Planters Punchlines
Men’s Garden Club of Wethersfield
June 2015
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ANNUAL PICNIC - MONDAY June 1st, 5:30 -8:00 p.m. at the SOLOMON WELLES HOUSE 220 Hartford Ave.
Wethersfield.
Wives, dates, guests, potential
members are cordially invited. The
club will supply hot dogs, hamburgers, etc., beer, wine & soda.
You are asked to please bring a dessert if your name comes
alphabetically between Sey Adil and Fred Odell – an appetizer, salad or side
dish if you are between Charlie Officer and Don Williams. Please bring your own
lawn chairs. Seating on the porch in case of rain.
Call Tony ASAP @ (860) 529-3257 to let him know how many people &
what you are bringing.
A brief business meeting will be held before we dine to elect the
2015-16 club officers and to discuss possible July/August activities.The following will be nominated at the
picnic: President: Tony Sanders, Secretary:
James Sulzen, Treasurer: Richard Prentice.
No V.P. is proposed. The V.P.’s
function is to get speakers. It was
felt that without a V.P the club found speakers this past year and we will rely
on the same system next year.
Rose Garden: Individual Plots for maintenance were
signed up for at the May picnic-meeting.
May 30 at 8:00 am the garden will be mulched. Everyone is invited.
Compostable Matter
By Jim Meehan
Okay, so
why do we hate dandelions so much? (I
say we because I think there are at least a few others that share my
hostility.) Mars suggested that perhaps
if I understood the “Taraxacum officinal’s” role in the ecology of our planet I
might find a reason to feel less bitter towards these malevolent yellow
monsters that keep desecrating my lawn.
Maybe, for example, they are like bees.
Bees pollinate plants – everybody loves bees, except when we are under
attack by a swarm of them.
Or, more
similarly, perhaps clover.
Google-search
for the purpose of clover and you will be overrun with adulatory articles about
this low-growing herbaceous plant. It sucks
nitrogen from the atmosphere and “fixes’ it on its roots from where it is
transferred to the soil; improves soil tilth and creates root channels;
provides better forage quality and increased yield (if you like tilth you’ve
gotta love forage); and (everybody’s favorite) furnishes pollen and nectar for
honeybees and tends to increase the population of beneficial predatory insects.
Plus clover
does all these things modestly without calling hardly any attention to itself.
So what
about dandelions? Since they announce
their presence so loudly you would think they must have much, much more to
contribute.
Here is
what I found in online in the google.com “backyard-nature” group:
“The plant can be used to make wine, as a diuretic, and a
source of vitamins and minerals. The root can be ground to make dandelion
coffee. The head can be battered
and fried, and the leaves can be blanched and eaten fresh or
cooked. Apparently they're not just useless weeds!”
To which I
say, “Meh”.
But (drum
roll please) “dandelion nectar and pollen is important to bees, and the nectar
is food for the Pearl-bordered Fritillary.”
The what?? (It’s a tiny
butterfly, orange with black spots.)
Apparently
“honey bees flock to dandelions both in the early spring and in times of dearth
when little else is in bloom.” But, like
we Irish and our potatoes, bees cannot live on dandelions alone. Dandelions do not have some of the amino
acids that are needed to produce protein – and all you exercisers know the
importance of your post workout protein shakes.
And, even worse, there is what I would call the “Viagra effect”.
“Researchers
have found that honey bees fed dandelion pollen alone have low success at
raising brood. In fact, some researchers found that that honey bees fail to raise
any brood when fed dandelion pollen alone.”
Maybe apian
colony collapse disorder (CCD) is really just bee ED.
So, having
tasted both dandelion leaves and dandelion wine somewhere back in my past when
I most likely didn’t have any choice, and having too much respect for honey
bees to give them false hope, or worse – I am now opting to permanently exclude
these flamboyant intruders from my property.
Dandelions
didn’t bother me that much back when I was working and had less time to deal
with such things. Actually before she
went back into the workforce Marsha quietly dispensed of these noxious weeds
with a device called a “Killer Cane” – also remembered on the “straight dope”
website as “a green tube with a cap at one end and a push pump at the other.
You filled it with weed killer and went around the yard pushing the pump down
on the crowns of weeds. Great product, you could do the yard in a few minutes,
but since it probably used Paraquat or Agent Orange you can't find it anymore.”
Then we
both began working all week and the dandelions fell off of our radar.
In
retirement however I now have time for Daily Dandelion Patrol with my trusty
fork-tongued weed tool – thirty minutes a day of fresh air, sunshine, and a
modicum of exercise. And my yard is
yellow-free for at least twelve hours.
If I happen
to spot a Pearl-bordered Fritillary in search of protein-free nectar I gently
carry it to the open field across the street.
It gives me an ecological purpose.
Heirloom Vegetables - Practical and Aesthetic Reasons
for Growing America’s Heritage Vegetables (excerpt)
By Bill Kohlhaase, Planet Natural
Plenty when
it’s the historic Caseknife Pole Bean, a hardy runner that was the most common
bean grown in Civil War-era gardens. Its pods, as you can guess, resemble a
knife sheath. Or take the Sutton’s Harbinger Pea, introduced in England by the
Sutton Seed Company in 1898 and winner of a Royal Horticultural Merit Award in
1901. One of the earliest peas, then and now, Harbinger lives up to its name by
giving the first harvests of the gardening season’s bounty. Then there’s the
flavorful Dr. Wyche’s Yellow Tomato, developed by an Oklahoma-based circus
owner, Dr. John Wyche, who fertilized his garden with elephant and tiger
manure.
Heirloom
TomatoesThe most famous story connected to an heirloom vegetable’s name has to
be that of the Mortgage Lifter Tomato. The Mortgage Lifter was developed during
the Great Depression by a guy named “Radiator Charlie.” When his West Virginia
radiator business suffered because of the economic calamity, Charlie took to
his garden and in a few years, through careful cross-pollination, had developed
a huge, meaty tomato that bred true. He sold starts of these tomatoes for $1.00.
In a few years, he sold enough tomato plants to pay off his largest debt: a
$6,000 mortgage.
Stories of
heirloom vegetables’ origins are a large part of their charm. But heirlooms,
because of their hardiness and disease and pest resistance, are more than just
charming. They play a valuable role in organic gardens. As the number of
varieties offered by commercial seed companies shrinks, it’s encouraging to
know that heirlooms are becoming as popular as they were in Radiator Charlie’s
day.
Raising heirloom
vegetables has become something of a cause, even a revolution, in the last few
years. Reasons for the rising popularity of heirlooms are as diverse as the
heirlooms themselves. Not only does the growing of heirloom vegetables and the
saving of its seed preserve and enhance biodiversity, it makes available
flavorful, condition-specific, disease-resistant vegetables that might
otherwise be lost to the harsh economics of seed marketing and the even harsher
practices of industrial agriculture. Growing heirlooms is a direct link to our
heritage, making a connection to generations of gardeners that came before us
and extending that link to our children, grandchildren and beyond.
Let’s Stop Calling Them “Heirloom” Tomatoes
By L.V. Anderson
Following
up on a series of tongue-in-cheek yet educational books by contributing editor
David Kamp, Vanity Fair began releasing short video entries from “The Snob’s
Dictionary” earlier this summer. After putting out an episode on American
International Pictures for film snobs and one on Nick Drake for rock snobs, the
magazine has finally produced a video for food snobs. The subject? Heirloom
tomatoes.
In spite of
its snarky tone and cheesy double entendres, the video is fairly informative,
offering a decent definition of heirloom tomatoes: “irregularly shaped, vividly
colored fruits grown from the seeds of non-hybridized tomato plants, thereby
standing apart from the drab supermarket tomatoes, which are uniformly orange
and spheroid.” Unlike the plants favored in industrialized agriculture, which
are cross-bred for traits like hardiness and visual appeal, heirloom breeds are
varieties that were pollinated without human meddling and that have reproduced
for decades or centuries. Heirloom tomatoes often look weirder than
conventional tomatoes, and they tend to be way more fragile, but many heirloom
varieties have a superior flavor and texture. Plus, the genetic diversity of
heirloom plants acts as insurance against blights that could hypothetically
wipe out genetically homogeneous crops to devastating effect.
But as the
very existence of a “Snob’s Dictionary” entry on heirloom tomatoes implies,
such plants project a certain rarefied image. As the Vanity Fair video puts it,
their perpetuation “has been helped along recently by beardy young neo-rustics
who are only too happy to try their hand at cultivating antique produce.”
Interest in heirloom varieties among the modish set is undeniable, but heirloom
varieties aren’t really much like antiques—their value is in their genetics and
their fertility, not their age, appearance, or collectability. Yet the very
name “heirloom” perpetuates the idea that these old, non-hybridized cultivars
are just kept around by rich people for their cachet.
Heirloom
vegetables need a brand makeover. The food movement has enough of a class
problem already; it doesn’t need misleading monikers making it look even more
elitist. “Heritage vegetables,” as they’re sometimes called in other
English-speaking countries, is a little bit better than “heirloom vegetables,”
but “heritage” still gives off a whiff of aristocratic privilege. A much better
label, in my opinion, would be “traditional vegetables,” which gives some sense
of the definition of these plants without any caste connotations.
Or, better
still, since it’s hard to convey the meaning and importance of so-called
heirloom vegetables in a single word, why not get rid of the umbrella term
altogether and let each individual variety speak for itself? One great thing
about non-hybridized vegetables is that there are so many kinds of them with so
many different traits and histories. Consider the Blaby Special tomato, an
English wartime favorite that was thought to have died out until a scientist
tracked down its seeds in 2006, or the Cream Saskatchewan watermelon, a Russian
variety with ghostly white flesh. Lumping thousands of traditional vegetable
varieties together in a single category—for the sake of distinguishing them
from standardized conventional crops—is a tad ironic.
Can you
think of a better name for heirloom vegetables?
oldest of heirlooms in native seeds/search’s catalog and seed bank
SOME PEOPLE
ASSERT AN HEIRLOOM VARIETY must date to pre-1951ish (around when hybrids became
popular); others claim 100 years old as the cutoff. At Native Seeds/SEARCH in Tucson,
Arizona—whose seed catalog includes the motto “Ancient Seeds for Modern
Needs”—such heirlooms would be mere pups. Learn about some of America’s
longest-cultivated seed varieties in my interview with Bill McDorman,
then-executive director of Native Seeds/SEARCH, where I bought seed for my very
first oddball winter squash decades ago.
Native
Seeds/SEARCH (NS/S) is a different kind of seed catalog. It’s a non-profit seed
bank focused on conservation, and offers many things you won’t see anywhere
else–some of them varieties that have been cultivated for thousands of years by
America’s native peoples. Through its traveling seed school and other efforts,
NS/S serves as a model for other organizations that want to do seed
stewardship.
And in a
shifting climate, its collection of Desert Southwest varieties are proving to
have a common trait–drought-tolerance–that looks increasingly appealing as the
planet changes rapidly.
“There will
be larger areas where these crops will be adapted to growing,” said Bill during
our recent conversation on my radio show, which is highlighted below.
oldest of heirlooms in native seeds/search’s catalog and
seed bank
Q. Let’s
start with a brief background, Bill—and also can you explain the acronym SEARCH
that’s part of Native Seeds’ name?
A. The
acronym in Native Seeds/SEARCH stands for the Southwest Arid Lands Research
Clearinghouse.
It
basically just symbolized that we were searching for what was left.
The
organization got started 30 years ago, because of fears we were going to lose
much of the diversity that had made up our agriculture. There was no longer a
reason for people to pay attention to the small, niche varieties of things that
were left growing in the Southwest for thousands of years. We were moving to
big agriculture—and all we needed were the new hybrids.
A group of
visionaries here said, “You know, it’s probably a good idea to scurry around
and save what’s left before it all disappears.”
It was out
of that thought, in the late 70s-early 80s, that we were born. [Read the whole
history of NS/S. That’s part of their Conservation Farm in the landspace photos
above.]
Q. Though
the NS/S collection centers on the Desert Southwest, it doesn’t just appeal to
Arizona gardeners, does it? I know even living in New York State, I’ve ordered
to see if I can coax some of those old beauties into performing in my garden.
A. I think
there’s a really important concept here that gardeners are just now starting to
become familiar with, and that is:
There are
differences in the amount of diversity still left in the varieties of the crops
that some gardeners are growing.
So if you
buy new, modern industrial hybrids, the diversity’s been bred out: They’ll be
more uniform. We can predict more exactly what they are going to do in specific
conditions.
And those
were bred from varieties that were either landraces or had been around for
awhile. If you follow it all the way back to what Native Seeds/SEARCH tapped
into—which was the oldest agriculture on the continent–you start getting back
into varieties that were the basis for almost everything that we grow and eat
in North America, at least from the New World foods, the ones that were native
here.
So the farther
back you go in time, there’s probably more diversity left in those
varieties. And one of the expressions of
that is that it has the adaptability to grow almost anywhere.
So if you
buy some of our seeds in New York, and you get them to grow and save seeds from
those, you’ve adapted them to your climate. You’ve take the inherent diversity
that is still in them, and you’re starting to express it in your own area.
And that’s
the process that we like to promote: creating new diversity in our agriculture,
instead of watching it disappear.
Q. Because
of your focus, you sort of define the word “heirloom” to the extreme. Tell us
about some of the oldies in your care.
A. The
oldest evidence of agriculture within the boundaries of the continental United
State is just outside of Tucson here. It’s a more-than-4,000-year-old
archaeological site.
There’s
evidence of a corn there, it’s a Chapalote corn [photo above], and we have what
we think are the ancestors from that corn in our collection.
Of course
corn goes back between 8,000 and maybe 10,000 years south of us here in Central
Mexico.
And we have
over 500 varieties of corn, from 50 tribes in the Desert Southwest, and we
don’t know how far they go back. As one of the tribal leaders said to me once:
They don’t try to define the number of years. They just know it goes back a
long, long way, and we have the children of these crops. In a sense we have
inherited all the care that all those people gave to those crops, by saving
them where they lived—saving the ones they liked best.
And it was
that simple ritual that was ending in the late 70s. Grandparents were finding
no place to pass their seeds.
Q.
Five-hundred kinds of corn?
A. Yes, I
think we have 564 varieties, in every color of the rainbow.
Q. There
was one that went viral this year, wasn’t there (to put an ancient crop in a
modern perspective)? ‘Glass Gem’ corn?
A. I’ve had
personal experiences where opening up corn cobs brought tears to my eyes.
A Cherokee
man spent about 20 years breeding corn for beauty. He wanted to unlock all the
colors and all the beauty he could find—using traditional breeding techniques.
After 20
years he started hitting on some spectacular cobs of corn. And during those 20
years the internet was invented, and we can pass pictures around at the speed
of light, so:
Ancient
breeding to find new beauty meets new medium—and ‘Glass Gem’ corn [photo above]
took off.
Last year
[2013] was the first time we had quantities so we could sell it, and about
August we started getting photos back from people who grew it from all over the
world.
Things with
fluorescent green and pink in them—where did that come from? One person called
it “Crayola corn.” So we had a contest, and picked the best photos to create a
2014 calendar. This has become the poster child for all those people who are
worried about genetically modified crops, because this is the opposite. ‘Glass Gem’ even has a Facebook page.
.
What are
other “signature” crops of NS/S, besides corn?
A. We’ve
famous for tepary beans [photo above]. They were here when the first Spanish
colonists got to Arizona; the Pima Indians grew these beans in a sort of
monsoonal agriculture along the rivers here.
Apparently
they were wild here, but the beans were very tiny, so they just saved seeds
from ones that were bigger and eventually bred this crop to be almost the size
of regular beans.
They’re
probably the best beans I’ve tasted for use in my soups.
Q. I know
you have squash, too! Some very unique creatures, including one of the first
unusual winter squash I ever saw, or grew. I think it was ‘Magdalena Big
Cheese.’
A. Yes,
with corn and beans, it’s part of the traditional Three Sisters of food crops.
I’m curious as to which one you bought all those years ago? ‘Magdalena Big
Cheese’ is one of our most popular varieties, and we’ve had it since the
beginning.
Q. Way
beyond these three crops, it’s a giant list of seeds at NS/S, isn’t it?
A. The
number of names of things you’ve never heard of before, when you first open the
catalog, is amazing. We have almost 2,000 accessions in our collection. We are
a world-class seed bank now, and we are charged with taking care of these
things. Five years ago we completed a capital campaign, and we are now in a
$1.4 million state-of-the-art facility [above, part of the storage facility].
But we
can’t just put them in a freezer, and leave them forever. We have to take them
out, and keep them alive. To do that we grow them out, and do very careful data
collection around them. And then the surplus of those seeds from our grow-outs
is what we make available in our catalog.
Q. We can’t
finish our conversation without some mention of chiles!
A. Again,
they go way, way back. But at the base of it all—and many gardeners don’t know
this—all chilis evolved from one plant, what we call chiltepins [above photo].
It’s a wild chili that grows wild here in Arizona. They’re tiny fruits, like
little round things, and they are very hot. And they are packed with diversity.
All the
different sizes and shapes and colors, and all the different ranges of heat in
chili peppers that we have today all came out of this plant.
So you have
tremendous power when you start growing chiltepins, to select for something
that you really like.
The power
to do this is what has been largely taken away from us in the 20th and early
21st century. That’s the crime. We forgot that we’re the ones who created all
this food in the first place-and we still have the power.
That's quite a side salad: The world's largest tomato
By Thomas Burrows for MailOnline
It took the
best part of 20 years to come to fruition.
But plant
breeders have finally launched a collection of super-sized tomatoes that can
feed an entire family. The new tomato
plants, called Gigantomo, can grow enormous fruits up to 10 inches wide and as
heavy as 3lbs - about 12 times the size of an average salad tomato. The super-sized tomatoes are so large one
tomato alone can serve up to four people and grow up to 6ft tall
The
revolutionary tomatoes have now gone on sale in Britain just in time for
gardeners to buy them before spring arrives.
Each plant can grow to 6ft tall and yield as many as 11 tomatoes but
must be supported to prevent it buckling under the weight of the fruit.
The new
variety is the result of almost two decades of research and development by
breeders in the UK and the US. Simon
Crawford, one of the UK's leading plant breeders, was called in five years ago
to finish the work of late American grower Paul Thomas, who spent 15 years
trying to breed the huge tomato. Mr
Thomas passed away before he saw his tomatoes hit the market, but Mr Crawford
was able to complete the breeding programme to ensure there would be enough
seed to sell commercially.
The new
tomato plants, called Gigantomo, can grow fruits up to 10 inches wide and as
heavy as 3lbs. They were launched in the
US last year by seed company Burpee and sold under the name SteakHouse. The
huge tomatoes were such a hit that they have now been brought across the
Atlantic but EU chiefs ruled the name unacceptable so it was changed to
Gigantomo.
Gigantomo
tomatoes can only be bought from Lincolnshire seed seller Van Meuwen, which has
launched them in their spring 2015 plant collection. Simon Crawford who helped
develop the tomato plants said he was hopeful it would lead to a world record
sized tomato
The company
has even stumped up a £5,000 jackpot for anyone who can grow a Gigantomo tomato
that breaks the world record of 7lbs 12oz.
The plants will be sold as plugs - seedlings that have already been
grown for a short time so they can be put directly into pots - costing £14.99
for a pack of five. It can also be bought as seed, with six costing £3.99.
Gigantomo
is a variation of the beefsteak tomato but its exact heritage is unknown as Mr
Thomas did not keep details of which tomatoes he had cross-bred during his
years of trials. Mr Crawford, who is
based in Spalding, Lincolnshire, said: 'Put simply, Gigantomo is the world's
largest commercially-available tomato. 'Each plant will yield nine to 11
fruits, and each tomato is so big it will feed a family of four. The fruits are
so heavy that the plants need support to stop them falling over.
'Although
the beefsteak tomato is not a hugely popular line in the UK, growing a really
big tomato that tastes great is something a large majority of gardeners would
like to do. Gigantomo is an incredibly
interesting variety that grows very well in the UK, and it won an Royal
Horticultural Society award of garden merit following growing trials last year. It's got to be greenhouse grown because
otherwise it would fruit too late, but provided that happens it will grow well
pretty much anywhere in Britain. With the right kind of care we think it would
be possible to grow a tomato that could break the world record.'
The
creation of super-sized tomatoes comes a month after Mr Crawford helped develop
the world's first blight-resistant tomato. The revolutionary tomatoes were the result of
eight years of research and development between breeder Simon Crawford and
Bangor University PhD student James Stroud.
Mr Crawford initially stumbled
across the disease-resistant genes while carrying out trials at his farm in
Yorkshire in 2006. While most of his
varieties were duly wiped out by blight, one was untouched by the deadly
bug.
Together
with Mr Stoud, whose PhD was about tomato and potato blight, and using that
variety the pair embarked on a complicated breeding programme using the strain. By cross-breeding the variety they were able
to create the first ever tomato to boast the PH2 and PH3 genes, which are
resistant to the pathogen Phytopthera infestans, the Latin name for blight.
The
tomatoes, called Crimson Crush, are being mass-grown at a nursery in East
Yorkshire and are available to purchase from Devon-based Suttons Seeds.
Horti-Culture Corner
Tomato Haiku by John Egerton
Forced to choose
between
True love and ripe
tomatoes –
Don't push me that
far.
(More Tomato Haikus
at http://www.chapter16.org/content/17-tomato-haiku-1)
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