Spring arrives - better late than never

It is early May, 2014, and Spring is finally, really, definitely here.  I start this season with a discussion of fruit trees because they are in spectacular bloom right now, and because time-is-a -wastin'.

One of two plum trees

This plum tree, in spectacular flower, gives the neighborhood an exotic reminder of the snowy winter we just endured.  Everything was late this Spring - I did not see any crocuses until early April - but the plants are making up for lost time.

With limited time, choices have to be made about where you devote your energy.  We have four fruit trees - 2 plums and 2 peaches, several raspberry bushes and a few blueberry bushes.  They all need attention NOW  if we want to be eating fruit later in the season.

I bought my husband a book called The Holistic Orchard, Tree Furits and berries the Biological Way  by Michael Phillips because I wanted to get away from all of the pesticides and man-made fertilizer we had been using.  Plus, we had one really good year, followed by one really bad year, and I wanted to see if there was a way to have more really good years without decimating the environment.

The book is full of information - more than I will ever be able to use.  However, there are two practices I am using to encourage a higher fruit yield.

The first is encouraging fungal growth on the surface around the tree and below ground at the tree's  roots.  You do want to promote this growth, contrary to what just about everybody believes about fungus.  Fungus below the ground actually increases the root system's ability to absorb nutrition exponentially.  More nutrition, happier, more productive tree.

One of the simplest ways to promote these fungi is to apply ramial wood chips around the base of the tree in the spring.  Ramial wood chips are small clippings from deciduous trees - no more than an inch in diameter.  If you prune your trees and you have all of those little pieces, put them around your fruit trees and bushes.  The thin pieces of wood have a relatively high concentration of nitrogen.  As the wood on a tree gets older and thicker, the relative concentration of nitrogen goes down and the concentration of carbon goes way up (which is why it is good to burn big pieces of wood).

 
Here is a picture of the area around my plum tree - I will be adding more tomorrow.

It helps to have a bored college student around to cut all of the little branches into sections around 6" long.  Thank you Becky.

Tomorrow, I will spread all of the wood chips I have around my remaining trees and bushes.

The second thing I do (or rather, my husband does), is spray the tree and the ground around it with neem oil.  This job should have been started in March, but since it was really cold in March, the job will have to be done this weekend.  The neem oil  helps jolt the tree with nutrition after the long winter.

I suggest that you get and read The Hollistic Orchard   if you are interested in growing fruit trees and bushes.

One last note about fungus.  Obviously, not all fungi are good.  If you have a healthy plant, and a healthy environment, it is easier to promote the good fungi and minimize the bad.