Garden Folklore by 'Paul James'

Will banana peels in the planting hole help your roses? Does planting on Good Friday ensure a bountiful harvest? Garden folklore represents the collective wisdom of all gardeners who came before us. Although much of it has no real basis in scientific fact, it's nevertheless interesting and in some cases may even be useful and practical. Master gardener Paul James takes a look at what's true and what's not:

Placing several banana peels in the planting hole was popular among rose growers in the 18th century, but they had no idea why the peels seemed to yield healthier roses. Today, we know that banana peels contain many useful nutrients, including calcium, magnesium, sulfur, phosphates and sodium. The peels rot quickly, which means these nutrients are readily available to the plant.
Gardeners and farmers thought that Good Friday was the best day of planting because it was the only day of the year when the devil was thought to be powerless. Parsley is notoriously slow to germinate, and very often gardeners would make three sowings--two for the devil and one for the gardener--before getting a crop to come up. They even poured boiling water over the soil before planting to deter the devil and that technique may have actually helped, since parsley germinates faster in warmer soils.
Before the advent of commercial fertilizers, gardeners used all sorts of things to boost the nutrient value of their soils--from animal carcasses and manures to beer and even milk. Beer was especially popular in old England, where gardeners routinely doused their cabbages with their favorite fermented hops. Today, fertilizers made of blood meal and bone meal as well as barnyard manure remain popular; however, today's beer, which contains chemicals not found in Britain's early brews, may actually harm plants. Diluted milk is still used by some gardeners, especially those who grow prized pumpkins, which seem to benefit from the proteins found in the milk. And some gardeners favor milk's fungicidal qualities.
Synthetic rooting hormone is used to stimulate root growth in cuttings of all kinds. A long time ago gardeners didn't know what a hormone was, but they did know that tea made from willow stems would enable cuttings to root a lot faster. These prophetic propagators would put several pieces of cut willow stems in a container and add enough warm water to cover the stems by about an inch. After a couple of days, they removed the stems and dipped their cuttings in the tea before planting. The willow water contains a growth hormone called indolebutyric acid, which is an active ingredient in the synthetic rooting compounds sold today. Many gardeners still prefer to use willow tea over commercial products, which are fairly expensive.
In more recent times, James' maternal grandfather, used nails as a means of boosting the iron content in soil. He would toss a handful on nails into the planting hole for a tree; as the nails rusted, they released their iron. "While there's some degree of scientific merit to the practice, it isn't something I'd encourage anyone to do," says James. "There are plenty of iron supplements on the market today, and the last thing we need to be doing is littering our soil with rusty nails.
For centuries, gardeners have relied on all sorts of sayings to tell them how to do certain tasks. Many of those sayings were relied upon as a means of predicting weather. For example, "When leaves show their undersides, be very sure that rain betides" and "When spider webs in air do fly, the weather will soon be very dry."
Savvy gardeners know that one of the best indicators of when to plant certain seeds is soil temperature, which is easily measured with a soil thermometer. But the modern thermometer wasn't invented until 1714 by a man named Fahrenheit; the association between soil temperature and seed germination rates wasn't established for at least another 150 years or so after that.

So how did gardeners of the area know when it was safe to plant? They had a saying that is one of James' folklore favorites: "If you can sit on the ground with your trousers down, it's safe to sow your seeds."