First Tulips

 

Topworking or, The Royal Society For Putting Things On Top Of Other Things

This year, is going to be a great year, for the royal society for putting things, on top of other things (Please see here for further explanation). I'm doing my bit for this illustrious society in the form of topworking. Topworking is an arborcultural process commonly employed in orchards where new varieties are grafted onto mature trees. The aim is to preserve all the time and effort that has gone into growing the existing tree while diverting its efforts toward a new crop. Two of my front yard fruit trees fall firmly into this category. A 'Story' Apricot and Plumcot, planted in the same hole have grown well but fruited poorly. The Story, known also as an Early Moorpark, grows like a rocket but produces a small crop for its size. The plumcot is a slower grower and last year produced its first ever fruit, singular. Long story short, I'm impatient and I don't have years to sit around waiting for a tree to produce just ONE fruit (although I actually do and probably will). My intention is to use these two trees as an experimental platform to test new grafting techniques I haven't tried before and to try some of the multitude of plum and apricot varieties available to kinds of people who sit up late at night looking at fruit on the internet. The grafting techniques best suited to topworking are the Cleft and the Bark Inlay. Both these are suited to joining stock and scion materials with dissimilar sizing. Choosing between the two may be merely a matter of preference and success rate, but I've also found that the Cleft graft is better suited to smaller stocks and Bark Inlay comes in to play with the thinker, older branches. Below are two Cleft grafts onto the Apricot. They vary only in the material used to seal the cleft as I decided tape would most likely provide the better seal. The first variety is a Green Gage from my next door neighbor. Like green lollies on a stick they are the sweetest plums I've ever tasted. The second is an unknown plum also next door. With a wide variety of unknown scion wood incoming its going to be fun detective work trying to find out what they all are. Coming up in the next post, my first attempt at a Bark Inlay graft.

 

The Plum and Apricot Experimental Grafting Platform or PAEGP, take that NASA.

Cutting the cleft and coddling it while the scion wood is prepared. The cut requires restraint and a hammer.

 

 Tile spacing wedges! My innovative contribution to Cleft grafting. They force open the gap and keep it open while you whittle away.

The first graft sealed with sticky purple grafting wax. I reckon when I'm an old man I'll still be using the same tub of this stuff.

 

I am particularly proud of the alignment of the wood on the right. I mean I'm my own harshest critic but, I think its master craftsmanship.

 

The tape sealed second graft.

It's Apple-ing Now Sir, But Why?

For the second year running I have experienced the querky phenomenon of autumn apple blossom and fruit.While this is far less of a problem than coddling moth or the icy massacre of a hail storm, autumn bud break (as I call it) has the potential to reduce the following year's yield not to mention confuse the bees. If I wanted to be irritating, I would name it "bi-anneal bearing" which is both a per-existing apple tree condition and a confusing measurement of time if you think hard enough about it. The activity occurs at the tips of the new growth with clusters of flowers followed by bunches of abnormal, elongated, Chernobyl-style fruit. The fruit never gets past acorn size and hangs on the tree until you pull them off and hock them at something. Why does it happen? No definitive answer so far with the internet being, as always, useless. As everyone knows, true gardening wisdom is only contained in mouldy old books that nobody owns. My strongest suspicion is climate, to be specific an unusually long 'Indian Summer' we had this year. Perhaps as Summer rolls on and on the trees decide to skip winter and get on with spring. The other suspects are rainfall and fertilizer. The last few years have produced excessive autumn rainfall and I may well have provided excess late Summer feeding. The only one of these factors that I can influence is fertilizing so next year there will be a test. I will feed some of the apples in late Summer and skip others and then we'll see. At the moment it's nothing more than a botanical oddity as the growth that blooms prematurely is almost always pruned back. However when the trees are properly established it may occur on the delicately nurtured fruiting spurs wasting the following years potential crop. I will continue searching for answers.

 

Deformed Corryong Pippins

Autumn Summer Strawberry's

Green Manure - Nature's Industrial Chemistry

Discovering green manure was for me one of the intriguing gardening practices.  I have always been fascinated by the ability of natural organisms to undertake chemical synthesis, sometimes complex, sometimes very simple and manufacture their own materials. While this may sound like stating the obvious, the fact is that I love chemistry, and I love gardening, and I say these things sometimes. The idea that you could give something back to the soil by growing something in it sounds so counter-intuitive but turns out to be a cheap and efficient source of soil nutrition. The key process, (well, one of them) is this ability that plants have to 'fix' Nitrogen from the atmosphere, processing it into a form that the plant can use for food. To get all technical for a minute, the gaseous atmospheric Nitrogen molecules N(2) are rearranged by enzymes called nitrogenase to form ammonia NH(3). Without this tiny, simple chemical equation, none of us would be here to do yoga, knitting or motorcross, can you imagine? Copying this remarkable feat of natural chemistry had to wait for the twentieth century and a guy called Fritz Harber, the less said about him the better really. He developed a simple industrial technique for fixing atmopheric Nitrogen that has become the backbone of fertilizer industry, the explosives industry and in a bizzare company merger, the exploding fertilizer factory industry! Anyway while it is a triumph of man poking his tounge out at nature, fertilizing crops with anhydrous ammonia in a big tank is about as far from nature's way as you could get and the runoff from this practice causes serious ecological problems. Long story short, anything we can give back to the soil without the help of Mr Harber the better and green manure is the perfect way to do it.

This is the third time I have grown a green manure crop in the long front bed. The first time I tried oats and woolly pod vetch, which didn't turn out to be 'woolly' as I'd hoped. The second go was a massive crop of broad beans, they blocked out the sun. The only problem there was, it turns out, a lot of people really like to eat broad beans and if you grow them where they can see, they won't take kindly to you cutting them down before the beans form and forking them into the ground. Seriously they look at you like you're insane and then say things to you like, "We'll maybe I'll just fork my next cake back into the flour bag and not bring you a slice." There are two solutions to this problem. 1. Grow a second (smaller) supply of broad beans and assure your neighbors that they'll get to sample their old world 'greeny' taste in good time. 2. Greater green manure awareness. This year I'm growing broad beans again including of course, a supplementary crop for consumption. I bought a kilogram of seeds which turns out to be a LOT of seeds and have treated the seeds for the green manure bed with the special powdery black inoculate. This I am told, supplies Nitrogen fixing bacteria to the roots of legumes like broad beans. When the plants are just about to flower, I will take to them with implements and send them soil-ward. Until then it's feet up while nature, the industrial chemist goes to work, campaign for green manure awareness and an end to fertilizer factory explosions please!

Just remember Ruby Rhod says, "it MUST be green, m-kay, m-kay!?"

We shall be needing oxygen masks when we get to the top of that one won't we Sir Edmund!

A field of little atmospheric processing units.

The Best Apple I've Ever Tasted

This single apple has indisputably wiped the floor with every other apple grown this year and delivered on all the hype and media buzz surrounding the famed Bramley's Seedling. This lone apple survived coddling moth, sunburn, pigeons and wierd alien fungus to mature into a plump, spotty and asymmetrical example of this legendary cooking apple. I vowed to myself that my first successfully grown Bramley would be stewed and served (still warm) over ice-cream. I kept my vow. As a result of this whole experience, my second Bramley tree, currently on the front nature strip, will be relocated to the orchard next to it's older sibling. Community gardening just got less communal.

 

Having just one specimen makes scientific photography a little more difficult. I tried to capture it from all necessary angles and in all it's grandeur before the processing began. I was relieved to find no evidence of watercore or a coddling moth tunnel when I sectioned it.

While I was dicing away at this moster I took the opportunity to judge the Bramley as an eating apple. It was a truly exceptional apple to eat raw. The flavour is difficult to describe, the sensation is acid to begin with but there is an underlying sweetness. The texture was crisp with a high water content. This apple makes the Granny Smith taste like a fake plastic apple! The stewing process was a bit of guess work. I had about 200g of fruit to which I added 2 teaspoons of caster sugar and 6 teaspoons of water.

General Spring Update

This is just a small selection of the things of Spring. Our first ever potato crop appears to be harvest ready and has been a definite success. I now understand the oft recollected pleasure of sifting through the earth to find these starchy nuggets! It's got to be the most exciting harvesting experience as you turn over the soil and they all tumble out. These are Kipflers grown from sprouting store bought spuds. They don't exhibit the Kipflers distinctive turd-like shape but I've seen ones that look like this before. High hopes for the taste test which is imminent.

 

 

 Herbs are happening in pots this year. The mint is making good use of an old recycling bin and even better use of a decent dose of dynamic lifter. Parsley has taken over the half wine barrel of my recently deceased blood orange. The next one will be bigger, bloodier and in the ground!

Has someone been fondling your street apples? Sigh. Unfortunately anything beyond the fenceline gets fondled sooner or later. How do I know this? It's the distinctive sheen they've developed. Apples are normally dusty and even a bit hairy when they're growing whereas these have a somewhat polished appearance. With successive croppings I'll probably calm down.

Malteser Syndrome

I have to say I'm almost numb now to the countless mysterious horrors presented to me when I walk through the apple orchard at the moment. This one however was just horrific enough to stir me. I think I'll call it the Malteser syndrome, firstly because I've got no idea so far as to what it really is and secondly for wholly obvious reasons. The damage is limited to the Summer Strawberry which continues to accept the brunt of natures boot this year and is limited to only five or six of the fruit. My sole suspicion so far is that its got something to do with the vicious 40 degree day we had about a week ago. Leaves were burnt and feelings hurt in the wake of that stinker and the sun-facing feature of these big brown spots is a dead giveaway. From the cross-section, the damage appears to be superficial but I can't see an apple recovering from this.