North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Kieran &/or Donna" <holycow@frontiernet.net>]

I want to send this in to Pomona, but maybe some of you would like to add your comments, (with your email addresses too).  I expect all you in the East are suffering from cabin fever and would like to think about summertime themes.  (This last batch of weather missed us, except it's pretty cold.  I do remember some horror story of a son who got the bright idea of deep feeding some mulberry tree.....  Anyway, further stories, further interpretations of the stories, whatever you think might be relevant.  I think we expect Pomona to tell us about varieties and local experiences, but there is universal information that can help anyone.  I remember T.O. Warren's article on grafting successes and failures, and at first I was disappointed in what he said, it was too simple, yet in the end it was the best advice I've ever received on grafting.  He said have strong rootstock, healthy scions, and a sharp knife.  I was expecting some kind of great secret....     Donna

THE BEST APPLES, EVER

Donna Hudson holycow@frontiernet.net

 

A woman I used to correspond with told me this story, she’s not a Nafexer or even much of a gardener.  When Betty and her husband bought their house in Virginia they planted 3 apple trees in the front yard.  The trees grew well and in a few years began to bear bumper crops of the most wonderful perfect apples anyone had ever seen.  Soon the neighbors began asking their secret, but they didn’t have one.  This neighborhood had the usual assortment of stubborn trees that bore little fruit or imperfect fruit, so the envious neighbors went out and bought the same varieties Betty had, but those trees did no better than the rest of them.  Finally after 15 glorious years of having an apple showcase in their front yard, they discovered that they had a leak in their sewer line.  The glorious crops ended soon after it was repaired. 

There is of course a moral to this story, (besides the possibility that a person could have a sewer leak accidentally on purpose if they worked at it a little.)  And that is that the average fruit nut with average fruit trees in their average backyard, could do better than average with proper nutrition and enough water.  Yes, it helps to plant the right varieties on the right rootstocks and to have fortuitously bought a lot containing 15 ft of Iowa topsoil.  But most of us don’t have ideal conditions, and most Americans don’t have a lot of room where they can plant lots of everything and neglect them to death like I can.  I would think that more of you readers are stuck with what’s in your little backyard, and you’d like all your fruit trees to be super trees.  So let’s look at a few more stories. 

One July a friend told me that she’d canned 5 quarts of pickled peppers.  I asked how many plants she had, just 3.  I had 2 dozen plants, and nothing to can yet, so I asked her secret.  She said on vacation one day they’d seen a house with one tomato plant covering the whole end of the house up to the eaves, and loaded with tomatoes from top to bottom.  Her husband asked the owner how he’d done it, and he said, “Miracle-Gro, every single day.”  So that’s what they’d been doing with their 3 pepper plants.  Now I’m into organic gardening, but I want people to succeed, and I want them to be so impressed by how much food they can grow that they’ll be hooked for life, so I recommend this to beginners.

At a garden club meeting one time a successful market gardener said that we spend a lot of time talking about the top 6” of soil, and maybe not enough talking about deeper down.  He’d seen an avocado grove planted where a coconut grove had been destroyed by a hurricane.  The owner had laid the trunks flat side by side and bulldozed dirt over them.  He said that it was very obvious which section of the grove was planted over the coconut trunks, and which wasn’t.  He saw this effect again at an experiment station in the Ozarks where they were trying to grow grapes in the heavy clay with very little success.  Finally in desperation they took a ditch digger and made trenches 4’ deep which they filled with sawdust, and then the vines would grow. 

            And finally, a Nafexers story.  This person had the same variety of apple on both MM111 and on M7.  He said the 111 tree made big perfect fruit, and the 7 tree made stunted little things.   I would suspect wooly apple aphids, because I have seen trees runted out by them here.  But looking more closely, I would say that MM111 could deliver water and nutrient to the top of the tree better than a shallow rooted semidwarf stock could do, especially if the SD stock was having it’s life sucked out. 

So what do we see in these stories?  In the first 2 we are looking at nutrients supplied with plenty of water.  In the sewer line story there would have been trace minerals as well as NPK.  Nitrogen was probably not too high compared to P and K, and in the latter stories the wood in the ground probably held N and allowed it to be released slowly.  All of these stories have to do with water and nutrients down in the root zone. 

Each of these stories contains control plants to contrast the experimental ones against.  The neighbor’s trees, and later on the experimental trees without their leaky sewer line.  My pepper plants vs my friend’s, the grapevines before and after the ditches full of sawdust, the avocado trees with and without rotting palm trunks under them.  We all have plants that are already our controls, all we need to do now is make changes to see if the plants respond. 

There are a few precautions to take.  Don’t stimulate late growth if you live in a climate with treacherous winters and possible sudden cold snaps.  Especially avoid this if your apple trees are on MM106.  Nitrogen and rapid growth are probably not what your trees need anyway.  Manure often contains too much N and can delay young trees cropping or throw mature trees into growth spurts instead of making more fruit.  Trees are more likely to need phosphate or potassium or trace minerals or just to have the soil loosened up so it holds water, nutrients, and trace minerals better. 

I would say, “You can hardly go wrong adding organic matter,” but the world has changed in recent years, and yes you can go wrong adding organic matter.  Hay or straw that was sprayed with Picloram, Clopyralid, or Aminopyralid will damage garden plants, and we don’t know what it might do to trees.  Manure from animals that have been fed hay that was sprayed with these herbicides will also kill plants.  These herbicides have been temporarily banned in England where thousands of gardens were destroyed by “killer compost”, and the stuff can go on killing or distorting plants for several years.  Something far more ubiquitous and entrenched is Roundup, which it turns out is not the harmless breaks-down-fast stuff they told us it was.  Roundup doesn’t actually kill weeds, rather it ties up minerals so that plants can’t protect themselves from diseases.  I will not bring home grass clippings unless I can see the lawn they came from with weeds in it.