Category — Daily Toil

(20 Minute Jim) Little in this world reminds me of the limits of my know-how like an apple tree.

Apple trees trigger fond memories for me. We had an apple tree in the backyard of the house where I grew up. Most specifically, my dad planted an apple tree as soon as he and Mom bought the place because he wanted me to grow up with a tree to climb and fruit to pick. And I did hide in the canopy of its leaves on more than one occasion, especially in high school. I knew just about as high as I could climb before the limbs would groan under my weight. The fruit was less predictable. One year we’d get absolutely nothing. Then the next year we’d have hundreds of tiny apples, maybe an inch and a half in diameter. It was my duty to rake them up before they soured on the ground and attracted a yard full of hornets. Apples this size, however, were perfect ammunition for battles with the neighborhood children.

Occasionally that tree gave useable fruit… sort of. As I raked them up, I would gather any windfalls that had the blush of ripeness and that didn’t have the spots of worm or hornet sting. Often they yielded a bite or two. Sometimes, I was able to gather enough for Mom to make a quart or two of apple sauce — rather tart apple sauce, as I recall. The year she moved out of the house was the best year for the apple tree. Mom canned several quarts of “Climb my Branches” apple sauce that we brought over to our cellar pantry.

The last few years there, I had started fertilizing and pruning. I fertilized with tree spikes hammered into the ground within the drip zone of the tree’s branches. Fertilizing helped the tree produce that bumper crop of tiny fruits every season not just every other. Pruning helped it produce slightly larger fruit, occasionally three inches in diameter. I don’t know if this correlation is common.

I asked a friend of the family who’d majored in forestry to show me a thing or two about pruning. One January afternoon — a couple decades ago now — we walked around the tree. To the extent that I know anything about pruning, I learned it that afternoon. I was more than daunted by the task, and I was glad I had a knowledgeable friend. I had grown up with the tree my entire life and now I was preparing to lop off parts of it. Sure, I’d trimmed branches that had been cracked in a storm but I was preparing to make deliberate cuts. I was literally dwarfed by this semi-dwarf. I didn’t really have the proper ladder and I only had a bow saw and a pair of hand snips.

Cathy started simply enough, telling me to walk around the tree and just look at it. Once you learn to see the tree, its shape, the way it grows, the easier it is to see which branches just don’t belong. That apple tree seemed to have a tulip shape, like a champagne flute rather than, say, a single poled ladder. I made a few tentative cuts. I started to see the tree a little better.

Cathy taught me to respect the “collar” around a twig or a branch when pruning. The collar is a slightly raised, well ah, collar, and it’s where the tree stores all the necessary ingredients to help a wound heal over when a branch or twig is removed. Though a branch should be removed as close to the collar as possible, it’s important not to nick or damage it.

This story isn’t one of those sudden revelation tales where I became a pruning master in one swoop of inspiration. We worked for awhile, ’til we got cold I bet. We cut away some dead wood and some water sprouts, cleared a little way for light to shine into the center of the tree. I still didn’t have the proper ladder reach up to the high branches which needed the most work. I gather it’s important not to prune away too much at any given time. I’d made a start. And I wish I could say I was diligent about pruning a bit every year. I remembered a few times, I know that, and the harvest grew at least a little better because of it. I never did get a better ladder.

In fact, I can’t even claim that I prune the tree in my backyard on a regular, annual basis. However, I did today. I donned steel-toed boots, leather gloves and a warm jacket and grabbed the bow saw, the folding ladder and the hand nippers. And at least I made an effort. I still don’t really “know” what I’m doing. But I tried to prune away the twigs the were on a collusion course with other twigs. I lopped off a good sized branch that had started to scrape against the barn. I nipped off a few water sprouts. And when I started to get cold, I came in. As I look out the back window, I *think* I can see the results of my handiwork but it’s not exactly that kind of a task, I don’t think.

And save the wood. It’s great for a smoker.

Looking down at my right hand I am reminded of that not-funny joke about child-rearing, you know, the one that goes “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” Well, I’m finished pruning the raspberries this year and though I can’t comment on how much I hurt the raspberries, the scratches and gashes on my hand show that I was hurt a bit in the process. It was well worth it.

I worked more than my allotted 20 minutes yesterday but this is one time of the year where a little bit of extra effort can really pay off. The black raspberry harvest is over and the second year canes that bore fruit are beginning to die, leaves turning yellow. It’s time to get those canes out of the way to allow the first year canes space to grow, to spread and to send out new branches. In other words it’s time to prepare for next year’s harvest.

Clipping out the dying canes is also good hygiene. The theory is that any dead tissue should be removed from the plants because you don’t want to encourage diseases that grow on such tissue. For this reason, I carefully remove the dead canes and put them in a compost bag for the city to take away, rather than using them in my own compost. I’m being extra cautious. I had a very terrifying brush with the dreaded Orange Rust a few years back. Basically Orange Rust is one of those cash-in-your-chips-thanks-for-playing catastrophic plant diseases. I was lax about bramble hygiene before that wake up call. I’m more vigilant now.

It’s easy to tell second year canes because they’re purple. Yup. Purple. I know an artist who used them in one of her pieces, though I have absolutely no idea how color fast the pigment is. First year canes are green, usually a vibrant “spring” green. If there are canes that are grey or brown, they’re even older than two years. Get them out too.

I wear a leather palmed glove on my left hand and I hold the pruning shears with my right. I find I can’t operate the shears with a gloved hand so that’s why I end up with so many scratches.

Inevitably, some of the first year canes are going to be bent over and kinked. That’s fine because they need to be pruned as well. Raspberries bear near the tip of their canes. Left to their own devices, each cane has only one tip. But, I bet due to the same process that makes apple trees send up suckers and water sprouts, raspberries can be coaxed into having multiple tips per cane. At this time of the year, I prune them pretty low, about two feet off the ground, though I’ll sometimes go a little higher if there aren’t any leaves on the resulting cane. This height corresponds pretty well to the first tier in my raspberry trellis so they have some kind of support.

Before fall, each one of these pruned canes will start sending out three or four lateral shoots, so the harvest is potentially four times larger. I’ve been told I could get another pruning in during the fall but I usually wait for spring. I’ll prune the canes about a foot beyond where they’ve split from the original cane. I like to do this pretty early in the spring to allow the new tips to grow and bear fruit. In the spring, the plants are putting out first year canes as well as so I know they’re under some stress. I’ve never had to fertilize my raspberries any more that the layer of thick mulch I have spread around them. I know some folks don’t mulch around their brambles but you already know how much I hate weeding and weeding around plants with nasty sharp thorns is the worst.

It’s always a little discouraging to look at the patch after pruning. The plants that were so mighty and formidable just a couple weeks ago are nipped down to clusters of sticks poking out of the ground. This of course is the perfect time to adjust the trellis, to shore up the posts and tighten the wires. I also took advantage of the elbow room to weed and spread a nice layer of fresh straw. By the end of August, though, the patch will have regained its look of vigor and it will be set for next year.

And the gashes on my hand will have healed up too.

I’m a big fan of mulching with straw. It’s relatively cheap, especially if you shop around at general stores and grain elevators, rather than specialty garden shops. And the number of casual horse owners around where we live make sure that straw is always available since it’s a great bedding material. Note well, I’m not talking about hay which is a feed and which ideally comes with a fair amount of seeds. Straw, at least ideally, has most of the seeds removed since it’s a by-product of growing grain.

But even if most of the seeds are removed, some remain which means that as you spread your mulch, you’re also sowing “weeds.” My utterly pragmatist definition of a weed is any plant growing where you don’t want it. Sometimes you can can get rid of a weed by transplanting it to a more desirable location. For instance, I am notoriously soft-hearted when it comes to “volunteer” tomato plants, even though I can’t vouch for their variety and I’ll usually find somewhere to tuck them in. However with the grain seed sprouted from straw the best thing I’ve found is to yank it up gently by its roots, leave it in the sun for a couple hours then use the stalks elsewhere as more mulch. I find that for the most part, the straw seeds germinate within the layer of straw itself so I can pull them out much easier than if the same plants had rooted in soil.

I’m mentioning all this because today’s twenty-minutes were spent weeding out the asparagus bed. It was a dangerously beautiful day, dangerous because I would have been tempted to spend all day out side and thus end up burned to to a lobster red. With a nicely defined task, however, I was able to get outside, do some meaningful work and get inside again before I incinerated.

We knew we were risking calamity by planting tender annuals this early but the down side seemed so slight, that is, we’d merely replant, and the upside so great, that is, we’d have tomatoes as early as possible. Calamity struck and for the most part, it wasn’t as calamitous as it might have been. The night before last our garden suffered a pretty hard frost. It didn’t freeze deeply enough to kill the kale or the broccoli which was no surprise. And in fact even the squash seemed to pull through without much damage. The most vulnerable plants were the basil and the tomatoes and we spread a little protection over them. The tomatoes in the juice jar cloches were still OK. Over one bed, we made a tent of clear plastic and that kept those tomatoes and basil plants happy. Another area was covered with a plain cotton sheet, a technique that has worked for us in the past. This time, however, we lost nearly all the plants underneath this sheet. I admit when I went out in the morning that sheet was covered in such a thick layer of frost that it nearly crackled as I lifted it. All tolled, it looks like we lost only a half dozen plants, mostly San Marzano Tomatoes.

Recovery won’t be very rough. Tomorrow is the mid-week Farmer’s Market so we can pick up another tray or two and tuck the plants into the gaps. Our favorite weather website suggests a warming trend so maybe that was the last frost we’ll have on this end of the growing season.

The peas finally went in the ground tonight. According to tradition, peas are to be planted on Good Friday, which is a tradition that is perhaps best not followed literally. Figuratively at least, peas tolerate if not adore a cool soil and growing condition so they grow best in spring and again in fall. I am still not exactly a convert to fresh peas but the lady next door who lets us use her garden LOVES peas so we planted a nice long row of them for her. She figures that she might be able to be eating peas in mid July.

Part of the reason why we’re so late, in fact, is because our neighbor hired some clever and industrious young men to build a short flagstone wall around the pea garden, and by short I mean no more than 8 inches tall! A trellis divides this bed. We planted the peas on the shady northern side of the trellis while we’re reserving the sunny southern side for tomatoes and basil which performed marvelously there last year. We wish we’d snapped photos of the progress on the wall from foundation to gravel to sand and every course in case we ever wanted to build such a structure, but hindsight is quite clear, isn’t it?

Our neighbor provided the seed this year, a huge packet of Dark Seeded Early Perfection from Burpee. The package claims they are “drought resistant, prolific and early.” I reserved half the seed for a late summer crop… if I don’t forget again. I soaked the ones going into the ground for awhile to soften the shell and prepare them for germination, then I drained off the water and rolled the seed in a bit of rhizobial bacteria. I’ve blathered about this wondrous symbiosis before but the bacteria actually helps legumes like these peas enrich the soil. Together, they are able to “fix” atmospheric nitrogen into soluble nitrogen, the kind that helps make plant foliage green. For this reason alone, I’m glad to grow beans and peas.

For pea bramble – the scaffold that the peas climb up – we used bits of the lilac branch that snapped off during the late snow fall. It’s not ideal but yada yada Mother of Invention and all.

The whole task took honestly about 20 minutes, a fair day’s effort.