That's the way it looks from here

I was awake this morning at 6 a.m. to hear Morning Edition and see whether Irwin Gratz and Lou McNally would be more specific regarding the north/south and midcoast/downeast boundaries. I heard no evidence that Lou McNally had been told of my concerns; the boundary between north and south was as vague as ever. Irwin Gratz used a different terminology--"the far north" and "the south." This seemed an improvement; "the far north" would begin around, say, Millinocket. But when Lou McNally signed off on his forecast, he did so as he usually does: "And that's the way it looks from here." Somehow I'd forgotten that yesterday when I was writing about his subject position, as the post-structuralists would say. It is a telling phrase in more ways than one.

I had particularly liked this way he signed off, because it suggested a degree of modesty--he wasn't claiming absolute authority for his forecast, just saying that this was how it looked to him from where he stood at the time, implying that it might be different from another standpoint. Beyond modesty, it was also the way we ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and cultural anthropologists were going about stating our own viewpoints when we described and represented other people making music or engaged in whatever social activities we were interpreting at the time. It used to be that those in our profession claimed full, not limited, authority--to take another example from the news, Walter Cronkite's famous signoff, "And that's the way it is." Compare that with "And that's the way it looks from here." Cronkite's newscasts ceased when he resigned, and it was also at about that time that a revolution was taking place among those of us who did fieldwork research and wrote ethnographies. We realized we were not reporters discovering objective reality but authors engaged in constructing (with the help of those we were observing and speaking with) the reality that we represented. Our limited viewpoints could claim only limited authority, and Lou McNally's phrase summed it up nicely: "And that's the way it looks from here."

From where was Lou McNally looking when he gave the weather forecasts for the state of Maine on Morning Edition, then? As I wrote in my last post, I'd thought he was looking at the computer in the Maine Public Radio studio in Portland, poking his head out the window from time to time to do a reality check. Then I'd heard rumors he'd gone out of state and was giving the forecasts remotely. When I finally checked into it, I heard directly from a source at Maine Public Radio that he was broadcasting from Florida, where he was teaching. His signoff phrase got me looking further into it: where in Florida? Disneyland? Almost; it turns out that he is now teaching meteorology at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in Daytona Beach, Florida. That is where "here" is when he signs off: the way the weather in Maine looks from Daytona Beach, Florida.

And this raises all kinds of interesting questions. No doubt he is looking at computer charts there at his Aeronautical University, and they are probably the same charts he would get if he were in the state of Maine--maybe even better. And so in that sense it doesn't matter if he is "here" or "there." And yet, when he pokes his head out the window he sees, what? Daytona Beach. Perhaps it is springtime when the high school and especially the college students make their pilgrimages to Daytona Beach--would the youth partying on the sandy beaches and in town affect his moods? Does "partly cloudy" in Maine turn into "partly sunny" in Florida because of the difference in climate? 

I'm only half joking. One way of thinking about science is that it is independent of one's position; the laws of gravity are the same in Singapore and they are in London. This way of thinking results in claims of absolute authority. We know that the mathematical equations describing the pull of gravity are the same everywhere in the visible world. But the kind of science, or humanistic social science that I do, the kind that calls for an authority limited by one's subject position, results in "And that's the way it looks from here." Yet, this signoff is no longer appropriate for Lou McNally. By his presence in Florida, he is claiming the kind of scientific authority that contends it doesn't matter whether you look from Portland, Maine or Daytona Beach, Florida--the most accurate weather forecast for the state of Maine will be the same no matter where one stands. And indeed, the Maine Public Radio source said as much: the station had not noticed that his forecasts from Florida were any less accurate than those made by in-state forecasters. 

I will finish up by recalling an incident that was related to me by a doctoral candidate at Brown some twenty years ago, Franziska von Rosen, who was my dissertation advisee and was working with what we call in the US Native Americans but those who in Canada (where Franziska was doing her fieldwork) are called First Nations Peoples. If I recall correctly, Franziska had been present at a gathering of tribal elders representing several Canadian tribes, where they were discussing something important. It was not clear that they would agree. There was some concern about this among them. How would they reach consensus? Each wise elder in turn gave his or her opinion. And, characteristically, each would begin by saying, "This is the way it looks to me from here," and then they would explain what "here" was--who they were, whom they represented, where they were all rooted, and what experience brought them to that view. Franziska said that the others in the group approved of this way of speaking. If instead the elders had said, "This is the way it is," no one would have believed them. And so by claiming limited authority the tribal elders were granted a great deal of authority, whereas if they had claimed to know, the others would have granted them no authority at all.

Grounded forecasts

For many years, Maine residents listening to the National Public Radio program "Morning Edition" with local host Irwin Gratz have had their weather forecasts from meteorologist Lou McNally, a friendly and knowledgeable fellow with a delivery that empathizes with us when the weather is going to be bad and celebrates when it will be good. He wishes us well in our weekend activities in fair weather, and commiserates with the summer tourists when it appears that their hard-earned vacations are going to be plagued with a week of foul weather. 


Imagine my surprise and disappointment when I heard the rumor that our friendly weatherman lived out of state. How could that be so, when his forecasts were so empathetic? I had envisioned him inside the Portland, Maine radio studio, poking his head out the window to give his forecasts a reality check. For some years I dismissed this rumor out of hand, thinking that it must be sour grapes planted by rival meteorologists to oust this genial fellow from his well-deserved post at Maine Public Radio. 

But gradually my suspicion got the better of me. For one thing, his forecasts seemed to lose their specificity. Even when he said things like "we're going to have to put up with a new weather pattern for a while," or "we're going to experience a back-door cold front with some rain," his knowledge of the state's geography seemed to become more vague. "Cold with up to three inches of precipitation in the North," he would say, without telling us just what line demarcated the North from the South. Was it a line from Bar Harbor to Rangeley? Calais to Skowhegan? "Rain will linger this evening downeast," but where did the mid-coast end and downeast begin? Was it Camden? Deer Isle? Mt. Desert Island? Inquiring minds began to get restless. Besides, I'd noticed that his reports were coming in on a remote connection, probably a cell phone--the signal was not very clear, and sometimes was unreliable--and this was consistent with those rumors.


And so the other day I gave in. I emailed the radio station and asked them where was the north/south demarcation, where was the mid-coast/downeast line, and oh by the way, I'd heard that Lou McNally didn't give his weather forecasts from the state of Maine; was that really true? The next day I got an email reply from a very nice person at the station. He would research the boundary lines with the weather forecasters, and yes, it was true that Lou McNally was out of state. Here is what he wrote: "Lou McNally is indeed based in Florida where he teaches meteorology. Many listeners over the years have enjoyed Lou's presentations when he was living here in Maine, and have asked that he continue with MPBN on a consultant basis. Although his forecasts are presented remotely, we have found that his accuracy rivals local forecasters."


Indeed, it probably does. Forecasts are done by computers these days, not by poking one's head out the window and looking at cloud formations. (You who are reading this will immediately think of those times when the weather forecaster should have looked out the window to see that it was raining despite the report of sunny conditions.) And so I asked myself why did I find myself resisting those rumors, and why am I disappointed that our kindly weatherman broadcasts our Maine forecasts from Florida?


I think it's because he's no longer one of us, and not experiencing the weather he forecasts. He pretends to be among the "We" when telling us "we're" going to have to face that back-door cold front as it spins in from the ocean, but he is not--he is in (mostly) sunny Florida when the nor'easters blow in their gale winds and rain or snowstorms into the state of Maine. Not that I envy him his location; I'd rather be in Maine. But that's the point: he's not. There's something about "being there," that in-person witnessing, that convinces through  grounded experience. We usually call this "authenticity." When NPR does a story about the state of Maine, they send a reporter here or they rely on one of the in-state public radio reporters who are attached to the prize-winning, public radio state news show, Maine Things Considered, broadcast daily in the half-hour starting at 5:30 p.m. In this age of virtuality, where communities are formed over the Internet, where people become rock musicians by playing virtual instruments on their computers (Rock Band) and even experience (virtually) what it is like to be a rock star, there is something about the news and weather that imposes a need for the real and the authentic, despite the skepticism of an age that scarcely believes in the possibility of these concepts anymore. 

As a postscript, this morning I had a very kind email from Irwin Gratz, who as I wrote above is the local host of Morning Edition. He didn't have to write, but he did, noting that in the forecast updates that he gives, he's got a certain geography in mind. Here is what he wrote: "Generally, when I'm doing a forecast I use Midcoast for locations from Brunswick to Camden, Downeast to refer to roughly Bar Harbor eastward.  But, when I can I'll try to use town names to draw a clearer map (talking about heavy snow on a line from Brunswick to Augusta headed east, or rain falling south of Portland).  I know Lou [McNally] often uses major roadways as markers, which can be useful."


All well and good, except that there's quite a lot of territory between the end of Irwin Gratz's Midcoast (Camden) and the start of his Downeast (Bar Harbor) -- I make it a two hour drive along federal Route 1 and then state route 3, to be precise, although by boat the distance (if not the time) is considerably less. (I should put a map here, but anyone can google around and find these places easily enough if they want to visualize them.) And it is from this region that my "apples from the island" originate. I am here, both literally and virtually. I can (and did) assure him that we have real weather here as well. My coastal region is usually termed East Penobscot Bay, but that's quite a mouthful for a weather forecaster. Hmm. It will be interesting to monitor future developments. It's possible I will get an email from Lou McNally. And I can't wait to hear tomorrow morning's forecast!

 

A deer hunter in the woods

Yesterday on my noon-ish walk in the woods back of the house I came upon a hunter with a shotgun who was after deer. Although I’ve posted the land it is to discourage people from away from hunting here; I’m happy to let the locals do it as long as they respect the land and the people and take care not to shoot in the direction of houses or when people are out and about nearby. For several years this policy has worked well. This hunter was someone I hadn’t seen before, so I inquired where he was from and learned that he lived in a house a couple of miles away—not quite a neighbor, but on the island.

By the end of our conversation we were closer to being neighbors. I learned some interesting things from him. He made his living, as so many around here do, from lobster fishing. This past year was a very good year for the fisherman as there were plenty of lobsters around, which he confirmed. He sets out 800 traps and works about 200 per day. The number of lobsters has been higher than normal for several years, which is a mystery to most around here. He thinks it’s because the fishermen are “feeding” them. I asked him what he meant, and he said it was because so often the fisherman had to throw the lobsters caught in the traps back into the ocean because they were too small, or they were “eggers” (females with eggs). The young ones kept eating the mackerel bait and getting caught again and again after being thrown back. This is the “feeding” that he meant. Of course once they get to be legal size they are not returned to the ocean. Instead, their claws are pegged and they are brought ashore, sold to one of the local lobster co-ops, and then distributed to markets and restaurants hereabouts and all over the world.

He said he’d had it hard growing up; his mother had died when the oldest child was 15, and he and his nine brothers and sisters were raised the rest of the way by his father and his father’s parents. His own daughter was at the University of Maine now, studying to be a doctor; she wanted to be a neurosurgeon and was doing well in her pre-med studies. Lobster fishermen can make a good living in a good year, like this year, but not enough over all to pay for college and medical school—she will need scholarships and is already on some, he said.

We parted and wished each other well. He continued his search for bucks—there are plenty of does and fawns around, but very few bucks—and I continued on my way. I’d asked if he’d been out at dusk or dawn in season—it was almost the end of the month when you can take deer with a gun legally hereabouts—and he said he had but that, again, all he’d seen were does.

Cider Winemaking

I learned cider winemaking from my Tufts University colleague Dan Dennett, who embarked on a home cider winemaking operation in the early 1970s, or possibly a few years earlier in the late 1960s. He and two of his friends, Tony Newcomb (a musicologist at the University of California, Berkeley) and Barry Lydgate (a professor of French teaching at Wellesley College) investigated the process, hoping to make cider wine in the Normandy style. In the mid-1970s my family and I joined them in their annual cider picking and pressing, usually held at Dan's summer home in East Penobscot Bay over Columbus Day weekend, and then on "bottling day" in the spring, held at Dan's home in Massachusetts. This kept up for about ten years until I bought an old, two-barrel cider press of my own in the mid-1980s, and started doing a similar picking and pressing with friends here on the island, something that I've kept up now most years since then. I used to invite students from Brown's old-time string band to come and enjoy a weekend in Maine, helping with the picking and pressing, while we played music at night. Nowadays it's local friends and neighbors who help out, and the scale is smaller. Last weekend we pressed a little more than ten gallons, enough to fill two carboys with cider to make wine and then a few gallon jugs for cider drinking immediately.

I'm not knowledgeable about Normandy cider winemaking, but I did watch Dan and the others make their cider wine and learned to do it pretty much as they did, except that I got some 19th century books on the subject of cider winemaking and made some small changes to the procedure. In this blog entry I will summarize the way I've made cider wine for 25+ years now, a wine which others seem to think is very tasty and refreshing. In taste tests it beat a commercial variety made and sold in this area, but my cider wine is not for sale. It's for sharing, first with the friends and neighbors who help with the picking and pressing, and then on social occasions when people visit or when a visit from me would be livened up with some "fotched-on" cider wine. Often I will bring three bottles, each from a different vintage, for like wine from grapes, the wine tastes different from one year to the next.

The first part of the procedure is the apple picking. I like a blend of sweet and juicy apples with tart apples. Over the years I've identified certain trees on this property that produce excellent apples for this blend, and I've also planted some that do. Most of these are grafted trees, which means they are (or once were) known varieties. Among those I do know are Calville Blanc, Kingston Black (an English cider apple), Prima, Liberty, Winesap, Rhode Island Greening and Shiawassee. The first five are trees I planted here; the last two were here when I bought the place in 1979, planted nearly 100 years ago. The Shiawassee is a tentative identification; it may also be a Duchess of Oldenberg. In some years other varieties are added to the mix: Milding is the only known variety, but there are others. Some of the trees may even be "volunteers," non-grafted varieties that grew from seed but produced remarkably good apples. I used to include a crab apple but not for some years. The idea of the blend is to get a good balance of sweet and juicy with tart and acidic. Sweetness will increase the alcoholic content and make for a stronger fermentation; tartness adds flavor, but of course one doesn't want it too tart.

When I started out in the 1980s I tasted each tree's apples and used those that tasted to me like they would make good wine. Some were sweet and some tart but all had plenty of good flavor. That is, they were all full-flavored and none were so tart they puckered my mouth. Those were my criteria then, and so I tried to make a balance, about half sweet and half tart. Today there are books with advice on which apples to grow and in which proportions to blend. But because I was able to produce excellent cider wine by relying on my tastebuds instead of science, I've continued to do so. I should probably add that my father's father was a wine taster by profession, so I come by my tastebuds honestly. Yours may differ and you may want to rely on the suggestions of the books and websites, but I suggest you start off using your tastebuds.

Some of these recent books on cider wine making advise waiting a couple of weeks between picking and pressing. During this period the apples "sweat," become softer and easier to press, and their flavor supposedly concentrates for a better cider. I think this is nonsense. The best cider apple, like the best eating apple or cooking apple, is the freshest apple. Besides, if you have a crew picking apples, why not continue along with the pressing so you have something to show, and drink, for your labor, right then and there?

It's true that in some years I've picked apples and let them wait a couple of weeks before pressing them. When I did so it was because the pressing was going to be later in the season and I needed to pick a particular tree because the apples were ripe before the pressing time, and falling to the ground, or because strong winds were forecast which would blow them down. They sweated away and softened up in their crates waiting for the pressing, and when all was done the cider wine that came of it was do different from years past on that account.   

When it comes time for the apple pressing, I usually alternate a bushel of one sweet variety with a bushel of a tart variety, and then a bushel of a different sweet one, then a different tart one, and so forth. This year the Shiawassee (somewhat tart though juicy, with a slight pear-like aroma) outnumbered the other apples, so the wine will taste more of that than any other. In different years other varieties, particularly Prima and Rhode Island Greening, have been most abundant, and of course the taste of the wine relects those differences.

The apples are not picked by hand, except for the low-hanging ones. Most are shaken down from the trees, either by people climbing them or by the use of a pole pruner hooked over the limbs and moved smartly up and down. As there usually are deer droppings (scat) below the trees, for the deer do like to eat the ones that the wind blows down (windfalls), so we cover the ground with tarpaulins and shake the apples so they fall atop the tarps. Bushel baskets are filled, each with a single variety, and then transported back to the barn where they are washed before the pressing.

The old press--I will try to get a photo or drawing of it in here at some point--is the kind displayed in the old turn-of-the-20th century Sears catalogs, with a grinder mounted above a bushel barrel one one side, and a screw pressing mechanism mounted above a bushel barrel on the other. The barrels have no tops, only sides; and the staves have vertical space between them. There is no bottom to the barrels either; they rest on platforms that move back and forth and in and out of the base of the press. The grinder wheel is turned by hand, with some effort, and after a few minutes a bushel of ground up apples has fallen into the half barrel underneath. This half barrel is tamped down and then pushed on its platform underneath the screw press, the press is screwed down, the cider juice flows out and goes through the slats in the platform to the wooden base of the press, where it slides down and off the press into a plastic or metal container of about a gallon, atop which a nylon mesh strainer rests.

As the cider is being pressed out of the ground apples by the screw mechanism on one side of the press, more apples are being ground into the half barrel on the other side. When the juice has stopped flowing, the screw comes back up, the half barrel now filled with apple "pomace" is taken away and the pomace dumped in the compost pile, while the next half barrel of ground apples is slid under the screw press. And this continues for a few hours, or more, depending on how many apples will be pressed and how much cider made.

The cider itself--it is of course now cider, not wine, because it hasn't fermented--gets poured from the gallon containers, when these are filled, into five-gallon glass "carboys" or jugs, which look very much like the jugs used for office water coolers. These carboys are then covered with simple plastic devices called fermentation locks, which permit the carbon dioxide (a product of the fermentation) to exit from the carboy, without allowing air into the carboy, where it would spoil the cider for wine and turn it to vinegar. Then they are moved into the cellar where they sit for a few days and settle.

Usually, as this year, there is cider left over for drinking. Put into containers such as washed-out plastic jugs that once held fruit juice, these go into the refrigerator and they, too, begin fermenting to "hard cider" which can be tasted after a few days. If too much air gets into the containers the cider will also begin to turn to vinegar.

At this point many cider winemakers add yeast and most add sugar. I do not add yeast, thinking that the natural yeast in the apples is sufficient for the fermentation, and in fact it has never not been. But I do add sugar, which will bring the wine to a sufficient alcoholic content to prevent spoilage once it is bottled. There are books--including the 19th century cider winemaking book that I consult--and online websites that will tell you how much sugar to put in for a certain alcohol content at the finish. Here I do follow science, but someone who doesn't want to consult the books might work with a ballpark figure of one pound of sugar per gallon of cider. The scientific amount depends on the specific gravity of your cider at this point in time, when it just begins to ferment; and to measure the specific gravity one needs a hygrometer, the same instrument that was used to test automobile batteries back in the day, though of course it would not be safe to use an instrument that has been used for batteries; nor is such a hygrometer scaled properly for this purpose. Instead, appropriate hygrometers may be purchased relatively inexpensively on line and in winemaking shops for this purpose. Occasionally one finds old ones in antiques shops, and often the owners do not know what they are. This is really the only scientific measurement that I take and the only time I feel more like a scientist in a laboratory than an artist blending apples for wine.

I put the sugar into the cider this way. I remove and then heat (but not to a boil) about one gallon of cider from each carboy, then add the appropriate amount of sugar for five gallons of cider to that one gallon, and mix so that all dissolves, and pour the mixture back into the carboy. Always there is some left over, so the best way is to remove a half gallon more cider per carboy than is needed, reserve this, and after the mixture of cider and sugar is poured back into the carboy add a bit of the reserve to bring the cider lever back up to the neck of the carboy, but not into the neck, as the mixture expands when fermenting.

And then I just leave the carboys in the cellar to ferment. The best fermenting temperature is slightly above fifty degrees Fahrenheit, I've found, and this is a temperature that the cellar keeps from mid-October when the pressing is completed, until late December when in the coldest weather it goes below fifty and fermentation more or less stops. In the spring when the temperature warms back to fifty the fermentation begins again. At this point some cider winemakers "rack" their wine, siphoning the liquid into other empty carboys, while letting the dregs stay at the bottom of the carboy. I do this in some years; most often I do not. At any rate, when the fermentation ceases while the temperature is above fifty--this is easily told because the cider wine stops making its small bubbles that rise to the top--then it is time either to age the cider in an oak cask, or to bottle it straightaway. I always age it in five gallon oak casks, which means siphoning it into rinsed-out casks, and after a few months in the cask I siphon it into used and cleaned and rinsed wine bottles and cork it.

The oak casks used for aging may be found in antiques shops but they usually are moldy and bad for this process. New ones can be purchased from winemaking supply houses, and good old ones may be found in people's homes, as long as they have kept them clean (sodium bisuplphite works as a wash, and then they must be rinsed and kept filled with water, whenever not filled with wine, so that they don't mold or dry out).

In all it takes about nine months to a year to make a good cider wine from apples. Once mine is siphoned from the casks into bottles and corked, I affix a little label that I made on the computer, printed out and pasted on the outside of the bottle, noting the vintage year. Then the bottles are placed on their sides and left for a few months. In some years they have almost finished fermenting, but not quite; they finish it up in the bottle making some champagne-like fizz in the cider wine as it bubbles when poured into the glass. It's possible to add a tiny bit of sugar to each bottle to make this happen, also. Or some sugar can be added to the mixture in the casks, but this is not as effective. But this procedure risks building up too much pressure inside the bottle, with the result that the cork is blown off after a few days, weeks, or months, and the cider spoils. Wires can be used to hold the corks in, if desired. After a few months the "bottle sickness," as it is called (in reference to a certain closed-in and musty taste of the cider wine) has departed, and the wine is ready to drink. It will keep for several years, sometimes improving in the bottle, sometimes not. The differences in the tastes from one year to the next are larger than in wine made from grapes. Some years the wine is very dry, others not so dry. Some years it is a bit sweeter, like a dessert of sipping wine; in others not so sweet.

That is how I've made cider wine for more than two decades now, and I'm well satisfied with it. It does take a few days of work, but the end is certainly worth the energy expended when one enjoys the wine among friends.

Skunk Cabbages Reborn in October

     Readers of this blog will recall that this year I've been following the growth and decay of the skunk cabbages in the woods behind my house on the island. I've posted photos and updates throughout the growing season, and I've consulted botany books to learn about its lifecycle. My previous entry on the skunk cabbages showed them on Sept. 3 with the leaves in an advanced state of decay or dissolution, and I assumed that the next entry would show a photo of the swampy area without a trace of them. When I went out there a few days ago my first sight was, indeed, of a swampy area with no trace of the skunk cabbage leaves that were decaying and dissolving a month earlier:

      

     But as I got closer in, I saw something that surprised me. Look at the lower part of the photo above, in the center. The plants are sending up spathes as they had in the early springtime. After photographing these (see below), I wondered whether their lifecycle had become confused by the recent rains and warm weather, so I searched the Internet to see if I could learn more about it. Was this an unusual case, an early skunk cabbage resurrection? 

     A scientist named Craig Holdrege has made a study of the skunk cabbage, and written about its lifecyle; but his essay does not mention this phenomenon. Mr. Holdrege is a professor and head of The Nature Institute, in upstate New York, so I emailed him on the chance that he might be willing to take the time to let me know what I was seeing, and what I was not seeing. I sent him this photo of the spathes with the new growth. He kindly replied the next day, and here is part of what he wrote: "Not by any means all, but some skunk cabbage plants let the tips of the buds emerge in late summer and they then stay dormant over the winter. I observe this every year in the area that I often go to.  Many people don't notice this because they don't tend to look for skunk cabbage in the late summer.  You're the second person who has written about this to me in the last couple of days... Why some partially emerge and others don't? I have no idea. In any case I see that the aboveground buds open and develop fine in the following spring." I will watch them over the winter and into the spring.

Heirloom apples and vegetables are in fashion now; should you grow them?

    Heirloom seeds and heirloom apples are in this year. The popular press is full of articles on them. National Public Radio’s Morning Edition did a story on saving seeds and growing heirloom (non-hybrid) vegetables only yesterday. It means something when public culture constructs memory in usable form. But planting heirloom seeds and apples isn’t as easy as planting contemporary varieties, and there’s something naive about the public press making it seem so.

    I should know; I’ve been growing them for thirty years. What I’ve found out about it may be of interest to anyone embarking on such an adventure today. I wouldn’t say don’t do it, but I’d say know what you are doing and be prepared for more failure than success.

    I started growing heirloom seeds and apples, and saving heirloom seeds, three decades ago for the same reasons that are advanced today; one, to help maintain diversity among the available varieties; two, because I read that most contemporary varieties are bred and grown for commercial use, not home use, with the result that they are bred for shipping qualities and appearance—that is, to appeal in the market—rather than primarily for taste. Growing heirloom varieties would not only maintain diversity, a good thing for sustainability in the face of disturbance, but the resulting fruits and vegetables would taste better, I thought. They would have "that old-fashioned [fill in the vegetable or fruit] flavor,” in other words.

    In that period, what have I learned about growing heirloom apples? Aside from the need to find varieties that will do well in one’s own climate, and micro-climate (ask your neighbors), in general the old varieties are not as resistant to pests and disease as the newer ones bred to be disease resistant. With a few notable exceptions such as Baldwin (originally a commercial apple, by the way) and Duchess of Oldenberg, around here most of the heirloom apple varieties require much more care than the newer, disease resistant ones; and they are less vigorous. So if you want to plant that Porter or Newtown Pippin or Jefferson’s favorite, the Esopus Spitzenberg, be prepared to keep them in intensive care, which means spraying several times each growing year, even if you are an organic orchardist (for you will use organic sprays). Check to make sure the varieties you want to plant are hardy and grow well in your area.

     And there is more, much more: deer, apple tree borers, and mice will destroy your young trees, and you will be "some sorry" (as the old timers say around here). Be prepared to keep the critters away; in this area deer love to browse (eat) the buds and branches of apple trees. The only reliable deterrent is a fence eight feet high. There are sprays sold for this purpose but they do not work. The apple tree borer is a beetle that eats its way into the trunk of the young tree a few inches above the ground; they can be deterred with fine wire mesh but the best course of action is to be vigilant and when you see evidence of their damage--the orange sawdust, called frass, at the base of the trunk--take a heavy paper clip, straighten it out, and dig it into the trunk to find and kill the borers. This poking and carving will do less damage to your young tree than the borers. And then in the wintertime, wrap the trunks with a plastic designed for the purpose, to about a foot above the snow line, to keep the mice from eating the bark and girdling and killing the tree. Otherwise they may not do well at all. Some of the old apple varieties I’ve planted do taste very good—Golden Russet is a fine example—but the fact is that after 30 years the newer varieties have done much better and oh, they taste very good also.

     Around here the modern, disease-resistant Prima and Liberty are excellent, and the Anoka (a modern Japanese apple) is exquisite. Now it’s difficult to find these disease resistant apples in the supermarket—they are chiefly for home use, though occasionally one finds them at a food co-op—but those are the ones I would recommend anyone starting a home orchard to consider, along with other disease resistant/immune varieties perhaps better suited to your area, along with the heirloom varieties you hope to taste after some years of intensive care, when your trees begin to bear. After ten years of attention you may find that the heirlooms succeed in all the ways you’d hoped; but if you are successful with those you will find that the disease-resistant ones are succeeding in those same ways, and with less effort in the spraying. I used to spray organically several times per season but after ten years when the trees that were going to grow well were doing so, I stopped spraying altogether. The disease resistant apples are just as well off, it seems, without spray; and that includes the disease resistant heirlooms as well. The others--they are not doing as well but I have enough and am satisfied with those that are.

     The best tasting variety is the one just picked ripe off the tree, heirloom or not. Fresh-picked, sound, ripe apples are delicious. Yes, the different varieties taste different, but they are all good. Well, except for the Ben Davis. As I blogged earlier, about 100 years ago when the Ben Davis was popular as a market apple, someone did a blindfold taste test in which people were asked to taste a Ben Davis and a ball of sawdust. Most people could not tell the difference. Poor Ben. Imagine having your name associated with this apple.

     And if you've never eaten a potato fresh dug (and cooked), you've not tasted how good potatoes can be, either.

    And what have I learned about growing heirloom vegetables from seed? Here the story is different. There are many very good heirloom vegetable seeds available from Seed Savers Exchange as well as in catalogs such as Fedco and Johnny’s Selected Seeds. Their descriptions are, as a rule, accurate. I’ve experimented with these to find the best for my microclimate, and it turned out that many of the best were the older heirlooms. A prime example is the Levi Robinson snap bean. On the other hand, heirloom tomatoes, the most popular kind of heirloom vegetable today, have been variable here, succeeding in some years but not most. Of course, this is scarcely the tomato-growing capital of the North American continent, but one would think that some of the old varieties of tomatoes would do better here than the modern ones simply because there are so many old ones out there. 

     One year I experimented and grew from seed every old variety that I could find information about that had been planted in Maine in the first quarter of the 20th century, about 25 in all. I grew them out in an experimental garden. Most did not grow well; some did. Of those that did grow well, none of them tasted as good as the varieties (from away) that I settled on over the years, for paste and slicing tomatoes. But I don’t regret the experiment. It might have worked for me, and it might work for you. Different varieties do better in different climates and microclimates, and in different years. It was some time before I realized I needed to find varieties resistant to late blight, for example, if I wanted to harvest tomatoes after the end of August. Once realizing this, I looked for this characteristic. Most tomatoes don’t have it. Some of the newer ones, like Defiant, do. Defiant is an interesting case: it’s very tasty, even has that “old tomato flavor”; it’s sufficiently vigorous here, nicely shaped, productive, and of course resistant to late blight. 

     Is Defiant going to be the perfect tomato for me? No, the skin is thick and tough, suggesting it was bred for commercial use, not home use. Thirty or even twenty years ago, on learning that a variety was bred for the supermarket, I’d have stayed away from it, not only on principle but because I believed that heirlooms would always be superior. The Defiant tomato has been the exception and it might even change my mind. Let’s see how it does next year, though.

Harvest end; apples to come

Getting in what's left of the dry beans completes the harvest for the year, with the exception of some lettuce and greens seedlings that will grow till the first freeze and then with any luck overwinter under agribon cloth. The deer that began getting into the garden by the old store in August ate most but not all of the dry beans, leaving (for reasons unknown) about three quarters of the Light Red Kidney and one quarter of the Jacob's Cattle Gasless. The others, including those planted just to grow out and produce new seed, were almost total losses. Next week I will comb through the remaining plants to see if I can salvage any of them for seed next year. Of the other crops, the summer squash (Gentry) were the best I'd ever had, prolific and delicious; the cucumbers (General Lee) as good as ever; the tomatoes a success (both the Bellstar paste and the four varieties of eating tomatoes--Sungold, Jetstar, Red Short Vine (Defiant), and Cosmonaut Volkov, all prolific and excellent tasting (the Jetstar a little less so), and all resisting the late blight. Defiant had a fine old-fashioned, acidic tomato taste; its only defect is thick skin. Potatoes had an average year, cut back by the two weeks without rain at the end of July. Cabbages and broccoli fared well; deer damaged the brussels sprouts; beets, lettuce, mustard, parsley, spinach, snap beans, and all other crops except swiss chard did well. Next year I will plant the beans in the garden down toward the Scotts' house, which was growing out to cover crops (buckwheat) this year, finished off with oats to hold the soil. It is a good apple year, and many of the trees are bearing better than ever--the Baldwin and Golden Russet planted 20 years ago especially. Looking forward to getting together with friends this month for picking apples and pressing the cider.

The skunk cabbage beside the road in the woods behind the house has all but vanished. On September 3, I took this photograph of the dying cabbages there.

Going back this week, few traces remained. Yet although they look frostbitten here, there has not been a frost. The first frost may come any time in October, and may even hold off until November.

American classics 1: Crevecoeur

One of the classics of early American literature, Letters from an American Farmer, by Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, turned up in an anthology I was reading the other day. I hadn't looked carefully at this since my days in graduate school more than forty years ago, so I was curious to see if he had anything to say of interest here. Crèvecoeur, it will be recalled, was born in France, educated in England, and migrated to the United States and took up farming in New York state in 1765. His writing was published six years after the American Revolution and, because he addressed the question "What is an American?" and used the "melting pot" metaphor to describe this "new man," his work was regarded as important. His notion of America as chiefly a land of farmers antedated Jefferson's better-known celebration of the so-called yeoman farmer, or farmer-citizen, drawing on the same pastoral ideals that freehold farmers (not peasants), living industrious lives close to nature, would constitute a new class and a new nation. 

Looking at Crèvecoeur more critically today, I find an early expression of the American exceptionalism that became part of the American myth and which still informs and justifies America's actions at home and abroad, despite (and ignoring other problems with Crèvecoeur's formulation) the fact that we have not been a nation of farmers for more than a century. One could go on about this, but I was reading Crèvecoeur to learn whether he said anything about farming itself, and came upon this: "Men are like plants; the goodness and flavor of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow." Whether or not people are like plants, the goodness and flavor of the fruit of plants does proceed from the particular soil and exposition in which they grow. This summer, that "exposition" included late deer intrusions which have taken their toll, chiefly on the dry beans; of these, the Light Red Kidney seem to have been earlier than the rest and so when the deer sampled them they were, possibly, a little too dry. Therefore they have left most of that variety alone, whereas the rest of the dry beans are nearly a total loss. In past years the deer have eaten the entire bean plants; this year they are more picky and ate just the bean pods. In future years they may learn to shell out the beans.

Oh Deer

Two deer have gotten into the garden by the old store and feasted themselves on beans, cucumbers, summer squash, beet greens, and the tops of the brussels sprouts. Fortunately we’ve had a good harvest of snap beans, cukes, squash, and beet greens already; but a lot of damage was done to the dry beans, and without further preventative measures the deer will eat the tomatoes and eventually everything else. Beans are the major attractant, and what they eat first.

A deer incursion occurs every half dozen years or so now, as they jump the fence despite the usual measures meant to discourage them: a high fence, now nearly 8 feet high; hair bags and/or aluminum foil pie plates hung on strings at the top of the fence; growth around the perimeter of the fence; bright lights; and a radio left on to an all night talk station (neither conservative political talk nor sports talk has discouraged them this year). I have seen two deer jump the eight foot fence this year, jumping out when I scared them. One was a smallish doe with a short tail; the other a good sized buck. I do not keep a gun in the house and would not shoot them; I intend to discourage them further before they eat the remaining beans and all the tomatoes, along with some fall lettuce and the brussels sprouts. I put agribon cloth over the tomatoes a few days ago and so far that is helping; I will spray the beans with a deer repellent today and put agribon over them and hope for the best. Next year the fence may have to go even higher, and I will plant beans elsewhere.

A warbler, a hawk, and a mystery

    End of July and beginning of August the summer squash, snap beans, cucumbers, new potatoes, beets, and earliest tomatoes come in. The old greens have gone by and the new ones are growing very slowly. Dry beans are doing so well that the rows are filling out too close to one another and I’ll have to watch carefully for mildew. After a couple of weeks’ drought the normal rains picked up again. Apples are beginning to size up. Buckwheat cover crop is mowed and will be tilled in so that another cover crop can be planted around Sept. 1, likely oats.
    We’ve had the pleasure of the company of master birder Ralph Odell, and as I may have written here earlier, when we go out walking with him the birds seem to know they ought to show themselves. Marta and I had seen a highly unusual bird in the marsh near the ocean, with a white head and shoulders and bright, robin’s egg blue wings, about the size of a sandpiper. We asked Ralph to come along to see if he could draw the mystery bird closer, and he graciously accepted; but the bird didn’t show itself. Unfortunately I hadn’t brought my camera along the first and only time we saw this bird; only binoculars. If either Marta or I had seen it by ourselves, the other wouldn’t have believed it; but each of us was a witness to the other. Marta thought it may have been an escaped parrot. It was not as afraid as most birds are, though not it didn’t fly up to us for a handout either.

    We were some disappointed but then on the trail back from the ocean to the house a black-throated green warbler came to view us, and I got a nice picture of it, shown here to the left. The black-throated green is a summer visitor here, usually quite a few of them in the forest all around, with their unmistakeable five-syllable song: za-zu-zee-zee-zu or as I hear it, “I’m black-throated green.” But in all the years I’ve looked for one, until a few days ago I’d never seen one. Credit Ralph with bringing it into view.

    And then yesterday morning, while I was writing a book review for a scholarly publication, I looked out the window and saw a hawk perching on the hawthorn tree. I got my camera, changed lenses, and snuck around the porch, hoping that the bird hadn’t flown. When I poked my head around the side of the house, the hawk was still perched there, and so I got this single photo before it flew away. On viewing the photo, Ralph identified it as an immature broad-winged hawk.

These photos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Dry bean threshing

Today was warm and pleasant, with a good breeze coming off the ocean in the afternoon keeping the temperature in the low 80s (in the shade), and a perfect day to thresh last year's grown dry beans, now very thoroughly dried and hanging from twine stretched across the rafters on the roof of the barn. After getting the bunches of beans down, I threshed a few plants at a time by holding the stems and turning them upside down and banging them against the sides of a metal garbage can that I reserve for this purpose. It's an easy, suitable low tech way to thresh the half dozen to two dozen quarts of dry bush beans that get put in covered Mason jars each year, to go to chili, soup, and baked bean dishes, chiefly.

It's also a day to complete the year's records in terms of varieties, yield, and lessons learned for future years. After decades trying many varieties, I've settled on two staple varieties to grow each year: Jacob's Cattle and Light Red Kidney. These are reliable with many good qualities and overall better than any other varieties here. I like black bean soup, and so for a decade or so I've been growing Black Coco, which does well some years and not well in other years. The fourth variety I grew last year was an experiment, called Saturday Night Special.

In terms of warmth, rain, and harvest dates 2010 was an average year overall. According to the weather bureau, it was a little warmer than usual; rainfall was a little less than usual in the summer (but beginning in September, more than usual). My planting date for the beans was a good two weeks earlier than usual: May 24; but the ground was dry enough and warm enough to plant then in that unusually forward spring.

I planted a similar amount of Jacob's Cattle Gasless, Light Red Kidney, and Black Coco beans. Yield of these was in the ratio of 3 to 2 to 1; that is, 3 times as many Jacob's Cattle Beans as Black Coco, with Light Red Kidney in the middle. The yield differences had most to do with the relative earliness of the cattle beans, which I was able to harvest before the September rains; the others had not dried enough on the vine before the rains came, which caused some disease and lowered the yield. Earliness is therefore a plus, not because they will be killed by frost before they are ready (which is what happens with most crops where earliness is desirable) but because of the rain. When threshing the beans I look for pods that will break apart easily; here the kidney beans were best, the black beans next, and the cattle beans shattered a little less easily when banged against the insides of the metal can. Of all the beans I've grown over the years, the one with the best qualities for threshing is Red Mexican, a variety that also grows very well here; but it has two inferior qualities--one, it tends to send out vines, with the result that the plants entangle so that picking and drying is more difficult than with the other varieties that do not vine; and the texture of the bean when cooked is slightly grainy compared with the others. And so although I'm keeping Red Mexican going by planting a half row every few years from saved seed, it's not one that I'm currently using for an eating crop.

The experimental bean this year, Saturday Night Special, is described in the Fedco catalog as a bean that the legendary plant breeder Elwyn Meader developed at the University of New Hampshire agriculture extension program in the 1960s in response to a request for a pea bean (that is, a small bean) that would bake well and grow in the short season characteristic of most of New England. The request came from the B and M Company, one of the oldest commercial cookers and canners of baked beans, who were based in New England and who no doubt wanted to rely on regional growers. But, the Fedco description goes on to say, B and M lost interest when they were bought out in the late 1960s by the Underwood Company, and so the "Saturday Night Special" that Meader bred for B and M never was introduced to the public. Meader's son John preserved the variety, which had not been named, as "X-3," and somehow Fedco growers got ahold of the seed and for the last couple of years have made it available, calling it Saturday Night Special.

Fedco describes it as heavy yielding (up to 20 pods per plant), early, on sturdy plants, and with delicious pea beans. In the 1980s and 1990s I tried a few pea bean varieties here, such as Navy beans, but they were not reliable and seemed subject to more mold in the September rains than the best varieties, so eventually I gave up. But who could resist such a story, and description of the result? Not I, and so I planted an experimental row of Saturday Night Special on May 24, 2010; but the results were not as Fedco said they would, or should, be. I would describe them as light yielding, with about six to eight pods on very slender stemmed, weak, short plants, containing pea beans so tiny that six of them would fit on top of my thumbnail. They were early, to be sure, missing the September rains; but the yield was small. I imagine they may do very well in baking--we shall see. But if I grow them again, I think I will add a good deal of composted chicken manure to the rows before planting. Beans don't as a rule need much, if any, fertilizer; but it appears that these specially bred ones need an extra amount if they are to grow into the little giants that Fedco says they will.

The varieties that I'm growing out to keep the variety going this year are Hutterite, Montcalm Red Kidney, Maine Surprise, Red Mexican, and Dot Yellow Eye. Each has its good qualities. Thus far this year Maine Surprise is surprisingly vigorous, more so than any other variety. I'm growing all the beans this year in the garden by the old store, where the soil is a little better than it is in the usual spot, in the garden down the road to the Scotts house. So I expect a better yield.

The sad thing about threshing the beans and putting them up is that it's time for the oldest jars of beans, if any are left, to be disposed of. After about 3 years in jars they begin to get pretty dry and tough, and although they can be used, they don't taste as good or cook as evenly or well as younger beans--the younger, the better. So out went the beans in the jars from 2007, which was a very high-yielding year for beans here. The 2010 is now on the shelf, along with the 2008. 2009 was a very difficult year because of all the rain throughout the planting and growing season, and the result was a very small harvest. But 2011 is growing well--the beans have been in flower for a few days now and I expect a good yield; and next summer there will be more beans to put up in jars, while any remaining 2008 and 2009 will be disposed of.

Vegetables on July 4th

Today, the 4th of July holiday, I felt the turn to summer weather, more in the humidity than in the temperature. If the temperature was in the high 70s, the humidity was in the 80s. Some people celebrate the 4th with parades and fireworks; others think about 1776 and the American Revolution or the “war for independence” as it was called when I was a boy. I usually also think of vegetables on July 4th. It makes a bad pun out of a book that I read back about 1980 when I began gardening here on this island in Maine, called Gardening for Independence, by Mort Mather. Today was wet-shirt working weather, the kind that shortens the season for greens and broccoli, while the beans and tomatoes soak it up. It is time to show some of this year’s garden in photographs, and so instead of birds, apple blossoms, and wildflowers we have a few snapshots of domesticated crop vegetables, the kind I plant for “home use,” or eating. 

Potatoes from the market are all right in season, but one hasn’t tasted a potato unless it is fresh picked and cooked right from the garden; and the early potatoes are best. The plants are just beginning to blossom now; when the blossoms fall the small, new potatoes can be dug. In the three rows shown here, the ones on the right are Dark Red Norland and the ones on the left are Satina. In the middle, the front are the Norlands and there are about a half dozen Satina in the rear (not in the picture). The rows are about 25 feet long. The potatoes are in a separate garden, near the barn.

 

Next we are in the bean patch. Yeats had nine bean rows and I have ten, this year, each about 30 feet long. These are Jacob’s Cattle Gasless dry beans, after nearly a month in the ground. Jacob’s Cattle, or Trout, are a widely planted, New England heirloom dry bean. The name comes from the brown spots on the bean seeds, which I suppose look a little like spots on the sides of cattle. The “gasless” variety comes from a seed saver who bred the strain many years ago; it is offered without a guarantee and I got some via the Seed Savers Exchange about twenty years ago, and have kept the strain going. If you look closely you will see a marigold which discourages bean beetles and other pests. The most serious bean problems here are mold and anthracnose, which tend to arise from September rains.  

I’ve written about starting the tomato seedlings and planting them through IRT much; here they are pictured, altogether roughly 40 plants, about 25 for tomato puree and paste and salsa, and the others for fresh eating and experimentation--the experimental variety this year is "Red Short Vine" from Johnny's Selected Seeds. I do select and save bean seeds but not tomatoes. I don’t stake the tomatoes because the stakes (or pole beans or anything high in the garden) and high growing tomatoes attract the deer, who can jump the fence if they try hard enough and in some years they do. The deer don’t see the low tomatoes from a distance because of the grass that grows high around the edges of the fence. 

Next we are in the mustard and beet green patch; these are succession planted, and here are the first, beyond their prime for greens although the beets themselves if and when thinned will size up and taste good. The mustard patch is an experiment, a “braising mix” from Johnny’s, first planted May 17. It adds a real zing to salads. I have yet to do a stir fry with any of it. The stones that you see in these pictures are genuine and authentic New England garden stones, which are pushed up by the frost each year. I get rid of only the largest ones, figuring that if weeds can grow despite them, so can vegetables. Carrots suffer.

Now we are looking at the onions, spinach, and part of the shallot row behind the spinach. These I planted May 7th. Red Sails lettuce, planted last August, can be seen to the immediate right of the shallots. As I wrote earlier, it did not grow well in the fall and I just left it there over winter underneath Reemay cloth. When I uncovered it in April it was as I had left it, so I decided to see if it would grow, and it surprised me. It is time for a final harvest and freeze of the spinach as it will go to seed shortly. The last-August planted lettuce that you see here is amazingly non-bitter still, and about to go to seed as well. It was a combination of serendipity and a seat of the pants experiment.

Finally, we can see several vegetables in this last picture: broccoli, with the foreground leaves being eaten down by insects, and yet unless we get a real heat wave there will be a good harvest in a couple of weeks; lettuce, which is also succession planted with the oldest going to seed; brussels sprouts behind the broccoli, and cabbage behind some spinach that I planted last fall which is now going quite well to seed. I haven’t shown cucumbers or squash, but they are here. At this time of year it’s difficult to keep greens going in succession planting in the ground, so I’m going to try to plant them in flats and keep them cool if possible during the sprouting period, down cellar. 

The ecologists tell us that there is less species diversity on islands than on the mainland. When the Audubon Christmas bird count is done each year, that seems to confirm it. As for vegetable gardening, I've given up on a few species, so my garden is less diverse. I would grow corn if I could reliably keep the raccoons and earworms out of it, but I can’t, at least not without more effort than it’s worth. So I don't do it any more, although back in the 1980s I devoted an entire garden plot to it. I've given up on winter squash, also; not that it can't be grown here--it does well, in fact--but I find that I don't eat it. No eggplant this year, either, though for no good reason. One year, enthused over heirloom tomato varieties offered by members of the Seed Savers Exchange--I offered heirloom dry beans when I was a member in the 1980s and 1990s--I must have nursed thirty different varieties from seed to garden, just to see which ones did the best in this microclimate which is not, as someone once said, the tomato capitol of the planet. On a smaller scale I did the same with heirloom beans. One of the lessons learned is that a single growing year is not enough time to test a variety. How does it perform in a hot year, how does it do in a cool one? A wet one, a dry one? With a side dressing of fertilizer or without? When planted early or late? In soil that is more acidic or less? How does it respond to mulch? And so forth. Those continuous experiments with varieties, to see which grow best (and taste best), as well as continuous selection of the most vigorous, early, disease-free plants for seed, have served to make a better yielding, more efficient, and tastier produce garden. 

I didn't intend to make a longitudinal study when I started here in 1980, but it's happened. I have the yearly records, also, first kept in a notebook by hand, and then on the computer. At some point, when I have more time on my hands, I may post them on this blog for future reference, though with the caveat that what has worked for me over here on this island in eastern Penobscot Bay will not work the same way for you over there, wherever you may be. 

Skunk cabbages on the move

More photos of the developing skunk cabbages, whose leaves grew quickly during May, while the flowers began to disintegrate. Here is a photo of a skunk cabbage on May 7. The cabbage leaves are now about 14" long and growing as they unfurl from the center. The flower is visible on the ground at the right hand side of the clump of leaves. And here is a photo of several skunk cabbages on June 5. 

The scale is difficult to see in the photo, but the largest leaves are more than two feet in length, and the cabbage plants are a good three feet high. Insects have munched on some of the leaves, but they are sturdy and vigorous. These cabbages do not make heads, as garden ones do.

From Tilling to Mowing

I mark the seasonal shift from planting to mowing when I finish up with the rototiller attachment on the tractor (which occurred today) and remove it to put on the sickle bar for mowing. Ideally this takes place in the middle of June, but in some years the weather does not cooperate. This year it has done so. The beans I planted a week ago are up, with relatively few areas where I must replant, although there was a spell of about four days when the soil cooled and rain fell and the dampness threatened to rot the beans in the ground. But not this year, apparently. As usual, I concentrated on dry beans for vegetarian chili, soups, and baked beans. Light red kidney, black coco, and jacob's cattle gasless went in six rows, while snap beans took up a seventh, and in an eighth and ninth row I planted some to keep for seed, to keep the varieties growing: Montcalm red kidney, red Mexican, Maine surprise, Hutterite soup beans, BE 205, and a few others. That was about a week ago.

This afternoon, late, I hoed them for the first time since they poked through the ground a few days ago, and used the wheel hoe with the two slicing bars, which goes fairly quickly compared with a long-handled hoe. The same treatment was extended to the beets, lettuce, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, onions, and spinach. The tomatoes are getting used to their new place outside the pots and their roots are extending below the IRT mulch. It usually takes about ten days for them to anchor in, and then they begin to grow rapidly. My last act of spring rototilling turned over the ground in the garden down the road to the Scotts' house, which I usually plant with dry beans; but having enough of a back stock of these, I confined them to the garden by the old store in a smaller area this year, and gave over this larger garden (about twenty feet by ninety feet) to a cover crop--this year a combination of buckwheat and millet, which I hope will smother weeds and produce a good deal of biomass. After five or six weeks the buckwheat will flower and I will have to decide whether to let it go or cut it and the millet down, wait a bit and incorporate it into the soil, and then plant a second crop of buckwheat. I will be hauling up seaweed from the ocean to this garden also. The next thing to do to it now is to repair the tops of the fences where I put up a wire or string with some aluminum foil pie plates to deter the birds and deer. In the near future aside from mowing the fields and weeding the gardens, there will be time to hill up the potatoes and continue to harvest greens for salads. Spinach will go to seed in a week or two so once it gets large enough it will be harvested and put up for the winter and spring. My attempts to grow a fall crop of lettuce and spinach have never succeeded in producing large enough plants in the fall, and perhaps this year I will not even try. We shall see.

A day for tomatoes

The weather turned last Thursday; the last four days have been dry, mild, and partly sunny, good weather to get into the garden. Usually at this time of the year it’s wet but the last few days have dried it out to the point where I’m on a planting binge, getting the warmer weather vegetables into the soil. Today was tomatoes.

The tomatoes go in the garden out by the old store, rotated through, with IRT mulch beneath. For the tomatoes the planting area is about six feet by twenty-eight feet (two sheets of IRT much side by side). During the winter I’d scattered wood ashes over this fenced garden area, which altogether is about forty feet by thirty; during breaks in the weather when it’s been dry I’ve rototilled it—a couple of times—and then this morning I raked the tomato area to get the soil more or less flat and some of the stones away, before laying down the mulch and holding it down with bricks. It would be possible to hold it down with soil but that takes up a bit of room on the mulch and I prefer to use all of it. Once the mulch is held in place, the tomato seedlings (and today some green peppers as well) are planted through the mulch by making holes and digging down with a trowel, then tossing a bit of composted chicken manure into the hole, then dropping in the tomato seedling to a depth a little below the soil level in the pot, then pushing back the soil around it to cover it up. I did this with about forty-five tomato seedlings; varieties were Sungold (imho by far the best tasting cherry tomato), Bellstar (the best paste tomato for this microclimate), and some slicing tomatoes: Jetstar, Cosmonaut Volkov, and a trial variety, Red Short Vine, from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. Jetstar is a dependable tomato; Cosmonaut Volkov, a Russian variety, is sublime tasting but in some seasons is difficult to grow—it doesn’t like a lot of water—and was named after a Russian cosmonaut who, I believe, was killed in space. Earlier this spring, I planted onions, spinach, shallots, beets, lettuce, arugula, cilantro, red cabbage, broccoli, chard, and a mesclun mix into this garden. In addition to tomato planting today, I also stuck a dozen brussels sprouts seedlings into the ground, but there's no trick to growing those hereabouts. The aphids that attack the sprouts in southern New England are absent here, and the only pests are the cutworm (not a problem if the soil is kept well organically) and cabbage moth.

One of the remarkable things that happened this spring was that I discovered the lettuce that I'd planted last August and covered with Reemay fabric in late October when the frosts arrived and it was still very small sized, was still alive under the Reemay when I removed it in early April. And since then it has grown, to the point where I've been eating it in salad, most days since mid-May until now. I thought that it would be bitter, but it's not. Good eating size now, it will go to seed in a few weeks, but I have more coming along that will replace it. The variety, Red Sails, is the one that consistently does best here, but it's not known as a particularly hardy variety for over-wintering, and this winter the temperatures did get to about ten below zero.
 

This is not a climate well suited to growing tomatoes, so various strategies can be used to increase one’s odds. For many years I’ve grown my own seedlings, as they are healthier and stockier than the ones I could get at the nurseries; the IRT mulch is another strategy, which keeps the soil warmer, keeps the weeds away, and holds the moisture in, all contributing to faster growth in a long, slow season. The most serious gardeners cover their rows with low tunnels or hoop houses to increase the temperature further and extend the seasons, but that’s more work and expense than I want to do. In effect once I put the tomatoes into the mulch there is nothing more to do—no weeding, a little watering at first and whenever it gets quite dry—except harvest them in midsummer and fall. Volkov can be early some years; Sungold usually ripens at the end of July. Bellstar is usually ready in two waves, one at the end of August and the other in mid-September. I put up the paste tomatoes in puree and sauce for use during the year. The others are consumed during the summer and fall.

In the 1980s when I was first gardening here, I made a number of mistakes with the tomatoes. The biggest mistake was staking them; as they rose up they became more attractive to the deer and tempted them to jump the garden fence and devour them, which they eventually did. Beans going up poles attract the deer the same way. But if I let them sprawl on the mulch they remain relatively clean and don’t attract the deer; and as for beans, the bush varieties don’t attract them nearly so much. Soybeans are very attractive, though—and so I usually plant those in a garden that’s better protected from deer than this one by the old store. Another mistake was hardening the seedlings off too quickly, or putting them in the ground too soon, in temperatures that were too low. Below fifty degrees will check their growth until they’ve gotten used to the low fifties. In Massachusetts and Minnesota you can plant your tomatoes around May 20; here, you’re better off waiting until June 1 at the earliest. It’s not simply a matter of frost; temperatures below fifty will set their growth back significantly. Another mistake was not using mulch. In the old days folks used black plastic and, used to gardening in warmer climates, I didn’t really want to put down that ugly black plastic mulch because I didn’t think it was needed. But it made quite a difference once I began to try it—the difference between bringing some varieties to ripeness or not. I tried other kinds of mulch such as grass clippings but the black plastic, and now the IRT mulch, is far better. Deer can always be a problem, and fences must be renewed and kept up. A dog helps.

So we shall see how well the tomatoes do this year. Last year was a good one for tomatoes whereas 2009 was not—it was a cool, wet summer and by the end most of the gardens were victimized by late blight. I was able to harvest quite a few that year but the blight eventually got to my garden as well, and nothing after the first of September was worth saving.

A Cool, Damp Summer to Come?

Our island postmistress Linda has predicted that we will have a summer like the one two years ago--"no summer at all," as she put it. That was a no-summer that rained from about mid-May through late June, making it impossible to get much of a garden in. What did get in, mostly rotted--although I'd never had bigger potatoes. The rest of the no-summer was mostly cool and damp, with some sunny days in July and August. The tomatoes did fairly well, too, until they got a bad case of late blight that year. First and only year that I've had it. Beans are usually very easy to grow but not in those conditions. There is an empty space in the pantry where the jars of dry beans stand--for the year 2009. I wonder how subsistence farmers here (or anywhere for that matter) were able to survive after a growing season like that back in the day. I suppose they stored up supplies for more than a year, if they were careful. 

Linda, by the way, is a resourceful and serious gardener herself. She has a greenhouse, and grows her vegetables in raised beds. Whether she has a crystal ball as well remains to be seen. The last two days were cloudy and the grass dried off enough for me to mow the lawn (which had gotten to be nearly a foot high in only two weeks) yesterday afternoon. The rain held off today although it was damp and cloudy, and I managed to get some cabbage transplants into the ground. At any rate, until the jet stream changes we're on track for exactly what Linda has predicted. Ironically, central Europe and the southwestern US are quite dry. The public radio program which highlights environmentalism in Europe pointed out, in today's broadcast, that central Europe has gotten only about 40% of it's normal rainfall this year. We'd be glad to send some of our rain over there if only we knew how to do it.

 

Rain, fog, rain

It's been raining and drizzling and raining with fog and mist for the past two weeks and the ground is wet through and through. Nothing has come up yet in the gardens where I planted except for weeds and witch grass. No more planting is possible till the soil dries, which won't be for at least a few more days I imagine. although I may try to get some transplants (cabbages, lettuce) in this weekend. The birds do seem to like this wet weather, though. More greens do need to get in as soon as possible. Planting time for tomatoes and beans is usually around June 1st. This year is about 10-14 days behind last year, which means it's more or less a normal year, though this much rain at this time is unusual. The early apple blossoms are at the full pink stage waiting for the first sunny day.

Potatoes, Onions, Shallots and Greens

Potatoes, onions, shallots, lettuce, spinach, and beet greens went into the gardens today. I’d hoped to get them in a week or so earlier but it was too wet to work the soil last week. In fact the weather report was for rain all weekend except for this morning, so I was up early to do the planting.
Three rows of Dark Red Norland and Satina potatoes went into the garden next to the barn. Having tilled the soil yesterday, I used a wheel hoe to mark the rows and dig shallow trenches. With a pointed shovel I dug small holes about 5-6” below the soil level for each seed potato, about 75 in all, and put some composted chicken manure into each hole, put a bit of soil on top of the manure, and dropped in a seed potato. In all it took a little more than an hour to do this. 
After thirty years of gardening here I’ve tried to be efficient, but certain inefficiencies of scale persist. If I were growing potatoes for market, I’d have to use a furrower attached to a walk-behind tractor to get the rows deeper without shoveling. This would be more efficient, given enough feet of row; but without enough, the time taken in fitting out the tractor for use would make up for any time saved by not shoveling in the trenches. I’ve also tried various kinds of fertilizer and found that putting composted chicken manure into the holes (or trenches) works best and leaves the soil in good shape year after year. For potatoes, it’s important not to lime the soil or drop wood ashes on it from the stove, as this causes scab. It’s a good idea to give the potatoes constant moisture during the growing season if there’s not enough rain; a side dressing of more composted manure before the first hilling helps increase the size of the tubers.
One 30 foot row of Stuttgarter onion sets and one row of shallots were what I planted next in the morning after resting for about fifteen minutes. These go in shallow rows, and again composted chicken manure goes in first. As with the potatoes, given the small amount that I grow now, it’s most efficient to dig out the rows with a wheel hoe and then to plant by hand, making sure the sets are in the soil properly, and then to fill in the soil around and just on top of them, so that the hard rains don’t push them out of the soil. Onions also need continuous moisture and do well with a side dressing of manure after a few weeks. The way onions perk up after a good rain is noticeable. Planting onions for me is hands and knees work, and as my knees are not in the greatest shape, I’ve learned to wear knee pads. These cushion my knees against the stony soil on the sides of the rows, and allow me to scrabble around without feeling knee pain the next day—all day. After the onions and shallots, a quarter row of Early Wonder Talltop beets for greens, a quarter row of Tyee spinach, and a quarter row of Red Sails lettuce; the beets and lettuce will be succession planted every couple of weeks thru June. Altogether the planting took about 2 and a half hours. The weather was mostly sunny with temperatures in the sixties and a light wind.
In past years I’ve planted peas, and later corn, but these days I seldom do, as they take up more space than I think they are worth, particularly now that I’ve cut down the total square footage of garden space. Corn also is bothered by earworms and raccoons. Prevention measures take a good deal of time—and don’t always work.

More skunk cabbages!

I promised some more pictures of the skunk cabbages as they are growing. On April 17 the green cabbage leaves were beginning to appear.

You can see the green leaf unfolding benow the maroon spaethe in the center of the photo. The spaethe is about six inches tall. The spadix is visible inside two of the spaethes. I have yet to see an insect crawl in. Now here is a photo from April 30, with several cabbage leaves unfolded.

The cabbage leaves tower over the spaethe--as the next photo shows.

It is most impressive. Here is a group of three cabbages on April 30:

And here, finally, is how a lot of them appear in the drying streambed:

Photos of skunk cabbages © 2011 by Jeff Todd Titon

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