The Cassia Tree

Saturday morning was crisp and cool.  The sunshine was brilliant.  The skies bluer than a blue bird.  It felt good to be alive!  A gentle breeze blew as I walked to the barn in my bathrobe with my coffee in hand and opened the nesting boxes so the hens could lay their eggs.  The animals don't care that I'm not properly dressed.  

As I hurried back inside where my wife was busy preparing scrambled eggs with sautéed mushrooms and onions, I glanced out and saw the cassia tree putting on a show.

Each fall the tree blooms and the yellow flowers are brighter than the sun.  The flowers are so bright, you almost need sunglasses to look at the tree.  The flowers fall from the tree and create a carpet of yellow petals on the patio.

Here is a photo of the yellow blooms that cover the tree:

And an even closer photograph.  You can see unopened blooms that will soon yield even more yellow blossoms!

While the tree is certainly beautiful with its happy, cheerful flowers, like any good thing, there are some drawbacks.  This tree will freeze back in the winter.  You'll think the thing is dead, but in the spring, it sprouts back up from the bottom.  This past year it didn't freeze but one time and the tree kept growing and growing.  

The major downside with the cassia is its root system.  The Lord did not bless this tree with a good, sturdy root system that anchors it.  During any thunderstorm or certainly hurricane, the cassia will fall over on its side.  To remedy this, I positioned three t-posts around the tree and wove rope around the t-posts to support the cassia to keep it from falling.  For the most part this has worked.  The cassia has many trunks.  At our local nursery, Tricia got a good idea.  The owner of the business braided the trunks as it grew into one main trunk.  It seemed to make a stronger, better looking tree.  If ours freezes this winter, I will certainly try this!

Lean on Me When You're Not Strong

We planted a couple of cassia trees in the backyard as we really like the beautiful yellow flowers that fill the trees in late summer/early fall.  We purchased the trees from a local nursery here in town called Natural Gardens.  They are very knowledgeable and helpful and they mentioned to us that the trees don't have a strong root structure and tend to blow over very easily in storms.  They told us that it is a good idea to stake the trees.

Well, we planted the trees and the trees quickly grew and thrived and added height and filled out nicely.  They make a nice looking tree for the backyard.  We got so busy doing other things that we never got around to staking the cassias.  Last month when we received almost 26 inches of rain (yeah, you read that right), the saturated soil coupled with the weight of the water on the foliage caused the trees to topple over sideways.  Lots of times I find myself waiting until disaster strikes to get around to doing things.

I googled the proper way to stake trees and it turns out it was a very easy process that I should have done from the "git-go."  Below is the finished product for the smaller tree.  You can see it is upright and happy.

All you need to properly stake a tree is two T-posts, some rope, and a sledgehammer.  Position the T-posts about a foot and a half away from the trunk so as not to damage the root ball and drive the t-posts in with the sledgehammer. Then drive them in until they are firm and solid.  Due to the saturated soil, I had to drive them in quite a way.

Then take a rope and loop it around the trunk and make a 'figure-8' and loop it around the t-post on one side.  Repeat the process on the other side, but pull it tight before you tie it off on the post, ensuring that the trunk is straight and true.

The other cassia tree was larger and required not only the two posts on either side, but a third post to be driven behind it to provide the stability and strength to stand. It took all of about 10 minutes to get the job done.  However, the rains continued to fall and the fact that this tree had more than one trunk caused complications that we didn't have with the other tree.  The weight of this tree caused it to continue toppling over.

It just needed a little fine-tuning, though.  I had Russ push the tree back upright and I tightened the rope on the left hand side and it pulled the tree back up.  If it would ever stop raining, the soil will stabilize, giving the roots something firm for which to anchor itself.  During dry weather, you don't need the staking, but when the storm winds blow and the weather rages, staking is mandatory.

I've discovered that like the cassia trees, we all need Someone to lean on when the storms of life hits!

The Best Method I Know of to Trellis Tomatoes

We plant heirloom, open pollinated tomatoes in our garden.  These tomatoes aren't the hybrid, determinate (bush-type) varieties that you attach to a stake.  These tomatoes are indeterminate, meaning they vine and just keep growing and growing and growing.  I've tried unsuccessfully to stake them, but their volume is just too much for the stake and inevitably the tomato plant weighs down the stake and the entire thing comes tumbling down.  It makes a mess.

The Internet proves to be a great source of information and I learned a trellising technique while researching that really works and although I've posted about this in past years, I'll share it again for new readers. People a lot smarter than I am came up with this tomato trellising idea that is called The Florida Weave.  That sounds like a trendy hairstyle or a crocheting technique, but funny name aside, this really works.

If you use wooden stakes and live in our climate, each year you have to purchase new stakes as they rot over the course of the year.  Not so with the stakes used for the Florida Weave - you use metal T-posts.  They'll last forever.  The method will hold up tomatoes in rough weather.  The tomatoes you see below just went through two separate storms carrying > 60 mile per hour gusts of wind and they are just fine.

The Florida Weave

Let's go step by step.  My garden rows are 30 feet in length.  I drive a T-post on one end, a T-post in the middle, and a T-post on the other end.  These serve as the main support skeleton of the apparatus.

T-posts provide the 'spine' of the trellising system

I purchase round bales of hay for our cows.  When I put the bales out in the pasture, I remove the polypropylene baling twine and wrap in around a stick to save for later.  Now is later!!  I take the twine and anchor it firmly around the T-post on the end.  Then I weave (see how it gets its name?) the twine around each plant - to the right side of one plant, to the left side of the next.  When I come to the center T-post, I firmly wrap the twine and continue weaving until I get to the T-post on the end. 

I tie it tight and re-trace my steps, only this time, I weave the twine on the opposite side of the tomato stem, weaving until I get to the end and then I tie it up tight.  You can see in the picture below that the twine forms a support structure around the plant. 

We appreciate your Support!

With the first strand complete, we put our twine away, but keep our eyes on the plants.  In a week or so they will have grown another 6 inches.  At that point we'll repeat the steps just shown (just 6 inches higher) and we'll have two strands of support.  We'll repeat the process again and again.  I think last year, I had 6 horizontal strands.

The thing I'm going to change this year is I will try to add some additional support going up. My T-posts are 6 feet in length and these tomatoes grow taller.  In past years everything is real neat and tidy until the tomato plant grows higher than 6 feet, then the top kind of falls over.  I tried to train the vines to climb along the top twine, but it still got kind of messy.  This year I'm going to try to extend the height by wiring another post to the top of each T-post and continue up vertically.  We'll see how that goes.

Healthy young tomato enjoying lots of support

These tomatoes have weathered some rough storms in April that brought high winds and over a foot of rain cumulatively.  I think now we'll get some more stable weather and we'll be able to watch the tomato plants really flourish over the next month or so.  Lots of the plants are putting on blooms. The plant below has a double bloom.  This is not uncommon and the fruit will be fine.  It will just produce an odd, atypical-shaped fruit.  Apparently, they appear on early blossoms and some think they are caused by cool weather or cross-pollination.  You aren't supposed to save the seeds from fruit like this if you want to produce the uniform-looking perfect tomato.  

Double Bloom on the tomato

Back to the Florida Weave, this process has really made growing tomatoes much easier and orderly for me and I recommend it highly.  There's always little tweaks to help make things better, but all in all, this technique is a winner.