Leonard Moorehead, the Urban Gardener: Snug and Warm

Saturday, January 20, 2018

Leonard Moorehead, GoLocalWorcester Gardening Expert

Gardeners are resilient folks. Our cities are full of people who face winter with fortitude and hope. Snow storms and frost bite nip at fingers and toes. We scurry from buses and cars to heated workplaces and home. Our kitchen tables have piles of seed catalogs to peruse. Heirloom seeds and plants are the rage. Garden plots silently endure the cold, hope swells our hearts. Spring may seem forever and day away. Gales blow from the north and classic nor’easters test us. Wind chimes add music to wind chill, all else is dormant. Not for gardeners, a glance at the planets and blessed sunlight are gentle reminders spring is closer. Are we ready?

Winter is the season for root crops. For many of us, potatoes were our first introduction to grow your own. Very cheap to purchase, urban gardeners may overlook the common or inexpensive in favor of exotic or pricey plants to cultivate. Harvest during the winter? Not so farfetched, our garden plots are fine storage for root crops snug under mulches. Thick mulches horde the earth’s natural heat and defy cold atmosphere. Beneath last autumn’s leaves, hay, and seaweed are plenty of bulbs and the humble potato. Unfrozen soil is alive, earthworms are slower but continue to digest buried organic materials.

Nutritionists advise us to eat cool weather plants such as kale, broccoli, and the lowly potato. Seek out vegetables that are robust bursts of anti-oxidants, color may be your best guide. Think a little outside of the box. The home garden plot is the best arena for those varieties unsuitable for the marketplace. Much plant research has focused upon plants that travel well, ripen slowly, or conform to stereotypical appearances. The home gardener is perfectly poised to cultivate fruits and vegetables once grown for taste and flavor. No tomato rivals those ripened under the sun and carried directly from the garden into the kitchen. We turn away from cultivars whose most prominent features are uniform appearance, consistent sizes, or expected colors. Not all apples are red.

Our famers markets are excellent barometers for fruits and vegetables grown locally. Carrots are excellent examples. Naturally sweet, carrots are rich sources of beta-carotene and a near synonym for orange. However, carrot cultivars are not confined to the familiar orange. Shake things up. Red, black and white carrots offer tasty choices. They survive most pests and vermin, sending up foliage after rabbits have found your plot. Carrots prefer very friable soils to form thick roots. Double dig your carrot patch, turn over the soil and remove stones or other obstacles to roots. Nantes types are shorter for heavy compacted soils. Carrots can be sown repeatedly through the growing season well into late fall for early spring growth. Many of us plant carrots to mark slow germinating parsley or fast growing beans.

Carrots were brought by the first European colonists and quickly naturalized across America. Queen Anne ’s lace is the common name of this so called wildflower. Their off white umbral blooms always have a red dot among the cluster of petite flowers. Make good use of their root harvest by growing taller leafy plants overhead. Carrots are best kept right in the ground until needed. Have some fun and plant different colors, all require full sunshine.

A sheet of paper towel is a foot square. Mix flour and water into a thick paste and daub onto the paper towel in geometric form. Pour seeds onto a plate and place a seed on each flour glue daub, allow to dry. Paper towels are remarkably versatile, lay the squares onto cultivated soil and cover with a quarter to half inch of soil. The paper and flour glue are bio-degradable. This method saves time thinning seedlings. Every gardener has spilled seeds during the sensitive transferal of seed from packet to planting area. Comfortably lay out the seeds on the paper towel sitting at the table or standing next to the ever handy garden bench rather than crouched or kneeling in the garden. Sudden gusts of wind or texts have no impact upon laying out each paper square. The paper towel method is good for many seeds. The paper sheets can be cut into strips or laid out whole. They store well for repetitive sowing during much busier seasons.

Beets reward gardeners. Every part of the plant is edible. The leaves are delicious. Swiss Chard is a beet specifically gown for its large leaves. Although paper towels may verge towards conformity they are handy cut in strips and laid out in Greek key patterns or facsimiles of Elizabethan knot gardens. Chard like all beets favors cool weather although they tolerate summer’s dog days. Harvest the outermost leaves for constant crops. Mulch around the plantings to walk gently in the garden without compacting friable soil underfoot. Several automynous plantings discourage mass infestations or roving varmints. Moving planting areas around the garden to forestall exhausting soil nutrients and discourage predatory insects.

Children are attracted to the lowly spud. Agro-business have created trademarked varieties for French fries. Indigenous peoples of the Andes domesticated potatoes millennia ago, often specific to altitude rather than day length. Potatoes offer vast opportunities to experiment with color and form. The blue potato once planted as a novelty has naturalized in my garden. Each “eye” on the spud will sprout a new plant and I’ve accidently sliced through potatoes while cultivating the soil. Simply cover and replant. Tolerate these volunteers, isolated plants are less prone to mass infestations of insects and fungi.

Potatoes attract insect pests. The foliage may be ravaged but the tuber survives and remains viable in the soil for year after year. White potatoes are ubiquitous, however why stop there? Yellow, red skins, deep blue, and golden potatoes can be harvested at every stage of growth. Lay out potatoes cut into segments with an “eye” or two, dust with rootone, the rooting powder for faster root growth. Organic gardeners develop humus rich soils ideal for potatoes. Children are often amused to grow potatoes in bales of hay. Their adult companions appreciate their easy harvest from the decayed moist hay. Spoiled hay is fine for the garden and discounted to gardeners, there is no need for expensive livestock hay, indeed gardeners salvage hay unsuitable for horses. Straw and aging wood chips are also fine for the spud plot. Leave potatoes right in the garden for storage. Bring the kids inside for the winter.

Leonard Moorehead is a life- long gardener. He practices organic-bio/dynamic gardening techniques in a side lot surrounded by city neighborhoods in Providence, RI. His adventures in composting, wood chips, manure, seaweed, hay and enormous amounts of leaves are minor distractions to the joy of cultivating the soil with flowers, herbs, vegetables, berries, and dwarf fruit tree.