Readers make inquiries, offer suggestions

One of the great pleasures associated with writing this column is the reader response it generates. Every once in awhile, someone writes me an actual letter, but more often my readers e-mail, telephone or stop me on the street. These contacts let me know what’s on my readers’ minds while they’re growing food, or having the vicarious experience of reading about other people doing it.

Here’s a sampling of what I’ve picked up from readers in the past few weeks. I’m always intrigued by the practical nature of the questions and the different perspective that people offer on the topics discussed here.

A reader e-mailed with a question about the possibilities for eradicating poison ivy from her berry thicket. Both she and her husband are highly allergic to poison ivy and were unable to get to their berries. I can empathize, because I start to itch just thinking about poison ivy. My husband, who has more Teflon coating than Ronald Reagan, doesn’t get poison ivy, and I briefly considered sending him over to pick their berries. However, this reader is looking for a permanent solution and my husband is probably unwilling to sign a lifetime contract.

I visited about this with Bruce Chladny, an Extension horticulturalist. The main issue here is how to kill the poison ivy without also killing the brambles. His advice was to “selectively spray or touch Roundup onto the individual poison ivy plants.” If you spray, the nozzle has to be set to stream rather than broadcasting the chemical. Better yet, use a small paint brush and dab a bit of Roundup on each poison ivy plant.

According to Bruce, the Roundup, when applied in this way, will affect just the individual plant and leave the brambles and their fruit unharmed.

This is a time-consuming and laborious task, but it appears to be the only permanent solution.

Another reader inquired about the “old straw” that I recommend for mulching vegetable gardens. She had tried to buy straw at a local garden center and was taken aback by the price, which was more than $6 a bale. Shame on such retailers. You can buy fresh bales directly from farmers for half that and often less.

What you want for mulch, though, is not fresh straw or hay, which will still have live seeds, but straw that has aged. This makes this reader’s question particularly timely. Most farmers are putting up hay now or have just finished. In many cases, the remainder of last year’s crop has been sitting out in the elements all year and farmers may be willing to part with it. So my first suggestion is to talk to a farmer who feeds livestock. He might even be willing to throw in some nicely aged manure. Now there’s a real deal!

At the very least, you can buy fresh hay at a more reasonable price, break up the bales, thoroughly hose down the straw and let it sit until it sprouts and dies. While you’re at it, set a couple of bales aside to rot until next year.

And finally, a reader was surprised that I had not been taken to the woodshed by the people who still do home canning. I went back and looked at last week’s column, and have to agree that the three or four paragraphs in which I bemoaned the labors of canning were very negative.

Canning is hot and hard work. It is also a labor of love.

There’s no way that canning becomes cost-effective today as it may have been in generations past. The main benefits of canning now are twofold: Your family gets to eat vegetables that are preserved only in water and salt, and you have the satisfaction of eating year-round what you grow in the summer.

This reader also offered the opinion that frozen green beans don’t taste as good as those that are canned. It’s true that frozen green beans can be a bit rubbery when they thaw. It’s important to blanch them for a minute or two before freezing but not so long that they actually cook.

Then when you prepare them to eat, you will have to let them simmer on the stove for perhaps 20 or 30 minutes. They’re best boiled with a strip of bacon and a couple of grindings of pepper.

You’ll also have to salt to taste, and you may be surprised by how much salt you add. Mass-produced canned beans often are high in sodium, and this influences our expectations of what beans should taste like.

When she’s not writing about foods and gardening, Gwyn Mellinger is teaching journalism at Baker University. Her phone number is (785) 594-4554.