Liberated Gardener

How To Launch a New Fig Tree by Layering a Branch

When I discover a plant I really like I want to have more of them. But sometimes I want more then my budget can support. Fortunately, as gardeners we can save money by making our own plants.

 One of the easiest ways to multiply plants is to grow new roots from the branches of shrubs and small trees. I’m not talking about taking cuttings or grafting or division. Those all have their pluses and minuses in the world of horticulture. I’m talking about an even easier technique called layering. I think it’s one of the most underutilized propagation techniques in the garden today for shrubs and trees. It can work with shrubs like rhododendrons, camellias, daphnes and even small trees like juneberries and hollies. 

 Other propagation techniques either require significant damage to the plant--such as division--or trying to start a plant without any roots—meaning cuttings--or trying to line up narrow pathways of the cambium—that’s grafting.

Layering gives the gardener and the new plant the best of both worlds: the new plant stays connected to the mama plant until it’s ready to grow on its own.  And there’s no tricky work for the gardener. You can start a plant from layering in any season. Here, I’ll show you how simple and reliable it is to layer a fig tree.

 1)   First pick a few slender branches (no more than an inch or so thick) that bend easily and can touch the ground.

2)   Take your pocketknife and scrape away a thin layer of bark from the side of the branch that will touch the soil. Scrape away an area about 2” long (in line with the branch) and up to a half inch wide to expose the green cambium. (Some gardeners like to bend the branch just till it cracks and that can work too.)

3)   For some species it may be beneficial to apply a dusting of root hormone to the cut area, but many plants will root successfully without that.

4)   Press the cut area onto the soil after removing any mulch or other debris.

5)   Hold the scraped branch in place with a stone, brick or length of stiff wire so it doesn’t move. You want the scraped area of the branch to have thorough and stable contact with the soil. The darkness, the moisture and the smell of good soil will stimulate the cambium to produce new roots from the damaged area.

6)   Leave it alone for one or more seasons. I often start layering a fig in fall, let it root over winter and pot it up in late winter or spring. You can also layer them in early spring and probably pot them up in late summer.

7)   When you think it’s been long enough lift the brick and brush soil away from the branch. If there are no roots, you haven’t given it enough time or it’s been too dry or too cold for much to happen. Put the brick back and wait another season. If the branch is holding in place and you can see roots reaching into the soil, then it’s ready to grow on its own.

  8)   Use your hand pruners or loppers to cut the new baby plant away from the mama plant. Make this cut on the mama side of the branch just an inch or so away from where you scraped the bark.

9)   With the rooted branch separated from the mama plant, carefully dig as deep as necessary to get the roots up out of the ground.

10)                 Put the rooted branch in a suitably sized pot.

11)                 Add any compost needed to fill the pot and keep the roots from drying out unless you are going to plant the new fig somewhere right away.

12)                 If you are going to grow the new plant in a pot for a while put soil less media (I recommend 2/3 compost and 1/3 shredded pine bark) so that the potted roots will have great drainage and can get better established.

13)                 Alternatively, you can just cut the branch and leave the new plant in the ground where it is until you are ready to move it or give it away. Here's a picture of a new fig tree that's been dug after leafing out in spring.

Once it’s all said and done, you’ve got a new fig tree and can look forward to filling bowls with this delicate fruit in two or three years. 

This beautiful and delicious variety is called Violete de Bourdeaux and is available at www.ediblelandscaping.com.

Fertilizing Dwarf Citrus in Pots

Our grove of potted dwarf citrus trees are a bit like pets with benefits (a phrase I borrowed from my wife Chris, who says that about chickens). I only have to take them for a walk twice a year (once around Thanksgiving to bring them in the house and again in March/April to take them out in the sun) and they give us fragrant flowers, delicious fruit in winter and evergreen foliage. 

 
 

I've had a sour orange tree for almost a dozen years, a Meyer lemon for about 7 years, a Clementine tangerine for 3 years and just bought a baby Meiwa sweet kumquat. 

Every few years I've done some root pruning and re-potted them. But this year I decided to figure out a way to simplify that job. So instead of spreading out a tarp and pulling these 2'-3' tall little trees from their 14"x14"x14" pots and messing around with the new and old potting soil and dealing with a lot of clean-up, I decided to figure out a way to root prune (to generate newer, more vigorous roots) and fertilize with less time and trouble. 

I pulled out the soil sample tube from my days of organic farming (you can get one on Amazon for $30-$60). It's a stainless steel tube of about 20" with a T handle and a sharp tip for cutting through roots and soil. It has an open side meant for examining the soil profile. Farmers and others use these tools to see the changes in soil type below the surface. For my purposes it allowed me to cut a channel in each of the four corners of the pots all the way to the bottom and extract the potting soil and roots of about a one inch wide well.

 

The soil probe pretty easily allowed me to dump the extracted potting soil through it's open side into another pot for re-use or composting later. Then I poured Espoma Citrus-Tone organic fertilizer (5-2-6) from the bag into the well until it was full. I poked the fertilizer down with my finger and added some more to top it off, replaced the mulch of attractive river rocks and watered them in. The probe worked about equally well in both wet and dry potting soil. The roots will have access to air in the channel and the organic fertilizer. 

And I didn't have to make a mess. Instead of a couple of hours of re-potting and clean up, it took me all of 30 minutes and one 4 lb. bag of Citrus Tone (here's the fact sheet) to put 4 wells in the potting soil of each of my four citrus trees and a few other potted tropicals that I knew would like the high nitrogen mix: two night-blooming cereus and a coffee tree.

To save money on this  technique, I suppose you could make a soil probe (or call it a potting soil extractor) from pvc, or copper which might be too bendable for this task. Either way, it would benefit from a T handle for twisting and the bottom would need to be sharp enough to cut roots. And you want the tube open on one side to get the potting soil out easily. Let me know if you make one that works and I'll post it. 

Meanwhile I'm looking forward to next winter's harvest of lemons, tangerines and sweet kumquats. 

 

3 Perennial Edibles in One Bed

 

Prices for fresh fruits and vegetables are rising partly because of the cost of fossil fuels for transportation. But our household’s cost for asparagus, rhubarb, raspberries, figs, artichokes and blueberries are the same as last year because we grow these perennial fruits and vegetables ourselves. Produce in the average family’s grocery cart traveled about 1500 miles. That burns up hundreds of gallons of fuel that would require the planting of thousands of trees to offset all the greenhouses gases produced. Lots of our produce, on the other hand, traveled much less than 1500 inches getting to our table. And instead  of burning up  fossil fuel, we burn up a few hundred calories working in the garden. That offsets the calories in the bowl of vanilla ice cream that I buried under a pile of alpine strawberries for dessert last night. How’s that for guilt-free pleasures? I saved the Earth and my waistline at the same time.

 
 

Prices for fresh fruits and vegetables are rising partly because of the cost of fossil fuels for transportation. But our household’s cost for asparagus, rhubarb, raspberries, figs, artichokes and blueberries are the same as last year because we grow these perennial fruits and vegetables ourselves. Produce in the average family’s grocery cart traveled about 1500 miles. That burns up hundreds of gallons of fuel that would require the planting of thousands of trees to offset all the greenhouses gases produced. Lots of our produce, on the other hand, traveled much less than 1500 inches getting to our table. And instead  of burning up  fossil fuel, we burn up a few hundred calories working in the garden. That offsets the calories in the bowl of vanilla ice cream that I buried under a pile of alpine strawberries for dessert last night. How’s that for guilt-free pleasures? I saved the Earth and my waistline at the same time.

I’ve kept an organic vegetable garden for over 25 years, but about 10 years ago, I wondered if it wouldn’t be less work to grow perennial fruits and vegetables for the table in addition to annual vegetables. After putting perennials in the ground the first time, there’s no tilling, no planting and no pulling spent plants out every few months. Don’t get me wrong—I love our vegetable garden, but I think of the annual tomatoes, peas, greens, broccoli and other vegetables as toddlers that need regular attention, while the perennials are more like pre-teens; old enough to be a bit independent, but they still like adults enough to want to stay close to home. And like pre-teens, they do need occasional help with grooming—mulching and pruning in the case of the perennials—but given the higher per pound cost at the store for these crops and the intensity of good flavor and texture we get when we can put fresh cut asparagus straight on the grill, they are more than worth that small amount of effort.

 

 We grow the raspberries, asparagus and alpine strawberries all together in a circular raised bed edged with basketball sized stones, because they all like very good drainage. We harvest the asparagus shoots til near the end of May and then let them grow up into ferny bushes that shade the alpine strawberries from the summer sun.  We’ve also recently planted a few perennial fruits and vegetables that we’ve yet to harvest: apple, sweet cherry, cardoon and lovage. All these perennial fruits and vegetable need at least 6-8 hours of full sun to produce well. But we’re growing some other plants in mostly shade, such as figs, native paw paw trees (produces a banana flavored fruit), Solomon’s Seal (you can eat the shoots similar to asparagus), ostrich ferns (the fiddleheads are edible) and mayapple, a native woodland groundcover that has a fruit that to me  tastes just like a scuppernong grape, but without the seeds and tough outer skin.

Gardening goes better with books and two that I recommend for someone intrigued with growing perennial fruits and vegetables are Perennial Vegetables by Eric Toensmeier and the NC Fruit and Vegetable Book by Walter Reeves and Felder Rushing.

Most of our edible perennials come from a nursery called  Edible Landscaping,(website of the same name).

Finally, you might be wondering how we manage to squeeze all these perennial fruits and vegetables onto our 1/6^th acre lot? We simply put our fossil-fuel consuming lawn on a diet. I mean, who wants to eat grass?

 

 

 

Edible Landscaping Nursery

Twenty five years ago, Mike McConkey, in Afton, Va., had potted up a few hardy kiwis given to him as cuttings from an old nurseryman. When the nurseryman was quoted in a garden magazine saying that Mike was the best source for hardy kiwis, he received about $10,000 worth of orders for the plant and knew it was time to get serious about running a nursery.  He called it Edible Landscaping. 

Mike's mission is to find edible varieties that grow well in the south and can be grown organically. 

Our Liberty apple, Stella sweet cherry, Violet of Bourdeaux and a few other plants had come from there via mail order and I had talked about visiting the place for years. But I only made it by there when Chris and I went to one of her cousin's weddings in Altoona, PA .

The Mapquest map brought us through the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah Valley and strangely right through the tiny town of Afton, VA, so I had to stop for a visit in Oct, when I took these pics. 

And brought home a few things. Like this seedless Che tree with scrumptious brain-like fruit. 

I did not buy a kiwi, but include this pic for contrast....

...with this hardy kiwi variety called Issai, which does not need a mate and does not need to be peeled like common kiwis (above). Just pop them in your mouth like a grape.

An epiphytic plant like a night blooming cereus grows in their greenhouse and produces an edible fruit. Here it gets some tender, loving care from a staff member. 

Native persimmons were ripe too. 

 I've had great success with plants from Edible Landscaping--he ships year round in pots, so you get a bigger plant with a strong root system. Costs more than most mail order places, but you definitely get more for your money. 

Figs in a Jam!

 

I love the look on the face of a person who's only known Fig Newtons and is getting their first taste of a tree-ripe, juicy, sweet, luscious fig from our back yard. Figs are one of the best fruiting trees for the south and for partial shade and for growing organically. They are drought hardy, rarely have serious bug or disease problems and are very hardy in our mild winters. 

The first of three harvests we get each summer from our Violette de Bourdeaux (bought from Edible Landscaping Nursery in Afton Va.) is the sweetest and we give away a lot. The spicy/sweet fig jam in the photo above is from our neighbor Sandi, who's a great cook. She was re-creating a fig jam she had tasted before and could no longer buy. ( I've read that great cooking is really about capturing flavors that are anchored in our memories.)

Okay, so now this spicey/sweet fig jam is anchored in my memory too. 

And here's Sandi's recipe in her own words:

Okay, I'm pretty sure what I did was (using a basic, old-fashioned jam recipe technique from Joy of Cooking):

4 to 5 cups of fresh figs, washed, half of them chopped roughly, the other half quartered:  put in a pot and press down on them a little to get some juices oozing.

Add 3 cups of sugar and slowly bring to a boil, then keep simmering, stirring frequently to keep from sticking or burning
(the old recipe calls for 3/4 to 1 c. of sugar to each cup of fruit, and I went on the lighter side, but still very sweet.  However, I think you DO need a high sugar content if you want to avoid using pectin)

Meanwhile, stick a jalepeño with a carving fork, and roast over open flame until blackened all over.  Stick it in a paper bag to steam & cool for ten minutes.
Peel the charred skin off of the pepper, and mince finely.  Depending on how hot you want the jam, throw away some or all of the seeds before adding to figs.  (in the recipe I tried, I threw away about half, but think I should have left them ALL in.  For MY taste, next time, I think I would use two jalepeños.)

Toss jalepeño and seeds into the simmering jam, along with 1 stick of cinnamon, and 4 or 5 cloves.

Continue to cook and stir until quite thickened (a total of about 45 minutes); remove the cinnamon stick (and any of the cloves you might notice), and pack in glass jars.

Should make 6, 7, or 8 half-pint jelly jarfuls.

Figs !

Lots of people worry that fig trees aren't hardy here in NC. But figs thrive in southern heat. They can even produce a good crop in part shade and dry soil. And without any spraying, so we don't have to worry about using chemicals. Figs are probably the easiest fruit crop to grow organically in the south. 

The only real threat is birds eating the figs, but we've convinced the birds that the neighbor's yards are safer by hanging an inflatable snake balloon in the fig tree to scare them away. We just move the snake every other day as the figs ripen, so they don't get used to it--and that matches our harvesting schedule anyway. 

We have one fig tree called Violette de Bourdeaux that produces a late spring crop (the sweetest), a mid summer crop (the heaviest) and a late summer crop (the lightest). It has a rich, sweet flavor, juicy texture, dark purple-black skin and strawberry colored flesh. Bought it from Edible Landscaping Nursery in Afton Virginia. When I read in the catalog, that this was the one that all the chefs wanted, I had to have it. 

Edible Landscaping's mission is to find or develop fruiting plants that do well in the south and can be grown organically. 

Since this fig produces more than we can eat, Chris makes a fig syrup and our neighbor makes a spicy fig jam. So we save money and have fresh fruit over a long season and conserved fruit through the winter. And we give a lot away to friends. We've also eaten the figs on Chris' pizzas and have dried them in the oven (but that took over 24 hours !). 

Here's a photo of our pretty figs getting stewed down for fig syrup. 

 

Here's a pic of some figs quartered with a dollop of goat cheese and a dribble of balsamic vinegar that Chris reduced on the stove. We shared these with some friends and brought a big plateful  to a potluck where they disappeared faster than a wheat field in a locust swarm. 

 

Mouthful of Raspberries

Is there anything better for shoving in your mouth than a handful of raspberries?

The answer is 'nope.' And they are only better if they are homegrown, organic and a hard-to-find heirloom variety with purple berries. 

Yesterday Chris and I circled our one plant, picking ripe berries and switching between popping them in our own mouths and feeding each other. 

We'll be enjoying these for most of the month of June. I've had this plant for about 10 years--it's called Carpenter's Heirloom. I've moved it twice over the years, because it's one terrific plant that I haven't wanted to leave behind when I moved. Hostas, azaleas, and daffodils I can turn my back on when I move and look forward to new plants in new gardens. But this plant is like a pet--and I don't mind the thorns. 

Don't know where you can get one yourself at this moment. The garden center I bought mine from lost contact with the grower--Jack Carpenter-- and I haven't been able to find out anything about him via Google or 411. 

I did propagate and sell a number of rooted cuttings two falls ago, but both attempts at rooting cuttings last fall failed--one from a hot spell and a windy day that blew the shade cover off and the next attempt the weather had turned too cool and the stems were too far along in dormancy. Mother Nature has her own agenda. 

Will make a more concerted go of it this fall. 

I will be selling a few dozen Carpenter's Heirloom purple raspberries at the April 2011 Plant Sale at Duke Gardens. 

Meanwhile the most similar purple  raspberry I've learned about is called Brandywine. Like the Carpenter's Heirloom, it's also purple, does well in the south and remarkably, doesn't sucker--which is a real advantage in a small garden like ours. Suckers are roots that send up shoots a few feet away. If you have plenty of space it's an easy way to get new plants. If not, it's just one more chore to keep them from spreading all over creation. 

If you can't wait for my Carpenter's Heirlooms or if you live too far away, I found a couple of nurseries on line that carry the Brandywine, but I can't promise anything about the size or quality of plants, as I haven't done business with these folks. 

Here's a link to my story in the Independent Weekly about my challenging year propagating cuttings--it includes my recipe for the best way to eat these berries without adulterating the flavor. 

And here's a link to Horticulture magazine where I have a story in the April issue about growing this raspberry in a bed with asparagus and alpine strawberries. I figured that if I had limited space, I would limit the edible garden to high-dollar/high-flavor crops. And these three fit well together in a Native American "3 Sisters Garden" kind of way. Since our piedmont zone 7 NC summers can be kinda hot for sweet, little alpine strawberries, planting them with asparagus gives them some shade in the summer. And the evergreen alpines get sunlight the rest of the year as the asparagus is cut back to the ground. 

Being alpines they also like having well-drained soil, so I planted them along the edge of the circular raised bed and mixed in some Chapel Hill grit (gravel or sand would work too). 

In the photo below, alpine strawberries edge the bed and the asparagus has turned yellow as it's late October. 

 

At the center of the bed is an old galvanized fence post with an attractive finial that I tie the purple raspberry to. They need a trellis of some kind, as their natural tendency is to send up a long shoot that then flops to the ground and roots--their way of leap-frogging across the property and covering the earth with leaves and vines.

I just tie the raspberry up with jute twine. Around Sept. I cut all the canes that flowered and set fruit (called floricanes for those who like technical terms) to the ground as they are dying anyway. 

All the other canes (Called primocanes as they are in their first year--the next year they will be floricanes and set fruit--got it?) I cut back to about 5' high and make sure they are securely tied to the post. Cutting them that high stimulates the growth of short (about 1'-2' long) horizontal shoots that will bloom and set fruit at a good picking height. 

In the photo below, it's fall and the asparagus has been cut to the ground, the older floricanes on the raspberry have been cut to the ground, the primocanes have been cut to about 5' high and some lime (the white-ish powder on the ground) has been spread to keep the pH up around 6.5 and soon some compost will be spread on the soil and that covered by a 2" layer of shredded tree leaves for a mulch to keep the winter annual weeds down and to help hold moisture in the soil come summer. There is also a soaker hose in the garden as the berry plants will suffer if there is a drought when they set flowers and fruit. 

 
 

If you find it hard to keep track of which cane is which in your head, don't sweat it. When you have a plant in the ground, it all becomes clear as the primocanes and floricanes look different after the picking season is over. Primocanes look robust, youthful and fresh. Primocanes look worse for wear and are starting to turn brown in spots. The differences will be obvious when you have an actual plant in front of you. 

Below, alpine strawberrie from the garden in May and asparagus from the garden in April and May.