Are mushrooms growing under your bed? This book suggests you might want them to – Orange County Register

It seems that people are increasingly turning to plants and gardening for consolation, exercise, and exploration during these pandemic times. Worlds of discovery await them. A serious gardener wears many hats: botanist, entomologist, weed scientist, plant pathologist, soil scientist, irrigation specialist. I also believe there is a back-to-the-land desire in all of us, although it may have been diminished by our ever more fervent worship of convenience in the high-tech era.

Although its title is “Backyard Farming” (Adams Media, 2021), this book has information that indoor farmers, too, will find of interest. For example, as long as you receive four hours of direct sunlight through a window in your home, you can grow leaf lettuce, radishes, carrots, chives, scallions, basil, and thyme indoors, although these crops will grow faster with six hours or more of unimpeded sun. Just make sure your growing containers are at least six inches deep. If you have a dense cluster of plants, a ceiling or box fan in the vicinity – activated on an occasional basis — will keep air circulating so as to prevent mildew and other disease.

Even if you don’t have much light, growing mushrooms is always an option. Grow them “in any dark corner, inside the kitchen cabinets, under the bathroom sink, or better yet, consider all that space going to waste under your bed.” Start with a mushroom growing kit that you can find on the Internet. Once you feel comfortable with the process, you can acquire your own growing medium such as straw or sawdust and purchase fungi spawn separately and in quantity to lower your cost.

Even if you have a small outdoor plot, you can maximize the growing space through interplanting. In between your tomato plants, for example, you can plant lettuces and radishes since “you’ll be picking the radishes and lettuce long before the tomatoes are full height and ripe, so you don’t need to worry about overcrowding.”

You can further maximize space by keeping tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, and melons growing straight up on trellises. The wooden trellises at home improvement centers are probably not sufficiently robust to support anything but tomatoes, but welded wire fencing, available by the roll, can be used for trellising heavier crops.

It is even possible to squeeze tree fruit into a limited area through espalier planting. If you have a small courtyard or enclosed patio with a narrow planting bed against a sunny wall, but still want to grow fruit trees, consider the possibility of espalier.

Espalier (ess-pal-yay) is a practice that involves growing fruit trees in a flat plane against walls, fences, or via a cordon system. It originated in ancient Egypt and first appeared in Europe in monasteries during the Middle Ages. The basic espalier form, which mimics the cordon system for cultivation of grapes, requires you to fasten three horizontal lengths of baling wire at 14-inch vertical intervals between four-inch diameter posts. You may extend your wire cordons as far as 15 feet, meaning that you would have up to 7 1/2-foot branches growing horizontally off either side of the trunk.

Plant your tree so that the trunk is 6 to 10 inches away from the wall. This will allow for air circulation and plenty of room for the trunk diameter to expand without rubbing against the wall. One-year-old fruit trees are recommended, but older trees can also be planted.

Select a standard, single-trunk tree and, after planting it, cut it down so that the top of the trunk meets the lowest wire on the wall. Shoots will sprout from the point where the cut was made and, when they are several inches long, you should snip off all but three of them. Two shoots should be carefully attached to the baling wire on either side of the trunk with soft strips of cloth and the third allowed to grow up vertically. When the ascending shoot reaches the second cordon, cut it and wait for new shoots to emerge before selecting three more shoots to continue the training of your espaliered tree.

Apple, pear, quince and fig trees are the easiest to espalier by the above method because of their highly flexible branches. Other fruit trees are more easily trained into fan-shaped subjects by the espalier technique, with shoots tied to the wires at 45-degree angles from the trunk. Use dwarf or semi-dwarf trees, which are easiest to control, where available. For maximum sun exposure, you will want to select a west- or south-facing wall. But keep in mind that walls impart a significant extra measure of reflected heat that could burn leaves or fruit in our scorching summer heat.

If you live in a hot spot without overhanging trees or eaves to take away some of the sun’s force, you may want to espalier against an east-facing wall. If you live in an area where winters are occasionally frosty, planting against a wall makes cultivation of tropicals such as citrus a less risky proposition. Heat absorbed by a wall during the day radiates outward and warms plants growing against it at night.

Aside from taking up less space, espalier trees produce fruit earlier and have heavier crops than free-standing trees. The reason for this is a change in hormonal balance, in favor of fruitfulness, that occurs when branches are bent to the horizontal. Espalier trees, since they seldom exceed 6 to 9 feet in height, also have the advantage of being easier to harvest and prune than conventional trees.

Almost any ornamental tree, shrub or vine can be grown in espalier fashion. One of the favorite choices for a richly flowering espalier this time of year is the Japanese camellia, which comes into full bloom in February. The fall-blooming Sasanqua camellia is another worthy, albeit slower-growing, espalier candidate. Other favorite espalier subjects include hibiscus, magnolia and ginkgo. If you have a shadier spot against a wall that needs some livening up, consider growing an espaliered star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides), English holly (Ilex aquifolium) or Japanese maple.

Richard Crowe has a 5,800 square foot, pie-shaped lot in Beaumont. Thanks to utilization of the espalier growing technique on his walls and utilization of a cordon system he constructed, he is cultivating more than 20 fruit trees, including naval and Valencia orange, Meyer and Eureka lemon, Bearss lime, pomelo, Algerian tangerine, Ruby Red grapefruit, six varieties of apple, Snow Queen and Panamint nectarine, peach, Minnie Royal and Royal Lee cherry, Black Jack fig, Warren pear, Fuyu persimmon, and pomegranate. Crowe also has a 300 square foot vegetable garden and sixty rose bushes on his property.

Crowe procured many of his trees from Trees of Antiquity (treesofantiquity.com). You can order trees from this Paso Robles nursery for direct shipping to your address.

Crowe recommended “The American Horticultural Society Pruning & Training,” calling it the bible for training (including espalier training) and pruning of more than 800 trees, shrubs, and vines, both fruit-bearing and ornamental, as well as roses.

Tip of the Week: “Backyard Farming” makes a strong case for growing sweet potatoes. “If you were only to grow one crop in your garden, you’d want to make it the sweet potato,” we read. “According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the sweet potato ranks highest in nutritional value compared to all other major staple foods.” And you can start your own sweet potato patch from slips or shoots that grow from a supermarket tuber. Cut a sweet potato into pieces and submerge them in moist potting soil in a container on your kitchen window sill and shoots will begin sprouting in a few days. Alternatively, you can take an entire tuber and place it in a glass of water, with half of it submerged, held in place by toothpicks in the manner that you place an avocado pit in a glass of water in order to coax a sprout from it. The difference is that as many as fifty shoots will sprout from a single sweet potato. When shoots are six inches long in about six weeks, carefully detach them from the tuber and lay them in a shallow bowl with their bottoms submerged and their leafy tops flopping over the edge of the bowl. Amend the soil in your sweet potato plot until it drains quickly so that the roots of your shoots can rapidly expand into it. Plant shoots twelve to eighteen inches apart and then keep the soil around them well soaked for the next several days.

Please send questions, comments, and photos to joshua@perfectplants.com