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So yesterday my brother in law brought a day laborer ( a nice man named Casimiro who I could not convince to come to the bathroom or to take a drink or anything). They cleaned up my back yard and pruned the feathers off my fruit trees.
A lot of people would say that it's too late to prune fruit trees once they've blossomed. But if the rules are that you have to prune your trees after the leaves fall and before the flowers come and in a period where you won't get any rain for four days, the rules are that you won't prune fruit trees in Santa Cruz, because the leaqves don't fall till after the rain starts and once the rain starts you don't get four days of dry weather till after the flowers start. Actually this year we had a kind of dry January but I was in Prague.
Fortunately for me, summer pruning works just fine in my climate. So I've been pruning in August and March for years. You definitely have to prune in March if you prune in August,anyway. The plum tree is as always gorgeous, the apricot tree is still on probation, and the apple tree looks much better. We tied up the ceanothus and cut back Monster Grape Vine which is not showing any signs of life yet. That's the Golden Muscat, my favorite. The other grape vine, the Concord-type, is leafing out, and I love its grapes but it doesn't make many. I had determined last year to sleep in the yard this August and September to chase off the raccoons and possums and rats and whatever that eat my grapes one by one as they become ripe (they are not the kind that come ripe bunch by bunch, alas).
The big job Casimiro did was hoeing out all the oxalis and piling it on my compost heap, which has disappeared under the weight of the biomass. Unfortunately he got two of my oreganos and some of my other plants, but I can be good-natured about it because my garden is so beautiful I'm actually thinking of having a party.
So today I went and got three more wine barrels because I decided that is the cheapest and easiest solution to the need for more raised beds. I could slap some together out of wood, or my brothers in law would do it, but honestly, I like the modular aspect of the winebarrels, and I think they look good in my yard. I didn't plant any of the now four empty barrels: all my extra soil is buried under a pile of biomass. But it will only be a few days before the pile rots down a but and I can dig some soil out of the bottom.
Local and local-ish folks: anybody want some rhizomes of i>pseudacorus iris? Never mind. it turns out that it's a noxious invasive weed and I better not hand off any of it to anybody. Oh well. Destructo time it is. I'm keeping the handful I moved into a new bed, though: I love it and it's been living in my garden for thirty years. We transplanted it from the lagoon when I was pregnant with Frank, which is also when we got the flowering quince out front that originally grew in front of the veterinarian's office at Ocean and Broadway. They were tearing it out to put in juniper or some damn thing and Carl Foytik brought it to us and we planted it and we've been pruning it five or six times a year ever since.
A lot of people would say that it's too late to prune fruit trees once they've blossomed. But if the rules are that you have to prune your trees after the leaves fall and before the flowers come and in a period where you won't get any rain for four days, the rules are that you won't prune fruit trees in Santa Cruz, because the leaqves don't fall till after the rain starts and once the rain starts you don't get four days of dry weather till after the flowers start. Actually this year we had a kind of dry January but I was in Prague.
Fortunately for me, summer pruning works just fine in my climate. So I've been pruning in August and March for years. You definitely have to prune in March if you prune in August,anyway. The plum tree is as always gorgeous, the apricot tree is still on probation, and the apple tree looks much better. We tied up the ceanothus and cut back Monster Grape Vine which is not showing any signs of life yet. That's the Golden Muscat, my favorite. The other grape vine, the Concord-type, is leafing out, and I love its grapes but it doesn't make many. I had determined last year to sleep in the yard this August and September to chase off the raccoons and possums and rats and whatever that eat my grapes one by one as they become ripe (they are not the kind that come ripe bunch by bunch, alas).
The big job Casimiro did was hoeing out all the oxalis and piling it on my compost heap, which has disappeared under the weight of the biomass. Unfortunately he got two of my oreganos and some of my other plants, but I can be good-natured about it because my garden is so beautiful I'm actually thinking of having a party.
So today I went and got three more wine barrels because I decided that is the cheapest and easiest solution to the need for more raised beds. I could slap some together out of wood, or my brothers in law would do it, but honestly, I like the modular aspect of the winebarrels, and I think they look good in my yard. I didn't plant any of the now four empty barrels: all my extra soil is buried under a pile of biomass. But it will only be a few days before the pile rots down a but and I can dig some soil out of the bottom.
Local and local-ish folks: anybody want some rhizomes of i>pseudacorus iris? Never mind. it turns out that it's a noxious invasive weed and I better not hand off any of it to anybody. Oh well. Destructo time it is. I'm keeping the handful I moved into a new bed, though: I love it and it's been living in my garden for thirty years. We transplanted it from the lagoon when I was pregnant with Frank, which is also when we got the flowering quince out front that originally grew in front of the veterinarian's office at Ocean and Broadway. They were tearing it out to put in juniper or some damn thing and Carl Foytik brought it to us and we planted it and we've been pruning it five or six times a year ever since.