Category Archives: Nature and Gardens

In Praise of Apricots

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I am in love with apricots: tree, flower, and fruit.

Long ago, in a house in Tunis, we had an apricot tree. My family was only passing through, residents in the house for two years, but I remember the garden. It had a fig tree with a bough thick enough and horizontal enough to sit on. It had loquat bushes, mysterious and fuzzy. It had a walled garden where plants that looked like water lilies of the air suddenly appeared and bloomed with bright red and yellow flowers. (I’d never seen a nasturtium before.) And it had an apricot tree.

Delicate, scented white blossoms, followed by a shower of petals like something out of a romance or a fantasy novel. Heart-shaped leaves. And finally, small orange fruit. More velvety than fuzzy, and not tasting like tiny peaches but with their own distinct flavor.

Alas, I didn’t settle in a Mediterranean climate. There are no local apricot orchards. Despite the cautions listed on the Extension website, I did try to grow my own. I planted two trees. They grew, they bloomed, they fruited. I even got to eat some rather speck-marked fruit before the squirrels discovered them, and before the year that both trees died, probably from shot hole disease.

Not wanted to kill another apricot tree, I planted a fig in its place. And wow, has that fig grown!

But when you love something, it’s really hard to give up on it.  Every so often, I buy apricots in the store, hoping that this batch will be ripe enough. I am usually disappointed.

The last time I did so, I saved some of the pits–just because. I chilled them in damp coffee filters for a month or so, in case they needed cold treatment, and planted them. Now I have three seedlings growing in my window. I know fruit varieties are usually grafted, so I can’t expect to get the variety I planted, but I am eager to find out if they will eventually produce those lovely delicate blossoms.

Apricot blossoms after an ice storm

 

Here’s the puzzle. If I love apricots, should I keep trying to grow them even though they are poorly suited to this climate? Or should I accept my situation and stick to the many plants that will flourish here?

And another puzzle: why is it so hard to give up one’s fantasy garden? Be it fields of English bluebells in the Midwest, or posies of sweet peas in the scorching South, or fresh ripe apricots in an area of many false springs, is it partly because they are just out of reach?

Till next post. 


 

Garden Battles–fighting for my tomatoes (and roses)

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In my imagination, a garden is a place of tranquil enjoyment where people move about slowly, smelling the roses and picking the fruits of their labor. Many public gardens are like this—well-tended spaces where visitors can soak up the atmosphere in comfort.
Not so in my backyard.
The problem isn’t with the work of gardening. Digging, planting, pruning, composting—I’m comfortable with those. I’m also okay with the fact that gardening takes time. I plant a fig and wait… and wait…three years now, and no fruit. But some day it will get there, I’m sure, as will the still-flowerless pomegranate bush. I’ve got time.
The problem is the pests. The four-footed pests, the six-footed pests, and those that have no feet at all.
The largest of the four-footed pests is the deer. Suburban deer are more and more numerous all the time. They are the main reason my landscaping is relatively boring. The back yard has plastic fencing attached to the chain-link to raise the height to nearly eight feet, but the front and sides of the house are undefended. As a result, my choices are limited. No hostas (deer candy), no roses (thorns will not stop them), no zinnias, no coneflowers. Even the azaleas get nibbled and so flower poorly. So I depend on rosemary, lavender, and irises where there is enough sun, and ferns and lamium in the shade.* The rest of the plants are restricted to the fenced backyard.
The fence doesn’t keep out other four-footed pests, though. The worst of these are the squirrels and the voles. The squirrels help themselves to my fruit before it has even ripened, running off with strawberries, green peaches, and half-ripe tomatoes. No fence will keep them out—I would have to cage my garden in chicken-wire to do that. 
While the squirrels attack from above, the voles attack from below. They leave neat little holes where plants once were. Sometimes I find a plant suddenly wilted and discover it no longer has any roots. I have lost whole rose bushes to voles, as well as tomato starts.
I haven’t included moles on my list of garden pests because they don’t eat plants and may in fact be snacking on the grubs of a different garden pest, the Japanese beetle. The Japanese beetle is certainly one of the most annoying of my six-footed pests, since it particularly likes the unopened buds of roses. Grasshoppers do damage to the leaves of plants, as does a mysterious brown beetle that only comes out at night. And then there is the tomato hornworm with its voracious appetite. It’s easy to pick off, though, so the worst thing about it is coming upon it unexpectedly when handling a tomato plant. (Shudder.)
Weeding is part of gardening, and I actually have fond feelings for the weeds that our guinea pigs used to enjoy: chickweed, wood sorrel, purslane, and dandelions. But sometimes a weed goes too far. I had just one summer of not being able to weed, and now the stiltgrass (Microstegium) is threatening to take over my entire yard. I am not kidding here. Naturally I would also like to be rid of the Youngia japonica and the mock strawberry (which does indeed mock me with a strawberry-like fruit that doesn’t taste like strawberries), but at least they aren’t growing knee-deep and dense enough to hide anything on the ground, from the garden hose to a yellow jacket’s nest.
The tiniest pests of all still make themselves felt in a big way.  I’ve lost rose after rose to black spot, a fungus, and a different fungus contributed to the deaths of two very well-developed apricot trees. I was afraid to replant apricots, lest the new ones go the same way, so now there is a fig in that spot. So far the fig is serenely unbothered by pests of any kind.
I have saved the very worst pest for last. This creature doesn’t eat, infect, or otherwise harm a single plant, but it has a bigger impact than any of the others. It is the mosquito. I can’t stay out more than ten minutes without long pants, long sleeves (in summer!), and DEET on all remaining exposed skin. Mosquitoes not only make it difficult for me to pull weeds, pick off bugs, and remove diseased leaves, but they also prevent me from enjoying my garden—which was the whole point of gardening in the first place.
And I can’t fence them out.
Till next post.
*Actually, I also have catmint, chives, thyme, sage, aromatic aster, assorted mints, and a pomegranate outside the deer fence. So far, they have not been eaten.

"Flowers or Vegetables?"–reasoning about gardening

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 Some years back, I heard a fellow gardener say that she only grew flowers, never vegetables. “I can get all the vegetables I want at the farmer’s market,” she said, “so why waste garden space?”

Her reasoning caught my attention then, and I am still thinking about it even now . “Flowers or vegetables?” is an important question for a gardener.  Plenty of gardeners–maybe even the majority–grow both. But some gardeners are mainly interested in creating a beautiful landscape, while others think flowers are a waste of space since you can’t eat them. (At least, not most of them, and not in a very sustaining way.)
I belong to the “both” school. I love flowers, but I can’t imagine having a garden without growing some tomatoes, maybe some carrots, certainly basil and parsley. When I browse seed catalogs, I spend at least as much time contemplating the enormous range of possible lettuces, sizes of carrots, varied summer squash and of course tomatoes, as I do looking at photos of zinnias, violas, and sweet peas (so lovely and so unsuited to my climate.)
Why grow vegetables? As my fellow gardener pointed out, I do live in a town with a flourishing farmer’s market. Most of the vegetables I grow (at least the ones I grow successfully), I could buy. They offer plenty of heirloom tomatoes, cute squash, leafy greens and so on. They sell beautiful green bouquets of basil. Most of their vegetables look better than mine, and I could pick and choose the ones I want.
I asked a similar question earlier about making homemade French bread. I can buy better French bread locally, so why make it? But I don’t think the answer is the same in the two cases. With French bread, I make it in large part for the challenge of the thing. I don’t grow vegetables for the challenge of it. In fact, I prefer vegetables that are easy to grow and don’t require much fuss.
Do I grow my own vegetables so I can get them exactly the way I want, as in the case of making myself a pair of lightweight green corduroy pants with double pleats? Or the time I tried to manufacture a grocery bag that was washable and yet would stay open easily?
There is certainly an element of choice. When I grow my own vegetables, I can choose unusual varieties that aren’t offered at the Farmer’s Market. Getting to choose is certainly what keeps me browsing seed catalogs through the winter.
However, some of the varieties I grow are available at the Farmer’s Market. Every year I plant a couple of Sungold tomatoes, even though I can buy the little orange globes by the pint. And while I’ve experimented with different kinds of basil, I’ve discovered that when I’m cooking I actually prefer plain, basic basil. As a result, that’s mostly what I grow now.
For some of the vegetables, and especially for the herbs, it is helpful to be able to go out back and pick just what I need, when I need it. A few leaves of basil, some sprigs of parsley, just enough lettuce for a salad. In fact, I should probably keep this in mind when planning and give priority to plants that don’t store well or are used in small quantities.
So why grow any other vegetables?
The answer, I think, is that there is just something very appealing about growing some of my own food. It’s the feeling of providing for myself–even if, in truth,  I’ve got hardly enough for one meal. It feels (ironically) deeply practical. This is probably the reason I keep planting fruit trees and bushes, even though the squirrels and birds make off with most of it. I could plant purely ornamental trees, but I like the thought of producing fruit in my own backyard.
Hyacinths may feed the soul, but peach trees feed the stomach as well. (Or, given squirrel thievery, maybe just the imagination.)
Till next post.