Category: Outdoors

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.