Category: Outdoors

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.