Spring food

No, the spicebush isn’t blooming yet, but I can hope and look forward, can’t I? There are barely two months to go before it does bloom. Now that the temperature has risen into the 40s for two days running, with the promise of topping 50 degrees today, I feel that spring is in the air. It isn’t, but I can hope.

For us gardeners, spring is the time of hope. For wild creatures (and for our ancestors who lived off the land), spring was the starving time–the most dangerous time of the year. Just imagine that you are dependent on what the earth can produce in your immediate vicinity for everything you eat. Now imagine that your winter’s cache of food is dwindling fast, but you have no idea when spring will come. And spring will not bring much food, because plants must go through most of the year’s growth cycle before they produce nutritious food. The starving time, indeed. We are lucky enough to no longer experience this, but wild animals certainly do. So I encourage you to consider their needs when you plan your garden.

What do wild creature eat in spring? They’re better at taking advantage of scarce resources than we are. A few seeds remain from last year, and some trees produce their seeds early. Early spring is when most birds have their young, so there must be food for them. Most birds feed nutritious insects to their nestlings. What do insects, particularly flying ones like springtime’s tiny flies and wasps, eat? Mostly pollen and nectar. Early birds don’t rely on worms–they rely on pollinating insects. So if you want to attract birds to your garden, plant early flowering perennials and shrubs. And do not use pesticides. Pesticides kill the insects that birds rely on for food.

Spicebush (Lindera benzoin, female flowers shown above) is one of our earliest-flowering native shrubs. The flowers are inconspicuous, but it blooms in early April, and the berries are extremely showy and will attract birds to your garden in late summer. Spicebush is a wetland plant, but it does quite well in my dry, sandy soil. Plant it in part shade, and plant several individuals, because it is dioecious–in other words, individual plants are either male or female, and you need at least one male to get fruit.

Another early-blooming shrub that’s extremely  useful to wildlife is serviceberry (Amelanchier species, sometimes called Juneberry or shadbush). These bloom in mid-April in our area, and there is nothing inconspicuous about them. It’s one of the most gorgeous spring bloomers we have, with delicate sprays of flowers that look like strings of pearls as they unfold. There are 25 or 30 species of Amelanchier, including shrubs and small trees. Choose one that’s the right size for your site.

Also important in early spring are the earliest blooming perennials–the spring ephemerals. These plants complete their entire yearly cycle—they emerge, flower, produce fruit, and go dormant—in early spring before the trees leaf out. Foremost among them are bloodroot (Sanginaria canadensis) and Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica), both shown below in bloom.

Both prefer most soil and shade. Other spring ephemerals are wild geranium (Geranium maculatum), trout lily (Erythronium americanum), Dutchman’s breeches  (Dicentra cucullaria), native bleeding heart (Dicentra eximia), and wild blue phlox (Phlox divaricata). There are many, many others, including some that don’t go dormant in summer and therefore work well as ground covers. These include wild ginger (Asarum canadense) and Canada anemone (Anemone canadensis). Choose a shady spot and a few of these plants, add some native ferns or perhaps the lovely variegated native pachysandra (Pachysandra procumbens), and you’ve got a spring blooming garden that will be lovely to you and useful to wildlife.

When choosing plants, don’t forget the real backbone of the spring larder—the canopy trees that produce very early seeds. The most important of these are the birches and maples. These are some of the most important sources of spring food for wildlife in our area. Plant a river birch (Betula lenta) on a moist site or yellow birch (Betula lutea) on a dry one , and you’ll enjoy its beauty for many years to come, while wildlife enjoys its bounty.

The garden in snow

More snow yesterday–snow on top of snow, and the temperature hasn’t risen above 20 degrees for what seems like two weeks. The garden was particularly pretty yesterday afternoon while the snow was still falling.

Bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) is holding its seedheads high above the snow for the birds to take advantage of. Although most of the most nutritious seeds (such as sunflower) and berries (such as dogwood) are long gone, plenty of winter food remains for the birds we see everyday.

Coralberry (Symphoricarpos orbiculatus) should be called pinkberry. The berries remain bright pink all winter. So please, please consider this small, carefree native shrub instead of the invasive beautyberry.

If your garden isn’t feeding the birds all winter, check back soon for a list of plants you might consider for winter food.

A mast year

 

We’re having a mast year here in Bergen County, New Jersey, and, I suspect, in the wider area as well. “Mast” comes from a German word that means “forest food,” and a mast year, a phenomenon that happens every few years, is a year in which nut-bearing trees (in our area, oaks, hickories, and beeches) produce unusually large numbers of nuts. Notice it the next time you’re out walking–in some place there are so many fallen acorns that they blanket the ground entirely.

 

Masting results from chemical signalling among all the trees in the area (yes, plants send out chemical signals, both through the air and through their roots). It happens because, in most years, animals eat all the acorns and other nuts, so none remain to reproduce the trees. So every few years, the trees act together to produce such a large crop of nuts that the animals can’t possibly eat them all. Consequently, some will remain to germinate next spring. Next season, look for lots of seedling oak trees and a larger-than-normal chipmunk population. Isn’t nature wonderful?

Thanks to everyone who turned out for the Arboretum walk yesterday. It was a gorgeous day.

 

Six jars of jam

Last week, I produced 4 jars–count them 4 whole jars–of pectin-free jam from my elderberries and aronia berries plus some prune plums bought at the market (4 pounds of fruit made 4 small jars of jam). It’s quite delicious, tart and sort of wild tasting. Aronia is very astringent and doesn’t taste quite like other fruits we’re used to eating.

Then, over the past week, as the plums on my American plum trees ripened, I picked a bowlful every other day until I had about four pounds of fruit. I stewed half of it with honey and a cinnamon stick and a little bit of water and put it in the fridge to eat with yogurt and granola. The other half I macerated with sugar last night, and tonight I made 2 more little jars of jam (for a total of six). Right now, it’s cooling down after being sterilized in a boiling water bath.

Did you ever see anything such a gorgeous color as those plums? They’re orange-red on the outside with a lovely whitish bloom, and the flesh is apricot color.

OK, enough about my fruit/jam obsession. Please forgive me–I grew up in a small apartment in Queens, and I never made jam before last year.

Wait ’til next year

The weather is still remarkably cool, and it’s starting to look like fall. The plants are getting ready–the hazelnuts have formed small catkins (the male flowers that will bloom in very early spring), and perennials that have basal leaves throughout the winter have formed them. We can’t go outside without disturbing the goldfinches among the sunflowers and the catbirds among the pokeberries and raspberries (they’ve finished off the grey dogwood and elderberries). Berries of spicebush and flowering dogwood will show color soon.

It’s time to think about next year. Whatever the season, gardeners always focus on how the garden can be better, but starting now and extending through the winter, it’s all about next year. How can I improve my tomato harvest?  grow cucumbers despite wilt? cut back those rampant Rudbeckias so the shorter plants can thrive? get rid of the bare spot on the lawn without using chemicals? make my garden m ore sustainable? It’s time to list this year’s successes and failures while they’re still fresh in my mind, do some research, make some plans, and then, wait ’til next year.

What’s on your list for next year?

More plums

What is there to say? I’ve never seen such a color–what a shame it will change to purple. I don’t know what combination of rainfall and temperature and heaven knows what else led to this abundance and beauty. I only wish it would last. Or come back next year. But I can’t count on it. With a garden, you never know.

Early harvest

I’m just a little bit obsessed with fruit. I selected many of the shrubs I grow because they produce fruit, not necessarily for us but for the birds and other critters. Today we noticed that the birds were going crazy among the ripe Aronia berries. A friend picked about half my berries for jam about a week ago, and I was going to get around to picking some for my own jam–sometime soon. Except that if I hadn’t gathered them today, there would have been none left. The catbirds and robins had devoured at least half of what was left, so I shooed them away and picked almost two pounds of berries. And those birds know how to pick ripe fruit–the berries were soft and juicy, not hard like Aronia berries usually are.

The photo shows the Aronia berries (right) before I picked them over and washed them, plus some elderberries (bottom) that I picked and cleaned a few days ago and stored in the fridge, and some prune plums I bought in the market. The plums on my American plum trees are turning red, but they’re not ripe yet. All this fruit is macerating with sugar in the refrigerator, and I’ll make jam tomorrow using a formula for pectin-free jam I found online.

All summer I’d been planning a purple-fruit jam made entirely of my own wild fruits–Aronia berries, elderberries, and plums–but the plums did not oblige. However, the hazelnuts (Corylus americanus) seem to have ripened today along with the Aronia berries. A few days ago I checked them, hoping to get just a few before the squirrels devoured them all, as they do every year; they were still tight and green inside their husks. Today the ground under the shrubs was littered with husks and shells.

I searched long and hard for some nuts left on one of the trees. I managed to find a single remaining nut and took a rather poor photo of it, so at least you can see what it looks like if you’ve never seen a hazelnut on a tree.

It still looks green, doesn’t it? It sure fooled me, but not the squirrels.

Late summer in black and white (and gold)

In the twenty years since I started gardening seriously, I don’t ever remember such a summer for wild fruits–such abundance. The birds can’t manage to eat them all. The branches of the black chokeberry (Aronia melanocarpa–above) are bent down from the weight of the fruits. Elderberries and grey dogwood berries (next two pictures) actually remain ripe on the bushes instead of being snatched by catbirds and robins and jays at every opportunity. There’s a continual screech of catbirds as they dive-bomb into the elderberry and raspberry bushes.

And the plums! In the past, each tree has ripened maybe a dozen plums, which were devoured unseen during the night. But this year there are untold numbers of fruits, slowly, teasingly, turning from green to yellow to gold and soon to red and then purple. We may actually get some this year. I’m told they’re very good. (If there are any other devotees of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House books out there, you surely remember a scene in which Laura and her Ma pick and preserve wild plums. It’s probably this species she’s describing.)

Each year, goldfinches arrive in my garden in late summer. These tiny beams of light rear their nestlings late in the season and depend on the seeds of wild flowers to feed them (and, I suspect, on the multitude of pollinating insects that still swarm over the perennial beds), so we always see them just as the perennial sunflowers begin to open and the Rudbeckias begin to ripen seeds. Right now I can’t walk out the back door without disturbing at least a dozen of them feeding in the perennial garden. They squawk loud in irritation and take off, like flashes of sunlight, for the shelter of the hemlocks across the yard. Look closely among the Rudbeckias:

 

More about growing tomatoes

Gardeners and would-be gardeners are obsessed with tomatoes, and with good reason. There’s nothing like a just-picked, vine-ripened tomato. The big tomatoes in my garden aren’t ripe yet, and yesterday a fellow gardener gave me one huge Beefmaster, so big that I could eat only half at a sitting, and it was fabulous. The kind of tomato that you eat by itself with only the tiniest sprinkle of salt. Yum.

But tomatoes are hard to grow. They are subject to all kinds of pests and diseases, they set fruit only within a narrow temperature window, the fruits crack or turn black with too much or too little water. The vines grow huge and are hard to control, and they continually put out suckers. Yet we go on year after year, buying plants or seeds, obsessing all winter and spring, enjoying those first few tomatoes but then seeing the harvest ruined by blight or overcrowding or too much rain. We’re all subject to climate and weather, but there are some things you can do to reduce the other problems that plague tomato plants.

Right now I am harvesting a dozen or so small tomatoes every day (yellow and red grapes), plus an occasional medium-size yellow tomato, and waiting impatiently for the vines with the large heirlooms to start producing (they got a late start). I’ve learned quite a bit from past mistakes–in the past, I’ve  planted too many vines too close together and haven’t been sufficiently vigilant about pruning out suckers, so the vines succumbed early to fungal diseases. Two years ago we got so much rain in the August that, after a great July harvest, the fruit cracked on the vine. Last year I overcompensated, didn’t water enough, and the fruit started to develop blossom end rot (later amended by proper watering.) Tomatoes are hard to grow. We should all stick to eggplant and zucchini, but we won’t.

This year things are going well, however. I have been scrupulous about removing  suckers and tying the plants to stakes every few days. Here’s a picture of my vegetable garden taken a couple of days ago:

The tall plant in the center is a single tomato vine (small yellow grape tomatoes). Because there’s plenty of room around this plant, I allowed it to have two main stems, each tied to its own stake (the two stakes in the center). These stakes are 8′ tall, and the vines have already reached the top. The other stakes in the picture are supporting eggplants.)

Based on my two and a half years’ experience growing tomatoes, plus my horticultural training, I would suggest that there are a few simple rules that will help you get a good harvest (but not ensure it):

1. Space the plants widely, at least 2-3′ apart, and be ruthless about pruning suckers.

2. Use tall, strong supports, such as 8′ stakes, and tie the plants frequently. They grow very fast.

3. Make sure the soil is loose and well drained and high in organic matter. Enrich with compost, and avoid high-nitrogen fertilizers.

4. Provide 1-2″ of water per week early in the season, 1″ per week once fruit has begun to set. Water deeply every 5-7 days rather than giving a little sprinkle every day.

5. Water early in the day, never in the evening. You want to make sure the leaves are dry before nightfall.

6. The vines will not set fruit during very hot or very cool weather, so don’t be alarmed if you see some incomplete fruit clusters.

7. Although tomatoes are subject to pests, fungal diseases such as verticillium and anthracnose are far more common. The reasons for rules #1, 2, and 5 are to  prevent fungal diseases from taking hold.

I wish you all good fruit set, not too much rain in August, and lots of delicious tomatoes throughout the summer and early fall.

 

Summertime (I)

We’re approaching the height of summer, and the garden is blooming almost aggressively. Tomatoes are ripening–finally–and the weather is hot. (My apologies to the great Ira Gershwin.) The picture above features Rudbeckia subtomentosa, sweet black-eyed Susan, which I really must cut back severely next spring; Vernonia fasciculata, ironweed (purple); and some perennial sunflowers not yet in bloom (Helanthus mollis, downy sunflower). Today I saw goldfinches for the first time this season. These late breeders arrive when the prairie plants are ready to set seed, and they feed the seeds to their babies. They’ll be with us for the rest of the summer, hanging upside down on seedheads and providing great entertainment.

The fruits on my native plum trees (Prunus americana) are finally ripening–notice the first hints of yellow. They first turn yellow, then red, and finally purple. As with most wild fruits, they ripen one-by-one, and we’ll almost never see a ripe one. The plum crop is heavy this year, but the birds get up earlier than I do.

Another plant that ripens its fruit one by one is grey dogwood (Cornus racemosa). This shrub is beautiful in all seasons, but I particularly love those red stems that signal to the birds that the fruits are almost ripe. The berries turn white when they’re ready to eat; as with the plums, we almost never see a ripe one.

Almost hidden among the Rudbeckias are the unripe seedpods of swamp milkweed (Asclepias  incarnata). When the seeds are mature, in another month or so, the pods will dry up and split open, and the seeds will drift away, each attached to a tiny parachute of milkweed down.

This year also promises to be a bountiful one for elderberries (Sambucus canadensis). Notice that the stems are turning purple–the fruit will ripen soon. This is another favorite of the birds, and there will be great exultation among the catbirds when the fruit are ripe. I can usually manage to pick some of these, however,–perhaps to put in the Aronia jam I hope to make later in the season.

I have not seen any monarchs this year, and this is the time they usually migrate through. I am seeing a great abundance of fireflies, however, and I think of the presence of these delightful insects as a sign of a relatively healthy environment. Do you see lots of fireflies on your property? If you do, good for you. If you don’t, you might want to think about trying to manage your yard in a more sustainable way.