Category — Plant care

You probably think I’m going to talk about your stress. Nope. I’m going to talk about plant stress. But you can extrapolate if you want: humans need a bit of stress, too, or we wouldn’t stand upright.

What seems to be important, in humans and in plants, is the right kind of stress. I’ve talked about bad kinds of stress, like what happens to plants that get watered, then  suffer from drought.

How do we create good plant stress?

Squeeze your grapes. Wine grapes, that is. But you’ve got to do it right. Mark and Rie Ishii Matthews, at the University of California, did a study on wine grapes that were stinted on water, making smaller, dryer grapes. These grapes made wine which was more aromatic and flavorful, and had a better appearance. The wine was worth more, too, which made the growers happy.

Whack off your vines.  Most vines put on a much better display if they’re severely pinched out or pruned early in life. Grapes would be only one example; most perennial flowering vines also benefit from being whacked. Instead of putting their energy into one long trailer, suddenly they have several branches, all potential rivers of flowers and fruit. Don’t forget that many tomatoes are vines, too. And some non-vine plants – such as chrysanthemums – also do well under this treatment.

Beat and shoot your trees. In the southeast U.S., farmers flail their pecan trees to make a better yield. This echos an old English custom, wassailing. On about the 17th of January (Twelfth Night on the old calendar, one of those post-winter-solstice holidays) farmers gather in the apple orchard with shotguns and other noisemakers. They pour libations of cider on the roots, and put cider-soaked pieces of toast in the branches. Sometimes a child is put in the branches of the chosen tree and fed some of the cider toast. Then guns are discharged through the branches, tin cans and trays are beaten, and a song is sung to the apple tree, encouraging it to bear.

There are records of similar rituals for other fruit-bearing trees, but for most of history, apple trees were the main source of alcohol, making them vitally important, and their rituals seem to have been more recorded. Some of the wassailing traditions include beating the trees, just like the southeastern pecan farmers.

Robert Stone’s 1989  book,  The Secret Life of Your Cells, got me thinking about this. Stone says that, in the grapes experiment, the researchers intended good when they turned off the water, and the plants sensed that. Having known scientific researchers, I think they were just as likely to be thinking about what they were having for lunch or if they could fit a trip to the gas station in before they got home, but OK. Let’s ride with this theory.

Certainly the farmers who beat their apple trees are looking to encourage, and not harm. Yet how many stories have we heard of plants who were threatened with death if they didn’t shape up – and they shaped up? How many of us have experienced plants thriving where they have no business to? A miniature citrus that thrives in a shady spot, but dies when moved to a sunny one; Ruth Stout’s gardenia, which flourished where it wasn’t supposed to.

Are these plants stressed, and liking it? Or are they just perverse? Is it the same thing?

Peter Henderson’s 1874 gardening book, Practical Floriculture, is an idea-provoking read that leaves me wondering where he got his manic amounts of energy. One of the things he seemed to enjoy most was experimenting with new technologies, and pooh-poohing old superstions.

One piece of dogma he refutes is the notion of using only soft water or rain water for plants, very popular then, and still recommended now. This is problematic for those of us whose water is full of minerals, and whose rain is only available for part of the year.  The other dictum about watering that Henderson refutes, is that most plants prefer warm water (bulbs don’t; they’re late-winter/early-spring creatures, adapted to cold).

Fortunately for a lot of us, Henderson dispels both these myths. He describes a greenhouse in Jersey City where he grew plants with cold, hard well water, and a greenhouse in Bergen (also in New Jersey) where he gave plants rainwater captured from the roof and stored in cisterns. “…yet we have never been able to see that our plants have been any better grown or healthier in one place than another.”

I will say from my own observation that rainwater (from the sky, as nature provides it) does seem to me to make plants grow more lushly and greenly. It could be because of nitrogen in the water, or it could just be that the time of year it rains here is the time when things are cool and moist and much more likely to be lush.

Whether municipal water poses more of a problem would be harder to say. In 1874, they didn’t use chlorine in their water supply, and there were plusses and minuses to that. Chlorine is used because it’s toxic to every form of organic life. Since people recommend that you let water sit and evaporate chlorine before filling a fish tank, it’s probably not all that great for plants either (or us), but then neither are typhoid fever and all the other great things you get from water gone bad.

As for the temperature of the water, Henderson explains, a simple thermometer test combined with observation takes care of that. He measured his greenhouse soil at 80 degrees; theory had it that the water was supposed to be the same temperature. Henderson begs to differ. “If we pour a pint of water at 40 degrees [about 4.4 degrees C] into the soil, the temperature will not be 40 degrees, but above the mean between 40 and 80 degrees [about 27 degrees C], or about 60 degrees [around 15.5 degrees C]. Now if the soil remained for any length of time at 60 degrees, it might be claimed to be injurious, but it does not.” In ten minutes, the soil temperature is back to normal, or almost.

“It is the duration of extremes of temperature that does the mischief; place a plant of Coleus in a temperature of 33 degrees (just above freezing in Fahrenheit) for 24 hours, and it will be almost certain to die, while it would remain as many minutes without injury. Let a dash of sun raise the temperature of your hot-bed to 100 degrees [ 38C], or over, for 10 minutes, and it will not seriously injure the contents, but an hour of this temperature might destroy the whole.”

He likens this to drinking ice water; the temperature is radically different from our body’s,  but most stomachs are up to the task of bringing the water up to body temperature pretty quickly, so even though having our insides at ice-temperatures is dangerous, it would take a heck of a lot of ice water for that to happen.

So for those who worry about such esoterica: worry no longer. And for those who are worried by people who worry about such esoterica: you’ve now got the perfect answer. Science and history have proven it: we can retire from excessive water snobbery, and all that heating and storing of water that I’m sure somebody did. Me, I’m just glad that science and history are providing a rationalization for sloth.

In times of stressed economy, it’s good to do what we can to save money.

Since I’ve been poor and cheap for decades, I’m well-prepared to inform those who are experiencing this for the first time. I have been working for years, very unscientifically, on getting my tulips to return, instead of buying them every year, as is our extravagant custom.

These Prinses Irene tulips returned year after year - until I made the mistake of digging them up

And then what do you do with tulip bulbs at the end of the year? Tossing them out makes me feel somewhat as I did in fourth grade, when the egg incubator failed in science class, and I had to pour a half-formed chicken down the drain (There seems to be a lot of trauma around science, here. Maybe this is the key to my unscientificness (lack of scientificity?).)

Keeping bulbs around seems to indicate that I should do something to help them survive. So I started looking for ways to do that.

Some of my ideas for getting tulips to return came from the folks at Old House Gardens, who have their own tip sheet for helping tulips come back. Others came from Janis Ruksans, who has been collecting, propagating, and breeding bulbs for decades. Brent and Becky’s gave me the good soil tip (which I ignored for many years). Still others are a combination of my own observation, research, and guesswork.

While I haven’t come up with the Definitive Home Method getting tulips to return, I have come up with a lot of things that will up your chances. Don’t be depressed by the length of the list; I don’t do all of the things on it, either. Bulbs are forgiving. Just taking heed of pointer #1 will give you ever-increasing returns on your tulips. Even in these hard times.

1. Buy the right varieties of tulip.

Older tulips were bred for gardeners. Newer ones (after about 1950) are bred for the cut-flower industry, which is more interested in instant results than lasting glory. But the category of tulip matters, too. Fosterianas, kauffmanias, greggis, and most so-called “species” tulips (they aren’t always) tend to repeat easily and reliably in the garden. Among these categories, some are more long-lasting than others. ‘Purissima’, ‘Sweetheart’, ‘Lady Jane’ and T. batalinii ‘Apricot Jewel’ have done well for me. (In an earlier post  I went into this in more detail.)

2. Leave tulip foliage on until it’s dead, dead, dead. And don’t tie it up, either.

For some reason, there’s a gardening tradition of cutting bulb foliage when it starts to go yellow. To me, this neatness smacks of overzealous housekeeping, but you don’t have to militate against tidiness to see that cutting foliage has a very bad effect on bulbs. Tying up foliage, often cited as an alternative, is equally bad; those leaves need sun. Which leads us to the next point.

3. Give tulips enough sun.

I learned this one the hard way. Sunlight on the foliage is what feeds it. And since the foliage feeds the bulb and the bulb makes the flower….this is starting to sound like a folk song, but you get the picture. My semi-shady garden has made me very aware that the more sun you give tulips, the better they return. Frances at Fairegarden  illustrates this with a story about her own tulips.

4. Don’t give tulips too much sun.

I learned this one the hard way, too. Hot weather can strike suddenly in spring, blasting tulip buds to tiny brown shriveled things, yellowing foliage before its time. Since the leaves make next year’s bulbs (this is beginning to be my theme song), foliage dead before its time usually means blind bulbs next spring.

5. Foliar feed tulips throughout the growing season.

I’ve been doing this for the last year for my tulips, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that suddenly, this year, I’m seeing blooms from several kinds of tulips I’ve had “incubating” for years as small bulbs in small pots. Janis Ruksans says that using foliar feed has vastly improved things in his bulb nursery, so I’m in good company. I use an organic foliar feed that promotes bloom, and I try to get it on my tulip foliage every two weeks until the leaves are gone. Every week would be better.

6. Calcium is great for tulips – as a foliar feed and in the ground.

Earlier, I posted my discovery  that Janis Ruksans, bulb hunter, propagator, and breeder, found that his small offset bulbs did far better when they were planted in rocky soil. Since he’s an experienced bulb worker, he had good drainage both places. The difference, in his opinion, was calcium. And, I think, probably other minerals. Photos of species bulbs show them in the rocky landscapes which create high-mineral soils. This is a clue to what bulbs need.

7. Ground feed tulips in fall and early spring.

Besides fertilizing with minerals spring and fall, I use an organic high-phosphorus fertilizer to give bulbs a boost. Fall fertilizing feeds bulbs as they wake from dormancy and start to send roots into the ground, seeking food; spring fertilizing (at least this is my theory) gives the foliage something extra to draw on as it feeds the bulbs for the following year. (Actually, I read up on some Experts, and found that they also believe in spring and fall fertilizing. Very gratifying.) In my own area, both feedings take advantage of seasonal rains to wash fertilizers into the soil, saving energy (mine) and water.

8. Split up tulip offsets and give them room to grow (separately).

Bulbs which are squashed together don’t have room to develop into maturity. They compete for turf and nutrients, like rats in a cage, and fail to thrive. If you’re getting a lot of blind bulbs, or the leaves are looking smaller and smaller, you need to dig them up when they’re dormant, split them apart, and give them living room. I generally use small pots for this, so I don’t lose track of tiny bulbs.

These are the small leaves that show when your bulbs are too small to bloom. They’ve been split up into pots to grow out.

9. Don’t water tulips in summer.

Unlike many plants, tulips loathe water. They rot. They sulk. They don’t reproduce. This makes tulips the ultimate low-water plant, since water is at its most precious in hot weather. If you plant tulips in pots, shelter those pots from rain until it’s time to fertilize in fall. If you plant in the ground, put tulips in low-water areas with herbs and succulents. (For more detailed info on this, check out Old House Gardens instructions on keeping bulbs going.)

10. Don’t put tulips where they will have saturated, moist soil at any time – they rot.

This is a continuation of the previous point, but it bears saying. I once put some tulips in a spot where they would receive maximum winter water (under an overhanging roof where the rain ran like a little spout). I thought this would nourish them to a fine future. What it actually did was turn them to mush. Tulips may benefit from a little water during an early-spring hot spell, but they need drainage drainage drainage, all year round. (The one exception to this might be Tulipa sylvestris, but my jury’s still out on that.)

11. Plant them deeper.

Two reliable sources said 8 inches to a foot. Do be sure that there is plenty of nutritious and amended soil under the bulb, no matter how deep you plant it; it still needs to get nourishent through its roots, not its top. And remember that tulips need drainage. Since I plant in pots, I compromise at about 8 inches. Sylvia from England writes that she has been experimenting with this; she planted her West Points a foot deep, and promises to report on the results.

12. Use good soil.

One of my antique garden books says that tulips need good soil, but not rich soil. That’s what Brent and Becky’s advises, too (it used to be in their print catalogue, but I didn’t find it online). Most tulips originally come from rocky mountain soils, so obviously they can grow in poor soils as long as mineral content is high. Like many plants, though, even species tulips enjoy a loose soil with easily-available nutrients. The big flashy ones bred in the light, sandy soils of the Netherlands may sometimes survive in hard or poor soils, but they don’t thrive there.

13. Deadhead.

Once they bloom, plants put all their energy into making seeds. They want the next generation to survive. If you want the foliage to feed your bulbs and future flowers more than the seeds, pick the green seedpods off as soon as flowering is done. If you have lots of tulips, you might be able to bribe some kids into doing it for something good to eat.

Maybe you’ve had experiences that refute these pointers. Maybe you want to exand on the ideas I’ve listed. Maybe you know of some tulips that seem to come back more easily than others, or even better, you’ve come up with yet another way to get tulips to return. Won’t you share the knowledge? And if you’ve got more questions about this (I sure do), maybe we can all put our heads together and discuss it.

Theoretically, alpine strawberries are a wonderful match for a woodland garden. But after a decade or so, I’m still waiting for mine to prove it. Alpine strawberries, so the story goes, don’t need as much sun to bloom and fruit. In fact, according to the writeups, they need some shade to thrive. Yellow alpines have berries less attractive to birds, less likely to be marauded. And, since I’d had “white” alpine strawberries (really a pale primrose yellow) from the garden of a market gardener (who rightly only allowed us a few out of one of his highest-paying crops), I knew they tasted great.

Many catalogues carry alpine strawberry seeds instead of the plants; I’ve never had any luck growing these, but I don’t claim to be an expert at growing from seed. (Lucky, that.) Which is why, after several tries, I was happy to find places where I could get a few starter plants (some of those resources are below. The original place where I got my own alpines no longer carries them). Having experimented with some of our local, rhizomous wild strawberries and found them slow going, I was happy to find some alpine strawberries with runners, because I thought I could propagate these more quickly.

Alpine strawberries are supposed to fruit all season, through the summer and fall. They are close to wild strawberries in their breeding, so the fruit and leaves are much smaller than the better-known commerical kinds. (The shape of the fruit is different, too; more like a tiny dunce cap than the fat wedges of store strawberries.) Some of them have runners; some spread by rhizomes. They’re hardy to about -20 degrees F (about -29 degrees C), or zone 5, according to the One Green World catalogue; zones 3 to 9. according to the Raintree catalogue. Rosalind Creasy says that alpine strawberries are good to zone 4; I would tend to trust her the most, since I know she has lots of experience as a hands-on gardener in regular people’s gardens, as opposed to nurseries with all the commercial equipment.

Creasy recommends dividing plants every three or four years for best production. Maybe that’s part of my problem; I have never done this. On the other hand, the plants have rarely looked crowded to me. And the plants she’s discussing appear to be the rhizomous strawberries, not the ones with runners; my theory has been that runners are runners, so I just heel in the new little plants-on-a-string the way Ruth Stout recommends, only in a less-organized fashion.

Creasy recommends morning sun for alpine strawberries, or filtered sun from high-branched trees; she warns against full or afternoon sun, which I have found does indeed burn the leaves. Good places for alpine strawberries are in rockeries, borders, and anywhere you need a quick-growing groundcover. I think they make a nice part of the transition garden, that edge where natives start to take over from imports. They take some summer water, though they aren’t nearly as thirsty as their big-fruited cousins, so be sure to plant alpine strawberries with natives that aren’t moisture hogs, but don’t mind some summer water.

After I gave up on growing strawberries in a strawberry pot for reasons of deadness,  I put them in some of my self-watering containers, where they have lingered, mostly berriless, to this day. They have copiously produced runners, though, possibly for lack of anything else to do in the shade. I don’t recall getting any berries out of either attempt at growing strawberries in a pot.

Some of the alpine strawberries in pots grew so vigorously that they crept over the edge, where they made several rosettes which managed to root themselves in the dry-summer ground. I’ve also grown a few in the ground on purpose, where they obligingly made a pleasant woodsy-looking groundcover, and more plants - but nary a berry. Since I give them the same fertilizers and foliar feeds that produce flowers in my other plants, I’m guessing lack of sun is the problem, though they do get that morning sun or filtered light that everybody seems to recommend. After all, that market gardener who sparked my alpine strawberry lust by feeding me a treasured few of his alpine strawberries - from berry plants that had plentiful fruit - well, that guy grew his alpine strawberries in full sun. It was in the Pacific Northwest, I grant you; their summers are mild. But still. This strengthens my theory that these berries actually need more sun than advertised. If you want berries, that is.

Even though I have only the leaves, they’re still useful. Strawberry leaves are among the winter-growing plants which have a high vitamin C content; vital in times when no other sources of vitamin C are available. Euell Gibbons devised a way to extract it by filling a blender with strawberry leaves, covering with water, then blending only until the leaves are fine-cut; he let the leaves soak in the water overnight (this continues the water extraction of vitamin C), and strained it in the morning. He recommended this in morning green drinks, or as a way to dilute frozen fruit juices.

Strawberry leaves have traditionally been used as an antiscorbutic - which means they’re effective against scurvy. Since scurvy is caused by vitamin C deficiency, it only makes sense.
My own method of getting the benefit out of strawberry leaves is to include them in what I call ‘garden tea’: leaves of whatever is plentiful at any given time. In winter, that’s usually lavender, sage, strawberry leaves, and violet leaves (which also contain vitamin C). I rub them between my hands until they’re bruised, then simmer them several minutes until the tea is bright chartreuse. Most people enjoy this tea, and it’s very enlivening.

Last fall, in yet another attempt to get some actual fruit, I transplanted the alpine strawberries into some plastic bulb bowls-I had a lot more than my original three plants. (Being an overzealous bulb freak, I also planted some Fritillaria meleagris alba in the same bowls, hoping their small white bells would fit in nicely, and that the strawberries would provide them with the moist, cool root run they prefer.) I set the bowls where they’ll get about half a day’s sun with afternoon shade, and gave them the fertilizing regime I’m giving everything over the fall and winter. We’ll see.

References and Resources:

Both catalogues are good sources for information on growing conditions and garden uses of these strawberries.

Raintree catalogue -  has not only the yellow alpine strawberries I planted, but now carries a (presumably really) white alpine strawberry plus two red ones. In addition, there other wild and wild-related strawberries for your delectation.

One Green World catalogue -  carries two kinds of alpines, different varieties than the ones offered by Raintree.

Rosalind Creasy,  The Gardener’s Handbook of Edible Plants, Sierra Club Books, 1986

Ruth Stout, How to Have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back: a New Method of Mulch Gardening, orig. published Exposition Press, 1955, with many subsequent printings. The chapter on strawberries is “Love Will Find a Way”.

In my last post, I discussed Peter Henderson’s 1875 greenhouse/hothouse plans for the wealthy. But Henderson deserves credit: he didn’t just write for the rich, he wanted people of every income to have a chance to grow a plentitude of houseplants and exotics.

After he’s exhausted himself on the subject of the Ideal Greenhouse, his Gardening for Pleasure continues with ideas for attached greenhouses and greenhouse-pits that need no artificial heating to hold the plants you would keep in a cool greenhouse. It’s advice that modern half-hardy and tender plant growers might use, since rising fuel prices make heating a greenhouse an increasingly expensive proposition.

The attached-greenhouse method only works in areas with relatively mild winters; Henderson wrote from Jersey City Heights, where it freezes and snows, but not inordinately. (New Jersey, whose car licenses still read “Garden State”, was at that time a huge market-garden area that served the massive population of New York City.) A small greenhouse attached to a heated building, properly constructed, says Henderson, will keep plants going in places where the temperature doesn’t fall below 25 degrees F (-4 C). It needs to be tightly glazed, and shielded from the north and north-west (if you’re below the equator, change the directions accordingly).

The pit greenhouse (which seems to be a kind of glorified sunken cold frame) is even better, Henderson says. “This is formed by excavating the soil to the depth of from 18 inches (45.7 cm) to 36 inches (91.4 cm), according to the size of the plants it is intended to contain. A convenient width is 6 feet (1.83 meters)…and of such length as may be desired.” He cautions that the ground must be dry enough that water won’t seep into the pit, and advises walling the sides of the pit  4  (10.2 cm) to 8 inches (20.3 cam) high with brick or planks.

“The back wall should be raised about eighteen inches (45.7 cm), and the front six inches (15.2 cm) above the surface, in order to give the nursery slope to receive the sun’s rays and to shed the water.” If glass is laid on top, and light shutters or half-inch boards  laid on top of the glass every evening, “it may be used to keep all the hardier class of greenhouse plants, even in localities where the thermometer falls to zero (-18 C). ”

While plants in such cool greenhouses won’t thrive lustily, they will be ready to go at the first sign of warm weather. That way, you wouldn’t have to grow out tender or half-hardy plants from small slips every year, or buy them new.  If I bestirred myself to make such a pit-greenhouse, I could  have the large collection of scented and flowering geraniums I’ve fantasized about, or keep beautiful brugmansias over winter reliably, and flower them before frost. I wouldn’t have to beg friends to babysit my houseplants when I go away in winter, either. (I don’t have central heating, so if temperatures fall below freezing, my houseplants turn to mush.)

Older technology has a lot to teach us. While we may not have the stay-at-home lifestyles or cheap help of past eras, many of these antique ideas make better sense than energy-eating options we are offered today.