Too Hot for Tomatoes?

This was the first year I didn’t start many tomato plants .  In the past, I’ve started all kinds — cherokee purple, green zebra, juliet, beefsteak, early girl, orange sunset, garden peach — in my basement in February, kept them under grow lights, hardened them off as the days got longer and had them all in the ground by Mother’s Day.  I’d start getting ripe tomatoes by August 1st and have 2-3 months of bounty, but also many, many green ones still hanging on the vine by the time the first killing frost hit.  So even though it’s easier to grow tomatoes in Chicago than it is in, say, Portland, Oregon, where I’ve heard the summers aren’t hot enough for the average home gardener to get a good crop of tomatoes, it’s still a short season, and the tomato-growing ain’t perfect.

But what’s happening this season is something I’ve never experienced before.   Due to the time constraints of a new job, I only started one variety of tomato this year, Cherokee purple, and did it straight outdoors sometime in April.  Aside from two Cherokees, I also have three volunteer tomato plants which came up from last year’s dropped seeds and four plants given to me by a friend.  The three volunteers are cherry tomatoes — an orange variety that’s super sweet and tasty.  I ate my first one on July 1st, a full month earlier than what’s customary in these parts.  But the other six plants have yielded exactly nothing.  In fact, only one plant has any tomatoes at all hanging from it.  And even that plant has just one.  One green tomato.  Six huge plants.

Solamente uno.

The soil is good and I’ve watered during the drought-like conditions we’ve had most of the spring and summer.  The plants look healthy; they’ve all had a fair amount of flowers, but they just aren’t fruiting.  Even though my ambitious neighbor on one side of me has some green zebra tomatoes coming in and my overachieving neighbor on the other side has some juliets, I know that I’m not the only one getting a pitiful crop from the bigger tomato varieties.  It makes me think that even the tomato — a stereotypically heat-loving vegetable — has its limits.  The plants are too stressed by a string of 100-degree days to do anything more than hang on.  Do Chicagoans need to start planting heat-tolerant varieties, like they must do in Florida and Georgia?  Has it just been too darn hot for tomatoes?  Is it time to move to Portland?

on Not Eating your Veggies

Last night I grabbed about 10 of bags of leaves from alongside my neighbor’s trash cans.  My friend and I couldn’t decide if they’d end up in a landfill or be composted.  Concerned that it’d be the former, I dragged them over to my back yard and emptied them willy nilly around the raspberries, some shrubs and our coldframe.  One bag was super heavy and clearly not leaves — funny the contents didn’t surprise me more; it was a bunch of swiss chard that looked like it had been pulled a day or two ago.  The chard leaves were not yet wilty but they were large enough so as not to be tender.  There were beet greens, too, and some still attached to their beets.  The tubers were old but still edible.  I’m roasting them now in the oven.  Aside from the beet bottoms, the contents of the bag didn’t cause me to raise a brow; I’ve thrown my share of fresh-grown garden greens in the trash too.  In my case, I throw it in the compost, but the idea is the same:  my neighbor and I, we’re growing more greens than we’re willing to eat.

swiss chard in trash

I threw two or three enormous collard green plants into the compost pile a few weeks ago.  I’ve also been foisting fresh kale off on my neighbor’s chickens since mid-September.  The truth is I tire of eating collards and kale myself.  I feel guilty about letting nutritious produce go to relative waste, but I haven’t found a good alternative.  The pattern’s been similar every growing season:  I start kale from seed in early March, relish eating it for a couple of weeks in June and lose all interest in it by July.  I try my darndest to revive some life into my repertoire of kale recipes for a brief spurt at summer’s end, but I ultimately neglect harvesting cooking greens in favor of fall lettuces, brussels sprouts, and tomatoes.

I might have considered saving some of the chard from the big brown leaf bag except that the gardener two doors down laid a heaping bag of swiss chard on my doorstep a few days ago, and I’m doing my part to cook that for dinner.  The freeze is upon us in Chicago and it’s time to clean up what will otherwise die out there in the earth.  It’s time to plant onions and garlic, too, which might just be the answer to this dilemma of the greens gone to waste.  Who ever tires of an onion in their kitchen?  Who would compost a perfectly usable head of garlic?  And who’s going to fill up a brown bag of either of those pantry staples and throw them out alongside their garbage cans?  Because that would surprise me.

big beet in the garbage

Bird Food

We just spent a weekend in Dearborn, Michigan, a well-to-do suburb just west of Detroit.  Contrasted with Chicago, where we live, this place was a veritable forest:  beech, cottonwood, dogwood, majestic maples, cherries, and hawthorns abounded.  Golly, it was pretty, that’s for sure, but more than that, it provided the setting for one well-planned bird party.  With winter coming, the birds of Dearborn did not delay to fill their bellies with nature’s ample food supply.  Each morning, we watched them flit and frolic from tree to well-stocked tree, nibbling on cranberries, service berries, and holly berries with no detectable sense of urgency.   Seeing blue jays, robins, and doves high on boughs and out of harm’s way reminded me of our little sparrows back home making a meal out of the echinacea plants in our parkway.  Sure, it’s nice that they have some coneflower seeds to munch on, but somehow a bird’s magnificence is reduced when he’s only 3 feet off the ground and a stone’s throw from a line of parked cars.  I suppose it’s better that our Chicago sparrows don’t know of the bounty enjoyed by their Midwestern cousins in Michigan.  But who knows; envy doesn’t seem to know a place in a bird’s emotional repertoire.  They sing their delighted songs and make do the best they can.

A Unified Divide

Each fall, Chicago’s chapter of the environmental nonprofit group Green Corps holds a Great Perennial Divide.  They get a bunch of plant donations from nurseries and landscapers who probably wouldn’t be able to sell them off before the end of the season anyway, and hand them out to representatives from community gardens in the city.  If you’re not a member of a community garden, you can still participate in the divide by bringing plants from your own garden in exchange for Green Corps’ handouts (community gardeners needn’t do anything but register and show up).  I’ve participated in the Great Perennial Divide twice, once as a community gardener and again as a private gardener.  Though you don’t get to choose what plants you get, you do get a generous amount, and if you’re lucky, there are a few gems in the bunch.  Last year I got a Lobelia siphilitica, or great blue cardinal flower, that bears cheerful, sky blue flowers from July to early September.

As Lobelia’s blooms begin to fade, it’s time to think about dividing perennials that are outgrowing the space you’ve provided them and plant new ones in spaces that need something more or just something different.  You give the garden some sprucing up via some subtraction and addition, and you get to relish in one of the gardener’s greatest pleasures, sharing the bounty.  I’ve always shared seeds and two years ago made a great connection with a seed-saving, seed-swapping group in upstate New York that is named for its ambitiously timed, but relatively simple seed-starting technique, Winter Sowers.  For the price of passing a quiz on their website, Winter Sowers will send you a large envelope full of different seeds — many unusual, all smartly labeled with pictures.  Each fall, I collect seeds from my home garden and send them off to the good folks at Winter Sowers; they never fail to send me more excellent varieties of wildflowers and vegetables in exchange, and thus, the sharing keeps things interesting for me in the Spring.  This is a gardening relationship that I have come to cherish.

The other is the relationship I have with nearby friends who are fortunate enough to have some amount of space they can dig around in and call garden.   My friends and I informally share seedlings, gardening ideas, plant knowledge, and lack of plant knowledge all the time.  This year I decided to pool that group of friends and organize our own perennial divide — though it may not have been great on the size and scale of Green Corps’, I thought it was pretty awesome.  It didn’t hurt that we were drinking Lemon Verbena gin and tonics and cosmopolitans with garden lavender and basil as we were swapping plants either.

Katy and the variegated grass she brought to the divide.

We made no rules about how many plants you had to bring or how many with which you could go home.  Since excited urban gardeners are inclined to plant more than they realistically have room for, comments like “No, I really can’t (take that plant)” or “I just don’t have the space” were common at the divide.  What was nice was that people got to be selective about what they really wanted.  We walked around to each person’s group of donations and the person from whose garden they came talked about the virtues and vices of the specimens up for grabs.  That in itself was a nice sharing of observations and experience.

Lisa shows off her stuff.

Chal was the big provider; she brought about 70 plants.

I don’t know if we have the beginnings of a tradition going here, but I know that it was lot of fun to prepare for, and then execute, the divide party.  Of course, I haven’t put any of my new plants into the ground yet.  As one friend commented, “The pressure here to plant is much greater than if you just bought some plants at a garden center.  The person you got your plant from is bound to ask you later ‘Oh,how is that hellebore (that I dug up and that you took home) doing?’ and you don’t want to say ‘Oh sorry, I left it in its pot to die over winter.”  No,no.  We want the workings of a unified divide.  We must follow through and give those perennials a proper home for the years ahead.  Or at least until we try to pawn them off on some new gardening friend …

The Perils of City Planting

Plant a garden in the country and risk its being decimated by deer, bunnies, or other furry creatures.  Plant a garden in the city and risk having it dug up by city workers repairing a water pipe, peed on by the neighborhood’s ceaseless supply of dogs, or besotted with black dust when your neighbor has her roof redone.  The last thing just happened to me.  Parts of Chicago, mine included, got nailed by a crazy hailstorm back in June, and the damage to homes has brought all sorts of opportunistic contractors to our doorstep:  “Have you found anyone to repair your house yet?”  We were told by insurance adjustors that the damage to our roof will take 10-15 years off its lifespan, and we don’t doubt it, but we’ve been reluctant to go ahead and have the work done because of just what we’re experiencing now – a lovely fall garden saturated with black dust.

lady's mantle in my parkway, usually a green plant except when debris falls all over it

nicotiana in my front yard, you know it looks horrible

Truth be told, I know that I’ve escaped many city gardening disasters that could be much more devastating.  One of my friends used to work her behind off acquiring and planting gorgeous shrubs and perennials at a Chicago park district property only to have the roses stolen by folks in the area and the Liatris dug up by unknowing volunteers.  I know people who have had to replant their entire parkway after the city needed to dig it up to access water pipes.  They were informed in advance of this, so they were able to salvage most of the plants, but no garden enjoys being completely uprooted just as no gardener wishes to to uproot it.  And that same hailstorm that brought on the roof repair over here wreaked havoc on the annual vegetable gardens of many of my friends to the east.  Of course, hail is hardly limited to urban areas, but the close plantings required by a city gardener seem to exaggerate its ill effects.

The good thing about the recent dust is that it gives me the courage and fortitude to get our own rooftop redone.  We’ve been postponing the inevitable, but as long as the plants have this black coating now, there’s a part of me that says we may as well get it over with and subject them to being doused once again before winter covers them up with a snowy blanket.  Then in the spring I can work on keeping them clean and healthy, at least until the siding needs to be replaced.

Ode to the Cup Plant

I didn’t know what I was getting into when I bought a tiny cup plant plug six years ago from Seed Savers Exchange.  I thought that it was cool that they were selling Midwestern prairie plants in addition to their wide array of vegetable starts, so I got the cup plant, a prairie blazing star, and a purple prairie clover to plant in my then-new front yard.  The prairie blazing star blends right in with everything else; it’s fine but not spectacular.  It’s kind of floppy and looks rather shag dog by summer’s end; it’s also a dime a dozen in Chicago’s landscaped environs so doesn’t offer much in terms of rarity.  The purple prairie clover is still one of my favorite plants.  Its tutu-like purple flowers are dazzling when they bloom in July, and the plant is almost never seen around the city.  But I fear that my own purple prairie clover is forever stunted by the dry conditions in my urban front yard; the plant still takes up barely ¼ square foot of space and is therefore easily overlooked in favor of more imposing species.  Like Silphium perfoliatum, more commonly known as cup plant.

Imposing and aggressive it is.  At 10 feet tall, the cup plant easily grabs your attention over other plants.  Each spring, when cup plants crop up all over my yard and my neighbor’s yard and who knows where else, its aggressiveness kind of irks me.  I’ve given cup plant seedlings away and walked away feeling rather coy.  Will the new owner curse me in two years’ time the way that I have cursed my own endless cup plant supply?  Or will they be able to hang in there — weeding it out where it isn’t wanted — and appreciate the magic it brings to the landscape?  Even though it can be a pain in the ass, in the late summer days of the Midwest, the cup plant has no equal.

The cup plant holds water in its leaves, which form a cup where they meet the sturdy stalk.  This is an incredibly useful feature for birds and butterflies, who sometimes find water in short supply, especially water that is high up and out of their predators’ reach.   Today, for instance, is generally hot, muggy, and dry, but we did get a little rain last night.  Leave it to the cup plant to save that precious rain for our thirsty friends.  And those same water-holding leaves also provide protection from the hot mid-day sun, serving as a quasi-umbrella for small birds or bugs when the heat is too much.

cup plant

The cup plant is opportunistic.  It leaps out of the cracks between our front yard and the sidewalk and flowers prolifically even when squashed between my neighbor’s chain link fence and our gangway.  Provided it has some sun and space, the cup plant will do well.  It has deep roots and is incredibly drought tolerant.  Never has it been on my laundry list of garden chores to “water the dear old cup plant.”

All of this is well and true, and I do so appreciate the cup plant for all of it.  But my favorite thing about the cup plant is something that makes me tear up as only a handful of things in the garden will:   winter’s first snowdrops perking their heads up beneath 18 inches of slush, strawberries ripening when the robins were busy looking the other way, hips following roses on a buxom Rugosa rose, and the unmistakable high-pitched song of goldfinches visiting the cup plant at 3 o’clock every afternoon.  I suppose it’s their early bird happy hour.  As my friend Craig once commented, “It’s their beer and peanuts,” with the beer being the stored-up water in the leaves and the peanuts, the large flower seeds.  Our cup plant has hosted a pair of goldfinch couples every late summer for years now:  two stunning gold yellow males and two subtly brown-yellow females.  Their song and their presence stops me in my tracks each afternoon and reminds me why I planted a garden in the first place, to give something to others and in so doing, to myself.

two female goldfinches in our front yard cup plant

Putting Smells to Mind

Today I walked through Chicago’s Lurie Garden after a hard rain.  Usually I love that place for its lush colors and varied textures, but today it was the smells working their magic.  Prairie Dropseed grass,  Sporobolus heterolepis, was the workhorse in the fragrance department.  There was also some ornamental oregano providing backup, but it was definitely the Dropseed which overwhelmed my olfactory senses.   To me, Sporobolus smells like what a natural bubblegum, if there were such a thing, might smell like:  sweet but not sugary, light and airy in the nostrils, playful in the mouth.  When I worked at Gethsemane Garden Center, one of the veterans in the perennial department described the smell as cotton candy.  There is definitely something sweet about the smell, but like she noted, it’s not fruity like the sweet of many wines.  It’s more of a candy sweet, reminiscent of the sweet smell of a Stevia plant, but somehow more pink than Stevia’s green.  Like many plants that aren’t herbs, the Sporobolus grass’ richest scent comes from its flowers.

Prairie Dropseed in bloom

One plant that doesn’t have to bloom in order to provide its smell is actually a good one for the urban gardener due to its compact size.  Comptonia peregrina, or Sweetfern, is a 2-4 foot tall plant which starts out about 18 inches wide but apparently will spread by rhizomes if it has the sun and space to do so.  My Sweetfern is only a year old so I haven’t seen it spread yet; I also haven’t seen it bloom.  But I’ve smelled its sweet fragrance many times because it is the leaves which, when disturbed, release a delicate aroma.

sweetfern, the leaves smell really good

Sweetfern is also native to the eastern United States, so we can feel doubly good about planting it here in Illinois.

In my home garden, I’ve found it somewhat difficult to plant specifically for fragrance.  For instance, I do have one happy Praire Dropseed in my front yard, but the perfume of one plant doesn’t swim over your cheekbones the way that a stand of twenty or thirty, like they have over at Lurie, does.  Admittedly, aside from the Sweetfern, I’ve been fairly remiss about planting with the sense of smell in mind.  I think I’m going to change this.  With age, my eyesight will probably wane before my olfactory senses do.   And in a city, a lovely fragrance is as much a combatant against stinky exhaust as the garden’s soft green colors are against stifling black asphalt and hard gray concrete.

Clary Sage flowers

Fortuitously, some of the stuff I’ve put in my garden for other reasons has provided great fragrance as well.  My friend Mary gave me Clary Sage, which is an annual here in Chicago but self-seeds prolifically enough that it might as well be perennial.  I let one seedling grow each spring and pull the others up.  The mature plant is fairly large, 3 feet tall and another 3ft around if you give it that.  It’s slightly floppy in habit, but its white flowers, each with a little light-blue, lipped shape cap above them, hang on almost all summer.  I originally kept the plant in my garden because it was from a friend and the flowers were cute.  I also liked that its shoddy-looking green leaves, which remind me of a fuzzy wild plantain, lay low and out of sight after the rest of the garden fills in.  The strong smell of the Clary Sage is my one of my favorite aspects of the plant now.   Some say the smell is astringent, but I’d prefer to call it “clean.”  It’s an earthy smell too, and spicier than traditional, culinary sage.  I walk the garden bed where it’s blooming and the odor greets me like an old pal.  “Thanks for keeping me around,” it seems to say; “No, thank you,” returns my nose.

Coveted Fruits

I run with two fellow gardeners some mornings.  It’s a treat for us to point out plants to each other as we trot, and today there was a wealth of pointing as we adventured on an 8-mile run into new urban terrain.  One of our walk and water breaks was at Kilbourn Park’s organic greenhouse and garden, where an orchard was planted a few years ago.  They had at least two cherries, a few pears, and some apple trees, one of which was marked as a Golden Delicious.  Kilbourn Park does an excellent job and their commitment to growing organic fruit is admirable, but unfortunately none of the trees looked especially healthy or productive.  My own experience growing organic fruit trees in a small urban space has taught me just how frustrating the endeavor can be.  Apple maggots infest my sweet and sour cherry trees every season.  I salvage what I can but spend far more time cleaning up fallen and infected fruit than I do actually storing edible fruit away for use.  My Bartlett pear, which I just put in last year, decided not to flower or fruit at all this season.  The tree looks healthy and did yield about 10 marginally edible pears last fall, but this year, without explanation, it has done nothing.  I know other urban gardeners who have had similar trouble.  My friend Katy had a few fruits on her pear tree this year, but the squirrels had already beaten her to them before they ripened.  At least somebody ate them.  One of my running friends, Gin, has battled apple scab and apple maggots in her backyard apple tree to the point where she can no longer harvest any of its fruit for home use.  It makes you wonder if it’s fruitless to try and grow fruit in the small home garden.  Or at least the kind of fruit that grows on trees.

On the return leg of our run, we came upon some blackberry canes growing very tidily up the front of a little brick house.  The color of the fruit, both the bright red of the unripe fruits and the rich black of the ripe ones, beckoned us over.  Each berry was about three or four times the size of a common raspberry.  They were perfectly plump, oval-shaped, adorable.  Forgive me, for I could not resist reaching beyond the fence for three fruits, a sample for each of us in sneakers.  The fruit’s juicy sweetness remains me with hours later, and my brain is busily plotting where I might be able to sneak a blackberry plant into our already crowded backyard.  As I have learned from growing raspberries, brambles do need space, but if you can give it to them, they will provide abundantly with little fuss.  Our raspberry patch is about 9ft.long and 4 ft. wide and yields enough for a family of four to feast on delicious raspberries at breakfast-time for about three weeks every fall.  (We get a spring crop too, but it pales in comparison to the fall one, both in quantity and quality.)  The raspberries could use more space, admittedly, as they tend to flop over on our sidewalk and generally get in the way of things, but we have all adapted to the arrangement.

The gooseberry, which can also be somewhat droopy in habit, is the most space-efficient bramble I know.  My mature gooseberry takes up only about 4 square feet of earth.  Gooseberries can be pruned and staked to keep the foliage and fruit off the ground, and good pruning can contribute to their ability to fruit heavily on few shoots.  Last year I harvested about 10 cups of gooseberries from one plant.  Gooseberries, like blackberries apparently, can tolerate partial shade, but the more sun they get, the sweeter their fruit.

Red gooseberry, yum

I find most gooseberries to be too sour to pop straight from the bush into my mouth, although if you can wait around for the very ripest, they are in fact sweet.  But it’s no sweetness like that of the blackberry I had this morning.  Gooseberries make a terrific, gorgeous-hued jam and are also good in a funny-sounding dessert called a “fool”:  essentially equal parts pureed fruit and whipped cream, with only a small amount of added sugar.

My initial research into the possibility of adding a Blackberry to the yard reveals that there’s a particular breed of blackberry called ‘Marion’ which is said to yield more fruit on fewer canes.  These are also called marionberries, after Marion County in Oregon.  Whatever the origin, I figure they are worth trying if I can taste that super juicy late summer fruit again without having to reach my hand over someone else’s fence.

marionberry fruits, yummer

Something Different in Yellow

There’s lots of yellow in the garden right now — black-eyed susan, sunflowers, cupplant, a little coreopsis still hanging on, my friend Gin’s early goldenrod.  The thing is that yellow can get mundane, so I try to keep my eye out for yellows that are particularly cool or different.  I don’t have the space to provide for a whole swath of yellow like that provided by five or seven fireworks Goldenrod, so my one Solidago rugosa just kind of sits there:  it ain’t too exciting, truth be told.  I figure if you only have room for yellows by the individual plant, those plants you do put in should knock ’em dead.  If I haven’t seen the plant much around the city, that’ll often knock me dead. And if I find out that it’s native, I’ll want to plant it myself.  A lot of times with these uncommon yellow-blooming plants, you can’t find them in local garden centers.  There’s only one thing to do: you’ve got to start those yellow babies yourself.  I get psyched up about this prospect.  Start my own rosinweed!  Start my own wild senna since the one (I thought) I had turned out to be fleabane.

Wild Senna, don't the leaves look like a sensitive plant's?

Lincoln Park Zoo has a year-old planting of about 30 acres of natives, some of them with their feet in the water or semi-submerged.  The plants are around the Zoo’s newly redesigned South Pond, and they call it the Nature Boardwalk.  I took a class there the other day and saw some unusual plants.  The Wild Senna is blooming over there right now and their Horticulture guy was nice enough to send me the above photo.  I’m even more determined to get it for myself now — there’s nothing quite like it.

There are a bunch of perennial sunflowers doing their thing right now.  I’ve got some kind of Helianthus that came with my yard when we bought a house; all my neighbors seem to have it too.  It does bloom a long time, granted, but it’s kind of floppy and a bit of a water-hog and it’s not unusual.  But over at the Nature Boardwalk, they’ve got Downy Sunflower.  It’s not blooming yet but looks super cute at its present budding stage.  It will probably be open next week and that’ll really be a good show.

Downy Sunflower, never seen one in a Chicago yard

Downy Sunflower’s  foliage is a blue-green that adds life to the same old, same old green-green garden.  Something different in yellow, something different in green.

Stiff Goldenrod, looks good before it opens too

Similar in appearance to the Downy Sunflower is Stiff Goldenrod.  I remember learning about it last year in a U of I-Extension Native Plant info session.  Solidago rigida is about the same height as other goldenrods, but its yellow flowers come in flat-topped clusters rather than plume-like ones.  They form a neat clump and don’t spread by rhizomes the way that Showy Goldenrod does.

And finally a plug for the Dumbo’s Ears Black-Eyed Susan.  This July-bloomer is goofy-looking and nowhere to be found at the Nature Boardwalk.  I don’t think it’s a native; it looks like it’s from another planet.  I got mine at Gethsemane Garden Center when I was working there unloading a delivery of perennials off a truck.  There were only about six of them and my boss warned that they wouldn’t always take in certain spots.  She wasn’t sure what made them work one place and not another but she knew that they wanted sun and she guessed that they needed space.  Old Dumbo’s Ears doesn’t bloom anywhere near as long as Rudbeckia goldstrum, which most folks in Chicago have yellowing up their yard from late July through October, but when it does bloom, people take notice.

Rudbeckia something, Dumbo's Ears

p.s. Something Different in Purple

Instead of Liatris spicata, the Prairie Blazing star we see all the time and refer to as Dense Blazing Star, there is Liatris aspera, Button Blazing star.

Prairie Blazing Star, but with buttons instead of clumpy spikes

The flowers are individualized instead of one long cat-taily clump.  The Button variety stands erect.  Admittedly, my Liatris spicata’s floppiness could be due to a scarcity of water.  The only place I’ve seen the Button is in a spot where the ground tends to be wet.  It looks terrific.  I wish I could swap it for my floppy spicata.

One Household Plants

I worry more about the sex of my plants than I ever did about the sex of my children before they were born.  With the children, whether male or female, they still had the same potential to develop into a person who could do a lot of cool things.  But with certain plants, you really only want them to do one cool thing:  yield fruit.  And if they’re not female, or don’t have a male nearby to pollinate them, they just won’t yield.  Anyone who has grown marijuana knows about this.  The male doesn’t provide buds, so unless you’re a serious grower trying to breed or cross-breed plants, there’s no reason to keep a male alive.  In fact, a male’s presence can even lower the quality of the female buds by making them seedy.

But some plants are monoecious; they have both male and female flowers on the same plant.  The term monoecious comes from the Greek and translates as “one household.”  I knew that certain squash were like this but wasn’t quite sure what that meant for someone who wanted to grow squash for their fruit and maybe an occasional squash blossom fried in butter.  Then my neighbor Andy came over last year and saw my Rouge Vif d’Etampes pumpkin plant teeming with flowers.  “Why don’t you pick some of these and eat them?” he asked.  I confessed that I wasn’t sure which flowers I could safely eat without disturbing the plant’s fruit production.  “Simple,” he explained, “the males have no bulge behind them; that’s how you know they’re not going to fruit.  Pick them and eat them.”  The female flowers have an ovary at their base.  They need to be left alone if you want fruit to form.  Of course, the females also need some male flowers for pollination, so you don’t want to fry up every single male squash blossom in butter either.

That was last summer.  We ate a fair amount of male flowers from that Rouge pumpkin plant and it still yielded three of the most gorgeous fruit I’ve ever seen:

daughter Louisa with Rouge Vif d'Etampes pumpkins

Five years ago, I got the idea to plant Corylus americana, the American hazelnut.  I wanted to plant something nut-bearing but didn’t have the space for a massive tree like a walnut or chestnut.  The hazelnut seemed like a good option because it is more of a shrub than a tree and supposedly gets to be no bigger than 12 feet (this is holding true so far).  In my search for growers of Corylus Americana, I found a groovy place in Kalamazoo, Michigan, that specializes in edible plants.  At the time, Oikos Tree Crops had a special where if you bought more than 25 hazelnuts, you would pay something like $2.50 per shrub.  Of course these were itty bitty plants, but I had a planting party in my neighborhood and we popped all but three of them in the public way.  The rest went home to me.  Two years ago, I noticed catkins on the hazelnuts and began to worry.  Two of them were taking up prime real estate in my city yard, and if catkins were a sign of their maleness and thus, their inability to fruit, I didn’t want them around.  Then I heard a talk from a grower down in southern Illinois.  He praised the American hazelnut for its fruiting power.  He said once the nuts started to ripen, he could approach that shrub with a shotgun and still the squirrels wouldn’t leave it.  “Go ahead,” the squirrels would say to him.  “Kill us if you like; we’re not giving up the nuts.”  I went home dreaming of the day when my city squirrels would say the same to me, yet remained uneducated as to how a female shrub could have catkins and whether my hazelnuts would ever bear fruit.  Surely Oikos Tree Crops knew how to keep a customer ordering 25 of the same shrubs happy?

It wasn’t until this season that the hazelnut’s monoeciousness finally dawned on me.  The catkins are the male flowers while the nuts come from the females.  They live on the same plant in perfect male and female harmony, and the result is a plant with more amazing features.  The largest of my hazelnut shrubs now has beautiful fruits, encased in a fuzzy, fibrous, light-green husk.  They are not yet ripe, so the squirrels haven’t started their stake-out, but I’m anticipating some fun adventures this fall surrounding this “one household” shrub and the fuzzy-tailed creatures who share our home garden and our taste for nuts.

fruits forming on five year-old shrub