George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Weird Veggies

May 14th, 2019

   I’ve seen a lot of vegetables in my day, but while looking over the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog, one odd picture grabbed my eye.

The jelly melon.
Credit: Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

   It was a full-color shot of what looked like a fat, orange, warty, bloated cigar.

   The plant was called a “jelly melon,” also known as the African horned cucumber, a vining crop native to Africa.

   “The pulp inside resembles lime green Jell-O,” the catalog description read. “The fruit has a sweet-sour, banana-lime-tropical taste. Good juiced and sweetened.”

   Sold.

   Sucker that I am for anything new and different (and especially weird), I had to try growing jelly melon.

   Turns out the jelly melon wasn’t all that great… sort of a seedy version of a soft cucumber.

   But nonetheless, experimenting with such oddities is one of the best parts about growing your own edibles.

   You can stick with the usual red tomatoes and green cucumbers if you want, but you also have the more adventurous option to grow just about anything you can get your seedy little hands on.

   Grocery-store produce sections are offering way more choices than even a decade ago, but it’s still only scratching the surface of the possibilities.

   For a few bucks’ investment, it’s doable to grow the world’s arguably tastiest watermelon (a variety called ‘Ali Baba’ from Iraq), a burgundy-leafed radicchio from Italy, a purple sweet potato, or a potato-like South American staple called jicama.

   Not all of the off-the-beaten-path stuff works out, of course. Some of it just doesn’t like our climate or soil or the way you look at it.

   But a big part of the fun is trying… just to see what’ll happen… just to find out what that jelly melon tastes like… just to see if the potato flesh really is blue like the picture.

Don’t Feel Bad about Your Lousy Lawn

April 30th, 2019

   This is the time of year when your lawn is going to look about as good as it’s going to get.

This kind of lush green carpet doesn’t come easily.

   But don’t feel bad if it’s not measuring up to the ideal that marketers conjured starting in the 1950s.

   Sporting that pristine green carpet takes a lot of effort, input, and expense.

   As if I have to tell you, much can wrong with a lawn in central Pennsylvania.

   So many of our yards have lousy soil to start with. It’s often clayish, shale-laden, or just a few inches of barely-passable “topsoil” spread on top of graded, packed subsoil.

   Grass is a plant, and like any plant, the roots need to penetrate the soil, have adequate oxygen and drainage, and be able to mine enough nutrition from the soil to feed the top growth.

   The compacted hardscrabble lurking in so much of suburbia makes all of that iffy. Odds are you have one big strike against you before you ever plant your first little grass seed.

   Then there’s the weather. We’ve always had erratic swings, but like most of the world, our extremes are getting “extremier.”

   We can get long strings of dry heat at triple-digit levels, or like last year, incessant soakings.

   Winters can hit 70 degrees one week and go under zero the next. Spring seems to show up, only to nose-dive back into winter.

   Like people, grass does best with gradual change and predictable conditions. Our weather has been more of a wild ride lately than ever.

   The simple fact that a lawn is made up of one kind of plant – cool-season grasses – is another big strike.

Water on a Slope

April 23rd, 2019

   When water heads down a slope, especially in heavy rains, it doesn’t always behave nicely.

Laying drainage pipe to carry water down and under a slope.

   Instead of soaking in, it can create channels or sheets that wash out everything in its path.

   Planting in these wash-out zones is futile. Even groundcovers end up at the bottom when a gully-washer erodes the soil underneath.

   Soil tends to be thin on slopes anyway, which discourages deep rooting. So what’s the answer?

   I’m using a variety of strategies on the fairly steep bank behind my new house in Pittsburgh. One or more of them might help you as well if you have a slope at your place.

   The previous owners of my new house apparently ignored the slope-runoff situation, allowing weeds and seeded-in maidenhair grasses (Miscanthus) to soften the flow along with a few channels dumping water into and across the lawn below.

   Much of that lawn was soggy all winter. After any substantial rain, it stays wet for days.

   Some of the water makes its way across the lawn to another slope down to the driveway. That slope is leveled a bit by a brick retaining wall at the bottom. Steps come down the middle of it.

   During heavy rains, water runs down the steps like a multi-tiered waterfall. While that’s a nice touch, it’s not a whole lot better than having a waterfall gushing out the second-floor window from the bathtub overflowing.

   My first goal was to deal with the biggest push of water coming into the yard in the first place from the neighbor’s sloped lawn above. I could see that water over the years had found (or created) a natural swale to cascade down my bank behind a block retaining wall that previous owners had built at the bottom of the bank, where the lawn begins.

   No system was in place to deal with that rush of water. I’m surprised the soil behind the wall never eroded away.

The Power of a Weed Seed

April 16th, 2019

   I was not aware that, left to its own devices for a dozen or so years, winter creeper plants can grow into trees with trunks the size of my ankle.

My inherited winter creeper “trees” have been producing seeds like this for years.

   It’s a plant that matures seeds with a vengeance, banking up future baby winter creepers for years to come.

   In other words, winter creeper can become a very big and very troublesome invader in a short time.

   I mention this because my new “landscape” in Pittsburgh is overrun with creeping winter creeper, climbing winter creeper, and stand-alone winter creeper trees. The best I can figure with the latter is that winter creeper climbed up a supporting plant (probably rose of sharon, another problem weed in my Pittsburgh yard), then killed the host plant after it trained as an upright.

   It’s obvious no one has checked the growth and spread of these plants in a long time.

   I’m now paying the price for years of neglect. Worse yet, even after I get the climbers out of the junipers and maples and dig out the many stand-alone winter creeper trees, I’m going to face an ongoing battle of new winter creeper seedlings.

   To me, stored and lurking weed seeds pose a bigger threat than existing weeds. Get rid of a weed, and if it has had a chance to drop seed over the years, all the removal does is open space for sunlight and moisture to germinate a whole new outbreak.

   Disturb the soil even years later, and that brings dormant weed seeds to the surface, where they sprout after years of waiting for the warmer, brighter opportunity.

   So, I’m gearing up for a battle I’d rather not have to fight at my age (not that fighting weeds is fun or easy at any age).

   The first step is getting rid of the existing winter creeper, especially the big, damaging plants and the ones that have gone to seed.

   Climbing winter creeper can kill trees, not by rooting into the trunks, but by its leaves that grow out to cover the tree’s foliage.

12 Ways to Keep from Hurting Yourself in the Garden

April 9th, 2019

   A lot of people hurt themselves gardening.

It’s easy to hurt yourself out there…

   Much can go wrong out there, from pruning your finger instead of the branch to straining your back from picking up a pot that you knew was way too heavy.

   I hate to be naggy, but I’d also like to see fewer gardeners hurt themselves. So in that spirit, here are 12 gardener-safety precautions to consider:  

   1.) Use the right tools for the right job in the way the instructions say. Yeah, those safety warnings are boring, long, and written with lawyer input, but they’re there for one main reason – to keep you from hurting yourself (and others).

   2.) Sharpen the tools. It’s amazing how much better sharp pruners and sharp shovels work. Less force to get the job done is much easier on your body parts, too.

   3.) Stretch and work up to full speed gradually. A great way to hurt yourself is to go out cold and do a vigorous job right off the bat, like move a heavy pot or dig out a big shrub.

   4.) Know your limits. If you’re getting tired and/or sore, injuries and accidents become more likely. It’s OK if the whole to-do list doesn’t get checked off today. Your lanky lilac limbs will forgive you. Also don’t try to pick up or carry things you know are too heavy for you.

   5.) Wear gloves. They protect you from cuts and keep hands from chapping and cracking in cold weather. Get a tetanus shot at least every 10 years anyway.

   6.) Mix up the jobs. Instead of doing the same motion over and over and over again for hours, protect your joints by doing a little digging, then a little raking, then a little pruning, then going back to finish the digging.