It’s winter. The occasional frost tips the blades of grass creeping slowly but surely through the brown, dry turf we don’t water all summer long, conserving water for the warm season crops of vegetables and orchard trees.
The animals don’t expect freedom from being shut-ins until eight o’clock each morning.
George, our orange cat, locates the morning sun streaming into an oversize doll house which occupies our den, where I write these columns. His body totally fills an upstairs bedroom in the doll house. I wish we could get a picture of him but he is exceptionally skittish and would leap out and hide under the bed if he saw a camera pointed at him.
With early evenings and chilly mornings, it is time to read more and let the garden rest a bit, but not too much. There is a goodly amount of important work to be done.
The obvious checklist includes spraying for peach-leaf curl, the second round is now and the third will be on Valentine’s Day, including pruning fruit trees and roses.
If you have overlooked the first spray at Thanksgiving, don’t overlook the next two. Peaches and nectarines need a copper-based spray while they are dormant and leafless.
Peach-leaf curl is no friend of a peach enthusiast. It results in the ruination of healthy leaves, which provide nutrition to new fruit forming. Often all the grower will have in summer are pits covered with discolored peach skin – no edible peach.
“But the curled leaves fall off and are replaced by healthy leaves,” commented one peach tree owner.
Yes, perhaps, but the tree has to replace all those leaves which is a waste of time and energy for the tree and the results are unpredictable and murky.
Nobody likes a murky peach.
Roses, which have a lot in common with fruit trees, both in strengths and weaknesses, need pruning.
We have a number of rose bushes which, in spite of a number of forays into the roses with shovels, pruners, even mattocks, during the summer months are still producing suckers.
What, exactly, is a sucker? It is essentially an outgrowth below the graft of a tree or shrub emanating from the root stock.
This leads to a more basic question: what is a root stock? You don’t recall ever buying a root stock? If you purchased roses or fruit trees commercially, you have bought root stock.
If you want to have a great learning experience, look up apple root stock online and read all about Merton Malling (MM) and the numbering system and what effect it has on apple trees. The MM numbering system determines how big or small your fruit tree will grow.
For roses, root stock provides vigor and some disease resistance. The two parts of a new rose or tree is the scion wood and the root stock. The scion is a cutting removed from the desired plant, about the width of a pencil. It is grafted onto the root stock and they remain bound together until they become one limb. This is accomplished with sticky glue and strong tape.
Once the scion is growing, attached and dependent upon the root stock, the branch or plant is on its own. There is only one problem. The root stock likes to grow as well and it sends out branches that form unwanted leaves and flowers.
They are usually an inferior bloom but hardy and strong, sapping strength from the preferred rose or fruiting wood. You want the root stock to perform that single responsibility of providing health to the scion, not procreating itself.
Therefore, the gardener must be vigilant removing sucker growth, detaching it as close as you can from its source. If it is merely pruned back at ground level, more suckering occurs.
Instead, dig down to where the sucker is growing off the root stock, bending it backwards and ripping it off.
I’m going outside to dig up a formerly beautiful Perfect Moment rose which has completely succumbed to suckers. We’ll know whether the rose recovers when spring comes.
It’s good to go outside and exercise while we accomplish something. George looks up only when he hears his kibble go into his little metal food dish. He doesn’t care if the bed is unmade in his doll house.
