Someone dressed the owl for Halloween. . .
. . .and the Fedco Tree Catalog is here! I had promised myself I wouldn’t even look at the fruit trees because THERE IS NO MORE ROOM, but the Klehm’s Improved Betchtel is incredibly tempting.
Archive for the ‘orchard’ Category
Who put this here?
Sunday, October 10th, 2010Five years ago I planted a small elderberry sapling “hard by” the front door, as they say around here. Well, it was way too “hard by”, and although the dog loved lying under it all summer and it produced bumper crops of berries for tonic and jelly, it was much too close to the front door of the house. No matter how much I pruned it back, the next year all adult visitors were ducking under the branches to come in and at midseason all you could see out the front of the house was elderberry bush, so I finally knuckled down and took it out. It was a three day process that involved wheelbarrows, picks and shovels, and assistance – which is something I rarely need in the garden. I moved the cropped remains to the lower garden (where the bush seems happy enough) lined the hole with plastic to discourage regrowth, filled it in with rocks and went on my way.
Two years later I noticed a few stalks of elderberry coming up by the Green Cone in the doorway. They were cute, blossomed nicely in the spring, and I let them be. This year(to be known henceforth as “The Most Incredible Gardening Year Ever 2010″) produced large crops of everything and that included elderberries. The bush grew 25 stalks to 12′, all hung with fat bunches of glossy black berries. And one morning I exited the house into the shade of the elderberry jungle and thought, “Who would plant a bush that size in the way of their front door?” And then, well, I really wished I had someone else to blame.
So I spent the morning cutting the 12′ branches down by half, digging out 4′ white roots nearly an inch in circumference, and discovered shoots springing up everywhere. Now that I’m no longer in denial I’ll have to root those out – I know what happens if I leave them to grow for a year or three.
The stalks have been cut and piled to one side and the wooden sides of the raised bed removed.
The roots encircled the base of the green cone, but the bush is so vigorous that I simply cut them off and removed the rest of the roots after the transplant.
I couldn’t move the root mass in one go, so I used some big loppers and a bow saw to cut it in half.
I placed the clumps of roots and stalks over a marshy part of the swamp, backfilled with soil, added a layer of mulch hay and then added old firewood to keep everything in place. I find that transplants take much more readily to their new home if movement from wind and weight is keep to a minimum.
The next post will be a view of the garden from the front door – finally!
After Apple Picking
Monday, September 20th, 2010
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human dream.
Robert Frost
Great idea? Or greatest idea ever? Grape Popsicles.
Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
We have a lot of grapes this year. We had a lot of peaches, and the tomatoes are still flowing in, the elderberries, raspberries, blueberries, well, 2010 has been a good year for fruit. I’ve started making grape juice in self defense (we can only eat so much jam before the next grape harvest comes along). Then R. suggested making popsicles, so I ran right out and picked some molds up at the dollar store. They proved very unsatisfactory (there’s sticky grape juice all over the freezer now) so I turned to Amazon. The new mold was delivered this afternoon and I’ve already made and sampled a batch and, yowsa – greatest idea ever.
The new mold has a metal cover with slots for those ubiquitous wooden popsicle sticks. The receptacles are sturdy and the frozen mix slides out easily. It also came with a recipe using orange juice that I adapted for grape.
Popsicles
3 C juice, 2 Tbs fresh lemon juice, 1/4 C sugar. Pour in molds and freeze for about 4 hours. The directions suggest soaking the sticks in water for an hour first so they don’t float up in the cells, but I was impatient and skipped that step to no ill effect.
Delicious. I think I want these instead of cake for my birthday next year.
The stove is a mess,
Saturday, August 28th, 2010but the steam canner is full of brandied peaches. Guess that’s a win.
Ghost apples
Saturday, July 31st, 2010
Today I finished spraying the fruit trees (and roses, grape vines and brussels sprouts) with Surround CP. Surround is made from white kaolin clay and food-grade wax – a wonderfully effective pesticide that coats leaves and fruit with a thin layer of what is essentially, porcelain. Insects are put off by the material, and those that ingest it, die. I’ve found it works well as a fungicide as well, protecting my hybrid fruit crops from the rusts and fungi carried by their wild cousins that grow rampant around my garden. The beauty of Surround is that it is completely passive, aside from the rather startling sight of ghostly grey foliage. I grow everything in close quarters and can’t afford to spray a poison on a tree that will kill the strawberries growing under the branches – and that’s aside from the considerations about my well, that is under the entire garden.
I chose a calm, sunny day – fortunately a day I had off from work, and my backpack sprayer and I made the rounds.
Pictured is a little Liberty apple tree with a sad backstory. This was one of my first fruit trees, purchased in 2004 when we were building the house. I planted it a safe distance from the construction and our septic field and planned to move it to a more advantageous position later on. Years went by and the spruce and pines grew up around the little tree that didn’t die, but did not get appreciably bigger either. I moved it in 2009 and you can tell from the photo below that it is still small. It bore for the first time this year and reminds me of a quince bonsai I saw at Longwood Gardens – a delicate structure with outlandishly disproportionate fruit.
Buoys, or not.
Saturday, July 10th, 2010Today I went down to Southwest Harbor for a concert. The Southwest Harborites were also celebrating the annual Pink Flamingo festival (the lawn ornaments are considered native fauna) and the Coast Guard base was having an open house so it was a high time on the village main street. I took the back road down to Clark Point and stopped at this stand to buy a jar of pear jam.
The sign is quite well designed, with the whole positive/negative space thing going on, and “Antiques” is spelled correctly. What happened to “bouys”? Curse those pesky diphthongs!
I bought a jar of pear jam. I’ve tried to make it myself, and could possibly make gallons of the stuff from the Seckel pear tree’s bounty, but my trial batches were gritty and insipid. This jar from Maine’s Own Treats has a nice clear color. The contents list includes: Pears, Sugar, Applesauce, Apple Juice and Pectin. Applesauce sounds like it might be the secret ingredient. We’re going to try the jam out tomorrow on Sunday waffles and then I’ll decide if this combination is worth another experiment.
I like the “We’re Open” sign, too. There wasn’t a soul around – what changes when they’re closed?
Sambucus
Wednesday, July 7th, 20102010 is shaping up to be a legendary garden year. Two years ago I dug a large Sambucus canadensis out of the dooryard and transplanted it to the lower garden. I laid plastic sheeting down over the bottom of the hole to keep it from re-generating, and here it is today. Perhaps I should have used steel plate. The Wikiepedia article lists the height as 3 meters or more, and that’s a 6′ step ladder at the right. This is going to be a great year for the elderberry harvest.
Sambucus (elder or elderberry) is a genus of between 5 and 30 species of shrubs or small trees in the moschatel family, Adoxaceae. It was formerly placed in the honeysuckle family, Caprifoliaceae, but was reclassified due to genetic evidence. Two of its species are herbaceous.
The genus is native in temperate-to-subtropical regions of both the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere. It is more widespread in the Northern Hemisphere; its Southern Hemisphere occurrence is restricted to parts of Australasia and South America.
The leaves are pinnate with 5–9 leaflets (rarely 3 or 11). Each leaf is 5–30 cm (2.0–12 in) long, and the leaflets have serrated margins. They bear large clusters of small white or cream-coloured flowers in late spring; these are followed by clusters of small black, blue-black, or red berries (rarely yellow or white).
Pruning, simplified
Saturday, June 26th, 2010With apologies to Lewis Hill, and his wonderful book.
I have 21 fruit trees scattered over two acres. Young or old, no matter what the type or variety, they all need to be pruned to fully realize their potential. Abandoned apple orchards line the highways in some parts of Maine, where cider was an economic force till the great Baldwin freeze of 1890. These trees have grown into gnarled and lichen covered thickets that bear no fruit and die from the inside out – so congested with their own growth that light never reaches the inner branches. Proper pruning allows light to reach every leaf, conserves the energy and flow of sap to productive branches, increases air circulation to discourage mildew and fungus development and keeps the fruit within reach of the gardener.
This weekend I took on the Seckel pear tree in the dooryard. Mature specimens of this variety can reach 50′ – although probably not in Maine. The tree is growing under my power lines so I am very conscientious about pruning this particular specimen.
You’ll need a good pair of pruning shears and a whet stone, a fine toothed tree saw, a pair of loppers and a “reach pruner”. I really, truly try to avoid getting on a ladder, but I do own an aluminum 8′ step ladder for trees that have lost control. Remember not to cut the branch down to the very end – leave the “collar” behind.
Here are the rules:
1. Remove dead or damaged branches
2. Remove branches that cross another branch or the trunk
3. Remove branches that grow straight up. You want a level or even downward slope
4. Shorten the remaining branches to the length required, but cut just above a leaf that is facing the way you want the branch to grow.
5. Stand back and look at the tree. Does it need to be shaped in any particular way? Cutting back hard encourages growth (although that doesn’t seem intuitive). Prune harder in the direction you want the tree to grow.
6. Pick up all the prunings. Dispose of them far from your trees, or bag or burn them. Leaving dead bits lying around encourages pests and fungus.
7. One additional rule that is all mine: if a part of the tree is too complicated to figure out this year, it will only be more complicated a year from now. See if you can cut that part out.
Get a good book on pruning fruit trees for your area. This is a field that folks before us have put in a great deal of time and effort to figure out – take advantage! And remember to sharpen your tools.
These photos are not very clear in a “branch by branch” fashion, but they do show the difference in size – before and after.
Playing defense
Monday, May 31st, 2010We are past apple blossom time here on the island; past plum, cherry, pear and peach blossoms too, and the trees have all set fruit. With the warmer nights and continued good rainfall comes new growth and rapid development, and the first signs of insect damage.
There are many good sites on the web for information on fruit tree pests. Every variety, no matter how modern and resistant, has its own weakness manifested in an insect, blight, rust, virus, spoor or mildew. Full time orchardists have a repertoire of traps and sprays in defense of (nearly) perfect product and I admire that. I should know more about traps, for instance, and plan to do the research for 2011 – I like passive defense. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or opportunity to be a specialist. I have to be at work five days a week, far from my trees, and often miss the first signs of mildew, or leaf curl, only to come home one day and the top third of the Clapp pear’s foliage is deformed by mites. It can be discouraging.
Then I discovered Surround CP (cue the music for the dishwashing detergent commercial). I use it on all the fruit trees plus roses and vegetable crops. Although it is promoted as an insecticide I find it also inhibits the spread of rust and mildew. From the Fedco website:
Forms a particle film which coats the surface of leaves and fruits, creating a barrier which acts as a broad-spectrum crop protectant, reducing damage from various insects, mites and disease-carrying pests. Recommended for controlling European apple sawfly, plum curculio, Japanese beetles, leafhoppers, CPB, thrips and other maleficial insects on fruit crops and field crops, effective against cucumber beetles on cucurbits. 95% kaolin clay, Surround’s layer of white particles creates an unfamiliar environment for the attacking insects, prevents them from recognizing their target, and, if they land, the particles rub off on them causing irritation and excessive grooming. The white surface also reflects sunlight, preventing sunburn and heat damage.
Notice that this product is 95% clay (most of the other material is food grade wax) and about $40.00 for 25 pounds. I have 20 trees and often grow food crops around and beneath the foliage so an inert material that is inexpensive (compared to most pesticides) is a good thing. I begin spraying just after petal fall and build up a good coating with two or three applications over a two week period and then one or two more over the course of the season depending on rainfall amounts. Surround does not wash off readily but it will strip off faster over a rainy summer. It has a helpful secondary effect of turning the foliage ghostly white after a fresh application making it easy to see where you’ve been and areas you’ve missed!
Which begs the question – is it visible on everything else? Yes, but it comes off the plastic chair and marble paving stones much faster than it does from foliage!
