Saturday, May 18, 2013

By Abigail Higgins
Published: July 16, 2009

In the gardening orders, values are lopsided. It is culturally orthodox for ornamental gardens to be seen as being somehow elevated, indeed an art form, while vegetable gardens are lowly and utilitarian. Do we need to put up with this? When it comes to cooking and dining well - there is nothing lowly and utilitarian about those activities at all. I propose the order of the "potager," which is French for vegetable garden, since the French are known for their - what else? - savoir faire. A well known celebrity once quipped that the ultimate status symbol was a "camp'' (small unimproved domicile) on the Vineyard. Today many Island gardeners have come to the conclusion that produce from one's own garden is one of the ultimate luxuries - along with a camp, of course.

July flowers: daylilies fill the gap in perennial gardens after the late spring garden display. Photo by Susan Safford

Onions for home gardens

Onions are a utilitarian crop. Some question the value of growing them, and other pantry staples, since they take up a lot of space in the amounts needed and are so readily available in stores. I think otherwise. Or maybe it is that a recession-era garden - potatoes, onions, turnips, cabbage - is going to feature a line-up different from one in easier times. Fewer herbs and frou-frou vegetables and more things one can actually eat.

This season I devoted at least a quarter of my garden area to onions, leeks, and garlic. I would have grown more if I had room for garden expansion. I have only one variety of onion, while some gardeners grow several - red, Vidalia, and differently shaped Italian heritage types. As useful and delicious as red onions are, if one variety is all there is room for, an onion that stores well is probably best. Through Homegrown, our Agricultural Society vegetable garden forum, I bought onion plants for hybrid "Copra," a standard yellow keeper.

As Shepard Ogden says in "Step By Step Organic Vegetable Gardening" (Harper Collins, 1992, 299 pp.), onions are one of the most frequently grown garden vegetables, yet most gardeners know little more about them "than how to push a handful of sets into the ground and wait for the tops to fall over." He describes how to grow the young plants that many gardeners assume they must buy:

Buy seed of a long-day or day-neutral onion variety and plant it indoors, as long as three months before the spring frost free date, using a 20-row tray. Sow the seed a quarter inch deep, water, and cover with a humidity dome. At 72 degrees on a heat mat, germination should take three or four days. The first leaf to show will be doubled over like a hairpin. Once it unfolds, thin the seedlings to a quarter inch apart in the rows; thinned plants may be potted up separately for extra large onions. Plants kept in the 20-row tray should be trimmed occasionally, to limit their height to three to four inches, but be careful not to cut the tip of the young leaf in the center of the plant, which is the growing point. (There is a lot more than this to growing onions. Acquire the book.)

Late season vegetables

Caught in a bind between conflicting demands, I spent more time tending my "potager" today than my schedule really allowed for. One demand recognizes that gardens need sowing of crops, now, that will take them through late fall. I made sowings of a number of vegetables, using the 20-row and 50-cell trays. Beets, Batavian lettuces, dill, basil, beans, the Westport Macomber turnip originally from Alan Wilder, lamb's lettuce, asparagus, snap peas. Just about the only vegetable sowed directly are carrots.

But before I could do the sowing I had to clean up the small "sunspace" greenhouse where I do it. Each year as warm weather arrives, work becomes more demanding. The plants must be taken outside, and what is left behind in the greenhouse is a special kind of mess consisting of failed plants, pollen, dead insects, cobwebs, and the dust produced by using soil-less potting mix and perlite. Surveying it, I initially find it overwhelming. But once I start in, shop vac screaming, I make progress and order seeps in.

While in the garden, I picked the first flowers of sweet peas, unbelievably late this year, considering how early the plants were set out. The catbirds and sparrows shadow me, perching and scolding and waiting for the black raspberries to ripen. They and their friends have already made off with each mulberry. I cracked off the outer, disfigured leaves of the heirloom 'Five Color Silverbeet' Swiss chard. These and leaves of beets are showing a kind of spotting damage they get from wet and cool weather early in the season. The recent growth is perfectly beautiful.

Deer tongue grass, Dichanthelium clandestinum, is blooming. It seeds itself through the fence and into the sweet peas. It is unwelcome, competing and putting down its tough roots, so I weed it out. But outside the vegetable garden I search for its airy flowers. They make beautiful filler added to vases of flowers in much the same way as baby's breath.

July could be said to be daylily month. There is a gap in Island perennial gardens that occurs after the early display of spring shrubs and early summer perennials. What to fill it with while waiting for the phlox? Many hosta varieties send up their bloom spikes in July, and while they are planted primarily for their foliage effects, some varieties' flowers make a pretty show and a nice contrast to the flowers of daylilies.

Bulletin from UMass Extension: plan regular fungicide applications for leaf blight problems.

Upcoming talks at Polly Hill Arboretum: Nature writer John Hanson Mitchell, July 22; Scott Arboretum director Claire Sawyers, July 29.