Gardening/Horticulture/Agriculture Thread

[Melkor]

Post pictures. Ask questions. Offer Advice. Swap Seeds/cuttings.




This is a 2.5 year old Japanese Fuyu persimmon grafted onto a Native Persimmon rootstock, fresh out of winter dormancy. The Japanese roots are very susceptible to nematodes and disease, where the native persimmon are quite resilient.



Already forming a persimmon blossom... I am tempted to let it grow and see it produce, but I will most likely prune the blossom.

[boog]

None of your pictures ever link for me!

[Melkor]

Waaaat. I suck at internets. Let me try this shit again.

[BadSkeelz]

It looks like the links Melkor is giving are A) not images themselves and B) behind an account wall.

You'd need to get to the source image (so that the URL ends in something like .jpeg .gif .png etc.), then post with [img] tags.

Melkor I suggest going to your links, right clicking on the image and selecting "View Image". That should get you to the source. That URL might be usable with tags or it might get blocked again by Google. If it's blocked I suggest rehosting on imgur or some other free hosting site.

Anyway that's my advice. Oh also Topsy Turvey planters suck unless you have really good light.

[Melkor]

The account wall was the issue. Thanks for the tip. just went and hosted on imgur.

If my blueberry picture from the other thread didn't show up, as well...

[Refugee]

Did you do the grafting yourself?  I would love to grow persimmons but the native variety are so very tall that us old folks don't want to mess with them.  Will your persimmon tree stay small like a pure Japanese tree?  And how different does the fruit taste between the native and Japanese variety?

Is your soil acidic enough for the blueberry or did you have to amend it?  I planted six blueberry bushes last month, four different cultivars for ripening throughout the summer.  I'm going to mulch the crap out of them with pine needles, and feed them food for acid loving plants.  I'd love to hear what you did.

[Refugee]

This is my sick peach tree.  It has peach leaf wilt.   



It's a fungus and very contagious to other peach trees.  I have to strip the infected leaves and burn them.  I'm going to pull off the little fruit too, so the tree will put all its energy to fighting off this invader and making more leaves to feed itself.  There are a lot of infected leaves.

[Melkor]

Did you do the grafting yourself?  I would love to grow persimmons but the native variety are so very tall that us old folks don't want to mess with them.  Will your persimmon tree stay small like a pure Japanese tree?  And how different does the fruit taste between the native and Japanese variety?

Is your soil acidic enough for the blueberry or did you have to amend it?  I planted six blueberry bushes last month, four different cultivars for ripening throughout the summer.  I'm going to mulch the crap out of them with pine needles, and feed them food for acid loving plants.  I'd love to hear what you did.

A friend of mine down in Jonesville did the grafting, and showed me how. He has some Fuyu persimmons grafted onto native rootstocks that are over 10 years old and about 15 feet tall. But if you want it more convenient, then topping and pruning will make the tree conform to your needs.

Persimmons are my favorite fruit. Our native ones are horribly astringent, and almost inedible until they are almost rotten, when the sugars overwhelm the astringency. Really native persimmons are only good for harvesting for their sugar, and rootstocks. There are other cultivars of persimmons that grow in Asia that are non-astringent, and delicious. My favorite is Fuyu persimmon, which looks like a big orange tomato with flesh the texture of firm honeydew, or if you let it overripen, like a tomato. They are so damned delicious. Every year I go to my friend's orchard in October and bring home bags of Fuyu Persimmons.

Right now, I am mass-planting native-persimmon seeds I collected from the woods. I want to grow like 30 native trees, then use them to graft clones of my Fuyu persimmon onto. My end-goal is to turn all of my land, and some of the surrounding forest, into a massive permaculture food forest. Many years of work ahead of me to see that endeavor realized.

My soil, undisturbed, is pretty neutral, a mix of limestone, sand, and clay. I amended the soil around where I planted my blueberry with the oak-leaf loam I can get from the woods - literally inches thick layer of rotten oak-leaf detritus -  mixed in with the surrounding soil. I have heard that top-mulching with acidic mulch like pinestraw and oak-leaves will only have a real impact with sandy soil, otherwise, it needs to me mixed in with the soil and left to decay.


Damn. That sucks about your peach tree. Years back, I had to cut and burn my orange and lime trees because they were infected with citrus canker. Will stripping the leaves and fruit be enough to prevent the spread to your other trees?

[boog]

You can graft anything onto anything! I recommend watching Dave Wilson Nursery's video series about backyard orchards, Refugee! You can prune nearly any tree and keep them very, very small and manageable!

[Melkor]

I thought trees have to be in the same Genus to be graft-compatible? Like all citrus can graft, apples and plums and whatnot can graft together, all persimmons can graft together, etc.

[boog]

Forgive me. I got excited. I don't think my statement was amazingly accurate, but I'm in between cooking supper and cleaning, so..

I know i works with ALL stone fruit. So, a cherry, plum, peach, can all be grafted onto the same root stock.

[Melkor]

Haha no worries. It is really exciting stuff. I've only recently gotten into grafting and cloning trees. I have two cuttings from a UF florida prince peach tree that I am trying to root right now. They are staying green and healthy, and they have been within moist soil for 3 or 4 days now, so I have high hopes. Other than that, I have a cutting from a Celeste fig, two blackberry cuttings, and a branch of my rose bush that my dog bent over that I am hoping I can root into a new plant.

[Melkor]

Even though the other side did amazingly? There aren't any barriers or anything in that garden. It's just a big stretch of dirt.

I grew so many watermelon, squash, and zucchini on the other side, that I was really ready to do just that, scorch the earth, heh.

I dunno if it's worth a go again. That place has never yielded well, unless it's a curcurbit. Everything else shits the bed at the park.

It's just hard and sad to give it up because it's been a part of my life for almost a decade now.

But I want fucking tomatoes and peppers, god dammit.

Um. Yeah. Garden thread. Let me get on that.

Hey Boog. I was thinking, maybe someone scorched the soil on the bad-side with a ton of concentrated fertilizer? or perhaps it is the opposite, depleted.

[Refugee]

Well sandy soil is not what I have at all!  I will have to change my plan.

I only have the one peach.  I had planned to put more in this year.  It affects peaches and nectarines. 

When I was a kid I loved the tart persimmons that grew wild on our farm, but you're right, it's important to wait until they are very very ripe!  I liked them after the first frost...if you could beat the cows to them.

[Refugee]

Thanks for the recommendation of the nursery videos, Boog, that site is great!

[boog]

Thanks for the recommendation of the nursery videos, Boog, that site is great!

I'm glad you're enjoying it! When I was working at the pharmacy I pulled 13 hour shifts for 3 days, so I'd get all my full time stuff out of the way. Sometimes, it'd get quiet in between backup calls (my job was to call in emergency 3 day supplies of medicine for patients who didn't receive their deliveries from us during the day/that evening/over the weekend), so I'd sit there and watch the backyard orchard series over and over and over again.

It's all super comprehensive and I feel incredibly knowledgeable just by having watched those videos. Plus, the guy who does the whole series is incredibly charismatic. I tried watching their container blueberry videos but that guy just isn't as good.

I want ALL of their fruit tree varieties. They're pricy, but I've heard their persimmons (since you two seem to like them a lot!) are ... fabulous.

I'm going to be moving my blueberry bushes from the park garden to my mother's house tomorrow, y'all. Wish me luck that I don't kill them. Blueberries are (supposedly) notoriously hard to transplant after they've been established in the ground. I'm taking some garbage bags and my shovel, digging wide trenches around each bush and extracting them with as much of the rootball intact as I'm able to.

Whew. It's gonna be tough work tomorrow. It's a good excuse to take it a little easier at the gym tonight.

[Refugee]

Good luck!

[Melkor]

Those Dave Wilson Nursery videos are great. I just spent the whole time watching his pruning videos salivating at the branches he was cutting off... Give them to me, man! Im going to get in touch with my friend with the persimmon nursery, see if he will let me keep his pruned branches this summer.

Ground to Ground transplants can be rough. Out of 8 or 9 Loquat trees of various sizes I transplanted last month, two died, two are in rough shape, three are decent, and one is awesomee. The two in rough shape have tap-roots that are intertwined, so I pulled them and planted them together. I am babying the hell out of them with tons of mulch and water. They seem to be hanging on, so I imagine new root growth is happening.

With your blueberries, I would suggest the same. Consider pruning the blossoms and fruit on it, and have your mom water it every morning and night. Root reestablishment is what you want.

Yo, refugee, we were talking about bows in the other thread. This morning, I took my dog on a 2 mile hike east of me to find a nice Eastern Red Cedar (Technically NOT a cedar, it is a Juniper, as it grows berries, not cones) Juniperus Virginiana to cut, replant some berries nearby, and carry home to green-carve.

I am aiming to make an English Long-bow (D-shaped limbs and handle, over 6 feet long) out of the heart-wood, which is very elastic, and beautiful in color.


Note that delicious purple heart-wood. I make depth-cuts with my chainsaw across the belly of the bow, the flat part of the D-shape. The back of the bow cannot be cut with anything other than hand-planers, surforms, rasps, and sandpaper, as a dip or rise of a millimeter in thickness can make that bow snap in your hands during the draw.


shot of the bark.


Some of the more recent bows I have carved. Left to right: Red oak flatbow, backed with fiberglass. Heavy as hell. I went overboard trying to make the fiberglass less ugly... wound up painting the shit out of it. I kinda hate it.
Yew stickbow. A decent bow. Only at about 45lbs at full draw. It is taking a lot of set over time. Beeswax and jute string made by a friend.
An ash recurve (heat treated and bent the tips into a slight reflex) backed with faux gator-skin. I wish I would have paid up for real gator-skin, but I was being cheap. Kinda bummed about that. Havent finished the bow for that reason.
An ash-backed, mahogany flatbow. Turns out you cant use mahogany as a bow-wood. lmfao. Way too brittle, porous.
Bamboo-backed, white-oak longbow with a white-oak riser. I fucked this bow during the tillering process. The bamboo backing was too thick, so it separated from the oak. I tried to re-laminate it, but it is done. Cant bring myself to burn it, though. It was turning out so nice.
A nice stave of sweetgum from my property that has been curing for the last 9 months in my shed. I painted the ends of the stave with latex paint to control the drying process, preventing checking and splitting.

[Refugee]

Awesome bows, man!

Cedar is so soft, I wouldn't think it would make a good bow?  In Kentucky, Eastern Cedar's like a tree-weed, it will take over your pasture in a couple of years if you don't constantly fight it.  We use it for fence posts because it's good against rot and bugs.

[Melkor]

Awesome bows, man!

Cedar is so soft, I wouldn't think it would make a good bow?  In Kentucky, Eastern Cedar's like a tree-weed, it will take over your pasture in a couple of years if you don't constantly fight it.  We use it for fence posts because it's good against rot and bugs.

Thanks. I still consider myself an apprentice bowyer. I break so many, it is so frustrating spending 20+ hours carving a piece of wood, only to have it break. This older bowyer (Who makes true works of art, they are incredible) I speak with reassures me that this is unavoidable, even with a ton of experience.
Absoultely. True Cedar cannot be used as a bow-wood. However, Eastern Red Cedar is a Juniper, and Junipers are surprisingly elastic per mass. The Sap-wood is around half of the density of water, but the heartwood is a little more dense, but a lot more elastic. For a shorter bow, it NEEDS to be backed. A long-bow disperses the tension along a longer length of wood, so you can leave it thicker without snapping. The length of wood I chose has about two inches of heart-wood on the thinner portion of the stave. I am probably going to back it with fiberglass, or rawhide if I feel like buying some. I read a while back that tribals used to use thicker limbs of juniper, backed with sinew.
The eastern Red Cedar thrives in the limestone quarry northeast of me, where the soil sucksss.

[Refugee]

Yeah, it likes the side of a hill where the limestone juts out of the ground.  Our little place doesn't have cedar problems, but it does get eat up with pine.  Pine's not as voracious but it's still a hassle to deal with.

Eastern cedar is the best whittling wood because it's so soft!  Whittling used to be a thing in the hills.  You just sit there and slowly turn a piece of wood into a pile of thin curls.  You don't want hard wood because that would be too much work, and whittling is about down time.  Unlike carving which is also a thing but turns the piece of wood into -something-.

[Melkor]

Down south, I waged a never-ending war against the Brazillian Pepper/Pink Peppercorn trees. They grew like wildfire, and the only way to kill them was to rip them out of the ground, or cut them down to stumps and keep a bonfire on them for half a day. They were sooo damned bad. The cardinals loved them, but lots of people are allergic to their sap, their pollen, and even their scent, which was so strong. The Islanders down south used the little peppercorns (not real peppercorns) to season their pork and seafood. I cut so many down that the scent was repulsive to me.

So, with whittling, you are not trying to really create anything?



Here is the healthiest loquat I transplanted from the woods to the east to the woods on my property.

[Refugee]

No, with whittling the idea was... let me see if I can describe it.

You have a smooth piece of eastern cedar you've been working on for a half hour.  You hold it in your hands and turn it as you work, each tiny imperfection to be smoothed away in lovely curling shavings.  All there is is this function, the feel of the wood, the look of it, the smell, your razor-sharp pocketknife, the growing pile of shavings.  You never take off a chunk, each cut removes just a very thin but long curling bit of wood.  It inevitably leaves a tiny imperfection because your wood is round and the blade is flat, so your next slice takes that...and so on.  Your mind is free to solve the great mysteries of the universe.  It's oddly satisfying, soothing.  Even as a hyper kid, I could do this for a long time. 

When I was a kid, I'd get paid $5 an acre to grub out baby cedars growing in peoples' pastures.  To put that in perspective, that was 100 packs of chewing gum, 50 bottles of pop, 15-20 gallons of gas.  It is a suck job but there wasn't a lot else you could earn that kind of money at as a young kid.  It also says a lot that people were willing to pay someone to do it.  There wasn't a lot of money in my area in those days.  I'd ride my fat pony bareback to some field and she'd graze all day while I hacked with my grubbin' hoe.  What we called a grubbing hoe isn't what I've found other people call that.  This is what we called a grubbin' hoe. 

You couldn't just cut them off at the surface, you had to dig down and get the better part of the roots too.

[Melkor]

I can see how that would be very therapeutic, meditative.

Ah, thats an adze, or maybe a mattock with the blade on the back end.

Depending on the density and size of the cedars growing, that sounds like an awesome job for a kid. There's no real work like that for kids these days. Instead, you have adults working minimum wage, and young-adults unemployed. I was lucky enough to finangle my way into working as a helper on local construction sites as a teenager, 20 bucks for a few hours of carrying lumber, cleaning up, whatever, until I was 18 and was actually a legal hourly employee.

[Refugee]

As a teenager I worked for $3 a day and a meal as a laborer in the fields doing whatever was needed until I got to be 16.  Mostly working hay, corn, and tobacco.  Then I got a job for $2 an hour working at a riding stable at a local resort, which I loved.

The day after my 17th birthday I went to the Navy recruiter and started the paperwork.  Woulda went on my birthday but it was a Sunday.  Couldn't wait to get out of there.  Ever since I've been struggling to get back.  And now I am finally going home.

Back to the subject of the thread!  So far I have cherry trees, apple trees, and one sick peach tree, blueberries, blackberries, and gooseberries, and pawpaws. 

I planned to have a big garden this year but our plans have been delayed that I don't think I will have time.  I want to try to grow as much of the animal feed as I can.  I think I will use the down year to put pigs over the garden area, so they can root out the blackberry rhizomes.  Those dang things....