Deferred Gratification

If there’s one thing I don’t like about gardening, it’s all the deferred gratification, all  the looking to the future. That future might be 3 or 4 weeks hence, when I’m planning to start harvesting the radishes that I’ll be sowing today. Or 8 or 9 weeks hence, when I’ll start harvesting tomatoes from plants I’m nurturing today and that I sowed in early April for planting out towards the end of May.

And it doesn’t end. No sooner will a large portion of the seeds and transplants be snuggled into this season’s garden than I’ll be sowing seeds of cabbage and broccoli for eventual transplanting in midsummer for harvest in autumn. Planning for autumn now! Shudder the thought, but it’s got to be done. I don’t want to even think about autumn’s impending cold weather with this wonderfully warming spring weather.

Okay, let me take a deep breath and resolve this not-living-in-the-present of gardening. It’s not really that bad. I figure out what has to be done -- a written schedule updated as necessary from previous seasons’ notes is crucial for this -- and and then immerse myself in the all-present of doing it. And it’s not all for end results; there’s the joy and satisfaction of watching plants grow and come into fruition and respond to my ministrations.

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In some cases, the longer the period of deferred gratification, the greater the satisfaction.

I wrote back in February about the excitement of seeing white roots of some yellowhorn tree seeds that were sprouting in potting soil in a plastic bag in my refrigerator. I planted all those in pots. But also, in that plastic bag, were some hackberry seeds I had collected last autumn. They were doing nothing. Nothing obvious, that is.

Seeds of woody plants that ripen in autumn have a dormancy that lasts until they think winter is over. Winter for my hackberry and yellowhorn seeds takes place in my refrigerator, which is ideal because the

temperatures that spur seeds -- and plant growth, for that matter -- awake are between about 30 and 45°F. That’s why yellowhorn seeds awoke back in February. Outdoors, the requisite number of hours in that temperature range might not have accumulated until around now.

Hackberry seeds evidently need to experience more chilly hours before they’re convinced to wake up, which happened last week. I potted up the delicate little seedlings.

In 20 years or so, those six hackberry seedlings should be large enough to be clothed in a corky bark that, especially in winter, displays crisp, achromatic

shadows reminiscent of the lunar landscape. Perhaps by then the plants will be old enough to bear pea-sized, date-flavored fruits. Not that the fruits offer much more than a nibble; within each pea-sized fruit is an almost pea-sized seed, leaving just a thin covering of sweet flesh.

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Sometimes -- usually -- it’s best to let Mother Nature do the planting. On a recent drive to West Virginia, where the spring season is about a week ahead of here, the mountainsides were awash in redbud bloom.

Usually, I not a fan of redbud. It’s the color. Pinkish purple. Yuk, and too flamboyant. At least, to me, from isolated trees that blare out their color from front or back yards.

But isolated redbud trees as well as large swathes of them livened up the scene as they nestled in among forests of trees

unfolding soft-colored, pale green blossoms and young leaves.

On a shorter time scale, I see Ms. Nature has also done a nice planting of cilantro. In the couple of beds where cilantro stood last year (from self-sown seeds of the previous year), small plants are now ready for harvest. And I didn’t even have to think ahead to plant them.

Rational in Spring? No.

People are funny, and that includes gardeners. Gardening is basically simple: You put a seed in the ground and, backed by millions of years of evolution, that seed grows. Sure, there are a few more wrinkles, like choosing a sunny spot (for sun loving plants), a well-drained soil (except for bog and water plants), and enriching the ground with organic materials, and, perhaps, fertilizer.

But people love to complicate things. Hence, compost tea, biochar, and now, straw bale culture. A recent article in the New York Times about straw bale culture has everyone -- or at least the handful of people who told me of their plans for the season -- trying out this new and allegedly wonderful alternative to merely dropping seeds in the ground.

Actually, straw bale culture is not “new.” I wrote, over a decade ago, in my book Weedless Gardening, “Straw bale culture of vegetables originated in Europe from a need to grow plants where diseases had built up in greenhouse soils. The idea is to set a bale of straw on the ground and grow a plant right in the bale. You do this by poking a transplant into a hole gouged in the top of the bale and sprinkling some fertilizer on it. Given adequate water and nutrients, the plant roots grow throughout the bale, hardly realizing that they’re not in real soil. There’s no reason why this method could not be used to start a small garden anywhere. Put some paper down on the ground and create mulched paths between the bales.”

Yes, the method could be used “anywhere,” but there are also good reasons not to. First, straw bale culture is not really organic. With this method, plants are fed mostly by soluble fertilizers sprinkled on the bales. The essence of organic gardening is to feed the soil which, in turn, feeds the plants. Plant foods are released from the soil matrix through microbial action. Microbes respond, as do plants, to warmth and moisture, so nutrients become available to plants in synch with plant needs. In straw bale culture, roots are bathed in readily available nutrients whether they want them or not.

Barring diseased soil or trying to garden on a rock ledge, why use straw bale culture in the first place? What’s wrong with dropping a seed in waiting furrow in the ground? 

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Not that I’m that rational a gardener, especially this time of year.

I’ve admonished many a person to begin with a site that needs a plant, determine what plant would do well with those site conditions, and then -- and only then -- to go out and get the plant or order it. All that’s

opposed to wandering into a garden center this time of year, when such places are awash with all sorts of desirable plants, picking out a plant you like, and then running around the yard with it trying to decide where to plant.

I, of course, did the latter. A couple of weeks ago, I read about Concorde pear, notable for having “the beautiful shape and crisp texture of the Conference, which gives it an elongated neck and firm, dense flesh. Its flavor is vanilla-sweet, reminiscent of the supple sweetness of Comice pears.” (Supple sweetness?)

The plant is readily available in Britain, but not here. All of which made it all the more desirable. Did I really need a Concorde pear tree? Aren’t the more than 20 varieties I now have sufficient? Evidently not.

As luck would have it, a nursery an hour away had Concorde. The nursery, of course, had  many other desirables also. So I also bought Black Gem, a named variety of black walnut. Not that there aren’t plenty of wild black walnuts around here, but this was a named variety.

So today I will run around the yard with these two plants trying to decide where to plant them.

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The appeal of Black Gem is that it has a name. A “named variety” of plant is one that was either bred or selected from a wild population and found to be superior in one or more ways. Said plant is given an official name and then reproduced by some method of cloning, such as by cuttings or, as is the case with most fruit

and nut trees, grafting. McIntosh is a named variety of apple. Seedling apple trees that pop up randomly along roadsides are not. All plants of the same variety name are genetically identical.

Named varieties are not available for every plant and, for some, pretty much all seedlings are quite good. The hedge of Nanking cherries along my driveway -- and now in bloom! -- are merely seedlings, but all the plants are beautiful and yield, in a couple of months, great quantities of tasty cherries with virtually no effort on my part. No varieties are available.

Black Gem, according to the tag, yields “huge crops of light-colored, high-quality, delicious nuts that crack in large segments and offer a superior nutmeat-to-shell ratio. Thin husks slip off easily.” How could I resist?

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Loving Locust

With a bit over 2 acres of land to play around with, I could have a woodlot. But I don’t. (I do harvest a lot of sunlight, though.) Still, because this is what I call a farmden (more than a garden, less than a farm), trees, aside from fruit trees, have to fit into the picture. To wit, four sugar maples planted  in 1997 as a sugarbush for tapping in another 20 years and my locust mini-grove.

Locust -- black locust, Robinia pseudoacacia, that is -- is a tree of many qualities. For starters, the roots can garner nitrogen from the air and put it into a form the tree can use, eventually putting it in the soil. Black locust also laughs off heat, drought, air pollution, and road salt. The tree’s craggy branches and deeply furrowed bark are fondly reminiscent of those trees that hugged Dorothy on the yellow brick road to Oz. Towards the end of next month, chains of pale lavender blossoms will be dangling from the branches. More than just pretty, these flowers fill the air with a sweet aroma that carries far.

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What more could one ask from a tree? Wood! Some of which I was harvesting from my locust mini-grove last week. The grove is a stand of locusts of various ages popping up in a swathe about 15 feet wide by about 60 feet long. Forsythia shares that space as understory, new plants developing wherever canes arch to the ground to root. The locust grove formed naturally from a long-gone nearby grove on a neighbor’s property, felled by chainsaws, the new plants arising from dropped seeds as well as from root suckers.

Locust is one of the best woods for burning, but cutting trees from my mini-grove for firewood would hardly be worth it. One week in winter would decimate the small patch.

The locust I cut is destined for posts. Locust is one of the most rot-resistant woods, putting even cedar to shame. It can outlast pressure-treated wood, offering a nice rustic look to boot. Spring, before the leaves come out, is a perfect time for cutting locust for posts because that’s when the bark peels off easily in long strips.

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The locust posts are for a new grape trellis. My grapes started out being trained to the traditional 4-arm Kniffen system, on two wires, one at 6 feet and the other at 3 feet from the ground. Two canes, originating near a central trunk, are trained horizontally in either direction along each wire to give a total of 4 canes each shortened to about 10 buds long. (A “cane” is a one-year-old stem.

The 4-arm Kniffen system has its limitations in terms of exposing the vine to maximum light, which translates into better-tasting grapes, and keeping foliage and berries dry, which translates into less disease.

So,a few years ago I morphed the vines to the high wire cordon system. A trunk about 6 feet high branched into two permanent arms (cordons) that travelled in opposite directions along a wire at trunk height. In this case, instead of being left with 4 long canes after pruning, the vine is left with many short canes drooping downwards right off the cordons.

We bag some of grape bunches to foil the birds and the bees, as well as other pests. Bagging also lets fruits hang on the vine longer without damage and so develop sweetness and aromatics that make for finest flavor. The problem with the 4-arm Kniffen and high wire cordon systems of training are that the fruiting shoots droop downwards, which makes bagging difficult and puts the bags at an angle that defies gravity, not a good thing. Which is why my grapes have morphed again, this time to a 5-wire trellis system.

The latest incarnation of grape support consists, then, of sturdy T-trellises spaced 10 feet apart. Running perpendicularly to the cross-arms of the T are 5 wires, the middle one to support 2 cordons growing off horizontally in opposite directions atop each vine’s 7 foot high trunk. The other wires will support the fruiting shoots that grow from short canes along the cordon perpendicularly to the outrigging wires. The more horizontal growth of the fruiting shoots should make bagging easier.

So it’s locust wood from my mini-grove that will deserve some thanks for luscious grapes.

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Not everyone is as enamored with black locust as I am. Many classify it as an invasive plant; here in New York, I’ve seen it classified as a native invasive plant. It originated in southeastern U.S. but now ranges far and wide because of its fecundity and it’s tolerance for a wide range of conditions below and above ground. The tree’s beauty and utility have also contributed to its spread, by humans.

My only beef with black locust is with its thorns. Still, I like my black locusts and I like my grapes.

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