THE WILLOW EXPERIMENT CONTINUES

My apologies for the absence last week. If you follow me on Facebook  or Instagram you'll know that I was down in Austin for a Saturday6 (Troy-Bilt's blogger team) event. I had all kinds of plans to get some posts up but I ought to stop making plans like that because it never happens. We had a fabulous time and I'll share some pictures with you later this week. There were lots of highlights, but the best part by far was that we got to do some gardening while we were there! It felt so good to get in the dirt again.

Do you remember my willow experiment last year? Inspired by a post and interview on Margaret Roach's site, I ordered all kind of willows from Michael Dodge's Vermont Willow Nursery and planted them in a hastily organized nursery bed.

I devised a somewhat odd plan in which I used coffee cups to try to focus some water around the roots of the willow twigs because the nursery bed was a bit sloped. Most of them took off growing and I pretty much forgot about them.

By the end of summer, most were alive although hardly thriving. Two that I had planted in gallon nursery pots were doing better even though they had been nibbled upon by deer. I had actually originally planned to put them all in pots for the first year, but I ran out of gallon containers when my dahlia buying got out of control.

A quick survey of the willow nursery suggests that I won't be bringing any willow branches in for forcing this spring. In fact, I'll be interested to see just what actually comes back.

It's a lesson that I seem to have to relearn every so often: Just because a plant is easy-care, doesn't me it doesn't need care, especially at first. I know this, but I allowed myself a pass.

I've ordered more willows. All of them are purpurea varieties said to be distasteful to deer. I still have high hopes of some day creating a fedge that might help slow the deer traffic through our yard and I love the decorative aspects of a weaved fedge. It's a long-term goal, to be sure, and the fact that I accept it as such is either a sign that I'm finally really starting to accept that gardening takes time or a sign of the coming apocalypse.

Assuming it's the former, these will be grown out in pots this year. And if they aren't appreciative I'll show them the willow nursery bed and tell them they better behave.

EXPERIMENTS IN HORTICULTURE (WINTER BOREDOM EDITION)

I have a few horticultural experiments going on in my house right now. This is unusual for me because I rarely have the patience for such things, but this time of year calls for finding new things to amuse ones self.

All of the cuttings are currently residing in one pot, but if they root successfully I'll pot them on in their own personal pots. If it all works I should have trees in like 15 years. Ha!

About six weeks ago, maybe a little less, I took cuttings from the new white spruce (Picea glauca 'Hudsonii') we planted last year. So far it's been a lovely little tree and one I wouldn't mind having a few more of. It's the first time I've tried to propagate an evergreen and from what I've read, it will take up to 13 weeks for the cuttings to root, so I've not even tried to check on them yet. The good news is that they appear to still be alive in their little mini greenhouse (i.e. a plastic bag over the pot).

The cuttings live in their own mini greenhouse while they hopefully root.

If it works, I'll be sure to tell you what I did, but I don't want to share a method that is a failure if it doesn't work.

The other experiment going has to do with sweet peas. According to my little seed chart, sweet peas are not scheduled to be sown until March 15 at the earliest in my area, but I want to do everything I can to make sure that they are successful.

There is some debate as to how to start sweet peas. OK, there is a lot of debate involving everything from timing to the type of pots you should start them in to what to do with the seeds before you sow them. The last bit is what my mini experiment focuses on.

Some people say to soak the seeds. Other suggest nicking them. And several of the British gardening television presenters suggest doing absolutely nothing to them other than sticking them in the soil.

Blog reader Casa Mariposa reminded me to soak the seeds overnight and said hers sprouted in just a couple days by doing that. The growing instructions that came with my Owl's Acres Sweet Peas order (yeah, I'm the freak who orders seeds from England the first time I try to grow sweet peas) strongly suggest nicking or soaking, going so far as to say they don't recommend even trying them without doing one or the other.

Since I ordered too many seeds (I'll probably end up giving away whatever I don't use, so stay tuned if you're interested in that sort of thing), I'm starting six of them early. I took three of a Spencer variety (long-stemmed, meant for showing and bouquets) called 'Lake Windemere' and three of grandiflora 'Fire and Ice' and potted them up, one pot per variety (which is how I intend to sow them in March). For each variety, I nicked one seed, soaked another for 22 hours and did nothing to the third seed.

My sweet pea experiment is underway in the basement where the two pots are on a heating mat and cardboard makes sure that all light (not that there's much down there) is blocked.

The two pots are currently on the seed-starting mat (set to about 60 degrees but it's having a hard time getting to that temp for some reason, maybe because the pots are somewhat large) and I'll be keeping an eye on what happens.

Of course I'll report the results to you when I have some, which maybe be in a few weeks because it can take some time for sweet peas to germinate.

THE POTATO TOWER EXPERIMENT: THE RESULTS

Remember the potato tower experiment? This was a method of growing potatoes I tried in part to get a crop of potatoes without using precious garden space. I also thought they would be easier to harvest.

Last weekend I attacked those towers to get a feel for how successful this experiment was.

I'm not going to keep you in suspense: it was basically a failure. (But since pictures of failures are horrible to lead with in a blog, I offer you this photo of some of the potatoes I did grow looking pretty.)

Honestly, I knew that it wasn't going well a long time ago. The towers never were covered in foliage like they should have been. And while a few nice shoots grew for a time, the plague of slugs (plague may be dramatic but after speaking with other gardeners, I'm convinced that the mass quantities of slugs were a common problem in our area) defoliated most of what was there. By late summer there were only a few sad leaves still hanging out of the towers.

Before I get to the depressing results, let's just take a look at the towers when they were fresh and new and full of hope.

When it came time to harvest my potatoes, I pulled out the metal stake that was supporting them and then knocked the first one over onto a tarp. And what I had was a big old mess because then I had to move all that soil and straw to the compost bin, and there was a lot of it. I got a little smarter with the second one and actually dug out the soil from the top with my hands as far as I could and then leveraged the wheelbarrow under it to catch most of the rest.

It wasn't easy to find the potatoes. Since my harvest was small in quantity and size, I was feeling through each bit of dirt for little potatoes that might be hiding in there.

One of the biggest earthworms I've ever seen peeking out from the great soil in the towers.

At this point one very good thing became clear. Those towers were creating some amazing soil. I pulled out several of the most enormous earthworms I've ever seen from them. And as far as I'm concerned, the quantity and quality of earthworms is the single best indicator of soil health there is.

After I cleaned up the potatoes, it was the moment of truth. After I added up all the costs that went into making the towers and figuring an average cost of $2.50 per pound for organic potatoes purchased at the store, I calculated that I would have needed to produce 22 pounds of potatoes to break even.

And this is all the potatoes I harvested.

And here's the moment of truth.

Don't get excited. The scale (an antique from Mr. Much More Patient's grandmother, I think) might say 6.25 pounds but that's before you subtract the 3-pound bowl.

For the math challenged, that means that I grew 3.25 pounds of potatoes. From 3 pounds of seed potatoes.

I'm not ready to say that potato towers don't work. There were a lot of factors that contributed to my lack of success. But the fact is, other than not taking up precious space in the garden, they don't have a lot of advantages. They were difficult to water, requiring me to spray the entire thing thoroughly. I think a PVC pipe with holes drilled in to stuck down the middle would help with watering the bottom layers, though. And they were a huge pain to harvest because cleaning up all of that soil wasn't easy.

It's not a total loss. First of all, I learned a little something, even if it was about what doesn't work. And I have a whole bowl of really pretty potatoes waiting for me to make something yummy with.

TOMATO WRANGLING GETS EXPERIMENTAL

Although it was not intentional, this has become a very experimental year in the vegetable garden. First I tried out the potato towers. The jury is still out on those as I'm seeing the first potato shoots coming out now. And it turns out that the "straw" that I bought (where they guaranteed it was straw and not hay and therefore no viable seeds) was a big, fat lie because I have hay seedlings popping up everywhere. I should stuck with the chopped up straw for lawns for the whole thing. Oh well, that's what you get in an experiment.

Then this weekend I planted the tomatoes at the house in a way I've never done before.

Since I grow all heirloom tomatoes, they tend to get huge. This year I'm going to try to keep a much tighter rein on them. That means being dutiful about pruning out the suckers (those aggressive shoots that pop up in the "armpit" between the main stem and a branch) and topping them at some point late in the summer to allow all the plant's energy to go into ripening the fruit that is already present instead of allowing it to make more tomatoes that will never have time to ripen.

As part of the first part of that plan, I'm trying a new method for staking them. I've tried many things over the years, and the most successful of them has been tomato ladders, but even those get to be a big mess by mid-summer. And if a branch goes awry, there's no bringing it back in.

So this year I'm going to grow them up a single string for each plant. The idea is that the string sort of winds around the main plant as it grows and you also tie it on where necessary.

With my new system of training tomatoes up a string, the tomato ladders are languishing in a corner of the garden. Never fear, they'll be put into good use out at the community garden plot.

To create a stable upper support, I screwed in two stainless steel screw eyes, one on each side of the top of the garden caging. Then I used a low-stretch line (in this case kevlar cording but there are many other things that would work; you just want to stay away from cotton cording or something that stretches a lot) between them and hung individual pieces of jute twine from the overhead line. The twine was a couple feet longer than necessary to accommodate tying it on top with a slip knot and having enough to tuck under the tomato plant. (*See the bottom of the post for my tip on how to get this overhead line really tight.)

If you don't have a garden setup where you could just connect a piece of line on an overhead-type structure, I've also see the same thing done with plumbing pipes, about 1-inch in diameter with just 90-degree elbows on the corners (imagine an upside-down U) and then sinking the legs deep in the garden to provide stability. Then you hang the twine from the upper pipe.

Making sure that the twine was hanging straight, I dug a hole like usual to plant the tomato plants. I always plant tomatoes plenty deep, having stripped off the bottom branches. Before I stuck them in the holes, I tucked the twine under the rootball, then filled in as usual. I made the twine taught, but not tight.

The twine gets tucked in under the root ball.

With a little tension on the twine, you can sort of wrap it around the stem, without disrupting branches.

Then I did another little experimental type thing. I planted empty nursery pots, just 4-inch round ones that annuals come in, next to each plant. The idea is that I will water into those pots, delivering the water to the root zone of each plant without splashing up soil (and potential disease) onto the leaves.

I have no idea how any of this will go. But you know I'll tell you all about it.

* HOW TO GET A LINE REALLY TIGHT

It's important for that overhead line to be tight to keep some tension on the twine (this is not a factor if you're using a solid setup such as the aforementioned plumbing pipes), but it's hard to pull a line tight between two points. Here's how you can get it nice and tight (by the way this works great for clotheslines and any number of other applications).

Tie a bowline into the screw eye on one end (or just tie a bowline around whatever you're tying into). Don't know how to tie a bowline? Well you can watch my really uncomfortable video on how to do it here.

Pull your line to the other end and get a rough feeling for where it will be going through the screw eye on that end. Then tie a small bowline about a foot back from the screw eye in the main body of the line.

With your bowline tied, pull the end through the screw eye and then back through the bowline and pull against it. You'll be amazed at how much purchase you get on it. One you have it as tight as you want it. Hold your left thumb over the spot where the line comes out of the bowline and then just do a couple half hitches with the end of the line (take the tail of the line around the body of the line, wrap it once and pull it through the loop you just made and pull tight; then repeat).