Monticello Podcasts

“A Rich Spot of Earth”

Episode 8 Shade, Propagation, Tomatoes, and Honey

August 2023

 

1. Prologue

 

Michael Tricomi:

It's August here at Monticello and we’re harvesting tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, and honey. But it’s also hot and humid. If you’re working outside, shade is your friend. Jefferson, of course, put that more poetically. He wrote, "Under the constant, beaming, almost vertical sun of Virginia, shade is our Elysium."

 

In this month’s podcast, we’re covering shade, tomatoes, honey and more.

 

2. Introduction

 

Michael Tricomi:

This is “A Rich Spot of Earth,” a podcast about gardening and the natural world. I’m Michael Tricomi, Interim Manager and Curator of Historic Gardens at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home in Albemarle County, Virginia.

 

3. Shade

 

Michael Tricomi:

Shade is a subject that appears often in both Jefferson’s letters and landscape plans.

 

Here’s Curator of Plants Peggy Cornett, Horticulturist Robert Dowell, and Flower Gardner Debbie Donnelly discussing shade in the garden.

 

Peggy Cornett:

Before the house was constructed, the top of the mountain was leveled, and so the forest was removed before the house was built, and he often lamented that he wished his house was embowered with shade. When he was in Philadelphia, he was spending time under what he called high plane trees, which would be our American sycamore. When he was living on the banks of the Schuylkill River and he was writing letters, he said under the high plane trees I dine and take my breakfast and meet my guests, and how I wish that my house was with shade.

 

Michael Tricomi:

After building Monticello, Jefferson planted trees around the house to create shade. He also had an interesting vision for transforming forested areas further down the mountain into gardens. He wrote, “the noblest gardens may be made without expense. We have only to cut out the superabundant plants.”

 

Peggy Cornett:

He wanted to maintain shade in his forest setting by clearing out the plants below the trees and limbing the trees up so that you could walk unencumbered through a woodland space. In Virginia, it's at least 10 degrees cooler when you're under the shade of forest trees than being out in the open.

 

Honey Locust

He was very aware of the quality of shade. He had honey locust planted to line his first roundabout road, which is a carriage road at the top of the mountain because they gave a nice, dappled shade.

 

Robert Dowell:

Gleditsia is the genus name for that plant. And like Peggy was saying, it's not a deep, dense shade like a beech or an oak or a maple would cast, but it's a very light shade in part because of the shape and size of the leaves. They have a pinnately compound leaf, meaning that they have a leaf composed of many leaflets.

 

Peggy Cornett:

There are four honey locusts planted in the visitor center at Monticello, in the courtyard and also over at the garden shop area. Nowadays, people love to use honey locust in landscape designs in parking lots, because it gives a nice shade for automobiles.

 

Robert Dowell:

The leaflets on the leaves are quite small, and so in the autumn time, they don't produce a lot of street litter. So that's another reason they're used in urban environments. And because they're in the legumaceae, the bean family, they are actually nitrogen fixing, so that's another benefit they can possibly lend to the landscape.

 

In terms of cultivating them, They have a preference for sunny areas. They're very tough. They're very drought-tolerant, sun-tolerant. They can take heavy clay soils. They're popular for those reasons too.

 

Peggy Cornett:

They've developed hybrids that are now thornless. But the native honey locusts that were planted along the first roundabout, we've had to replace some of them, but they do have amazing thorns right on the trunk.

 

Robert Dowell:

Yes. trunk, branches. You can't miss them. They're not like little rose prickles. They are significant, multi-inch long thorns. They're medieval looking.

 

Peggy Cornett:

Yeah. They can not only put your tire out, but they can also put the lawnmower tires out. That was always a problem.

 

I just like to imagine Jefferson writing his Phaeton under this dappled shade of those trees. The experience of it, I think, is quite a nice image.

 

Lindens

Peggy Cornett:

We have two types of lindens around the house. There's the European linden, the little leaf linden, which has a magnificent shape to it. It's very graceful. It's right at the east front as people wait to go in line. It arches up and down. In fact, some of the branches are even rooting into the ground. They're not a Jefferson period tree, but they've probably been there since the early 1900s. We also have the American Linden, which is also called the basswood. The shape is more upright, very tall, larger leaf, more rounded, but they both have very fragrant flowers.

 

Robert Dowell:

And great for bees, for pollination. The honey is supposed to be very nice for both of them.

 

Peggy Cornett:

They're quite glorious, yeah. They really are nice. We've done a lot to try to protect them because people want to get up under them. We're trying to keep people off the root zone. They've blocked off that, but they can still enjoy the shade.

 

Creating Shade

Michael Tricomi:

We associate shade with trees, but you can create pockets of shade in your garden with other plants.

 

Debbie Donley:

If you have a totally sunny garden, you can always create your own shade by planting certain shrubs or trees to create a place so that you can sit and relax in your garden and not have the sun beating down on you.

 

You can also create places for certain plants that need shade like our twinleaf. We plant the twinleaf under the rose mallow so that that does create shade for the twinleaf, the Jeffersonia diphylla. Even though it's in the full sun area, that rose mallow makes shade for it. You have to think about things like that. If you want ferns, hostas, plants like that. So if you don't have shade, think about it in your garden design and you can make shady areas.

 

You have to pay attention to where the sun is coming from and where the shadows will be cast, so it's a number of things to think about. But if you have a blank slate or even an established garden, you can create these little areas to your benefit and pleasure.

 

4. Propagation

Michael Tricomi:

Now we’re going to switch gears and talk about plant propagation. Robert has been propagating Red Twig Dogwoods this month.

 

Robert Dowell: Plant propagation is basically the art and science of making plants from existing plants. Sexual propagation is the reproduction of plants by seeds. The genetic material of two parents is combined by pollination and fertilization to create offspring that are different from each parent.

 

There's generally two categories of propagation. There's what's called sexual propagation, which is getting seed material or there's what's called asexual propagation, also called cloning, and that can take on multiple different forms. Cuttings is probably the most commonly used and most well known to many gardeners and horticulturalists.

 

Any plant can be propagated, obviously. It's just a matter of knowing which technique and when to do it. Timing is very critical with propagation. Late spring into summer, is softwood cutting season. Any species that can be propagated by softwood cuttings, generally June, July, even into August is the time to do that. When the plant is putting out specific types of vegetation, that tells you what type of cuttings to take.

 

Softwood and Hardwood Cuttings

Peggy Cornett:

It's the turgidity of the stem, right?

 

Robert Dowell: The maturity level of the stem. So generally, the way you would define a softwood cutting is that there is a noticeable gradation in leaf size. So if you look at a shoot, if you look at the last six inches, you'll see at the base of it the largest and most mature leaves, and as you get towards the tip, it'll be more tender, and there'll be smaller leaves there.

 

You can also propagate with hardwood cuttings. The beauty of different plants is that you can propagate them by different ways different times of the year. Any woody plant can produce softwood cuttings or hardwood cuttings depending on what stage of growth that plant happens to be in. So if you take the red twig dogwood that I was working with today. This time of year, it's flushing out and it's growing, so it's producing those softwood cuttings that I can harvest. If I was to come back to that plant in November or December, it would be leafless and those would be hardwood cuttings. It would be hardened, mature wood from that season that I would then be working with.

 

So If you miss the window at certain times of the year, you might have a second chance at it. At CHP, we're working on propagating a lot of roses, and last month, and also back in May, we took a lot of softwood cuttings, because that was the window for roses. And we've had limited success. We had a mist system that went down for a few days, and that kind of cooked them a little bit. But we can revisit that project in the autumn and the winter with hardwood cuttings from the same plants if they have the material that we can harvest from.

Figs are another example of that. At CHP we typically will propagate figs via hardwood cuttings in autumn into winter.

 

Peggy Cornett: The advantage of the hardwood cuttings is that they're leafless and they won't dry out. When you harvest softwood cuttings, a very critical thing to remember is that that is a living, leafy tissue that can dry out very quickly, so you want to keep it in a cool, moist environment.

 

The issue with figs is that they have big leaves.

 

Robert Dowell: Yeah, big, leafy material is at an even greater risk of drying out, so that's another reason, if you can propagate via hardwood cuttings with some things, it's much more advantageous.

 

Propagation techniques

Michael Tricomi:

Here are some propagation techniques, tips, and tricks.

 

Robert Dowell: Some species are very easy and some species are more difficult. One species that's, at least as far as the woodies are concerned, very easy to propagate is willow. You can literally just take a cutting off a willow and stick it in the ground and it will become a new plant as long as you keep the ground moist. And apparently red twig dogwood is similar. I've heard stories of people sticking red twigs in planters for winter decorations and then the following spring they realize that what they stuck in the planter actually turned into a rooted plant.

 

Debbie Donley: I've even had that happen with boxwood. I cut boxwood and stick it in a pot, just in soil, just for winter interest, and then by spring, sometimes they are rooted.

 

Peggy Cornett: That's great.

 

Robert Dowell: Generally you're looking for something that's between four to six inches long, and it'll have multiple nodes. So you want several of those nodes on your cutting, because a node is just a point of growth where new buds will emerge.

 

Generally, you want to stick them, is the technique. You're actually inserting your cuttings into the growing media you intend to use. You want to do that as soon as possible, but if you have to wait a day or two, you want to store them in a refrigerator, cool and moist.

 

And then when you are ready to stick them, then you would trim the leaves off, leaving a few leaves, because that'll help feed the cutting over time, but not too many leaves, that would pull up too much water and make the cutting dry out. You would use a rooting hormone, if it was a more difficult to root cutting, you generally need a higher concentration of whatever rooting chemical you're using, and that can either be in like a talcum powder or a liquid formulation. Propagators have figured all sorts of unique ways to propagate these things. And then you insert them in generally a course draining media. A perlite based media is often best, or sand. You keep them warm and moist, and not too sunny, because that'll cause them to dry out, and if they're well-behaved little cuttings, they'll give you roots in a period of time.

 

Peggy Cornett: The home gardener can create their own little greenhouse with a plastic bag.

 

Robert Dowell: Yeah, it can be very low tech.

 

Peggy Cornett: A former nursery manager used to use, I think it was Hines cat litter to root the roses and he had great success.

 

Robert Dowell: Because the cutting, it's very vulnerable to rot. I once worked for a propagator and he said, whenever you take a cutting and you stick it in rooting media, it's going to do one of two things. It's either going to root or it's going to rot. You want to push the scale towards the root end, and the way you do that is you maintain a very delicate balance of moisture and air.

 

Debbie Donley: I even had a friend that propagated roses in potatoes.

 

Peggy Cornett: Yeah, I've heard of that, too. They just stick the cutting into a potato because it has a nice moisture there. Your home gardener can try these things.

 

5. Visitor Spotlight

 

Michael Tricomi:

Let’s hear from some Monticello visitors and then we'll talk about vegetables.

 

6. Vegetable Garden

 

Michael Tricomi:

One of the best things about August is that it’s peak tomato-time in the garden. After months of planting, watering, and pruning, we can finally harvest the tomatoes.

 

Recently, our farm associate Ana Lobianco-Sims sat down with me and Peggy to talk tomatoes. We use the tomatoes she grows to make the hot sauce and Bloody Mary mix we sell in our shop. This year, we’re also developing salsa.

 

Anna Lobianco-Sims: We've pulled about 50 pounds of tomatoes this year. so far.

 

Michael Tricomi: That's good. That's very good.

 

Anna Lobianco-Sims: Which is good. They're going to the salsa.

 

Michael Tricomi: Testing the salsa.

 

Anna Lobianco-Sims: Yeah, so they said 50 pounds and I was like, oh, we just met that today.

 

Michael Tricomi:

I got a lot of my cherry tomatoes in very first, and they're also the first things that ripen, They asked for more romas than anything. We mixed in some Amish Paste, some glacier, tried to get a good balance of like really juicy varieties and also more of those meatier varieties as well.

Michael Tricomi:

We have Amish Paste as well.

 

Anna Lobianco-Sims:

I prefer the Amish Paste because, this year, They're huge. Compared to the roma and the San Marzano especially, you could probably put five San Marzano into one Amish Paste

 

Peggy Cornett:

You also have a new, it's like a cherry tomato, but it forms in clusters. The name is German and it means clusters of grapes.

 

Michael Tricomi:

The Reisenschraub. They are doing really well this year so far.

 

Peggy Cornett:

And this is our first year, isn't it, to grow them?

 

Michael Tricomi:

It's a first for us, yeah. It's a small to medium sized cherry tomato, and great flavor, of German origin.

 

Peggy Cornett:

Over the years, we've grown just all types of different heirloom tomatoes. That was our feature. Years ago, we used to have tomato tasting workshops. It's a thing.

I do like that Purple Calabash. Are we growing that?

 

Michael Tricomi:

Oh, sure, yeah.

 

Peggy Cornett:

I like the purple ones.

 

Michael Tricomi:

Purple tomatoes usually have a great taste to them. They seem to be more acidic. Yeah, Purple Calabash. That's a great variety. One of my favorites is the Black Krim tomato. Has a really great flavor to it, too. And of course, the Italian cherry tomatoes.

 

Anna Lobianco-Sims:

I think a Tufton favorite for multiple years now has been the Eva Purple. They're just extremely reliable plants, the fruit is very uniform, even the plants just have a great form, they're very well behaved. It's a really nice plant to work with.

 

Michael Tricomi:

The vegetable garden on the mountaintop is an historic garden. That means we mostly grow plants documented in Jefferson’s Garden Book and other records. But we interpret tomatoes pretty loosely because Jefferson was not very specific about the varieties he grew.

 

Peggy Cornett:

He only mentions four or five by name.

 

Michael Tricomi:

It was such a new thing to grow, and just experimenting with that and didn't have all this development like, say, beans or peas did. You didn't have neighbors and other people raising these different crops.

 

Peggy Cornett:

Tomatoes were, it's a South American plant and a new world kind of tropical plant, but people in Europe weren't used to eating them. The Spaniards introduced tomatoes early to the Mediterranean region and to Spain, but the English didn't really care for tomatoes. One of the early herbalists was writing about tomatoes in England and he said that the tomatoes were full of slimy pulp and their odor was so offensive that they were very improper for the pleasure garden. That was the English take on the tomato.

 

I always say you can't grow a good tomato in England. I mean, you have a hot summer, and so it became really a staple in Mediterranean cooking. and Because in the nightshade family, a lot people thought they were poisonous, and so there was this whole myth about the tomato and love apple and the wolf's bane. But he did not introduce tomatoes. to North America, so that's a myth. In his book, Notes on the State of Virginia, which was published in the 1780s, it was long listing of native plants, but then at the end he also includes crops that were common in our region, and tomatoes were included in that. But think a lot of people weren't growing tomatoes as much as Jefferson was.

 

Michael Tricomi:

They definitely weren't as popular as lot of other vegetable crops that we commonly see.

 

Peggy Cornett:

Tell them about your tomato and okra experiment.

 

Michael Tricomi:

Oh, yeah. In square ten in the vegetable garden, we planted tomatoes and okra side by side. That was commonly where tomatoes were grown and raised in the vegetable garden, square ten, and one year there were tomatoes surrounded by okra. An interesting planting pattern. So we have them both in that square today.

 

Peggy Cornett:

 It was odd because he planted the okra like a hedge around the tomatoes. Of course, tomatoes and okra were an essential ingredient in the, it was almost like a gumbo, that was one of the favorite recipes of the Jefferson household.

 

Michael Tricomi:

Here are some tips for dealing with common tomato problems.

 

Anna Lobianco-Sims:

The humidity is normally maybe our number one issue with tomatoes, just because they're susceptible to a lot of blights and fungal diseases and that high humidity can really aggravate those, so we're starting to see some of that in our plants. Certain cultural practices, like pruning them really hard, letting them climb up something and generating good airflow, are all beneficial.

 

Michael Tricomi:

Mulching is also really good.

 

Peggy Cornett:

Removing lower leaves as soon as they turn yellow.

 

Michael Tricomi:

We've been pruning our tomatoes pretty, pretty heavily, trying remove as many suckers as we can, those side shoots, cause that really helps channel the energy that the plant is producing into some of the fruit that the main stem is making. Also, it decreases on all those side shoots and so you get a lot less plant material growing and concentrate that energy.

 

Peggy Cornett:

It actually probably will increase production, because it's not putting energy into making leaves.

 

Anna Lobianco-Sims:

It'll increase the longevity of the plant. If you let it become really bushy, let those side shoots take over, they might produce little fruits here and there, but it'll create a more bushy, denser plant, and make it more susceptible to those fungus and blights that could kill it later on in the season.

 

Michael Tricomi:

I think you mentioned air flow. That's another big reason why we prune too is just allowing it to have more air get through. Every Monday we'll go out and continue tying our tomatoes to the trellis and also prune off any new side shoots that they're trying to make.

 

Peggy Cornett:

They do need to be pollinated, the flowers, to make good fruit set so it's good to have bees and around. When was a child, one winter my father decided he was going to grow greenhouse tomatoes in a hoop house. One of my jobs was to take a paintbrush and to pollinate flowers the winter because I was being a bee, I guess..

 

The main thing with tomatoes is you want to alternate the soil you plant it in year. You don't want to plant it in same bed year after year, that's when you're really, transmitting those diseases that get in the soil and affect the plant. Also having very clean culture, like when you remove any diseased leaves or something, don't put it in your compost. You should actually throw it away.

 

Michael Tricomi:

We also try to disinfect our pruners and anything that we cut our plants with pretty regularly. We use a 70% alcohol solution. We just spray a little bit on our pruners as we're going.

 

Peggy Cornett: We do the same with roses, when we're pruning roses.

Harvesting

Michael Tricomi:

And last but not least, we talked about when to harvest tomatoes.

 

Anna Lobianco-Sims: I'm in the camp of harvest as soon as the fruit starts to blush, because you can bring it inside and there's less of a chance for a bug or an animal to eat it. As soon as it starts to blush, it has enough gas in it to ripen the whole fruit.

 

Peggy Cornett: And when you store it, you put the stem side down. In bowls and stuff, I know they're prettier with stem side up, but it's better to have the stem side down. It doesn't rot as quickly. Birds peck on them, too.

 

Michael Tricomi: We had a groundhog starting to even climb a little bit on our trellis to get some of the ones that were a little bit higher up.

 

Anna Lobianco-Sims: The rabbits have been decimating everything basically six inches up, so I grab it as soon as it's ripe. I've got six big groundhogs.

 

Michael Tricomi: Another good tip for harvesting is to try to leave the stem, too. That'll increase the amount of time that it'll last.

 

7. Bees

Michael Tricomi:

Anna manages our beehives at Monticello. August is typically the last month for harvesting honey.

Anna Lobianco-Sims:

As soon as the honey super, which is just the box that goes on the top of the hive, which is where they put the majority of their honey, once it starts getting filled out you can put another one on top, and then they'll just move to the next one. When you want to do a harvest, you can just take that whole stack off, bring it in, do your harvest, and then, put another one back on. We'll be doing another harvest in about a week or two, and that will probably close out the season.

 

After that, you have to compensate for all of the honey that you just robbed from them, basically, or else they'll starve throughout the winter. bees need between 60 to 100 pounds of honey to make it through the winter, We will put feeders on our hives and fill it with sugar water, and they will use that sugar water to quickly convert into honey for themselves. We like the nice, natural, flower pollen honey But fundamentally it's the same makeup and it gets them through the winter just fine.

 

Michael Tricomi: If you don't harvest the honey that they make, what do they do with it? If they have more than what is needed to get them through the winter?

 

Anna Lobianco-Sims: There's always a chance that a hive can become honey bound, we call it, which is where they use up all of their space with honey and so there's no more room for the queen to lay eggs. That tends to be a little less of a risk in the fall and winter because they will start eating that honey, and the queen also doesn't lay at all once the temperature drops to a certain point.

 

The flowers naturally will start dying off like in late August. They'll enter something called a honey dearth, which is just less honey production.

 

Peggy Cornett: That's why they always say that asters are so important to have in your garden, because they're the last to bloom, and most of them are native.

 

When you've harvested this honey, where is it going?

 

Anna Lobianco-Sims: We take the honey supers. We'll open up each frame, each honey super carries about nine frames of honey. And we'll take this hot knife that we pass over each side of the honey frame, and that uncaps the honey. It opens it up so the honey can flow freely. And then we'll use an electric knife to catch any edges that we missed. And we'll load it up into our centrifuge and then we'll run the centrifuge really fast for maybe like an hour, and it will spin out all the honey from the cells, and it'll drain to the bottom. And we use a little spout, It's an extremely sticky process.

 

But usually around August is when things start dying down. We enter that dearth that I mentioned. Some people also recommend taking your honey supers off before the tree of heaven blooms.

 

Peggy Cornett:

Because it stinks.

 

Anna Lobianco-Sims:

Yeah, and it tends to taint the honey with a weird taste.

 

Peggy Cornett:

It comes out in a little spout, and what kind of container, and then where does it go?

Anna Lobianco-Sims:

We have five-gallon food grade buckets. They can be really heavy. I think it's 12 pounds to a gallon. And then we ship them off to the distribution center. We'll also give them any of the wax cappings that we catch when we trim off. They'll use it to extract beeswax and use for the products as well.

 

8. Conclusion

Michael Tricomi:

We sell raw honey in our shop. And we also use Anna’s honey different products we sell, like hot sauce, beer, soap.

That’s it for August! Staying cool, enjoy some fresh tomatoes, and we’ll see you next month.