Author: Henry Homeyer

Whatever happens, keep planting and learning

At the end of the year I always like to take a little time to reflect on what worked well in the garden — and what didn’t. This year I also called some gardening friends — some experienced, some less so — to ask what they had learned.

I’ll go first. In 2021 I planted some bare-root oaks I bought from the State of New Hampshire and planted them for a client in an open meadow in what had previously been a lawn. Most did well last year and really took off this year. Based on that success, I planted even more this year in part because I could get unusual trees not available locally — northern pecan, hardy persimmon, pawpaw and more. We’ll see how they do next year.

Bare-root trees are usually the thickness of a pencil and have a foot or so of root with 18 to 24 inches of bare trunk. Although I found a grower in Vermont willing to sell them to me, most growers sell them to nurseries that pot them up and sell them in a year or two. But if you go online you can find growers who will ship bare-root trees and shrubs in the spring. They are easy to ship — no soil is included — and are less expensive than trees that have been tended and watered for a couple of years.

The downside is that bare root trees are generally only sold when dormant, and need to be planted soon after arrival. Some growers keep big coolers full of bare-root material, but you still need to get them in the ground soon after you get them. Look for them now and order what you want for spring delivery.

A friend bought a house in southern New Hampshire and had her first vegetable garden this year. She was surprised and delighted that there was no blight on her tomatoes. This did not surprise me at all. The fungus that blights so many tomatoes lives in the soil, and in a new location it rarely shows up until Year 2.

She also reported that some of her new raised beds were placed on ground so hard that she couldn’t even get a shovel in it. The wood beds were 8 inches tall but didn’t drain well, and none of her root crops did well. In the spring she is going to dig out the soil, remove the beds, and put 2 inches of coarse sand on the ground. Then she will replace the wood-sided beds and soil, and hope for the best. I predict that will solve the problem, particularly if she adds lots of compost to the soil in the beds.

Another friend was reminded this year that if a perennial is not “happy” where it is planted, you should move it! She said she had divided some phlox and, lacking a good spot for it all, put some in a place that was too shady for it. So she dug it up and moved it to a better place late in the season. Almost anything can be moved; just do it on a cool cloudy or rainy day. Even peonies can be moved if you are careful.

Another friend said that he learned to use hydrogen peroxide as a preventive for fungus on grapes. He bought some industrial-strength peroxide (30 percent concentration) and diluted it (10 parts water to one part peroxide). He then filled his big sprayer to apply it. He sprayed after pollination but before the grapes had appeared. Unlike chemical sprays, he says, it just breaks down to water and oxygen.

Another friend moved to Vermont from New York and has been working to maintain and personalize the large flower gardens that came with the house. She has learned to focus on one area at a time. She also said she has learned that it is important to act on your own ideas, even if you have inherited wonderful gardens. I agree. For example I learned that I love flowers called burnets (Sanguisorba spp.) and I collect them.

Burnets bloom in mid to late summer and come in size from miniature (6 inches tall) to huge (6 feet tall) and do best in sun with moist soil. Each year I add a few. My most recent addition is a S. hakusanensis called Lilac squirrel. I think of it as “the pink squirrel” as its blossoms are fuzzy and much like a squirrel’s tail, though much smaller. Mine are pink, not lilac in color. Not common in most garden centers, it is available from Digging Dog Nursery in California.

So yes, we all learn new techniques, try new plants and do our best to be good gardeners. All my best to you for the year ahead.

Featured photo: ‘Lilac Squirrel’ Sanguisorba blossoms are delightful to touch and see. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Put on a hoodie and shake off the snow

We recently got hit by a big winter storm that dropped at least 15 inches of heavy, wet snow. It clung to branches, breaking some and bending others to near their breaking points. If you suffer the same sometime this winter, here are some things you might consider to help your woody plants.

First, the best thing to do is be proactive. Even before the storm had finished I went outside and started shaking branches to get snow off them. Wear a hoodie! Snow can go right down your neck if you don’t. For shrubs and small trees, you can shake the central stem, and it will clear the snow from the entire plant. For larger trees, you will need to shake individual branches.

A good tool for clearing snow is a bamboo pole, the longer and thicker the better. Some hardware stores and feed-and-grain stores will have them. I used one to knock snow off branches I couldn’t reach.

So what can you do to repair cracked and broken branches? Generally, nothing. Take a sharp saw or loppers and remove the branch back to its point of origin — the main trunk or a large branch. But don’t cut flush to the trunk if you can avoid it. And never leave a stub as it will have to rot back to the branch collar to heal.

The tree heals itself at what is called the branch collar. The branch collar is a swollen area at the base of each branch. If you cut that off flush to the trunk, it will be harder to heal and take longer. Often the branch collar has ridges or rings around it, and you should leave them in place.

Two winters ago we had a big snowstorm and my small leatherwood shrub (Dirca palustris) split up the middle. The break was not complete: There was still an attachment point for both halves of the shrub. I didn’t notice the damage for a few days, but when I did, I decided to try to repair it.

Grafting is a well-known but difficult skill whereby a skilled person can add a branch to a living tree. This is most often done with fruit trees, allowing orchardists to add other varieties of apple on a tree. I have an apple with three different flavors of apple because it had other varieties grafted to the original tree. Truth be known, the tree came like that. I’ve taken classes in grafting and tried to do it, but have never succeeded. It’s an art.

But back to my little leatherwood tree. Because it was still hinged at the bottom of the break, I moved it back together and used some stretchy green plastic tape to wrap the two halves together. I wound it tightly, and lo and behold, it worked! I removed the tape (which is usually used for tying flower stems to stakes to keep them from breaking in the rain) after two or three months. Now, two years later, the shrub shows no signs of ever being damaged, other than a little scar tissue.

What else did the storm do? It almost flattened a small grove of willow trees I had planted 20 years ago. They are a variety of Salix integra called Hakuro Nishiki. Very popular, these willows have tri-colored leaves (green, white and for part of the summer pink) and are fast-growing. There is nothing I can do for them. They are bent over and weighed down by snow, but should recover once the snow melts in a week or two. And if they don’t spring back up? I will lop off the bent stems and let them re-grow. It’s difficult to kill a willow, and they should have been shortened long ago.

The storm also knocked down a large tree on our property, a wild black cherry (Prunus serotina). The black cherry doesn’t produce cherries we can eat, but birds eat them. The fruit is just a third of an inch across with a pit. Not much food for anybody, really. The blossoms are not important, either, but it is a good plant for pollinators, one of the keystone species.

The tree we lost had a diameter of 14 inches at its base and stood over 67 feet tall — I measured it after it fell. It was not one I had planted, but a bird probably dropped a seed in our woods. I will count the growth rings when it gets cut up for firewood. Where it grew is a good example of where not to plant a tree.

So what was wrong with our tree? Most trees do not have tap roots going down deep into the soil. Two feet is probably average. But they spread widely. I was told in a horticulture class to think of a tree as a wine glass sitting on a dinner plate. The plate represents the root system, the wine glass the trunk and branches.

But ours was growing right next to a rock ledge that was actually showing above ground. The roots could not grow that way, so all the roots were on just three sides. The wind came from the fourth side, and with the snow load, it blew over. So if you plant trees, be mindful of bedrock and ledge. Keep away from them. You can use a steel rod or crowbar to poke the soil to find ledge before planting.

Although I will miss that big tree, I try to never mourn a plant that dies. After all, it provides me a chance to plant something else there. My best wishes to you all for the holidays.

Featured photo: Cut back a broken branch to the branch collar. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Pruned trees for outside, cut branches for inside

Normally at this time of year I can go out to the stream behind my house and pick stems of a shrub called winterberry (Ilex verticillata) to use in vases and on my wreath. It is generally loaded with small red berries that persist until mid-winter when hungry birds eat them, or they just plain fall off.

Winterberry is a great decorative shrub in winter that prefers wet feet but will grow in ordinary garden soil too. It is dioecious, meaning that it requires male and female plants — usually one male will take care of all the females. This year I didn’t get many of those bright red berries I like so much for decoration, and I have heard from other gardeners that they had few, too.

This prompted me to walk around my property looking at my woody shrubs to see what might substitute for winterberries. I didn’t find any berries at all. But I did cut some red-twigged dogwood (Cornus sericea) to use in a vase, and some budded branches of a Merrill magnolia (Magnolia x loebneri).

The magnolia buds are a bit like pussywillows on steroids: an inch long and very fuzzy. I have some in a vase on the table, and they look very good, and will for many weeks ahead. I’ve done this before, and will occasionally get a few buds to open into white flowers. I cut some greenery to go with them, a few stems of white pine. Hemlock would look good instead, but doesn’t hold needles well indoors.

It struck me that winter can be pretty bleak for people who don’t have nice-looking winter shrubs and trees. Judicious pruning can transform a messy tree full of small branches going every which way into sculpture. I recently helped a client prune a 50-year-old Japanese maple into sculpture that will keep it looking great for several years — with only a few minor pruning cuts each year.

When pruning, I ask myself, what will this little branch, currently the thickness of a finger, look like when it is the thickness of an arm — or a leg. If it is growing sideways toward a walkway, it must come off. Going through the middle of the tree? Remove it! The maple I pruned had many small dead branches that had been choked out because bigger branches had blocked off the sun, effectively starving them.

Bark is important. I like plants that have exfoliating bark, which means bark that is shaggy and peeling off — thus showing more than one color. My Seven Sons Flower Tree (Heptacodium miconioides) is one of those. In addition to the nice bark it offers me a display of small white flowers each fall. White birch (Betula papyrifera) and river birch (Betula nigra) are others with interesting bark. In fact all the birches have handsome bark.

I’ve been growing a paperbark maple (Acer griseum) for about 20 years. It has lovely shaggy reddish-brown bark that is very handsome. It is a very slow-growing tree, at least in this climate. It is listed as a Zone 5 plant (good to minus 20 F) but mine has survived colder temperatures. It looks great in winter.

One of my favorites — but one I do not grow — is sycamore (Platanus occidentalis), which I knew growing up in Connecticut but is rare in New Hampshire where I live. It reminds me of the English plane tree, so common in Europe. The bark peels off in big swaths, showing light gray-green in some areas, dark brown in others. It is just barely hardy to Zone 4, and prefers to grow in river bottoms, but will grow in drier soils, too.

Of the bigger trees, I like American beech (Fagus sylvatica) for its smooth gray bark. Unfortunately, beeches are prone to a fungal disease that mars the bark and eventually kills the tree.

That same smooth bark is a prominent feature of a shrub known variously as shad bush, serviceberry and Saskatoon bush. All belong to the genus Amelanchierbut bear different species names. Most are multi-stemmed bushes that get no more than 10 feet tall, though I have a wild one more than twice that height. Their blossoms are similar to apple blossoms. They do well in partial sun, often growing and blooming on roadsides.

Apple trees, particularly crabapples, can look great in winter. Some crabs hold onto their fruit throughout much of the winter, some drop their fruit in fall and many provide fruit for the birds to eat (that disappears before winter is done). Ask at the nursery when you buy a crabapple if the birds like the fruit. The form and bark of a well-pruned apple or crabapple is gorgeous to my eye.

So if your landscape has little to offer you in winter, plan on adding some winter interest come planting time. And if your trees and shrubs are drab, think about adding some strings of little winter lights to brighten them up, at least at night.

Featured photo: Merrill magnolia buds look like pussywillows all winter long, and bloom in late April. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Today’s veggie scraps makes tomorrow’s soil

When I was a boy it was one of my many jobs to take out the kitchen scraps every few days and dump them in our woods in a compost pile. Like the postman, I did my job no matter what: “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays this boy from the swift completion of his appointed rounds.” I would not say that the postman nor the boy enjoyed their tasks in a blowing rain. But I did it. Now, older and wiser, I still do it.

Making good compost is easy. Plenty has been written about the best way to create that “black gold” we all love to give our plants. There should be the proper mix of ingredients that are high in nitrogen and those that are high in carbon. That will help our microbe pals breakdown leaves, weeds and kitchen scraps into useful biologically active material to support plant growth. Now, in winter, composting is more of a challenge.

Scientists disagree about the ratio of carbon and nitrogen materials to get a compost pile “working.” Some say an even 50-50 mix of materials, but others say up to 30 times more carbon-based materials than those high in nitrogen. Me? I aim for three parts dry, brown material to one part high nitrogen material. Eventually, everything breaks down and turns into compost.

What ingredients are high in nitrogen? Grass clippings, green leaves and weeds. Animal manures are good, but you should never use cat or dog waste. Vegetable scraps, raw or cooked, fall in this category too, and coffee grounds. Moldy broccoli from the back of the fridge? Sure.

High-carbon materials include dead leaves, straw, tea bags, even a little shredded paper. If using newspaper, avoid glossy pages and things with lots of color. Newspapers are pretty benign these days, as they use soy inks and no heavy metals. I keep a supply of fall leaves next to my compost pile and spread a layer over the kitchen scraps every time I empty the compost bucket. That also minimizes flies in summer.

A good compost pile also needs oxygen to work well. And if your pile stays soggy, it won’t allow the microorganisms to get enough oxygen. But if your pile is too dry, the working microbes won’t be able to thrive, either. If you grab a handful and squeeze it, it should feel like a wrung-out sponge. People who really want a fast-acting compost pile turn over the compost with a garden fork regularly to help aerate it, but I don’t have the time or energy to do that.

In winter, most compost piles stop breaking down plant material because it is too cold for the organisms that cause decomposition. In summer, if yours is working well, temperatures can go up over 140 degrees F, which will kill weed seeds. In fact I’ve done experiments and found that 125 degrees for a couple of days killed the seeds of the annual grass I placed in it — though some weeds may be tougher to kill than that. To get my compost pile that hot I layered in fresh lawn clippings. Still, the pile had cooler pockets and hotter ones.

So how does all this help you in winter? First, accept that your kitchen scraps will be frozen and not breaking down. Even those big plastic drums that rotate compost probably won’t work in winter — the material will be one big lump impossible to turn.

I used to keep my compost pile near the vegetable garden so I could throw weeds in it. But the problem was that in winter I needed boots or snowshoes to get to my compost pile. If you don’t want to build a bin or trudge to a distant compost pile in winter, think about just using a big trash can and saving all your scraps until spring when things thaw out and temperatures are good for composting. This will also keep dogs and skunks out of it. Recently I built a nice bin made of wood pallets that is next to my woodpile, near the house — and more accessible all year.

Not all compost is the same. The microbes attracted to material made from woody plants are different from the ones attracted to kitchen scraps and grass clippings. Think about the soil in an established forest: It is dark and rich, formed by the breakdown of leaves, twigs and branches over a long period of time. You can mimic that and speed up the process to create mulch or compost to put around newly planted trees and shrubs. Just compost your autumn leaves, twigs and small branches. I shred them in a chipper-shredder machine.

If you collect scraps (no meat or oil) and are a member of a CSA, they may accept your kitchen scraps for their composting system. If you have a 5-gallon pail with cover, you can easily transport it to a farm or recycling facility that accepts food scraps. When we were on vacation in Maine, we brought our kitchen scraps to a farm that used them for compost.

Aside from helping your plants, making compost helps keep food waste out of the landfill, which is important: We are running out of space in landfills. So do your part, even in winter. And whatever you make will enhance your soil when you add it in at planting time.

Featured photo: I keep chopped leaves in a barrel next to my compost pile to spread over kitchen scraps. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Pruning makes them pretty

Living in New England is a joy, but we gardeners do have some challenges: cold winter winds, deer, rocky soil and more. As we get ready for winter, one of the biggest challenges for many of us is the deer. They are hungry and relentless. In my part of the world, there was a crop failure for acorns this year, a staple for hungry deer. The deer don’t care that you spent $275 on a nice tree. If they want to browse it, they will, unless you take steps now to protect it.

The most expensive but most sure method to prevent deer from damaging your plants is to fence your entire property with 8-foot-tall deer fence. That will keep them from your flowers — tulips are a favorite — as well as vegetables, shrubs and trees. It’s what most arboretums do. You don’t need to have a metal fence — though metal posts are best — as plastic mesh deer fencing is readily available.

Alternatively, you can protect plants that have suffered damage in the past, or, if new, are known as “deer candy.” Yew is an evergreen favorite of deer. I recently wrapped a pair of yews with burlap for a client whose plants had suffered deer damage in the past. The plants stand 7 feet tall or so, and are about as wide. I used a 6-foot-wide roll of 10-ounce burlap to wrap the shrubs and four 8-foot-tall stakes for each plant. I left the top open to avoid breakage due to heavy snows. The burlap came from burlapsupply.com.

Various repellent sprays may deter the deer, too. But if they wear off before you re-apply, the deer will let you know. Rain and warmer weather can affect how long they last.

Voles and other rodents can be a problem, too. Years when we have deep snow are the worst because owls and hawks are less able to eat the rodents that may eat the bark and girdle a tree. Wire mesh known as hardware cloth is great for keeping away rodents, but now plastic spiral wraps are available and easier to install. Young fruit trees are the most vulnerable, so do protect yours until they are 5 years old or so. Protection should go up 18 to 24 inches of the trunk.

What about those evergreen rhododendrons that have their leaves shrivel up? When the ground freezes, the roots can’t take up water to replace water used in photosynthesis on sunny days or water that just evaporates from the broad leaves. There is a product called Wilt-Pruf that works as an anti-transpirant for up to four months in winter. It is available in ready-to-use form or as a concentrate.

According to its literature, Wilt-Pruf “contains a film-forming polymer which offers high density, good efficacy, and even coverage across foliage.” Talking with a local arborist, I was advised to spray both top and bottom of leaves or needles, and to do so late in the fall. He also said it may also make foliage less attractive to deer. Shriveled leaves do recover, come spring.

If you planted new trees this year, think about mulching with bark mulch now if you haven’t done so. Trees do much of their root growth now, after leaf drop and before the ground freezes deeply. Trees have stored carbohydrates for use by roots even though they are no longer producing them.

By now I have about an inch of frozen soil on the surface, but roots are deeper than that — most are within a foot of the surface. So you can still put down 2 inches of mulch over the roots to slow the freezing of the soil.

Although traditionally farmers pruned their apple trees in late winter or early spring, I have always assumed that the reason for this is that they had time on their hands then. But if you want to do some pruning now, after the garden has gone to bed, feel free!

Begin pruning by removing any dead branches. This is a bit trickier now than when leaves are on the tree. Just look for cracked or damaged branches. Dead branches have bark that is a bit different than the rest: dry, flakey, lifeless. Rub small branches with a thumbnail. If you see green beneath the outer layer, the branch is alive. If there is no green, the branch is dead.

The goal of pruning is to allow every leaf to get sunshine. If the density of branches is too great, inner leaves will not do their job. Leaves have two major jobs: to feed sugars to their roots and to help produce flowers, fruit and seeds. If you prune back too much, a tree will respond by growing lots of new shoots, usually those vertical water sprouts. Don’t take off more than 20 percent of the tree in any one season.

Look for rubbing branches, branches growing toward the center of the tree or branches that parallel others closely. Those are all good candidates for removal. And any time a fruit tree is getting too tall, reduce the height. Finally, pruning should make your tree or shrub beautiful to look at — especially in winter.

Featured photo: Burlap will protect these yews from deer all winter. Photo by Henry Homeyer.