A tree I grafted last winter

Two winters ago a large Douglas Fir tree fell in my garden and completely demolished a Santa Rosa Plum tree. The following spring shoots appeared from the rootstock and last winter I grafted a scion of a Mirabelle De Nancy plum on to the biggest of them (and removed the rest). With a well established root network the scion has grown amazingly fast and is already 8 feet tall with many branches.

If you lose a fruit tree, watch out for shoots from the root, which is often more resilient than the cultivar. If these appear you can do as I did and graft on to them.

The New Vegetable Growers Handbook

I’ve been away from this blog for far too long, which is unfortunate, but I do have a reasonable excuse. The extended absence is due to the fact that almost all of my writing energy for the past 9 months has been devoted to revising my previous book “The Vegetable Growers Handbook” One kind Goodreads reviewer called that book “the best, most useful guide to vegetable gardening I have ever read”, which made me feel good, but I am not one to rest on my laurels (which is good as they are pretty few and far between). I wrote that book five years ago and in the meantime  I have learned a lot more and I eventually reached the point where I was no longer so proud of the first book and felt I could do better. The result is “The New Vegetable Growers Handbook”, which isn’t the most original title, but describes it adequately enough. The new book is bigger (50% bigger), better (with more information and more plants) and hopefully will keep me happy for another five years.

My new baby

Seed saving

Saving seed from your own garden is one of the most satisfying garden activities I can think of. It is as close as you can come to getting something for nothing and is an amazing demonstration of how gardens are living, self perpetuating things (the fact that the garden produces these amazingly complex little genetic packages is as near to a miracle as most of us are ever likely to come). All you have to do is allow nature to take its course and everything you need to plant more gardens in following years is produced for you.  Doing this saves money, makes you more self sufficient, helps to preserve genetic diversity and is fun (I have also found it is the best ways to one-up other gardeners in discussions at parties because few people do it or know much about it). 

Carrot seed

Seed saving is most commonly practiced in the vegetable garden. You can plant a crop of bush beans, harvest it for weeks and then let the last pods mature and end up with more bean seed than you started with! It doesn’t have to stop with the vegetables though, I save seed from all kinds of useful plants, nitrogen fixers, biomass plants, fruiting trees and shrubs and more. It is a great way to get enough seed to grow biomass plants and nitrogen fixers on a large scale. When you have an abundance of seed you can afford to be profligate with it, scattering it wherever you think it might survive.

Seed saving sounds like it could be complicated, but it really couldn’t be much simpler. Plants are programmed to make reproduction their top priority (just like we are) and if we leave them alone they will flower and make seed (in most cases). The only part that requires some thought is keeping the varieties pure and this largely depends upon whether a plant is self-pollinated or cross-pollinated. Self-pollinated plants produce seed that is the same as their parents, whereas cross-pollinated plants produce seed that is a mix of both parents. To maintain a cross-pollinated variety it must be pollinated by another plant of the same variety. Another problem is with hybrid seed, the seed of F1 hybrids don’t usually resemble their parents, so saving it is not generally considered to be worthwhile (stick with open pollinated varieties).

Amaranth seed

The easiest plants to save seed from are the self-pollinating fruit producers, such as tomatoes, eggplants and peppers (just collect the seed before you eat them). Beans and peas and lettuce are also mostly self-pollinating and easy to deal with. Cross-pollinated crops (these include brassicas, cucurbits and corn) are a little more difficult because they need to receive pollen from another plant of the same variety. The easiest way to do this is to have only one variety of each species flowering at one time, though you could also hand-pollinate, which isn’t as hard as it sounds. You don’t want one variety getting pollinated by another or the resulting seeds will be a mix of the two.

Keeping a variety totally pure is most important if you are selling or trading it, or if you want to conserve a rare variety. If you are just using the seed yourself it isn’t necessarily essential (I use most of my lettuce seed for growing salad mixes and don’t even notice what variety it is). If a variety gets crossed and turns into something weird and unusable you can always discard it and buy new seed.

Leek seed

Saving seed has become a routine activity in my garden, whenever I see seed ripening I go out with my dishes or paper grocery bags and collect it (I tend to decide whether I actually want it after collecting it). In some cases you have to watch the ripening seed carefully, so you can get it before it is falls or is dispersed. Depending upon the plants you might collect seed directly from the plant, or you might cut the whole seed bearing top and dry it in a paper bag. I then dry the seed in a warm place (usually my greenhouse) and then clean it with various sized mesh sieves and by winnowing. I store the dry seed in regular paper envelopes in a cool dry place. Moisture is the enemy of stored seed, they must be dry when you store them and must remain dry until you use them. 

I find one of the biggest problems with seed saving is what to do with all of the seed that accumulates (plants like Amaranth and Kale can be amazingly productive). You only need a small fraction for planting your own garden, so have to find ways to use the rest. This usually means giving it away (it makes great Christmas presents), trading it, selling it, or in some cases sprouting and eating it. 

Sweet clover seed

Another bonus from allowing plants to produce seed is that some will inevitably fall and you get volunteers appearing in unexpected places. I encourage this by cleaning the seed out in the garden and scattering the emptied seed heads out in the garden (they often contain some seed). In some cases you may get so many volunteers that you don’t actually need to plant, but that’s for another post. 

If you want to save seed you need to know exactly what it is, so it is important to label the plants carefully (and write it down in your journal too). You don’t want to be in any doubt what the seed is.

Favorite gardening quotes

Here are my favorite quotes on gardening and together they sum up my garden philosophy pretty well (I like to think I belong with such illustrious company).

But if each man could have his own house, a large garden to cultivate and healthy surroundings - then, I thought, there will be for them a better opportunity of a happy family life. George Cadbury

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.   Orson Scott Card

A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.  D Elton Trueblood

I think this is what hooks one to gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at creation. Phyllis Theroux 

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. Marcus Cicero 

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway. Michael Pollan 

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.  Voltaire 

There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling.   Mirabel Osler

I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation.  It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.   Nathaniel Hawthorne

I never had any other desire so strong, and so like to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large Garden.   Abraham Cowley  1666

When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.   Ralph Waldo Emerson

The highest reward for man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.   John Ruskin

To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves. Mohandas Gandhi

Gardening is the purest of human pleasures.  Francis Bacon

A house though otherwise beautiful, yet if it hath no Garden belonging to it, is more like a Prison than a House.    William Coles

I want death to find me planting my cabbages.   Michel de Montaigne

A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library.  Henri Frederic Amiel

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God.   Thomas Jefferson

The garden that is finished is dead.  H. E. Bates

Gardening is a labour full of tranquility and satisfaction; natural and instructive, and as such contributes to the most serious contemplation, experience, health and longevity. John Evelyn, 1666

For most of us who are intimidated by theories of garden design, the cottage garden provides immediate appeal, since it is a horticultural rather than an architectural solution to a limited area.   Patricia Thorpe

We come from the earth, We return to the earth, And in between we garden.   Author Unknown

The more help a man has in his garden, the less it belongs to him.   William M. Davies

The most serious gardening I do would seem very strange to an onlooker, for it involves hours of walking round in circles, apparently doing nothing.   Helen Dillon

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature. Zeno 335BC

And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden . . . You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.   Rudyard Kipling

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.   Albert Einstein

If you would be happy your whole life long, Become a gardener.   Old Chinese Proverb

A garden is not made in a year; indeed it is never made in the sense of finality. It grows, and with the labour of love should go on growing.   Frederick Eden

There is no such thing as an ugly garden-gardens, like babies, are all beautiful to their parents.   Ken Druse

Advice on dandelions: If you can't beat them, eat them.   Dr James Duke

In his garden every man may be his own artist without apology or explanation.   Louise Beebe Wilder

It used to be thought that our love of plants was an impractical but pure passion. But now, in the age of environmental crisis, we're discovering that gardening is essential to human life.   Jacqueline Heriteau

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.   Wendell Berry

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.   Frances Hodgson Burnett

The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.  Paul Cezanne

Deer

Deer have got into the garden again. About a week ago I had a vague suspicion that something was wrong when the family dog barked far more than usual one night. She was obviously trying to explain the situation to me, but I just made her come inside for the night. I first noticed something was amiss when I saw footprints across a bed of seedlings, but dismissed it as possibly being the dog (though she usually sticks to the paths). Later that day I also noticed some missing grape leaves, but I attributed that to the always destructive quail. The dog barked again the next night and was ignored again. The next day I saw the telltale stripped lower branches of a cherry tree, too high for quail, but just right for deer and I finally understood there was a problem. With my eyes newly opened I started to see damage all over: a row of tomato seedlings topped, bitten off raspberry shoots, mallow plants completely stripped and the lower branches of several apple trees gone (deer particularly enjoy apple leaves).

As I have just moved a fence line to expand my garden I assumed that the deer must be getting in through the newest part of the garden, so I spent some time going over the new fencing trying to figure out where. I strengthened some suspicious spots and hoped for the best. It didn’t work though, they got in again that night and ate some more apple tree as well as some low plum branches and various wild plants. I was awakened at dawn the next morning by the dog barking, so I let her out and she chased them away (if I was fully awake I would have tried to see where they went out). I then went over the older sections of fence and found a place where a branch had fallen and the wire had been pushed down to a point where deer could jump over. I fixed that, as well as a place where the fence had been pushed up to leave a wide gap underneath. I breathed a sigh of relief that I had finally found the problem, but they got in again that night and just about finished off one apple tree. The next day I found a well hidden spot where a falling branch from a neighbors tree had torn a hole just big enough for a deer to get through. This finally did the trick and the garden is now secure again (for the time being). 

Dogs are domesticated wolves and know more 

about deer than you do, so listen to them

One of my garden rules is that I don’t buy anything I can salvage, so my perimeter fence is an almost laughable mix of 8 or 9 different kinds of fencing, held together with wire. It is only 6ft high at its tallest and only 5 ft in many places, which is theoretically low enough for deer to jump, but they don’t. Either they are too well fed to make the effort or the fences look too hazardous to try. I suspect the latter as a broken leg would be the end of a deer.

The thing I find most interesting about this whole event is that the damage has been relatively minor compared to the last time it happened (which was four or five years ago). Then it was a major event and set back many plants significantly. The garden has grown a lot since then and many of the fruit trees are now too tall to be seriously damaged. Now I understand why trees take the shape they do (and feel grateful we don’t have giraffes around here). There is also far more vegetation around in general, so the same amount of damage isn’t nearly as significant. We have all heard that the garden gets more resilient as it matures and diversifies, and this is a real world example of this.

 I no longer get too perturbed by minor disasters like this, as you might have guessed by the length of time it took me to fix it. I don’t even feel any animosity to “the little deers”, as they are simply trying to make a living (if anything I am the interloper into their world). 

Greenhouse update

I have now been using my new greenhouse for five months now and have found it to be a huge improvement on my old one. Even though I haven’t added any insulation or thermal mass as yet, it stays much warmer at night, which was always the problem in the old one. This has speeded up the germination and growth of my spring seedlings enormously and I’m now overwhelmed with new plants. When I add the insulation and thermal mass I think I will be able to realize an unfulfilled gardening ambition to grow bananas (I already have one in there). It has also been a great teacher and has given me a better understanding of how greenhouses actually work. I already knew the theory of course, but there is a big difference between reading about it and actually feeling it.

I finished installing the glazing just after the winter solstice, when the days are short (under 10 hours) and the sun is at its lowest point in the sky and easily obstructed by evergreen trees (deciduous trees aren’t a problem). At this time of year the sun doesn’t even hit my greenhouse until 11:00 and is gone by 4:00, which means that it doesn’t have a lot of opportunity to build up heat (it only reaches about 80 degrees F). Fortunately there isn’t a lot going on because the short day length restricts plant growth severely. Generally all you need to do is keep the place comfortably above freezing so tender plants can survive the winter. Here in the Santa Cruz mountains the weather is mild enough that this doesn’t require a lot of heat, but in colder climates some serious thermal mass and insulation may be needed to keep it from freezing at night. To make your winter greenhouse more productive you might try growing various salad greens, as most of these can tolerate quite low temperatures.

In February and March the greenhouse becomes the center of the garden and fills to capacity with the seedlings that will make up the spring garden (it is also the nicest place to work at this time). Even though it can be just as cold outside as it was in December, the conditions inside are very different because the sun is higher in the sky (which means less shade) and the days are longer (it gets sun by 10:00). This means the greenhouse warms up much more rapidly and can reach 100 degrees F if not vented.

In April and May the greenhouse is full of plants and the warmer weather means that cooling becomes more of a concern than heating. As the sun gets stronger the temperature in a closed greenhouse can easily reach 120 degrees F and forgetting to open the vents can damage plants. The vents aren’t just to control temperature however, they are also needed for air circulation, as warm, still humid air encourages diseases such as damping off. Vents should be opened any time they won’t make the greenhouse too cold.

In summer the days are long, the sun is high in the sky (there is little shading from trees) and it gets very hot inside the greenhouse every day. At this time of year the value of the greenhouse depends upon the climate. In warmer areas it may well get too hot for healthy plant growth and often stands empty (though you can try using shade cloth and wide open venting to keep the temperature down to tolerable levels). In cooler climates it can still be important for growing heat loving crops (this is the case where I live as summer nights can be too chilly for melons or okra to be really happy).

In fall, as the sun drops lower in the sky again, deciduous trees can be a problem for as long as they have their leaves. In the reverse of spring the days shorten and shade increases so there is less heating potential. However this isn’t usually a big problem as the thermal mass of the greenhouse still holds a lot of accumulated heat from the summer. You aren’t usually starting many seedlings at this time, though you may bring in tender plants (tomatoes or peppers) from the garden to extend the harvest season (try rooting suckers from your favorite plants in July or August and potting them up for this). 

Excuses

Where did all that time go, it’s been two months since I last posted anything. There are several reasons for this, none to do with lack of interest.

The biggest one is that spring (my favorite time of the garden year) arrived and the garden was suddenly full of things to see and do. It seems absurd to sit inside on a sunny day, staring at a computer screen, writing about gardening, when you can be out in the garden. I’ve always claimed to be a gardener first and a writer a distant second.

This time of year is always very busy with starting the vegetable gardening and moving and propagating plants, but this year has been even more hectic than usual. This is because I have been clearing a huge swath of land (maybe ¼ acre) that has been covered in poison oak since before I moved here. This is going to be my next garden area and has required a lot of work (it still does).

With all of this outdoor activity, my time on the computer has been limited to necessity. This has meant working on the Smartgardener.com website (which is mainly devoted to vegetable gardening), converting my print books to e-books and working on a Fruit Gardeners Handbook.