Rhubarb and rain
About now, up North, if they had had this much rain, we’d be saying to each other, “Think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?” No, it survives in it and grows. One pundit’s answer was, “Oh yeah! Rain will break up a catfight (rhubarb) real fast – OOOPS, you mean the plant.” The expected reply is to be, “Not if it’s in a can.”
We have been having more than our share of rain this season, thankfully. The five rainy months from June through the end of October make up 70 percent of our rain for the year. Last year, 2014, we were 6.08 inches above normal for the May 26 to Oct. 15 time period. Naples Municipal Airport recorded 42.0 inches of rain total in 2014.
This is the main source of replenishing our ground water drinking supplies and landscaping survival. It’s difficult to remember to drain my pot-bound plants and their standing water that is turning their leaves yellow from drowning, but the vegetation is really growing. Someone commented to me that they hadn’t had water in 3 days; my reply was that I have not had a day without rain. Crazy how some of our friends get rain and others don’t. How the clouds pick and choose is beyond me.
We are about to bid adieu to the summer of 2015. As long as the heat goes too, the humidity isn’t so bad. Fall is coming, after all, Labor Day has come and gone, summer is over. Why are we still so hot?
The heat is setting records across a large piece of our country, getting 15 degrees to 20 degrees above normal. Climate scientists expect intense heat waves to be more common as our planet warms. The Northeast will be cooler as soon as the pressure system dips and sends down that arctic air, but the South and the West, particularly the West where they are battling a record-setting wildfire season, are still a big concern. The heat waves will become more intense and more common as more heat trapped by greenhouse gases accumulates. That and the prospect of an El Nino lead us to expect a warming world. This will be the hottest year on record.
We are also sneaking up on the autumnal equinox. An equinox is when the day and night time are almost equal – when the sun crosses the celestial equator. (Only if the sun were to shrink to a starlike point and we lived in a world without air, the spring and fall equinoxes would truly have “equal nights”), says the Farmer’s Almanac’s former astronomer, George Greenstein. Astrologically speaking, Sept. 23, 2015, at 4:21 a.m., is the date for the autumnal equinox. So fall is coming.
We miss the lovely change of fall leaves … it’s been said we get the fall change in license plate colors.
I have just been to the Trafalgar Middle School gardens; Extension now refers to it as a farm. School and community gardens are now the rage. We are working closer to the school buildings, putting in the flower bed triangles. One bed is full of spearmint and expanding. The challenge is, it is partial shade, not full sun, which many cut flowers prefer. We may see if we can stretch some of the full sun blooms to partial. Stretching to find the sun will only give us longer stems for the bouquets for which we are striving, bouquets for Hope Hospice. It is time to get the gardens going.
They have a small greenhouse now and a roto-tiller, bought with the winnings from the awards won last spring. There is a fertilizer pump installed and they are about to set up the stacked hydroponics pots. Al is now teaching out in a pod by the gardens, and his mind is ever churning ideas to excel.
Food costs are going higher and higher, the price of eggs makes me wish I could raise hens. Then I’d probably want a goat to chew down (mow) the lawn, but my infirmities prevent all that, to say nothing about the building codes. It is time to start preparing to plan for any spring harvest of happiness.
Speaking of rhubarb, which I did in the opening, I have tried to grow it to no avail. I saw a column about a gal desperately seeking rhubarb, meaning she wanted to grow a patch like I had in Ohio. She was directed to the grocer freezer section.
The EDIS pamphlet #HS657 from Gainesville states, it is not well adapted to Florida. It will not grow or thrive where summer temperatures are above 75 degrees F, and winter is above 40 degrees F. We have neither condition here. We need to obtain crowns of their fleshy rhizomes that have been through a period of rest in cool weather, or they will just continue their growth from last year.
To do the annual bit, you can try to do seeds; there is a great variation of forms and colors. When planting seedlings, it is questionable whether you can have sufficient growth in 1 year to make this practical. You can order in the early spring, crowns from up north whose rest periods have been broken; or in late summer, place in a freezer and freeze them solid for 6 weeks (to fulfill that rest requirement) and plant in the fall or early winter; or a winter forcing of the crowns, a commercial practice up north, which might help the Florida gardener.
In a trial test at Zellwood, on muck soil, seeds planted by Dec. 12, produced marketable petioles by May 26, so they won’t be growing in the rainy season anyway.
Stay out from under a tree if lightning strikes, but do thank it for giving oxygen and absorbing carbon dioxide. Take a deep breath.
-Joyce Comingore is a Master Gardener, hibiscus enthusiast and member of the Garden Club of Cape Coral.