring.
Zinnia blossoms turned brown while the leaves remained green for the past two day. But last night’s cold temps turned the leaves grayish brown. Tithonia is shriveling; cosmos is disappearing.
But Love-Lies-Bleeding is looking marvelous and beginning to cascade. I will definitely plant it again and again, plus more of the showy amaranths. I cut several long stalks and brought them inside to enjoy.
Dug the Florence fennel. Now I have to cut off the feathery tops and store both in the fridge to eat within a week. I’ll see if I can freeze it. As it turns out, I have a nice boneless pork roast waiting to be cooked and I just found a recipe online for roast pork and fennel. I’ll make it tomorrow.
The garden will die tonight. All that’s left to eat is the rainbow chard and one pumpkin. I’ll start to clean it up tomorrow.
by Mary Jasch
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September 2009
Breakfast
9/27
Yellow squash plants are dying – just one plant left with a few babies that probably won’t grow much larger. That delicious squash taught me how convenient and healthy it is to have fresh veggies for breakfast, so this morning I bake a cut up acorn squash given to me by the CT Ag Experiment Station, along with butternut, peaches (whitish yellow so sweet and juicy), and green apples – crisp, juicy and tart. This week – time to get back to the garden.
Grass clippings are great mulch for paths. Nothing grows through it, as opposed to bark or pulled weeds.
Take note: leaves of summer squash, pole bean leaves and tomato leaves have all been nipped off by the deer - but they didn't eat any squash, beans or tomatoes!
9/22
The black-eyed Susan vine forms a wall at least 5 feet tall. It could easily cover 7 feet. Next year, I will plant the seedlings about a foot apart for each plant growths thick. I’ll also plant blue browallia closer – maybe 8 inches apart. It grows well in partial shade.
The moonflower has many buds with blackened sepals. I must sneak down to the pen at night to check for blossoms and hope for no bears.
9/18
There’s something soul-satisfying about going out in my own yard, sleep-eyed and picking breakfast – yellow Supersette squash. As fresh as you can get, clean, no poisons or chemicals, and all I need to do is run it under water to get rain-splashed earth or petals from fruiting tomatoes above it. Ten minutes in the sauté pan with a sprinkle of cheese or just butter with a little hummus on the side.
In early summer, I picked raspberries that grew wild along the edge below my deck and, this year, next to the garage. Nature’s gift – what could be better? Breakfast didn’t even require dish or utensil. It is my favorite breakfast.
The garden has turned to flowers, though I still await the moon flower and more from the cardinal climber that has thrown out a blossom or two. Granted, everything was planted late.
Weeks ago: the garden is troubled. Pumpkin vines yellow; pepper plants look better but don’t produce; tomatoes rot. Their new growth looks promising but eventually the fruit rots, except for Sun Gold cherry tomatoes.
The weekend’s storm blew the corn down – must have swirled around in that corner of the pen. The corn stalks must be weak because the stockade blocks out two light exposures. I notice that nearby cornfields remain upright.
by Mary Jasch
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August 2009
Disaster in the Garden and Magical Pumpkin
Please click on the August link to the right to read this and see photos.
8/4
Disaster in the garden!
- Heirloom Spanish Musica pole beans are wilting fast and it’s not due to lack of soil moisture.
- On the back of a pumpkin leaf, there is a cluster of tiny copper-colored bumps. That plant is getting yellow-edged leaves. If anyone knows what this is, please email me at:
mary@dig-itmag.com
- Low fruit to flower ratio on the tomatoes
- Tomato plants croaking from the bottom up
- Never laid eyes on Cerinthe: Pride of Gibraltar that I planted months ago. If anyone has a photo of the seedlings of this plant, please send to:
mary@dig-itmag.com so I can post it. I know what most garden weed seedlings look like, and I have not seen anything different.
- Pepper and chile plants are wilted and spotted.
Good things:
- Lots of Supersette crookneck squash
- Zinnia transplants from seed sown in the garden grow easily.
- Pumpkins, even when trained to grow vertically, need more than 1 square-foot to grow. Their big leaves shade out everything in front of them, such as the cayenne plants. It may be fine to plant greens in their shade in summer.
- Potatoes are sprouting.
- And the corn is as high as a human’s eye.
8/1
Does a plant have a “brain”? Even a pea-size brain? What triggers their every action? Imagining a vegetable brain is not hard; after all, they have ovaries – and we eat them (vegetarians, take note). I wonder.
The tendrils on a climbing pumpkin plant are one of the most amazing plant structures I have ever seen – intricate, functional, effective and beautiful. I think they will grow to whatever length they need to in order to accomplish their task: plant stability. Long, delicate and wavy in search, they become wound tight as coils on a spring when they reach their destination.
Lance says the coils allow spring action in wind so the stem doesn’t break. Mother nature’s springs.
One tendril fastener per location is not enough for pumpkins. They seem to arrange for the future increase in plant size and weight by sending out fasteners in all directions to grab hold of horizontal and vertical structures – much like a map view of highway intersections and jughandles.
Their immense leaves are gearing up for super production. What will the plants bring? If never a fruit, their leaves, tendrils and stems are entertaining enough. If my son were small again, pumpkin is the plant I would grow for him.
by Mary Jasch
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July 2009
Growing Cherry Tomatoes
Be sure to click the last July entry on the right for photos. You can read the blog there, too.
July 22
Pumpkins over-run cayenne; cherry tomatoes on top of basil; German tomatoes swiftly approach chard – all because I didn’t tie up the tomatoes and pumpkins asap. (I was busy. I had a band date to keep and work to do.)
Growing Sun Gold cherry tomatoes is a challenge. They seem to sucker from the bottom and, after waiting too long to remove them, it’s hard to tell which is the main stem. I should have taken heed of a photo I took summers ago of cherry tomatoes neatly espaliered at The Frelinghuysen Arboretum. (Click on July on the right to see nice photo.)
And how can I trash suckers that already have fruit and blossoms (the SFG way)? Can’t. I remove a few and stick them in the soil along the fence toward the road where sunflowers and melons didn’t germinate. Maybe birds ate those seeds. The birds seem to like hanging out on the fence. I need a screen from the road there and if the tomatoes will do it, why not. I won’t remove their suckers.
Flashback: My father used to tell my mother he removed the suckers from the tomato plants in his German accent. My devout Catholic mother would say to him: “Stanley! Please don’t use that word!”
The garden is full of compromises. What to do about work and band commitments (like practicing every day)? Answer: do the best I can. The plants are gung ho and the band is gung ho. The only one keeping work gung ho is me.
What will I do about having just one stem on each tomato plant neatly trained up the fence instead of sprawling suckers? I tied everything the best I could and broke a bunch off. In the future they must be planted 3 to 5 inches from the fence so they can be tied at a young age and guided.
Perhaps gardens teach about life – of fruiting plants and their life cycles, of insects that eat and pollinate them, of people learning that they cannot control something and that life goes on despite visions of perfection.
July 23
I thinned the chard today and have it for dinner. I suppose I’ll let the tomatoes crawl among the chard as it grows. Turns out, I have two Pink German Jonathan and two Striped German.
Planted some sprouted Idaho spuds today, took out the sagging tomato suckers and planted Anasazi beans instead. My friend Kathy gave them to me. a friend from New Mexico sent them to her.
by Mary Jasch
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July 2009
Construction – Production
July 2
The name of this game is economy. I use everything – even the skinny box elder I tried to cut down but couldn’t. Where are box elder bugs when you need them? I removed lower branches and will somehow get the upper ones but moonflower (RG) will soon cover it and scent the night.
Stones get piled at edges of fence beds like stone walls in the woods. Pulled weeds from garden and elsewhere get laid in the 3-foot paths as mulch. Mel Bartholomew told me that you need a 3-foot space between beds if you have tall or trellised plants for the ones behind them to get sun. So that’s what I’m doing. The eventual fruits and flowers and layout will make the garden pretty. I realize now what makes me not 100 percent committed to the idea of Square Foot Gardening: I love my garden as a parterre. That is the look I missed with SFG – although most principles can be the same.
The soil near the fence is lighter and fluffier from decomposed grass clippings left where they fall. The guys who rototilled the pen said the soil was nice but sticky. What does that mean?
The tomato is now against the other fence and in its place is a Gigante parsley plant (CR). Next come all seeds: Galia, Earlidew & Solid Gold melons (RG), sunflower 4620 (TM), Cardinal Climber (RG) and moonflower. On the little spit of fence by the gate I planted Mammoth Dill (Burpee). The bed there is only 4-5 inches out from the fence.
Check the July link to the right for photos.
July 1
My corn is ankle high by the 1st of July. And everything else is coming up! My exotic eggplant turns out to be an heirloom tomato. I’ll move it against the fence because it’s indeterminate.
Work begins on the last fence line – just 24 feet and on the other side near the gate. I plan to have a little patio on one side on the existing marble and slate. The 2-foot veggie garden along the fence will come up to the patio and a 1-foot fence garden with climbing flowers will extend around it.
The stockade fence on the outside of the chain link must come down. it was originally placed there to block the dogs’ view of walkers and bicyclists on the road so they wouldn’t bark at them (and it did work).
The nerve. Yesterday as I pulled into my driveway I saw the hind end of a deer sticking out from between the huge mock orange and the monster forsythia. My cohort Kathy got out of the truck to get a look and the deer sauntered straight into the garden. I ran down the hill yelling and it bolted out, up the hill and across the road. I must remember to close the gate.
I’ve ditched regular “exercise” while I build my garden. I am getting in better shape doing the garden than doing official exercise. I think of a professor I once knew who wondered aloud why young male students went to the gym to work out when they could be working out on his wood pile.
Comments? Questions? Answers? Please email me:
mary@dig-itmag.com
by Mary Jasch
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June 2009
Planting Fever
June 24
I am so psyched about my garden that I haven’t taken time to put up the blog, so please see below. Also see photos in individual entries on the right. Today I bought a 50-foot roll of chicken wire, the last I’ll need. I finish the third side of fence today. I plant more Tithonia for a show and in front of the pole beans, some white and blue Browallia (VV).
Discoveries:
Why burdock is such a monster
Two big garter snakes living under a hunk of marble
Moss along a northeast facing stockade fence just like it’s supposed to be
So what am I going to do about these things?
Well, burdock roots pull out much easier in shade so I discovered its long tap root. In other areas - all over the garden - I do the best I can. I’ll have to whack it back if it sprouts. Eventually it should die, I think, if it’s not allowed to photosynthesize.
The snakes: I’ll let them live in my garden although I may move the marble. The marble pieces come from a 6-foot table I once had. I put it in the pen years ago when I moved here because it was too heavy for my home's 1860s’ floor. I thought it would be cool for the dogs to lie on. Now I have something in mind for it and the slate I laid in there for the “patio” I was making my dogs!
The moss –I’ll replant it somewhere.
June 23
Dug along the fence on the third side (south) this morning, shook out the soil, cut the chicken wire and settled it in the trench and up the stockade and chain link fence. I snipped the outer edges with wire cutters so I could wrap the loose ends around the wire fence that Lance installed against the stockade fence and also the chain link fence.
Now, if any critter dares to enter and eat my plants I will have to learn to shoot. That is, if we haven’t yet lost our Right to Bear Arms. Is the Constitution of the United States of America an Endangered Species?
Finally I backfilled the trench and did the fun part – plant. In front of the fence: Trombetta di Albenga Italian summer squash seed (RG), Kentucky Wonder pole bean seed (FM), 1 Beefsteak tomato plant (I grew from Thompson & Morgan seed I found) and Tithonia seed. In front of that: 4 Jalepeno and 4 Red bell pepper plants (VV). Still some empty space here.
June 22
Spent three hours today digging along the eastern fence, laying chicken wire in, backfilling and planting. Plus, while drinking my coffee, I look at all the seeds and also Mel Bartholomew’s book, Square Foot Gardening, which has a chart of planting times for seasonal crops of most seeds. Also, Renee’s Garden seed packets have blurbs about which seeds are good for a summer/fall crop.
Today I plant to climb on the fence: 4 Striped German tomato plants (CR), Autumn Gold & Spookie pumpkin seed (RG), and Chelsea Prize English cuke seed (RG). In front of them: Bright Lights rainbow chard seed (RG), 4 chocolate pepper and 4 cayenne plants (VV).
I must hurry and beat the weeds.
June 21, Sunday
Found two rolls of wire fence in my garage from the previous home owners: one chicken wire and one with 2x3 welded rectangles with fence posts in it. Lance helps me put it up and, to let in more light, he saws off part of the stockade fence that overlaps the chain link. We dig and pitchfork soil along the fence. I make all beds along the fence line 2 feet deep so I can reach in without having to step on the soil.
I plant to grow on the north stockade fence (facing south): Sunny Supersett crookneck squash (RG), 3 Sun Gold tomato plants from Farmer Rich (Catalpa Ridge), Spanish Musica pole beans (RG). In the foot away from the fence: 2 Ping Tong Long eggplant plants (CR), Profumo di Genova basil seed (RG), 4 Blue Jay bell pepper plants (Valley View farm stand), 2 Big Bertha pepper plants (CR).
June 19
Yesterday I visited Burpee at Fordhook Farm in Doylestown, PA. It was just what the garden guru ordered. I am psyched about my garden even though it just looks like a pen of weeds and dirt. I start in the northeastern corner, dig a 13-foot trench near the fence and lay in pieces of hardware cloth that Lance gave me. I backfill it and plant a patch of Silver Queen corn (Ferry Morse bought at Home Depot) with each seed a foot away in each direction.
by Mary Jasch
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June 2009
Time's a Wastin'!
June 17
A week later, between rain and work, I haven’t been in the garden. I know I’ll skip the digging and go for twisting the pitchfork in the soil – except for one shovel-width next to the fence so I can lay chicken wire down. I’ll forget the quarter and half-inch wire because I’ve learned I have moles in my yard, not voles. Voles are for veggies and moles eat meat, Marvin, a CT master gardener, tells me. And moles make the hills that are all over my field that makes walking bumpy.
Time’s wasting. Got to plant that garden this weekend, starting tonight after I get back from visiting Burpee for an article. That ought to get me going!
June 10
On my walk today, I saw new wildflowers- panicled hawkweed, yellow goatsbeard, sweet yellow clover, common cinquefoil. The sweet scent of multiflora rose and a choir of songbirds on this dewey morning make this country road heaven.
The dog pen is rototilled. The tiller couldn’t get close to the fencing, so my digging has begun. Thankfully I live on glacial till and, although stones pervade the soil, it is beautiful and loose. It’s never been turned over, except years ago when it was planted in grass.
Lance suggests I loosen the soil with a pitchfork, then dig. He is right and I find myself, after pitchforking, just yanking out the weeds and grass – roots and all. I wonder if I even need to turn it over. Shades of Square Foot Gardening! One of Mel Bartholomew’s tenets is
NO DIGGING So, who says I have to dig around the fence line? I don’t think I will! I just saved myself some hard work and hours.
Now my little “dwarf” shrub garden on the hillside next to my house beckons. I weed it, trim back a mugo pine and plant most of my seedlings that survived – seven thunbergia.
by Mary Jasch
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May 2009
Ode to a City Girl
On my walk this morning I saw buttercups, wild geranium, wood anemone, red columbine, the last of the celandine, bladder campion, young maidenhair, clouds of wild madder, red clover, henbit, mouse-ear chickweed, common fleabane, feral purple columbine and iris, and puffs of peachy flowers on an escaped purple smoke bush. Purple is a trend today.
Let me speak a word for my mother who died this Mother’s Day.
She was a city girl – white gloves, tailored clothes and pinned up hair. She was fiercly independent, headstrong, a librarian who instilled a love of books in her five children and nurtured each one's individuality, a volunteer for causes that touched her heart, and an indoors person. She was so independent, she left her large Irish family and ventured to spend her life in another state. During WWII she moved to Newark to work for the US Government and met my father who was working in the Kearny shipyards building battleships.
She married my father, a Pennsylvania German who grew up on a subsistence farm. My father’s family grew their own veggies, fruit, raised their own meat, made scrapple, baloney, bacon, and everything including
fashnachts .
My father had a garden for as long as I can remember – dozens of tomatoes, peppers, gooseberries, herbs and roses. Every year he grew his own transplants and cooked and pickled the harvest.
I was the opposite of my city mother (I had thought). I grew up outdoors and played King of the Mountain with boys on piles of dirt in construction lots and ran up and down the moonscape of the forbidden local landfill. I sat on spreading limbs of oaks and weeping willow where a few girls and I held our Dare Devil Club meetings (which I heavily promoted - maybe that’s why mother used to tell me my middle name was “Trouble”). We played in wooded lots and made our own variety of deer-like trails through brambles and bushes. And we enjoyed the sweetest blackberries, raspberries and wild strawberries ever and, in wonder, ran home with asparagus from the weedy garden of an old, scary, deserted house.
At 23, I drove with my young son to the coast of northern California for a while and lived in a cabin in the woods. Someone gave me cuttings of houseplants (what a concept!), which I put in water in cups on a high, sunless shelf that ran around the one-room cabin. They died and when I asked what went wrong I was told that the cups had needed to be refilled with water and the plants given light.
Three years later on another Mother’s Day in central Jersey, my mother gave me a purple
Tradescantia zebrina hanging basket. I took it outside to hang it in the sun and its brilliance and depth of color transfixed me. How could a color like this be on a leaf? What was with all those perfect little hairs on the leaves? The color was so luscious and liquid it looked as if it could quench my thirst or color my cheeks if I rubbed it on my face.
I was forever lost, then, because of the plant my city mother gave me. Needless to say, she and the Zebrina changed my life forever. Later, I came to learn that my mother and I were not dissimilar at all – only in our individual pursuits. We are part of each other.
Her name is Gertrude Mohn and she wrote the dedication to DIG IT! Now it is enriched.
by Mary Jasch
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April 2009
Suffering Seedlings
April 24.
The seedlings are croaking. The leaves are shrinking and folding. A few evenings ago I looked at them and wondered what happened to all the green.
That morning I had to leave for the entire day and wouldn’t be home till after dark. It had been sunless for days before. It was in the 50s that morning and I debated about putting them in my glassed-in south-facing porch. I knew the sun would eventually warm it up.
But the big question was: is it more important for them to get sun now? Or be warm now? That morning, I knew they would not have both. So I put them out. That night, forget it.
The plants continue to decline except for the ones I left inside in a small south-facing window. The Pompeii tomatoes and a few Thunbergia are doing best.
by Mary Jasch
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