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The
Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
May 26 - June 1, 2005 Edition
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Garden
Notes
Thinking ahead about the garden and the coming season, this year’s Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society Harvest Festival is planned for October 1. It will celebrate the bounty of Martha’s Vineyard with daytime activities and an early evening potluck dinner, followed by a dance. The focus of the potluck is the challenge to the participants to bring a dish composed of Island-grown ingredients, whether from your garden, local farms, or Island seafood and game. Ladies and gentlemen, please plan your plantings and preserving accordingly.Perennial chores One task of the early part of the growing season is the process of pinching out. It is a technique of perennial management that seems under-utilized, where the growing tip of the plant is nipped out once or several times up until around June 21, the solstice, or even later in the case of asters and chrysanthemums. Many gardeners are familiar with it in connection with chrysanthemums at least, but it is a good management tool for many other plants, annual and perennial, too. It is most easily done with the fingernails of the thumb and forefinger, taking out only the tenderest growing tip of the shoot. It is actually a form of pruning. With annuals, such as snapdragons, salvia, petunias, and so on, nip out the first set of leaves as you plant. The reasons to do it are: to promote bushiness; to control height and lessen need for staking; to retard bloom time; to get more and smaller flowerheads; and to shape plants in a pleasing form. There are perennials To Pinch and those To Pinch Not. Among those To Pinch are the asters (Michaelmas daisies,) garden phlox, garden chrysanthemums/anthemis/dendranthema group, and perovskia. What one is looking for in the To Pinch category is a perennial that grows with a branching habit, where undeveloped axillary buds are forced into growth by the removal of the apical bud. Therefore perennials such as platycodon may be pinched to retard their time of flowering to coincide with a September event, where ordinarily the main flush of bloom would be in August. Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ is another good subject for pinching. There, the flowering stem will shift from one large flat-topped flowerhead to a more branching effect of many smaller flowerets. These will withstand heavy rainfall better than the one immense flowerhead, thus lessening the need to stake or prop up the clump after an August tropical depression. On the other hand, daylilies and lilies from bulbs are merely decapitated by pinching back—there will be no flower at all, so these are To Pinch Nots. Additional ones are iris, lupine, and poppy. But I think most gardeners have a sense or have learnt from sad experience which plants are not to be pinched back. What I am attempting to encourage is a tool that can be used to improve plants that are otherwise left to grow on their own: the meddling human hand. Jaws strikes again While I was pinching back phlox in an Edgartown garden last week I noticed that several of the many clumps had been munched. Rabbits, was my first thought, but on closer inspection I spotted the telltale wilted leaves pulled down into the soil here and there, that are typical of cutworm activity. Stirring around carefully with my cultivator I was slightly revolted and fascinated to accumulate 49 plump and juicy cutworms in and among the three clumps! I checked the other plants and found no more. I have never seen such an infestation before. I piled the cutworms into a borrowed juice jar and took them home to the chickens at the end of the day. Overjoyed fowl staged a feeding frenzy as if they had been famished. While I would have preferred no cutworms at all, I suppose those phlox have been quite pinched back. I am keeping a scientifically observational eye on them. An associated technique to pinching back is cutting back, which is done by cutting off more growth than just the growing tip. As with pinching back, aim to cut the stem back to just above a node. Cutting back is usually done with pruners but is also done with hedging shears. Santolina and lavender plants are plants I cut back using hedging shears, as are chrysanthemums. It saves time where there are many plants to be done. Cutting back like this is also done after the first flush of bloom with plants such as nepeta, alchemilla, and campanula. Rake up the clippings carefully afterwards. Houseplants that are bound for a summer outside are candidates for cutting or pinching back. The outdoor light will cause their growth to thicken nicely. Look at rosemary, bay laurel, and ivy topiaries, the geraniums, gardenias, and other tender perennials with a branching habit: all will benefit from a nipping here and there. Good time to repot too. If there is enough interest (at least five people signing up), Pete Costas will hold another business class for landscapers, like the one he held earlier in the spring. It is designed for landscapers “who want some tools, advice, ideas, to get organized so they can keep track of their expenses and get their billing out in a timely manner.” Please contact him at pete@vineyardgardens.net if you are interested. |
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