What does a bean with a good imagination look like? If you’ve got the same tastes as Dr. Seuss then the ‘Red Noodle’ Bean or the ‘Yard-Long bean should be right up your alley. We have grown the former for several years in our vegetable garden, and usually just eat it straight off the vine—it’s so sweet and tasty. But it stays crunchier if you cook it, whether stir fried or steamed. Boiling, however, isn’t recommended—these beans get water-logged and tasteless.
‘Red Noodle’ (Vigna unguiculata) is, as the name suggests, a burgundy red color. What is exceptional about the bean (aside from its brilliant color) is that its average size is 18 inches long. It looks more like a jumbo Twizzler than anything you’d normally call a healthy bean. And, like most beans, the smaller, slender ones are the most tender—try to harvest when they are about 12 inches long and still slim.
Last week we discussed different onion varieties and explored several ways to prevent the tears from flowing once these spicy bulbs go under the knife. This week, we’re switching gears to discuss planting techniques and focus on successfully growing our onions this season.
This is the time of year that I start heading down to the farmer’s market in search of onion transplants, which are generally sold in a small, 2-inch pot—all crammed in together. They need to be thinned as well as planted. Once I get into the garden, I take the mass out of the pot and drop it to the ground, letting the root ball shatter and the minuscule transplants separate from each other. With a trowel held like a dagger in one hand and the transplants in the other, I stab the ground and place them 1 – 2 inches deep and an inch apart. In less than a month you will be pulling them up and tossing them into your salad.
I can be very sentimental when it comes to gardening, and the subject of today’s topic always brings a tear to my eyes: onions. My favorite onions are bunching onions (spring or green onions), though they are not the culprits that make me cry. Spring onions are an incredibly versatile delight that can be tossed into a salad or sauce at the last minute. Instead, it’s their pungent cousins that get me, so let’s talk about them.
You will notice that onions are listed as three separate growing types: short-day, intermediate, and long-day varieties. Onions are sensitive not only to temperatures but to the amount of daylight, as well. Short-day onions will start to form their bulbs with 11-12 hours of daylight; intermediate types need between 12 and 18, and long-day onions only form their bulbs after receiving 14 hours or more of sunlight.
Northerners grow long-day onions that are planted in the spring, southerners plant short-day onions grown in the winter, and intermediate types are generally planted in early spring and harvested in summer.
While attending New England Grows—a regional tradeshow and educational forum that takes place in Boston each year—I was lucky enough to hear the ecologist and public spokesperson, Nalini Nadkarni, give a lecture on rain forest ecology and its importance as a biological system.
Dr. Nadkarni’s research was not conducted on the forest floor, but rather at great heights above it. She quite literally harnessed the tools of the arborist’s trade and hoisted herself and a team of researchers 100 feet up in the air to explore the biological communities that thrived in the upper layers of the rain forest’s canopy.
Up in the treetops, Nadkarni and her team found a surprising diversity. The plants they came upon were expected: orchids, bromeliads, ferns, mosses, and lichens. These epiphytic plants are an important component of tropical arboreal communities, surviving and thriving by collecting water and nutrients from rainfall trapped in their foliage. What surprised the researchers, however, was the complexity of the arboreal ecosystem.
I picked up the Select Seeds catalog and stopped dead in my tracks. Facing me from the second page was a gorgeous intergeneric hybrid called ×Digiplexis ILLUMINATION® ‘Flame’. The name will make sense just as soon as I explain its heritage, and wipe away any thought of ’70s disco dancers you may be entertaining at the moment.
You have heard me use the term intergeneric hybrids before, when I have discussed orchids. Intergeneric hybrids are crosses between closely related genera. A well-known example in the orchid world is ×Laeliocattleya, which is a cross between a Laelia and a Cattleya. In the case of ×Digiplexis, it is a cross between a foxglove (Digitalis) and Isoplexis, which is a shrub-like, short-lived perennial (zone 9 – 11) from the Canary Islands and Madeira.
Isoplexis typically grows up to 4 feet tall and 3 feet wide. It has foot-long upright flower spikes that are densely covered with tubular flowers, each a blend of vermillion, rust, and gold. Its common name, cresta de gallo, alludes to the fact that it is reminiscent of a cockscomb. The plant was originally thought to have been pollinated by sunbirds, having since been replaced by Canary Island Chiffchaffs and other warblers.
Our spate of presentations from international gardening savants continued in February with British landscape architect Kim Wilkie, who joined us for the second of our annual Winter Lectures. At face value he may seem mild-mannered, but make no mistake: Wilkie loves to play in the mud. He shifts massive amounts of soil to sculpt the landscape in a very literal fashion.
Wilkie began his discussion by explaining how he infuses his contemporary ideas with historical perspectives. One source of inspiration is Mother Nature. He paid tribute to the powerful influence of ice and water, and the role of erosion in shaping the landscape. After this long, punishing winter, most of us will remember ice and water as a combined nuisance, reflecting on the piles of snow that buried our cars and blocked sidewalks. Wilkie, however, had a much more romanticized view of nature, presenting images of graceful contours carved into the land by winding rivers and glacial erosion.
In his quintessentially British Oxbridge manner, Wilkie related the fascinating chronology of both the military and spiritual tradition of moving massive amounts of earth to create man-made fortifications and construct sites for burial, solace, and worship. His slides carried us back in history with a sublime visual tour of this Northern European landscape custom.
For the beauty queen in all of us, there was Color Me Beautiful, a guide that helped you develop your own color personality, providing tips that range from makeup to clothes to camouflaging your figure. In the garden, however, Color Me Tomatoes are the up and coming trend.
I’m still trawling this year’s catalogs in search of delightful new tomatoes hitting the market. In the New York area, I generally plant tomatoes outside one to two weeks after the last frost, which ranges from April 21 to May 7 depending on whom you ask. This means your tomatoes will be planted outside during either the second or third week of May if you are conservative, or the end of April and into the first week of May if you are bold.
Our annual Orchid Show begins this weekend, carrying us off to the warmth and greenery of Key West. I myself have eaten hearts of palm in Key West, toured Ernest Hemingway’s home, and gone swimming and sunbathing, but I never took the time to stop and admire the island’s orchids. On the key, the Audubon House and Tropical Gardens combine history and nature for the avid naturalist, showcasing a one-acre garden full of native and exotic orchids.
Florida boasts a large and diverse population of orchids owing to its climate, which ranges from subtropical in the north to tropical in the south. These variations support temperate and tropical orchids, respectively. Many epiphytic orchids that colonize the southern portion of the state, including Key West, are indigenous to the Caribbean and southern tropical regions.
At the end of January, our 14th Annual Winter Lecture Series kicked off with the first of three presentations as given by Brian Huntley, emeritus professor, renowned conservation scientist, and former CEO of the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI). Huntley was instrumental in shaping South Africa’s most famous garden, Kirstenbosch, from the ’90s and into the ’00s, and was a key figure in post-apartheid conservation across South Africa.
The Cape Floral Kingdom populating Kirstenbosch is incredibly diverse and unique, full of color and contrast. The poster child of South African flora is the protea (Proteaceae). As the country’s national flower, it has since become a huge success in the cut flower trade worldwide, but apart from this iconic South African plant, the country is also famous for its unique collection of geophytes (bulbs of all colors and shapes), irises (Iridaceae), heathers (Ericaceae), and a variety of colorful succulents and grass-like restios (Restionaceae). A few of the internationally-known plants from this region are the ubiquitous geranium (Pelargonium), the Kaffir lily (Clivia), African lily (Agapanthus), and gladiolus (Gladiolus).
I arrived at the lecture expecting to be captivated by the many South African floral treasures discussed by Professor Huntley, but even I couldn’t anticipate such beauty. I further came away with a profound appreciation of the country’s botanical history. Huntley intertwined the famous flora of South Africa with stories of conservation efforts and a history of their premier botanical garden—Kirstenbosch. His leadership was clear as he provided us with a vivid history, mission, and vision of the famed garden.
Last week I began a discussion of some of the drivers and dynamics behind gardening trends, and I continue here with some of the trends that David Culp, author and Vice President of Sales at Sunny Border Nursery in Kensington, Connecticut, covered in a lecture during Plant-O-Rama. We have been following many of these trends for the past several years, and will continue to do so for some time.
While the enthusiasm for vegetable gardening waned slightly in the past year, it has grown in such magnitude over the past few years, and with such glamor and entrepreneurial attitude, that we can hardly call it a slip. Vegetables have always captured the hearts of homeowners due to their overall ease and impressive, family-pleasing results. The boom has been propelled even further by growing awareness and a trend towards fitness, general health, and a cooking fad that’s been boosted by the support of major television networks.
Along the same lines of thought is the “organic revolution.” Wait… haven’t we seen that one before, like in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s…? Let’s face it: we seem to be stuck in a perpetual industrial, chemical, and technological cycle where we proceed to destroy the environment and then recoil, implementing new, safer measures (which are often just old measures rehashed for the modern day). Organics is not only trendy these days, but an important part of branding, a potent money-maker, and hopefully an area where people “put their money where their mouth is.” Credibility over commercialism in this arena is always preferred.
