Keeping Your Fruit Crops Healthy
Unlike vegetable crops, which share many of the same pests, fruit plants are affected by a wide variety of insects and diseases. Because fruit are borne on so many types of plants, they have a wide range of cultural requirements as well. However, regardless of the crop you are growing, there are basic steps you can take to help to control insects and diseases.
Full Sun is a must for nearly all fruit crops; even 1 or 2 hours of shade a day may result in smaller crops and less-flavored fruits. Well-drained soil is also essential - if you find that drainage is a problem, then plant in raised beds. A location near the top of a gentle slope is ideal. A north-facing slope will help delay spring flowering, which is a plus where frost damage is common.
While good air circulation helps reduce disease problems, blustery winds in open areas or on hilltop can make training difficult, knock fruit off trees early, or topple trees altogether. To encourage growth, space plants far enough apart so they won’t grow into each other or nearby plants.
Planning Fruit and Berry Trees
Fruit trees and berry trees are a long-term investment. Before you plant, learn about the types of fruit suitable to your local climate. It is important to establish sturdy, well-placed main branches while trees are young. Prune apples, pears, grapes, and berry trees in late winter or early spring before they break dormancy. Prune peaches, plums and cherries just after the buds burst in spring, when they are less prone to canker infection.
Fruit trees such as pear, apple, lemon, orange and the like, are lovely enough to be used as shade trees on the front lawn. Nut trees are often planted 10 feet apart each way, but better results are likely to be obtained at twelve feet apart. The intervening spaces may be filled with gooseberries, currants, or raspberries, or even vegetable crops, until the nut trees require all the ground to themselves.
Some Tips For Harvesting Your Fruit
Currants: In some gardens there is a practice of leaving red-currants to grow uncut; people say that they crop more heavily. However, the voice of experience proves that the fruit loses color and size; the bushes become lanky and flop about so that the fruits are mostly on the ground, splashed by rain and made easier prey for the birds.
A good tip is to cover a few currant bushes with burlap, so you can eat currants in August. Draping the bushes shades them, and you slow down the ripening process and delay the harvest.
Pears: Pears that ripen very soon after gathering are much improved by being taken from the tree before they are completely mature. Late-ripening varieties should stay on as long as possible. Some ripen better in a dark room, while others are best in full light. Check your variety to see what is best for you.
Many people are not aware of the great benefit of mulching, and the rapid and powerful effects of liquid manure. This treatment was tried on some dwarf pears - one tree, five years from starting and four feet high, bore 83 pears in one season!
Pickled Peaches: Peaches can be pickled and are very nice this way. Try the following recipe:
Pour sugar and vinegar into a large saucepan, and stir to dissolve sugar. Add cinnamon sticks and cloves, and bring to a boil. Cover and boil for about 5 minutes. Strain out the cloves and cinnamon sticks, or you can leave them in for a stronger flavor.
Pack peaches into hot sterile 1 pint jars to within 1 inch of the rim. Fill each jar with syrup to within 1/2 inch from the top. Wipe rims with a clean dry cloth, and seal with new lids and screwbands. Process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes. Stores for about 6 months. Enjoy!
Landscaping Your Flowering Plants
To grow great-looking, healthy blooms, take a look at your garden soil. Flowers grown in poor soil make for sad plants. Always have a little pile of composted manure in some outer corner. This is very convenient when you may be planting just a few plants at a time. A pile of manure is priceless when it comes to soil improvement. Use an inch of this black gold as mulch around your flowers each year and watch them flourish.
A Deeper Shade of Blues …
Landscape gardeners use warm colors - red, orange,and yellow - to make objects look as though they are coming forward. They also use cool colors - blue and violet - to suggest distance. You can create the same effect in your flower beds. Purple of a rich bluish hue is one of the colors which bind instead of separate, and purple becomes an excellent focal color in the garden.Gray-leaved plants create a quiet tone which seems to soothe all the conflicting elements of the garden, and creates a tranquil unity and accord. Blue lyme grass is one of the best gray-leaved plants for the border, even though its leaves are usually described as blue. Whether you see it as blue or gray, this grass is an excellent ornamental that’s hardy from Zones 4-10. It is not fussy about soil and will grow in either sun or light shade.
A garden filled with shades of green can be extremely attractive, if you use a variety of plants and shapes to add interest. Try growing Virginia creeper, Ostrich fern, Solomon’s seal, Jack-in-the-pulpit, Hostas, and Lady’s mantle. It is said that green is the last color to be appreciated in a garden, but even the Japanese, who are so sensitive to color, use many green leaves in their flower art.
A quote from Loring Underwood in A Garden Diary and Country Home Guide, 1908, reads:
Did you ever think how monotonous and gaudy flowers would seem without green foliage to set off their beauty? Have all the green things you can in the garden, particularly at the back of flower beds and borders, and take as much pains in protecting foliage of plants from insects as you do flowers.
Contrasting Colors to Cure Your Garden Doldrums
A white border can be a delight in any garden, especially in the evening, and also in the daytime. A sprinkling of white in any flower bed is what the diamond is in the mineral world. If you take a tall jar and fill it with water, add some tall blue flower, (Delphinium) and then add some white Canterbury bells, you will be pleasantly surprised at how the colors just spring out when the white is added. If you want to harmonize any two colors together, just add white.
There are many gardeners who like the “one-color” garden, but they often seem to be monotonous in effect. They are seldom truly harmonious and fail to give the pleasure that is often derived from a garden full of color. In many ways too, the lack of color can exclude many types of wonderful flowers that cannot play a part in such a color scheme. Think of all the pinks, blue and yellows that give such satisfaction to a color palette.
That being said, the joy of gardening is that we can all be free to express ourselves, be whimsical, ardent and most of all enjoy the fruits of our labor!
Buying and Maintaining Healthy Bulbs
In order to have a good display of bulbs in your garden, you first have to make sure that the bulbs you are going to rely on for that display are healthy.
Buy only dormant bulbs that show little if any, root development and no top growth other than a pale fat bud. (Lilies, however, are never really dormant; their bulbs often have fleshy roots attached.)
Look for bulbs that have their papery skins (called tunics) intact. These contain natural compounds that inhibit disease and premature sprouting. Choose bulbs that are packaged in materials that permit air to enter, the package should have some kind of ventilation to achieve this. If the bulbs are packed in plastic bags, then they will often rot.
Select bulbs that are firm with few wrinkles and no soft spots. You may find that healthy bulbs seem heavier than their size suggests. Avoid bulbs with cuts, dark or water-soaked spots, or colored or scabby areas.
Tips for Planting Bulbs to Create a Beautiful, Healthy Display
Try planting your bulbs in drifts. A drift is a thin, longish line of plants, drawn diagonally across a straight border or placed in a slender bow in a long bed. It spreads the flowers in such a way that even the sparest bloom will seem abundant. Twelve to eighteen plants make a sustaining drift that gives continuity to a border. Fifty to a hundred bulbs make a wonderful drift, but you can also attain a similar look with fewer bulbs. A drift is inclined to draw the eye from one end of it to another, and works really well when one type of flower is featured.
Handle bulbs well when planting to avoid injuries that provide access to diseases, and remove problem plants quickly to keep pests and disease from spreading. Always let bulb foliage die back naturally to allow food production for growth and flowering in subsequent years. Clean up flower beds in fall to remove plant debris that often shelters pests and diseases.
Healthy bulbs and good culture go a long way toward successful plantings. Happy gardening!
