The New Year is upon us; onward we go.
New Year’s resolutions are never a bad idea, even if they are promptly broken. These suggestions, which have appeared in previous New Year’s Garden Notes, are useful outside the garden:
- No one will ever get out of this world alive. Resolve therefore to maintain a reasonable sense of values.
- Take care of yourself. Good health is everyone’s major source of wealth. Without it, happiness is almost impossible.
- Resolve to be cheerful and helpful. People will repay you in kind.
- Avoid angry, abrasive persons. They are generally vengeful.
- Avoid zealots. They are generally humorless.
- Resolve to listen more and to talk less. No one ever learns anything by talking.
- Be chary of giving advice. Wise people don’t need it, and fools won’t heed it.
- Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and wrong. Sometime in life you will have been all of these.
- Do not equate money with success. There are many successful moneymakers who are miserable failures as human beings. What counts most about success is how a person achieves it.
Best wishes for a happy 2025!
Weed of the Year, 2024
It has become almost cliché: Emerson and others, including Rebecca Gilbert of Native Earth Teaching Farm, North Road (“Weedy Wisdom”), have observed that a weed is a plant whose virtues are yet to be discovered.
Doubtless, there is a wide assortment of candidates for this putative “dishonor,” Weed of the Year. Individual gardeners have their pet weedy peeves, depending upon where they work; and each season, it seems, a characteristically predominant weed emerges in gardens, although it is rarely the same plant two years running.
A couple of years ago, the consistent brat was Galium aparine, nicknamed cleavers. Then Canadian horsetail, Erigeron canadensis, was everywhere and needing removal. (On the Vineyard, unappreciated forms of goldenrod are, of course, eternal.)
Could there be cycles of germination and prevalence in the weedy realm?
After all, there are cycles of acorns, outbreak cycles of insects, cycles of lemmings and voles …
For 2024 I am nominating Cardamine hirsuta, spitting cress, a winter or summer annual brassica, as Weed of the Year. It was, and still is, everywhere! Per Del Tredici: The plant completes its life cycle very quickly, and under cool, moist conditions is capable of producing multiple generations in a single season.
With a nasturtium- or watercress-like pepperiness, the little cresses are actually a forager’s delight, and make a great addition to salads. Learn more about the highly successful self-sower with the nickname “spit-in-your-eye” at bit.ly/BBG_SpittingCress.
Winter moth
Speaking of outbreak cycles, this season appears to be hosting a fairly heavy flight of winter moth (Operophthera brumata). There is something slightly creepy about their bodies massing, and plastered nocturnally, on glass doors and around porch lights. Let’s assume that the resident winter bird life still active at dusk knows to go after the insect protein.
Forest cacti: Schlumbergera, Rhipsalis
The December ’24 edition of RHS’ Plant Review features houseplants, and due to the explosion of interest in them, makes for informative reading. To each his or her own; this edition covers many houseplant groups.
Monsteras and so-called Swiss cheese plants are very popular, but of less interest to me personally than gesneriads, such as Achimenes, and epiphytic forest cacti, such as Schlumbergera and Rhipsalis.
Commonly known as Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Easter cacti, forest cacti Schlumbergera have undergone extensive hybridization. They are all combined in Schlumbergera now, eliminating former genera such as Zygocactus.
Forest cacti are generally native to moist forests of Brazil, and grow in filtered light on trees there. In Northern Hemisphere houses, they are durable and uncomplaining, accepting lower light levels and intermittent watering, and give us blazes of bloom during festive seasons. With minimal care, plants commonly live a very long time (bit.ly/RHS_ChristmasCactus).
The Schlumbergera cultivars database (Schlumbergera.net/Schlumbergera-cultivars) currently lists more than 2,000 different cultivars. The explosion in Schlumbergera hybrid and cultivar breeding includes many that grow and bloom in more upright habits, and also, now, miniatures. Many make good hanging plants, due to the growth habit with downward-facing flowers.
Rhipsalis share many traits that make Schlumbergeras good houseplants. Undemanding and uncomplaining, yet covered with their funny little flowers several times per year, their hairy, ropelike branches grow quietly in a trailing or cascading habit. That makes them, as with some Schlumbergeras, suited to hanging planters.
According to the New York Botanical Garden, “Mixing one part perlite (for drainage) with one part potting soil, one part peat [would substituting coir for the peat work?] and one part coarse orchid bark (for structure and nutrition) creates an excellent soil for most jungle cacti.”
In the garden
Keep overwintering pelargoniums (“geraniums”) dry. Overwatering harms plants more than drought. Hang yellow sticky traps to control whitefly.
The weather’s vicissitudes toy with garden plants’ ability to go, at long last, into winter-long dormancy.
Lettuces and members of the Swiss chard/leaf beet family persist, some under floating row cover; leeks and mâche still supply the kitchen. However, garden organizing and weeding now begin.
During winter, brassicas are the main source of healthy food from gardens. Various kales are made sweeter by being frosted. Although ornamental kales in seasonal planters are decorative and colorful, right there in the vegetable garden is Portuguese ‘Beira’ kale. It is beautiful, and more suited to Island conditions than one might suppose.
Leaf debris makes free, perfectly suitable mulch, protecting soil and plants, and suppressing weeds such as spitting cress until spring removal.
