crocus in the fall

It's late September, and the crocuses are blooming! These flowers look very much like spring crocus on steroids. But they are really a different plant altogether.
Colchium, aka Fall Crocus, comes in different shades of pink, purple and white, with single and double varieties. They send up a few thin leaves in spring, which soon wither and disappear. Then in fall they send up huge flowers. One variety of colchium is crocus sativus. The yellow stamens of that plant are dried to become saffron - the world's most expensive spice.


It's a lovely surprise to see such a spring-like colour pop our with no warning. They don't last long, but they're really stunning.

Sour grapes II: What's eating Heidi's grapes?

Last year, my grapes were reduced to twigs before I had a chance to eat them. I blamed the bluejays. This year, I did everything right. I draped fine netting over the vines and tucked in the ends so the birds couldn't get close. And yet this happened:
Many of the bunches were reduced to partial skeletons. I decided to look closer, and discovered a great many grapes on the ground under the vine. It wasn't the bluejays after all - the grapes ripened and dropped by themselves. I pulled off the useless netting and picked a surprizing amount of fruit - over 4 pounds! They are safely tucked in a bag in the fridge, and I'll be enjoying them for quite a while. Sorry about playing the blame game, jays!

Garlic 101

If I do say so myself, my garlic is far bigger, juicier, and more flavourful than those palid pretenders in the grocery store. It's really easy to grow, and it's the first thing to pop up in the garden next spring.
You can choose to plant garlic in the spring or in the fall. Because it has had more time to grow, fall garlic will get much bigger. It's important to buy garlic that has been grown close to home. Most garlic we eat comes from California, Florida, or China, from climates much milder than ours. That stock will not survive our harsh winters.
The best time to plant is in September or October. First, prepare the soil. Garlic is a heavy feeder, so enrich the soil with well-aged manure or compost. Use a string suspended between two sticks to make a straight row, and with a hoe make a 3-inch deep trench on both sides of the string about 1 foot apart.

Separate the heads of garlic into individual cloves. I found that one pound of garlic yielded 28 cloves, each of which will grow into a new head. Drop the cloves into the trench about 8 inches apart, and press them into the ground root side down, pointy side up. Cover and firm the soil, and you're done! Next spring, even before the snow is all melted, your garlic will sprout. The plants grow about 2.5 feet tall, and at the beginning of July produce a twisted stalk with a seed head called a scape. These should be cut off so that the plant concentrates on making a bigger garlic head. The scapes have a mild garlic flavour, are good in salads or stir-fries, and keep a long time in a bag in the fridge.
Next August, when the leaves are almost totally dry, dig up the plants, brush off the soil, and cure them outside on newspapers. Brush off the rest of the soil, tie together, and hang in a cool place away from direct sun. Presto - beautiful garlic that will put the store-bought stuff to shame!

Yes-what you see in this picture is my garden with weeds and volunteers that have not been cleared out. That is a new columbine smack dab in the middle of the garlic rows, and it will look a bit strange next year in amongst the garlic plants. But an organic farmer I know assures me that he gets a better yield of vegetables when he does not pull out every weed, so I will follow his advice. It has nothing to do with the fact that I may have let the weeds get ahead of me this year!

Critter damage II: Sour grapes

All summer, I've been waiting with some anticipation for my grapes to ripen. This variety, called Valient, produces blueberry-sized grapes in delicious clusters. There must be 50 clusters this year, and I'm waiting patiently for October, when they will be fully ripe.

Two years ago, I was able to enjoy a bunch of my lucious grapes every day for a month. Last year the crop was even bigger. But just before they were ready to eat, I suddenly found that there was nothing left but a bunch of skeletonized twigs. Every single grape was gone. I have no proof, but I'm blaming the blue jays.
This year, the grapes are being attacked by a new enemy. This has to be racoon damage. I woke up one morning to grapes scattered all over the deck. And they aren't even ripe yet. You may not think I should begrudge a few bunches, but I'm afraid this is just a taste of what's to come. I don't want to lose out on the taste treat of the season.
Now I'm hauling out the big guns: netting. Birds and other critters are terrified of getting caught in netting. I've put netting over my compost bin and voila! no more kitchen scraps dragged from the bin to the lawn. Since draping a large piece of netting over the entire grape vine, there has been no damage, and my grapes are ripening nicely.

And there's a bonus. Tiny grape seedlings have sprouted in my vegetable garden. I'm guessing that last year's hordes of bluejays dined on my grapes and then used the garden as a toilet and left the seeds behind.

Critter damage

I had a really poor carrot crop this year. I seeded twice, because my first try yielded about three carrots. And the second got me about four. Now that it's time to harvest, to add insult to injury, I'm finding a black hole in this carrot. The culprit is the carrot rust fly, a tiny insect that can smell carrots far away. The fly lays its eggs close to the carrot, and when they hatch, the larvae take up residence inside by chewing their way in. For years, I've been following the rules: plant the crop in a new location each year, and harvest the carrots before the second week in September, when a new generation of carrot rust flies is ready to move to a carrot near you. I pulled this one September 1, and it was already too late. I'm thinking that because everything seemed to mature early this year, so did the fly.

Sick trees

For the past three years, maples in the Charlottetown area have been getting sick. By mid-August, the leaves are curled and brown and starting to fall. Looking closer, the leaves are dotted with black raised dots called Tar Spot fungus.

Tar spot won't kill the tree, but it sure makes them ugly. And there won't be the traditional amazing display of colour that only a maple can show off in the fall. This fungus thrives in warm damp conditions, and it is less likely to be killed off in cold conditions because our winters have been mild. Experts advise raking up and disposing of fallen leaves, but that is difficult because they take their time, and don't drop off all at once. They are also blown around by the wind and disappear. It also means I can't use leaves as mulch or compost them, because that fungus will still be present.
Most of the maples in the area are affected - and they all happen to be non-native Norway maples. But not 20 feet from this ugly specimen on my lawn are two maples that show no sign of the disease. These are sugar maples, a native variety, and it's great to see that some maples are resistant. And the fall colour show will happen in a smaller way this year.
Norway maples were planted everywhere because they were cheap, grew well, and were resistant to cold. But now they are all looking terrible. This is a good example of why we should be careful not to plant a monoculture. Too much of the same thing is definitely not a good thing. When we have more variety and one species is attacked by disease, it doesn't make such a big impact.

2-faced oddities

Seeds usually grow up to be like the picture on the package. But sometimes seeds a plant dropped in your garden last season offer some surprises. Sunflowers are great for this. Volunteers sprout like mad in my garden, and I don't have the heart to pull them out. And I want to see what happens. Sometimes the seed from a regular one-headed sunflower grows into a beast with many tiny heads. And sometimes this happens. These two plants have two faces on one stem. Very strange!

The hurricane that was a "hurri-can't"

"Hurri-can't" - my son Tristan's word for what happened on PEI on Saturday. We were warned days in advance that Hurricane Earl was on its way. Hour by hour, minute by minute, media updates flooded in. We were hyped up about this one. We secured flower pots, patio furniture, anything that could become a flying missile. When the storm blew in on Saturday, there was heavy wind and hard rain. Some branches broke free, but here's the extent of the damage in my back yard: a trellis with such a high centre of gravity that it falls down regularly. The roses and honeysuckle must be quite dizzy. The bush the trellis fell on is a mock orange that despite my best efforts has never bloomed in the 10 years it's been there.
I took a short walk through the back fields to the Vesey's Seeds trial gardens. The corn was flattened and the sunflowers were down, but that was the extent of the damage. I should be grateful that it wasn't worse, but sometimes we just crave a bit of excitement.

Here is a downed branch with some very interesting fungus attached. It gave me a new perspective on what could be happening just over my head.

Don't turn your back

It doesn't pay to turn your back on happenings in the garden.
I was given a lovely plant with a pink frothy flower that behaved itself in my garden for at least 5 years. But this year, I didn't keep an eye on it until - surprise - it took over most of the flowerbed, choking out nearby irises and black-eyed susans. Its roots formed a mat so dense that I can't put a shovel through it. An organic herbicide turned the leaves brown, but then new green ones popped up. Even Round-Up is not killing it.

My staghorn sumac is finally putting up it's distinctive brown horns for the first time this year. But it's also being attacked by a mysterious culprit that is turning every group of leaves white at the tips. I cut off each blasted tip as the damage appears.

Tent caterpllars moved in on my PG Hydraneas, but I countered with potato dust, and that seemed to do the trick.

If I turn my back on the pests and problems, they won't go away. Sometimes my efforts work to irradicate the problem, and sometimes I'm helpless, like with black tar spot on the maple trees. Maples all over PEI are affected, with black spots turning the leaves crispy and dropping early. I can't save the leaves for compost, because the pathogen will stick around, and we won't have the blazing colour we expect from our maples. It's a lesson in perseverence, but also in patience and acceptance.