George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

New Life for the Vegetable Garden

August 31st, 2021

   Labor Day shouldn’t mark the beginning of the end for the vegetable garden.

Many of the same cool-season crops that grow here in spring can be replanted for fall.

   As spring-planted summer crops are harvested or wind down, new crops can take their place to keep the veggie plot chugging along well into fall.

   With a little protection, some of them can even keep producing into early winter.

   The cooling weather of fall is perfectly suited for many of the same crops that we plant in late winter to early spring for late-spring to early-summer harvest, i.e. lettuce, carrots, red beets, broccoli, and cabbage.

   Rather than let the vegetable garden run its course until post-frost cleanup time, savvy gardeners replant this time of year.

   The warming climate makes fall harvests a better bet than ever.

   The third week of October used to be the drop-dead time frame when you could figure a killing frost would put an end to the tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and other summer fare.

   Tradition held that that was when you “put the garden to bed” by yanking everything and giving the whole plot a good tilling (which, by the way, is now regarded as a bad idea because it harms soil structure, wastes soil-borne nitrogen, disrupts soil microbes, and stirs up weed seeds.)

Read more on why fall tilling isn’t a good idea

   In some recent years, we’ve gone well into November before facing the first serious freeze.

   Other years, we’ll get a brief brush with below-freezing nights in late October, then go back to warmth for another couple of weeks.

   Why cede that time when we could seed it?

   Why not reload the garden in late summer so that it’s still fully planted until real cold is here to stay?

How Much Grass Seed Are You Really Getting?

August 24th, 2021

   You might assume that a bag of grass seed contains all or mostly grass seed, but if you pay attention to the labels, you’ll find that’s usually not the case these days.

Read those grass-seed labels. You might be surprised what’s in the bag.

   Many bags of retail grass seed contain only half grass seed with the rest made up of fertilizer, coatings, fillers, and other “inert” materials. Some lawn-patching products even contain up to 90 percent of non-seed ingredients, primarily paper.

   It’s easy to tell how much actual grass seed you’re getting for your dollar. The Federal Seed Act, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, requires grass-seed bags to spell out the amounts and varieties of each grass seed inside as well as the percentage of the bag’s weight that’s devoted to non-seed materials.

   Although the format can vary, seed companies must label their bags with several standard pieces of information.

   These include germination rates, where the seed originated, when the seeds were tested, when they should be sold by, and the percentage of weed seeds.

   Two of the most important categories are the makeup of the grass seed and what else is in the bag.

   Federal label laws require companies to list the percentage, by weight, of each of the specific grass-seed varieties in the bag. By adding these together, you can tell what percentage of the bag’s total weight is actual grass seed.

   Bags then must list percentages of other ingredients, which can include coatings (typically fertilizer), weed seeds, and “inert matter.”

   Inert matter is a catch-all term for anything else that doesn’t grow. It includes unavoidable left-overs from the seed-cleaning process, such as chaff, broken seeds, and seed stems, but it also can include added fillers or mulching materials, such as sawdust or paper.

   When companies don’t add fillers, percentages of other materials typically add up to less than 2 percent of the bag’s weight.

   Read the labels, though, and you’ll find the percentages of coatings and inert matter add up to 50 percent or more on many of them.

Good Plants I Can’t Grow

August 17th, 2021

   No matter how much you know about plants or how many right things you do, sometimes plants just die.

Some people can do lupines like this. Not me.

   Like it or not, it’s a fact of gardening.

   A lot of the time, easy expiration is a shortcoming of particular plants, such as how dwarf Alberta spruces are spider-mite magnets, or how hosta and daylilies are candy to deer, or how delphiniums, heather, and lady’s mantle fry in our increasingly hot summers.

   That’s why I didn’t feel too inferior when I killed the persnickety blue poppy, a gorgeous spring bloomer that’s very happy in Vancouver and Great Britain but adamant about not moving to Harrisburg.

   My wife once bought me a pack of blue-poppy seeds and challenged me to grow some. I got a few to sprout inside, but only one survived the transplant… and that one died over the first winter before ever thinking about throwing out a petal.

   Failure, yes. Understandable? Also yes.

   Far more troubling are the “enigmas.”

   These are the plants we should be able to grow without much trouble, and, in fact, are ones that most people grow with their trowels tied behind their back.

   For some reason, I have a few enigmas that just won’t grow well for me even though they seem to thrive in other people’s gardens.

   I suspect I’m not alone in that… although I’ll bet enigma plants are different ones from gardener to gardener.

   For me, I can’t keep a lupine alive to save my life.

   I thought these spiked hybrid beauties just didn’t like our heat, and so I filed them in the general don’t-do-well-here category… until I heard several other local gardeners tell me how much they love their lupines.

   Apparently, lupines don’t mind sweating it out in some gardens. Just not mine.

Where the Rain Doesn’t Reach

August 10th, 2021

   Those summer rains can be a little tricky when it comes to keeping plants happy.

Just because we get a heavy rain doesn’t mean it’s reached all of our plant roots.

   Just because we’ve had a downpour doesn’t mean water has made it to where it counts, which is down to just below and all around our plant roots.

   Young and newly planted plants are particularly susceptible to these fakeouts.

   One problem spot is where the rains don’t reach at all.

   Tops on that list is under roof overhangs. These can sometimes reach out two or more feet over walls, blocking rain from falling on anything you’ve planted that close to the structure.

   Keep an eye on plants in these spots because you might have to water them even in rainy weather.

   A second sneakily dry area is under trees… especially big shade trees.

   For one thing, raindrops can be blocked and/or absorbed by the thick leaf canopies, limiting how much water actually makes it to the ground.

   Then the rain that makes it through the canopy has to penetrate the mulch layer that most people have around their plants under trees.

   Depending on how thick that layer is (and it shouldn’t be any more than about three inches around shrubs and one to two inches around perennials and groundcovers), it can take an inch or more of rain just to reach the soil surface under the mulch.

   Rain that gets soaked up by mulch is a factor anywhere, by the way… not just under trees.

Failure to Thrive

August 3rd, 2021

   Plants sometimes just aren’t happy where you put them.

This azalea is being stunted by big tree roots nearby.

   Good plants just sit there and seemingly sulk, barely growing or worse – starting down that road to a slow death.

   Once you realize you’re dealing with a “failure-to-thrive” situation, the best thing you can do (usually) is dig up the plant and try again.

   Sometimes just improving the soil and replanting in the same place is enough to make a big difference.

   Other times, moving the plant to a more amenable location turns the table.

   From what I’ve seen over the years, two main factors are behind most cases of stunted growth – 1.) lousy soil and 2.) wrong location.