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Lifestyle 16 17
THURSDAY, APRIL 16, 2020
The basics on starting a vegetable garden
Lee Reich
AP - Lots of people sheltering at
home now because of the corona-
virus pandemic are thinking about
planting a vegetable garden. It offers
more than food: Growing vegetables
is a family activity, gives everyone a
reason to get out in the fresh air, pro-
vides exercise and saves money.
Home-grown vegetables are de-
licious not only for their freshness,
but also because you can choose
what to grow based on lavour,
rather than commercial qualities.
And growing vegetables is easy to
do organically, without pesticides
or even chemical fertilisers.
Some basics for getting started:
WHERE TO PLANT
The irst considerations are sun
and soil. Most vegetables require
six or more hours daily of sunlight.
Lettuce, arugula, spinach and other
leafy vegetables can get by with a
little less. (Other vegetables can too,
but with some sacriice of yield.)
As for soil, water drainage is
the most important consideration.
Don’t plant where water sits for long
periods after rains. Your vegetables
will thrive wherever lawn grass or
most garden lowers grew well.
You don’t need a small farm to
grow your own vegetables. A plot
15 feet on each side will yield an
amazing amount of fresh vegetables
(and perhaps spur you to plant
more next year). Whatever size your
garden, the closer it is to your home,
the more care it will receive.
No yard space in which to plant
vegetables? No problem. Grow
them in tubs, lowerpots or other
containers. Again, drainage is im-
portant. Containers should have
drainage holes in their bottoms. Fill
them with potting soil, not garden
soil, because it doesn’t drain well
within the conines of a container,
even if it does so in open ground.
READYING THE GROUND
As an alternative to the traditional
digging or rototilling, here’s a way
of clearing existing vegetation from
your proposed garden site: Just cov-
er the whole area with newspaper,
four sheets thick and overlapped,
or “landscape paper.” Wet the paper
in either case to prevent blowing.
Then mark out areas with string for
three-foot-wide beds separated by
18- to 24-inch-wide paths.
Now check with local stores
or online for “compost”. If your
garden is going to be small, bagged
compost from a garden centre
might be enough. Otherwise, have it
delivered in bulk. What you need is
enough compost to spread an inch
or more deep in each designated
bed, over the paper.
For the paths, all you need is any
weed-free, organic material such as
wood chips, wood shavings, saw-
dust, straw or pine needles. Lay
down just enough to hide the paper.
The advantage of this nontradi-
tional method of preparing the soil
is that it’s quicker, less disruptive to
soil life, and results in fewer weeds
in the weeks to come.
TIMING IS IMPORTANT
Planting time depends on where
you live. Find out the average date
of the last killing frost in your area;
you can call your county Coopera-
tive Extension ofice for the date.
Since we can’t predict weather, we
go by averages.
Vegetables can be divided into
those that thrive in cooler weather
and those that thrive in warmer
weather. Cool-weather vegetables
can be planted outdoors a few
weeks before the average date of
the last killing frost. Warm-weather
vegetables can be planted out-
doors about a week after that last
frost date.
Not to muddy the waters,
but within each of these catego-
ries are vegetables whose seeds
you plant directly in the garden,
and those that require so long a
growing season that you need to
purchase transplants (seedlings)
for planting.
Putting all this together for some
common vegetables breaks down
this way:
— Cool-weather vegetables for
seeding directly in the garden: Let-
tuce, spinach, kale, arugula, peas.
— Cool-weather vegetables plant-
ed as transplants: Broccoli, cab-
bage, Brussels sprouts.
— Warm-weather vegetables for
seedingdirectly in thegarden: Beans,
corn, cucumber, okra, squash.
— Warm-weather vegetables
planted as transplants: Eggplant,
pepper, tomato.
Now you’re on your way to great-
tasting vegetables, plus the other
beneits afforded by a backyard
vegetable garden.
10 pioneer-era apple
types thought extinct
found in US West
Gillian Flaccus
PORTLAND, OREGON (AP) — A team
of retirees that scours the remote
ravines and windswept plains of the
Paciic Northwest for long-forgotten
pioneer orchards has rediscovered
10 apple varieties that were believed
to be extinct — the largest number
ever unearthed in a single season by
the non-proit Lost Apple Project.
The Vietnam veteran and for-
mer FBI agent who make up the
nonproit recently learned of their
tally from last fall’s apple sleuthing
from expert botanists at the Tem-
perate Orchard Conservancy in Or-
egon, where all the apples are sent
for study and identiication. The ap-
ples positively identiied as previ-
ously “lost” were among hundreds
of fruits collected last October and
November from 140-year-old or-
chards tucked into small canyons
or hidden in forests that have since
grown up around them in rural Ida-
ho and Washington state.
“It was just one heck of a season.
It was almost unbelievable. If we
had found one apple or two apples
a year in the past, we thought we
were doing good. But we were
getting one after another after
another,” said EJ Brandt, who hunts
for the apples along with fellow
amateur botanist David Benscoter.
“I don’t know how we’re going to
keep up with that.”
Each fall, Brandt and Benscoter
spend countless hours and log
hundreds of miles searching for
ancient — and often dying — apple
trees across the PaciicNorthwest by
truck, all-terrain vehicle and on foot.
They collect hundreds of apples
from long-abandoned orchards that
they ind using old maps, county
fair records, newspaper clippings
and nursery sales ledgers that
can tell them which homesteader
bought what apple tree and when
the purchase happened.
By matching names from those
records with property maps, they
can pinpoint where an orchard
might have been — and they often
ind a few specimens still growing
there. The pair carefully note the
location of each tree using GPS
and tag the tree with a plastic band
before bagging the apples in zip-
close bags and shipping them to the
Oregon experts for identiication.
“When I ind an apple that’s lost,
I want to know who homesteaded
it, when they were there, who their
children were, when they took their
last drink of water,” Brandt said. “We
cannot afford to lose the name of
even one of these landowners.”
In the winter, they return to
the trees — often on foot or on
snowshoes in freezing temperatures
and blinding snow — to take wood
cuttings that can be grafted onto
root stock to propagate new trees
of the varieties that come back as
“lost” specimens.
The task is huge. North America
once had 17,000 named varieties
of domesticated apples, but only
about 4,500 are known to exist
today. The Lost Apple Project be-
lieves settlers planted a few hun-
dred varieties in their corner of the
Paciic Northwest alone as they
moved across the United States
(US) West to try their hands at the
pioneer life.
These newcomers planted
orchards with enough variety to
get them through the long winter,
with apples that ripened from early
spring until the irst frosts. Many
were brought with the settlers in
buckets from their homes on the
East Coast and in the Midwest.
Then, as now, trees planted for
eating apples were not raised from
seeds; cuttings taken from existing
trees were grafted onto a generic
root stock and raised to maturity.
These cloned trees remove the
genetic variation that often makes
“wild” apples inedible.
With the 10 latest varieties
identiied, Brandt and Benscoter
have rediscovered a total of 23
varieties. The latest inds include
the Sary Sinap, an ancient apple
from Turkey; the Streaked Pippin,
which may have originated as early
as 1744 in New York; and the Butter
Sweet of Pennsylvania, a variety
that was irst noted in a trial orchard
in Illinois in 1901.
Botanists from the Temperate
Orchard Society identiied them by
comparing the collected apples to
watercolour illustrations created by
the US Department of Agriculture in
the 1800s and early 1900s and by
poring over written descriptions in
old botany textbooks and reference
guides, some of them more than
150 years old.
One apple, the Gold Ridge,
was particularly hard to identify
because the experts couldn’t ind
any illustrations or descriptions
of it anywhere. Finally, botanist
Joanie Cooper went page by page
through a reference book written
by a botanist who died in 1912 until
she found it.
“It’s the luck of the draw,” said
Shaun Shepherd, another Tem-
perate Orchard Conservancy bot-
anist. “And we learn more as we
go along.”
With spring underway, the
Lost Apple Project will soon enter
its busy season as apple trees
everywhere blossom and prepare
to fruit. As they wait, Brandt and
Benscoter are busy grafting wood
cuttings from the newly discovered
“lost” apple trees onto root stocks
and updating their records from
the last season.
Their non-proit took a major hit
when they had to cancel both an
annual fair where they sell newly
grafted “lost” apple trees and a
class on how to graft wood to grow
a new apple tree because of the
new coronavirus. The two events
fund much of their USD10,000
annual budget that goes toward
travel costs, apple shipping and
apple identiication.
“Two months ago, I was
thinking: ‘This is going to be great.
We’ve got 10 varieties that have
been rediscovered,’ but .... right
now, we couldn’t pay our bills,”
Benscoter said.
Still, the self-described apple
detectives take comfort in their
work as they navigate today’s
unprecedented times and find
inspiration in imagining the lives
of the pioneers who planted
these trees.
About 25 per cent of home-
steads didn’t make it, Brandt said,
and many settlers died or simply
walked away to avoid starvation.
“It was a hard life. I can’t even
imagine what they went through,
but they survived and they went on
with their lives,” he said. “It’s hard
now, too, but it’s going to be OK.
It’s all a part of life.”
FROM LEFT: Photos provided by the Temperate Orchard Conservancy in Molalla, Oregon, show the Mihalyi and Gold Ridge apples collected by David Benscoter and EJ Brandt of the Lost Apple Project in northern Idaho and eastern Washington. They are two of 10 apple
varieties in the Paciic Northwest planted by long-ago pioneers and had been thought extinct; and Apples collected by amateur botanist David Benscoter, of the Lost Apple Project, rest next to his ield notes and an apple picking pole in an orchard at a remote homestead
near Pullman, Washington on October 28, 2019
Amateur botanist David Benscoter, of the Lost Apple Project, works in an orchard at an abandoned homestead near Genesee, Idaho on October 28, 2019.
PHOTOS: AP
This undated photo shows a vegetable garden in New Paltz, New York. A surprisingly large amount of vegetables
can be harvested from even a small vegetable garden. PHOTO: AP
Gardening