Radishes prized for flavor, quick growth
Snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils traditionally herald spring's arrival. But in the pageant of Earth's renewal let's hear it also for the perky radish.
As the soil warms up, nothing thrives in it faster than a radish. It can sprout in three days and be ready to eat in 18. In other words, you're already harvesting a crop before you've even planted many other annual vegetables.
The taste of the crisp, cherry-skinned little beauties with the snow-white insides ranges from mild to sharp, depending on how long you wait before harvesting. If you want to keep a mild taste, dig them and store them instead of letting them age in the ground. In the growth period, regular watering is helpful for good taste.
Radishes have long been used to mark the rows of slower-germinating crops, like carrots or parsnips. As the radishes mature, the soil loosens and makes it easier for the other plants to germinate and prosper.
They need no special soil preparation for growth.
But the cabbage root maggot is their worst enemy. Wood ashes mixed in the soil before sowing and spread on top of new plants help repel the pest.
While native Americans were the first to grow some of the world's best-loved vegetables like tomatoes, potatoes, beans and peppers it was Europeans who brought radishes to the New World. They were growing in Mexico as early as 1500. The English settlers also introduced them early.
Cherry trees bring poetic feel
Look at the cherry trees now blooming along the Tidal Basin. Now look at the one in your yard.
Why do the famous ones look lifted from a Japanese wood cut and yours resemble, in the words of local horticulturist Phil Normandy, "beach umbrellas"?
To get the desired effect, you have to hunt for the right variety and wait a few years.
The ancient specimens of Yoshino and Kwanzan cherries on and near the Mall have achieved their poetic stance through genes and age. Cherry-tree connoisseurs know that as beautiful as the blossoms are, the trees hold even greater value, in the silhouette of their black and winding trunk and weeping branches.
The pendulous effect is accentuated by age, though certain varieties were chosen for their weeping character. To achieve that droopy look right away on new trees, growers graft a mop of dangling branches of one species to another. To Normandy's eyes, and many others, the placement of a pendulous plant on top of a straight trunk looks unnatural.Technically, growers take a weeping form of the Higan cherry (botanically Prunus subhirtella forma pendula) and connect it to a young, ramrod-straight trunk of another species, often a European cherry named Prunus avium. By connecting it at chest height or more, the plant achieves instant size and retail value. Apart from the aesthestic flaws, the weeping Japanese cherry has a habit of sprouting fresh branches from the large understock.
New book highlights living arts, crafts
If arts and crafts is a term now used liberally and generously for all levels of homemade decorative items, many of the garden crafts featured in a new book by author Geraldine Rudge are worthy of William Morris.
A six-foot-high screen of living willow, trained into a basket-weave pattern, is astonishing, but the image that took our fancy is of an urn fashioned from slate, perhaps because once built it won't need continual pruning and training.
Building it might not be the do-it-yourself project that Rudge proffers, however ("Garden Crafts," Lyons Press, $35).
The artisan who fashioned it, Joe Smith, is a lifelong stonemason, and it is crafted from thousands of shards of slate together weighing a quarter-ton.
Smith uses a slate knife, a makeshift anvil and a master's eye to give a curving edge to each piece, which is then dry-stacked.
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