by Jude Hsiang

Many of us are coming to the end of the active gardening season. While some have a greenhouse, it may be small and not heated. Perhaps you’ve already had a light frost – or a heavier one – and are beginning to clean up the plants that have been affected. For others, it won’t be long until it’s time to “put the garden to bed.”

If you have not been composting, this is the time to think about it. If you don’t have the small amount of space required in your yard, check with your town waste disposal system. More towns are including composting in their waste management system. The resulting compost is used by local residents, businesses, and the local public works department to reduce the money, time, and labor we all once paid used to haul away this valuable commodity.

Compost repairs and enriches our soil by replacing the nutrients used by our lawns and gardens. When we make our own compost, we don’t have to buy as much soil or mulch and can be sure that we are not throwing away – and everything’s got to go somewhere – something we can make good use of.

At its simplest, you can find a spot to pile leaves, kitchen waste (no bones or fats that can attract varmints in a home compost system) and turn it over from time to time. Shredded paper is fine, too, as it was once plant material. Just avoid plastics and other things that won’t decompose or might contain hazardous materials. Eventually it will all decompose, resulting in a nice brown humus mixture that can be used in any garden or planting containers. Spread it around trees and shrubs (no more than a couple of inches and piled against the trunk. They’ll appreciate the nutrients that will continue to feed the soil. With just a little labor and spending no money, you can improve the soil and reduce the amount of fertilizers, soil amendments, and mulches needed.

If you want a more organized system, you can still compost at home without turning it into a big project. A bin to contain the compost can be made with something you might have around the garage, storage shed, or barn. Chicken wire or other leftover fencing materials work well. For a larger set up, six used pallets will make a three-bin composting system for forking the compost from one to the next as the material decomposes. There are lots of good ideas available at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension and other reliable gardening sources. You may not have to spend a cent.

Some people prefer to buy a home composter but should be aware that in addition to the cost, these bins don’t hold a lot and will require frequent turning of the handle to mix and aerate the material in order to speed up the process in the way they are advertised. The old saying “let it rot” will do just fine, just takes longer. Some people worry about smells, which are only an issue if the compost contains animal products or if it gets very wet for a time – just turning it to allow more oxygen to get into the center will take care of that possibility.

Here in our cooler part of the world it can take up to two years to achieve a nice rich compost by doing almost nothing. The process can be sped up by taking a more step-by-step route and mixing the types of materials as university experts have learned, having a good ratio of greener, wetter things like grass clippings, garden, and kitchen extras to the amount of browner, drier ingredients like fall leaves and shredded paper. The entire process can be as casual or scientific as you like. It’s the result that matters – good healthy soil for the future.

© Judith Chute Hsiang
Jude Hsiang is a retired Extension Master Gardener instructor and member of the China Community Garden.

by Jude Hsiang

Winter squashes, like the butternut and acorn varieties are members of the cucurbit, or gourd family, like cucumbers and zucchini. The family has almost one thousand species including edible plants like melons. Ornamental gourds and loofah “sponges” sponges are some of the others. Humans have been cultivating and developing new types for thousands of years all over the world’s temperate and tropical regions.

We harvest summer squashes and zucchini when they are young and tender, but the winter squashes are allowed to mature on the vine and can be stored for months. From Thanksgiving through the winter months, squash dishes are a regular part of our diet.

Squash is among the easiest plants to grow with big seeds that the littlest fingers can handle. Seeds of many quashes can be roasted or can be saved to plant next year,

There are so many winter squashes to choose from – various sizes, shapes, and colors – and new ones seem to pop up in seed catalogs or the grocery shelves every year. This is because they cross-pollinate very easily. If you’ve grown different varieties close to each other, you’ve probably gotten some unexpected oddities in your garden.

Horticulturists note the seeds from cross-pollinated squash can contain a toxin that could make you sick, so it’s wise to save seeds only from the squash that look like the ones you expected to see when you planted them.

Although squashes are easy to plant, they do have a couple of common pests. One of the most frustrating for the gardener is the squash vine borer which is the larva of a moth. These insects bore into the base of the plant and eat through the stem for several weeks before crawling out and burrowing in the soil to pupate. Suddenly a beautiful, productive plant will shrivel and die as it can no longer get water from the roots. Another pest insect is the squash bug which feeds on the upper parts of the plants.

Help with these pests is part of Integrated Pest Management, a system of low impact measures used to fight pests and diseases with few or now pesticides. Trap cropping is a way of protecting desirable plants by introducing another plant that is more attractive to the pest. The method works especially well with squash and cucumber, too.

The large Blue Hubbard squash has been found to be the favorite of squash pests. Farmers start these plants early in the green house and plant them outside when they plant the seeds of their main cash crop. As the Blue Hubbard plants grow, the insects arrive to feed on them, leaving the other squashes alone. The insects can be picked off or killed with a limited amount of pesticide, leaving the other squashes for harvest. Only six ro eight Blue Hubbards will protect one hundred main crop squash plants. While farmers generally use this technique, it would be interesting to plant a couple of Blue Hubbard squash in a backyard garden, keeping in mind they have to be started a couple weeks earlier in order to be mature enough to trap the bad guys.

Trap cropping is one of the ways to reduce the use of pesticides and labor in agriculture. There are a number of other methods of Integrated Pest Management that have been discovered by scientists and other observant gardeners. Something to think about as we watch our squash grow.

© Judith Chute Hsiang
Jude Hsiang is a retired Extension Master Gardener instructor and member of the China Community Garden.

by Jude Hsiang

People have long known that the potato and tomato are related, and both arose in South America. But we might wonder why potatoes produce tubers when other members of the solanaceous or nightshade family – tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, tobacco, and petunias – do not. The word tuber is even found inside the name of three plants in Chile that look very much like modern potatoes and are called etuberosums, yet none of these plants form tubers. Genetic studies have shown that potatoes are more closely related to tomatoes than to the etuberosums.

So how did potatoes, such a basic part of our Maine food culture and a very important crop worldwide, develop? Recently scientists have followed the genetic trail and learned that ancient etuberosums hybridized with tomatoes about nine million years ago. The resulting potatoes inherited a gene from tomatoes that causes underground stems to begin to form tubers, even though tomatoes don’t do that. From the etuberosums, the potatoes inherited a gene that controls the growth of the tubers. Both genes are needed by potatoes to grow the tubers we eat.

Scientists learned that this was happening as the Andes mountains were forming and it seems that having tubers that store nutrients allowed this new kind of plant to adapt to the changing environment. The spuds on our tables turn out to have a more complicated story than we had previously thought.

In more recent times potatoes didn’t make their way from South America to North America by trade among the Indigenous peoples of the New World. Instead, potatoes were introduced to Europe by Spanish explorers. Once there, time passed before Europeans found them to be an acceptable addition to their diet. Eventually, the potato came back to the New World with European settlers, including a fellow named Joseph Houlton who brought a type of potato called the Early Blue to Aroostook County in 1807. The town of Houlton was named for Joseph.

Aroostook County’s soil was just what the potatoes wanted: sandy loam, free draining, fertile, and slightly acidic. For farmers and home gardeners around the world, the potato has been found to adapt to almost any soil.

Maine potatoes became a large part of the state’s economy and continue to have an impact. There’s more to the story of the simple potato – stay tuned for Part 2.

© Judith Chute Hsiang
Jude Hsiang is a retired Extension Master Gardener instructor and member of the China Community Garden.

by Jude Hsiang

Humans began farming about 12,000 years ago in locations around the world after much earlier recognized plant materials that could be used for food, clothing, shelter, and wooden tools. One thing that sets humans apart from other creatures is our desire to beautify ourselves and our surroundings. Cave paintings using the minerals ochres are 40,000 years old. Archeologists find beads and other small items carved from stone, bones, and shells.

We know that people learned to make twine, baskets and felted and woven fabrics more than 20,000 years ago. These materials rarely survived but sometimes left impressions in clay. We don’t know when they learned to color things with dyes as well as paints, but fossilized pollen from dye plants, as well as foods, can be found in caves and early settlements.

Natural fibers from plants like cotton and linen, like the animal fibers wool and mohair can be dyed with natural dyes. These fibers can be in the form of fleeces, yarn, fabric, and basketry material. Synthetic fibers like polyester will not accept natural dyes. Natural dyes can be made from minerals, fungi, lichens, and mollusks, but dyes from plants are the most common and easiest to use. Dye plants are often listed under the heading “economic botany” for their importance along with plants for food, medicine, and other useful traits.

I include dye plants in my Kennebec County garden, having begun exploring natural dyeing almost 50 years ago. I also forage dye materials locally and buy some natural dyes that only grow in tropical or subtropical regions. The entire process typically requires a mordant – a chemical salt such as alum which is also used for making pickles – and heat but is not very complex. Using proven procedures with care will produce lightfast results. Dyeing was a normal household task for centuries, even as some dyers became experts in the craft, like millers, tailors, and blacksmiths. However, as with other topics, the spread of misinformation through the internet often results in wasting fiber, dye, mordants, water, and heat. A favorite book among newer and long-time dyers is Wild Color, by Jenny Dean, published about 25 years ago.

The plant parts that provide dyes include roots, bark, wood, stems, seeds, leaves, and flowers. In some cases, several parts of the same plant can be used, perhaps for different shades; for others, only one part gives color. Sources for yellow dyes are the most common. I grow several plants for yellow: weld, dyer’s chamomile, dyer’s coreopsis, yellow cosmos, and marigolds. Any goldenrod will produce a bright yellow. Other flowers, whether red, blue, or white, still produce yellow dyes of varying quality. Onion skins can be saved for dyeing, too, and don’t require a mordant.

Although beets can be used to dye Easter eggs, they will not dye fibers as their red is not lightfast. I grow madder, the best red among plant dyes. Madder is a small, tender woody shrub from Europe and Asia that requires patience as the dye is contained in the roots which are harvested after three or four years from planting seeds. The roots of native Clayton’s bedstraw, found in swamps, also make a red dye but require a much larger quantity, and are hardly worth searching for. The very best red dyes are from several species of sub-tropical insects.

For blue I raise Japanese indigo which is more tolerant of our cool climate than other plants containing indigo. This species doesn’t have the strength of tropical indigo, but it’s fun to grow a little. Woad contains one of the indigo chemicals but at a much lower concentration. It can be invasive in croplands, but it is not on Maine’s list of invasive species. This is a reminder that conscientious dyers, like other gardeners, don’t give seeds to folks in other regions without knowing if they are potentially harmful.

As we learned as children, red, yellow, and blue can be mixed to make a wide range of colors. Adding brown and black to the whites of many natural fibers and we can have a world of color at hand. Some of the plants mentioned above are grown as annuals in our planting zone. Many plants that offer an excellent source of dye aren’t particularly interesting to look at. However, a few of them might fill a spot in a flower bed among the more glamorous blooms.

© Judith Chute Hsiang
Jude Hsiang Is a retired Extension Master Gardener instructor and member of the China Community Garden.

by Jude Hsiang

Mid-summer cookouts will feature a wealth of garden produce: green salads with tomatoes, watermelon, and, of course, corn on the cob. Even the most confirmed meat eater looks forward to this special summer treat.

We New Englanders are waiting for this season’s local sweet corn as we see corn in local groceries that was grown in Georgia, then Virginia, then New Jersey. It may remind us that the corn we know began as a grass in South America. The first people practicing agriculture, some 9,000 years ago, selected the largest seeds to grind for food and to plant. Eventually what we know as corn or maize developed and were traded from groups of peoples eventually reaching well into North America.

Over time the size of the ears grew and with more modern selection, different varieties were developed. We still have what was commonly known as “Indian Corn” which retained the ability to produce multicolored kernels. Corn as animal feed is now the most important crop economically and, by weight, is the largest of all grain crops worldwide. But for most folks, corn means sweet corn for eating off the cob, canned or frozen, or ground into meal for baking. And don’t forget popcorn!

This year’s wet spring delayed planting in the Central and Northeastern states. From large farms growing corn for animal feed to backyard gardeners looking forward to a small plot of sweet corn, the weather continues to cause concern. What is a summer barbeque without buttery sweet corn?

Because corn is a grass, pollination occurs by wind, not with the aid of insect pollinators. Home gardeners plant corn in square or rectangular plots rather than one lone row so that the pollen grains can easily be blown among the plants, moving from the seed-bearing tassels to the young ears where each stand of silk will catch and carry the pollen down into the ear to fertilize a kernel. When plucking the annoying silk from an ear of corn, remember that one single strand of silk was responsible for each one of the hundreds of tasty kernels.

While we Mainers wait for the arrival of sweet corn – from our garden or from the local farmers’ market – let’s recall the thousands of years and miles this summer treat traveled to reach our plates.

© Judith Chute Hsiang
Jude Hsiang Is a retired Extension Master Gardener instructor and member of the China Community Garden.