Some advice for senior citizen gardeners
The topic for this week’s column was precipitated by the passing of an old acquaintance of mine, who I had not seen in about five years, so, this week, I will offer advice for those of my generation and pepper it with phrases and expressions from my younger days.
I hope that those of you who are not in this category will read on as well, because your time will come, if you are lucky! It is a sad fact that by the time we are old and secure enough to retire to do the things we enjoy most, we are too old to enjoy them as much as we did when we were younger.
Buy a kneeling, sitting, device for weeding. I resisted this purchase for years because I felt that I did not need such a device and also because these gadgets (dohickies) were so expensive. Fifty dollars for a glorified kneeling pad with a frame that can be flipped over to become a seat seemed extravagant to me, but since I no longer need to buy tennis balls, I decided to go for it.
I learned years ago that there are only so many “bendovers” in my back on any given day and that number is inversely proportional to my age, so I bought one and I love it! You will too.
Water only when the plants wilt. It is my observation that most people tend to overwater their gardens, thus expending energy better spent reading a newspaper or pondering why our head hair is disappearing, or better yet, napping! Most of the garden soils in this region have lots of clay, particularly soils inland from the Hudson River and in the Catskill mountains. Clay textured soils retain lots of moisture and most garden plants will develop deep root systems that can tap into this water if forced to do so. Frequent watering encourages shallow rooting, thus creating its own worst enemy. ]
Some garden plants, such as tomatoes, will wilt every single hot afternoon, regardless of how often you water. This is because they lose more water via transpiration than their root systems can absorb. This is a result of temperature, not water need. As long as your plants are not wilted in the early morning, you don’t need to water.
Weed only after a bodacious rainfall (Gen X people may need to look up “bodacious”, seniors won’t). Even if it goes dry
for a week or more and the weeds seem to be taking over, resist the urge to yank them out, since you will end up breaking off many at soil level and broken weeds always regrow much more quickly than those uprooted. Moist soil allows you to pull the weeds out easily and entirely.
Forget about most weeding after mid-August. A single crabgrass plant can produce upwards of 150,000 seeds and those seeds remain viable for at least three years. Most garden guides advise weeding well into the fall. The idea is to prevent them from going to seed to begin with, so allowing even one crabgrass plant to go to seed, even 100 feet or more away from my garden, supplies the weed seed bank with more seed than I will ever remove for years. Why spend the effort to prevent it from seeding by breaking my back in the hottest days of the year when I will NEVER eliminate the soil seed bank in my lifetime?
August is generally when we harvest. Worry about weeding in the spring when weeds compete with the plant’s growth.
“Better living through chemistry.” Millennials will surely need to research that quote. Simply stated, it means that chemicals such as pesticides and, dare I mention it, herbicides, such as Roundup really can save a great deal of manual effort. Everyone who watches TV knows that there is a class action suit against the manufacturers of this product because it may cause cancer. If you are on Facebook you also know that virtually every single item in our diet contains detectable residues of it.
I grew up in New Jersey in the ‘50s and ‘60s, consequently, I have already been exposed to thousands of carcinogens. Should I develop cancer, it will not be hard to find a possible cause. Hundreds of millions of acres of corn, soybeans and other food crops will be treated with Roundup in the U.S. in 2019. If it is as dangerous as portrayed, then it should be banned outright, as it is in some places in Europe, but, in the meantime, allow me the luxury of killing the poison ivy around my house without having to yank it out by hand. Before too long, I will kick the bucket and my use of Roundup will be a moot point in the big picture.
(Young people may also need to look up “kick the bucket.”)