Tucked Into Bed October 31, 2008

 

On October 23rd, I put my vegetable garden to bed.  After the first frost we’d had earlier in the week, the tomato vines were brown and brittle, littering the last of their fruits in a mushy carpet on the garden path.  I pulled the vines and raked up the tomatoes.

 

 

Next I tackled the ground cherry plants which had splayed over in the frosty nights.  Again, I had to spend a great deal of time racking up mushy fruit from the ground.   Then came out the last of the corn stalks and the winter squash vine that produced only one sorry little butternut squash in its short life.  The carrots were also pulled as the deer kept eating the tops so the roots were not going to get any larger.  I was actually impressed the carrots were as big as they were – most about 4 inches long and 1/2 inch in diameter.  

 

 

The only things remaining in my four long vegetable rows at the end of the clean-up were the patch of sorrel which will overwinter, my hardy rosemary and sage plants, and the three young rhubarb starts I’m hoping will make it through the winter.  After I cleaned out all the plant debris, I spread about an inch of leaf mold over the beds to help protect the soil from any hard autumn rains that might cause erosion and compaction.  I had hoped to put in a cover crop but found the season got away from me to get any seed besides winter rye to germinate.   I decided not to use winter rye as it’s a thug to remove by hand in the spring and I don’t want to till and form my beds again.    So, the vegetable plot is officially in bed for the winter.

centranthus ruber October 30, 2008

photo provided by http://www.bluestoneperennials.com/b/bp/CERUS.html

 

Here’s yet another perennial with cut flower potential to log in my “what to plant when I have my flower farm” file.  According to Armitage’s book on specialty cut flowers, this one falls in and out of favor with growers selling to florists as it tends to be either and “in” or “out” flower as the hip trends determine.  I personally think it sounds like a winner as it’s tremendously adaptable to different growing sites and it’s on a nice long straight stem.  For market bouquets and arrangements I design myself, it would make a great filler.  Colors available are pink, red, and white.

Helianthus Angustifolia ‘Mellow Yellow’ October 26, 2008

 

During a recent tour of the Mt. Cuba Center, an outstanding institution dedicated to the collection and promotion of native plants in garden settings, I was captivated by a beautiful buttery yellow flower in the meadow.   It turned out to be Helianthus angustifolia ‘Mellow Yellow’, more commonly known as swamp sunflower.   However, according to the gardener I asked, this particular plant was not growing in moist conditions, but rather a relatively dry, low fertility site.  

 

These autumn blooms remind me of a rustic cosmo nodding on similarly long lanky stems.  I’m always on the hunt for native plants, particularly those tolerant of frost, that have cut flower potential.  As long as these blooms last in the vase for at least five days, I’d say swamp sunflower would be an excellent choice.   I like this cultivar for its soft yellow versus the straight species’ bright yellow that is much more common in native flowers and sometimes hard to incorporate into multi-colored bunches.  If I can get my hands on some seeds or cuttings, I will definitely be giving this plant a try.

 

At Mt. Cuba, they also had a cutting garden of native plants.  While there wasn’t much to see in late October, it did seem like there would be plenty to come back to view next growing season.  I think this will be a great resource for future cut flower explorations. 

Making Tea October 22, 2008

 

Over the growing season, I harvested small bunches of fresh herbs each week and hung them to dry in anticipation of making my own herbal tea when the cooler months got here.  I started tea making last year with just anise hyssop, yarrow and lavender.  This year I had a much wider palette of herbs growing in my garden and I’m eager to get started with my “recipe” testing.  

 

 

I converted my closet into a mini drying room, using clothes hangers to hold the herb bunches while they dried with a small fan circulating air inside the closet.    The closet was the ideal space since it was dark, warm and dry.   Within its confines, I dried mint, anise hyssop, yarrow, lavender, calendula, sweet marjoram, bergamot, chamomile, rosemary, and sage.

 

 

Since my time was precious during the busy growing season, I just stored whole dried bunches in air-tight containers until I was ready to process them.  Besides running out of room in the closet, leaving the herbs hanging all summer would have left them dusty and a bit “off” when brewed.    This week I had the chance to process all those dried bunches, striping the leaves and buds off the brittle stems and sorting them into tupperware. 

 

 

From here I plan on using a few books for guidance and my own tongue to guide the way to some good brews of herbal mixes.  The bergamot will be mixed with some bulk black tea to make my own Earl Grey Tea.   The sweet marjoram and chamomile might make a nice match with soem calendula petals sprinkled in for vibrant orange color.  I have also been harvesting rose hips and drying them in the closet.   I’ll use those with the yarrow and lavender for a bright floral tincture.

 

Leftovers & Frost October 22, 2008

 

The first frost of this fall came on Sunday night, Oct 19th.  While the frost was right on schedule for our average first frost date in Southeastern Pennsylvania, I was a bit surprised to see it come since the weather throughout October has been unseasonably warm.  But suddenly on Sunday, the winds changed and the chill of true autumn settled over the garden.  The chill seems to be here to stay with night temperatures in the 30s pretty much this whole week.  Bye-bye garden.   I quickly gathered the last of my cut flowers and tea herbs on Sunday evening and brought them inside.

 

 

While it’s tough to see the garden go into such quick decline and the evenings get dark so fast, it does give me time to sort through some of the files I accumulated over the growing season and post an assortment of leftover pictures that I never got to post. 

 

 

I also cleaned out a cold frame and put the “lights” on it so I could try some “winter sowing”.  Apparently there’s a whole movement of folks determined to let the use of heated greenhouses pass them by in favor of using cold frames to get their seeds going over winter.  My first trial is with Baptisia seeds, which I sowed on October 20th.   After scarifying the seed with rough sand paper to enable the seedcoat to absorb moisture, I sowed perhaps a hundred seeds in two open flats and put one in the covered cold frame and one on my bench in the greenhouse.   I figure even with spotty germination, I’ll have far more Baptisia than I’ll need (perhaps we can sell some at a fundraiser) and the comparison of cold frame success to greenhouse success will be helpful in deciding how to germinate seeds over the winter.  

 

 

The next big task is to truly put the garden to bed for the winter.  I’ve been pulling out the plants that are hardest hit by the cold each day, but need to spend the time to clean out all the annuals and prep the perennials, including digging up the dahlia tubers.  I also took advantage of the additional free time now that classes are done to stroll around Longwood and see the fall sites, including the ghastly carved pumpkins.

 

Fall Flowers: Asters October 21, 2008

 

 

Fall cut flowers might initially seem hard to come by; I’m discovering they aren’t really.

 

 

 

There is a large stand of wonderfully florifous and long lasting violet asters near the greenhouse.  I’ve never been a huge fan of asters in the past, but watching these staying in full bloom on long straight stems for more than two months has made me a fan.   I am not entirely sure what variety these asters are:  I do know that they are very tall (5’) and have lanceolate leaves with entire margins.  At first glance I thought they might be a hybrid called ‘Little Carlow’, but that hybrid has cordate to ovate leaves.  My next best guess is that they are a A. laevis, which has the lanceolate leaves but reportedly only grows to 3 ½’ high normally.  Perhaps the ones I’m trying to i.d. just love their site so they’ve gotten a good bit taller.  In any case, I do know that these asters have convinced me to consider putting in asters at the farm for fall cut flowers.  I think this arrangement of asters with Verbena bonariensis  and purple grasses is rather elegant and dramatic.

 

Wintering the Bee Hives October 13, 2008

 

This week as part of our entamology class studies, we had a demonstration of how to prepare bee hives for winter.  Winterizing of bee hives should take place sometime in October, depending on the temperatures and coinciding with frost.  Hives can survive without this extra pampering, but their chances are greater with a little help.

 

 

There are basically two camps of philosophy for how to carry hives through the winter: cold and warm.  The “cold camp” believes you should keep the hives shaded through the winter, surrounding them with hay bales or other such material so that the sun doesn’t warm the hives up too much during the day and fool the bees into going out of the hive when its still bitterly cold.  If they do leave the hive, they can usually survive because the hay bales are providing a windbreaker and give them a place for the bees to land quickly to do their business before scurrying back to the warmth of the hive.   The pros to this system are the bees have a greater chance of surviving the outside elements either by not being fooled into going out by the heat of the sun or by having some shelter if they do.  The cons of this system are that the bees tend to stay very compact within the hive’s center, not wanting to leave the warmth of their communal ball of bodily warmth.  As such, they tend not to move around to feed since they risk dying of cold if they go too far away from their brethern.  Hives can essentially starve themselves even if they have enough honey in the outer combs. 

 

 

The “warm camp” believes you should take advantage of the sun’s rays to keep the hive as warm as possible through the winter, wrapping the hives in black paper to both absorb more solar heat and to serve as some protection against the wind.  This system’s pros are that bees tend to move around much more inside the hive since its internal temperature is much higher than that of a “cold camp” hive and so they don’t die off as much within the hive due to poor feeding or moving away from their centeral heat.  However, the cons of this system are that bees can be easily fooled into going outside, thinking it’s as toasty out there as it is in their hive.  Once outside, with no hay bales to break the bitter winter winds, bees often fall to the ground and die.

 

 

Buck White came to demonstrate these two systems to our class and to talk more about bee behaviour in winter.  He recommends putting either bee “fondant” or manufactured pollen cakes in the hive at the time you winterize them.  These cakes of essentially pure sugar will serve as another food source in the event the bees use up their honey stores.  If using pollen cakes, Buck says to be sure to get the ones with some natural pollen in them as it helps the bees take to the cakes faster. 

 

 

Another “tip” Buck offered was the concept of drilling a “communication hole” through the center of all the combs.  With a little hole in the center of each comb, bees are able to crawl from one side of a comb to the other and on to another and another without leaving that central ball of communal body heat that’s so vital to their survival.  Without this centralized communication hole, bees would have to crawl to the outer edges of the hive to go around the ends of a comb to get to the honey on the other side of a comb.  This journey to the outer edges, while seemingly short, can be deadly on very cold days.  The drilling of the centralized communication holes can be relatively easy with the use of a long drill bit that can be started on the outside of the hive box and drilled straight through to the other side.  The outside hole should be plugged up with wax or caulking to keep the wind from getting into the hive. 

 

 

While I found all the information for wintering bees over to be very interesting, I was most fascinated with the way the bees interacted with our class during all of this activity around their hives.  We did not smoke the bees at all and no one, not even Buck, got stung once!  The bees did enjoy landing on us though, a harmless act as long as we stayed calm and didn’t try to swat them.

 

Harvesting Sweet Potatoes October 13, 2008

 

It just hasn’t been my year for fall crops. First the mustard greens, then the rutabaga, and now the sweet potatoes. My sweet potato vines had been gorgeous and pest-free for months. Then the deer came along, apparently “famished” since they’d eaten all the Swiss chard in every student garden, and took their fill of the sweet potato leaves in late September. With such heavy defoliation, I decided to go ahead and dig the potatoes on October 2nd since they weren’t going to get any bigger without leaves.

 

 

Well, it turned out my sweet potatoes had had a very nasty pest all season long… voles! They ate out the hearts of all the big tubers. All that was left were small 1-2” diameter potatoes deep in the soil, which tended to snap off as I tried to dig them up. Needless to say, I was disappointed. I really like sweet potato soup and had hopes for plenty of it this fall. Guess I’ll just have to hit up some farmers markets for my supply instead. Next year I’ll try growing sweet potatoes again, but this time I’ll pull up my vines more often to check for furry critters and will probably put out poisoned bait for the voles if they return for another season-long buffet.

 

 

Bulb Plan for Next Spring October 10, 2008

 

 

I’ve been mulling over my plan for spring bulbs (which need to be planted here in the next few weeks), trying to figure out both my intent for the bulbs/design and my limitations in my existing and future garden layout.  After flipping through a few bulb catalogs, I realized I would definitely like to accomplish two distinct objectives with my bulb planting. 

 
First, I want to continue my experimentation with good cut flowers and there’s no better time of the year for cut flower than in spring when everyone’s desperate to get a little freshness and color in their lives to overcome the final days of cold weather.  Having learned a thing or two from my cut flowers over this past summer, I’ve decided to choose varieties of tulips and narcissus with outstanding fragrance and deep rich hues of purples, maroons and some pearly whites.  I was lacking anything with fragrance this past summer and I’ve honed my floral design skills a bit to realize I enjoy putting together arrangements that feature lush jewel tones.   In addition to these perfumed flowers, I am very eager to work with alliums as cutting flowers.  Since they come in some fantastic shades of purple, they’ll fit right in with my design scheme.

 
My second intent for my bulb design is to add early season interest to my garden that would carry it through to the time when other plants are starting to put on their late spring colors.  To accomplish this, I wanted to be sure to place bulbs around the garden for overall interest and to have one main concentrate sweep for a little “wow” factor.   Getting a mix of bulb varieties that bloom in succession is key for this part of the design, including a vibrant spring container planting of low early-spring hyacinths, medium mid-spring tulips, and tall late-spring alliums. 

 
At this point, I ran into the limitations of my overall garden design – both existing and future.  I have enjoyed my current linear layout with very distinct beds with distinct purposed (cutting garden, tea garden, sedum hill).  However, I know that I want to do a large redesign next spring to incorporate a more winding path and a shaded corner in the back of the current cutting garden.  To accomplish this overhaul, I’ll need to have access to a large part of that back left corner in early spring to construct my “walls” and to sink in several new shade perennials.  Putting bulbs back there is out of the question.  Also, to move my path from the center into a more curved form originating from the front right corner and ending in that newly shaded back left corner, I need to relocated several of my perennial tea herbs to the back left corner of the current tea garden, clumping them much more densely than they are currently. 

 
Bearing all of that in mind, I have sketched out the idea of “river” of densely planted multiple blue-hued grape hyacinths and purple-hued anemones trickling out from the top of Sedum Hill into a full flood that spills across the full front of the current tea garden.  This layout leaves space for me to work in the back of the garden on the new structure.  After the bulbs are done, I can re-dig my path along the area where they were.  In the meantime, the front of the cutting garden will remain relatively untouched within the parameters of my future garden design so the cutting bulbs will be arranged in a hedge similar to my zinnias this summer and additional small but dense clumps will be scattered among my existing perennials. 

 
Some bulb cultivars I’m considering at the moment include:

• Drumstick Alliums
• Mediterraneann Bells (a type of allium)
• Wild Flowering Tulips (low growing)
• Double Late Tulips
• Princess Irene Tulip
• Calgary Narcissus
• Delft Blue Muscari Mix (grape hyacinths)
• Negrita Tulip

 

 

Ornamentals Turned Cut Flowers October 3, 2008

Gladiolus murielae

 

There are many learning experiences of many different calibers here at Longwood.  For me, the most outstanding by far have been the Ornamental Plants certificate classes.  Offered to the public at large too, these classes attract some truly outstanding teachers that are at the top of their chosen horticulture specialty.  I just recently completed the Annuals I class and Shade Perennials class, giving me detailed information on more than 150 plants, a good many of which were unfamiliar to me previously.

 

Among these 150 plants, I found several new possibilities for future cut flower production.  The discovery of new cut flowers among the list of annuals was no surprise.  However, I was truly impressed with how many shade perennials have potential as cut flowers, something I plan on putting to the test in a shady track along the backside of the urban farm that’s currently going unused. 

 

Annuals with Cut Flower Potential:

Angelonia angustifolia – look for tallest varieties
Dianthus barbatus – also edible
Melampodium divaricatum – good filler for shorter bunches
Gladiolus murielae – fragrant fall bloomer with elegant coloring
Capsicum annuum – fun and colorful filler for autumn bunches

 

Shade Perennials with Cut Flower Potential:

Alchemilla mollis (Lady’s Mantle) – spring filler
Anemone teomentosa ‘Robustissima’ – fall flower
Chasmantium latifolium – wild oats for filler
Digitalis lutea – vertical accent
Helleborus argutifolius – pale green flowers in March
Heuchera villosa – spikes of white flowers in fall
Hosta ‘Krossa Regal’ – dramatic blue-green foliage for accents
Matteuccia struthiopteris (Ostrich Fern) – fern filler and dried fertile fronds attractive too
Mertensia virginica -  beautiful clear blue flower in early spring (uncertain vase life)