Tags
apples, apricot jam, apricots, bags for apples, beans, codling moth, desert gardening, fruit trees, gardening, greenhouse, organic pest control, peaches, pears, planting bare root trees, plums, potatoes, spring weather, starting seeds
Whoa- leave town for a week and Spring sneaks in and gets all kinds of stuff going! We just returned from a week of cavorting on the Colorado Plateau, and spent Saturday trying to catch up in the yard and garden.
While we were gone my package from the Tree Fairy came…or rather, from Raintree Nursery: a new Plum Tree. It came Monday; I talked to my daughter (who stayed home) Thursday and she mentioned that I had a package and she’d brought it inside. Yikes! I told her to put it back outside in the shade. I didn’t want the tree trying to wake up and grow in our nice warm house. Unfortunately, it was pretty nice and warm outside, too. I opened it up and it looked dormant enough, and well packed too.
In the past I’ve bought trees exclusively from Trees of Antiquity (13 trees so far), but I went with Raintree this time because they carried these hopefully awesome little apple socks that you can put on your fruit to keep the codling moths away.
The package says ‘maggot barriers’, which is a different creature from the codling moth, but I’m hoping that they will work.
The tree was packed very well; the roots were still wet, appeared to be in good shape. Here’s the root ball after I got the paper off:
Now you dig a nice big hole, mix the existing soil with an equal measure of potting soil, compost, or similar (the idea being to help the tree, but not so much it is unwilling to spread its roots into the local soil), and place the tree in the hole such that the graft will end up above the soil level.
This tree (and all my others) are ‘semi-dwarf’ trees, meaning the regular tree has been grafted on to a root stock that will keep it from growing to full height. If you plant the graft below the soil line, the actual tree stock may take root and produce a full size tree.
This was also seed starting day. We might have one or two more freezes (our last freeze the previous spring was May 1st), so I start the seeds in cups and move them into the garden at the beginning of May.
I also planted potatoes; they are already sprouting, so I will just have to watch the weather and be ready to cover things up if a freeze comes. Usually our spring freezes are just barely below freezing, no lower than 30 degrees, so covering works well.
AND, finally, here is an update on the fruit trees:
Tonight it will be about 37 or so; then it warms a little, dips into the high 30’s later this week. No problem. This is always the tricky time, wondering if some freeze will come along that wipes out all those precious, beautiful blossoms. Last year the apricots, which usually commit suicide this time of year by blooming early, got all their blooming done before the final freeze, and we had a bumper crop. I still have jam from last year, and as I said, I don’t even grow apricots. If all goes well I am going to be hip deep in apples come fall, which is fine with me. Apple pie, apple cider, apple butter, and fresh eating until I can’t stand it anymore. Yum!