The garden is exploding with growth! Several new fruit tree plantings + 1 removal, exciting native habitat plant discoveries, and the slugs tricked me again on some of my veg plantings.
In the fruit garden
Check out how pretty this unfortunately named Black Boy peach blooms! Unfortunately, it did not set very well this year. Again. This year I had excellent fruit set on all of my other stone fruit trees that are mature, so something is up with this variety. And the fruit I got last year didn’t taste very good. Sour without much aroma. Some maggoty insect had made its way into the stem end of the fruits, super unappealing, and despite my best efforts I couldn’t identify the sucker.
I’m currently in the process of removal. I known I could graft another variety onto this tree, but peaches and nectarines are notoriously difficult in this climate. In part due to peach leaf curl. You can find curl resistant varieties, but then you have another major disease issue to deal with: bacterial canker. I could also consider grafting other stone fruits onto this rootstock, but grafting is really difficult as you want to avoid doing so in the rainy season, or keep the tree under cover. Not something easy for me to do. You can find both of these diseases on the PNW Disease Handbook should you like to learn more. For me, it’s probably just easier to buy a tree if I want another variety.
New fruit additions to my garden, after doing all that research that I’ve posted extensively about:
Izu Persimmon
Early Bird Mulberry (I may have a slight mulberry addiction)
Desert King Fig
Early Laxton Plum
Early Golden Asian Plum
Howard Miracle Plum
Imperial Epineuse Plum
Krymskaya Quince
Price Grape
Jupiter Grape
Buffalo Grape
Interlaken Grape
Brooks Plum
Killarney Raspberry
Seascape Strawberry
Orcas European Pear has bloomed this year for the first time, and seems to have set some fruits. But I did notice an infection of Erineum mites, which I’ll have to treat during the dormant season with dormant oil spray.
Hosui Asian Pear bloomed quite profusely this year for the first time, in timing with my other Asian pears, but dang it doesn’t seem to have set any fruit. What a bummer. I did not have conditions for Blossom Blast this year, and I did check closely. Perhaps it is just young.
Seigyoku Asian Pear - a baby I planted last fall - scion decided to fail late in the game. Bummer. Guess I’ll have to try grafting. I am not lacking for Asian pears in my orchard, but I am lacking for a good winter storage pear. Considering Conference. Or Bosc, but Bosc is known to have a little scab issue that I’d rather avoid.
Apple trees that are fruiting for the first time for me this year: Golden Russet, Ashmead’s Kernel, Spitzenberg, and Yellow Bellflower. Exciting!
Methley Plum has set an incredible amount of fruit for me. I’ve never thinned it, but the fruit set is so incredibly heavy this year I may need to, in order to keep some of the branches from breaking off.
Currant Sawfly has been going after several of my Ribes species. The year before last they skeletonized the leaves my plants pretty good. Last year, I noticed on Facebook someone had seen Sawflies on their currants in May. I went and checked my plants and sure enough, found a few. I spent a few days squishing them and they didn’t come back - though they are reported to have 4 generations a year. Hoping to have the same result this year, but if they get out of control will spray reluctantly with spinosad.
Pluot - combo tree set well this year. Splash, of course, is the variety that went bonkers. I thinned it heavily already.
Noir of Spain Mulberry is fruiting in its second year in the ground for me. Hooray!
European Pear, combo - set heavily this year. I don’t know the varieties… I think they are Orcas and Rescue.
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In the veg garden
This year I’m trying to get better at growing quantities of paste tomatoes for freezing. I’m trialing Amish paste, Baylor Paste, Pomodoro Squisito, Pozzano, and Principe Borghese. They are all planted out now that the weather has warmed up some.
Slugs got to me again this year. Normally I try and wait to plant slug-sensitive crops until the ground has really warmed for things to grow fast beyond the prime slug munching seedling stage. This year, we had a very warm, dry spell. The slugs stayed away, so I went ahead and planted. Then a long came mild drenching rains for several days, and damn the slugs really came out while I wasn’t paying close attention. The completely defoliated some runner beans, lettuce, kale, and cauliflower. Luckily, not all of them. Next year, I hope I can contain my urge to plant early, so I’m not wasting my time.
Millennium asparagus has been cranking out the spears for me for a few weeks. While I like this variety, and think it tastes quite good, it doesn’t have that same wow factor that I have had in other home-grown asparagus. I planted a bunch of Jersey Knight from Territorial this year - but was super disappointed to have received very small crowns from them. If some of them don’t make it this year, I’ll be buying from elsewhere. I also planted a smaller bunch from Pine tree of a purple variety, and the crowns were huge! Bonus - they sell in bunches of only 10 instead of 25, which can be a little overwhelming to do all at once.
Another slug-resistant perennial veg I’ve harvested a couple of times is Good King Henry. I like this plant for its ease of growing as it survives on complete neglect. This year though, I’m noticing some bitterness, which came through in a dish I made that had a heavy dose of greens. I wonder if it was that hot dry period that prompted it to bolt. I’ll try harvesting it earlier next year to see if I get the same result.
In the habitat garden
Much of my work the last couple of weeks has been focused on blackberry and cherry removal, in part to get to an Ash tree, where I hung a trap for the ash borer as I discussed in one of my previous posts.
Sad to report that I’ve discovered that almost all of my alder trees are either dead or dying. After asking this question to multiple sources, I was finally given an answer as to what’s going on here.
The answer is a complex interaction involving climate change. Not necessarily drought - as these are grown in a stream - but the loss of water vapor in the air. The weakened trees are becoming targets for the usual suspects of alder pathogens: flea beetles, phytopthora, sunscald, etc. There is a fascinating webinar that our forestry county extension agent has on the topic, which you can watch here.
From my understanding, there really isn’t anything to be done. I wonder what the die-off is going to do to my water table. Yikes.
An exciting discovery for me this year would be a new-to-me violet species on my property!
Not only does this look way different than all other violets I have on my property, it has a bloom period that doesn’t overlap. So I knew I had something special here. After asking native plant enthusiasts and wildflower experts, it seems indeed I have Viola Howellii, which isn’t common in my area. This one popped up in a pathway, a super unfortunate location. After I pull back more and more of the blackberry, I might find more!
Another super exciting and uncommon find this year appears to be a rocky mountain maple - Acer Glabrum or Douglas Maple. It is difficult to photograph.
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Another discovery this year for me, which is too hard to photograph: a sizable mock orange growing near my ash trees in my wetland! I have never seen them in the wild here, and was beginning to wonder just how native they are in my location. I’ve planted multiple bought from nurseries, and found that they are not quite as drought tolerant as the literature would make them out to be. If they don’t get enough water, they simply don’t bloom. Finding it growing in wetland - in quite a bit of shade with blooms all over it - confirmed my suspicion that this is a shrub that does better where there is more ground moisture or irrigation.
One more discovery this year for me was a nice size patch of native thistles. I am a very amateur butterfly enthusiast, and so I knew that there are butterflies that host on thistles exclusively. For an excellent article on the topic, check out this write-up on the Clackamas County Soil and Water Conservation District’s website about identifying native and non-native thistles.
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Lastly, I’ve been noticing this Painted Lady Butterfly in one particular area of my garden for roughly a week. Only after I had gone on a murder quest of it’s favorite host plant did I figure out why. I had gone after Canada Thistles pretty intensively. Oops. Yes, Canada Thistle is a non-native plant, but it is the one that the Painted lady favors as a host plant for its young and that is exactly what this butterfly was up to as I noticed it flitting from dead plant to dead plant. Oops. I gathered up all the dead foliage and put the leaves over near the native thistle, thinking that the egg caterpillars the butterfly managed to lay might have some fighting chance of survival. Had I figured out what was going on beforehand, I would have simply chopped off the flowers before they set seed. Luckily, this species doesn’t have any shortage of plants in the area.
How are things in your garden?
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In my garden I use corn meal around the plants that the slugs like to munch on and it seems to work for me. They eat the corn get full but can’t digest it and they die off. You may have to reapply occasionally but it is cheaper than slug bait ( corn is one of the main ingredient in the bait).