Category: Outdoors

Early-in-the-season gardening chores

I’ve finally had a few days of dry weather with temperature in the 50s, so I have been able to start some spring cleanup. Some of my beds are still too wet, so I will wait on working there until my feet don’t sink in. Walking on wet soil compacts it, ruining soil structure.

My first chore is always to rake up the sand and gravel that the snowplows leave on my lawn. I use a straight-edged shovel that is made of aluminum and is sold for barn cleanup. I rake the sand into the broad shovel, and dump it into a wheelbarrow. If I see that the grass is being pulled up, I wait until later, when the grass has fully woken up.

Next on my list is to pick up any downed branches. Winter always does some “pruning” of dead branches. If I can reach any jagged tears where branches have broken off, I snip or saw them back to the trunk or the branch where it originated. And this is a good time to take off those plastic wraps that protect young trees from mice and voles.

I don’t generally rake leaves out of my flower beds in the fall, as I like the extra protection against erosion and cold temperatures they provide. But that means that bulb plants are covered now, and the ground is insulated from the spring sun. I want the soil to warm up. So I try to clean up places where I know there are spring bulbs as early as possible.

If the daffodils are poking through, I use my fingers to pull back the leaves. I fear that a rake will damage the tender stems and flower buds. In other places where bulbs are not up yet, I use a rake and gently rake off the leaves. Sometimes I will bring along a scrap of plywood or a 6-inch plank to stand on as I work, minimizing compaction.

This is when I prune blueberry bushes. By now it is easy to identify the fat, round fruit buds as opposed to the skinny little leaf buds. I remove branches that aren’t producing fruit, allowing for more sunshine to get into my plants.

For the past few years a foreign fruit fly has badly damaged blueberry crops. The spotted-winged drosophila (SWD) infests ripening fruit, causing it to get mushy and unpleasant. This is in contrast to ordinary, native fruit flies that only lay eggs in over-ripe or rotting fruit.

At present the only way I know that organic growers can prevent damage is to cover bushes with row cover or a very fine mesh. But that is a big bother when it is time to start picking. The SWD appears fairly late in summer, so early-ripening varieties can sometimes avoid them.

Of course if you haven’t cut back all your perennials, spring is a good time to do that. I like to wait until spring to cut back some perennial flowers with seeds. Finches and other seed-eaters enjoy the seeds, particularly when bigger, greedy and aggressive birds or squirrels are hogging the seeds at the feeder.

In the fall I usually do a good job of weeding and mulching the vegetable garden with fallen leaves or straw. In the spring I rake the mulch of my wide raised beds so that the sun can help to dry out and warm up the beds. I leave the mulch in the walkways to inhibit weeds, and later I will add new mulch around my tomatoes and other plants.

My roses haven’t woken up yet, or not by the time I wrote this, but will soon. I have a dozen or more roses and most are very hardy. I particularly like the Knockout rose series. They are very resistant to diseases, do not seem to attract Japanese beetles or rose chafers, and are very vigorous. But each spring I need to cut back the canes to a point where the tissue has not been winter damaged.

You can easily tell if the stems of your roses are alive by rubbing a stem gently with your thumbnail. If it shows green, it is alive. If it is not green, it is dead. Cut back any stem to a place where there is a bud on tissue that is alive. Or you can wait until they leaf out, and cut back the dead parts. If you have a few shoots that got much taller than the rest of the plant, you should cut those back for aesthetic reasons.

Spring is also a good time to pay attention to the “volunteer” shrubs and trees that show up uninvited. There are several invasive species that birds plant seemingly “willy-nilly” anywhere they perch. Seeds pass through them and start growing without your help. But you should pull these shrubs and trees before they get so big you need a backhoe!

Here are some to look for: bush honeysuckle (Lonicera spp.), barberry (Berberis thunbergii), burning bush (Euonymus alatus), Autumn Olive (Elaeagnus umbellata), blunt-leaved privet (Ligustrum obtusifolium) and the vine Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus). Norway maple (Acer platanoides) and common buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica) are trees that are also common and invasive.

Why worry about invasives now? They are more obvious in the landscape. Most get a jump on the growing season by putting on leaves while our native plants are still asleep. Plus, you have time now. So go dig them out if you can. Cutting them down usually just stimulates them to set up many new plants from their roots.

Later, when spring warms up, we will be planting our veggies and annual flowers so we won’t have time for many of these activities. So get out there on the next nice day.

Featured photo: This aluminum shovel is lightweight and good for cleanup. Courtesy photo.

Plant summer-blooming flowers now

I like dahlias. They are bright and come in many colors with blossoms from the size of daisies to the size of dinner plates. My wife, Cindy, loves dahlias. Every year we have discussions about how many we should plant and where they might go. I believe there is such a thing as too many dahlias. Cindy does not.

Each fall we dig up our dahlias a week or so after the first hard frost but before the ground freezes. We store them in a cool basement in boxes filled with sphagnum moss or sawdust that is lightly moist. The problem is, each plant produces a dozen or more tubers, and each and every one will produce a new plant the next summer.

If you have purchased dahlia plants at a greenhouse in the past, maybe this year you would like to try planting some tubers. They tend to be less expensive, and there is definitely more variety. Go to your local garden center or go online and order tubers.

Choose a 6-inch pot and fill it three quarters full with potting soil. Place the tuber so that it is lying flat on the surface, and cover with a few inches of potting soil. Pat it down, water lightly, and let it be. When it is ready, it will send up shoots and then it will need some bright lights. They have tiny “eyes” or growing points, and if you can spot one, be sure to plant it on the top side. But eyes are not always easily identified.

I grow ours on a plant stand with fluorescent lights and have never tried them on a bright windowsill, but I guess that would work, too. If you find your plants on a windowsill are floppy or pale, switch to artificial lights if you have them.

I love calla lilies. These beauties are not true lilies at all, but members of the Arum family (which includes Jack-in-the-pulpit, skunk cabbage and the house plants dieffenbachia and philodendron). Calla lilies are perennial in warm climates but, like dahlias and gladiolas, must be dug and brought inside before the winter here. Now is the time to start some calla rhizomes (a bulb-like modified stem) indoors. Plant them with the smooth side down.

One of the advantages of growing calla lilies is that they are not true lilies, hence not bothered by that dastardly red bug, the lily-leaf beetle. The lily-leaf beetle attacks Oriental and Asiatic lilies that I do so love but have given up growing. Calla lilies also bloom for a much longer time than true lilies, though they lack the fragrance of Oriental lilies.

To start calla lilies indoors now, buy rhizomes now at your local garden center or from a reputable supplier. The rhizomes need to be planted about 3 inches deep, then covered with potting mix. It is a good plant for people who tend to overwater their houseplants, as they thrive in moist soil. (By the way, start doubling the water to your rosemary plants if you over-wintered any. Otherwise they will dry out and die).

Once summer is here you can either transplant your potted calla to a nice sunny spot, or keep it in the pot and move it outside. Come fall, you will need to bring them inside, as temperatures around 20 will kill them. Callas need to go dormant in winter.

When buying some calla lily rhizomes at my local garden center, I also bought some gladiolus corms (commonly called bulbs). My gardening grandfather loved growing gladioli, and won ribbons at the Worcester, Massachusetts, county fair most years.

Gladiolus corms are relatively inexpensive so most gardeners don’t bother saving them. Classic colors are red, yellow, pink and purple. I recently bought bulbs that will produce flowers with pink, white, and white with pink designs at my local garden center. I will wait and plant them directly in the soil in my garden in June.

Another summer beauty is the canna lily. We grew some that were 6 feet tall last summer and they bloomed from mid-summer till fall. Buy rhizomes now and start them indoors to get a good jump on the season. They come in various sizes, and with green or purple foliage.

My favorite summer bulb plant is called a variety of common names: peacock orchid, sword lily, or fragrant gladiolus (even though this plant is not an orchid, a lily or a gladiolus). That’s why I like Latin names. If you ask for acidanthera murielae, plant-knowledgeable people around the world will know what you mean. But for now, I’ll refer to it as sword lily.

The sword lily has long, narrow leaves — like swords — that stand 18 inches or more tall. The blossoms are white with deep purple markings in the center of the six-petaled flower, along with a little yellow at the very center. You get two or three blossoms per stem, and they are enticingly fragrant, particularly in the evening. I’ll plant them now, eight to 12 bulbs 3 inches deep in a 12-inch pot, and grow them on the deck this summer.

I don’t know about you, but I need all the green growing things around me I can get as mud season lingers on. So get your summer bulbs now, before they are all sold out, and start a few indoors.

Featured photo: Sword lilies are highly fragrant in the evening. Courtesy photo.

Easy to grow and trouble-free

Every year you probably plant tomatoes. Wouldn’t it be great if they would come back every year without the bother of preparing the soil, starting seedlings in April and setting them out? Well, that’s what nut and fruit trees and berry bushes do: Once planted (and mature), they produce food every year. To me, there is a definite allure to plants requiring less work.

I recently was sent a review copy of a wonderful book by Allyson Levy and Scott Serrano: Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts: 50 Easy-to-Grow Plants for the Organic Home Garden or Landscape printed by Chelsea Green Publishing. When I got it I could barely pull myself away from it because it has so much to teach me.

Each of the species included has five or six pages devoted to it and at least five excellent photos. The information starts with “Growth Difficulty Rating” — how hard is it to grow? Most are easy. It includes taste profile and uses, pollination requirements (is it self-pollinating?), site and soil conditions, zone hardiness, good cultivars to look for, and a paragraph on pests and problems, and more.

I called the authors and asked about their experience growing this diverse group of plants. They live in Stone Ridge, New York, a town about 100 miles north of NYC and 10 miles or so from the Hudson River. They are in Zone 6, where winter temperatures only go a little below zero most winters.

They are both artists, and originally started growing plants to use in their art. About 20 years ago they bought 8 acres across the street from them and started their own arboretum, later adding another 10 acres. Their arboretum is Hortus Arboretum and Botanical Garden and is a Level II arboretum according to the Morton Arboretum.

I asked them what they would recommend for fruit if someone had none and wanted to start with winners. Scott suggested blueberries and blackberries. Both are easy and tasty. Elderberries are good, too, they said, although you need to cook the berries to make them palatable. Elderberries, honey and lemon juice make a nice syrup, which I use to help prevent colds in winter.

We talked about honeyberries. It’s a fruit I will definitely plant this year. Although the fruit looks a little like a big oblong blueberry, it is actually in the genus with honeysuckle. It is native to the northern U.S., Canada and Siberia. A friend gave us a few to taste last summer, and I like the flavor.

According to the book, honeyberry is the first fruit to ripen here, a couple of weeks before strawberries. But it is a couple of weeks after they turn blue and look ripe that they actually lose their astringency and turn sweet. This is the kind of information that most books or plant tags don’t have, and only comes from someone who grows and knows the plant. Allyson said she discovered that lots of berries are hidden under the leaves. The fruit gets better every year, apparently.

Another fruit in the book is pawpaw, a somewhat tropical-flavored tree fruit (banana crossed with mango flavor?). As the book explains, you need two different trees (not clones) to get pollination and fruit. I am growing it, but started out with only clones, so I have not gotten fruit yet.

Of the nuts, they recommend hazelnuts. These produce nuts as much younger plants than things like black walnut or pecans, which are tall trees that require years to produce nuts. You need to have two or more hazelnuts as they are not self-fertile. Scott pointed out that the native species has smaller nuts than some of the named varieties.

Pecans are discussed in the book. The biggest difficulty is not growing the tree, but having a growing season long enough for the nuts to ripen. They need 150 to 180 days. But as the climate changes, perhaps this will not be a problem in 25 years. They note that you must have two compatible grafted varieties to get nuts, as the trees are not self-fertile. These are big, handsome trees and should be grown in full sun and rich soil if possible.

A tree that is not native but produces a lot of food for deer is the Korean stone pine. The pine nuts we use for pesto are most often from these trees grown in Asia. The cones open up in winter and drop their seeds, which are rich in oil and high in calories. Scott said in Siberia tigers indirectly depend on the stone pine because they feed the deer and boar the tigers need to survive.

The Hortus Arboretum and Garden is open from Mother’s Day in May until the end of October, Friday to Sunday. Admission is by donation. Because of Covid, they have been scheduling visitors online during the season at their website, hortusgardens.org.

This book is terrifically useful to anyone interested in growing fruit and nuts. I should note that it does not cover apples, plums and peaches because those fruits are well-covered by other writers, and, as they say, much prone to pests and diseases. The plants discussed are generally easy to grow and trouble-free. Just what we all want!

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.