An Old Technique?

Peaches are the most difficult fruit to grow organically.  There are a variety of pest and diseases that like nothing more than to attack a peach. In the past, I have used a variety of organic sprays (kaolin, anti-fungals, pesticides) to produce usable peaches. What we get, mostly, is usable peach flesh (that is, we have to cut out the bad parts).  But we do get enough for fresh eating (slices), cobbler, pie, crisps, sorbet and jam.  This year, I am trying an old barrier technique, paper bags. Growers have been bagging fruit for a long time, especially to get premium fruit (most often apples). Some recommend using plastic, zipper-seal bags, but these can cook (steam) your fruit on hot days.  Others suggest sewing netting or row cover bags, bu this is a lot more work and a determined squirrel can still defeat it (my dogs keep the squirrels at bay!).  So, I am using paper lunch sacks- they should provide protection and last for the season. I went into the garden with 40 or so lunch sacks and a stapler and bagged the best looking fruits. I will report on the outcome!
Happy gardening!

Wednesday Lagnaippe: Post- Apple Tree Pruning or The Green Monster

Fruit trees need yearly, extensive pruning, much more pruning than other types of trees.  If you fail to do this pruning, your tree quickly gets out of hand.  This past winter I did some pretty extensive pruning on my apple, peach and pear trees.  They really needed it.  Branches had shot up so high, it was difficult to impossible to harvest some of the fruit.  I also could not spray these hard to reach branches with kaolin clay protectant and organic fungicides, so the fruit above rotted and spread disease down to lower branches.

How to fruit trees respond to extensive pruning? Exuberantly!  The two photos above are of my apple tree:  it almost looks like the branches and main trunk are covered with green fur, the new sprouts are so dense.  So, gotta' get back up on the ladder and remove these new, non-productive, growths.  And, if you did your fruit tree pruning last winter, you do too!

Happy gardening!

Dreaded beetles boring into your tree? Relax!

It is generally not a good thing to see holes in ones' tree, though they do not always signify major problems.  Take these holes, for instance. This is a photo of a mature apple tree in my back yard.  This tree, which we guess to be between 20 and 25 years old, is hale and hearty (yes, attacked by the usual apple diseases, but the wood is sound).  There is no sign of any infestation in the tree, so what are these holes?  If you see a series of closely-spaced holes drilled into a tree in a linear fashion it is the sign of a woodpecker, not invasive bugs.  Generally your tree will do just fine with this kind of damage, the holes will seal over and the tree with survive.  If you want to to avoid this, provide an alternative food source, i.e., suet, for these birds in winter (though some say this will simply attract the birds to your yard!).  I think wrapping the tree would be ineffective (woodpecker beaks are very strong, as are their neck muscles) and unattractive.  If you see non-linear holes (not like the above) in your trees and: the tree is in decline; there is a exudate from the hole (sappy, gelatinous gunk) and/or: the areas around the hole are rotting, it it time to do more investigation!

Happy gardening!

Pruning Window

The window for tree pruning is rapidly closing.  This weekend my husband and I completed pruning on our fruit trees (3 peaches, 1 enormous apple, 2 pears and 3 huge figs).  Fruit trees can take a lot more pruning than other trees and should be pruned fairly "hard" each season.  The general rules are this: first, remove suckers and waterspouts.  Suckers are straight stems coming up from the base of a tree and waterspouts are (non-productive) stems coming up from branches, usually where previous pruning has occurred.  Next, prune off damaged or dead branches and crossing branches.  Then, of what is left, prune the tree to meet these objectives:
1. Open up the interior of the tree to allow in air and sunlight (this reduces the spread of disease);
2. Remove branches that are too high for you to easily pick from;
3. Remove branches that interfere with getting to other branches, again for ease of harvesting and:
4. Remove branches to keep the tree size in check.
Once the tree breaks dormancy (early March for us for fruit trees, except for figs), it is considered to be too late for major pruning, though minor pruning can still be done at this time.
Next up for us is to spray the trees with dormant oil (I am a little late on this too) and liquid copper on the pears to control fire blight. 

We have some ornamental trees to prune too, but some birds will nesting soon and that will close the ornamental pruning window!

Happy gardening!
P.S. Be  kind to your crape myrtles and don't hack them (see my entries on crape myrtle)!  Just give them a light shearing!

Fruit Trees

Though rewarding, fruit trees can be a lot of work, especially for the organic gardener. If you have, or want, apple, pear, peach, plum, or cherry trees, know that they have to be pruned every year in order to be productive, and to keep them in bounds for applications of organic sprays and for ease of picking. If you are unable or unwilling to do this (or pay someone to do it), grow easier fruits, of which there are many: strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries and currants (where allowed), blueberries and even figs (which though fruit trees, do not exactly fit the prune-every-year rule). After pruning, fruit trees need applications of dormant/horticultural oil and various organic pesticides and fungicides. Above is a photo of me (January, 2012) in the apple tree we inherited (unpruned) when we moved in. I have since added three peach trees and two pears (among many other plants). Though my husband does the major work with my assistance, I did get up in the tree this year to prune (and did not fall out of it, like I did two years ago-ouch!). We took off a bunch of water spouts (new, totally vertical growth that will be unproductive) and a few large limbs we could not easily reach to pick fruit. I had done the major pruning earlier on the much smaller pear trees and the peach trees remain to be pruned severely and soon. We also do need to prune the figs- they respond well to pruning and are finally getting too tall to easily pick.

If you don't have fruit trees and are considering getting some, think about the work load. It can be fun, but it is work. And, if you do have fruit trees, get out there and do that annual pruning! To motivate yourself, remember the peach, fig, cherry and plum preserves, pies, fresh and dried fruit and the like!

Happy gardening!

time to thin fruit trees

Time to thin fruit trees



Listen to my pod cast for Friday, May 7th on thinning of fruit on fruit trees (I try not to duplicate topics on blog and pod cast, but this time I had pictures).
To recap: to prevent:
1. too many, small fruits (all that later processing for less gain) and
2. cracking and snapping branches from too much weight from ripening fruit,
you need to thin off immature fruit to about one fruit for 6 to 8 inches of branch. I know it is hard to do, but do it you must! Above and below are some befores and afters (not great pix, but you get the idea. BTW the white stuff on the trees is Surround, an organic, kayolin clay spray that deters most pests on fruits)....
Happy gardening!

Tree Pruning 2

Tree Pruning 2

[photo: Ain't is pretty? Flowers on my "Moonglow" pear].

I am not an excellent pruner, especially of my fruit trees. But I do know the basics. Here are some rules to follow for pruning fruit or other trees:

1. Unless you inherited a neglected orchard, do not remove more than one-third of the branches at a time. If you inherited an orchard, consult an orchard arborist!

2. Make sure your tools are sharp and in good working order. It is frustrating to begin a big pruning job and a tool does not work. I like a folding hand saw, pruning shears (secateurs), long handled pruners and a large hand saw. I am not comfortable with power equipment and I think chain saws encourage you to cut, baby, cut and over do it! (I once read that the best advice to give someone contemplating pruning a tree is to not let your husband or other male loose on it with a chain saw!) And made sure the tool fits the cut- hand-held pruning shears will not cut a half-inch diameter branch. You will damage the branch, the tool and/or your hand!

3. Make a cut from below (in an upward direction) first, then cut downward from above. This prevents the bark from pulling off in a long strip when the limb meets gravity (a sign of poor pruning is when you get a lot of these peeled areas at the site of a cut. Some accidental peeling is unavoidable, a lot is a sign of carelessness).

4. Recently I read advice to not paint the cut limb- it traps germs against the wound. Allow the wound to heal in fresh, cold air.

5. Cut off unproductive “water spouts,” that is, the long, straight, vertical branches that often form where you pruned previously. They are ugly and, in the case of fruit trees, cannot support fruit.

6. Cut off any crossed limbs, or, in young trees, you can use spreaders (see last entry) to move them around.

7. Don’t “top” trees (cut off all the branches on a mature tree to try to make it smaller) unless you want to kill it!

8. Lastly, if you cannot reach the fruit on a limb, cut it off!

Happy gardening!

Fruit Tree Spreaders

Fruit Tree Limb Spreading

Mike McGrath, the garden guru (formerly of Organic Gardening Magazine, now has a garden show on WHYY in Philly called “You Bet Your Garden”) seems to hate fruit trees. He discourages anyone from planting them. They take a lot of work, he is right about that. Like Mike, I would recommend that novice gardeners try the small fruits first, that is raspberries, strawberries, and blue berries, and that the first tree you plant in this climate be a fig. But I would not flat out discourage planting large fruit trees. Despite the difficulty of growing large fruit trees (apples, pears, cherries, peaches, etc) home growing is the only way to get copious amounts of organic fruit without a huge cost. In addition, some of the “work” is fun, if you like gardening! The fruit may not be the ready for a grocery store ad, but it will taste great! (So far I have an apple tree, 4 peaches, two pears, 5 figs and lots of the small fruits too).

I planted two disease-resistant pear trees a few years ago (“Moonglow” and “Crisp ‘n Sweet”) and they produced fruit for the first time this year. Then they shot up all summer trying to be tall columns. This is not the ideal shape for fruit trees- whenever you look at trees in a commercial orchard, you see that the limbs are spread out and the tree is relatively short. Indeed, the trees look gnarled and twisted, limbs splayed out versus erect. To achieve this, you must prune the tree early in its life and continue regular pruning throughout. In addition, orchardists recommend that, early on, you use limb spreaders to spread out the limbs of the trees from a more vertical to a more horizontal direction. You can buy commercial limb spreaders, can simply tie a limb to a brick (not too drastic a bend or the limb might just snap off as I discovered-but I saved the limb! And make sure that mowers know the brick is there and move it back into place should they disturb it) or tie the limb to an empty container and fill it with water until the desired bend is reached. Or you can do what I did in the photo above- make your own limb spreaders out of tree branches (sticks). The best stick to use is one with a fork at one end and some sort of V at the other with another limb. Then just slip the stick into place between two branches, and tie it off with a soft cloth. You can get fancy and actually whittle two v-shaped notches in either end of a stick and tie off as suggested. You will need to remove it after the growing season, do some more pruning, and reposition new spreaders until the final desired form is reached (though the pruning really never ends!) And, this is the time of year to do this, now that the trees are dormant. My method will not always be possible, i.e. if there is no opposing branch to brace one end of the stick spreader, so I will use the other methods as well.

Coming soon- what to cut off and how much?

Happy gardening!