Planting Trees For Tomorrow

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Ann Lovejoy
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A Gift To The Garden Is A Gift To The Planet

One of my favorite places to relax is in a little sunporch off my bedroom. The glass roof echoes rain sounds delightfully and the big glass sliders offer an uninterrupted view of trees and sky. Years ago, people could see the water of Fletcher Bay from this room. Now, I can get a glimpse of the water in winter, when the alders and maples shed their leaves. Even then, the cedars and firs encircle me with trees that frame a skyful of clouds.

I don’t miss the water view, really. Sure, it would be nice to see the sparkling bay, but I’ve always felt that trees are in themselves a view well worth cherishing. If I were an artist, I’d make enormous paintings of treetops and clouds reflecting every mood and season. They could hang in cities where it’s hard to see the sky and where trees are rare and mostly tame or dispirited.

Plant A Tree

Since I’m not a painter, I find great satisfaction in planting as many trees as I can. I am so lucky to be able to plant public spaces, from the local library grounds to local schools and churches. I was thrilled  this past year to get the chance to plant a new public park near the ferry terminal. I was given a list of a dozen interested people who wanted to help, but none of them responded to calls or emails about meetings. That turned out to be awesome, since it meant I could do whatever I wanted.

That park has two beds, one of about 5,000 square feet that’s near the street, and another of about 10,000 square feet that backs onto a ravine. The first bed is more formal, holding a sheet of a low-growing, evergreen, shrubby honeysuckle called Lonicera pileata Royal Carpet. There are only three trees in that bed; two Mount Fuji cherries, which will mature into low, wide-skirted beauties that will float like clouds over the mass of green, and a lovely Japanese maple called Acer palmatum Katsura, which colors gorgeously in spring and fall. Each is given enough room to develop into a striking specimen with fully developed form and character.

Wild Things

The L-shaped larger bed is called the Wild Garden, since it flows into the natural environment on the backsides of the L. Here, we installed dozens of trees, clustering native shadbush (Amelanchier) and wild cherries into thickets, as they grow in the wild, and spacing a few specimen maples where they have space to shine. These trees are layered down from the towering skyline of bigleaf maples to the retaining wall with massed shrubs. At the back are groups of ocean spray, Indian plum, sumac and elderberry, along with Garryas, colorful twiggy dogwoods, and buxom Mahonias. Lacing through them are 300 evergreen huckleberries to knit the clusters into a whole.

Here, most of the trees are woven into a living tapestry rather than free standing. In a few seasons, this dense planting will scoop like the sides of a bowl, flowing downward from the surrounding mature treetops to the wide walkways where passersby stroll. The front stretches of the Wild Garden are tamed into sweeps of low-growing barberries and spireas, which so far have not been eaten by the ever-present deer.

Bring It All Home

Not everyone has such a majestic setting to play with, of course, but almost any of us can find space for a tree or two. If your available space is small, look for charming compact trees, some of which can live contended in a container or tree box for decades. If you have room to paint on a bolder scale, plant trees for every season, considering fall color as much as spring bloom, summer fruit, and winter silhouette.

Worried about the environment? Plant a tree. Even a small tree is a gift to the world, exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen every day its whole life long. The Arbor Day Foundation says, “a mature leafy tree produces as much oxygen in a season as 10 people inhale in a year.”  A recent New York Times article claimed that “one acre of trees annually consumes the amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to that produced by driving an average car for 26,000 miles.” Naturally, the amount of either substance being consumed or created will vary depending on each tree’s size, kind, and state of health. Still, it’s an impressive contribution to the wellbeing of the world.

Plant With An Eye To The Future

While few of us have an acre of land to devote to trees, every tree we plant is a gift to the earth and all its critters. Sadly, many trees fail to reach their full life span because they are planted in inappropriate places. Trees placed too close to buildings, trees planted under power lines, trees set smack by a sidewalk or roadway are largely doomed to die long before their natural lifespan is reached.

When you think about planting a tree, consider both the tree’s ultimate size and the available space. Stand where you want to put your tree and look up. If the airspace is already full of branches, think again. This is especially important when planting a potentially majestic tree like a chestnut, a parrotia, or a katsura. All need a space the size of a house if they are to reach their full growth.

Pick The Right Tree

For many folks this means planting trees that mature at 12-20 feet instead of 100 footers. That’s not bad news, since there are dozens of excellent choices. Those who have a huge empty lot or meadow to fill can dream even bigger. True, a tree planted today won’t achieve grandeur for at least a few decades. However, planting trees is as much about tomorrow as it is about instant gratification.

I was recently sent a stunning set of pictures of “tree tunnels” from around the world. In one scene, ancient yews line a narrow country lane in Ireland. In another, stately sycamores flank a roadway in France. Still a third showed a road vanishing into a vista of flaming maples in New England.

Tunnels Of Leafy Love

Clearly, such plantings require one to own significant amounts of land, but how glorious a sight might be created if a whole neighborhood agreed to plant the same tree in each sidewalk strip. Years ago, friends in Victoria, BC took me for a ride in their Cadillac convertible. At one point they told me to shut my eyes and lean my head back. I opened my eyes to an endless mass of cherry blossom. Trees planted back in the 1950‘s now meet across the wide street, making a perfect arc of bloom in spring.

On another trip, I visited a hazelnut farm in Oregon, where the trees formed seemingly endless arches running across rolling hills. That scene was all the more enchanting because grape hyacinths had naturalized throughout the orchard in an unbroken carpet of blue.  There’s something majestic about such scenes, something that creates a sense of awe and wonder. As John Muir, the Scottish naturalist who founded the Sierra club once wrote, “Everyone needs beauty as well as bread, places to play and pray, where nature heals and gives strength to body and soul alike.”

Look With New Eyes

Lack room for a full-out tree tunnel? Look around, look up, and see where a tree or two might make themselves at home. Even modest properties can host arboreal marvels on a smaller scale. If not a fabulous specimen, why not plant an allee of beeches, or birches, or laburnum, or lilacs? Dream into it, research the possibilities, and plant a gift for the garden and the world.

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The Aftermath Of Spring

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Ann Lovejoy
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Dealing With Bulb Foliage

Spring bulb displays are so bold and beautiful that it’s tempting to pack the beds and borders with them. However, most are not especially good mixers, wanting a lengthy period of ripening and summer drought to restore their bloom power. Foliage ripening can be an issue, since some spring bloomers produce masses of leaves that topple in damp heaps over neighboring perennials once the bulb flowers have faded.

Aging bulb foliage can be unsightly indeed as it passes through various unattractive color changes on the way to brown crispness. It’s tempting at the homeliest point to cut the leaves off, but to do so seriously weakens the bulbs. After a few seasons of such premature treatment, bulbs will rebloom sparsely if at all.

Feed and Fold

One good way to handle all this is to feed bulbs just as they come into bloom. Because the soil is chilly at that point, chemical fertilizers won’t help, but a blend of feather, soy or cottonseed meal and kelp meal will nurture your bulbs as they bloom and fade over the next few months. I also renew their blanket of mulch with several inches of either aged compost or well rotted dairy manure.

When the bulb foliage starts to collapse, you can gently fold it earthward. Once it changes from green to yellow, the foliage is no longer feeding the mother bulb. Now you can tucking it discretely under the mulch and let it decay in peace without becoming an eyesore.

Moving Bulbs In The Green

I am often asked when it’s best to divide or transplant bulbs. Spring bulbs are best moved ‘in the green’, which means after the flowers have faded but while the foliage is still robust and green. Start with the earliest bloomers such as snow crocus and snow drops, which are typically ready to divide by late March. In time, of course, many early bulbs will spread themselves into enormous carpets, as long as their foliage is not removed too soon. However, if you don’t want to wait decades to see this charming sight, you can speed the process up considerably.

Dig up a crowded clump and gently separate the bulbs. Replant them in little colonies, including some larger bulbs as well as tiny seedlings in each new group. Every little cluster will expand each season, and you can facilitate their spread by dividing them every 3-5 years. Add some of the bulb food described above to each new group, mulch them well with compost and your early bulbs will spread with alacrity.

Make A Tapestry Meadow

If you want to introduce snowdrops, crocus, or daffodils into a lawn or meadow, you can cut 3-sided flaps of turf and set the bulbs beneath them. Set the bulbs in groups of 5-10, firm them into the exposed soil, then gently tamp down the grass flaps. This works best with dry bulbs, and is most successful when done in autumn, just as the rains arrive.

To avoid squirrel theft, use varieties of Crocus tommasinianus. Tommies, as the Brits fondly call them, come in soft shades of lavender, purple, and rose madder and bloom in early spring. By nature, they are prolific little critters, spreading by seed and bulblet in any decent soil. At the Bainbridge Public Library, the Friday Tidies put in 500 tommies about 10 years ago. The seed got into our compost, and now every bed we mulch with it produces sheets of lovely crocus from February into March.

Timing The Treatments

In my garden, dozens of daffodils are still blooming bravely in early May, but that’s because I planted them very late indeed. Last week’s heat wave brought temperatures into the 80’s, after a long, slow spring, and many plants went into shock (people too). My bulbs are in shade for much of the day and thus escaped the crisping some plants experienced. Many of the later blooming bulbs are definitely distressed looking now and they will be divided and moved this week.

Among them are snowflakes (Leucojum), larger, taller and later to bloom than snowdrops (Galanthus). They are often confused, since both have white petals tipped or touched with green. However,  where snowdrops have a long outer skirt and a shorter inner skirt of 3 petals each, snowflakes have 6 petals all the same length. They also bloom on 12-16-inch stems, where most snowdrops remain under 6 inches.

Time To Trim

Snowflakes make great masses of foliage, as do grape hyacinths. Unlike more delicate bulbs, these will both rebloom even if their foliage gets trimmed a bit on the early side. In any case, once the leaves have fully browned off and turn brittle, they can be removed and composted.

Potted bulbs that were enjoyed indoors are not always good repeaters when transplanted into the garden. However, if fed with the bulb mix described above and planted well away from any summer irrigation, they usually recover in a season or two. Some, like hyacinths, may persist for decades, slowly increasing by offsets and building into generous clumps.

Time To Hide

The slowly maturing stalks of later blooming tulips can look awful amongst the rising tide of summery perennials. These can be gently persuaded to lie down, then covered with mulch. If you never get around to removing the elderly stems and leaves, it won’t matter a bit. If you prefer, you can also trim them a bit at a time, removing the soft, pale bits and leaving anything still firm and green. This works for lilies as well, which can be similarly weakened by precipitate removal of browning stems and leaves.

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Keeping Blueberries Happy In Containers

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Ann Lovejoy
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Sunshine and Slightly Acid Soil

In a recent entry, I mentioned that, because of my resident deer herd, I grow my blueberries in containers. This sparked several good questions, so I thought I’d provide a bit more detail for those of you who want to try it. However, if you want a lot of fruit and have plenty of room, I’d suggest growing highbush blueberries. These big, strapping creatures can top 8 feet in height, and thrive in full sun. Their roots are shallow and wide-spreading, so they appreciate good garden soil, well amended with compost.

To keep the humus level high, renew blueberry bed mulch each spring and fall. Add any combination of aged manure, mature compost, rotted leaves, and well rotted sawdust or finely ground bark to improve soil and help smother weeds. Compost is especially valuable, since it strengthens and sweetens fruit flavor and provides most of the nourishment these sturdy plants need.

Just Enough, Never Too Much

Give blueberries full sun and good air circulation, as well as a dedicated bed free of root competition from nearby trees. Blueberries thrive near water but don’t tolerate waterlogged soil. They grow best in open-textured, well-drained loam, with plenty of humus (organic matter). They prefer acid soils with a pH between 4.5 and 5.5, which fortunately is quite typical throughout the maritime Northwest.

While consistent moisture is important to blueberry production, excess fertilizer and water dilutes that subtle, tart-sweet flavor. If you use irrigation, make sure it delivers two inches of water a week to new shrubs, and 1 inch a week to established bushes. Don’t overfeed, but use a combination of compost mulch and a slow-release organic fertilizer to enjoy the fullest-flavored fruit. Fertilizers that will mildly increase soil acidity include cottonseed meal, feather meal, and fertilizer blends made for rhododendrons and azaleas.

A Blueberry Edible Hedge

Blueberries can be planted as close as 3 feet apart to form solid hedgerows, which also makes them slightly easier to net so birds can’t capture the entire crop. You can also space them 6-8 feet apart as free-standing individual specimens. If planted in rows, allow  about 8 feet between the rows, especially if you use a large mower to keep a grassy path well shorn (though better paths could be made from wood chips or shavings).

If you’ve got ample space, consider growing Chandler, a tall (5-7 feet) shrub that produces huge, plump berries with great flavor. Blueray (4-6 feet) is an old-time blueberry with excellent vigor and fine flavor. Highbush blueberries bear up to eight quarts of fruit a year. For a long and productive season, grow some early, mid- and late fruiters. If you plan to make pies and freeze extra berries, plant three or more bushes per person, otherwise two each should do.

Light Pruning Makes For Stronger Plants

Blueberry shrubs need little pruning beyond the removal of dead, broken, or weak stems. In spring, trim off any aging, unproductive branches, making room for sturdy new branches to develop. In late winter, trim back productive branches by 25% to encourage new fruit bearing shoots to form.

Where space is limited or deer are rampant, grow your blueberries in containers. Mine are on a deck almost 20 feet above the ground, and so far, no deer has managed to reach them. Compact blueberry varieties will be happiest in large containers filled with slightly acidic, moisture-retentive soil.

Potting Soil For Acid Lovers

Since bagged potting mixes are pH neutral, I blend my own slightly acid garden soil with aged dairy manure and compost. You can also use Booster Blend, a mix produced by Seattle’s Cedar Grove, which combines compost with composted dairy manure.

As I have probably made abundantly clear in previous posts, I never use peat, which is destructively strip-mined and devoid of nutritional value. Dairy manure is an excellent replacement, especially from dairies that don’t use Bovine Growth Hormone or routine doses of antibiotics and steroids. My favorite source for pit-washed dairy manure is Moo Doo For You (see below), but most Agricultural Extension services offer manure Hotlines for sourcing local manures.

Unlike peat, aged dairy manure makes an excellent soil amendment and top dressing. So does coir fiber, a byproduct of the coconut industry. Wiry and tough, yet fine textured, coir breaks down slowly, providing soil nutrients and improving soil texture for several years (or more).

Big Pot, Big Harvest

Give blueberries large containers to accommodate their  wide, questing roots. Plant new blueberries in pots that hold at least 5 gallons. After two years, pot them up into half-barrels, where they can remain indefinitely. To keep them happy, topdress with aged compost each spring and fall, and feed moderately from spring through late summer as outlined below.

Good container candidates include Tophat, the smallest blueberry bush, and Northsky, which tastes like wild berries. Northblue and Northcountry are both 2-footers that thrive in containers for many years. If the container is large enough (think half-barrel), so will my favorite, Sunshine Blue, an evergreen blueberry with silvery blue foliage that looks lovely all year round.

Those in Western Washington can get beautiful aged, dairy manure from:

Moo Doo For You
Mark Vukich
(206) 271-6490
(253) 939-0627

Posted in composting, fall/winter crops, Garden Prep, Growing Berry Crops, Nutrition, Pets & Pests In The Garden, Pruning, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Deadly Days In The Garden

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Ann Lovejoy
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Dealing with Deer and Other Pests In Victorian Times

I recently attended a delightful Victorian festival in Port Townsend, Washington. I delivered several gardening talks to beautifully garbed audiences, male and female, decked out in marvelous clothes appropriate to various Victorian periods. I was not in period costume myself, but deeply enjoyed the chance to talk a bit about one of my favorite periods in garden history.

One of my talks was about Victorian pest controls, notably with respect to deer. Interestingly, in Victorian times, deer were as often preserved as deterred. Because much of England was still forested, there was plenty of habitat and food gardens were usually walled, which served to keep deer out.

Darling, Dainty Deer??

In fact, deer parks were a common adjunct to a sweeping country estate, and many a family seat was graced by a herd of particularly pretty deer, which were often fed during hard winters and late springs. Gamekeepers carefully tended deer, along with the birds that Victorian gentlemen found so entertaining to shoot. Gamekeepers spent a tremendous amount of time and energy trying to foil the poachers who wanted to feed their hungry families. Old folk songs like The Keeper Would A-Hunting Go suggest that at times, the keepers were as hungry as the poachers.

However, Victorian gardeners struggled wit garden pests, just as we do today, and their pest controls were direct and simple. During the mid- to late Victorian period, a boatload of toxins were developed, giving them an almost incredible arsenal of deadly poisons to play with. Indeed, the lethal ingredients found in typical garden sheds inspired several generations of murderers as well as mystery writers.

Deadly Mysteries

Pharmacies sold poisons in glass bottles marked “poison” with no other identification, making “mistakes” dead simple. Anyone could buy arsenic or strychnine for killing rats and mice, then absent mindedly use it to remove a nagging spouse. You could buy half an ounce of odorless, tasteless arsenic for a penny at any pharmacy, though eventually purchasers had to sign a poison register.

The Victorians didn’t stop at poisoning pests and each other, they also poisoned themselves. Laudanum, an over the counter herbal cure for sleeplessness, nerves, or stress, was used especially for ladies of delicate sensibility, as well as for fussy babies. Described as an herbal remedy, it is made from poppies, and contains every form of opiate, from morphine to cocaine to heroin. Incidentally, laudanum is still legally prescribed in the US, though possibly not for long…

Dying From Dye

Paris Green, a dye containing copper arsenate, was used in garden sprays, wallpapers, clothing and even children’s toys, and many people died. Early Bayer ads touted both the brand new aspirin and pure heroin, promoted as ‘the sedative for coughs’. In the US, cocaine was sold over the counter until 1914 and was commonly found in products like children’s toothache drops, dandruff remedies and medicinal tonics. Coca wine combined wine with cocaine were quite popular. I understand why; In Costa Rica, I chewed coca leaves, along with cola nuts and the result was fabulous: there was no high, but nothing in my aging body hurt. Wow!

Today, all plant poisons are detectable in an autopsy or bloodwork, but back then, no such luck. Thus, many mysteries of the day were based on unknown toxins like South American curare, but there was plenty of fatal stuff in every Victorian garden, from foxgloves to datura. However, when dealing with garden pests, gardeners mostly stuck with the classic four deadly plants; hellebore, aconite, nicotine, and hemlock. Extracts of all of these noxious plants were cheerfully sprayed on everything from rose bushes to rutabegas to kill off cutworms and caterpillars, slugs and snails, molds and mildews, or whatever was giving trouble at the time. Eventually people began to notice that folks who used these sprays often ended up as dead as the pests they were fighting. That’s not surprising, since heritage pesticides often included mercury and arsenic as well as strychnine, nicotine, and copper.

Dealing With Deer

Anyway, back to the deer. I was impressed to see how tame the Port Townsend deer are, grazing gardens happily as cars or people pass them by. My own yard is visited daily by a small herd of deer, and despite all the published lists of plants deer don’t eat, wherever deer populations are high, there are very few plants that won’t be browsed. For years, I planted the outer areas of my gardens with strongly scented foliage plants, finding that deer rarely ate them. These days, I’m noticing that, while adult deer seldom graze on intensely flavorful herbs like scented geraniums, rosemary, and lavender, young deer will eat anything, at least for a while.

I can’t promise that my advice will rid you of their presence, but I can offer some ideas for making deer and other pests less welcome. As an example, Victorian critter chasers consisted of slim wands like fishing rods, with twine that held a potato stuck with feathers bobbing at the end. They used fly paper in greenhouses and in vegetable gardens to capture aphids, thrips, and whitefly, and painted wooden apples red, then coated them with glue and hung them in orchards to catch apple maggots, all of which work very well indeed even today.

Fancy Fences And Male Pee

For deer, Victorians who couldn’t afford brick or stone garden walls made wooden fences just as the Romans did, using a series of poles in 3 heights (5- 6- and 7-feet) set 6 inches apart. (Prince Charles has one at Highgate). Today, we have many kinds of deer fencing, from heavy duty netting to stockade wire as well as wood. Where fencing is impractical, we can try an ever-changing array of tricks to keep deer away. They quickly habituate to whatever we use, so it’s most effective to rotate several different techniques. Some folks swear by smelly repellants, from soap to human hair to stinky clothing dryer sheets and rotting salmon.

Male predator urine is generally very effective. Bottles of wolf or coyote urine are inhumanely collected from caged animals, but many of us keep male predators around the home. Teenaged boy pee works best, and they often think it’s hilarious to whizz around the garden. It turns to nitrogen, so that’s all good. Collected pee can be placed in plastic flower bud picks, with a piece of cotton rope for a wick, and set around the garden, a charmingly intimate touch.

Berry Traps

Deer love strawberries and I have experimented with many ways to keep deer out of my berry beds. One of the more successful techniques I’ve used is to buy big bargain-sized packets of skinny bamboo kebab skewers and poke them thickly, pointy side up, in amongst the berries. It works even better if you thread some of the stinking dryer sheets on the skewers.

Some folks place salt licks to entice deer away from their gardens. Others keep aggressive male dogs, but I’ve found that a scarecrow water spray device is very effective if moved often. Also Skydd, made from blood meal (sourced from steer, no mad cow) really works. Finally, I’ve had excellent results using bittering agents which make plant foliage smell and taste bad to deer.

The Chocolate Cure

Bitrex spray is mixed with a clear latex carrier that coats stems and foliage. Repellex systemic tablets are placed in soil when planting, repel not only deer but rodents, gophers, rabbits and other herbivores, providing up to two years of protection for roses, lilies, and so forth, according to field studies performed at Rutgers and other testing institutes.

As an added bonus, the best antidote to the bitter taste (which transfers readily to hand and mouth) is chocolate! Con: It takes about a month for the bittering agents to enter the plant’s system fully. Thus, bulbs, roots, shoots, and foliage may need physical protection during that window of vulnerability. Also, if not used according to package directions (tablets inserted about 3 inches into the soil), the product may not be as effective. In addition, if this extremely bitter stuff gets on your hands, it inevitably reaches your mouth, where it can take a day or two to wear off, Chocolate! More chocolate!

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