North Country Reflections

Gardens are built on the past. In large part, the garden we enjoy today is determined by what we did months or even years ago. And likewise:

what we do in the garden today sets the table for the garden of the tomorrow.

With this in mind I would like to suggest that:

Late fall is the perfect time to ready your kitchen garden for spring.

I well know that if I miss this opportunity in October and November, I must wait until the ground is both unfrozen and warm enough to work in spring…usually about mid-May in the mountains.

And, come May, all too often I find reality thwarts my best intentions.

In Vermont the weather in May can be quite chilly, sometimes raining for days on end.  And on the days when the sun is out I am off helping clients with THEIR gardens.  So by the time June arrives all the weeds are growing mightily and definitely winning the war.

Last fall (2010) we were blessed with a long spell of mild weather that lasted until Thanksgiving, and to my great satisfaction I was able to prepare my entire vegetable garden.

And this past summer (2011) my efforts were rewarded with the most wonderfully productive and essentially weed-free garden.

My ‘fall clean-up recipe’ for the kitchen garden

In my four-square kitchen garden I like to work on one bed at a time. I always start with the four center beds where I will be growing my annual crops. As time permits I move on to the perimeter bed and maybe even prune the fruit bushes while I am at it.

Here is my recipe. And what you don’t complete this fall can be finished off next spring.

Gather your ingredients:

• Compost (from your compost pile or elsewhere), reasonably well aged and mixed
• A big stack of  old newspapers (NO colored sections)
• Mulch hay…I find 8 bales of hay will cover my four center beds (approximately 500 square feet)

And follow these simple steps:

1. Cut and remove any ANNUAL weeds that are setting seed. (You can leave any that do not have seed heads)
2. Remove ALL PERENNIAL weeds…dandelions, field grasses and the like.  Do this carefully, being sure to get out the whole root system; otherwise next summer the offending weed will surely return to haunt you.
3. Spread up to four inches of  compost over the whole surface of the bed.
4. Using a garden fork, gently incorporate the compost into the top few inches of soil and rake it smooth.
5. Cover the whole bed with six layers of newspaper…overlapping the sections somewhat.  If you use boards for a path, tuck the newspaper under them too.  If the wind insists on blowing the newspaper about, douse it with water to keep it in place.
6. Cover the bed with several inches of hay .

Hay as mulch??

Hay is readily available from the farms around here and many of us use it as a mulch for our veggie gardens. But I do like to check that hay I am getting was cut young enough so that it does not contain visible seed heads from field grasses or other undesirables.

Why the newspaper??

The purpose of the newsprint, which will still be reasonably intact next summer, is to keep the LIGHT away from the soil and prevent the ANNUAL weed seeds that live in the soil from germinating.

Next spring: reap the benefits!

If you follow this late fall ritual, a bed can sit without any further attention until YOU are ready to plant it out. No more worrying about the race against time and the weeds.

Select the time that is just right for any particular crop…. for instance: peas in April, salad greens and spinach in early May, beans, tomatoes and squash on Memorial Day!

To plant individual seedlings: where you will be planting just pull the hay back a little,  cut a hole through the newspaper and plop your seedling into the nice fluffy soil beneath. Water well and reposition the mulch around it.

To plant a row of seeds: first  pull the hay back a few inches along the entire length of the row. Now cut a slot in the newspaper and plant your seeds.

For the heat-lovers: If you are concerned that the mulch is preventing the soil from warming up enough for crops like tomatoes, just pull the entire mulch sandwich to one side for a week or so to expose the soil to the sun.  After you actually get around to planting, pull everything all back around your plants to stop the annual weeds from getting a foothold.

What could be easier??!!

 

Spring planting time in my new four-square kitchen garden

Always a vegetable garden

Everywhere I have lived I have made a vegetable garden …typically rectangular and sized to match whatever space was both sunny and near the house. The vegetables were delicious, but I always craved more.

So when we moved to Vermont I decided the old potato field to the south of the barn would be perfect for a real country kitchen garden. It is not too far from the kitchen and offers excellent southern exposure, while the barn provides ample storage for tools, poles, fertilizer and more.

I started out with ‘yet another rectangle’, this one an ample sixty feet long by forty feet wide, giving me fifteen or so rows, each forty feet long, (a total of about 600 square feet of growing space) and oriented in an ideal east-west direction.

Why not a rectangle?

But I soon discovered the entire space was daunting, and my rectangle was neither efficient nor attractive!!

After a full morning of weeding and planting, I would complete a couple of rows (at most), while the remainder looked both ugly and messy.  Not very pretty!

I was also weeding all that space between the rows just for me to walk on. What a waste!

And the overall space did not lend itself particularly well to crop rotation, nor to permanent plantings like fruit bushes.

So, being human, each spring I would gradually favor the flower beds that were visible from the house and before long the veggie garden became an ‘out-of sight and out-of-mind’ mess.  And the weedier it got, the less I wanted to work in it…a vicious cycle indeed!

A garden to match my personality

After about six years of this I decided to do an entire make-over of the whole space, combining my personal predilections, lessons learned from past gardens, and ideas gleaned from others.

I came up with a wish list for my kitchen garden:

• It had to be both FUN and FUNCTIONAL.
• It must be ATTRACTIVE and VISUALLY INTERESTING
• It should be SIMPLE  and UNFUSSY, as I have neither the time nor the inclination to create an intricate ‘potager’ style veggie garden that seems to be in currently vogue
• Its design should be FLEXIBLE enough that I can modify my crop choices…who knows, maybe next year I will want to grow potatoes
• It must foster a ‘DIVIDE AND CONQUER’ approach, whereby I can complete a portion of the garden without having a huge guilt complex about the remainder.

Here is how it came out:

A Four-Square Kitchen Garden

I decided upon a simplified version of a Four-Square garden design dating back to both Old England and to American colonial times.

Four beds for annual crops

At the heart of the garden are four slightly raised beds for annual vegetables. Each bed is twelve-foot square and bisected by a single east-west path (made of left-over lumber), providing a total of about 500 square feet of growing space. (And for a smaller garden, four eight-foot beds square will provide 225 square feet of growing space.)

Each bed is large enough to grow either one or two crops a season…salad greens, chard, squash, kale, beans, tomatoes etc.  I use attractive trellises for climbing crops like edible-podded peas, pole beans and cucumbers.

I rotate the contents of the squares annually in a clock-wise direction. This all makes for a nice tidy rotation system, while still allowing for minor adjustments in the space allocated to a particular crop to reflect our changing desires.

To keep the wild creatures at bay…

the entire space is enclosed by a four-foot high wire fence with a cedar cap, and a single gate at the north end.  Moose won’t walk through a visible fence.  And so far the deer have not tried to jump inside, I assume because the interior space appears too confining.  If they ever do decide to jump, my back-up plan is to run wires decorated with colored flags above the fence. Once a woodchuck came visiting, so we dosed the entrance with urine….either that or the presence of our dog were deterrent enough…and  we never saw him again.

Fruit bushes

Inside the fence there is also a three-foot deep perimeter bed. Along its east, south and west sides I grow different kinds of fruit…rhubarb, raspberries, black-currants, red-currants and gooseberries.  On the north side, I use the two halves, flanked by the gate, for tomatoes and summer squash (on alternating sides each year). To give these heat loving crops  an extra boost of sun and warmth we attach reflective foil panels to the fence.

Five-foot wide grass paths…

separate all the beds. These are wide enough to move around a good-sized garden cart comfortably throughout the garden.

The results…

have been immensely gratifying. The garden is sized about right, both for our needs and for my ability to manage. We grow most of our summer vegetables, plus additional to put by for the months ahead.

And certainly on a warm summer evening, nothing beats going up to the garden to harvest supper.

Taking stock

As the season draws to a close  this is the perfect time to consider what has worked well versus what could stand improvement in future. Decide whether you want a few raised beds to give you summer salads and tomatoes,  or an extensive plot to fill your tummy in summer and your freezer for winter…or perhaps something in between.

Speaking personally,  I need to remind myself:

More is not necessarily better!!

Here are some questions to guide your garden plans for the coming season:

• Is your current garden too big…or too small? How much growing area will meet your needs?
• Does your appetite for gardening match the demands of your garden?
• What produce does your family really enjoy?  Do you need more…or less…of some crops?
• Could your garden layout be more efficient…and more attractive?
• Do you want to invest in raised beds or a surrounding fence?

Jot down the answers now, while your memories are fresh.  Then in January, as the catalog avalanche begins, make plans for the new season with your eyes open.

Freshly picked raspberries in October?? Just as the garden is shutting down for the season, along comes this truly delicious treat for the fruit-lover.

I have a dense row (some twenty feet long and three feet wide) of ‘ever-bearing raspberries’…the offspring of half a dozen plants given to me some four years ago as a much appreciated gift from a friend and fellow-gardener (along with some June-bearing raspberries that I grow on the opposite corner of the vegetable garden).

Just six weeks ago Hurricane Irene whipped through the plants and tore the leaves to shreds. But the immature fruit, clustered at the tops of the canes, miraculously survived. And now, a month later, we are enjoying the ripening fruit each evening.

And I have discovered that the taste of fresh or lightly cooked raspberries combines superbly with the rhubarb sauce I made a few days back. This is a taste combo that is every bit as delicious as the classic strawberry-rhubarb pie.

And ever-bearing raspberries will fruit in the summer too!

Late in the season, ever-bearing raspberries produce a heavy crop of fruit close to the top of this year’s new canes. (Hence they are sometimes called fall raspberries).   Iinitially I was told that, to encourage them to produce new canes for next year’s crop, I should cut the entire patch right down to the ground in November.

That certainly works.  But with a little research on the Internet I discovered I could induce this year’s canes to fruit again next summer.

Here’s how: in November I will choose the strongest canes and prune them back by one-third. I will then remove all the other canes right to the ground. The canes that I leave to over-winter will then reward me with additional fruit…a secondary crop…borne on side shoots, that will gradually ripen over a period of six weeks in July and August.

While the secondary crop is not as prolific as the fall crop, it certainly fills the gap between the June-bearing raspberries across the garden, and the main fall crop in this bed.

And of course by then, next-year’s new canes—with lots of green leaves—will be dominating the bed. So it takes a bit searching to find the luscious red fruit hiding among the leaves on the shorter stems. But for this raspberry-lover it is definitely worth the effort!

Ever-bearing raspberries for north country gardens

At this latitude (43°) and elevation (1700 feet) our growing season is short.  And I find my ever-bearing raspberries are producing their main crop of fruit so late in the season that some of it never ripens before the weather turns really cold.

The solution to this problem is to look for a variety where the main crop ripens a bit earlier. After checking the University of Maine website I plan to start a new raspberry bed in yet another corner of the vegetable garden with an ever-bearing raspberry called Autumn Bliss that should produce its main crop in September.

And after all one can never have too many raspberries in the garden!

Yesterday, I was just starting the ritual fall clean up of the veggie garden, when…surprise…surprise… I noticed my rhubarb plants still had great looking leaves.

I know that any day now they will succumb to a hard frost, and the plants have no more need of photosynthesis this year. So I quickly harvested every last pink stem….about three pounds in all.  (The leaves are toxic and are always discarded).  And this morning I cooked up a batch of  delicious rhubarb sauce.

I think of rhubarb as a spring fruit (yes… I know that technically it is a vegetable but we all use it as a fruit…right!),  something that is traditionally combined with  June strawberries. So it was a bit of a jolt to have it as a fall delicacy.

Rhubarb is always really acidic, which in turn leads people to add a huge quantity of sugar to the cooking. For instance the recipe on Wikepedia calls for 4 to 6 ounces of sugar for one pound of rhubarb…which in my book is an awful lot of sugar.

So some years back…recalling chemistry lessons relating to buffered solutions somewhere in my distant past …I tried adding a tiny pinch of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to partially neutralize the acid in my cooked rhubarb. It worked like a charm, and I found I could slash the amount for sugar needed to make the dish enjoyable.

A downside is that this may also remove some of the Vitamin C, but these days I am more concerned with too much sugar in my diet.  It seems that so often life is about making trade-offs!

To cook 1 pound of rhubarb:

• Remove the rhubarb leaves. Clean the stalks and cut into 2 inch length.
• Cook in about a inch of water till soft.
• Add a tiny pinch of baking soda.
• First you will see lots of bubbles frothing up…let everything cook a little bit more until the bubbles subside.
• Now stir in about 2-3 ounces of sugar. I use either demerara or raw sugar.  Check the taste and add a bit more sugar if necessary.

The result:

A nice fruit sauce that uses about a quarter the amount of sugar than a conventional rhubarb sauce, to combine with our evening yogurt, .

 

“Autumn, the year’s last, loveliest smile”

William Cullen Bryant (1794 – 1878)

 

One day in early September a friend remarked “Well, I suppose your garden is all gone by now”.

Not at all!!  While the exuberance of summer may be past,  in its own way the garden in autumn is every bit as lovely. Summer stalwarts– like Shasta daisies and Echinacea— may be past their prime. But others…like rudbeckia, sedums, anemones and asters—are just coming into their own. The colors of our flowers are more mellow in autumn, in harmony with the tawny colors in the forest around us.

Of course it is that way all through the year. As early flowers fade, others enter the spotlight. Flowers are like actors waiting for their cues to take center stage for a few weeks of glory.

Autumn belongs to perennials like rosy sedums, golden Rudbeckias, lavender Asters…and more! And they will flower until the middle of October, even though the time remaining for them to get fertilized and set seed before the cold weather seems impossibly short! Now it is the first week of October, and the asters are still abuzz with the humming of late season bees, so clearly pollination is happening!!

Here, in no particular order, are six great perennials plus a noteworthy annual for the fall garden. Double click on any picture to see an enlargement.

Black-Eyed Susans

Everyone is familiar with Black Eyed Susans, Rudbeckia fulgida, and, like everyone else, I have lots in my garden. When we moved to Vermont  back in 1994 I brought a couple of plants of the supposedly more floriferous cultivar Goldsturm from my old garden, which I had purchased from White Flower Farms around 1990.
Now there are enormous patches of sunny gold daisies all around the place.  They began blooming in early August and two months later they are only just now losing their petals.  They are pest-free and they flourish in part shade as well as full sun. What more could one ask?

From a design perspective the gold of Black-eyed Susans sometimes seems a bit brash. So I like to pair them up with other flowers, such as purple or lavender asters, or set in front of a fall hydrangea Tardiva as in the picture above.

I also love the their much taller cousin…the six foot high Rudbeckia ‘Herbstronne’.  This is one big plant that makes a bold statement, but even even in the smallest garden there is probably a place for it.

And resist any temptation to cut and compost either rudbeckia at this time of year.  If you leave them standing through the winter their skeletons will look lovely against the snow and the seed-heads provide winter food for the chickadees and goldfinch who, miraculously, remain with us throughout the winter.

Japanese Anemones

Japanese anemones have a charming way of weaving themselves among shrubs and sometimes popping up in the most unexpected places. In my New Jersey garden they could be a little too rambunctious, but here in Vermont, towards the edge of their hardiness range, they behave beautifully.

I have two kinds in my Vermont garden.

The  single pink Grapeleaf Anemone, (A. tomentosa ‘Robustissima’) starts to flower in August, and looks spectacular against the dusky colored leaves of the smokebush cultivar Cotinus‘Grace’.

And then there is a pure white hybrid, (A. Honorine ‘Jobert’) which is a real standout next to a large blue pot on our shady barn slope.

However I feel very white flowers of the Honorine Jobert Anemone would look nicer without having to compete with the creamy white flowers of the Canadian Burnett. So in November I plan to replace it with the pink flowered Japanese Burnet, and relocate the Canadian burnet to the pond bed. Musical chairs…it seems there there will always be a few things in the garden that need modifying  to get the best effect.

Sedums

Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’  is a delightful and dependable old stand-by, and every garden could use some.  In the summer months it has interesting leaves, in September its flat rosy-pink flower heads are a standout, eventually morphing to a bronze color in October.  And finally in the winter the spent flower-heads of Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ look great under little hats of snow.

There are also some smaller sedums that  wait until September to flower…in my garden most notably Sedum cauticola, which has crimson pink flowers against gray leaves, and faces off a group of the amazing annual (but self-seeding) Salvia hominium. Everybody who comes to the garden at this time of year raves about both plants.

Asters

By the time the asters put on their show we know the season is coming to a close.  I love the wild asters that grow around here, in open fields and in swampy areas, and even in the woods. They come in colors of white, lilac and lavender, with names such as Heart-leaved Aster, Flat-topped Aster and Purple-stemmed Aster.  And at lower altitudes even from the windows of your car you can spot the well-known New England Aster, with its larger, deeper colored flower, growing along at the side of the road.

According to Wikipedia all our ‘New World’ Asters are about to be be reclassified into a different genus called Symphyotrichum, which seems like a horrible mouthful. So, for the time being at least, I will continue to call them all Asters!

For many years in the garden I have grown a number of cultivars of our native New England Aster.  I am especially fond of the dwarf cultivar  ‘Purple Dome’ near the front of the bed.

But I am gradually switching my negligence to some of the other species of the Aster clan. For me, New England Asters have two problems. Typically the leaves on their thick lower stems shrivel to brown as the flowers are starting, resulting in ‘ugly legs’ which I attempt to camouflage with Black-eyed Susans.  I also find, with our shortened growing season at this altitude, that cultivars like Harringtons Pink,  Hella Lacy and Alma Potschke’ are coming into flower just as the frost is shuttering the garden down, and therefore not worth the space I had accorded them on the garden.

This coming November, when I do my post-fall garden clean-up, I am resolved to completely remove all the new England Aster ‘Harrington’s Pink’, replacing it with the Canadian Burnet from the barn slope. ‘Harrington’s Pink’ was a small plant that I purchased some years back which it has now grown into an enormous clump in the pond bed,  but it rewards me with… at best… a week ‘s worth of flowers in mid-October.  It is not worth the space!

I am very fond of some European Asters, Aster amellus (which I grew from seed in a mix of colors a few years back) as well as the dwarf New England Aster cultivar ‘Woods Purple’.  And  I have recently added Aster oblongifolius ‘October Skies’ to my fall  garden mix. It is a beautiful delicate lilac color, starting about the third week in September.  And I also have several clumps of the wild heart-leaved aster I find growing in the meadows around here.

Geranium ‘Rozanne’

Rozanne is not just any old geranium. In my gardening world she is one small miracle!

I think of geraniums as early summer flowers, and very useful plants they are for that.  But Rozanne is unique among geraniums. In my garden she only really gets going in July… but once started she flowers non-stop until cut down in mid-October by the first heavy frost.  She also keeps spreading outwards, so by the time September comes, a single plant is making quite a statement in the garden.

Rozanne also has an interesting history. About 20 years ago Donald and Rozanne Waterer noticed some interesting and long-flowering geraniums in their garden in Somerset, England.  From these plants, Alan Bloom, owner of  ‘Blooms of Bressingham, developed the patented Rozanne hybrid via tissue culture, and introduced her to the plant world in 2000.

Listed as hardy to Zone 5, I was skeptical that I could grow Rozanne successfully in my Zone 4 garden. But I acquired three plants that have all come through multiple winters.  And despite that really cold snap last winter (when the temperature here dropped to -25℉) my  plants have done better than ever this year. But then again, perhaps that was because they were so well protected under last winter’s excellent snow-cover.  Anyway I am delighted to have this violet-blue  flowered geranium gracing my garden again this fall.

Chrysanthemums

Hardy ‘mums’  help north country gardeners finish the gardening year in style. While most so-called ‘hardy mums’ …the double-flowered types you buy at the garden center at this time of year…will not prove hardy in our climate, I can vouch for two of the single daisy types of chrysanthemums as true perennials in my Vermont garden.

The Chrysanthemum ‘Clara Curtis’, with rosy-pink flowers and yellow centers, blooms first. She is quite pretty and very easy to grow, but tends to flop a bit. Every fall I tell myself that, come next spring, I will create an elegant bamboo frame to support her…. but that has yet to happen.

The second ‘mum’ I grow is Chrysanthemum ‘Mary Stoker’.  While this one waits until in mid-September before coming into flower, she will still be gracing the garden in mid-October.  Mary Stoker is a pretty buttery-yellow and always stands perfectly upright, even in winter.

And finally…an annual salvia that blends with our autumn colors

Visitors to my garden invariably ask ‘What is that lovely plant?’ as they admire the purple and pink colors of my Marble Arch Salvia, Salvia hominium, which flowers from July to October

They are usually quite surprised when I tell them is an annual, since most people think annual salvias will be fire-engine red.

However the Marble Arch mix is different.  The attractive bracts come in colors pinks, purples and sometimes a greenish white, with interesting veining that makes them delightful to see up close too.

It is quite easy to grow from seed. And what is more it usually obligingly self seeds in the garden. So, providing I am not too careless with my spring weeding, plants will re-appear next year, behaving for the gardener almost  like a perennial!

Don’t say its over

This is the first week of October and the garden has that typical fall look…the blueberry bushes have a wonderful bronze color, the sweet autumn clematis on the arch is in full flower, and still the aromatic asters, Autumn Joy sedum, the Marble Arch salvia, Rozanne geranium and Mary Stoker ‘mums’ are flowering like there is no tomorrow.

As with life, it is up to us to enjoy the garden in every season!