My Half Acre of Paradise

Early Saturday morning, before dawn, our Lacebark Elm (Ulmus parvifolia) suffered a major break from some heavy wind. We’ve had wind like this many times, but there was a weak crotch where two major scaffold branches were growing in too deep of a V-shape. When branches grow with narrow crotch angles, they end up with “included bark” which means a line of bark is sandwiched betwen the branches as they grow thicker and thicker. This line prevents the two branches from being knitted together, and it creates a major weakness that someday can turn into this kind of break. It’s heartbreaking to have this happen to a tree we’ve loved so much. It will survive, but I’m not sure if the remaining branch is strong enough where the break is to continue supporting all the growth on that side of the tree. We might end up with another break and another major section of the tree missing.

On a brighter note, check out these beautiful Hibiscus moscheutos blooms. These plants are in large pots on my deck, and they make a great accent there.

My nectarines are almost ripe! I actually picked one yesterday and ate it today, but it was still just a bit green. They should all be ripe in a week or so. Tasted good, even though it wasn’t completely ripe! I’ll also throw in a shot of our second veggie garden on the side of our basement walkout. Those zucchini plants sure are getting huge! And finally, here’s a closeup of some Caryopteris shrub blooms. It’s nice having some things that bloom late in the season like these. They add new life to the garden at the end of summer.

Lots of things to share, and I think I’ll just use the photos as my guide:

My Clematis ‘Ville de Lyon’ is beginning its bloom season now. It will hit its peak probably a week from now, and I’ll post another photo later. I’m having a little trouble with the clematis, because after this time of year, the trees by it are leafed out and start to give it too much shade. I don’t know if it can handle transplanting, but I don’t have another great place to put it anyway.

First roses of the season. This is some unknown variety of floribunda rose — it was supposed to be ‘Pink Simplicity,’ and it’s in the middle of a long hedge of ‘Pink Simplicity’ roses. But it turns out to be a case of mistaken identity by the nursery, and it flowers earlier than the rest of the hedge. One day, I need to move it and replace it with the right rose, but I keep debating whether to replace all the simplicities with something else. Oh well, not this year.

These are ‘Lapins’ cherries. I have two trees, and this one is acting a little funny this year. A lot of fruit has fallen off of it in the past two weeks, but I read online that this is common with many cherries, because they set much more fruit than they can really bear. But now, on this tree, many of the cherries are turning red too soon. They usually ripen around the Fourth of July. I’m not sure what to make of it. I’ll try eating them when they ripen and see if they taste normal. The other tree’s cherries are still all green, with just a few getting a hint of blush. I’ll keep you posted on what happens. I sprayed the cherry trees last Saturday with malathion, and I also hit the apple trees and the trunk of the nectarine (to kill/repel any borers that might be lurking).

This is my favorite place in the garden for rest and meditation, although I certainly don’t do enough of that. I like how the shrubs are growing through the benches and it’s getting that wild, natural look. But still, I might have to trim back those shrubs (they’re Alpine Currants), because my wife likes things neater. And the branches may get damaged when we sit there, anyway.

My Jonathan (left) and Granny Smith (right) apples are developing well, I think. I was supposed to pick off at least half the blossoms this year to try to force it back to annual blooming and bearing. But I was busy and late, so I just went out on Saturday and snipped off a bunch of the little fruit, hoping that saves some of the trees’ energy to promote next year’s blossoms. I hope I wasn’t too late. There were a lot of little apples that fell off just when I touched them, so they wereready to abort much of the fruit anyway. I hope they bloom and bear next year! I LIVE for apple pie from my own apples in the fall!

I got my 10 tomatoes all caged on the weekend. Those wild things!

Going clockwise: The salvias are beginning their bloom now. This is the ‘East Friesland’ variety. My ‘Nearly Wild’ rose is also just starting its bloom. These shrubs are kinda cool together, with the fine texture of the ‘Antony Waterer’ Spirea in the foreground and the lighter-colored, bigger-leaved Golden Vicary Privets behind them. My plain green Japanese Maple is getting quite graceful. I hope it doesn’t get verticilium wilt like my red one in the front of my house is getting. I should post a photo of the red one. I had to prune out a lot of dead wood last week, but it’s still acceptable. Next, the bees are all over the raspberries these days. You can just sit there, close your eyes, and marvel at all the buzzing you hear. I’m looking forward to those berries on vanilla ice cream in about three weeks! Finally, just a shot of the lower part of my backyard. I’m still loving that arbor. Going to plant two grapes (Himrod — I have them in pots on the deck) to grow on it this year, but I worry a little that the one of the north side may not get enough sun. When it grows tall enough to be on top of the arbor it’ll be fine, so I hope it grows fast.

That’s enough for now. Happy gardening to you!

OK, well I’ve been a bit slow to get into the groove this spring, mostly because I’ve been working hard to finish my basement construction, and now I’m almost done. Carpet goes in this week, and I should now have much more time for gardening. What a relief! I’ve been working on that basement project for about 14 months, trying to do most of it myself.

I’m going to catch up on several weeks of photos in this post. I’ll start with our big April 15 snow storm — I took these shots the next morning. It was huge! Some areas near us got 13 inches, while we got around four on the ground. In some of those communities, a lot of tree branches broke from the weight of all the snow. You can see in the one photo below how my birch tree was arching heavily from the snow.

One bummer in my backyard: one of my last two alpine firs (sometimes called subalpine fir) is dying. There’s really nothing I can do to save it now, I think. Larry Sagers (who was my master gardener teacher) says it’s showing the stress of something done wrong last year. He said it’s likely that I didn’t give it enough water last year, since these trees live at high altitudes in moist conditions. It probably got too dry last fall, and that doomed it. I do recall reading the advice that evergreens should be well-watered in the fall before it freezes, and I really should have taken that advice. You can also see that it was misshapen, because deer ate all the lower branches when it was younger.

So, here’s something amazing — one week after that big snow storm, the tulip festival started at Thanksgiving Point. I’m a volunteer there now and then, working to get my 40 hours of service done to earn my master gardener title. On that first day, only 30% of the tulips were in bloom, but then our master gardener class went for a tour on Thursday the 24th, and it was more than 60% in bloom. Here are some photos from that day.

A few of those shots are from the “Secret Garden” at Thanksgiving Point, which is really cool. I like the brick walls with Boston ivy growing on them, the wooden gates/doors, the arches with honeysuckle and climbing roses growing over them, and the cool, old-fashioned flowering quince shrub (with the salmon-red blooms above). That shot with all the people is our master gardener class (or most of us), with Karen Ashton, the founder of Thanksgiving Point Gardens, providing the guided tour. Karen was part of our class last fall, and it was fun to hear her personal insights on the gardens and stories about how they were developed.

The tulip festival is over, but I’d bet if you go to the gardens this week, you’ll still see incredible flowerbeds, about 80% in bloom (it was 90% last Thursday). It’s worth it to go see!

Now, onto my garden and what’s blooming this week. My Granny Smith apple (below) is blooming very well this year. I also have a Jonathan apple and it’s a little slower but starting to bloom, too. You may recall that I had no blossoms on these last year. The advice from Larry Sagers was to pluck off about half of the blossoms now, so the tree doesn’t spend too much energy producing fruit and has enough energy to start producing the microscopic beginnings of next year’s flower buds. I’m supposed to do this blossom thinning for two years and then it should be back to normal. I need to get out and do that this week.

Here are a few more things in bloom right now.

Starting from the top left, those are:
1st row: close shot of Kwanzan Cherry tree blossoms (ornamental tree), Vinca minor groundcover, and blossoms forming on leatherleaf Viburnum.
2nd row: Candytuft (Iberis) groundcover, a close-ish shot of flowering cherry (or sand cherry) shrubs, and Rockcress or Arabis.
3rd row: close shot of Prairiefire Crabapple blossoms (just starting to open this week), some Iceland poppies, and some hyacinths (man, they smell great!) with tulips. I planted the hyacinths by my front walkway to give that pleasant aroma as you approach the house.

And now, one final photo. This is Brunera, or Siberian Bugloss (don’t ask about the name - I have no idea what “bugloss” is supposed to mean!). It’s also called false forget-me-not or perennial forget-me-not:

My beautiful Japanese maple in front of my house has a disease or something. I’m worried about it. This one main branch and all the smaller branches that shoot off of it are dying. It started with some leaves turning red about a month ago, and now they’ve shriveled up. Some of the smaller twigs turned black, but the thicker part of the branch is still green. I’m going to post on GardenWeb to see what kind of answers I can get.

The rest of the tree looks just fine, as shown in this photo. What should I do? Should I cut off that branch as far down the tree as I can go? How will I know the disease or pest hasn’t started attacking other parts of the tree? Is there a pesticide that could help inoculate the rest of the tree against whatever is harming this branch?

I’ve tried to raise maybe a dozen Japanese maple seedlings over the past two seasons, and almost all have died. I’m down to only one left now — one just died this week. I don’t know if I’m giving them too much water or not enough. Or if they need more humidity or more shade, or some fertilizer, or what. All those cool little seedlings I grew last year died; most of them because I left them outside too long at the start of winter.

So, I posted in the maples forum at GardenWeb.com to see if I can get some advice. I’ll follow up here with their advice soon.

After seeking input last year on getting my Pink Simplicity roses to bloom better, I decided to do two things this year:

1. Give them a lot more water. I’ve been putting a soaker hose on them for an hour or two once a week, sometimes skipping a week, but trying for once a week. I’ve been doing this since early April, when they first began leafing out. I also opened up some drip emitters that I had shut off before, because I had thought back then that they were getting too much water. This advice to give more water came from folks on the Gardenweb.com rose forum when I showed them photos of the little flowerbuds drying up and falling off. The consensus was that our dry air here was causing the shrubs to prematurely abort those buds at a joint where they are later meant to separate from the plant after the flowers are spent.
2. Give them more fertilizer. I’ve been spraying them with Miracle-Gro about once a week, missing a week here and there. It’s just a quick wetting of the leaves with the fertilizer, using it as a foliar feeding, not a soil soaking.

It’s working fairly well, because they’re now all blooming, including two that get shaded by my nectarine tree, which have almost never bloomed in the past. It still took a long time for the first bloom wave — it didn’t happen until just this last week or two. But there are many, many flowerbuds still developing, and it looks like I’ll have a strong, continued bloom season. I’m still disappointed that they grow so tall before they bloom. I cut them back to around two feet high in the spring, but they still got six feet tall again before blooming. Here are some photos from this week:

I’ve been waiting to harvest the Granny Smith apples, because they haven’t been ripening well this year. It could be a number of factors, including the spider mites that attacked the leaves this year, probably making it less productive of sugars, and it could be that our fall got really cold in mid-September and stayed that way until about two weeks ago. These are a late-ripening apple variety, and I’ve heard some say that Grannies don’t do well in Utah because they’re so late. But in all the past five years, they’ve always ripened fine if I just let them stay on the tree till late October.

Anyway, they look good, and many are large and juicy, but the juice doesn’t have as much “punch” as it is supposed to — it’s a little bland. And the skins seem a little thick and hard to me. I think they’ll be fine for baking, although I don’t really want to gain five pounds eating all the pies myself; no one else in my family seems to like cooked fruit! Yeah, I know they’re a bit weird, but hey, they’re family so you gotta love ‘em.

I’ve been laboring under the delusion that I was growing a Rocky Mountain Maple from seed I collected up American Fork Canyon. Well, I now think this is probably just a lousy Box Elder tree. It’s awfully similar to the small Box Elder I was growing in a pot until someone at GardenWeb identified it for me. Darn it! This isn’t what I wanted! When I was trying to sprout these seeds, I had the little pots outside. A Box Elder seed must have just fallen into the pot. What a bummer.

I posted the following on GardenWeb’s Rocky Mountain Forum:

I’ve NEVER had a problem with mites like I do now. Is it caused by this unusually hot, dry summer we’ve had? Maybe my trees have had more water stress in this weather, making them more susceptible?

Here’s what’s happening:

Starting in June, I got spider mites really bad on my Granny Smith apple and somewhat less on my Jonathan apple. I’ve been spraying every couple weeks with malathion to prevent codling moth and other pests, but I don’t know if it’s working very well for the mites. I know soap can help, but I’d think malathion would be more effective, don’t you?. Any more serious chemicals I should try?

I also have an Arctic blue willow shrub suffering from mites, and since it’s not a food plant, I could use a systemic insecticide on that one.

Also, one of my young (3-yr old) cherry trees has been hit by mites, too. Not as bad as the one apple, but suffering moderate damage. Then, it suddenly got yellow leaves and dropped a lot of them. It didn’t look like iron chlorosis — I thought maybe it was too dry, so I soaked it with a hose (it only gets drip irrigation from one of those star-pattern sprayer things, and it doesn’t cover the whole root zone). Anyway, then it dropped more leaves, making me wonder if it was actually too wet rather than too dry (after a couple rainstorms last week, it dropped more leaves). Now, it’s growing a new crop of leaves on some of the branch tips. Anyone know how much water cherry trees need? I’m pretty sure I’ve stressed it with inadequate water, which made the mites attack more. I really need to keep this tree alive!

I have this small row of five Hibiscus syriacus shrubs, and one of them has been growing funny the past two years. It doesn’t grow much, and its leaves and flowers are unusually small. It looks a little pale compared to its neighbors, too. Here are some photos:

See how short it is compared to the others above. But it has lots of flowerbuds, and although the leaves are slightly dull, it’s not that bad in terms of color. Doesn’t look cholorotic to me.

But see how the leaves are so much smaller than the normal leaf from the neighboring shrub? And the flowers are much smaller, too. The flowers look the same, just miniature, so I think it’s not a different variety of Hibiscus.

Anyway, I’m posting something about this on GardenWeb.com to see what answers I can find.