Behold! A Miracle

Text by Trina
Photos by Trina and Greg



It might be considered more of an actual miracle if my fig tree were to sprout forth a banana or a live piranha, but given this tree's history, the presence of even a single, tiny, pre-pubescent fig is, truly, nothing short of miraculous.

This tree lives in a pot on wheels because I live in Colorado. It gets rolled indoors for the winter. After a painful lesson two summers ago about figs not liking wind, I decided to leave the tree inside for the whole season last year. It didn't like that either. Yes, it was protected from wind, but it simply didn't get enough sun so its growth became very leggy with lots of long, bare branches that sported 3 or 4 big leaves at the tip, and no fruit spurs whatsoever. The tree was taking up the entire living room with its rangy branches and producing no fruit. This spring, wind or no wind, the tree had to go outside. I wheeled it out, gave it a shade cloth for the transitional period, and then pruned it hard, shortening the leggy branches and, in phases, removing all the leafy growth so that the tree would essentially start completely over in a more compact growth habit. I didn't dream that the tree would offer up any fruit after such an assault, so I was pruning in anticipation of a possible crop next year. The tree is now the happiest and healthiest I've seen it since I bought it, and it looks like it might be rewarding me ever so sparingly with a single fig.

Unless, of course, the wind blows.



Other garden treats:



Bee pollinating lettuce



Saving kale seed





Fig sap



Grapevine weights



Onion flower



Chamomile



Japanese maple espalier in May, pre-prune



and post-prune, in early June,



and one month later, in July:

Tilt and Shift

Words by Greg
Photos by Greg and Trina

As we pass the celestial moment that defines the beginning of spring, it seems we should interrupt our Baja reports and throw in a few photos from the last gasps of our rather mild winter. Astronomically and calendar-wise, this is the earliest equinox since 1896 -- or so I read on the interwebs. But no one in our valley needs the interwebs to note that it's warmer this year. Ice in deep shadows is melting quickly. Garden flowers and fruit trees are blooming -- foolishly, of course, as it froze again last night, and we're probably not done with that.

Add in the suddenly longer evening light -- courtesy of an hour of daylight stolen from the mornings -- and there are more and more reasons to be outside playing. A few photos. Icy river float on a sunny day. Afternoon rides in summer attire. Zeek is back to fishing for goldfish. (While riding a bike! Is it any wonder we think our dogs are pretty much the most amazing dogs in the world?) Apricot blossoms. A night ride with friends.

If you need us, we'll probably be outside.

Schmo-tek Espalier

Photos and text by Trina

Green gage plum, 6 years old



Same tree with one year's uncontrolled growth, before today's trellis installation and pruning and tying-in of branches



Same tree, a year ago, with just the beginnings of the design tied in place



Espalier is a lovely blend of art and gardening that lends itself quite well to a perfectionist, anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive approach, but I’m here to tell you that you don't have to be an uptight control-freak to be successful at it. Having experimented in the past with letting my vegetable garden be "free-range," letting things grow wherever they chose to seed themselves from the previous year's plants, and discovering that, while it's a sweet idea, it's also a complete mess, with crops being very hard to keep track of and harvest, I now aim more toward the middle of the chaos-to-order spectrum. Orderly enough to be manageable, and yet wild enough to look and feel natural. Rows don't have to be perfectly straight, nor do they have to contain only one variety of plant. It's not a factory; it's a garden.

You can take a similar approach to espalier. It's an art form, yes, so your goal is to control and shape the branches into a pre-determined design, but it's also an organic, living plant you're working with, and it might not sprout a branch exactly where you want one to be in order to achieve the design you had in mind. While you can use tricks like notching the bark just above where you want a branch to come in,



you can also leave room in the process for the tree to speak for itself, room to see what the tree will and won't do, and room to change The Plan when it starts to diverge greatly from The Reality.

Since espalier pruning and tying-in of branches happens in the summer or early fall before the branches harden off and become less malleable, the task of shaping and pruning really amounts to seeing what the tree did in a year's time, and figuring out what you can do with that. Your starting point each summer is a chaos of growth, branches going every which way, mostly in the "wrong" place, and an abundance of leaves making it nearly impossible to see where branches are, and where to even begin. Working with the tree instead of fighting it will make it a little easier and a lot more fun.

Japanese maple, at one year



Same tree at 2 years, before today’s pruning and tying-in



Same tree, after today’s pruning and tying-in



This one still has a long way to go, and the design may have to be changed a bit, both to accommodate what the tree is actually doing, and to correct for some mistakes made by the gardener.



A similarly flexible, informal approach can be taken when it comes to the support framework for espalier. Proper, traditional, rule-following espalier calls for an extensive and expensive system of heavy gauge horizontal wires strung taught with special tension bolts and other highly essential gizmos, either against a fence or wall, or if freestanding, framed in by a serious, sturdy structure. It's nice; it's fancy; it works; but it's unneccessary. I've found that a schmo-tek approach to espalier -- using metal concrete mesh that comes in 4' x 7' sheets and costs about $8 a sheet, installed with very simple hardware -- helps espalier to be that much less daunting, makes it into the kind of project I can bang out myself without needing the help of someone more construction-capable than myself, and I actually like the simple, humble look of it. Once your tree has grown in, the mesh virtually disappears anyway, being covered up by branches and leaves. It'll be the last thing people notice when they're admiring your lovely, artfully designed trees.

The two schmo-tek mesh installation methods I've used successfully, depending on whether the tree is going against a fence or the side of the house (which in my case is stucco) are:

tacking the mesh to the fence with poultry net staples, allowing the space between the horizontal 2x4s and the pickets to serve as the minimum 4" of breathing space your tree needs behind it,



and hanging the mesh from screw hooks screwed into whatever sturdy beam you can find under your eaves, bridging the distance with chain as necessary:





Espalier isn’t easy. You have to know how to recognize (and not cut off) the spurs or branches that will provide the next year’s crop, how to deal with 18 million fruit tree diseases and pests, how to anticipate a tree’s growth habit, how to encourage and discourage individual branch growth, how to tell the difference between a fruit bud and a leaf bud, how to speak in a haughty British accent, and so much more. Taking a less-rigid-than-normal approach to the design aspect is one way I’ve found to make it a little more do-able and a little less daunting. A judicious application of schmo-tek on the technical end is the other.

The one thing you definitely can’t skimp on, though, and probably the most difficult part, is patience.

More espalier photos and notes here

Espalier: Gardening for the Extremist Fanatic

While Greg is off doing extreme rides, I still ride without him of course, but I'm much more inclined to take the opportunity to lose myself in a little extreme gardening. Five years ago I started putting in fruit trees. My entire property, including my 600 square foot cottage, is 40' x 50' so I have to be very mindful of the amount of space each plant takes up. In addition to the vegetable gardens, which are planted in the easement between the sidewalk and street, I have managed to squeeze 18 kinds of fruit (trees and vines) into this miniscule space. This is only possible because most of the trees are trained as espaliers. Not only is espalier a blend of art and gardening that is well suited to my creative bent and obsessive nature; it also keeps the trees two-dimensional, trellised up against either a wall of the house or a fence, where they are manageable, small, productive and especially beautiful. Even living humbly and making a verrry small footprint on the planet, you can still grow your own food and create an outrageous garden that never leaves you wanting for something to prune and play with.

apricot in 2008

From dirt & dogs

same apricot, a couple years prior, with only two lateral branches and two vertical leaders destined to become the next tier in the design

From dirt & dogs

same apricot when it was just a brand new little bitty baby in 2005

From dirt & dogs

a green gage plum that doesn't look too exciting right now

From dirt & dogs

It was originally in a big pot under a window...

From dirt & dogs

... destined to look like this

From dirt & dogs

...but I've since moved it to the ground and changed its design so that it is now well on its way to looking something like this (from Lee Reich's The Pruning Book):

From dirt & dogs

Honey Sweet pear 5 years ago

From dirt & dogs

...now about 2/3 of the way toward its ultimate design:

From dirt & dogs

Espalier is typically, traditionally trained on a fancy, expensive trellis system that consists of horizontal wires that are strung taut between big bolts drilled into the supporting wall; I'm doing fine with a schmo-tech version that implements cattle panels as trellis and things like rocks hung from branches to pull them down into position where I don't have or want the visual of the trellis. And I like this funkier look so much better than the official, "nice" trellising system. Here's to humble but effective gardening!

From dirt & dogs

~trina

Paradise, and countdown to spring

Reading Eat, Pray, Love, I learned that I live -- truly, technically, etymologically -- in a paradise, the word having both Iranian and Greek origins meaning essentially "walled garden." I love that. Without even knowing it, a paradise is pretty much what I've created here in my very tiny little downtown piece of the earth.

From dirt & dogs

Ever trying to carve out more space to grow food, I had a shade-creating tree cut down over the winter. After some serious lateral root removal, tilling and ammending which I'll start tackling this weekend, I'll have another 300 square feet of garden space that will now have FULL sun ALL day! I love the fact that I am surrounded by big, beautiful trees in my neighborhood but one does need some direct sun to have successful food crops.

Spring is coming. Really, it is. Technically, of course, Equinox is this weekend, but in practical terms, only the few cold hardy vegetables can be put in for another month or two. It's not until May that it's safe to put the entire garden in. Spring, as always, is coming in fits and starts -- false starts like the last three days of near 60 degree weather during which everyone on my route was blinded by my pasty white legs in shorts for the first time this year. But today it's back to rain/snow with expectations of below freezing temps for the next two or three nights. But more sunshine and warmth is on the way...eventually...which means it's time to start getting the garden ready! Bone meal, blood meal, compost, manure... followed by seeds for the early crops: broccoli raab, sweet peas, greens.

Soon -- very, very soon -- it will look like this:

early season, not yet the full, lush chaos that the garden always becomes:

From dirt & dogs

From dirt & dogs

Espaliered apricot tree in its third year:

From dirt & dogs

Zeek, green gage plum tree, black-eyed susans and strawberries:

From dirt & dogs