Figs ripening

FIG UPRISING

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Up From the Ground

Raising my figs last week got me as excited as, I imagine, opening a kiln does for a potter. What would this spring’s disinterment — “kiln opening” — hold?

In an effort to grow figs outdoors here, despite winter temperatures regularly dipping below zero degrees Fahrenheit (-18° F. this past winter) I buried two plants last fall. Actually, those plants were put in the ground two years ago, but a combination of mice and insufficient cold protection prevented their making successful emergence each spring. Figs are resourceful plants, though, and new shoots sprouted each year from the roots. Read more

Pruning young pear tree, showing where I prune

NATURE’S DESSERT

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What Do I Hear?

Every morning I can hear especially one group of plants crying out to be pruned. It’s the fruit trees. They demand annual and careful pruning. I’m almost finished pruning them, but not quite.Old apple tree, unpruned & pruned

Taste the sweetness of a perfectly ripe pear: that sweetness represents energy, the result of pruning so all limbs bask in energy-generating sunshine. Pruning also helps these trees strike a balance between shoot growth and fruit production. Pruning removes some potential fruits so that more of the plant’s energy can be funneled into the fewer fruits that remain, fewer but larger and more flavorful fruits.

I started off regular pruning of Read more

Basket of various heirloom apples

OLDIES BUT GOODIES

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Varieties and Aesthetics Past

You’re rummaging in the attic, in your greatgrandma’s steamer trunk, and you come upon a dusty, old packet of garden balsam seeds. An heirloom! This heirloom’s probably more valuable for the picture on the packet than for the seeds, which probably have lost their vitality. You could, though, if you wanted, get your hands on heirloom plants seeds or plants that would grow.

Old seed packets Read more

Cut open chocolate pod

WAYS WITH CHOCOLATE

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The Horticultural Way

The classic gift for your sweetie on Valentine’s Day is, of course, chocolate.

Chocolate plant pods

Chocolate plant pods

But plain old chocolate won’t do, not even rich Theo or Equal Exchange chocolates (my two favorites). The gift is going to be a chocolate plant — this is about gardening, after all.

Plant a Hershey’s Kiss and it’ll never sprout to become a chocolate tree. Read more

Well pruned, old apple tree

RENOVATION: NOT A KITCHEN

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(The following is adapted from my book THE PRUNING BOOK, available from the usual sources or directly from me, signed, on this website.)

Renovation Instead of Despair

How many of us have inherited neglected, overgrown, old apple trees with our property? Yes, such trees do have charm, their gnarled, elbowed branches seemingly ready to reach out to offer a hug. Their fruits, however, usually leave much to be desired. More often than not they’re too small, too high in the tree, and too pest-ridden. These problems are largely the result of unfettered growth, the tree growing so large and dense with branches that it has shaded itself into nonproductivity and disease-inducing dankness.

No need for despair: such a tree can be returned to its former glory by “renovation,” as corrective pruning of an old tree is called. Read more

My gooseberry varieties

GOOD GERMS

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Despite its sinister sound, a “germplasm collection” spells good things for farmers and gardeners alike. Think beyond the flu season and the word germ takes on a broader meaning: a small mass of living substance that can give rise to a whole organism or one of its parts. Think of wheat germ, that nutritious part of a wheat seed that contains the cells — the germ — that develop into a whole new wheat plant.

My Collection Swells

To us gardeners, a germplasm collection is a collection of plants or seeds. Forty years ago, I started amassing a collection of gooseberry varieties, A collection that swelled to almost fifty of them! Besides offering good eating, that group of plants was at the time one of the largest germplasm collections of gooseberries in the country.

My gooseberry varieties

Some of my gooseberry varieties

Read more

Apricot orchard n bloom

HEY BUD

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Budding Interest

Winter is a good time to look at some of the finer details of trees and shrubs — their buds, for example. Buds!? Bo-o-o-oring, you say? Not really, if you take the time to appreciate details such as their shapes, colors, and textures.

Plum buds about to pop

Plum buds about to pop

Buds can do more than just help you wile away winter hours. They can disclose a plant’s identity as well as foretell for you what what’s in the offing for the upcoming growing season as far as flowers and fruits. Read more

Shipova fruit

SORBUS’ WORTHY OF ATTENTION

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Good for More then Youth Artillery

As children, my friends and I were well acquainted with mountain ash trees. European Mountain Ash (Sorbus aucuparia) was ubiquitous to suburban home lots in the Northeast in the 1950’s, and the trees were readily recognized by their ferny leaves and clusters of flashy berries that also served as artillery.

European mountainash leaves and fruit

European mountainash

Since that time, mountain ashes have fallen out of favor — and rightly so in many cases. Like our native white birch, European Mountain Ash is native to cool, moist habitats. When planted in sun-drenched backyards where summers are hot, sometimes droughty, they fall prey to borers and other ills. Those berries aren’t actually berries, but pome fruits like apples, to which mountain ashes are closely related and with which they share many of the same ills.

No reason to ignore the whole Sorbus genus, though Read more

Old olive tree in Spain

O OLIVE TREE, O OLIVE TREE, HOW LOVELY ARE . . .

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Consider the Olive

I’m not suggesting that olive trees should elbow out spruces, firs, and other conifers that are our traditional Christmas trees. Still, an olive tree symbolizes peace and is a tree you actually would find growing in Jerusalem, so is an appropriate accompaniment to the holiday season.

Old olive tree in Spain

Old olive tree in Spain

Even if you’ll never see strings of light bulbs corralling cut olive trees together on bare lots of land the way they do cut Christmas trees, you could Read more

Laying down or burying fig for winter

INTERMENT, BUT NOT DEATH

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(The following is from my book GROWING FIGS IN COLD CLIMATES) 

The Warm Earth

I buried two fig plants a few days ago. No, not because they died. The reason was night temperatures occasionally dipping into the low ‘teens (13°F, to be exact, on December 4th), which is just about the limit for fig stem survival. If the stems die from cold, there’ll be no fig harvest from them them next summer.

Last summer’s figs

So what’s the connection with cold and burying the plants? The ground is a repository of heat; dig a few feet down Read more