TOO EARLY FOR TRANSPLANTS, TRY SPROUTS

It’s early May and around here we don’t plant outside until Memorial Day, and even then we know there’ll likely be a big wet snow the first week of June. But the days warm, the snow recedes, and you get anxious. You counsel patience, but want to do something productive. This year I tried sprouting seeds for the first time.

At last year’s Colorado Garden & Home Show we bought a pack called “5 Part Salad Mix Sprouting Seeds,” packaged by Handy Pantry Sprouting in Springville, Utah. Contents: organic alfalfa, radish, mung bean, lentil, and broccoli. Certified 100% organic, the label says, “This mixture creates denser, higher fiber salad.”

To grow them in, I ordered the Biosta Sprouting Kit from territorialseed.com. It consists of three light plastic trays, and a bottom receptacle; place your seeds in t h e three stacking trays, pour water into the top and it filters down through the others, eventually ending up in the bottom. Price is a hefty $40.95 for what it is, but it’s clever and works very well.

The “5 Part Salad Mix Sprouting Seeds” yields about 5 cups of sprouts. As with any sprouts, you gotta eat them within a few days or they get funky. I put them on salads, but also find other uses, like in a breakfast burrito with Eggbeaters, onions, maybe some potato cubes and cheddar cheese. From our long-ago sailing days, when everything on board sometimes got damp and soft, sprouts give you a nice crisp c-r-u-n-c-h.

You can buy online. The 4-ounce pack we bought at the show for $4.83, sells online for $3.42. Don’t ask me why, but I guess it was the vendor expanding her profit margin. Handy Pantry has lots of other products, including various sprouting seed mixes, and sprouting containers less expensive than the one we bought.

Living Whole Foods d.b.a. Handy Pantry Sprouting, 1041 North 450 West., Springville, UT 84663, tel. 800–735–0630, handypantry.com.

The First Wildflower

The first really warm day of 2010 came upon us suddenly, last week. Temperatures soared into the 60s and low 70s. Tops were down on the convertible cars, families went for bike rides, and teens floated in rubber rafts on the lake outside town.

For most of April, we were teased with a sunny, clear day, that might hit 50°, only to be beaten back the next by a whiteout of frozen mix driven sideways by howling winds.

Despite the snowy violence, the daffodils on the front of our house popped, thanks to heat reflected off the walls. And when the snow in the backyard melted away from the garden beds, the crocuses appeared. Out in the fields, the first green blades of new grass began to thrust up through the mat of brown, dead stalks.

Walking the dogs through the field last Friday I saw the first wildflowers: spring beauty (Claytonia lanceolata). That day I counted just a few, but over the weekend hundreds more appeared. It’s a remarkably predictable flower. My records indicate the earliest appearance, in our 10 years here, was April 10. In 2004 it was April 12; in 2008 it was April 13; and in 2007 it was tax day—April 15.

Soon to come are the yellowbells, woodland shooting stars, several varieties of phlox, and streamside bluebells.

On my errand list today is new fabric for the vegetable garden hoop tunnels, because around here we know there’s more snow in the offing—right up to the first week of June.

—Dan Spurr

Ax In The Garden

Yesterday Bob fired up the rototiller and tilled most of the vegetable plot. The riding mower was stubborn, though; the battery needs to be replaced, an annual event. I divided our perennial bachelor’s buttons and daylilies and set about putting down new landscape fabric and bark mulch. I used a spading fork to lift the clumps, but then, the clumps were so tough I thought an ax would be better than a shovel to divide them. Bob came over and laughed at me; he said I didn’t mess around—I had grabbed a splitting mall instead of an ax. But it sure did work well!

—Cheryl Moore-Gough

THE GARLIC AND RHUBARB ARE UP!

Today while I gave an early spring gardening talk at Bozeman’s Winter Farmers Market, Bob sowed tomato and pepper seeds for this year’s transplants. We’re seeding our very favorite heirloom tomato, ‘Black Sea Man’ and also ‘Bloody Butcher’ because it works for us in our garden. I simply must have ‘Sun Gold’ cherry tomato—the sweetest treat in the world, but it cracks horribly if you don’t watch the watering later in the season. We’ve had great success growing ‘Big Bertha’ sweet peppers so we’re repeating them, along with ‘New Ace’ which is blockier and ‘Pepperoncini’ for something new to try.

We figure it takes six to eight weeks to grow a good transplant of peppers and tomatoes; we’re soaking okra seeds (aids germination) and will sow them tomorrow. Bozeman is definitely not the best location to grow okra, but we like to try new things each year. Our onion and leek seedlings are doing nicely, and I’m keeping them trimmed to 4 inches until we can set them to the garden.

The foxglove is huge, and the catnip…ah the catnip. I planted some free seeds from the bottom of a container of catnip I purchased at the pet store, along with some newly purchased, fresh seed. What a huge difference. I’ve harvested enough catnip to put my cat into la-la land for a year from the fresh, and the barely living plants from the old seed hit the trash.

Our fall-planted spinach is up and looks good…we had good snowc over so we didn’t mulch or anything. The September/October-planted garlic is up and we can see it from the kitchen window. Our salsify overwintered and we’re looking forward to saving seeds from it this year as it’s a biennial. I’m anxious to see the blue flower since the only salsify I’ve ever known is a yellow-flowered weed. Edible salsify is different. The fennel overwintered nicely and I’m really looking forward to saving seeds from those plants!

The rhubarb is up, and we have our first crocus flowers this morning.

Don’t you just love it when the earth awakens in spring?

Cheryl Moore-Gough

Parsnips, And Two Lives, Come Full Circle

The month of April has taken the frost out of the ground and I have taken the parsnips. They overwintered just fine in our zone 4 garden, protected from the deep cold by a good blanket of snow. Their tops had begun to green, Nature's signal that we had better use them while they have plenty of sugar left or Nature will use the sugar to form their seed stalks. So I took what we needed and left the rest to complete their biennial cycle and set their seeds.

We save seeds of our open-pollinated vegetables every year and look forward to a good harvest of 'Hollow Crown' parsnip seeds in August. Saving seeds saves us a little money and gives us a larger sense of self-sufficiency, and the pleasure of seeing our vegetables complete their lifecycles, itself a reflection and a foreshadowing of our own destiny.

It is an expression of that sense of Nature's completeness that led us to write our next book, due out in Spring 2011. Over nearly a century of combined gardening experience we have taught folks how to plant, care for, and harvest their crops. So it was only fitting that in our next book we tell readers how to save the seeds of nearly 2,000 species of vegetables, herbs, flowers, fruit, trees, and shrubs. It is a thorough book that itself completes our own journey in horticulture. We have come full circle, from seed to seed. The parsnips I left in the ground will do the same and that is good.

—Dr. Bob Gough

When To Prune

Well, the onions and celery and leeks are started in the house now. They're up and doing just fine. So, on a warm day last week I walked out onto the crusty snow in the backyard to see what might be going on with the trees and shrubs. As I suspected, not much. Too early for winter damage to show up, but it is time to sharpen the pruning shears for the annual spring pruning.

Folks always ask us when the right time is to prune, and we always tell them "When the knife is sharp." Liberty Hyde Bailey, the Father of American Horticulture, gave folks the same answer a century ago, but I know he didn't get it from us. We are far more sophisticated today...we have to have a precise time and a precise method for every gardening chore.

But Nature doesn't dictate that with pruning. In fact, it makes little difference to the tree whether you prune it or not. After all, no one prunes them in the wild. We've devised times for pruning that suit OUR needs, not those of the plants. Prune spring flowering shrubs right after they bloom and prune just about all trees in early spring. That works just fine, so long as we sharpen the knives this time of year so that we... prune when the knife is sharp.

—Dr. Bob Gough

Vivipary

My husband and I don’t care for green tomato pie, green tomato chutney, or green tomato salsa. We love homegrown tomatoes, so we store our last fall harvest in a box in the garage, where it’s cool enough that the green tomatoes slowly ripen. Each week, I pick out the yellow-to-orange colored fruit and place them in a dark blue hand-thrown ceramic bowl sitting on the kitchen counter, to finish ripening. While these tomatoes aren’t as flavorful as our sun-ripened ones, we think they taste better than the winter tomatoes we find in the stores around town.

A few weeks ago, the last of our tomatoes sat on the counter. Some were a bit wrinkled, all not much larger than cherry tomatoes. My friend, Becky, turning up her nose when she saw them in the bowl, asked why I hadn’t thrown them out. I was defensive. “Cooked in olive oil, these taste great in a casserole or eggs.” I’m not sure she believed me.

Several days later, preparing stuffed acorn squash for supper, I cut open an inch and a half long, firm, unwrinkled, red ‘Roma,’ and saw green. Thinking Becky may have been right—I looked closer, and saw tiny stems with green leaves sprouting from the seeds.

Years ago, cutting open a grapefruit I’d stored in my fridge—one seed had sprouted. I’d thought it odd then, but now, with a tomato full of sprouted seeds, I wanted answers. I sent Cheryl, our technical editor for horticulture, an email to see if she’d have an interesting explanation.

Cheryl responded, “Yep. I’ve seen this too, with seeds germinating inside the fruit. Did you know that corn, dried on the stalk, will germinate right on the plant? I think this would be a good one for Dr. Bob.” She forwarded my e-mail to her husband.

Dr. Bob replied, “The technical term for this sort of thing is ‘vivipary.’ The juice of some fruit, such as tomato, apple, and some citrus, contains germination inhibitors that prevent the seeds from germinating in the fruit. Over time, in storage, those inhibitors become ineffective, allowing germination to occur. Additionally, seeds of many fruit—mostly fruit of woody plants—require a period of cold before they can germinate. So, if you store fruit in the refrigerator for any length of time, the cold requirement is satisfied AND the germination inhibitors break down, allowing the seeds to germinate in the fruit. Fruit in this condition is not harmful, but because it is old, it may not taste very good.”

There you have it—vivipary...

I chopped up the rest of my tomatoes that evening—none of the others had sprouted and they tasted great with the stuffed acorn squash. Later, I planted the sprouts, leaving them on the tomato slice, in a small pot, barely covering them with soil. Two seeds have grown; one is an inch tall. We’ll see if they’ll bear fruit this summer.

—Rilla Esbjornson