Preparing the Blueberry Bushes for the Spring

 As we continue to harvest fruit from our citrus trees, our attention turns to taking care of our other fruit-bearing bushes nearby - Blueberries!  The first thing we've begun to do is dump coffee grounds around the base of all of our blueberry bushes.  Blueberries love acidic soil.  We've read that coffee is acidic and adding the grounds around the bushes will make the blueberries happy.  I've been bringing a bunch of used coffee grounds home from work for this purpose.  We'll see if this experiment is successful.

Our oldest son, Russ, has a degree in Horticulture.  He knows the name of every plant anywhere around and how to care for them too.  So we count on him for assisting in and providing knowledge toward care for our plants.  When he was here last Sunday, we asked him if he would help us prune the blueberries.  He showed us how to remove parts of the bush with pruning shears.

He removed some of the older growth, growth that crosses over other branches, as well as branches that don't look healthy.  I've never been a confident pruner.  The result of pruning the blueberry bushes was a cleaner-looking plant which should result in bigger berries.  Again, we'll see how that experiment works as well.  The animals in the pasture enjoyed the pruning experiment and are already calling it a rousing success.

Finally, I have to show a neat photo from our kitchen window.  If you look due east, you see a (not so picturesque) view of our neighbor's shop.  It just so happens that if you look through both openings of their shop, the view of a big white horse across the road is framed nicely in the photo with a red barn as the backdrop.

Have a great weekend!  I'll talk to you more on Sunday night.

Before And After

I had a big double row of zinnias growing on the last row of the garden before the sugar cane.  For months it gave us beautiful technicolor blooms.  Tricia has been picking bouquets and putting them in a vase in the kitchen.  It was my first trial in planting flowers in the vegetable garden.  Last year I planted zinnias right outside the garden in the holes of some cinder blocks that line the ditch that borders the garden.  They did nicely and at the end of the season, I saved the flower heads for seed.  I really didn't know how well they would germinate, but Good Golly, Miss Molly, I think every last seed grew.  I think I'll plant them again next year. 

Well, last week, in one of the earliest freezes I can remember, temperatures dipped into the mid 20's and zapped the zinnias.  In a stunning before and after shot, you can compare the photo above with the same flowers a day after the deep freeze hit.  From delightful to dull in a very short time.

But the flowers weren't the only thing that the freeze claimed.  It also obliterated our okra.  We have harvested loads and loads of okra this year.  We ate it very often and have some frozen for gumbos, too.  It produced for months and was still producing until the north wind freeze dried it.  Here is a photo of the last two plants left standing before I chopped them down.

We often talk about planting seeds in the garden.  Once a plant runs its course, what do you do.  I want to talk about that briefly.  In the past I would just uproot the dead or dying plants and toss them in the compost pile.  That's not a bad thing to do, but there is a better alternative.  Over the years I started to leave the root system intact. 

Okra grows into a large plant.  Some of the okra plants were approaching three inches across at the base of the plant!  Instead of pulling the plant up, I use a cheap but effective pruning saw I bought for next to nothing at Harbor Freight.  I saw the plant top off right above ground level.  Once I'm done, you can't even tell a plant was even there.

So what does that gain me?  A lot.  The roots will quickly rot and the decomposed organic matter will amend the garden soil.  It opens up passageways for rain water and air flow.  The tunnels that the roots opened will help earthworms as they move throughout the soil and finally the roots will feed soil microbes.  Overall, it is a win-win to leave the roots in the soil.

The okra plants themselves are another story.  Some of them were ten feet tall.  After I chopped them down, I piled them in the back of the garden.  I'll cover them with piles of wood chips mixed with some cow poop and allow them to decompose for a year or so.

Once things in the garden were vibrant with a multitude of colors from bright zinnias to the green okra.  Now, everything is dull and drab and dead.  Not for long, though.  The sugar snap peas are growing and are beginning to trellis.  Soon they'll be blooming and there will be more color in the garden.

Thinning Things Out

My hair is getting more and more gray with each passing day.  I'm okay with it and haven't considered hair products to color the grey.  On the bright side, at least for now, although it is turning grey, it hasn't started turning loose.  It is still thick and when I go get a haircut, the barber often pulls out some thinning shears like shown below to thin things out a bit.

Image Credit

I thought of the haircut analogy the other day when I started an undertaking in trimming one of our live oak trees.  It had a lot of interior growth that just needed to be cleaned up. A friend of ours had his live oaks trimmed and the price tag was way more than what I wanted to fork over, so I started trimming this tree and it will take me about a week or so of plugging away at it before I get it completed, but I made a good start.

Of course I did a lot of googling of how to properly trim a live oak.  Here's a little bit of what I learned:

1. Don't trim flush with the limb or you'll take off the collar that helps your tree scab over and heal,
2. Take off all the dead and diseased limbs,
3. Remove any lower limbs that are growing upward to the crown as this will help airflow,
4. Cut away branches that rub together,
5. Trim off 'ugly' looking branches. (Oh, I have one more thing I'll show you at the end that I learned by making a mistake!)

I used a big extension ladder to get myself up where I needed to be to trim with a chain saw, a pole saw, and and hand saw.  The ladder was equally effective in getting me up high as well as making my wife nervous.  I'm not afraid of heights.

Unlike my wife, the cows, goats, and chickens were pleased with my new project because I threw the limbs I trimmed over the fence and the animals ate the leaves and the chickens found bugs and such to eat amongst the leaves and branches.

In THIS POST and another post referenced in that  one, I tell of  how we repaired this live oak that had split down the middle by cabling it together.  You can see a cable spanning a two of the large limbs and pulled tight with a turnbuckle in the photo below:

After a recent storm I noticed that one of the two cables supporting the great weight of the mighty oak had come loose.

I quickly diagnosed the problem - the weight of the tree pulling against the turnbuckle had straightened out one of the hooks, allowing the turnbuckle to release from the eye bolt anchored in the tree.  I'll need t fix that as we are smack dab in the middle of  hurricane season and I don't want to leave the tree vulnerable.

Okay, back to the lesson I learned the hard way.  When you make a cut, you are supposed to paint the fresh cut with some black spray paint.  Newly cut wood is sweet smelling and attracts bugs that will bore into your tree, introducing disease. Painting the cut helps to reduce the risk of bug damage.

You can see my mistake at the seven o'clock position in the photo below.  Rather than doing what I knew to do and make my first cut at the bottom of the limb, I cut from the top. With no bottom cut, the weight of the cut limb tore some of the bark off of the bottom.  That could have been eliminated, but the tree will heal.  I'll just do it right from this point forward.

With the tree trimming about 50% done on this live oak, I think it looks a lot cleaner  and opened up the view under the expansive canopy that just makes the tree look better.  It should also allow a little more sunlight that will perk up the St. Augustine grass that grows beneath the tree's branches.  We all benefit from a little thinning out from time to time.

Pruning the Navel Orange Tree

This weekend it really warmed up.  As I walked by our citrus trees, especially the navel orange, I could vaguely smell the fragrance of orange blossoms.  What do you know?  The trees were beginning to bloom.  Not a lot, but in a week or two, the trees will be covered in blooms and I'll want to pull up a chair beside the trees and just enjoy the aroma.

While I was thinking about the trees, I made a mental note that I needed to research how to prune citrus trees.  You see, the fruit from the navel orange tree is so heavy that it caused a couple of branches to break this year.  Other branches that didn't break became so heavy that the limbs bent over and much of the fruit touched the ground and ended up rotting.  I want to see if I can keep that from happening this year.

As if on cue, my son, Russ, who is in the last semester of his senior year at LSU and majoring in Horticulture, sent me an email that stated the following:

We went out to Burden a couple weeks ago with the fruit specialist Dr. Johnson and pruned citrus and then last week we pruned peaches and table grapes/muscadines.  I learned alot.  Here was the homework for the class.  Thought you would want to read it. 

How to prune a citrus tree.  A rule of thumb is to cut what is necessary, then what is needed, and finally what is impossible.  First, prune everything below the graft line because those shoots are the root stock Poncirus trifoliata which is thorny and produces sub-par, non-ideal fruit.  Next, lift the skirt. That means cut branches that are growing down to the ground.  Prune away branches from your pants pocket down to keep the bottom of the tree open.  Next, focus on pruning any shoots that are growing straight up or any exceptionally tall shoots that you wouldn't be tall enough to pick fruit from anyway. Of course, prune away dead or decaying branches.  Finally, prune some branches from the middle of the tree so that you can somewhat see your partner on the other side of the tree.  Basically, you are trying to thin out the tree to open it so picking fruit will be less of a hassle.  

So I followed the instructions in the bolded paragraph above and here's how the navel orange turned out:

I realized immediately that I should have taken a 'before' photo.  Suffice it to say that pruning the navel really opened things up.  The cows enjoyed my pruning exercise as well!

Russ does a lot of freelance landscaping and told me that he pruned a lady's citrus last year and that she remarked to him that she noticed an increase in the production following the pruning.  The tangerine trees were pruned right after we picked all the fruit off of them.  They are nicely shaped and seem to be doing well. We'll see how the navel orange does after its "haircut."  It'll definitely be easier to harvest in December.

Pruning the Suckers off of Tomatoes

Yesterday while showing you the Florida Weave method of trellising tomatoes, I mentioned pruning the suckers off of tomato plants.  Let's look at the proper way of doing this.  Now, you're reading from a guy who plants seeds a little closer than recommended in the event that the germination isn't good and then I hate to thin things out because I don't like to kill perfectly healthy plants, so I don't always follow directions.

But removing suckers from tomatoes is a good idea and I've learned this from experience.  There are several reasons for doing this.  First if you leave all the suckers, they will flower and produce fruit, but the plant might not be able to support the nutrition needs of all the fruit and the resulting tomatoes will be smaller.  Secondly, indeterminate tomatoes (not the bush-type) grow and grow and grow.  If you don't remove the suckers, the plant will grow large, heavy, and out of control.  Before long you'll have a sprawling mess on your hands.  As a result, I try to remove the suckers as often as I can.

Let's first identify what a sucker looks like.  In the photo below, look at the second branch from the bottom that is reaching horizontally to the left.  In the crease between the main stalk and the branch, you can see new growth coming out at a 45 degree angle.  That is the sucker.

Identifying the sucker

When they are small to medium sized (pencil sized or smaller), you can just snap them off with your fingers. The plant heals up nicely and continues to grow upward from the top of the plant instead of bushing outward.  I usually toss the suckers over the fence to the chickens and they eat up the fresh, green growth.

SNAP!

Here is a photo of a sucker that I farted around and missed.  You can see that the main stem of the tomato has grown to the side (toward the 10 o'clock position in the photo), while the sucker is growing straight up. I did not catch this one while it was small.  There are two small suckers on the branches below it that I can still snap off with my fingers.  If I would leave this big sucker alone, the plant would become top-heavy and unmanageable, so I'm going to remove it.  I can't snap this one off with my fingers without damaging the plant as it is simply too large.  I'll take my pocketknife and simply cut it off.  The plant will right itself and straighten up and fly right (as Nat King Cole might say)! 

A large sucker

And that's really all there is to it.  A snap here and a snap there and maybe a cut or two and you're done. Your tomatoes will be large and your plants will be orderly and manageable.