Author: Henry Homeyer

One option: grow a lot of something you love

Are you in a rut? Spring is here, but most of us cannot plant anything outdoors due to cold nights or wet ground. Yes, you can plant seeds indoors and baby them until early summer, but that requires a place to grow them and lights to keep them happy. So maybe you should put on your thinking cap and decide what you want to do later on, and do some research.

For starters, you could join a plant society, of which there are many. If you love daylilies, join the American Hemerocallis Society. You will find people who love daylilies, too, but have much more knowledge than you ever will. You will learn how to collect seeds and to hybridize daylilies of new colors.

Or what about the International Aroid Society? The Arum genus has a diverse collection of plants from skunk cabbage to philodendrons to Colocasia yams. The Plumeria Society of America is focused solely on the 11 species of plumeria, known as frangipani in English. Hostas? Wildflowers? Boxwood or bonsai? There are societies for each and every group.

An easy project indoors would be to start an avocado tree. Avocados ripen in California starting in spring and going through summer. Winter avocados won’t usually sprout from their seeds — they have been in cold storage too long. The classic method is to perch a seed in a glass of water using three toothpicks to keep its bottom just kissing the water. Put the point end up and the fat end down. I cut one open recently, and it was already sprouting! So I planted it in a mixture of potting soil and compost. I let the sprout just peek out above the soil line.

I have grown many avocado trees over the years, generally by recognizing the shiny leaves in my compost pile. So I know that you don’t have to suspend the seed in water — they will be glad to grow in compost. When I lived in West Africa I was able to buy avocados for a penny or two apiece, and often fed them to our cats. Cats love them because of their oil content. I have a 5-foot-tall avocado tree growing in a 12-inch pot that lives as a house plant in winter and goes out on the deck in summer. It started life in the compost pile.

Try to remember the favorite flowers of your grandparents, or your parents. This would be a good time to ask your mom, for example, what did her mom really love? My grandmother, who died in 1953, loved peonies. My mother, may she rest in peace, dug up one of her mom’s peonies and moved it from Spencer, Mass., to Woodbridge, Connecticut, and grew it for decades before I came along and divided it in the early 1980s and brought a part of it to Cornish Flat, where I live. The peony I got is ‘Festiva Maxima,’ a highly fragrant double white with splotches of red inside — blood from a fairy princess, I think.

If your Grammy loved roses, study your yard and figure out where one could go in loving memory of her. And do a little research now if you have never grown roses. Roses are easier to grow now than they were 40 or 50 years ago when Grammy was growing them. I love the ‘Knockout” series of roses. The Knockouts are not fragrant, so they do not attract Japanese beetles, and they bloom for months.

Think about planting an oak later in the month. Many gardeners don’t think of planting oaks, saying they get too big or grow too slowly. But it has been proven that oaks are the No. 1 best plant to support our birds, pollinators and mammals. And you can even plant a sprouting acorn now.

Oaks probably grow faster than you think. I planted several bare-root oaks in the spring of 2021. They were as thick as a pencil and only a foot or two tall. In two years many of them have taken off and are 3 feet tall or more, and they will be 10 feet tall in less than five years.

Want a fast-growing flowering tree? Plant a catalpa. They are native and the flowers are amazing. Fragrant, attractive. The leaves are huge — big enough that Native Americans used them for diapers for babies, I’ve read. I bought a 10-footer five years ago and now it is already a shade tree — 25 feet tall with a 20-foot-wide crown.

What else can you do? Grow a lot of something you love, starting from seed. I love rosemary, and recently bought a packet of seeds and planted 50 seeds. If all goes well, I will have plenty to share.

I will grow them on an electric heat mat (designed for use with seeds) as they germinate best at temperatures in the 70s. Once they have germinated I will grow them under very bright LED lights and will transplant them into rows in my vegetable garden in mid-June. Of course I will keep some in pots, and grow them on the deck.

Lastly, plan on growing a vegetable you have never grown before. You might try tiny decorative pumpkins, or huge ones. Or rutabagas. Dreaming big is part of being a gardener.

Featured photo: Oaks are pretty for us and food for caterpillars and wildlife. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Henry is a UNH Master Gardener and the author of four gardening books. His website is Gardening-Guy.com. Reach him by email at [email protected].

Walk gently and carry a soft rake

Although I still have some snow around the house here in Cornish, New Hampshire, many of you may be looking at brown grass and mud. It will be some time before real spring weather is safely ensconced. We all want to get outside and enjoy warm, sunny days, and most of us are itching to do some work in the garden.

If you do go outside, please be extra careful where you walk. Your lawn and gardens are probably soggy, and your footsteps can easily compact the soil and damage roots. Take a different route to your garden each time you go out. Game trails in the forest can be made by animals as small as a housecat due to compaction if they follow the same path, day after day. Plants do not thrive if their roots are in compacted soil.

I live on a dirt road, and each year the town plows dump sand and gravel mixed with snow on the lawn. I try to shovel that grit and snow back onto the road or haul it away while it is still mixed in with snow to cut down on raking later in spring. Use a soft rake, one with bamboo or plastic tines, when you rake the lawn so you will be less likely to tear up the grass as you rake.

If you have decorative grasses that overwintered, they are probably pretty bedraggled by now. It is better to cut down tall grasses before they start growing. Last year’s stems will not turn green- they grow new stems each year. The only problem you might have now is that they may be in a garden bed that you wish to avoid walking in. I use a serrated knife for the job, but pruners will work, too.

If you want to work in flower beds, find a couple of 3-foot-long 6- to 8-inch-wide planks. Place them in your garden bed and step on them instead of the soil. They will distribute your weight and allow you to work while avoiding the problem of compacting the soil.

If you have bluebird boxes or other nesting boxes, this is a good time to clean them out. I don’t know just when the bluebirds arrive and claim their nesting places, but I want to be ready for them. This would also be a good time to put up a bat house. Bats eat lots of mosquitoes, so you should welcome them to your garden. Pre-made bat boxes are available, and directions to make your own are available online.

I love art and whimsy in my garden, and I have all kinds of interesting art placed around my property. I recently noticed that some of it has tipped or fallen over. Depending on the nature of the whimsy, you might be able to right it now. Others, such as wire sculpture that has rods designed to go into the soil, might have to wait. My soil is still frozen, which deterred me from fixing all of mine that needed straightening.

It’s too early here for me to rake leaves and clean up garden beds that need it. But I am picking up sticks that were blown out of trees. After a little drying time in the barn they will provide me with kindling for my woodstove.

In the past I piled up broken branches each year and burned it all in late winter while there was still plenty of snow around the pile. I have stopped creating burn piles, for two reasons. First, little animals may have settled into the burn pile over the winter, and I don’t want to evict them or possibly kill them. And certainly there are lots of insects that overwinter in dead branches and stems of things like goldenrod and bee balm, which used to go into the burn pile (but are now composted).

The second reason is environmental: The bonfires I enjoyed in the past send up a lot of smoke and air pollution, and I want to avoid doing that. Instead of burning those branches, we bought a chipper/shredder to make chipped branches that can be used on pathways to keep down weeds. Or they can be double-ground and the fine results are good for mulching or mixing with food waste in our compost pile.

Chipper shredders come in many sizes. We bought a gasoline-powered machine that will allegedly take 3-inch stems but is actually better for things half that size and smaller. Manufacturers want to sell their products, so they tend to exaggerate a bit. But buy the most powerful machine you can afford. Ours cost $600 and is good for our needs.

What don’t they tell you? Chipper/shredders are noisy and can be dangerous. Mine does not start in winter. One pass though the machine makes a rough mixture of shredded branches that is not aesthetically pleasing to my eye as a mulch. But this material is easily dumped in the top hopper for fine grinding. Electric machines are out there, but the ones I’ve tried are not as powerful as a gas-powered machine. Good for small branches and leaves, I suppose.

I’ll start my tomato seedlings around April 10 indoors. These I will plant outdoors around June 10. Vine crops I’ll plant later — early May will be fine for cukes, squash and pumpkins that will go out in mid-June. I don’t need to tend seedlings any longer than need be.

Spring and summer are just around the corner. So try to be patient and avoid compacting your soil. If you see footprints in the soil, you should stay off it. Or wear your snowshoes to get around the garden!

Featured photo: This plank will let me cut down this decorative grass without compacting the soil. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Henry is a UNH Master Gardener and the author of four gardening books. His website is Gardening-Guy.com. Reach him by email at [email protected].

Take a look around without flowers distracting you

Early spring is a good time to look at the trees and shrubs on your property, when you are not distracted by flowers and leaves. Study your “woodies” now to see if they need some care — and if some plants need to be removed for the health or beauty of the remaining ones.

If you have a wooded area on your property, it probably needs some help from you, especially if you haven’t done any thinning or grooming of trees in recent years. Start by going outside and really looking at the trees growing on your property with a critical eye.

In nature trees grow willy-nilly. Where a seed lands is largely determined by chance. It is unable to know if it is 6 inches or 6 feet from another tree. If it germinates and grows it might be a good place, or it might be smack-dab next to another tree — or your house.

Ask yourself this question as you walk around your property at your trees: What is the future of this particular tree? How big does this type of tree grow to be? What will this one look like in 10 years? In 50? Is it too close to its neighboring trees or to the house? Is it shading your vegetable garden or favorite flower bed?

I’m a tree-hugger but I have no problem with cutting down trees when judicious removal is beneficial. Now is the time to plan on some careful thinning of trees to improve the health of your best trees and to improve the looks of your landscape.

Before you start tagging trees for culling, you need to learn to identify the trees on your property. A good guide is A Guide to Nature in Winter by Donald Stokes, a wonderful book that will help you with that. Because there are no leaves on most trees out there now, the Stokes book is great — it identifies trees by their bark, shape and buds. It also teaches much about all the other living things out there in the woods, from snow fleas to deer and everything in between.

Trees that I cull from my woods include poplars (Populus spp.), boxelder (Acer negundo) and alders (Alnus spp.). These are fast-growing trees that are short-lived and that produce lots of seedlings.

Trees that I revere are maples, oaks, beeches, birches and hophornbeams (Carpinus caroliniana). I would think long and hard about cutting down one of them. But if a fast-growing poplar were growing within 6 feet of one of my favorites, I would not hesitate to cut the popular down. Trees need plenty of space to do well.

Invasive shrubs make their way into most woods, too. Barberries, burning bush and honeysuckles are shrubs that can choke out native shrubs and many native wildflowers. I work on eliminating those every spring, but the honeysuckles are still ahead of me. Learn to identify them and tag them for removal.

There are a few buckthorns (Rhamnus spp.) moving into the neighborhood, and I am keeping a sharp eye to make sure none get established on my property. Buckthorns are invaders that cannot be easily killed by cutting them down because they sprout up from their roots if you cut them down.

To rid your property of buckthorns, you can pull young ones or girdle the older ones. Trees up to about 2.5 inches in diameter can be pulled with a tool designed for that purpose. It is often called a weed wrench, although the original Weed Wrench company has gone out of business. Another brand of weed wrench is called the “Pullerbear.” It is a steel tool with a gripping mouthpiece and a long handle that provides mechanical advantage. They come in several sizes and prices. For more info see www.pullerbear.com. I have not yet tried one of this brand, but they look like the old weed wrenches I have used.

If you cut down a mature buckthorn it will stimulate the roots to send up many suckers that will develop into new trees. To prevent this from happening, you need to girdle buckthorns twice about 12 inches apart. Cut through the bark severing the green cambium layer all the way around the trunk, but don’t cut deeply. They will usually survive two years before dying. Girdling starves the roots of food from the leaves.

You can girdle them now but doing so right after they leaf out in the spring is better. Just tag them now, and plan their demise. Some buckthorns develop multiple stems in a cluster, making it tough to girdle them, but it is possible using a pointed pruning saw.

Hemlocks and pines often grow so densely that their lower limbs die out because the sun never reaches their leaves. Removing those lower branches opens up the landscape — another task you could do now. And think about removing any wild grapes that are climbing your trees — they can kill them.

So enjoy the spring weather and make some plans for real spring.

Henry Homeyer is the author of four gardening books. You may contact him at [email protected], or P.O. Box 364, Cornish Flat, NH 03746. His website is www.Gardening-Guy.com.

Featured photo: A weed wrench allows anyone to pull out invasive shrubs. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Cut stems, force blossoms, enjoy view

Even though spring has arrived according to the calendar, I fear winter is not done with us yet. Mother Nature is full of tricks,but to reassure me that she will provide us with flowers this spring, I am forcing her hand a bit. Or should I say, forcing some woody stems to blossom indoors now.

The easiest to force are forsythia and pussywillows. But it is also possible to force magnolias, rhododendrons and azaleas, apples and crabapples, cherries, plums, dogwood, spirea and peach. Of course cutting stems off your young peach or plum tree will reduce your fruit crop.

Trees and shrubs that bloom early in the season are quicker to produce their flowers. Shrubs like hydrangeas that bloom in late summer or fall will not bloom now, no matter what you do. I’ve never had much luck with lilacs, though perhaps if I tried closer to bloom time it would work.

In general, flower buds tend to be bigger and fatter than leaf buds. Apple and crabapple trees produce flower buds on short “fruit spurs” but not on those tall water sprouts that appear each summer. So if you are pruning your apples now, look for branches with short spurs and fat buds. Keep those, and bring them into the house.

I lost a plum tree this winter — it broke under the weight of snow and ice. It took 20 years from the time I planted a bare root twig to the time it first produced fruit. This year it was loaded with fruit spurs and I was looking forward to a big crop of plums. I am making the best of it by cutting lots of stems with fruit spurs and placing them in vases in the house. I should get a multitude of blossoms in a few weeks.

I am also cutting stems from forsythia bushes, one of the first to bloom outside and one of the easiest to force inside. It produces bright yellow flowers in quantity. Look for branches with pointy buds on stems that are at least two years old. You will see skinny new-looking branches that grew last year. They probably won’t produce flowers. Stems that are closer in diameter to pencils are what you want. Older branches have stems growing out of them, often with flower buds.

Then there are the pussy willows. What we call pussywillows are actually the male catkins — pollen-producing parts — of two species of willows (Salix caprea and Salix discolor). Both grow wild, and are available at nurseries. Pussy willows, like all willows, like wet, swampy areas. They will grow up to be small trees but can be kept to a manageable size with yearly pruning — and now is a good time to do so. The more you trim your pussy willows, the more productive they will be. Left unpruned, pussy willows can easily reach 20 feet tall. Since they bloom on their upper branches, picking good-looking stems can be difficult unless you have a pole pruner.

An established pussy willow is next to impossible to kill. If you have wild pussy willow that is tall and gangly, you can take a saw and cut it all right to the ground. It will come back. It can grow 4 feet or more in a single season.

If you see yellow dust on your pussy willows, they are already producing pollen. So if you are allergy-prone, don’t pick stems with yellow on them. But you can halt pussy willows from producing pollen: pick them at their peak of beauty, and place them in a dry vase. They will stay looking the same for a year. If you pick them before they are fully developed, put them in a vase with water to let them mature. Drain off the water when the little gray kitties are at their cutest.

In 2005 I worked as a volunteer on an organic farm in the Dordogne region of France that grew willow for making baskets. I worked through an organization called Willing Workers on Organic Farms (wwoof.org). In exchange for four to six hours of work each day I got room and board, lived with a family, and learned a lot about willows, including how easy it is to root them.

To root willows, cut 8- to 12-inch sections of vigorous young stems in May or June. Strip off the lower leaves, and push the stems into moist soil, leaving just 2 inches above ground. Roots will develop at each node (where leaves start) on the stem below ground; new stems and leaves will grow above ground, so long as you leave at least one node above ground. Depending on your soil, you may need to poke a hole in the ground with a screwdriver before inserting your willow stem; be sure the ground is firmed up around it when you are done.

So cut some stems to flower and chase away the late winter blues.

Featured photo: Fruit buds on plum tree. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Use good tools and don’t overdo it

Ask a farmer, “When should I prune my apple trees?” and you will most likely hear, “March.” That’s an old tradition, but not because it is the only time to prune. You can prune any time. But March is a month on a farm when not so much is happening outdoors and farmers have time to prune their apples. Me? I often prune in the fall, or later in the spring when the ground dries out and it warms up. I say, “Prune when you have the time and inclination.”

Pruning serves a number of functions. First, for many of us, it helps to create a work of living sculpture. Next, pruning opens up a tree and lets sunshine hit every leaf so that it can produce food for the roots and fruits. A well-pruned tree will be healthier and produce tastier fruit. My pruning mentor told me decades ago that a bird should be able to fly through a well-pruned apple tree without getting hurt.

When pruning a fruit tree it’s important to know which branches will be blossoming and producing fruit. Look for fruit spurs on apples and pears. These are roughly 3- to 6-inch-long protuberances with buds on them. As you prune you will have to make choices about which of two branches to cut. Look for those fruit spurs, and be guided by them.

In general when making cuts on an older, neglected tree, it’s better to remove a few larger branches than to make many smaller cuts.

It’s important to know where to make your cuts. If you cut off a branch flush with the trunk you will create a bigger wound than if you cut it off a little farther out from the trunk. Notice that most branches swell a bit at their base. That swollen, wrinkled area is called the branch collar, and it is where healing takes place. Cut just beyond the collar. But if you cut too far out on the branch, you leave a stub which will not heal quickly — it will have to rot back to the collar before it can scab over.

Start by removing any dead or damaged branches. Cut them back to the trunk, or to a larger branch where they originate. Heavy wet snow and high winds this winter have created lots of broken branches. Clean them up. Knowing if a small branch is alive is easy: scrape it with your thumbnail. If it shows green, it is alive. Bigger dead branches will have flaky, discolored bark and will not be flexible if bent.

Remove any branches that are rubbing other branches. Keep the best-looking branch and remove the other. Remove any branch that is headed into the center of the tree instead of growing toward the outside.

Or perhaps you’d like to begin with the easiest branches to remove, the water sprouts. These are vertical shoots coming up from a more-or-less horizontal branch. They are very numerous in some trees, not so much in others.

Water sprouts are generally a tree’s response to a need for more food for the roots. Trees that haven’t been pruned in years have many of these as there are many leaves shaded out and not producing much food for the roots. Or after a heavy pruning, a tree may produce lots of water sprouts to replace food-producing branches that have been removed.

If water sprouts are not removed when they are the thickness of a pencil or a hot dog, they will become as thick as your arm or leg and be difficult to remove. Clean those up every year.

You can change the angle of growth of a branch that is only an inch or less thick. Once winter is over, attach string or rope to a branch and tie it to a peg in the ground or to a weight to bend it down. A half-gallon milk jug works well. Just add water until you have the correct angle on the branch. Forty-five to 60 degrees off vertical is fine. You can remove the weights in June. Branches that are 45 degrees from the horizontal produce more fruit than more vertical branches.

If you have to remove a bigger branch, do it in two steps. First make a cut 2 or 3 feet out from the trunk to reduce the weight of the branch. Then make a second cut just outside the branch collar. Use one hand on the saw, one hand supporting the weight of the branch. That will prevent tearing the bark on the trunk if it falls before you finish the cut.

When pruning, don’t overdo it. Trees need their leaves to feed the roots and fruit. In any given year don’t take more than 25 percent of the leaves (woody stems don’t count when calculating how much you have taken off). In winter you just have to estimate how much live wood you can take off.

A few words on tools: The basics are a good pair of hand pruners, kept sharp. A good pair of geared loppers for medium-sized branches. A good hand saw with a tri-cut blade for branches bigger than an inch or so. Don’t buy the cheapest you can find. Buy the most expensive you can afford. My new curved Stihl hand saw went through a 3-inch apple branch like a hot knife through butter. With the leather sheath, it cost about $65 and is worth every penny.

Featured photo: Fruit spur on an apple tree will produce fruit and leaves. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

They’re born to keep on blooming

Reclining in an easy chair on a recent cold and snowy day, I imagined myself a bumblebee. I meandered from flower to flower, taking in the colors and scents and textures of annual flowers, starting with A (alyssum) and ending with Z (zinnias).

I was a bumblebee tourist, seeing everything my mind could imagine, and all were in bloom at once. Then, returning to reality, I got out of my catalogs and started searching for new flowers.

Annual flowers are wonderful. Perennials are great too, but most make a relatively short appearance, rarely more than three weeks. Annuals are born to flower: many start early and keep on blooming all summer if you keep cutting them. They need to make plenty of seeds or their genetic lineage can literally die out and disappear at the end of the season.

I like starting annuals by seed in six-packs indoors, even when it’s warm enough that I could plant them directly in the ground. Flowers can easily get lost or misidentified as weeds when planted directly in the soil, especially things I haven’t tried before, or if I just want a few.

I love zinnias. They come in such a profusion of colors, and range in size from diminutive to giant. I love the lime-green ones such as Envy and Benary’s Giant Lime because they look so great mixed in with other flowers, in a vase or in a flower bed. Zinnias come as singles, such as the Profusion series, which are short (12”), and doubles such as Sunbow (24 to 30 inches) and Oklahoma (30 to 40 inches). I save seed from non-hybrid ones and plant them directly in the soil in large numbers. And the more you cut these flowers, the more they branch and re-bloom.

Most annual flowers are easy to grow from seed, but not all. One of my favorites, lisianthus, takes 17 days to germinate if kept at 72 degrees, longer if cooler. And even after it starts to grow, its seedlings do not grow fast for several weeks. It’s not a flower for impatient gardeners.

Cosmos varieties have been bred and hybridized in recent years. Looking at the John Scheepers Garden Seeds website I see 23 different kinds of cosmos, including one I must try: “Double Click Cranberries Cosmos,” deep wine-colored and double-petaled like an old-fashioned rose.

A flower good as a cut flower or as a dry flower and spectacular in the garden goes by the unlikely name gomphrena. I plan to plant at least a dozen of these this year, maybe more.

Vines are good, too. I love purple hyacinth bean with purplish leaves and pink-purple flowers. They are slow to start, so I’ll start some indoors in March.

Nasturtiums are vines that don’t climb. They sprawl. Plant these large seeds in full sun after the danger of frost has passed, perhaps in a bed of daffodils. The daffies need sunshine to recharge their bulbs until the foliage dies away, and the nasturtiums will fill in and hide the dying foliage. Nasturtiums like lean soil, so don’t add fertilizer.

I grow some of my favorite annuals not for their flowers but for their leaves. These beauties are always in bloom, which is to say their leaves are a treat to look at. I love their bright colors and shiny surfaces. Here are some good ones:

Perilla: This is a terrific purple-leafed plant that self-sows exuberantly. Pinch off the flowers (which are not at all showy) if you don’t want it to spread next year. Eighteen inches tall. The ‘Magellanica’ cultivar is taller and has foliage in shades of hot pink, deep plum and vibrant green.

Persian Shield (Strobilanthes dyerianus): This plant just shimmers with silver overtones on dark purple and pink leaves. It loves hot weather and gets big: One plant can spread over a 3-foot circle and stand 3 to 4 feet tall.

Licorice plant (Helichrysum petiolare): I buy some of this every summer because I love the silvery leaves, because it mixes so well with bright-colored flowers in planters, and because it takes abuse. It rarely complains if I let it dry out in a pot. It flows over the edge of pots and weaves it way through other plants. It’s also exceptional in flower arrangements. There are also chartreuse and variegated lemon-lime varieties.

So even though annuals are disposable plants — they die when frost comes — I have to have them. I grow them in the vegetable garden, and in pots to fill in drab corners of the flower garden after perennials have finished blooming. If you want, all those mentioned above are available as plants in six-packs at your local nursery, come spring. Most are great cut flowers — and the bumblebees love them.

Featured photo: I grow Persian shield for its foliage. Photo by Henry Homeyer.