Better than a Boxer and Goodbye to Mac

Check it out! New video up at www.youtube.com/leereichfarmden showing step-by-step preparation of weedless beds in autumn.

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Some people consider owning a Porsche Boxer to be a luxury; I consider crunching through winter snow to the greenhouse and picking a fresh head of lettuce to be a luxury. This lettuce-y luxury must be earned at a price that is more than monetary. It was a couple of weeks ago that I started paying for part of this year and next.

The goal is to harvest a head of lettuce every day from now through winter and on into next spring. That takes planning.

So at the end of August I filled a 4 by 6 inch seed flat with potting soil and sprinkled a different variety of lettuce into each of four mini-furrows. Covered with a pane of glass and watered, the seeds soon sprouted,

and after the sprouts grew for a week or two I delicately lifted individual seedlings out of the flat by their tiny leaves. Each sprout went into a waiting hole dibbled into a larger flat filled with potting soil, this time a flat where each sprout got its own cell.

Another payment: Today I spread an inch depth of compost in each permanent planting bed in the greenhouse. (Excepted were two beds, one awaiting the ripening of two more melons and the other that will be ripening cucumbers for the next few weeks.) Into the beds went seeds of various cool weather greens -- mâche, arugula, mustard, minutina (also known as erba stella), and baby bok choi -- as well as a few different varieties of lettuce.

Yet another payment: Towards the end of the month, I’ll lift out the lettuce seedlings that I transplanted into seed flats and plant them about 8 inches apart in any remaining beds.

All this planting may seem hectic or redundant but there is method to the madness. These greens tend to bolt (go to seed) when the weather is warm and days are sufficiently long. Sown too soon for winter, and they do just that. They’re ruined. On the other hand, autumn and early winter days are short and temperatures are cool to cold which makes for very slow growth. If plants are too small going to autumn, they don’t grow large enough to amount to anything until February or March.

So plants have to be big enough, but not too big going into autumn. How big is best depends on the plant, in some cases even the variety of plant. Plants grown from seed planted directly in the ground seem to bolt less readily than plants grown from transplants. All of which is why I grow a little of everything every which way at various times.

Although I’ve gardened for decades, my greenhouse experience spans only 13 years; perhaps after another 10 years I’ll know just when to sow everything to ensure a steady supply of fresh salads all winter.

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“Payment” for my lettuce-y luxuries is too strong a term. All this ground preparation, sowing, and transplanting really just extends the fun of gardening into the winter months. And, did I mention weeding. What fun it is in winter. Really!

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It is with regret that I thinned out excess turnip seedlings this morning. Not that I regretted tossing away the green tops. What I regretted was not being able to share the tops with Mac, my old neighbor. He died late last year.

Mac grew up in the South and wended his way north harvesting fruits and vegetables. He eventually

settled in the north, in a small house that practically butted right up against my garage.

You couldn’t conjure up a more disparate pairing: me, a short, white guy from the suburbs of New York City, and Mac, a tall, black guy from deep in the South. We were drawn together by our love for gardening. Perhaps I have some roots in the South (doubtful) because he and I also shared our love for okra and greens. A frequent summer refrain over the hedge separating our yards was, “How many bags of okra you got in the freezer so far?”

Mac and I always got along. When a pin oak on our property line was threatening to shade my plum trees, I hadn’t even finished my question before Mac answered, “Just take it down.” Some visitors here thought the ramshackle sheds and assorted objects scattered over his yard were an eyesore. I looked upon them as nothing more than “different strokes for different folks.”

Mac eventually moved into an apartment in town and, as he aged, his gardening capabilities diminished. But not his love for gardening, being in the garden, and eating from the garden. Each spring, he would bring me some seeds that he thought were worth growing and I would raise “starts,” as he called them, for both of us.

Because I’m partial  to the turnip varieties Purple Top White Globe and Oasis, I always got my own turnip seeds. The seeds are small and no matter how thinly they’re sown, they always come up crowding each other. So the only way to get nice, plump turnip roots is to thin out the plants when they are still young.

I like turnip greens but Mac liked them more. Every year, I’d collect the thinnings into a bushel basket, then hand them over to Mac who would sit outside his front door washing them, then cook and freeze them.

After he moved to an apartment, he started washing them here to bring home. As he aged, I started washing them while he watched. And finally, I started bringing him bags of washed, boiled, frozen turnip greens.

This year, I’ll just compost most of the greens. Bye, Mac.

Tomato Sowing, and More

Sowing tomatoes was the big moment in the garden last week. The sowing was actually indoors and it was on April 1st, which is 6 weeks before the “average date of the last killing frost,” or, to those in the know, ADLKF.

I’m finicky about what varieties to grow because good tomatoes just waste garden space, never getting eaten if great-tasting tomatoes, are also to be had. But look at tomato variety descriptions in seed catalogues and on seed packets, and you’d think that every tomato variety tastes great and is worth growing. 

I read those descriptors carefully to narrow the field. For starters, I avoid any tomato listed as “determinate.” Determinate varieties grow by branching repeatedly because each stem ends in a cluster of fruits. The plants are compact and ripen their fruits over a short season, which appeals to commercial growers. Downsides are that their lower leaf to fruit ratio results in poor flavor and concentrated ripening causes more stress and, hence, susceptibility to diseases.

So I grow only “indeterminate” varieties, whose clusters of fruits hang from along their ever elongating (indeterminate in length) stems. These are the varieties that can be pruned for staking.

Short of tasting a particular variety of tomato, the next descriptor that would guide me is whether or not it’s a “potato leaf” variety. Yes, their leaves look like those of potatoes (a close relative), that is, thicker and with smooth, rather than serrated edges. Still, a lot of great-tasting tomatoes are not potato-leaved.

Pink, heart-shaped tomatoes also have the edge on flavor. Same goes for tomatoes that don’t ripen to a

Two great tomatoes: Cherokee Purple & Amish Paste

uniform red color. Or tomatoes that don’t ripen to perfectly round orbs. I also happen to like dark colored -- so-called “black” -- varieties. You could almost say that the uglier the tomato (by commercial standards) the better the flavor. Which is not to say that every tomato variety bearing ugly fruits is great-tasting; but it’s a start.

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A man (or woman, or child) can grow only so many tomatoes. This year I narrowed my lineup to 16 varieties, some old favorites and a few new ones, the new ones chosen on the basis of being indeterminate, perhaps potato-leaved, etc.

The old favorites are Belgian Giant, Anna Russian (good cooked and fresh), San Marzano (good cooked, bad fresh), Cherokee Purple, Blue Beech (good fresh and with unique, good flavor cooked), Amish Paste (good

Some of last year's tomatoes

cooked and fresh), Rose de Berne, Valencia (orange fruit), and Nepal. Also two cherry tomatoes, Sungold and Gardener’s Delight. The latter was my favorite decades ago and I’m curious now how it compares with the incomparable Sungold.

New varieties for this year are Brandywine Black, Black Prince, Cherokee Chocolate, German Giant, and Black Krim.

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Whew! That’s a lotta’ tomatoes.

Even with a greenhouse, indoor planting space is at a premium. Besides those 16 varieties of tomatoes, with plans for at least 4 plants of each variety, I have dozens of other vegetable seedlings -- broccoli, lettuce, kale, Brussels sprouts, pepper, eggplant, and more -- growing or in the works. And multiple varieties of each.

I’m managing all this by starting out sowing seeds in what look like miniature fields. These “fields” are 4 by 6 inch seed flats, filled with potting soil into which I press 4 furrows with my MFT (my “mini-furrowing tool”). MFT is a 4 by 6 piece of plywood with a handle on its upper side and four, spaced out, 1/4 inch diameter dowels glued to its underside. Into the furrows impressed by the dowels I sprinkle the seeds, cover the furrows, and then smooth the “field” with a similar plywood rectangle lacking the dowel underbelly. The seedlings, when they sprout, look like miniature fields of plants.

Once sprouts unfold their second sets of leaves, they’re ready to be “pricked out” and given their own home. That home could be a pot or a cell in a plastic tray of multiple cells. Sliding a small, blunt knife into the potting soil beneath a seedling lets me gingerly grab its leaves and lift it out with roots intact to be dropped

A lot of seedlings in a little space.

into a waiting hole I’ve dibbled with my cone shaped “dibbler.” As each seedling is in place I tuck potting soil in around its roots. Without delay, once a tray of seedlings has been pricked out, I spray a gentle but thorough mist of water to moisten the soil and settle the little sprouts into place without knocking them down.

Seeds and very young sprouts spend one or more weeks -- four in the case of slow-germinating and growing celery -- in the seed flats, and then another four weeks or so in their cells. That translates to 50 or more seedling in an area 4 by 6 inches for a couple of weeks and then about 20 older seedlings growing up in a space of about a square foot for the next four weeks.

All this not only squeezes oodles of seedlings into relatively small space; it also keeps me intimate with them in their youth. I’ll be planting tomato seedlings out in the garden one week after the ADLKF.

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THINGS NOT SO ROSEY

Lest anyone believe that everything is always rosy here on the farmden, it ain’t so. True, right now, vegetable beds are brimming over with crisp, tender heads of delicious lettuce, broccoli, endive, and cabbage, and upright stalks of aromatic celery and leek. And, yes, the floor of the greenhouse is verdant with developing, young lettuce, large, leafy kale and Swiss chard plants, and 10 foot tall fig trees bearing fruits

But let’s start with those figs, three different varieties of which live with their roots right in the ground in the greenhouse. Green Ischia has been bearing large, copper-colored, firm, sweet fruits for weeks and weeks. No problem here.

About 8 feet from the Green Ischia grows a Brown Turkey fig. It kicked off the season as usual, loaded with fruit that started ripening in early September. Then scale insects moved in, dotting stems and eventually the fruits with their gray bodies, and sucking the life out of everything until the harvest petered away to almost nothing

About 8 feet from the Brown Turkey tree grows another fig tree, Kadota, with fruits lined up along its stems also. From past experience, I expected problems with Kadota. It’s a delectable and heavy yielder that thrives in hot, dry climates. The greenhouse is hot but hardly dry. With the high humidity in there, almost every Kadota fig has turned to a fuzzy, white ball just before ripening.

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The Kadota problem is the one most easily solved. That white fuzz is fungal, and the fungal culprit is probably Botrytis cinerea, a cosmopolitan fungus boasting a slew of host plants. Botrytis claims credit, for example, for a wet spring’s fuzzy, gray strawberries, for a wet summer’s fuzzy, gray raspberries, and, in a more benevolent form, for “noble rot” of grapes, which makes for a sought-after wine. All sorts of ominous chemicals can control botrytis. More benignly, on stored fruits at least, it has been controlled with a 1% solution of baking soda, or an atmosphere of either 15 ppm acetic acid (i.e. vinegar) or 75 ppm cinnamaldehyde, the natural flavoring of cinnamon

Trying to control disease on my Kadota figs with sprays would be an uphill battle considering the perfect conditions for botrytis: a very susceptible variety of fig, a very humid environment, and presence of the fungus. My approach is straightforward, and that is to dig up Kadota and plant a more disease-resistant variety in its place

On to Brown Turkey . . . Scale insects get up into plants and move around with the help of ants. Stopping the ants goes a long way to putting the brakes on scale. Stopping the ants is easy: Masking tape wrapped around the trunk and coated with a continuous ring of sticky Tanglefoot Tangle-Trap Insect Trap Coating. I also, of course, have to make sure there are no leafy, stemmy, or other bridges around which ants can detour. Next year

One other possibility for reining in scale insects is to spray “summer oil” in spring after the plants have leafed out and greenhouse beds are clear of lettuce, kale, and other vegetables. Summer oil is highly refined so as not to damage plants while it’s smothering the scale insects.

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Another problem I notice in the greenhouse is that developing lettuce heads have some hole-y leaves and a few gobs of insect poop. Slugs are the usual, occasional problem in my greenhouse, but they don’t leave green, gobby, poopy calling cards. (No less unpleasant are the silvery trails they do leave, from their dried slime.) With more than usual grasshoppers this year, that was also a possibility. Nix on that. I just haven’t seen enough of them for all that poop, and they chew beginning at the edges of leaves. Attacked lettuce leaves were pocked with holes

The feeding resembles the handiwork of cabbageworms or cabbage loopers. They’ve never before indicated a liking for my lettuce but are known to include lettuce in their diet. Yet another possibility is another caterpillar, armyworm. This one feeds at night and, because I haven’t seen any caterpillars, is now the most likely culprit

The natural insecticide, Bt (sold under such trade names as Dipel and Thuricide), that I mentioned last week is very effective against the cabbageworms and loopers, as well as young armyworms. Larger armyworms are finished or just about finished feeding anyway.

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These few problems notwithstanding, things are still rose-y, or at least carnation-y, in the greenhouse. The big, fat, fragrant ‘Enfant de Nice’ carnations that I grew this summer . . . well, I couldn’t just leave them out to die from cold. So I dug up some plants to grow in the greenhouse. They add a nice spot of red, white, or pink color, and the fragrance is, as billed, “intoxicating spicy-sweet clove.”

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