Author: Henry Homeyer

As the saying goes, “spring has sprung.” In my garden, daffodils are blooming and tulips are on the way. My peas are planted. But how do you know when to plant your veggies and tender annual flowers? It’s not just about the last frost of the spring. You need to think about which plants can survive and thrive in cold, wet soil and which would rather wait to get planted until late May or even mid-June.

In the vegetable garden, tomatoes, peppers and eggplants are the prima donnas. I generally wait until June 10 at 9 a.m. to plant them. Or something like that. I shape up my wide raised beds well before I plant, allowing the soil to dry out and get warmed up. I rake off the straw or leaves I used to protect the soil from erosion over the winter. I like to work in aged compost well before planting time.

Peas and spinach are very cold-hardy and can survive frosts. Root crops like carrots, beets, onions and potatoes prefer warm soil for growing but will tolerate cool soils and won’t get killed by a late frost even if their leaves are up. But in my opinion almost any plant would prefer to grow in soil that is at least 50 degrees.

Whether you start your tomato seedlings indoors or buy plants from a garden center, you should “harden them off.” They need to be introduced to sun and wind in small doses at first so they don’t get sunburned or dehydrated after being pampered for weeks in a greenhouse or on a kitchen windowsill. This process will take five days or so, but if you don’t do it you will either kill your baby peppers or stunt their growth for two weeks or more while they recover.

Start by putting your plants outside in a place protected from the wind that only gets morning sun. Give them two hours of morning sun the first day, then bring them back inside or well out of the sun’s rays. Increase the time outside each day and by Day 3 give them some afternoon sun too. On Day 5 they should be OK outside all day, and after that you can plant them.

What about fertilizer? I generally don’t give annual flowers like cosmos or zinnias any at all. Soluble nitrogen found in chemical fertilizers will make them grow tall but delay flowering. Of the vegetables, only peppers need no fertilizer, but in my opinion no vegetables should get chemicals of any kind, including fertilizer and pesticides.

Newly planted seedlings and seeds need to be kept in lightly moist soil. A seedling that cracks open its husk to send up a shoot may not make it to the soil surface if the soil is too dry. So check your garden every day. And if your tomato starts to look limp or drooping, water immediately — even if it means going to work late. Just email me; I’ll send an excuse to your boss to keep you out of trouble.

There are many ways to keep your plants lightly moist in the vegetable or flower garden. One way is to set up a drip irrigation system. I’ve had good luck installing soaker hoses — rubber hoses that leak slowly through pores. I’ve bought the “Snip and Drip” system from Gardener’s Supply.

The basic kit comes with the hose and T-junctions and fittings to install it. Then, if you buy a watering timer the system will come on a schedule you determine. I’ve used many types of timers during my time as a garden designer and installer. My advice? Get the simplest one you can get.

What about rototillers? Should you rent or buy one, or not? I used one for years until someone more knowledgeable than me explained why he didn’t: Rototillers seriously disturb the microbes in the soil. They break up useful fungal networks that support your plants. They make a bed clean and neat, but in fact have only sliced up the weeds and buried them. One invasive root becomes multiple roots and can move them farther from their initial location. I have a friend who rototilled a small patch of horseradish and turned the bed into a large bed full of horseradish he could never eliminate.

So how do I prepare my soil? I use a five-tined old-fashioned potato rake that loosens the soil as I pull it through the soil. Or you can use an ordinary garden fork to loosen the soil if it is a heavy clay, and then finish it off at planting time with a good hand tool like a CobraHead weeder. You can use a hoe to pull soil from the walkways up to form mounded beds. And as you improve your soil with compost each year it will get easier to prepare nice, fluffy beds rich in organic matter.

Gardening is fun. It is rewarding, too: Tomatoes and lettuce taste better when eaten the day they were picked. The exercise will make you healthy, too. Just don’t work so hard you get blisters and sunburn. Ease yourself into gardening — just like you harden off your plants.

Henry is an organic gardener who has been fussing around in gardens for about 75 years. He is the author of four gardening books. His email is [email protected].

Featured photo: This kale was started indoors on Feb. 22 and needs to be hardened off before going in the ground in early May. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

As we begin 2024 I think it is good not only to look back but also to plan ahead. We can’t know if we’ll be facing hot and dry or wet and soggy this summer, or perfect conditions. But we can make plans and hope for the best.

For many of us 2023 was a disappointment. The summer was rainy much of the time. Vegetables like tomatoes and potatoes — vegetables that require lots of energy to build fruit or tubers — did not do well. Fungal diseases like late blight are most virulent with moist conditions, which we had in spades. And in my part of the world there was a late frost that spoiled the blossoms on our fruit trees — so no apples or pears. Sigh.

On the other hand, it was a great summer for newly planted trees and shrubs. I planted yet another pawpaw tree this summer, along with a fringe tree, an American hazelnut and a gooseberry. The soil stayed moist all summer from the rain, and all have done well.

Pawpaw (Asimina triloba) is a native fruit tree that is common in the woods of Pennsylvania and Ohio. The fruit is almost tropical in flavor, sometimes compared to a mix of mango and banana flavors. The trees are rated hardy to Zone 5 (minus 20 degrees F), but I have had one survive much colder temperatures — and another that died in a cold winter.

I have one pawpaw tree that is now 20 feet tall and 10 years old or more, but I am yet to get any fruit from it, despite the fact that it has blossomed. Apparently they are self-sterile, so in the past three years I have been planting new trees from different sources. Pawpaws send up root suckers, but these are genetic clones and not suitable for pollinating the mother tree.

A few thoughts about planting trees: First, preferentially choose trees and shrubs that are native to New England — or the United States. These are best for our birds and pollinators. And no, that doesn’t mean you should deprive yourself of the beauty of a Merrill or Jane magnolia. I just want to suggest a 90:10 or 80:20 ratio of natives to imported or hybridized varieties.

Secondly, if you plant trees in spring or summer, you must water during dry times. Fall is usually wet enough. A newly planted tree needs 5 gallons of water once a week distributed in a wide circle around it. A 2-inch layer of mulch will help minimize drying on hot August days and keep the mowers and string trimmers at bay. Mulch will also minimize weeds that compete for nutrients and water.

Some gardeners focus on growing vegetables, others on flowers. I want both. I started as a vegetable gardener, largely because there is little better in life than biting into a home-grown tomato warm from the sun. I grow heirloom tomatoes like Brandywine, Cherokee Purple and Ox Heart, but I also plant hybrids like Sungold, my favorite cherry tomato, and Defiant, which is resistant to some diseases.

If you grow open pollinated (heirloom) tomatoes, you can save a few seeds each year and dry them on a paper towel. Store them in a cool dark location and they will serve you well if you want to start your own seedlings, starting indoors in early April. But don’t save hybrid seeds,. as most will not breed true.

One of my readers wrote me this fall reminding me of something I wrote long ago: “I will make it through another winter because I want to see what else did.” It’s true. I can’t let age catch up with me because I want to see the annual show: snowdrops blooming in March; my Merrill magnolia, which blooms each year with 1,000 double white blossoms on my birthday in April; and the Japanese primroses — 500 to 1,000 of them beginning in May and lasting until mid-June.

My advice about planting flowers is simple: Grow what you love. Grow what your Grammie and mother grew. Grow what stops you in your tracks when you see if for the first time each season. Plant more of your favorites each year, or divide them and spread them out to new corners of the property. But keep it simple: Don’t plant so much that weeding becomes a dreaded chore.

I love arranging flowers and keep a vase of my own cut flowers on the table from March until after Halloween. You can do this if you plant lots of bulbs for early spring, your favorite perennials, and very importantly, this: plant annual flowers. Annual flowers keep on blooming all summer if you keep them from going to seed.

It’s easy to buy six-packs of annuals in spring and plant them in your perennial beds as well as in your vegetable garden. Most like full sun or part sun/part shade. And don’t fertilize annuals in the garden — too much nitrogen promotes leafy growth but delays flowering. Potted annuals do need some fertilizer as the fertilizer in potting mix is water-soluble and gets used up or washes away.

Remember, as you ponder your plans for a garden while looking at a snowy landscape, that gardening should be fun. My garden is my respite. It’s where I go when the world is too much with me. So do some planning now. And dream.

Henry’s column will appear about once a month this winter. Reach him at [email protected] or PO Box 364, Cornish Flat, NH 03746.

Featured photo: Gomphrena, an annual, is great in arrangements. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Take time to sit and enjoy your garden

On Nov. 8, 1998, my first gardening column appeared in my hometown paper, The Valley News of West Lebanon, New Hampshire. Since then I have written more than 1,200 weekly columns and answered countless questions from readers. I am 77 years old and plan to slow down a bit — I’ll be writing just one column per month this winter, and perhaps two a month after that. We’ll see.

I’ve learned a lot during that time, interviewed plenty of interesting gardeners, and visited (and written about) great gardens in New England and further afield. Thank you, dear readers, for sending me suggestions, asking questions and generally keeping me on my toes. Early on I wrote about digging in the dirt and got an irate email from a reader: “It’s not dirt,” she wrote. “It’s soil. It’s what makes a garden work well. Dirt is what you sweep up.” Later, during an election campaign, another reader told me to shut up about politics and write about what I know, gardening. As I said, you have kept me in line all these years.

My favorite interview was with Ray Magliozzi of public radio’s Car Talk. He lives in a suburb of Boston and has a simple but elegant garden of rhododendrons, roses, dahlias and a tropical called Datura or Angel’s Trumpet. He has the same quirky sense of humor and boisterous laugh in the garden that he has on the radio. I asked him if there was a common thread between gardening and working on cars. Quickly he answered with a full belly laugh: “Dirt. But garden dirt washes off more easily. The reason I love gardening is that I love getting my hands dirty. When we fix cars, it’s not all science. There’s an art to it, too.”

Who else? The White House Gardener, Dale Haney. Tasha Tudor, the reclusive artist and gardener living in southern Vermont. Jean and Weston Cate, octogenarians who introduced me to the Seed Savers Exchange and the Boston Marrow Squash, a winter squash that they told me was the most popular squash grown in America in the 1850s — and still grown by them. And I interviewed and became friends with Sydney Eddison, a fabulous garden writer who when I called her recently had just come in from re-building a stone wall, even though she is now in her 90s. Gardeners do seem to last a long time.

I love the letters and emails of you readers and wish I had saved them all. Here’s part of one that I got recently that might interest you: What to do about the dreaded Asian jumping worm? “I sprinkled the tea seed meal (using my hand fertilizer spreader) and within a week (after a light rainfall which surely helped the process) the worms came to the surface (ick) and died. It would be lovely if they just stayed in the ground, but it was also gratifying to see that the tea seed meal actually worked! I have been told that they lay eggs this time of year so I will begin the process anew next spring.” This reader told me that she bought it at her local feed-and-grain store. She used 50 pounds for her lawn and gardens — about half an acre. The worms die in winter and hatch in early summer, so I may try it as soon as I see them next summer. That said, I must warn you that even though this is a natural, organic product, it can have negative effects on fish and amphibians. Do your research, and I will, too. To be continued.

What else have I learned as part of my experience writing a column? Although I had been a gardener since I was a toddler and learned how to grow veggies and flowers from my Grampy, I took classes to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. I went to Vermont Technical College in Randolph, Vermont, and took classes, including a great one about all the trees and shrubs that do well in our climatic zone. I already knew all the native trees that grow in Connecticut (where I grew up), but few shrubs and virtually no unusual decorative trees.

I took the Master Gardener course in New Hampshire, and that taught me lots of technical details about things like lawn care, insects and diseases, and lots more that I had never focused on. I drove 60 miles each way for 10 weeks to Concord, New Hampshire, where I spent half a day taking classes. And I committed to helping teach others in my community, which I have been doing ever since. And it helped expand my knowledge for the column. I continue to take seminars given by experts whenever I can.

Writing a column also gave me a great excuse to buy plants. I needed to know, for example, if Toadlily or Himalayan blue poppy would do well here, and what they needed to succeed. I learned to buy perennials in groups of three or five — to make a bold statement, or to try in various locations.

I needed to learn how to design a beautiful landscape with flowers, trees and shrubs. All that was part of my education. I now grow about 200 kinds of flowers and nearly 100 kinds of trees and shrubs. I’ve written about the ones that thrived — and the ones I’ve killed.

Eventually I learned not to buy plants unless I already have a place in mind where I might plant them. OK, I fib a little there. I am a sucker for beautiful flowers in bloom, and will buy them — and make a place for them somewhere!

What is my advice to you after all these years? Never get discouraged or give up. But also don’t bite off too much work. Start small and increase your gardens, one bed at a time. Stay true to using organic practices: Chemicals disrupt the natural balance of nature. Make a long-term plan for your garden if you can. Establish sight lines and pathways, and create small “rooms” in the garden. Plant trees early on — they take the longest to reach maturity. And when you reach my age, those trees can be magnificent. I planted several in 1972 that please me every time I think about them. Lastly, take time to sit down and enjoy your garden. You deserve to do so every day of the year.

I’d love to hear from you, dear reader. Is there an article that you remember best, or one you clipped and still refer to? I’m at [email protected] or PO Box 364, Cornish Flat, NH 03746. Thanks!

Featured photo: Branch collar to left of line drawn shows where to prune a branch. Photo by Henry Homeyer.