FRUITFUL PURSUITS
Tolerance and Rules
People tend to be too tolerant of their fruit trees, accepting them even if they bear poor or no fruit. Perhaps it’s the snowball of blossoms in spring that makes a lack of edible fruit later in the season acceptable. Of course, if a tree is young and not yet of flowering age, the barren plant can be forgiven. But pinpointing the reason why your tree is barren is the first step to reaping both visual and gustatory pleasures.
Lack of cross-pollination, that is, pollen from a different variety of the same kind of fruit, could be the problem.
Apricot orchard in bloom
FEEDING FRENZY
Watch Your (Plants’) Diet
You wouldn’t eat as much pie as you would bread, would you? So don’t ever feed your plants without considering how rich their food — fertilizer — is. Urea, for example, is the plant food equivalent of a chocolate bar, a very rich food, rich enough so that a whole cup could kill a rose bush. Near the other extreme might be bone meal, the unbuttered popcorn of fertilizers, providing nourishment but nothing to get fat on.
A well-nourished garden because . . .
THOSE OTHER PEONIES
I wouldn’t say that tree peonies — those “other peonies” — prepare you for the show of the herbaceous ones soon to come. No, with quivering golden stamens enveloped in dish-sized whorls of silky white, pink, red, lavender, or yellow petals, tree peony blossoms catapult you into peony-dom. Later, catch your breath with the herbaceous ones.
