Autumn Frost Squash: What I Will Grow Next Year

I have written about this before, but butternut squash is the go-to squash for "pumpkin" pie (and bread).  The canned "pumpkin" you purchase in the grocery is butternut.  I grow it every year, until this season, when the few seeds I had failed (maybe they got too old?).  But, luckily I had been seduced by the glossy photos on a seed house website and ordered Autumn Frost squash.  This squash is a pretty, buff colored squash, more orange than butternut, and just as tasty (some have green markings).  Though it is smaller than butternut, it is prolific and I will grow it next year, alongside the good old Waltham butternut!  By the way, this hard-stemmed squash has never been affected by squash vine borers in my garden (same with butternut and Long Island Cheese)! This is true for all Curcubita moschata squash.

Roast the squash (any winter squash) after you poke it with a few holes (you don't want it to explode!) in a glass dish in a 350 degree oven for 50 minutes or so.  Let it cool, cut it in half, remove the seeds and scrape out the flesh, easy peasey!

Nature's Little Jokes

 Sometimes, nature pays here little jokes on us!  I accidentally pulled these out while weeding.

Have fun out there!

One Reason I grow...

 Botanical Art

I started gardening when I was a kid. Wherever I had a place where I could grow veggies, I did it.  In the mid 2000's, I began taking botanical art classes and earned a Certificate in Botanical Illustration a few years later.  Why? So I could document what I grew, and the produce of others.  In fact, fruits and veggies are my favorite subjects!  Here's one:

Asian Long Eggplant

(Sorry about the photo quality, I need to work on that!)

WTH is this?

 

I try to buy decent potting soil as I pot up a large number plants every year and have many house plants.  Quality, organic potting soil is expensive, so I will sometimes reuse old soil (if I think it is relatively disease- and weed-free), recharge it with finished compost and coffee chaff (a peat and perlite substitute).  In a pinch I bought a less expensive potting mix and did not read the ingredients for the dreaded "forestry byproducts," aka tree bark leftovers from making mulch (I suspect it is swept off the floor).   Shredded tree bark is a bad substrate in which to actually grow plants, it robs the soil of nutrients as it breaks down and provides a great habitat for various fungi.  Well, the photo above was from a purchase of one of these cheap soils.  It is mostly all shredded bark with a little dirt thrown in!  I hope this was a fluke in production, but I will not be buying this "container mix" again (plus the harsh chemical fertilizers!):

The Fig Gods smiled

 

Brown Turkey Figs

One of the first things I planted when we moved to our central Virginia home 20 years ago were three brown turkey fig trees. Positioned on the southeastern corner of our house to protect the roots in winter, they started producing fruit in about 3 years, really hitting their stride at the 5 year mark, producing hundreds of ripe figs per day for weeks. Then "the music died."  Late freezes damaged the young fruit (which is really a flower in disguise) and the subsequent fruit could not ripen in time.  For the last 4 years we got nada, zilch, nothing.

So, then I read up on unproductive fig trees. As the trees mature, they tend to fill in the center and send up straight, unproductive branches.  This shades the tree, reducing the potential for ripening. Last January, our figs trees had a date with a Japanese pruning saw.  I removed much of the interior growth, and the vertical, crossed and dead branches, and took off some of the height.  At first, I was disappointed, the tree grew back lushly and I though we would not get figs. But I think pruning, plus no late freezes, did the trick and now...THERE BE FIGS HERE!

It's....Pawpaw Time!

 

If my reader recalls, I have a thing for pawpaws, ever since discovering them while walking down by the James River...and reading about them, most notably Andrew Moore's book pictured below (a riveting read for us garden nerds):

The pawpaw, and in this case I mean Asimina triloba, not the other 10 species of Asimina, is North America's largest native fruit.  It is the northern most member of a family of tropical plants. The pawpaw is now in commercial cultivation, and many improved hybrids exist.  Fruit from wild trees can have variable taste depending on the tree (and by tree, I mean all the many trees that come from the same rootstock, spread by runners/vegetative growth).  The pawpaw fruit is exceedingly fragile; when ripe it is very soft and does not transport well (and they will not ripen up if picked unripe). You will not find them at your local grocery store, but may find some at a local farmer's market. The best way to have pawpaws is to grow them yourself.  The  flavor of pawpaws is often described as a combination of banana with mango and pineapple overtones.

I lucked out, I grew my pawpaws from seed collected from wild plants-talk about a wild card! Even if you taste the fruit, the flower was most likely pollinated by a genetically different tree, and you don't know what you might get from that cross. Pawpaws are seldom self fertile, as the female and male parts of the flower come out at different times.  I hand pollinate mine with male flowers collected locally.

An added bonus of growing pawpaws is that they are the host plant for the larva of the zebra swallowtail butterfly! 

The top photo shows the fruit, pulp, and the large seeds (do no eat the seeds or skin, they can make you sick,  And, like everything, some people are allergic to pawpaws).  The second photo is of pawpaw pudding, a traditional recipe, sort of a dense cake.  Some people claim that cooked pawpaw can cause digestive upset, but it never has for me, nor can I find good evidence for that claim.

For Virginia growers, Edible Landscaping in Afton, VA offers several named varieties of pawpaws.

Ginger Update!

 

Turmeric

 Ginger

I wrote last season about my success with growing culinary ginger. I was so happy with the outcome (pickled sushi ginger anyone?), that I also ordered organic turmeric rhizomes this year and started some of those plants. Both turmeric and ginger are in the same family, the Zingiberaceae.  

We had a very hot and dry July and I was watering often- the gingers do like their water.  Then we had a hot and wet August and the plants really shot up.  Stay tuned for the outcome, I hope to have ginger and turmeric to share with friends!  By the way, I order my fresh ginger and turmeric roots from Hawaiian sources in February and start them in my sunroom as soon as they arrive (next year I want to try another ginger: galangal!).

A few informational resources on growing your own ginger in Virginia:

http://www.laughingduckgardens.com/2013/04/03/growing-ginger-in-virginia/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gko7DlV_mm0

HOT HOT HOT

 

from https://weather.com/  7/27/21

Dear Central Virginians,

That recent reprieve from the hot weather was great, but, sadly, it is not going to last. More days in the 90's are ahead, plus limited chance for rain.  

This is a "do what I say..." post. For a number of years, I have occasionally used soaker hoses.  But, because I was leaving a fairly newly planted vegetable garden for over 3 weeks in June (what was I thinking!??!?) I set up a series of soaker hoses on a timer and I am glad I did! For shorter vacations, I often asked kind neighbors and friends to water my garden by turning on sprinklers for a couple hours every few days.  I was never gone for long, so did not worry about the water wastage and inefficiency of this watering. I just needed a way for friends to do this easily and it was sort of ok.  And I was too lazy to set up soakers and timers. BUT I KNEW BETTER!  High, overhead sprinkling wastes up to 90% of the water to evaporation. The higher the arc of the spray and the more fine the spray, the greater the waste. Try an experiment: set up an overhead sprinkler for an hour, then dig into the soil after it turns off.  You will see that the water did not penetrate far.  This encourages shallow roots which cannot support healthy plants.

My setup is not the greatest. I have hoses that cross the brick paths between the beds, that wasted water partly reclaimed by buckets to be used later.  I need a better solution.  But my plants are lush and healthier than usual, despite the hot, dry conditions. Typically by this time of year my tomatoes have leaf spot diseases, caused by overhead watering splashing fungal spores from the soil to the leaves, but not this year so far (compost mulch helps with this, too).

I am going to find a solution to the lost water, and really set up a great system next spring!

Not a Keeper?

 I really enjoy growing garlic. I plant softneck garlic in the fall, in late September or early October and it overwinters with little sprouts, starting to grow again in the spring.  Typically, I harvest it in June when the leaves turn yellow and a "test head" looks ready (not round, but forming distinct cloves). But, this June I was on vacation when my garlic was ready.  I missed optimum harvest by over 2 weeks. What happens then? See the head of garlic pictured above? The cloves have started to separate from the head. If I waited longer, the cloves would have fallen free of the head.  Why is this a problem?  Garlic that reaches this stage has poor keeping qualities, it will spoil in my usual storage in a dark, dry cabinet layered in newspaper. 

So what to do?  Thank goodness there are alternative ways to preserve garlic. The University of California, Davis, produced this helpful document:

http://postharvest.ucdavis.edu/files/251548.pdf

Following their advice, I am separating the cloves, peeling and preserving them in the fridge in dry red wine, dry white wine, and white wine vinegar.  A bonus is that you can cook with this garlic-infused wine and vinegar!  I am also peeling and freezing them, roasting and freezing them (and smearing them on crusty bread, yum!), dehydrating them and making some of my own garlic powder and garlic salt.  (One thing I am not doing is preserving garlic in oil, due to the danger of botulism). As a consequence, my kitchen smells like a garlic factory!  I will still hold some of the better-looking heads in the cupboard, but will check on and rotate them often.

Carrots Can Be STUNNING

I am not the greatest grower of carrots, but I do eat a lot of them. I've had luck with other root crops from sweet potatoes to turnips, daikon, and radishes, but carrot culture eluded me for a while. I particularly love the purple carrots pictured above. I don't know if they taste any better or more nutritious, but they certainly appeal to the botanical artist in me. 

These are called Cosmic Purple Carrots. The interior can be solid orange, yellow, or orange with a yellow core. Like most unusually colored vegetables, they don't really maintain their color after they've been cooked, but just a little. Carrots need loose and light soil that is deeply worked, but no nitrogen. Some gardeners suggest working soilless seed starting mix or perlite into the carrot bed as well as making sure the soil is not at all compacted. Too much nitrogen makes the carrots hairy and woody and they won't taste as good. Once the tiny carrot seeds are planted just below the surface, the soil must stay damp in order for the carrot seeds to sprout. A rookie mistake, which I somehow seem to make regularly, is to plant them too thickly and fail to thin them. If you don't thin your carrots, you'll have lots of teeny tiny carrots that are not worth harvesting.

It's a good idea to plant carrots in the summer and harvest them in the fall. Carrot seeds like to germinate in warm soil and are sweeter when harvested after some cooler weather. However, if you plant them in the spring and you end up with carrots with a bitter taste, you can rescue them by cooking them with salt. Though the carrot will not get incredibly sweeter, the bitter flavor will be leached out. If my spring planted carrots get this way, I will often use them in a slightly sweet Asian stir fry.

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Vacay in Maine

My posts have been a little spotty lately, because I have been on a 3-week vacation near the Schoodic Peninsula part of Acadia National Park, gorgeous!  I have people watering and checking on my garden, but expect to come home to weeds, weeds, and more weeds. 

In the interim, here is some botanical eye candy from the region!

Sweet Potatoes, my Favorite YUM!

I love sweet potatoes in all their delicious incarnations: baked, boiled, roasted wedges, pie, curry, bread, gnocchi...you name it, I have  tried it.  Last year my heart was a bit broken over the sweet potato harvest. Sweet potato vines truly sprawl all over and take up a lot of room. And they will do this even if voles have eaten half of the sweet potatoes from underneath. This is exactly what happened last year. Despite my lining the base of each garden bed with fine garden cloth, the voles found a way in. This year that bed is the tomato bed and each tomato is planted in its own individual cage, after trying to figure out how the voles got in the bed and stop them!

Because of the problem with sweet potatoes sprawling everywhere, I am trying something new this year, that is planting them in garden bags. These bags are about 25 gallons each and are filled with a combination of potting mix, coir, coffee chaff, and compost. I know people have grown white potatoes in these kinds of bags before, as well as other garden crops. I did some reading and found that it is possible to grow sweet potatoes in them, though I have no idea what the yield would be like. Stay tuned for an update when we get closer to October!

What I will Grow again Next Year...and have for a few seasons

 

Isn't she lovely? What a beauty!  I have grown a few types of bok choi/pak choi/tat soi over the years and this white-stemmed pak choi beats them all.  It is easy to grow and wonderful in stir fries.  I ordered my seed from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, located not too far from where I live in central Virginia (they are in Mineral, VA):  https://www.southernexposure.com/

The only special requirement is that pak choi is a cool-season crop. It does really well when planted in early spring.  You cannot grow it in the summer, it bolts too quickly.  Like all brassicas, it can suffer from cabbage white caterpillars, which munch on the leaves. If this is a problem for you, grow them under a light weight row cover.

Tomatoes and Blossom-End Rot: Is Lack of Calcium the Culprit?

 

Photo from:

https://www.canr.msu.edu/resources/blossom_end_rot_tip_sheet#:~:text=Blossom%2Dend%20rot%20is%20caused,the%20tissue%20of%20the%20tomato.&text=Since%20calcium%20is%20only%20moved,affected%20by%20a%20calcium%20deficiency.

I am writing this to correct a mistake I made on this blog years go...and in my garden for decades.  For years, I have read than blossom-end rot on tomatoes is due to a lack of calcium.  You know blossom-end rot (see photo above). The fruit rots from the blossom up and is ruined. Each year, I added crushed eggshells, calcium carbonate, even a calcium-based antacid to my tomato planting holes to prevent it. But, you know what?  Calcium does play a role, but most soils have enough calcium to support tomatoes. It is inconsistent watering that creates problems for the transfer of calcium into the tomato plant.  So all those calcium supplements were useless to stop blossom-end rot, though eggshells certainly don't hurt anything. Make sure your watering is consistent.  And, don't water after a heavy rain. Tomatoes are not good at regulating water flow, and too much water will cause ripening fruit to crack!

I STAND CORRECTED.

Reference:

https://mgnv.org/2018/07/16/garden-myth-busters-eggshells-blossom-end-rot/

SO DARN PROUD OF MYSELF

 

OK, these are not just photos of a spindly tree.  Well, ok, they are, but it is a special, spindly tree!  Maybe 8 years ago, I found a wild pawpaw tree that had good tasting fruit (pawpaw fruit flavor from wild trees can vary quite a bit).  I collected a few fruit, saved the seeds, cold treated them (stratified them), and raised a few trees. Last year was the first year I cross-pollinated with fruit with pollen from an unrelated tree and got a nice crop! And the fruit was just lovely, tasted great!

This year I was more careful about selecting only male flowers shedding pollen to cross pollinate my flowers.  Pawpaw flowers are considered "perfect," with both male and female parts, but also "protogynaus," or 'female first'. That is, the female part of the flower matures first, then is no longer receptive when the male part appears. This is thought to be a strategy to reduce self- pollination and increase genetic diversity, but it is one reason the pawpaw is poor at producing fruit (other reasons: their pollinators, flies and carrion beetles, are inefficient; the trees are more likely to reproduce by underground runners than sexually and: as the colony grows, the trees get shaded and flower less).  I had to make sure I had receptive female flowers, then find trees that had advanced to having male flowers, aka pollen (luckily I had scoped this out last year).

If you look at the photos above, you will see the baby pawpaw fruits circled in red (the largest cluster has 7 fruits!). It is hard to take a photos of these tiny things. I was very successful in cross-pollinating with a paint brush this year, so successful, I may have to remove some fruit as it might weight the branches down too much!

You do not have to do what I did to get  pawpaw trees, you can purchase named varieties, just make sure to get two different cultivars for cross pollination.  I just liked the challenge and adventure of doing this myself!

Repurposing

I am a big fan of the philosophy "Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, or Do without" especially the idea inherent in this, repurposing.  I try to follow this in my home and in my garden. I have used silver packaging plastic cut in strips and tied to a pole  to scare birds, plastic lids as plant saucers, that kind of thing. My latest creation is pictured above.  While pruning my figs last winter, I saved some tall and straight branches to use in the garden as stakes.  But the rest requires a back story.

In my 20's, I was a bad abstract artist, and several of my paintings made it through various moves to our current home.  I was doing a big purge just before the pandemic, and saw these terrible paintings. I put then in the shed to break them down and toss them out. I recently stripped off the canvas and pulled out the staples.  "Huh" I thought "What can I do with these old canvas stretchers?" I teamed them up with the fig branch poles, some string I has saved, and some zip ties...and voila!  Pea trellises! And I think they are fun!

Landscaping with Natives

 Virginia Master Gardeners have some archived webinars on using native plants in your landscape that are worth a look!

https://mgnv.org/reading-room/master-gardener-virtual-classroom/?amp

Pretty Menace

A couple of years ago, when I was waylaid by a health problem, I noticed this pretty plant popping up in my flower garden (the saga of my flower garden is a tale for another day). When I finally got around to IDing it (thank you Virginia Native Plant Society FB page), it had flowered and seeded.  It is purple fumitory, a non-native plant with invasive tendencies. I call it a type of "shot weed," you know, the kind of plant that shoots its seeds about when you pull it when the seeds are ripe (bittercress, another invasive does this, as do impatiens, I believe). This year, I have been staging an eradication campaign to root it up before flowering and have had great success, though need to have 'constant vigilance' (a la Harry Potter and The Dark Arts).  I make regular sweeps through the garden, pulling it up (alas, I did not get the main root when I pulled up the plant in the photo) and also squishing the tiny seedlings from last years "crop."  From this experience I have learned to ID strange new plants as soon as I note them, and remove whatever is an invasive bad actor.

What Happens in Our Backyard?

Want to know what happens in your very own back yard? Woods? Parks? I found a lovely podcast, Backyard Ecology.  I leaned about things I never thought to ask, for example: most lightning bugs (fireflies) don't eat as adults, some flash synchronously, some not. In one species, the males hatch first, climb a tree and latch onto the first female nymph they find so they can mate with her first.  This is a fun podcast, delivered in a conversational, non-jargony way, that opened my eyes even more to the world around me!

Find it at:

https://www.backyardecology.net/posts/podcast/

Book Review: Ken Thompson, Darwin's Most Wonderful Plants

 

This a delightful short book, describing Charles Darwin's fascination with plants and the many plant experiments he carried out at Down House...and some of these experiments were quite extensive!  The book starts with his experiments on twining, vining, and climbing plants and the way plants accomplish these behaviors (yes, behaviors! There is more to plants than meets the eye!). I sort of knew the difference, but still learned so much, about the strategies of honeysuckles, legumes, and Virginia creeper.  But the book also addresses pollination strategies, orchids, and the relationship between plants, nectar, and flowers.  The author fills us in with more recent research that often validates Darwin's explanations. I think this book will make me a more keen observer of what goes on in my garden!

PS If you are interested in repeating some of these experiments, esp. with kids, try this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Backyard-Small-Experiments-Theory-ebook/dp/B01M4JOSRX