That rain was earlier in the year, lately it has been hot and dry. I noticed weeks ago a section of my “Happy Returns” daylily hedge lying down. I thought at first maybe an animal, or a toddler, had done it. It resembled what you’ll find in the grass after a deer has bedded down for the night. There was also then some yellowing, so I thought maybe it was the drought.

Finally, when watering heavily did not help at all, I thought maybe it was a pest. So I dug down underneath the foliage and found tons and tons of aphids. They had been eating from lower on the leaves causing them
to lack vigor and strength and fall over. Some of the plants looked nearly dead.

I immediately got out my duster and filled it with some diatomaceous earth. This is a white powder substance to us, made up of ground up ancient seashells. But to small soft bodied insects it is like razor blades, and it is a non-chemical way of killing them. So I injected the dust all on the row.

But the foliage was very thick, and I worried I couldn’t get coverage, so later I then cut the most affected ones back to better get at the lower growth. There was so little green left that they really did look dead, and I don’t think they’ll recover yet this year, but daylilies have such strong roots that I’m sure they will be back next year.

Then, next time I was at Lowes, I got a systemic pesticide. If I had caught it earlier my initial efforts may have been enough, but this was a full blown infestation, very progressed, and I had to not only treat the affected plants, but protect the ones not yet attacked. A systemic product doesn’t kill bugs on contact, instead it is taken up by the plant, and then the bugs who eat the plant injest it. A indiscriminate pesticide could kill bees or lady bugs or other beneficial insects, but a systemic one should only get the bad ones, the ones that eat the plant. It was a Bayer product and it says it lasts for 30 days in the plants, providing long term protection that should hopefully get rid of my aphid problem.

Aphids can often be treated without chemicals. When on trees or roses or other plants that stand up straight, you can often blast them off with a hose, use a soap based product, or the diatomaceous earth as I used. However with these daylilies they were really down in deep where they couldn’t really be sprayed away or accessed well with any sort of spray. There was too much daylily foliage providing coverage. A systemic pesticide was really the best solution as I did not need to worry about spraying all the aphids, but only all the affected plants.

In the future, if this happens again, I will know what to look for and hopefully be able to head it off before it gets this bad.

I can tell where the creature, undoubtedly a groundhog I’m sure, entered my yard. It ate the leaves off a new paw paw tree I had just planted. Then ate the top growth off my single small boysenberry plant. Waltzed across the driveway, ate 3 or 4 small petunias I had just planted, ate all the small leaves off the lowest branches of my yellow delicious apple tree, ditto on my honeycrisp apple tree, which it then climbed to destroy my primary branches. Then it continued to eat the tops off some hardy hibiscus, and finally off to the neighbor’s yard.

It figures too. I had just critter-proofed my back yard. Nothing bigger than a squirrel can get in the entire backyard now (not unless it can climb a 6 foot privacy fence). I had to do it because every once in awhile a skunk will wander in, and my toddler son has no idea that a skunk is not a dog or a cat and would probaby run at it waving and screaming and that is not something I wanted to deal with. Not that I needed much arm twisting to do so, having dealt with groundhog damage over the years. But, now they’re hitting my front yard, the devious rodents.

So, I learned a lesson. I normally leave limbs on trees as much as possible, to provide more leaves, and thus more energy for growth. But I immediately went out and pruned off all the small lowest branches on my dwarf apple trees. On the honeycrisp the critter had used these small lowest branches as a ladder to reach the higher and thicker (and far more important) primary branches, which it then tried to climb to the end of, until the branch snapped. Then the stupid thing went back and did it on the other side. The point being, without the ladder-like small lower branches, I don’t think it could have reached so high.

So, from now on, I’ll remove the option of climbing the tree. Now, hopefully, I just have to worry about them gnawing at the trunk.

Bamboo Flower Close-up

Now, up where I live, there is only one bamboo that can really grow. Fargesia Nitida, a clumping Chinese mountain bamboo that is hardy to zone 5.

The thing about bamboo, it doesn’t flower, it doesn’t flower for decades, a century, then it flowers and dies. this makes it very very very hard to hybridize bamboo because the generation period is so long.

It also has a bit of a plant memory, when you take a clone, a cutting, from bamboo, it isn’t “born again” it is the same age as the original. So my 6 or 7 year old clump of Fargesia Nitida, which was finally getting big, was really like 100 years old since it was an original from the first discovered clump. I knew this was possible, because Fargesia Nitidas have been flowering worldwide in recent years, but I was hoping…

Anyways, so now it will die, because once bamboos flower, they die. The seeds can be valuable though, because, they’re a once in a 100 year harvest. But I will have to start all over again, and that does kind of suck.

Bamboo Flowering

I may end up sharing some of the seeds, or keeping them. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll store them until I move for planting at my new house (in like 5 years). I do really like this plant, and I recommend it. If you shop for it though, make sure you know if you’re getting a new seedling version, or an old clone, because old clones could flower and die on you in just a couple years.

It was a Forest Pansy Redbud. I’ve had bad luck with the spot that I planted it. It is very full sun, from dawn to dusk, I had two weeping cherries die, but I think they were infected with bacteria at the nursery, then I ordered a redbud mailorder, and grew it for a year, and spring came and the blossoms were the wrong color, so I gave it to a neighbor, and finally bought my Forest Pansy.

In Memoriam

This tree was really great, it has a fairly unique purple foliage color, not red, or burgundy, but purple. In addition to the typical redbud pink flowers in spring. I like trees and plants with more than one feature. So both leaves and flowers.

I was so excited at how well it was doing last year, very full with leaves, nice color, growing great. Then a wind storm came and it had grown too great because branches were too heavy and the trunk split. I blogged about this and tried to fix it. I was able to maintain the current foliage last year after the damage, but the leaves on the weaker half never grew this spring. So I cut that half off.

Then we had a hail storm that damaged all my plants with large leaves, like redbuds. So the tree was looking really straggly.

Then we’ve had a drought for 2 months that just ended today, just one barely rainy day that whole period.

This is where the plant biology comes in. Redbuds like shade, they are an understory tree that likes to be sheltered by big oaks and whatnot. My spot, as I said, is full sun, and Redbuds can grow there, mine did very well in 2009 and before, but they need moisture.

Plants leaves lose moisture based on sun exposure and heat, the more direct sun, and the hotter it is, the more moisture they lose. If you’ve ever seen a squash plant on a hot summer day, with the wilting leaves, that illustrates the point. With squash the leaves will recover during the night or after a watering, some others, like a redbud, will get crispy and scorched.

So, in general, plants that prefer shade do so because they have a hard time providing enough water from their roots to their leaves when in full sun. Think of it like the water is actually flowing, if the flow rate out of the leaves is greater than the flow rate up from the roots, the leaves wilt and could scorch or die.

So, my redbud was able to thrive, despite being in sun, because I kept it watered.

This year, during the drought, I kept it watered as well, but it wasn’t helping. After I cut it down I discovered why. At one cross section, because of the split trunk damage and a previous scar from before I bought the tree, 80% of the tree’s cambium layer was dead. This is the layer of green flesh directly below the bark where trees do all of their “living.” So the roots had access to water, but there was a bottleneck getting it up to the leaves. I knew the cambium layer had been damaged when the trunk split, so I did a lot of pruning of the leaves to try to keep things in balance.

Unfortunately, even with the pruning, the tree could not stand up to the two months of heat, constant sun, and less water. There was to much cambium layer damage, for a tree that really needs to be at it’s best to handle full sun.

So I cut it down. I’ll plant one again some day when I have a different house with a spot for one in shade.

To replace it I waffled a lot, I kept going back and forth between different ideas. First I wanted a pine, but something tall and narrow. Then I decided I wanted a columnar maple, and really got interested in a “Newton Sentry” maple which is this really neat tree that grows 60 feet tall but only 6 feet wide. However, the only source I could find had short ones, and if I know we’ll probably be moving in 5 years I would never see it get to it’s potential.

Then I thought about doing a chinese red birch, because the bark is amazing, but I couldn’t find any source for those except seeds, which of course would take a really long time.

I finally decided on a “Royal Frost” Birch. This tree has burgundy foliage and interesting white peeling bark, bit of a standard birch, but at least two points of interest on it. I was able to get a 14 foot tall one for only about $60, which was by far the cheapest option in a price to foot comparison from among the ones I had shopped around for. It doesn’t have much trunk caliper, but it is tall. My forest pansy had a beefier trunk, but wasn’t more than 7 feet tall. So this fills the space well.

Birches are often sold in single trunk or multiple trunk forms. Some people like multiple trunk forms, or “bushier” forms, I’m not sure why, but multitrunk birches don’t grow as tall. Considering I was going for something tall and narrow, I went with a single trunk birch, so that it’ll grow narrower and taller. But if you ever buy a birch mail order or something, make sure you know what kind of trunk form it has, because many are trained to be multitrunk.

The tree made it through the winter and both halves are still alive, but growing at different rates.

Below you can see the flower buds from the winning half of the tree. They’re fully swollen and will open any day now.

The other half of the tree, the half that had fallen down and that now has less trunk attachment, it is growing, and is alive, and is still reattached as I made it, but it is growing slower. In the below picture you’ll notice the buds barely growing out of the branches.

These pictures were of course taken on the same day. Obviously I think the amount of cambium left attaching the weak side of the tree to the trunk is unable to fully support it at a normal growth rate, or at least, at the same growth rate as the strong side of the tree. I may need to do additional pruning on the weak side until I reach an equillibrium between the growth and it’s energy supply. But, regardless, the tree lives, and that is the important thing.

I wanted one of these probably for 2 years before finding and buying one, and then, back in early October, disaster struck! A wind storm heavily, heavily, damaged the tree. Splitting the trunk in two places.

In retrospect going out and looking at the damage, it was bound to happen, the tree had grown so well that some limbs obviously outweighed the strength of their junction with the trunk, it should have had some preventative pruning done, but I was busy being a new dad.

Some people, when a tree is damaged like that, would just cut it down. If they think it’ll never be perfectly shaped again, they don’t want it. I personally think a tree that survives damage will have more character and be more interesting, plus, I did say it was my favorite tree, so I decided to repair it.

When faced with this sort of damage you really have two options, you can try to mend the split, which is possible when it is a 50/50 split or close to and there is still substantial amounts in tact on both sides. Or, if one side is severely weaker, it may not be able to be saved and so you’ll have to trim it up and make it as clean as possible. I had to do both.

The picture above is of the upper trunk split, this one you’ll notice is really severe with no structural integrity left on the right side. Trees do all of their physiology in the thin green moist layer right beneath the bark (xylem, cambium, and phloem layers, sometimes just called cambium) so if there isn’t enough bark area left to sustain the split branch, it’ll die. If you’re a few hours or a day after the damage and the leaves are wilting, you’ll know there isn’t enough cambium left. You might be able to do some heavy pruning so that the remaining foliage is better matched to the remaining cambium, but chances are you just need to cut the limb off.

So, for the damage shown above, the leaves were already wilting and the structure was so obviously compromised, so I cut the limb off, as cleanly as I could.

The above picture is of the lower trunk split. This is the first branching point of the trunk, the first main scaffold branch split off. In this case though the prognosis was much better, the leaves had not wilted in the least (and I was easily 8-10 hours after the storm) there was still structure integrity to the branch (it was hanging parrallel to the ground, not drooping all the way) and the split was probably 40/60. So I decided to fix it.

The first thing I did was some severe pruning to reduce the weight load of the branch. This branch had grown significantly during the summer and really weighed too much, I probably took off 70% of it’s mass. Just so I could lift it back into place as much as anything else.

I temporarily tied the branch up with twine, temporarily for a few reasons, namely because if you tie a tree you choke it. People run into this all the time with birdhouses. They do not want to “hurt” the tree so they use rope, twine, or wire (the worst) to tie a bird house to a tree. Really, the better thing to do is just to nail it. A tree can survive a puncture wound no problem, but if the tree grows into a rope or wire it’ll impede the flow in the cambium layer and choke it.

After the tree was in place I got out my power drill and bored a hole through the tree at the site of the split. Then I went down into my basement and looked through my screw/nut/bolt/nail organizer. In a bin called “toilet parts” I found some large brass bolts, these were perfect. Brass doesn’t rust, and being an alloy of copper it may have some antifungal properties. I put a large bolt through the hole and secured it.

I then drilled another hole a few inches above the split and put a longer bolt through there. I made sure the hole was slightly smaller than the bolt so I really had to shove and pound it in (thus making sure there would be no gap) and then I used a wrench to tighten nuts on both.

My tree was now a cyborg, and the actions I took may seem severe, drilling two holes, but as I said, trees can survive puncture holes no problem. There was another flap of torn bark and I actually brought out my nail gun and put some brad nails into that, more wounds, but the tree doesn’t mind them.

Eventually the tree will grow over those metal rods, incorporating them into it’s structure, and being all the more stronger for it, with no adverse damage, because they go through the cambium layer, not around it.

So, weight removed, gash mechanically repaired, now I had to worry about insects and diseases. I had both a can of tree pruning sealer and a can of natural shellac wood sealer. I had just read an article saying shellac was better than the other stuff and so used it. Shellac is an all natural waxy resin made by insects and used in everything from wood products, to food, to pills. You probably eat a little bit every day, it is harmless, but it seals wood good. Insects and diseases love open wounds and so it was important to seal the tree with something.

That taken care of, the last thing I needed to worry about was water. Just like with concrete, water can get in a crack, freeze, and then widen and make the crack worse. Even with the shellac the force of water expanding as it freezes was a potential hazard. What I eventually did, though which is not shown in the picture, is just put a bead of silicone caulk around the top of the crack (but not the bottom) preventing any water from seeping in, but if any does, still allowing it to seep out. Silicone is a neutral and inert substance and the tree will probably grow around it fine, or, after healing has progressed, I can take it out. Another option would be to wrap the tree in some sort of plastic, but that can hold in moisture too close to the bark and promote rot, I think my caulk solution is best.

I’ll post an update next year to show how the tree is doing.

Should you repair every tree? No, you shouldn’t, if there is a safety issue where the tree overhangs a structure or is where people often sit, walk, or play, you should always err on the side of safety. If the tree limbs are too big for you to manage to put back into place, you may not have to cut the tree down, but you’ll need to remove the limb. But, if your tree is not yet too large to manage (mine was only about 10 feet tall) you can try to repair it. It doesn’t need to be a total loss.

Well, I’m sure some citizens may hate this, but this is an opportunity for gardens, you’ll probably be able to finagle lots of compost from neighbors, or just do midnight raids on those green compost bins on the curb.

But if you’re going to be composting in a city, or trying to compost in San Francisco for this new law, there are issues you need to consider, especially if you don’t have a lot of land, yard, or plants.

Now, I wouldn’t really worry about making too much compost over the course of a year, unless you have no garden whatsoever. You may think you produce a lot of kitchen scraps, but you don’t, not really. Because they’re mostly water they shrink vastly in size while they rot, a cubic yard of uncomposted material may, in the end, produce a cubic foot of compost.

But there are things you need to worry about, such as rodents. Any open pile or bin with an open bottom or unsecured lid can and will attract wildlife, and not the kind you want. In the country it is mostly bears and raccoons and opossums. In cities you might still get raccoons and an opossum, depending on the size of the city, but mostly you’re looking at rats, dangerous and disease carrying rats. You don’t want to build a rat habitat in your yard, so you don’t want a pile or bin.

A compost tumbler is superior in that it is raised off the ground and fully enclosed, so that is what I would recommend for anyone in an urban or even suburban environment, or people in bear country (honestly, the tumbler will excel pretty much everywhere).

Don’t think you can squeak by leaving it exposed, I once let a bag of compost on my porch for a couple hours, and that is all it took to attract an ugly opossum.

Another big issue for the urban composter, is ingredient balance. Compost works best with aerobic decomposition which uses oxygen loving bacteria that need a balance of moisture, nitrogen, and carbon. Kitchen scraps tend to be high on the first two ingredients, but lax on the third. I solve this partway by loading all my kitchen scraps into brown paper bags, which are a carbon source, but that isn’t even, even I’ve had problems.

My main solution is to take newspaper, which is 100% biodegradable, run it through my paper shredder, and do that. It balances out the moisture because it is dry, and adds the necessary carbon. As a general rule of thumb, if your compost tumbler smells like garbage or sewage, you have anaerobic bacteria working instead of aerobic and you need to add more carbon (newspaper, shredded fine), less water, and mix it up (tumble) to produce more oxygen.

This balance issue is more an issue for city dwellers than country dwellers because urbanites have less trees, and so less leaves that’ll drop in the fall, which are a great and primary source of carbon for many composters. You can also use straw from a farmer, which is against more accessible to those in the country.

Another option for brown material is sawdust from untreated unpainted and unstained wood. You can get such sawdust from carpenters, building sites, saw mills, etc. Just make sure it is all untreated, and it is a miracle ingredient.

Finally, small amounts of wood ash or charcoal, again from unpainted, unstained, and untreated wood, also is an excellent source of carbon, but it can affect the Ph of your compost so you can’t use it in large quantities. So if you have a fire pit or fireplace and burn natural wood without lighter fluid or anything like that, you can save and use the ashes and any left over charred bits in your compost. In fact there is a whole gardening method called biochar that utilizes burnt wood to a large degree.

Following these tips should help you produce usable fertilizer for your garden from all the kitchen scraps your neighbors are going to be sending your way.

Composting is not an exact science, and even someone who has used a compost tumbler for a long time like me can mess up.

I use my compost tumbler in the following way: I take brown paper bags and while cooking put scraps of veggies, peels, watermelon rinds, etc, in the bags. Then I toss the whole bag into the tumbler. The bag provides the brown, the contents the green, and it should compost, and it does compost. I know though that the bag doesn’t provide enough brown, but I also add clippings from the garden, including chipped branches and other woody stuff, and of course in Fall I add leaves.

So, in this batch, not enough brown, too much green. It got wet, it get smelly, it got poopy. This is not good compost. You need enough brown to absorb that moisture and make sure it doesn’t smell. Compost shouldn’t smell, if it does, you need to add more brown, more carbon.

If this was Fall I would add leaves, I could also add straw, or more shredded woody prunings. But instead I’ve set upon a cheap, easy, and fast solution. Shredded newspaper.

To make this all you need is newspaper, and a paper shredder. Run Sunday’s paper through, leaving out any glossy or otherwise fancy pages. Newspaper print is completely organic and biodegradable, the ink is soy based. It’ll absorb the water, and because it is paper, will decompose fast, quickly rectifying my compost problem in less than a week.

The other day, well, almost 4 weeks ago (we’ve got a new baby, and so I’ve been too busy to blog), on my way to the hospital to see said baby I noticed large clumps of something on my Tanyosho pine. The pine hadn’t been looking too hot this Spring but I hadn’t looked too closely at it, but now it couldn’t be avoided.

Clumps of something had weighed down the tips of the needles to the point where they were drooping noticably, very obvious abnormal. So I took a closer look. It wasn’t a growth, it wasn’t needles with elephantisis, it was an infestation of caterpillars. They looked like the “tent worms” (gypsy moth larvae) that had defoliated so many trees around my parents house when I was younger (eventually forcing government intervention with airplane spraying).

I don’t, or rather I didn’t, often think of pines or other conifers as having pest problems. Their foliage is much more armored and it just didn’t seem like something they’d deal with. But these larvae had made short work of the needles on my pine and had defoliated maybe 30 or 40% of it before I noticed. This, is of course, much much worse than a critter defoliating a deciduous tree, because such trees are used to losing their leaves yearly and growing a new set in Spring. When most evergreens lose needles they usually do not grow back. Pines are somewhat of an exception, they do lose a small amount of needles every year and regrow them, but no where near 40%. So this is a big hit to the tree.

I googled it of course and turns out these are sawfly larvae, and the specifically target young or short pines, who would have thought, with all the other more vulnerable trees out there, the sawfly evolved to have their larvae target pines.

Couple the very bad damage, and the fact that I needed to get to the hospital (not for the delivery mind you, this was two days later) I didn’t bother trying to deal with it by hand (there were many dozens, but they were big suckers, so I could have, technically) or finding an all natural pest control (something I do usually think about, but rarely try, because they’re so hard to find to buy, and the one time I tried a home made concoction I killed every plant I tried it on). I grabbed trusty Sevin, and making sure no bees were present, I went to town. They rapidly started dropping and I haven’t seen one since.

However, if you must stake a tree, let me explain to you how, because it is not as easy as you may think.

The above tree is an example of what not to do. For one, the tree is far too small to need such massive stakes. If your stake is wider than the trunk of the tree, you’re doing it wrong. For two, there are three stakes. The people obviously thought they needed to immobilize the tree trunk, and long term, those stakes have been there years. This is not the goal of staking.

Staking is used to moderate swings or to protect the tree from violent winds that could uproot it prior to it being established. It is not meant to prevent all movement. If a tree does not move it does not develop a strong trunk. Trees develop strong trunks in response to wind, it is a response mechanism, all plants do. This is also why plants grown indoors can be spindly and tall, there is no wind indoors (you can direct a fan at your seedlings to correct this).

So, when plants aren’t allowed to bend, then don’t put energy into growing stronger, so instead they grow taller. You can see this in nature. Trees clustered together in a grove will be taller and skinnier because they offer each other wind protection. Whereas the tree alone in a field with no wind protection develops a much wider trunk. This has repercussions even within the maple syrup industry as farmers have to balance planting density with the desire to encourage large trunk development.

In addition to not wanting to completely immobilize the tree, you also only need to stake it until it is established, which means one year, tops. Any longer than that and you can permanently weaken the trunk. The tree will grow tall, and spindly, and if you ever unstaked it it’d tip over like a limp noodle, so you think it needs to be staked more, nope. The only think that’ll fix a spindly trunk is removing the stakes. You stake for the roots, not for the trunk. Because of how staked securely increases vertical growth in lieu of a thicker trunk, nurseries often do it because many unwitting consumers buy the tallest tree. When you do your shopping, do yourself a favor, buy the one with the widest trunk.

Then, finally, the actual material you use to tie the tree has a big impact as well.

The above is a picture of my espaliered apple tree. Espalier is a method of training a tree to grow two dimensionally (such as along a fence) as opposed to three dimensionally. It is used for aesthetics, but also to increase air flow, make it easy to harvest fruit, and to spray fruit trees. Training is the exception to all of the above rules and is different from staking, if you’re training a tree for bonsai, espalier, niwagi, or whatever else (such as training a weeping tree to stand upright), you obviously need to tie it and manipulate it as such, but I show you this picture to show you what can happen. I had wrapped a wire around the trunk of this tree and forgotten about it, as you can see the tree has now grown around the wire and is completely encapsulating it. There is also now a good chance that eventually this wire could choke off and kill all the top growth of the tree. This wouldn’t be the end of the world to me, because two good scaffold branches exist below this point, but it would be a set back. What I should have done is loosened the wire every year, I forgot to.

But I mention all this to illustrate what can go wrong if you use the wrong material, like wire (or even synthetic ropes), to stake your tree. The tree can and will grow into it. and it can permanently harm the tree. The one thing the first picture in this post did right was to run their wire (which they shouldn’t have been using to begin with) through a bit of tubing to provide it some padding, but over time even that tubing is not big enough to fully prevent the tree from growing over it because padding or not, it is still on there tight.

So, now that I’ve written you a book on what not to do, let me write you a couple sentences on what to do.

To properly stake a tree place two stakes one foot away from the trunk on either side of the trunk in such a way that they’re perpendicular to the prevailing winds (which means typically one stake on the north side, and one of the south side, unless you’ve got abnormal wind directions in your area). Tie the stakes to the tree using something broad and flexible. Specialty tree ties are made, but old nylons work great. They’re stretchy, flexible, and broad. Then, leave your stakes on no more than one year. But before you do any of that, think if you really need to stake at all, and if the tree is less than six or seven feet high, the answer to that is usually no.