Sanhedrin Nursery – Garden Blog

• Potatoes are available now for spring planting. Choose from red, white, yellow and blue varieties as well as the popular fingerlings.

• Spray for peach leaf curl with copper spray. Peach and nectarine trees may suffer from this fungus disease without a protective spray.

• Roses should be pruned now. After pruning, remove all old leaves on and around the bushes and spray plants with Neem oil to prevent early pest and disease problems.

• Asparagus will provide you with delicious, low-priced spears for years to come if you plant them now from dormant crowns.

•Â  Give someone you love a pretty red Cyclamen today.

Disease-Resistant Fruits

Wet spring weather is prime time for diseases of all kinds, which can make leaves unsightly and even damage flowers. But it is especially hard on fruit trees causing diseases that last into the summer and damage the fruit as well as the foliage.

Spraying is typically done through the springtime to inhibit disease spores, but an even more successful way is to plant disease-resistant varieties. This is particularly beneficial for apples, which are prone to scab and cedar-apple rust; pears, which are prone to fireblight; peaches, which are prone to peach leaf curl; and apricots, which are prone to brown rot.

One of the best apple varieties for disease resistance is ‘Liberty’. This dark red apple has yellowish flesh that is crisp, juicy and fine flavored. It is primarily a dessert apple and it makes a fine pinkish applesauce. It is not susceptible to scab and very resistant to other apple diseases.

Other apples that are resistant to scab are ‘Golden Russet’, with crisp, aromatic, creamy yellow flesh and excellent sweet flavor; and ‘York Imperial’, a crisp, juicy apple with semi-sweet flavor that is a good keeper. ‘Empire’, a sweet and juicy red apple, and ‘Spartan’, with pure white, crisp, juicy flesh, are resistant to both fireblight and scab. ‘Stayman Winesap’, a late red apple with a lively flavor, is resistant to fireblight. ‘Honeycrisp’, a sweet, crisp apple, has some resistance to scab.

Some years, when the weather is just right, we can have a bad problem with fireblight on pears. It is a good idea to plant at least one resistant variety. Look for ‘Harrow Delight‘, with fruit similar to ‘Bartlett’, and ‘Warren’, whose smooth flesh is juicy and buttery with superb flavor. ‘Magness’, with soft, juicy, sweet flesh, and ‘Moonglow’, a large fruit for fresh use or canning, are also fireblight resistant.

Asian pears, which have round, juicy, crisp-like-an-apple fruit, can also be attacked by fireblight. ‘20th Century’, with sweet, mild-flavored fruit, and ‘Shinko’, with sweet, flavorful fruit, are both resistant to fireblight.

Peach trees can be severely damaged by peach leaf curl. ‘Frost’ peach is a delicious, medium-sized yellow freestone that is very resistant. So is ‘Q-1-8’, a semi-freestone white peach that is sweet and juicy with a sprightly flavor, and ‘Indian Free’, a white peach with red streaks through the fruit. It is tart until fully ripe when it develops a rich, distinctive flavor.

Apricots can have trouble with brown rot, which causes fruit to rot on the tree forming mummies. It is a problem when we have moderate temperatures and moist weather during bloom. ‘Harcot’, which has medium to large fruit with a sweet, rich flavor, is resistant to this disease.

Your orchard will be easier to maintain if you choose disease-resistant varieties whenever you can.

• Plant seeds of broccoli, cabbage, lettuce and other spring vegetables now.

• Plant strawberry plants now for delicious strawberry shortcake this summer.

• Apples and pears are the easiest fruits to grow in our area. Choose early, mid-season and late varieties for a continuous harvest from late summer into winter.

• Primroses, in their rainbow of colors, will light up your flower beds and boxes this winter and spring.

Berry Cousins

Lingonberries have been a gourmet staple in Sweden, Norway and Germany since the time of the Vikings. Europeans are wild about lingonberry jams, juices, syrups and liqueurs. For a pancake syrup, their flavor is excellent. Also known as mountain cranberry or foxberry, this berry is little known in this country.

The pea-sized fruits have a strong red color and a tasty, tart flavor. They have unusually good keeping qualities, up to 8 weeks under refrigeration. Berries and leaves of the bush are used for medicinal purposes and, eaten raw, they are good for the digestion.

The lingonberry, Vaccinium vitis-idaea, is a wonderful ornamental plant. The bright red berries and bright evergreen foliage make it attractive year-round. It is a creeping, ground-cover plant growing 12 to 16 inches tall. It needs constant moisture and partial shade and will make a handsome ground-cover under rhododendrons. They are closely related to cranberries and blueberries.

In Northern Europe the lingonberry is found commonly growing in the pine forests. It is very hardy, and prefers a cool location. They also like an acid and gritty soil with a pH of 4 to 5. When planting, amend the soil with generous amounts of peat moss and sand and be sure the soil is well-drained. When given the right conditions, they will form a solid mat which shades the ground and provides its own mulch.

The pinkish white, bell-shaped flowers come in clusters in early spring and produce dark red berries which ripen by late spring or early summer. The plants are very disease-resistant.

Lingonberries also make attractive container plants. As a potted ornamental, it fruits in the fall of the year, and the red berries set against the green foliage are very showy. Find a spot in your garden for this intriguing, edible landscape plant.

A close cousin to the lingonberry is our native huckleberry, Vaccinium ovatum. This lovely shrub has small shiny leaves that are dark green above and pale green underneath, with copper-colored new growth. The spring flowers are particularly attractive. They hang like clusters of pink, urn-shaped bells very much like heather or manzanita blossoms, to which they are related.

Huckleberries make excellent landscaping plants since they have such attractive, glossy, evergreen foliage and showy edible fruit. They are good for anchoring soil and flourish in sun or shade with some summer watering and good drainage. They like acidic soil that is low in organic matter, and tolerate everything from sandy soils to clay, and are drought tolerant once established. One inch of organic mulch will keep them happy.

Evergreen huckleberries are excellent plants for creating wildlife habitats. The flowers attract butterflies and the berries are eaten by scarlet tanagers, bluebirds, thrushes, and other songbirds. Deer and rabbit browse freely on the plants. Because of their food value to wildlife and their dense shrubby growth, evergreen huckleberry is a good addition to hedgerows.

In fall, the plants are covered with delicious, juicy, purplish-black berries. They are delicious fresh and also make excellent jelly, pies, pancakes and muffins. They can also be frozen and used for up to 6 months.

Edible plants can be important additions to your landscape, providing beauty as well as tasty and healthy treats for your family.

• It’s bare root season, which means you can save money on fruit trees and shade trees by planting them now. A wide selection is now available.

• Onion plants can be set out now for early summer harvest. Choose your favorite varieties.

• Blueberries are a delicious fruit that can be planted now from young plants. Give them a rich, acid bed prepared with lots of peat moss.

• Spray fruit trees with a dormant oil spray after you prune them. Spray from the bottom up, including the undersides of limbs and the ground around the tree, to prevent early spring insect infestations.

• FREE Fruit Tree Pruning Class this Sunday, January 29, from 10 AM to 3 PM. Meet at Mendocino County Museum, 400 E Commercial St, Willits, and look for the signs. Call 459-9009 for more information.

Pruning Fruit Trees

The main purpose of pruning a fruit tree is to create a tree with delicious high quality fruit at a height where you can pick it safely.

When fruit trees are young, 1-4 years old, the main object of pruning is to establish a well-formed framework of branches that will be capable of holding and bearing the fruit. This framework can take many forms from the traditional open-vase or central-leader systems to the newer spindle-bush system.

The traditional open-vase is an excellent form for most fruit trees and it is the easiest to do. Remember that as the tree grows, a given branch will always be the same distance from the ground: it does not grow up with the tree.

For a fruit tree to fruit properly, it needs 6-8 hours of sunlight a day. Proper pruning will allow sunlight to penetrate throughout the tree so that all the flowers, fruit spurs, and fruit get all the sun’s energy they need in order to grow properly and produce fruit.

In order to maintain a balance between fruiting wood on the tree and vegetative growth, which will become new fruiting wood in time, trees must be pruned moderately, avoiding large swings of growth brought about by heavy pruning. This will also help the trees bear regular crops every year, especially on trees that tend to bear heavily one year and lightly the next.

Proper pruning also distributes the fruit evenly throughout the tree. And it creates better air circulation, which helps prevent certain diseases.

The two basic pruning cuts are a heading cut, which removes part of a branch, and a thinning cut, which removes a branch all the way back to where it meets another branch. We use these two types of pruning cuts at different times to achieve our pruning goals. Height control on fruit trees is best done with summer pruning, while winter pruning causes lush regrowth, especially in the top of your tree.

Sometimes a large, old, neglected fruit tree must be pruned in order to bring its height down to a more manageable level and to improve its fruit quality. This takes careful work over 2-3 years.

Pruning should always include the removal of dead, diseased and broken branches, cutting out unwanted growth like water sprouts, suckers, and crossing or rubbing branches, and improving the structure of the tree by removing narrow or weak branch attachments.

Learn where the fruit is produced on your trees so that you can prune your trees properly and not prune off the fruiting wood.

Proper pruning will make for a strong, healthy tree that will give you bushels of fruit for years to come. There is a lot to know about pruning, so take a pruning class, read books and observe carefully the results of your own pruning on your trees. Have fun and enjoy the fruits of your labor.