Liberated Gardener

A Salad Green for Winter and Summer

In NC we can grow greens easily from fall, through winter and spring. 

Summertime--not so much.

But there is one green that we grow year-round and use for salads, sandwiches, sauteeing and soups. 

 
 It's called chard or Swiss chard. Probably originates in Sicily so you know it can take the heat. Gardeners called it "Swiss" to differentiate it from French spinach varieties of the 19th cent.

It's a relative of beets, but doesn't have an edible root. The stems have been cultivated to grow in a variety of colors--red, yellow, orange, white. The young leaves are best for fresh eating and the larger leaves for cooking. 

Can be cooked like spinach or any other green: simmer some onions and garlic in butter and/or olive oil, then add cut-up chard leaves till they just collapse, but still have a nice bright color. Serve. Or add to a quiche or use instead of spinach in a lasagna.

 

I've been planting more vegetables with longer lives that are biennials,  like chard,  or perennials to reduce the amount of time I spend planting and re-planting beds. 

Chard is a biennial, which means it'll live through one or two summers and one or two winters depending on what season it's planted. You'll know it has run its course when it gets leggy and sends up a shoot of modest flowers.

 

Chard seeds are a bit smaller than pea seeds, so easy handling for kids. I soak the seeds overnight in a bowl so they can soak up some water to help them germinate.  They'll germinate outdoors in spring, summer or fall unless it's very hot. Plant them as a group a few inches apart if you want to harvest them young as salad greens with scissors. Or put them a foot apart if you want to hand pick leaves for both cooking and fresh-eating.

Sometimes Chris puts an individual plant at the center of a bed of carrots or lettuce for visual impact like the dimple in Mona Lisa's smile. I also use chard in container plantings so its big leaves contrast with finer, fernier leaves. 

And there's no law against using chard in a perennial bed or a bed of annuals--it's pretty enough--and always there for healthy snacking. Goes well with wine or beer as you knock out a few one-handed garden tasks after work. 

Aerial Pumpkins on the Way

Probably everyone knows that pumpkins are vines, but you probably don't think about them growing on a trellis. 

 

Here's a closeup of a tender tendril that's strong enough to lift the plant and the pumpkins themselves up off the ground. 
 

 

We planted these pumpkins the second week of June and little over a month later they are just starting to flower. When we have some colorful fruit, I'll post those photos too. 

The red trellis is cobbled together from some shelf racks from a defunct store bought for $10 apiece. The paint will fade to pink over time and they will get surface rust, but they will stand up to the weather for many years. They are held up by a 5' length of rebar pushed into the ground at each end and tied to the rack with tie wire. Jute twine would probably do for the season too. 

Pumpkins generally do fine just running on the ground without a trellis, but they do tend to get underfoot and the fruit can rot on the ground if we get endless weeks of rain. 

This way we can keep the paths between beds clear of the vines and keep the fruit off the ground. At harvest time we won't have to bend over either. 

And it looks pretty. 

Cinderella's Pumpkin

It's June and I'm thinking about pumpkins. But when I think about carving pumpkins, this is what I mean:

 

You're looking at the bottom half of a 46 pound pumpkin. It's Rouge Vif d' Etampes (meaning Deep Red from Etampes). 

Here it is playing the starring role as a table centerpiece for a Thanksgiving dinner at our house. 

It's an heirloom variety that came to this country in 1883 and you can get seeds at Southern Exposure. 

We've been growing this juicy battleship of a pumpkin for a few years. Chris makes pies, soufflees, pumpkin butter and pumpkin ice cream with the flesh. And as she's cooking, we are popping roasted and salted pumpkin seeds in our mouths. A crop that feeds you while you're cooking it. 

 

We have seedlings just coming up now in mid-June. We'll harvest in late September/early October. We've kept some pumpkins at room temperature all winter and into spring before eating them. 

In theory I'm going to build a trellis for the vines to grow on.

Here's an immature one with a glowing yellow coat. 

They are pretty tough plants. Only problem has been from squash vine borers. They are a moth that flies at night and lays an egg at the base of the stem. The egg hatches and a caterpillar chews its way into the hollow stem of the pumpkin and it eats it's way along until the plant doesn't get enough water and nutrients form the roots and dies. You'll know this is happening if you see what looks like sawdust at the base of a plant. Also if leaves start wilting in the morning. It's not the end of your holiday meals tho--there's still time to save your pumpkins.

Some obsessed garden writers would have you mix Bt (an organic poison for caterpillars) with water and inject it into each of the stems of every plant with a hypodermic needle--no kidding. 

This Liberated Gardener thinks the easy way to deal with this critter is to scoop a modest shovel full of garden soil and simply cover a small section of vine with soil. Since the pumpkin is a vine, it will root rather than rot under this soil and be able to feed the plant even if cut off from the original roots. So dump a shovel of soil on 3-5 spots of each plant if you see signs of vine borers. 

So why did I call this Cinderella's Pumpkin?

Apparently Walt Disney's minions chose Rouge Vif d' Etampes as the model for their drawings of Cinderella's coach. 

But don't ask me which species of mouse pulled the carriage.

  

 

 

Spring Garden Tips

A few things to help get spring good and rolling:

* If you didn't spread mulch over the winter, get it done now before the summer heat sweeps you indoors. A layer of organic mulch--shredded leaves, shredded bark--keeps the sun from drying out the soil, reduces the number of weeds, provides food for earthworms, provides nutrients for plants and just looks better. From the mid-Atlantic south, about 2"-3" will last a year or so. If you get a late start, only apply about an inch, that way you can apply some more this winter and get on a better schedule. 

* If you have new plantings, put a soaker hose around them (see earlier post about soaker hoses), cover the soaker hose and bed with mulch, connect the soaker to a garden hose, connect the garden hose to a timer and connect the timer to your spigot. Then when you go to work you can cut on the timer/spigot and go to work knowing that the water will turn itself off and your plants won''t be toasted during a heat wave. 

* If you haven't applied lime to your fescue lawn, you can do so now. Really you can do so anytime. It takes about 6 months for the lime to have any effect. 

* Pull weeds before they can set seed. Keeping the number of weed seeds down will reduce your weed population over time. 

* Even if you don't eat them, plant dill and fennel. Their wide clusters of tiny flowers will attract tiny wasps that don't sting people and lay eggs that attack garden pests, like tomato hornworms. 

* From the mid-Atlantic south, even if you planted in April, there are still vegetable crops that can be planted in May and June: sweet potatoes, okra, watermelons, pumpkins, corn, new potatoes, cucumbers and winter squash as well as any mid spring crops that had setbacks, such as tomatoes, peppers, etc. It's a long enough season for late spring/early summer plantings to do well. 

* If any leaves show signs of disease--early blight on tomatoes, rust on iris, for example--pull those leaves and throw them away. Any rain or overhead irrigation that hits those leaves will splash the disease onto other leaves on other plants. 

* Any perennials that grew too tall and flopped over last summer can be cut back hard now. That will force them to grow more stems that are shorter and more stable. 

* Deadhead flowers that seed in more than you like or just to keep them from putting energy into seed production at  the expense of next year's flowers. 

 

Making a Trellis for Peas and Beans from Bamboo

Peas can grow on the ground, which might be good if you're a kid, but I find I like to bend over less than I used to. Picking peas and beans from a trellis keeps them cleaner and saves time and strain in the picking.

I harvested some 2" bamboo from the overgrown alley at my old house in the Burch Ave. neighborhood and cut it to about 8' long to get it home in the truck. The peas were already planted and had grown about 12" high and were waving around searching for something to climb. 

As you can see in the picture, I set a pair of bamboo at each end of the 4'x4' raised bed and used tie-wire (twine would work fine too--I just used what was handy) to make an "A" frame. Just cut a piece of wire long enough (about 16" or so, length of wire will depend on size of bamboo) and wrap around once and twist the ends together.

An advantage of tie-wire is that you can then use a wrench to grab the twisted ends and twist them tighter to snug up the pieces of bamboo. I then used a third bamboo to hold an "A" up temporarily by leaning them together ( a helper can be useful to hold things in place while you tie them, but if you're handy and take your time to think out your steps, you can do this alone if need be).

Another piece of bamboo that reached from the bottom of one "A" to the crossing point of the other "A" was tie-wired (and tightened with pliers). A diagonal like this is necessary to keep the whole thing from falling over. The final piece of bamboo (cut with a saw to the right length) straddled the top of each "A" horizontally and was tied and tightened.

With the bamboo frame in place, I just needed something to drape on it for the peas to climb on. I had a short section of galvanized fence left over from a project that fit in both dimensions. Any kind of netting would work or you could use jute twine to weave your own netting. I've seen one gardener use twine to weave a netting that looked like a big spider's web--so there is no law that the netting has be be composed of a series of rectangles or parallel lines. The peas won't notice.

In fact you could use a tangle of branches laid against the bamboo if you've been doing some pruning. Peas and other vines evolved clambering up twigs and branches anyway,  so they'll be right at home.

And then if you've planted Sugar Snap peas you and your sweetheart can stuff your faces with the green candy in May/June while sitting on the porch admiring your handiwork.

Everlasting Tomato Cages

For years I promoted using concrete reinforcing wire to make the best tomato cages. These cages (trellises) need no staking, no tying up the tomatoes, they're tall enough (5'x18") to handle a healthy indeterminate tomato vine,  they have a lovely patina of rust,  they last almost forever and can live outdoors in the off-season. These things are real timesavers in the garden and they are so superior to those dinky, galvanized cages that most garden centers and big box stores sell. 

But few people used them. Then it dawned on me that not every gardener had a truck that could haul an 80 lb. roll of wire or had a set of bolt cutters that it takes to cut this heavy-gauge wire. And since you can get about 25 cages from one roll, most gardeners aren't going to want to spend $100 or so on a roll, when they only need a few cages to trellis their tomatoes. 

So last spring I put the word out that I would sell tomato cages for $12 each (and put the money in our Travel Fund). And sold about 100 of them over the course of a week. 

This spring, we're a bit busier, so I didn't market them as much and due to the recession, I cut the price back to $10 each and still sold about 50 of them this weekend (April 10/11). 

Have had some conversations with garden centers about selling them on consignment. May not get to it this year--we're leaving town for a month on April 29th. Maybe next spring. 

Below is a pic of a young tomato plant getting started inside a cage. I used to stake the cages (with tent stakes) but that was a pain and then it struck me that simply setting 3 or 4 of the cages cheek-by-jowl and tying the tops together with a bit of twine would create a big enough foot print so they wouldn't topple over even in a storm. 

Creating these would be a good project for a community garden. All you need is someone with a truck to pick up the wire, a set of bolt cutters and a space to work in and you're good to go. 

Instructions:

1) Use the bolt cutters to remove any clips holding the roll together. 

2) Use some weights (such as a couple of cinderblocks--I put them in a couple of milk crates to have handles) to hold down the wire so you can cut it. The ends of the wire are sharp and it's springy. It wants to bite you, so use the weights to hold the wire on the ground. 

3) Count out 10 squares (they are 6"x6"--big enough to pull out a one pound tomato with your hand) and then cut the end of the wires on the 11th square. 

4) CAREFULLY remove the weights one at a time. 

5) Pull the edges of the cage together and bend over the cut ends to hold the cage together in a circle. 

6) Plant and mulch your tomatoes on 18" centers in a square or triangular pattern and put the cages over them such that each cage is touching two other cages. 

7) Tie the tops of each cage to 2 other cages with hemp or jute twine (although zip ties or tie wire would be fine too). 

8) Enjoy the time you Don't spend staking and tying up your tomatoes.