Spring is Springing: Asian Pears and Asparagus

Posted on March 29, 2012 by

4-in-1 Pear Breaking BudDespite recent snows and heavy rains, signs of spring continue to appear in the garden.  The 4-in-1 Asian pear I planted a few weeks back is leafing out and breaking bud.  It’s an interesting one, as each of the four branches seems to have its own way of doing things.  I’m eager to see how this tree acts, how it flowers, how it leafs out.  Three of the varieties, 20th Century, Chojuro, and Hosui, are listed as late mid-season harvest, with the fourth, Shinseiki, listed as early mid-season.

In other news, the asparagus is really kicking into gear, and I imagine that there will be spears for eating within a week or so.  It’s heartening to see some of the small crowns I planted just last year pushing growth, which means they lived through year one and are hopefully well rooted and happy in their current locale.

Spring AsparagusI find it interesting that they’re coming up red, as they aren’t red varieties.  I wonder if that has to do with temperature, or age, nutrition, or soil chemistry?  In any case, I think they’re quite lovely, and they have little chance of making it into the kitchen, as I much prefer to simply eat them raw, sweet and tender and with just the right bite, straight from the ground.  Last year was a miserable year for asparagus, so I’m hoping that this one will be productive.

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Always Be Propagating

Posted on March 22, 2012 by

Always Be PropagatingEvery weekday morning, before heading down the hill to work, I spend 15 or 20 minutes in the greenhouse, staring at the cuttings and seedlings.

After this morning’s greenhouse session, I’m happy to report that the tomato seedlings are growing nicely.  When I teach gardening classes, the vast majority of attendees report that they got into vegetable gardening because of tomatoes, making toms something of a gardening gateway drug.  I confess that tomatoes are among my favorite things to grow, and every year I put in 50 or more plants.

This year, I planted seeds of Burbank, Red House Freestanding, Ropreco, Red Currant, Peacevine Cherry, Red and Yellow Pear, Yellow Perfection, Oaxacan Pink, Kootenai, Sugar Cherry, Bull’s Heart, and one that I’ve been saving for a couple of years and simply calling “Special Seeds of the Tomato.”  This last one was a surprise orange cherry that I didn’t plant – it just showed up – so I’ve been saving seeds of it every year.

Jujube CuttingsThe squash seeds I mentioned in a previous post have mostly germinated, and the cuttings are mostly looking good as well.  There’s a certain amount of loss to be expected when rooting cuttings, but so far, I’ve only lost a few quince, and maybe one or two others.  The rest seem to be surviving, if not yet rooting.

The jujube seems to be a particularly tough one to root.  I have a bunch of them upright, and they’re putting out leaves, but no roots so far.  I took a pair of the upright cuttings, trimmed them down, and buried them on their sides in a little 2 liter soda bottle terrarium.  It’s my hope that roots will form at the base of the new shoots.  Cross your fingers.

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Adventures in Forest Gardening – Giulia Forsythe’s Visual Notes

Posted on March 15, 2012 by

Forest GardeningThe other day, I visited the El Dorado Center of Folsom Lake College and presented on the topic of food forests.  I streamed the talk to DS106 Radio, an open, public Internet radio station that I’m involved with, and my friend @giuliaforsythe was listening in from Canada.  Giulia, a thoughtful educator and talented artist, is renowned for her visual notetaking, and she was kind enough to share this really wonderful drawing of my talk.  She blogs about it here.

Image by Giulia Forsythe (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

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DIY Plant Markers

Posted on March 15, 2012 by

DIY Plant MarkerI finally got around to a) purchasing some proper aluminum plant markers, and b) deciding that it’s silly to buy aluminum plant markers and proceeding to craft my own from a cheap aluminum pie pan.  Farewell, six dollars U.S.  Backing up a step, I’ve long struggled with marking plants in the garden, even though I know it’s important.  I’ve relied instead on making notes and maps, sometimes on paper, sometimes digital, all the while realizing that the immediacy of plant markers ACTUALLY ATTACHED TO PLANTS certainly has its appeal.  I have a lot of propagation projects in progress all the time, lots of cuttings from lots of sources, and it’s easy to lose track.  For instance, just in Actinidia, I have A. deliciousa (Abbott, Vincent, Tomuri and Monty) and A. chinensis (El Dorado and GCu02).  They’re all right next to each other, and they all look exactly the same, at least at this point in the season.  Historically, I’ve done most of my plant marking by cutting up mini blinds and writing on them with Sharpie markers, but the ink fades with exposure to the elements – permanent indeed!  Scribing plant names and planting dates on thin aluminum with a ballpoint pen, then attaching said markers to the plants with bonsai wire is likely a much better and more long-lasting solution.  I’m surprised that it took me this long to get it together, but there you have it.

The nearest marker (the DIY one) is for Celtis sinensis – Chinese Hackberry.  I planted six seeds in September, and one germinated immediately.  The rest are either not viable, or simply waiting for conditions to improve.  The precocious one is looking really strong, and will have a place in the food forest in a year or two.

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Of Giant Moths, Nanking Cherries and Sea Side Plums

Posted on March 14, 2012 by

Big Ole MothJust look at this huge and handsome character!   It arrived last night, drawn to the greenhouse lights.

In other news, the Nanking Cherry (Prunus tomentosa) and Beach Plum (Prunus maratima) trees arrived yesterday from Raintree Nursery (purveyors of rare and unusual fruits and vegetables).  It’s raining and raining around here, and I haven’t time to plant the new specimens until the weekend, so I heeled them in out in the garden, and will plant one each in the mini orchard (where the ducks lived before they were eaten by the bears), with the rest destined for the food forest.  From what I’ve read, in size and form these trees fall somewhere between the small tree layer and the shrub layer, and so I think they’ll fit in nicely.

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Layering Blackcurrants

Posted on March 11, 2012 by

Spent the day propagating plants.  Back in fall, I tried my hand at ground layering, a technique that involves burying part of a plant stem to encourage the plant to root in place.  Specifically, I bent a long blackcurrant stem down to the ground, wounded it with a razor blade – under the proper conditions, plants respond to wounds by throwing roots – pinned the wounded section down with a piece of wire, and covered it shallowly with soil and mulch.

Today, I unburied the layered section, and was delighted to find roots!  I cut the plant off at the previous above ground bud, and potted the cutting up – when it’s well rooted and growing vigorously, I’ll plant it out in the food forest.

Line art drawing of ground layering (above) donated to the Wikimedia Foundation and released into the public domain by Pearson Scott Foresman.

Ground Layered BlackcurrantI also planted all sorts of seeds into speedling trays and six packs in the greenhouse, including peppers (cayenne, jalapeno, purira, ancho, habanero, Jupiter, hatch, Thai), sage, 4 varieties of eggplant (3 Italians and 1 Japanese), sorrel, pimpinella, epazote, lambsquarters, pickling melon, papalo (Bolivian coriander), summer squash (a yellow one called Success, and also acorn and one called zapallito that a friend smuggled in from Argentina), and Thai red roselle. I also potted up cuttings of fig and pomegranate, and pruned the red flame seedless grape.

Today was probably the last garden day for a week – there are some big storms on the way.

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Bees to the Rescue

Posted on March 4, 2012 by

Plum Blossoms against a blue skyIn a prior post, I speculated that the plum blossoms would be ruined, resulting in (yet another) bad fruit year.  As I wandered the garden this morning, I was delighted by the familiar buzz of hundreds (sounding like thousands) of European honey bees (Apius mellifera) happily foraging in the plum boughs.  The flowers, sagging and covered with snow just two days ago, seem to have weathered the storm in fine shape, and with any luck, between the bees and the weather I might just get some plums after all.

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March Miracle?

Posted on March 1, 2012 by

March miracle?Woke up to snow for the first time in months.  Not sure if this is the March miracle I’ve been hoping for – it’s been an unusual weather year, overly warm and overly dry – but I’ll take it.  Of course, snow likely means that all the fruit trees that have flowered early because of the warm weather will likely not set any fruit, but this is actually fairly normal.  I only have a good fruit year maybe one year out of four, and the last one was a long time ago.  It’s been so warm and dry that I forgot (or neglected) to take down the poultry netting that keeps the grosbeaks and robins out of the blueberries.

Disaster in the Vaccinium Yard

 

My mistake.  Fortunately, though it was loaded with snow, it hadn’t entirely collapsed, though some of the support poles were bent, and I was able to cut it all down and set it aside for re-installation in the spring.  More snow on the way tonight…

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Time for Spring or Planting as an Act of Optimism

Posted on February 23, 2012 by

Rhubarb EmergingRhubarb is always one of the harbingers of spring, but I can’t recall a season when it’s been this early.  Likewise the asparagus, which in a typical year emerges some time between April 9th at the earliest to Apring 19th at the latest.

Walking the garden this morning, I noticed two asparagus spears poking out of the ground, six weeks or so earlier than in a typical year.

The nectarine and peach trees that I put in last year are about to flower as well.  If prior years are any indication – though I’m beginning to believe that this year is a very special year – this early flowering is almost a guarantee that there will be ZERO fruit this year from any fruit tree.  Snow and rain and stormy weather typically ruin the early flowers, and so very little fruit results.  In fact, I haven’t had a really good fruit year – plums, pears, cherries – in maybe 5 years?

Gardening, though, is a necessarily optimistic endeavor.  Put enough seeds in the ground, take enough cuttings, plant enough plants, and eventually, hopefully, something will grow and maybe even provide food.

For me, planting bare root fruit trees is perhaps the biggest leap of faith.  Whatever would make one believe that this dormant, sorry looking stick will ever grow to produce fruit, some 3-5 years (or more) after planting?  Still, the promise of trees laden with fruit is like a siren song, and so over the weekend I planted a jujube, a 4-in-1 Asian pear, and, out in the forest a walnut tree.

As is often the case with the fruits and vegetables I plant, I have never tasted a jujube.  I just like the idea of a prolific tree that produces fruit that, according to what I’ve read, is best left to dry on the tree.  Jujube is a serious plant, protected by robust, savage thorns, and I planted it in a hugelkultur mound I prepared over the summer in the (former) duck yard.

I have high hopes too for the 4-in-1 Asian pear – it’s a beautiful specimen (leafless and seemingly lifeless though it may be), and the graft unions are works of art on this particular tree, with four equally-sized, sturdy branches, each a different pear variety, and each firmly attached to the rootstock.

Nectarine BudsThe walnut is the first nut tree I’ve ever planted, and it’s home is an area of the forest where it has ample space to grow to be 60 feet high by 60 feet wide, should it choose to do so.  Protein isn’t easy to plant, so I’m hoping that this particular tree makes it.  Almonds are next, along with Nanking cherries, perhaps sea-buckthorn, and the quince cuttings, should they reward care and optimism with roots.  Oh, and fruit.  Eventually fruit.

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Signs of Spring

Posted on February 18, 2012 by

CuttingsPlants seem uninterested in dates, instead using temperature and daylight hours and plant hormones to define “spring,” and many plants in my garden have decided that now’s the time.  Though there doesn’t seem to be consensus – the asparagus seems to be abstaining so far – the rhubarb (one of the earliest spring indicator species in my garden) has decided to break dormancy and begin setting leaves, the plum tree is flowering, and surprisingly the mint has decided to start growing in earnest.  I hold out hope that a Miracle March will deliver late and prodigious snow, but we’ll just have to see.  In the meantime, there are garden chores to be done.

I spent the day yesterday taking cuttings of Ladyfinger and Flame Seedless grapes, black and red currants, gooseberries and yostaberries, and potting those up in the hopes that they will root and will eventually find their way into the food forest.

I also potted up the quince cuttings that came in the mail from Oregon.  Quince is related to apples and pears, and is used as a dwarfing rootstock for pears.  My plan, should the cuttings root, is to let some grow to be quinces – I’m intrigued by the “ancientness” of this fruit – and to use others as rootstock, to host grafts from the delicious 30-year-old-pear tree near the house.

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