Recent weather warnings of snowfall and extreme winter temperatures sent gardeners scurrying out into their landscapes to protect vulnerable edible and ornamental plantings. A friend described to me the tent-like shelter he and his wife erected over their palm tree.
Like many gardeners, I was keen to preserve the food plants in good useable condition 鈥� the beets and carrots, the Asian and other green leafy vegetables. I spread leaves and soil over the root crops and covered the plot with two layers of old floating row fabric.
I harvested some of the mizuna and other听 leafy Asian greens, in case the planting succumbed to the cold, and placed several layers of row cover over these greens and the endive and radicchio plot.
Kale and leeks usually fare well in cold weather. Still, with the predicted low temperatures in mind, I piled soil around the bases of the leeks and draped old row covers over the kale.
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Weed watch. In the front garden I piled mounds of soil over the dahlia root clumps. As I did this, I noted with surprise patches of bittercress in various stages of growth. A few of the plants bore flower clusters already. Bad news. Those tiny white flowers are quick to produce seeds that snap and pop away from the plant to create further weedy patches.
Over the next weeks, and beyond, watch for bittercress. Left unchecked, the plants will spread all over a garden. The small, short-lived annuals can complete their life cycles from germination to听seed dispersal within a month.
The small, leafy rosettes and upright stems bearing tiny white flowers are a familiar sight in听gardens, and I鈥檝e often seen them growing in听the听soil of plants I鈥檝e purchased. Pull them up or听hoe them under before they can set seeds. If you听come across a plump, young plant, gather the听greens for adding a light mustardy flavour to听a听salad.
For its habit of forcefully expelling seeds and for its spicy flavour, bittercress has been given other common names: pepperweed, snapweed, shotweed, popweed, flickweed, popping cress.
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Surprise visitor. The pre-freezeup plant protection (and weed pulling) project finished, I returned to听the warm and cosy indoors to notice a flurry of activity next to the family room glass doors. A hummingbird was darting from bloom to bloom in the four pansy planters raised on stands on the patio. What a pleasure to have such a close-up visit, almost like a reward for the outdoor plant-preservation expedition
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Clancy. When the William Dam Seeds catalogue arrived last month, I was mildly surprised to see potatoes, apparently freshly dug, soil still clinging to the skins, spread across the cover.
On the inside front cover, a message reflects my surprise: 鈥淲hy did we choose to put a potato on our front cover? The potato is Clancy, a potato grown from botanical seed, True Potato Seed.鈥�
The message goes on to explain how the complex DNA of the potato means that any seeds that develop on our potato plants, if sown, will produce plants and tubers of greatly varying quality and with a pronounced diversity of听 traits. It takes skill, time, and patience to breed a potato that will 鈥渃ome true鈥� from seed.
Clancy is described as an elongated tuber with predominately red skin. Around 10 per cent of the spuds have blush to yellow skin. The flesh colour ranges from yellow to cream.
In his introduction to Clancy, owner William Dam notes:听 鈥淐lancy is a flavourful and beautiful potato. It is also a robust variety with healthy plants strong against disease. Clancy means Red Warrior in Gaelic.鈥澨�
Potatoes are normally grown from certified 鈥渟eed鈥� potatoes, which are clones of the parent plant. Those clones produce tubers just like the parent.
Why potatoes from seed? The Clancy listing in the catalogue offers a significant reason: 鈥淭rue potato seed is particularly important for small farmers in remote areas of the world where access to good quality tubers is difficult.鈥� Seed is obviously more easily transportable that seed potatoes. Just 200 grams (that鈥檚 seven ounces) of the seed can yield 200 pounds of potatoes.
West Coast Seeds also lists Clancy and, as usual in its catalogue, gives meticulously detailed instructions on growing the seeds, transplanting, and harvesting.
