September 2014

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Planters Punchlines

Men’s Garden Club of Wethersfield

September 2014

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Garden Club Kicks off 2014-15 Season

Monday Sept. 22 @ 7:00 p.m. 
Pitkin Community Center

Our September meeting will feature Jim Woodworth speaking about the Great Meadows Conservation Trust – incorporated in 1968 by concerned citizens of Wethersfield, Rocky Hill and Glastonbury as a non-profit tax exempt land trust to protect and preserve the Great Meadows.  Open to the public – bring a prospective member!

V.P. John Swingen is regretfully leaving the Garden Club as he and Anne are moving to Carson City, Nevada in September where Anne, has been offered a new job as the State Administrator of Ag Education.  Best of luck to a good member and friend and we look forward to hearing about the future adventures of the Men’s Garden Club of Carson City.

2014-2015 Club Officers

President:  Tony Sanders                  
Vice President: open       

Secretary: James Sulzen                   
Treasurer: Richard Prentice

Compostable Matter

By Jim Meehan

We are on the cusp of autumn and our pokeweed is in full bloom and dripping with ripe berries

       

Some of you may recall the initial appearance of this poisonous perennial from two summers ago when it popped up in the unintended sun garden that began creating itself after we reluctantly had to remove some of our major shade-producing trees.  I circulated a photo of our newest unknown resident amongst my garden-savvy friends.   

Several plant people easily identified our intruder.   One close friend – a Master Gardener and a guest at our son and daughter-in-law’s wedding – pointed out to me that “the very creative flower arranger used pokeweed, with those beautiful purple berries, plus some other stuff, including something that reminded me a little of lunaria, altho it was different and someone mentioned that it was an invasive weed. Gorgeous arrangements.”

       

Neither Mars, nor I, nor our son and (very horticulturally on the ball) daughter-in-law remembered.  Depending on where your mind is at, what’s decoration to some can be the focal centerpiece to others.  That’s probably why there are wedding planners to take care of some of the details and make certain that it all comes together.

       

Based on the feedback we decided to keep the plant and see what developed.  In fact its arrival and the need to replace our fried shade plants with some more solar-thirsty varieties prompted Mars and me to seek out other berry-producing/bird attracting bushes.  (We assumed, without really checking, that the pokeweed’s toxicity would not affect the avian guests we were hoping to attract.  Based on the lack of feathered corpses at the base of the flower we apparently were correct.)

       

Some of the newbies, such as Little Henry, were purchased.  Most just showed up.  Also this summer I made a concerted effort not to prune back any shrub until I was absolutely certain that it’s floral/fruit life cycle has run its course – rather than trying to maintain that neat, trimmed appearance.  Fortunately none of the areas got that close to the abandoned property look. 

       

We did have our arborist come and trim away all of the small competitive trees that were stunting the growth of the unpremeditated flowering crab that showed up a few feet down from the Pokeweed.  When we bought this house thirty-seven years ago there were three such trees – a pair at the opposite end of the property and one in about the middle. 

       

The duo was more bush-like than tree-like and every couple of years I would basically lop them to the ground and watch them reassemble themselves into a slightly different configuration of intertwined berry-bearing branches.  It was an every other autumn activity that I actually looked forward to – relatively hard outdoor work on a relatively cool day with a definite result.

       

The third one was our bird feeder holder until disease caused its flowers to disappear and its wood to crumble.  They are all gone now but their branches still pop up pretty much everywhere.  This one that we are now nurturing has the good fortune of being someplace where we want it at a time when we are switching to a more bird-centric landscape design.

       

The biggest surprise of this summer however was a four-foot tall plant with a thickish green stem at the end of which was a large (about the size of my hand) white composite flower head much like an oversized but more delicate Queen Anne’s Lace – or maybe (since I was hungry at the time) one of those Munson chocolate nonpareil candies.  I noticed it sometime in late July.  In August it suddenly vanished.  And in place of the pale petals were tiny red fruits – one per former floret, or so it seemed.  It was a magical illusion worth of Penn and Teller – performed without any paranormal trickery or human sleight-of-hand.

       

Not realizing the dramatic change that was coming I didn’t think to take a picture of the plant’s floral incarnation to send to my panel of gardening gurus.  Internet searches haven’t worked either.

      

 Meanwhile the birds seemed not to care that their latest source of nutrition remained unidentified.  Depending on where your mind is at, what’s decoration to some can be the focal centerpiece to others.  That’s why Mars and I are letting Mother Nature take the lead in this garden plan.

You Know You’re Addicted to Gardening When… :

author unknown, submitted by Walt Kiser

 http://www.growyourownnevada.com

Your neighbors recognize you in your pajamas, rubber clogs and a cup of coffee.

You grab other people’s banana peels, coffee grinds, apple cores, etc. for your compost pile.

You have to wash your hair to get your fingernails clean.

All your neighbors come and ask you questions.

You know the temperature of your compost every day.

You buy a bigger truck so that you can haul more mulch.

You enjoy crushing Japanese beetles because you like the sound that it makes.

Your boss makes “taking care of the office plants” an official part of your job description.

Everything you touch turns to “fertilizer.”

Your non-gardening spouse becomes conversant in botanical names.

You find yourself feeling leaves, flowers and trunks of trees wherever you go, even at funerals.

You dumpster-dive for discarded bulbs after commercial landscapers remove them to plant annuals.

You plan vacation trips around the locations of botanical gardens, arboreta, historic gardens, etc.

You sneak home a 7-foot Japanese Maple and wonder if your spouse will notice.

When considering your budget, plants are more important than groceries.

You always carry a shovel, bottled water and a plastic bag in your trunk as emergency tools.

You appreciate your Master Gardener badge more than your jewelry.

You talk “dirt” at baseball practice.

You spend more time chopping your kitchen greens for the compost pile than for cooking.

You like the smell of horse manure better than Estee Lauder.

You rejoice in rain… even after 10 straight days of it.

You have pride in how bad your hands look.

You have a decorative compost container on your kitchen counter.

You can give away plants easily, but compost is another thing.

Soil test results actually mean something.

You understand what IPM means and are happy about it.

You’d rather go to a nursery to shop than a clothes store.

You know that Sevin is not a number.

You take every single person who enters your house on a “garden tour.”

You look at your child’s sandbox and see a raised bed.

You ask for tools for Christmas, Mother’s/Father’s Day, your birthday and any other occasion you can think of.

You can’t bear to thin seedlings and throw them away.

You scold total strangers who don’t take care of their potted plants.

You know how many bags of fertilizer/potting soil/mulch your car will hold.

You drive around the neighborhood hoping to score extra bags of leaves for your compost pile.

Your preferred reading matter is seed catalogs.

And last but not least:

You know that the four seasons are:

Planning the Garden

Preparing the Garden

Gardening ~and~

Preparing and Planning for the next Garden.

The Secret To Making The Best 
Tomato Sandwich In The World

The Huffington Post  | By Julie R. Thomson

It's here. Tomato season. The plants have been growing since March, but the fruit just arrived in July. And now that August is finally here, those green globes are turning shades of red, orange and yellow and slowly sweetening. When the fruit turns ripe, the tomato problem quickly shifts from being without to stocking an overwhelming abundance. It's a great problem to have.

       

With tomato salads, tomato sauces and tomato salsas to be had, there's a good many things to make with the bounty of summer tomatoes. But all those recipes pale in comparison to the tomato sandwich (of which you should be eating at least one a day during the month of August). This is not a sandwich with tomato in it, but a sandwich made of nothing more than summer's sweetest fruit. Thick, summer-ripe tomato slices and white sandwich bread (with mayo, of course). That's it.

       

Blackberry Farm's master gardener John Coykendall, a genius on the topic of heirloom tomatoes, shared the secret to building the best tomato sandwich: "To me there's one requirement. Of course you have to have tons of mayonnaise and salt and pepper, but the true requirement is you have to have that old, cheap, white bread. The kind you wouldn't ordinarily touch in your daily life. It's the one thing that it was created for, tomato sandwiches. You stand over the sink [eating it] and it runs like Niagara Falls -- it's wonderful."

Horti-Culture Corner

Tomato Haiku by John Egerton

Beefsteak behemoth,

Cover my entire sandwich

With a single slice.

Invasives in the Garden: ‘You’ll Love It. It’ll Spread!’

http://nourishingwords.net

Most gardeners have been there at some point. Whether faced with a tiny yard or wide open spaces, filling our newly dug garden with perennials seemed a daunting task. Heading to the local nursery to get the job done is often not feasible, depending on the size of the garden.

       

Sharing plants and plant wisdom is one of my most favorite things about gardening. Gardeners are generous people by nature and seem to love to share plants and to teach each other what they know. I was a blank slate when I moved into my current home and started carving gardens out of the sandy soil, and my friends were there to help.    Not only do I remember and recognize every single perennial in my garden that was given to me by a friend, but I remember the odd little stories that go along with each.

      

 I’m famously bad at remembering plant names, but I have one plant in my long perennial border that, at least ten years after receiving it from a friend, I still call the “specimen plant.” When she so generously arrived with one more in a series of boxes of confusing balls of soil and roots, she pulled one clump out, saying, “this one is a real specimen plant.”

      

 I’m sure I’d be a better person if I knew its real name but this makes me smile every time, remembering the many plants she shared with me to help me get that forty-foot border started.

      

 Unfortunately, not all memories of plant gifts make me smile. In fact, a few make me curse.

       

A gardening coworker, about fourteen years ago, offered me white violets that she was supposedly “dividing” in her garden. Recalling early childhood garden moments spent picking tiny bouquets of purple violets and johnny jump-ups, I envisioned a similarly pleasant scene in my new garden. Encouragingly, she said, “You’ll love them; they’ll spread.” I don’t think she had love in her heart when she made that offer.

       

Those blasted white violets are the most invasive plants my garden has encountered. Any attempt to dig them up only causes them to retaliate by multiplying. Allowing them to show their sweet little blooms is sure to result in thousands of tiny seedlings the next spring. Their knobby roots make them ridiculously hard to remove.

      

 At about the same time, I wandered into a not so reputable nursery, in search of cheap perennials. I found a pretty, variegated plant, that the owner told me was a groundcover that “would spread beautifully.” He told me it was ajuga, although I’m sure he didn’t specify what variety. I really only heard the words “spread beautifully.” I bought one.

       

I’ve spent hundreds of hours, I’m sure, digging ajuga from all corners of my yard. It’s now growing behind my yard in the woods, not seeming to care if it has sun or not. I have since learned of, and acquired, a couple of very well-behaved, small purple ajugas, but this one would eat my shed if left alone. It spreads by sending out runners, then putting down roots wherever it can, which is anywhere.

       

If I were at all entrepreneurial, I’d probably dig all the ajuga plants in my yard up (as I imagine that nursery owner must have done), pot them and sell them from a fly-by-night roadside stand. I could make a big sign saying, “Perfect Plants: Will Spread Like Crazy!”

       

A north country friend is establishing a new shade garden and I’ve offered to share a few things from my garden. Of course, I love the idea that she might walk through her yard one day and remember a story about a plant I passed along. Mindful of having been wronged by at least one generous gardener of the past (not a friend–friends know they’ll be around when the cursing begins years later), I’m considering giving her a box of my favorite all-time ground cover, sweet woodruff.

       

Sweet woodruff does spread. It blooms in May into a beautiful flotilla of tiny white blossoms. In my garden, it spreads in a slow, predictable way. It doesn’t burrow under the foundation and appear on the other side of the house, or leap through the air. It just spreads a little more and becomes a little more dense each year.

       

Can I be assured it will behave this way in another garden? As long as she’s not planting it in a very wet area, it should behave itself. It’s a little risky, but it’s a beautiful plant, so I’ll take the risk. If I hear my friend cursing in a few years, I’ll be there to help.

The Race to Grow the One-Ton Pumpkin

By Julia Scott The New York Times

“When they are really at their peak growth, they'll make a sound,” said Don Young, a competitive pumpkin grower in Des Moines. To water his crop takes 27,000 gallons a month, and 80 sprinkler heads.

       

Don Young of Iowa grows his pumpkins by grafting double sprouts. He also raises hanging long gourds.

       

EARLY one morning about a month ago, Don Young peeled the floral bedsheets off the giant pumpkins growing in his backyard. Tiptoeing around the jungly vines, he carefully checked for holes. Then, bending his ear down over the nearest gourd, which was as high as his gut and wider than a truck tire, he gave it a solid smack and listened intently, like a doctor with a stethoscope.

      

 “This one’s thumping pretty good,” he said with a grin.

      

 Mr. Young is one of a number of amateur gardeners whose heart’s desire is to raise a pumpkin bigger than anybody else’s. These enthusiasts have always been obsessed, but now they are especially so. With the current world record at 1,810 pounds (a Smart car, by comparison, weighs 1,600 pounds), these growers can see the most important milestone of all on the horizon: the one-ton pumpkin. Galvanized by the prospect, they are doubling their efforts and devising a raft of new strategies involving natural growth hormones, double grafting and more, to become the first to reach that goal.

       

This fall’s pumpkin contests have begun, and as many as 14 amateur growers have won regional weigh-offs with entries tipping the scales at more than 1,500 pounds. The contests are far from over — they continue in force over the next two weekends — but already one pumpkin, raised by Dave Stelts of Edinburg, Pa., has come within three pounds of beating the 1,810-pound record set last year. Rumor has it that a record-breaker may emerge in California.

      

 The extreme summer weather this year has somewhat dampened the prospects of many growers in the Midwest, including Mr. Young. Still, he plans to enter a couple of 1,300-pounders in a weigh-off in either Wisconsin or Minnesota this weekend, and true to his hobby’s compulsive form, even as he prepares for those contests he is busy mapping his strategies for next year.

       

A professional tree trimmer by trade, Mr. Young, 47, spends $8,000 a year on his pumpkin hobby, money he admits he does not really have. His modest one-bedroom house is smaller than his backyard.

      

 “If you try to make a living growing pumpkins, you better have something to fall back on,” he said about his day job.

      

 Mr. Young has set state pumpkin records in both Iowa and California — in 2009 Conan O’Brien smashed one of his giant pumpkins on television with a monster truck — and he is a leading figure among those who are fashioning new growing practices. He has invented a grafting technique, for instance, that pushes the food and energy of two pumpkin plants into a single fruit. Other top pumpkin competitors are experimenting with ZeoPro, a synthetic cocktail of supernutrients developed by NASA to grow lettuce and other edible plants in space.

       

This year, several growers have also tested out a pink powder bacteria that converts a plant’s methane output into a natural growth hormone found in seaweed. Called PPFM (or pink-pigmented facultative methylotrophs), the substance is not even on the market, but the lure of the 2,000-pound pumpkin prompted those growers to obtain samples from RTI, the company in Salinas, Calf., testing the bacteria.

       

“These guys will try absolutely anything to get an edge on their competitors,” said Neil Anderson, the president of RTI.

      

 In fact, growers typically feed their pumpkins a compost “brew” so rich — the water is mixed with worm castings, molasses and liquid kelp — that the fruits can gain as much as 50 pounds a day.

       

“I like to say we’re just a big bunch of obsessive-compulsive people,” said Mr. Stelts, 52, the president of a group of giant-pumpkin enthusiasts called the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth. “The stuff we do to get pumpkins to this size, it’s out of control.”

       

Sometimes, Mr. Young said, he will just sit among his pumpkins.

       

“This is going to sound really crazy, but when these are really at their peak growth, they’ll make a sound,” he said. “You can feel it. It’s something surging in the pumpkin. Bup. Bup.”

       

When the season ends, growers like Mr. Young often tow their creations to a fairground or botanical garden for display; with walls a foot thick and low sugar content, the pumpkins are not fit for pie. But this inedibility has not deterred contractors, doctors, midwives and other amateurs from growing them.

       

BigPumpkins.com, the Facebook-like forum of the giant-pumpkin world, now gets more than a million unique hits a month. And according to the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, the number of officially sanctioned weigh-offs has grown from 22 to 92 in seven years, and now includes competitions in Italy, Finland and Australia.

       

With the right seeds and soil preparations, veterans say, it’s fairly easy to grow an impressively large pumpkin. But the hobby’s elite, while still amateurs, operate on a different playing field. These growers spend hundreds of dollars on laboratory analyses of soil and plant tissues to help them decide whether to add more nitrogen, say, or calcium. And they speed photosynthesis by spraying their plants’ leaves with carbon dioxide.

      

 “We’re taking a natural process and we’ve got complete control over it,” said Steve Connolly, 56, a grower in Sharon, Mass., whose pumpkins consistently rank among the world’s 10 heaviest.

      

 Taking control begins with pollination, a process that growers have wrested from the bees. In early summer, they cross-pollinate the pumpkins themselves, selecting a male flower from one plant and rubbing the pollen onto a female flower from another. Other budding pumpkins are eliminated so that the main vine supports only one plant. As extra vines sprout, they are likewise removed. The patch is more than tended. It is manicured.

       

But it is the seeds, a strong indicator of a pumpkin’s size, that are the most bankable factor in the quest for giants. Last fall, Chris Stevens, 33, a Wisconsin general contractor who grew the 1,810-pound pumpkin, sold a single seed from it for $1,600, by far the most anyone has ever paid for a pumpkin seed. Its descendants may prove just as valuable.

      

 Seed trading has helped set new world records almost every year since 1997, when a pumpkin first broke the 1,000-pound barrier. The Giant Pumpkin Commonwealth bestows special leather jackets on those who have grown a pumpkin over 1,400 pounds, a club that includes fewer than 50 gardeners. But Mr. Stelts said he was raising the minimum to 1,600 pounds because of the escalating competition.

      

 “We’d like to award everybody,” he said. “But you know what? It’s not the Boy Scouts. You’ve got to prove yourself.”

       

MR. YOUNG keeps his pumpkin trophies, ribbons and plaques in a corner of his living room. Cash winnings are reinvested in his hobby. But there is no award for what may be his greatest accomplishment: dual grafting.

       

To explain, he crouched in the dirt, pointing to a double stump that he grafted together in his kitchen last winter. Each stump is the size of a beefy forearm, and the root systems bring in twice the nutrients.

       

“They told me it couldn’t be done, they told me that for years,” said Mr. Young, who had to sacrifice 300 pumpkin seeds before he discovered the best way to fuse two young pumpkin sprouts. He borrowed a surgical knife from a hog farmer to shave the stems and then clipped them together with hair barrettes. Soon he and his wife, Julie, had to avoid knocking over pots and heat lamps spread around the kitchen counters.

       

Next year, he plans to grow all his pumpkins with grafted double sprouts. “With good weather, I can really set the world on fire,” he said. His competitive spirit is also extending beyond pumpkins; he has started to grow championship long gourds that are as thick as a bull snake.

       

Mrs. Young, 46, supports her husband’s hobby and has even won a trophy herself for pumpkin growing. “It’s exciting,” she said. “He doesn’t do anything small. He’s all in, like in poker.” She added, “People don’t realize that there’s gardening, then there’s extreme gardening.”

       

Extreme gardening involves money and sacrifice. Mr. Young wakes up in the middle of the night to check his pumpkins. He uses 27,000 gallons of water a month — nearly enough to supply a family of four for a year — and he has 80 sprinkler heads. He runs heat lamps all night after planting seeds in the chilly April ground, and cools his gourds with fans in sweltering midsummer heat. He can’t remember the last time he took a vacation.

      

 Still, for all the work, heartbreak is inevitable. A gardener can pamper his gourds for months and vigilantly stave off rot, disease and bad weather. But sometimes the giant fruits are so juiced up that they do not know how to stop feeding themselves.

       

Mr. Connolly remembers with particular sadness one morning a few years ago when he left his pumpkins to go to church. He was gone for less than an hour, but he returned to find that his biggest pumpkin had exploded under the force of its own growth spurt.

       

“There was a footlong crack through the rind,” he said. “It just blew up.”