Garlic Planting Time

Columbus Day is a good reminder to plant garlic. What you plant now will be ready to harvest on the fourth of July, 2009. Why plant garlic? Several reasons… it is easy to grow, homegrown quality is better than store bought, and the satisfaction of producing really high quality garlic is hard to beat. Tulips and daffodils aren’t the only fall bulbs to be planting this weekend. Don’t forget the garlic.

Penn State’s on-line garlic fact sheet seems to be in revision or hiding somewhere on the web so I’ll outline some garlic planting basics. First, get the right planting stock. DO NOT plant store bought stuff. If you can find a local grower, that is best. While poking around on line looking for our fact sheet, I found several Pennsylvania producers who will sell to you. I’ve been buying from Johnny’s Select Seeds in Maine for years and they still offer a nice lineup of varieties adapted to the Northeast US. If you go to a local Farmers Market, chat with the garlic sellers. If they grew it, it is obviously well adapted to your area. Many growers are partial to the hardneck types, which have excellent flavor. My garlic buddy sent me a variety called Music that is getting lots of acclaim. I currently have Russian and German Red as well as New York White. I like them all. Right now my garage is decorated with bunches of heads, hanging from the rafters. It is a beautiful sight and a reassuring feeling to know that I have a winter’s supply.

The planting details…you’ll plant individual garlic cloves about 1.5 inches deep in rich, well-drained garden soil in October. Space about 6 to 8 inches apart. A few leaves will sprout this fall. After we’ve had several hard freezes, it is a good idea to mulch the garlic bed with straw or leaves to lock in that cold. This prevents “heaving” that can occur as winter temps fluctuate. Not too deep, just a couple inches of fluffy organic matter. Next spring, the garlic will grow thru the mulch. A shot of nitrogen rich fertilizer in April is helpful and then you simply wait for the bulbs to size up. When about one half of the lower leaves have died, it’s time to harvest.

Dan the Chicken Man and His Garden

Last weekend I visited gardening friend, Graham Bell (see previous blog, “Graham’s Garden Inspirations”) in Rhode Island. Our primary mission was to assist his friend, Dan, in the task of processing (killing and cleaning) 85 chickens. It’s kind of a communal thing. Dan raises the chickens. Friends pay a share of the feed costs and get a share of the meat in return. Shareholders pitch in on Chicken Day in October when the birds are ready to harvest. Oddballs like me and my wife go just for the fun of it. So, in four hours about ten of us killed, plucked, dressed (gutted) and bagged the birds.

Since this is a gardening blog, I’ll spare you the details of chicken processing. So here is the gardening part. Chicken Man Dan is also a very good gardener. I sensed this as I wheel barrowed chicken feathers and blood soaked leaves (nitrogen rich) to his compost pile. Dan told me that he’ll add a layer of apple pomace from a cider maker and by next spring he’ll have some killer compost. He adds lots of tree leaves as a carbon source. You read about the value of feathers and blood as compost ingredients but rarely see it. Not many folks are killing their own chickens these days.

I took a detour on the way back from dumping blood and feathers to check out Dan’s garden. I saw fall red raspberries, tomato trellis, raised beds, etc. That’s when I saw the large mail box in the middle of his garden and knew I had found the solution to the maddening task of storing garden tools and other stuff in a handy place. Dan’s big old mail box
holds all of those tools you often need but don’t remember to carry…. lettuce harvesting knives, dibbles, tying materials, labels, etc. Next to the mail box was a box of spoons… flattened to make nifty row-markers. More durable than wood…or even plastic..

Once again, great gardening ideas from afar. It pays to get out of your own backyard once in a while.

Giant Skeeters... Actually Crane Flies

Lots of calls are coming into the Bucks County Extension office about giant mosquitoes. Turns out, what everyone is looking at are Crane Flies. It’s easy to see how they might be confused. These bugs are long-legged and slender-bodied… like the biting bug that everyone is worried about. Crane flies don’t bite. And they are a lot bigger than most mosquitoes. Right now they are sipping a bit of nectar from fall flowers and mating.. a nice life, but a short one. They live about 10-15 days before laying eggs. Their larvae feed on decaying organic matter, improving habitat for other creatures and getting gobbled up by frogs, fish and other predators. So it turns out that crane flies are good guys.

If you get poking around on-line you may learn that there are a couple of crane fly species (out of about 1500 in North America) that damage lawns. This is mostly confined to the Pacific Northwest. I did see an unusual case of crane fly larvae damage to a lawn a few years ago but that lawn was already severely damaged by other pests. The crane flies were mostly on clean up duty, decomposing the dead turf.
So don’t sweat the long legged, mosquito imposters, even if you see dozens or hundreds on the side of the house on a cool fall evening.

Believe it or not, I found a website called Crane Flies of Pennsylvania on-line and if you need to read more, check it out. I leaned that there are at least 300 species in Pennsylvania and about 10 in Bucks County. Looks like Philadelphia county wins the prize with more than 100 species accounted for.

Fall Flowers

Spring flowers are a nice thing. Maybe seeing bright colors after a drab winter is the reason that spring flowers are so memorable. But right now I am enjoying fall flowers…. Goldenrods (Solidago), Asters (Aster) White-snakeroot (Eupatorium rugosum) and Beggar-ticks (Bidens) are just a few of the beauties that are blooming now. September is a good time to appreciate them. Fall leaf color is not competing for our attention yet.

I had to get out my plant references to identify the White-snakeroot that is blooming (white) along the 611 bypass near Danboro. It wasn’t in “Weeds of the Northeast” so I went to “The Plants of Pennsylvania”. I like “Weeds of the Northeast” because it lists several hundred common weedy plants and has lots of color pictures. “The Plants of Pennsylvania” doesn’t have color pictures but lists several thousand species! It helps to have a rough idea of what you’re looking for when consulting it. So, as I was researching the White-snake root I learned that there are 18 Euparoriums, 45 Asters and 26 Solidagos in Pennsylvania.

Besides the colorful show that fall blooms provide, many of them provide forage for insects, including honey bees. If you are near a bee hive in September, the fragrance of goldenrod and aster nectar is unmistakable.
If you enjoy identifying local flora, the two books I mentioned are excellent references. You can find both of them at on-line book sellers.

Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve in Washington Crossing, PA is offering guided wildflower walks this fall, daily at 2 p.m. for a small fee. A great way to learn the names of more fall bloomers.

Powdery Mildew Appears

What’s that white stuff on my…. you name it….zinnias, lilac, pumpkin, dogwood. It’s powdery mildew, a common fungal disease that appears in late summer every year. Yes, it is a disease but there is no need for alarm. In most cases, it’s just cosmetic.
Actually, there are many different, related fungi that cause symptoms that we call powdery mildew. While related, in most cases they are specific to their host plants. For instance the powdery mildew on apple is not that same as the organism that affects lilac.

Commercial growers of pumpkin, apples, peaches and some other crops must manage powdery mildew or serious crop damage can occur. In backyard gardens, we can usually accept this damage caused by the disease. All deciduous plant leaves are due to drop in the next month so, powdery mildew or not their days are numbered.
Bottom line, don’t worry about powdery mildew. For a more complete story on this common disease see what Cornell University has to say.

Don’t worry about putting mildew infected leaves into the compost. Next year’s infections will come from many sources and the fungus will probably have trouble surviving the compost pile environment anyway.

Budworms ate my blossoms

Penn State Master Gardeners have established several fantastic demonstration gardens at Neshaminy Manor Center, where our Extension office is located. We recently received the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society “Community Greening Award”.

But there is trouble in paradise. The tobacco budworm has eaten virtually every blossom and flower bud from our petunias! Purple ones, white ones, pink ones. We knew what was up because this is a recurring problem. Initially, we thought that the petunias simply stopped blooming but on closer inspection it was easy to see the chewing damage. Once we caught one of the caterpillars it was easy to solve the mystery.

Several weeks ago we applied Bt, (Bacillus thuringiensis) a biological insecticide, and that did the job. We must be into the next generation of budworms now because the color is again gone from our petunia beds. The Bt treatment only lasts a short time.
So, if your petunias (or geraniums or tobacco)seem to have mysteriously stopped blooming, check the flower buds for ragged, chewing feeding symptoms. The insects themselves are elusive, feeding at night and hiding during the day. A shot of Bt did the trick for us. Other insecticides will work but Bt is quite selective for caterpillars and so that is a good choice.

Thanks, Mother Nature

Ah rain. Until Hanna delivered a few inches last weekend, we were in a drought. What’s a drought ? The National Weather Service says an agricultural drought refers to a situation where the amount of moisture in the soil no longer meets the needs of a particular crop.

The effects of drought on annual garden plants such as vegetable and flower gardens are obvious. Certainly the needs of these plants were not met as August yielded less than an inch of rainfall in most of Bucks County….less than half and inch in my neighborhood. But what concerns me more is the long term effect of drought on perennial plants, especially trees. For the last two weeks I’ve observed severe stress symptoms on many trees and shrubs. They will revive and survive but in many cases this stress will lead to disease and failure in years to come. Penn State’s plant disease clinic receives many plant samples each year and has correlated the incidence of drought and certain diseases of woody plants, especially botryosphaeria canker on rhododendron, dogwood, redbud and crabapple and cytospora canker on spruce. These diseases lead to severe branch cankering and dieback.
During the drought of 1999, which was extreme, I observed stress on many woody plants that lead to plant decline and death in the years that followed. Here at Neshaminy Manor Center, home of the Almshouse Arboretum, we watered trees that were planted in 2007 and 2008 to insure that they will thrive in years to come.