Earth Day and peas 22 April 2008

Happy Earth Day!  In my opinion, one of the best things you can do to help the earth is to grow some of what you use yourself - vegetables, herbs (culinary and/or medicinal), fruit, cut flowers if you like keeping flowers in the house, etc. Last week I read about a site that’s helping people to do just that: Kitchen Gardeners International. I haven’t had much time to explore it yet, but what I have seen does seem pretty cool. It seems like a nice mix of stuff for novices and more advanced gardeners, and their list of gardening blogs is one of the best I’ve yet seen on the web. Another great thing to do is to  use reusable bags instead of plastic or paper ones. I even use them to carry home plants from the nursery.

Appropriately enough, today I discovered that the first peas are finally sprouting! If I didn’t think from past experience the picture wouldn’t turn out very well, I would attempt to take one to post here.  Something like tiny pea sprouts is just too much for my digital camera to typically be able to take a good macro shot of. Instead, here’s a photo of the taller, leggier, larger-potted nemesia (not the cultivar ‘Sundrops’ that I already planted), corydalis ‘Purple Leaf’, and saxifrage ‘Peter Pan’ waiting to be planted:

I checked the forecast this morning and the revised forecast says it is supposed to be 80 F tomorrow! So hopefully I will get to plant the rest of the stuff in pots today.  And hopefully the heat wave won’t keep the peas from continuing to sprout.

Sundry 19 April 2008

Midmorning Friday

Today is another gorgeous day - sunny with temperatures already in the 50s F and forecast to go higher if the cool sea breeze doesn’t reach these few miles inland. This is the essence of spring to me.

Today I am planning to swing by the nursery again (today the garden section’s manager will be working, and she often has ideas for me; she wasn’t working on my last trip), which will give me a nice walk in the beautiful weather and time spent amongst pretty flowers regardless of whether I buy anything, do fresh cleanup (more leaves have blown into the garden since my last cleanup and there are other odds and ends I need to do) and finish planting. Since I hadn’t grown nemesia in a few years at least (if ever), I did not remember until I’d already bought it that it’s not very frost-hardy. Our average last frost date is the second week of May, so I’ve been going back and forth in my head since getting it about whether to actually plant it or to keep it inside till it’s a bit warmer, like I did last April when W. and I went to the annual herb sale at one of the estates run by the Historical Society and I kept my basil, Cape mallow ‘Elegant Lady’ (that was where I found it, which I thought was a little odd - and that’s why I have no idea where to get a new one this year, since it isn’t hardy and didn’t last the winter), etc. indoors like houseplants till the weather warmed up some more.

Yesterday I went to the hardware store, which always sells seeds and bare roots in spring. I was disappointed to see that they had fewer bare roots than in past years (and the garden store has none this year), concentrating mostly on gladiola and dahlia bulbs. I don’t like modern glads much, preferring the beautiful old ones sold by Old House Gardens, and while I adore dahlias, they did pathetically last year in my back garden, and they generally like rich soil and some moisture so I have made the assumption that they would look even more pathetic in the sunnier front garden. (I may try growing a few dahlias in pots so that I can move them around, though; I have a few tubers saved from last year.) I got a bareroot hosta and a bareroot Siberian iris (’Caesar’s Brother’), two of the few non-bulb/corm/tuber things they were selling this year.

I also got some seeds I hadn’t seen elsewhere, including fenugreek, Sweet Annie (Artemesia annua), and calendula ‘Zeolights’, which is certainly not an old strain of calendula but whose sunset-colored changing-colors orangey-pink blooms (if the illustration on the seed pack is to be believed) should fit well with some of the other annuals I’ve planted. Here is a link to a page on ‘Zeolights’ at the seed company’s website. I grow calendula (I’d already planted seeds of a couple other cultivars) not just because they’re beautiful, not even just because they’re edible and brighten up salads, but also because calendula has great medicinal properties and can be made into salves or simply crushed and rubbed over the skin. Sweet Annie is widely grown by garden-crafters but for me, I just like the look and scent of its lovely foliage, and if I happen to harvest it later on it will just be a nice bonus to me rather than the whole point of growing it. Not surprisingly since it’s an Artemesia, it is not very frost-hardy and while I sowed the calendula and fenugreek yesterday, I’ve reserved its seeds to sow in mid-May. Fenugreek, by contrast, should’ve been planted before now, like the poppies and love-in-a-mist that I belatedly recently sowed.

…

Saturday

If I could bottle this string of days, I would do it without hesitation: They are the essence of spring, sunny and dry air and blueblueblue sky - the color of aquamarine in shadow - and temperatures in the 50s to 70 F, daffodils blooming away cheerily. I would save the bottles for midsummer, when the humidity is like a boulder weighing down everything, soot coating the plants and smog choking the air, making it difficult to see a block ahead.

Silly me for thinking I could go to the nursery on a beautiful day without being tempted into buying anything. Yesterday, after consulting with the nursery manager, I ended up getting two euphorbias. two saxifrages, and another plant (whose name I’m currently forgetting) on her recommendation, as well as two seedling packs of sweet alyssum (they’d added it since my last visit), Corydalis ‘Purple Leaf’, borage, and comfrey. Borage and comfrey are both considered herbs by the nursery and thus are cheaper than they would otherwise be. (To better explain what I mean, lavenders are considered perennials instead of herbs at the nursery so they are sold at perennial prices rather than herb prices and placed with the other perennials instead of with the shelves of herbs.)

Last year I grew borage from seed and it did surprisingly well in the crappy conditions of the front garden, and though it definitely did not ever attain the heights it did in my old garden with its richer soil and shelter from the wind, it bloomed nearly nonstop from midsummer till killed by frost, and attracted bees and other pollinators galore. Since it was near my bean plants, that was an especially happy thing. This year I decided to just go ahead and get a plant that was already doing pretty well. It’s got three rosettes; I think mine only had one last year.

Anyway, comfrey is a plant I love so much I can’t even begin to tell you. I grew a large species - not the standard herb - in my old garden in a humus-rich, moist to boggy soil with partial sun and it grew to tremendous heights, some of the leaves two to three feet long and the bloom stalks reaching for the sky. In addition to comfrey being a medicinal herb, it is said to improve the soil around it and its leaves are said to speed up the process of compost-making. Plus, being a member of the borage family (it often started to bloom in my old garden as the strikingly similar blooms of its cousins, Virginia bluebells and lungwort, were fading), it’s a bee favorite. Grow comfrey!

I don’t know why I’ve never grown euphorbia till this year. It’ll be an interesting experiment. Yesterday I planted the two euphorbias - an upright one with leaves in varying shades of blackish-purple and deep red, that according to its tag blooms in late spring and early summer - and one that is far more common, at least here, the floppy one with obviously succulent blue-green leaves that has chartreuse flowers in spring and is, in fact, blooming right now. I also planted the sweet alyssum, the borage, and the little alpine-ish plant whose name I just can’t recall at present, a dainty relative of the cranesbills/hardy geraniums.

I do know why I’ve never grown saxifrage, though.  For some reason they intimidate me.  They are tiny plants with tiny mounding succulent leaves and though that would make you - or at least me - think that they prefer sunny, dry conditions, they seem to be fussier than all that. So I got instructions to plant them on the slope in the back garden, with partial shade, particularly during midday. Apparently they have a tendency to go dormant when it gets too hot and sunny, so partial shade should help with that. We’ll see how they do. For now they are lovely charming mounds of various shades of green, one of them with heaps of ruby red buds sticking up on bloom stalks that are taller than the mound of leaves. If they adjust well (I’m planning to plant them today) within the next few weeks, I might buy a couple more in time for them to bloom (all the ones at the nursery bloom in spring; it’s just exactly when that varies). I try to do the majority of my hard-labor gardening in spring and autumn; it’s better for both the plants and me.

I’ve been writing this post for over a day.  It’s time to post it and perhaps I will write more later.

Seeds! 14 April 2008

Today I looked through the seeds still in sock at the nearest nursery and bought some packs. In previous years the nursery has stocked Burpee’s seeds and sometimes (much to my delight) also Renee’s Garden Seeds (http://www.reneesgarden.com/) and/or Plants of Distinction seeds (http://www.plantsofdistinction.co.uk/). This year, however, they are stocking a seed company I’d never heard of before - Olds Seed. (I was charmed by the sub-heading on the seed pack for the gourd Goblin Eggs, proclaiming that yes, goblins are monotremes.) In looking Olds Seed up on the web just now, I’m further surprised to discover that their specialty is Upper Midwest seeds. I wonder why the nursery picked them (or even knew about them), since we are certainly not Upper Midwest.

Regardless, the flower seeds were pretty well picked over, mostly now consisting of sunflower cultivars and morning glory cultivars. I already have sunflower and morning glory seeds in my box of seed packets, so I didn’t get any more of those. I did, however, get both kinds of Sweet William that they had in stock - the descriptive if dull “dwarf mix” and “tall mix” (which both list the height as 12-14″; I don’t know if one of them is a typo) - as well as Sweet Sultan (Centaurea moschata), which is an old cottage garden annual that’s difficult to find nowadays here in the States and which I was quite surprised to discover on the seed rack. In addition, I got some more vegetables - two more kinds of pea (my favorite, Dwarf Grey Sugar, as well as Mammoth Melting, which I’ve never grown before) as well as a bean (the best performer I’ve grown in this climate, Royalty Purple Pod), a cowpea (more later in the post), a lima bean (Henderson Bush, a “baby lima” that is supposed to mature faster than most limas, thus having a higher chance of actually producing in this climate), a soybean (more later), and two okras (the common Clemson Spineless and the less common Burgundy).

I love okra but most Yankees don’t much like it and it tends to be finicky in our northern clime, so even the farmers’ market doesn’t carry it every year and when they do, usually only one to three weeks all season. It’s been several years since I tried to grow it and never in this garden, so I am curious to see how it does. It is a member of the large mallow family and another member, Cape mallow ‘Elegant Lady,’ did superbly in the front garden this year - despite dire claims that mallows should never be transplanted past seedling stage and that Cape mallow would be felled by a hot summer climate and that mallow taproots in general are too shallow to stand a poor soil, fairly xeriscaped garden - so I am especially curious to see what it will do if planted there. Okra has such gorgeous flowers that when I see it in bloom, I’m always surprised it’s not grown as an ornamental, like some other plants you can eat are (see: nasturtiums).

Cowpeas, another veggie more common in the South, are great plants for city gardens because they can take more shade than most veggies. I’ve even read that they can be planted under loosely branched tree canopies, though I’ve not tried that myself. What I like to do is plant them under taller veggies like pole beans. I’ve got some seeds saved from last year’s cowpea crop (’Papago’). Today I bought a cowpea that’s supposed to do well in the north, which on the label is identified as the cultivar ‘Blackeye Pea’ (which is actually another name for cowpeas; I’m not sure yet if it’s also a cultivar name, or if this is some unnamed cowpea). According to the photo on the seed pack, this cowpea is white or cream with dark coloration around its eye.

The soybean I got is labelled “Vegetable Soybeans, GardenSoy” (yes, no spacing - GardenSoy). According to the sead pack, Richard Bernard of the Unversity of Illinois-Urbana developed GardenSoy for growing in home gardens. I’ve grown soybeans in the past but felt like the yield was so small with the cultivars I tried that it wasn’t really worth taking up the space in my small garden. I want to try this one to see if one that’s specifically developed for home gardens gives more yield per plant than the previous ones I’ve tried, which I’m guessing (with no proof) were developed for small-farm farmers. Like okra, soybeans (specifically edamame) are only sometimes available at the farmers’ market and when they are, it’s usually only for a week or two. This is my favorite fresh edamame recipe: http://www.recipetips.com/recipe-cards/t–2174/edamame-pilaf-rice-with-soybeans.asp It’s so good I can’t even tell you.

While I’m on the subject of seeds, I’d like to tell you about something that it seems too few people know about. Monticello, the historic estate of Thomas Jefferson, has a Center for Historic Plants (http://monticello.org/chp/index.html) that has information on various heirloom plants (with the largest focus on irises, dianthus, and roses) and publishes a newsletter that has some articles online, and the Center also sells plants, seeds (including vegetable seeds), and other things for gardens at Monticello’s online shop (http://monticellostore.stores.yahoo.net/plants—seeds.html).