Lilac before its annual pruning

MORE PRUNING?

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Showtime Again, Next Year

The main show is over, at least here on the farmden: Spring blooming shrubs and vines have strutted their stuff. With blossoms past, those plants are melding into other landscape greenery. You can’t turn your back on them, though; pruning now will encourage them into repeat performances next year and in years to come.

Many shrubs and vines renew themselves each year by sending up new stems at or near ground level. With age, these stems crowd each other, flower less profusely, and put fragrant or colorful blossoms beyond where they can best be seen or reached with your nose should you want to get close for an aromatic sniff as you walk past.

Lilac before its annual pruning

Lilac before its annual pruning

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Garlic mustard leaf

MY BRIEF AFFAIR

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What Could Be Bad?

Like most brief affairs, this one ended without rancor. A friend had introduced me to garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), our meeting coming at a time when I could look fondly upon any wild edible plant. That was many years ago, yet after a few years tensions between us escalated. 

In retrospect, I can’t really understand the attraction I had for garlic mustard. True, the name was appealing: you would think that any plant combining the flavors of garlic and mustard would have elicited affection that would linger, even grow, over the years.Despite the enticing name, I can now reminisce with a clear mind and remember finding the taste ho-hum at best, biting at worst.Garlic mustard

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Composted garden beds in fall

ORGANIC FOODS FOR YOUR PLANTS

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Where to Feed, With an Exception

To get the most out of any organic fertilizer, keep in mind how plants feed and how these fertilizers act in the soil. The bulk of plants’ feeder roots — whether the plants are midget marigolds or mighty oaks — lie just beneath the surface, so generally there is no need to dig fertilizer deep into the soil. And anyway, low oxygen levels there would retard the microbial growth necessary to unlock nutrients from most organic fertilizers.Composted garden beds in fall

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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

All from a seed like this sprouting one

I PLANTED MY FIRST SEED

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My Plant Stalled

Growing tomato plants from seed is fun, interesting, and, of course, useful. Perhaps even more fun and interesting is growing a tree from seed. And then you also get a perspective in a potentially long span of time, and a chance to reflect on your place in that spectrum.

I planted my first tree seed many, many years ago, when I had just dipped my toes into the wide ocean of gardening. I was living in a small apartment and, having just finished eating a McIntosh apple, took a look at what was left. A core and seeds. I removed one seed from the core and buried it an inch deep in a 6-inch diameter flower pot, then gave it a drink and moved it to a sunny window.

Hackberry seedlings

Not my first apple seedlings, but my hackberry seedlings in 2013

To my delight, the seed actually sprouted and grew to a few inches height. My vision of an old apple tree sometime offering me bushels of fruit stalled when growth of the seedling also stalled, still at a few inches height. And stayed there. Read more

Cold damaged rhododendron

WHAT’S DOING IN YOUR ‘HOOD

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Rhododendron Death?

I don’t know if this is happening in your neighborhood, but in my neighborhood a fungus is reported to be ravaging rhododendrons. Except that it’s not a fungus. Those browning, wilting leaves are caused by cold.

This past winter, temperatures did drop a few degrees below zero Fahrenheit, but that’s pretty much par for the course these days. In years past, winter temperatures here on the farmden regularly dipped down to near minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit, which was why I was always reluctant to plant rhododendrons.Cold damaged rhododendron

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Many seedlings in spring

WATERING SEEDLINGS MADE EASY

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Ready. Set. Go. Or Grow.

Growing seedlings indoors seems almost like a race. Of course, it has a staggered start, with onions already growing strongly and tomatoes not yet sown. Watering these seedlings is crucial: timely watering keeps them chugging along apace; two or three days of neglect might spell death.Many seedlings in spring

A simple way to automatically water seedlings is to rely on the soil to draw water, as needed, via capillary action. Read more

nursery trees, bare root 2

TREE PLANTING MYTHS DEBUNKED

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And the Best Time to Plant Is . . .

Planting a tree has gotten a lot easier these days, not from new technology in digging equipment but because research into trees’ responses to various planting practices has dispelled many myths. Too late to act on this one but even the best season for planting has been shifted for many tree species from the more traditional spring planting to planting in fall.

Arbovitae & Balsam fir

Arbovitae & Balsam fir, planted in 1990s

Okay, perhaps you haven’t come up with where or what to plant this spring, take heartwith some of the reasons why fall — if you’re ready then — is a good, in some cases better, time. Fall planting is easier because the soil is generally in better condition for digging and because planting can be done at a relaxed pace. Lingering summer heat coupled with fall rains makes for a soil that is moist and crumbly rather than the goopy mess often found in spring.

And there’s no need to rush a plant into the ground for fear of stems beginning growth before roots take hold. Buds won’t awaken until they’ve experienced a winter’s worth of cold, and by then roots of fall planted trees will have already begun to extend out into the surrounding soil.

Come spring, roots of fall planted trees are also in place and ready to soak up a winter’s worth of soil moisture, so need less watering by you.

Don’t Work So Hard

Whether painting in spring or fall, DO NOT bow to certain traditions of planting. Such as: Read more

Organic weedkiller between row of pear trees

SOAP UP

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Plus Ça Change . . .

In gardening as much as anything else “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” In 1845, Andrew Jackson Downing, famous horticulturalist (and native son to New York’s Hudson Valley) that a “wash of soft soap is very good for many purposes . . . penetrates all the crevices where insects may be lodged, destroying them.”Vintage ad for sprayer

Savvy gardeners were using soap sprays even back in the 1700’s, and they were continuing to do so right through the beginning of the 20th century. Read more