Five things to do in the garden this week:
Fruit. Greg Alder, Southern California’s avocado guru, performed a ripening experiment with avocados, placing them in a box with an apple and a banana. Accepted wisdom on this subject maintains that placing avocados together with bananas or apples will speed up their ripening since ethylene, a ripening agent, is given off by these fruits. However, in Alder’s experiment, proximity to these fruits in a closed box did not hasten ripening. Heat, however, according to Alder, does speed up ripening so that an avocado on a warm kitchen counter will ripen more quickly than one placed on a cool garage floor. Too much heat, however, will ripen avocados too quickly and affect their quality, as Alder learned when avocados he left in his truck quickly deteriorated. In conclusion, he states: “I’ve settled on the rule of thumb that if it’s warmer than comfortable for me, then it’s warmer than comfortable for my avocados.”
Vegetables. Romanesco is a peculiar-looking vegetable with a taste that falls somewhere between broccoli and cauliflower and a crunch that the others lack. Its bumpy texture and spiral configuration impart the look of a forbidding lizard. Plant it now along with other fall vegetables and root crops. Let’s put it this way: With the exception of crops that need hot weather to thrive — tomato, cucumber, squash, eggplant, and corn — you can plant virtually anything now, meaning nearly all leafy and root vegetables, taking care to apply extra water in a heat wave. However, shortening days mean less heat stress, no matter how hot it gets.
Flowers. Cornflowers or bachelor buttons (Centaurea cyanus) are easily grown from seed. Their most famous color is an electric blue, although pink, rose, wine red, and white are also seen. This plant is a reliable self-seeder, so you should have it around for years. The petals are edible and known for their peppery flavor, with overtones of cucumber and cloves, and are suitable for garnishes and salads. In the Victorian era, men wore them in their jacket buttonhole as a sign of their bachelor status and interest in changing it. Centaurea cineraria is a cousin that looks like classic dusty miller with its deeply lobed silvery foliage; only it’s larger, growing to a height of three feet with pale violet flowers.
Herbs. The most pleasant foliar fragrance my nose has encountered was that of green cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum), a relative of ginger. It is spicily aromatic, some would say with a tutti-frutti scent, a mixture of camphor, lemon, and mint. Cardamom grows as a two- to three-foot-tall ground cover for shady areas in frost-free zones. All gingers have stout rhizomes that allow them to spread so that you will soon have a considerable stand of them and can happily dig up pieces to give to friends. Tropical in origin, it does need regular water, and it will never flower here since our nighttime temperatures are not warm enough for that to happen. The only live plants I found are at Logees.com, but pods, each containing around a dozen seeds, are widely available online.
Indoor plants. Wax plant or porcelain flower (Hoya spp.) possesses the most irresistibly fragrant blooms of any indoor plant. Its leaves may also have interesting shapes, including square-tipped, cup-shaped, pencil-like, and twisted. Foliage may also turn pink or red when sun-exposed, in addition to the fascinating variegated patterns displayed on some varieties. Add a remarkable degree of drought tolerance, and you wonder why Hoyas are among the lesser-known indoor plants. Yet there is a Hoya craze going on right now, and enthusiasts are assembling formidable collections of its many species, including miniatures.