Monday, December 28, 2009
The secret life of plants
A fascinating look here, in a New York Times science story by Natalie Angier, at the secret life of plants. As a garden writer, I often have a hard time convincing people to even think of plants (such as lawns) as living things. This article pushes further my understanding of just how lively they are.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Passing judgment on tomatoes
It seems to be universally acknowledged around here that the summer of 2009 in Chicago was wet until it was dry, cool except when it was hot and generally lousy for tomatoes. Most people's ripened late and many never got enough sun for good flavor. Will I let these extenuating circumstances stop me from passing judgment on the tomatoes I grew on my back porches? Of course not.
Seed catalogs are arriving -- Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Seed Savers Exchange, many more no doubt to come. My experience has been that to keep seed-ordering under control I need to make a plan early, write it down and commit to it. Otherwise I will just keep collecting seductive new seed packets until I have 27 times as many seeds as I a) have space to start and b) would have room to plant outdoors. Making a plan requires rigorous assessment of what worked last year and what didn't. So fair or not, here goes:
I had space for a total of 10 tomato plants -- four in two large self-watering containers, two in large plastic pots that I jury-rigged to be self-watering containers and two small plants tucked into the ends of planter boxes full of herbs. All of these plants were on 3rd and 4th floor porches overlooking an alley (the only place in my greater gardening domain that gets anywhere near a tomato's worth of sunlight). Given the limited quarters and the fact that light is somewhat reduced by the porch railings, I chose all small-fruited tomatoes, figuring they had a better shot.
The varieties: 'Black Cherry,' 'Sun Gold, 'Red Robin' (a dwarf container-bred variety) and 'Bonito Ojo,' which has fruits a little bit larger than cherry but which seemed like a good idea at the time.
Turned out not to be -- because though the ones I tasted had a fine flavor, the skinny stems weren't strong enough to hold the 2 - to 2 1/2-diameter fruits. They bent under the weight, cutting off water to the fruits, few of which ripened. If I had attentively hand-tied every single stem to the cage, maybe I would have gotten a few more tomatoes, but that is never, ever going to happen in my lifetime. So no more 'Bonito Ojo' for me. I need tomatoes that can stand up for themselves in a tomato cage match.
'Black Cherry' seemed like a good idea, too, because I love the flavor of 'Black Krim' and 'Cherokee Purple' and other dark-fruited heirlooms. But 'Black Cherry' was a big disappointment. The tomatoes ripened late or (mostly) not at all -- yes, it was a lousy weather year, but still. Even when ripe -- or at least when they had some color -- they tasted more green than purple. Maybe if I gardened in sun-flooded Texas or someplace they would have been more flavorful. But I don't.
I had four plants of 'Red Robin,' which I had sought out because I had forgotten the tomato I really wanted was 'Tiny Tim.' (Sad saga here.) 'Red Robin' was sturdy and productive, giving me plenty of 1-inch-diameter red fruits right up until frost. Eventually I caught on that with the plants' short internodes, I needed to burrow among the foliage, where I often found ripe fruits hiding. Flavor-wise, they were only so-so. But they did yeoman duty supplying salads and pasta sauces when 'Black Cherry' was letting me down.
Still, I'm going to make an effort to find 'Tiny Tim' again this year, just to see if my intense memory of their fine flavor and perfect container habit holds up.
And finally: If I were one of the cool kids I would be too cool to admit I love the same tomato everybody else loves, but I'm not, so I'll say it: I love 'Sun Gold.' Once it got started, it gave me gazillions of flavor-poppin' little orange fruits, which ripened just fine when 'Black Cherry' couldn't. This is one I'll definitely plant again.
'Sun Gold' has just flaw, from my point of view: It's indeterminate. I did not fully realize the implications of indeterminacy in my particular gardening situation until one summer day when I looked down as I was hanging practically by my ankles over the 4th-floor porch railing trying to prune back long stems that were growing out over the alley and dropping green tomatoes to bounce off my neighbors' parked cars.
Not only did I feel unneighborly for launching missiles at cars and people, I was tired of hauling water to nurture tomatoes that I would never be able to reach when they were ripe. So I was risking my life to try and prune them. As I gazed down at the asphalt 50 feet below my head, though, I decided I would stick to determinate varieties in the future -- varieties that will keep my tomatoes within safe reach without requiring aerial acrobatics.
This is going to be tough, because there are so many more indeterminate than determinate varieties. My options will be greatly reduced. But maybe I'll live longer.
I'll make an exception for 'Sun Gold,' though, and just try to remember to prune it before it gets a chance to sprawl halfway to Garfield Park.
So, this year's ground rules: 'Sun Gold.' 'Tiny Tim.' Other small-fruited, determinate varieties to be named later. The hunt is on.
Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .
All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.
Seed catalogs are arriving -- Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Seed Savers Exchange, many more no doubt to come. My experience has been that to keep seed-ordering under control I need to make a plan early, write it down and commit to it. Otherwise I will just keep collecting seductive new seed packets until I have 27 times as many seeds as I a) have space to start and b) would have room to plant outdoors. Making a plan requires rigorous assessment of what worked last year and what didn't. So fair or not, here goes:
I had space for a total of 10 tomato plants -- four in two large self-watering containers, two in large plastic pots that I jury-rigged to be self-watering containers and two small plants tucked into the ends of planter boxes full of herbs. All of these plants were on 3rd and 4th floor porches overlooking an alley (the only place in my greater gardening domain that gets anywhere near a tomato's worth of sunlight). Given the limited quarters and the fact that light is somewhat reduced by the porch railings, I chose all small-fruited tomatoes, figuring they had a better shot.
The varieties: 'Black Cherry,' 'Sun Gold, 'Red Robin' (a dwarf container-bred variety) and 'Bonito Ojo,' which has fruits a little bit larger than cherry but which seemed like a good idea at the time.
Turned out not to be -- because though the ones I tasted had a fine flavor, the skinny stems weren't strong enough to hold the 2 - to 2 1/2-diameter fruits. They bent under the weight, cutting off water to the fruits, few of which ripened. If I had attentively hand-tied every single stem to the cage, maybe I would have gotten a few more tomatoes, but that is never, ever going to happen in my lifetime. So no more 'Bonito Ojo' for me. I need tomatoes that can stand up for themselves in a tomato cage match.
'Black Cherry' seemed like a good idea, too, because I love the flavor of 'Black Krim' and 'Cherokee Purple' and other dark-fruited heirlooms. But 'Black Cherry' was a big disappointment. The tomatoes ripened late or (mostly) not at all -- yes, it was a lousy weather year, but still. Even when ripe -- or at least when they had some color -- they tasted more green than purple. Maybe if I gardened in sun-flooded Texas or someplace they would have been more flavorful. But I don't.
I had four plants of 'Red Robin,' which I had sought out because I had forgotten the tomato I really wanted was 'Tiny Tim.' (Sad saga here.) 'Red Robin' was sturdy and productive, giving me plenty of 1-inch-diameter red fruits right up until frost. Eventually I caught on that with the plants' short internodes, I needed to burrow among the foliage, where I often found ripe fruits hiding. Flavor-wise, they were only so-so. But they did yeoman duty supplying salads and pasta sauces when 'Black Cherry' was letting me down.
Still, I'm going to make an effort to find 'Tiny Tim' again this year, just to see if my intense memory of their fine flavor and perfect container habit holds up.
And finally: If I were one of the cool kids I would be too cool to admit I love the same tomato everybody else loves, but I'm not, so I'll say it: I love 'Sun Gold.' Once it got started, it gave me gazillions of flavor-poppin' little orange fruits, which ripened just fine when 'Black Cherry' couldn't. This is one I'll definitely plant again.
'Sun Gold' has just flaw, from my point of view: It's indeterminate. I did not fully realize the implications of indeterminacy in my particular gardening situation until one summer day when I looked down as I was hanging practically by my ankles over the 4th-floor porch railing trying to prune back long stems that were growing out over the alley and dropping green tomatoes to bounce off my neighbors' parked cars.
Not only did I feel unneighborly for launching missiles at cars and people, I was tired of hauling water to nurture tomatoes that I would never be able to reach when they were ripe. So I was risking my life to try and prune them. As I gazed down at the asphalt 50 feet below my head, though, I decided I would stick to determinate varieties in the future -- varieties that will keep my tomatoes within safe reach without requiring aerial acrobatics.
This is going to be tough, because there are so many more indeterminate than determinate varieties. My options will be greatly reduced. But maybe I'll live longer.
I'll make an exception for 'Sun Gold,' though, and just try to remember to prune it before it gets a chance to sprawl halfway to Garfield Park.
So, this year's ground rules: 'Sun Gold.' 'Tiny Tim.' Other small-fruited, determinate varieties to be named later. The hunt is on.
Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .
All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Vrooooooom! toward the future
Wednesday morning is when Eric Hansen drives his propane-powered 1-ton pickup truck from Detroit to Melrose Park for his all-propane-powered landscape crew. Here's a news release about it (which I wrote) from the Midwest Ecological Landscaping Association.
One of the questions I asked Eric was: Is your lawn company organic? And he said no--they can't get their commercial customers to pay for the extra labor it takes to maintain a lawn entirely without herbicides, or to accept a lawn with a lot of weeds.
But over the last few years, he said, they've moved from the once-standard blanket applications of pesticides, whether the lawn needed it or not, to occasional spot treatments where there really is a persistent weed problem.
That's a step in the right direction, just as changing from a less efficient fossil fuel for the mowers and blowers to a more efficient fossil fuel is a step in the right direction.
But still, as Eric told me, maintenance firms like his are tasked with "maintaining the landscape that gets built." And usually the landscape that gets built is not designed with serious consideration of all the long-term costs of maintaining it -- not just the monetary cost of water and fertilizer and the labor to mow big swaths of lawn, but the costs that so far haven't been monetized: greenhouse gas emissions from power tools, fossil fuel use, risk from herbicides, depletion of water supplies.
The ultimate answer, as Eric says, is to design different landscapes. But that will require a change in the mainstream aesthetic toward more shrubs, more ornamental grasses, more ground covers more native plants, more freedom, less rigidity and less lawn.
Real sustainability will happen when the people who rent space in office parks and the people who buy homes because they're in good school districts -- people who don't really much notice their yards unless they sense that their yards don't meet the neighborhood standard -- are comfortable with this different kind of landscape and will maintain it or pay to have it maintained.
For that to happen, these concepts need to move out of the garden-geek and green-geek in-groups and into the consciousness of the people who lay out parking lots and standard-issue subdivisions. These ideas need to become part of the standard issue.
I think that change is coming. The Sustainable Sites Initiative, a voluntary effort to create a set of guidelines for landscapes similar to the LEED standards for buildings, calls for no more than 40 percent of a landscape to be lawn. I expect that by the time housing development gets going again, expectations--from government, from zoning boards, from home buyers--will have shifted. Design firms and landscape maintenance firms that are already moving toward more sustainable practices will have the advantage.
Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .
All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.
One of the questions I asked Eric was: Is your lawn company organic? And he said no--they can't get their commercial customers to pay for the extra labor it takes to maintain a lawn entirely without herbicides, or to accept a lawn with a lot of weeds.
But over the last few years, he said, they've moved from the once-standard blanket applications of pesticides, whether the lawn needed it or not, to occasional spot treatments where there really is a persistent weed problem.
That's a step in the right direction, just as changing from a less efficient fossil fuel for the mowers and blowers to a more efficient fossil fuel is a step in the right direction.
But still, as Eric told me, maintenance firms like his are tasked with "maintaining the landscape that gets built." And usually the landscape that gets built is not designed with serious consideration of all the long-term costs of maintaining it -- not just the monetary cost of water and fertilizer and the labor to mow big swaths of lawn, but the costs that so far haven't been monetized: greenhouse gas emissions from power tools, fossil fuel use, risk from herbicides, depletion of water supplies.
The ultimate answer, as Eric says, is to design different landscapes. But that will require a change in the mainstream aesthetic toward more shrubs, more ornamental grasses, more ground covers more native plants, more freedom, less rigidity and less lawn.
Real sustainability will happen when the people who rent space in office parks and the people who buy homes because they're in good school districts -- people who don't really much notice their yards unless they sense that their yards don't meet the neighborhood standard -- are comfortable with this different kind of landscape and will maintain it or pay to have it maintained.
For that to happen, these concepts need to move out of the garden-geek and green-geek in-groups and into the consciousness of the people who lay out parking lots and standard-issue subdivisions. These ideas need to become part of the standard issue.
I think that change is coming. The Sustainable Sites Initiative, a voluntary effort to create a set of guidelines for landscapes similar to the LEED standards for buildings, calls for no more than 40 percent of a landscape to be lawn. I expect that by the time housing development gets going again, expectations--from government, from zoning boards, from home buyers--will have shifted. Design firms and landscape maintenance firms that are already moving toward more sustainable practices will have the advantage.
Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .
All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Alternative fuels for the landscape crew
Isn't there a better way to maintain a lawn than with emissions-spewing gasoline leaf blowers and lawn mowers? One landscape contractor, Eric Hansen of Competitive Lawn Service in Downers Grove, is equipping an entire landscape crew with propane power--including the 1-ton truck. Propane is a fossil fuel, but it burns much hotter and therefore much more efficiently than gasoline, resulting in fewer emissions. Eric will be on Mike Nowak's radio show tomorrow morning from 8 to 10 a.m. on WCPT-AM, 820 in Chicago, to talk about the effort.
Eric is a member of the Midwest Ecological Landscaping Association, a trade group that is trying to encourage horticulture and landscape businesses in the Chicago area to adopt greener practices. Mike is the founder of the group, and I'm also a member and a contractor for MELA.
Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .
All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.
Eric is a member of the Midwest Ecological Landscaping Association, a trade group that is trying to encourage horticulture and landscape businesses in the Chicago area to adopt greener practices. Mike is the founder of the group, and I'm also a member and a contractor for MELA.
Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .
All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.
Chicagoland Gardening Magazine changing hands
Chicagoland Gardening magazine--which for more than 10 years has been the Bible for dedicated gardeners in this area--is in the process of changing hands. Negotiations are underway for Bill Aldrich's Growit Communications Inc. to sell the magazine to State by State publications, based in Louisiana, which includes 10 garden garden magazines including Carolina Gardener, Mississippi Gardener and Louisiana Gardener.
Here's the good news and the essential fact: Chicagoland Gardening will continue; subscriptions will continue. Chicago and its metropolitan area will continue to have a magazine focused on what it's like and what it takes to garden right here. Carolyn Ulrich will continue as editor. I'm still a senior editor.
State by State is a southern outfit and this magazine is their first foray to the frozen north. I'm sure it will be an education for them to learn about the facts of Chicago ecosystems and Chicago winters. But the whole point of their magazines is to be locally focused, so nobody should expect any recommendations to plant camellias or crape myrtles around here.
Bill, who started the magazine after a long career as a Chicago Tribune editor, has done a magnificent job giving Chicago-area gardeners their own voice. I'm proud to say he's a friend of mine. He deserves a big hand of applause from every Chicago gardener. He's also the author of several books on Illinois gardening, and I'm confident more great things are ahead for him in the gardening world.
Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .
All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.
Here's the good news and the essential fact: Chicagoland Gardening will continue; subscriptions will continue. Chicago and its metropolitan area will continue to have a magazine focused on what it's like and what it takes to garden right here. Carolyn Ulrich will continue as editor. I'm still a senior editor.
State by State is a southern outfit and this magazine is their first foray to the frozen north. I'm sure it will be an education for them to learn about the facts of Chicago ecosystems and Chicago winters. But the whole point of their magazines is to be locally focused, so nobody should expect any recommendations to plant camellias or crape myrtles around here.
Bill, who started the magazine after a long career as a Chicago Tribune editor, has done a magnificent job giving Chicago-area gardeners their own voice. I'm proud to say he's a friend of mine. He deserves a big hand of applause from every Chicago gardener. He's also the author of several books on Illinois gardening, and I'm confident more great things are ahead for him in the gardening world.
Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .
All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Winter's really here
Here's how I know: It's not because my hands and feet actually hurt from the cold as I brushed off the car yesterday. It's not because the air in my apartment is so dry from the heating that you could make fruit leather. It's not the snow on the lawns, roofs and sidewalks, or the 2 1/2 hours of white-knuckle driving on more or less pure sheet ice that took me 35 miles on Wednesday.
It's the fact that yesterday I had to put a banana peel in the garbage.
This is a big, dark day for me every year: The day when all the compost bins are not only full to the brim but frozen solid, and even the 5-gallon bucket that is my way station to the bins is a chock-full block of ice (well, icy vegetable scraps and coffee grounds). So there I was, standing with a banana peel in my hand, and no place to compost it until spring.
It just pains me. Perfectly good biomass that's going to go to a landfill. I am miserly with biomass. I don't want anything leaving my garden that could in the long run help my soil and my plants.
Yes, I know I should have a worm bin. But I haven't figured out a place to do that. My kitchen is tiny. My basement is four flights of stairs down, and my experience of keeping worms there was that I forgot all about them and they died. It's the same reason that I have learned to start seeds in the guest room--there's lots more space in the basement, but it's a remote outer province, like Siberia, that slips my mind unless I'm doing laundry. Nothing that requires my attention will survive down there.
So from December to roughly March I must steel myself to send apple cores, banana peels, coffee grounds, strange organisms found in the depths of the crisper and other yummy microorganism fodder off to the Dumpster.
I use all the plant matter I can. I leave most of my leaves where they fall as mulch. I collect all the leaves from the paths and the lawn, and as much as I can reach from my neighbors' yards. Nothing that might decay escapes the compost bin during the growing season. But winter in Chicago sends a lot of things into hiding, including the microbes, fungi, arthropods and insects that make the compost magic. They die off or hunker down until it's warm enough for them to work.
One of the things I have high hopes for is the change in law that makes commercial food composting legal in Illinois. We're a long way from implementation, but someday, I hope, food scraps will be collected from homes, supermarkets and restaurants for commercial composting. Those operations use huge, long piles called windrows that are regularly turned with front-loaders, and they get hot enough to keep the bugs and critters working all winter long. So if that ever happens, I'll have something constructive to do with a banana peel, even in the middle of winter.
Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .
All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.
It's the fact that yesterday I had to put a banana peel in the garbage.
This is a big, dark day for me every year: The day when all the compost bins are not only full to the brim but frozen solid, and even the 5-gallon bucket that is my way station to the bins is a chock-full block of ice (well, icy vegetable scraps and coffee grounds). So there I was, standing with a banana peel in my hand, and no place to compost it until spring.
It just pains me. Perfectly good biomass that's going to go to a landfill. I am miserly with biomass. I don't want anything leaving my garden that could in the long run help my soil and my plants.
Yes, I know I should have a worm bin. But I haven't figured out a place to do that. My kitchen is tiny. My basement is four flights of stairs down, and my experience of keeping worms there was that I forgot all about them and they died. It's the same reason that I have learned to start seeds in the guest room--there's lots more space in the basement, but it's a remote outer province, like Siberia, that slips my mind unless I'm doing laundry. Nothing that requires my attention will survive down there.
So from December to roughly March I must steel myself to send apple cores, banana peels, coffee grounds, strange organisms found in the depths of the crisper and other yummy microorganism fodder off to the Dumpster.
I use all the plant matter I can. I leave most of my leaves where they fall as mulch. I collect all the leaves from the paths and the lawn, and as much as I can reach from my neighbors' yards. Nothing that might decay escapes the compost bin during the growing season. But winter in Chicago sends a lot of things into hiding, including the microbes, fungi, arthropods and insects that make the compost magic. They die off or hunker down until it's warm enough for them to work.
One of the things I have high hopes for is the change in law that makes commercial food composting legal in Illinois. We're a long way from implementation, but someday, I hope, food scraps will be collected from homes, supermarkets and restaurants for commercial composting. Those operations use huge, long piles called windrows that are regularly turned with front-loaders, and they get hot enough to keep the bugs and critters working all winter long. So if that ever happens, I'll have something constructive to do with a banana peel, even in the middle of winter.
Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .
All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.
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