2 posts tagged “bareroot”

It's bareroot season and the limited availability of some new low-chill Zaiger Genetics cherry cultivars has made me rush to order.  I was too afraid I'd be left out.  If I waited longer, I could maybe get some deals at local drugstores.  But I couldn't wait.  Not counting the time I've spent looking at the internet and catalogues before today, it must have taken me 3 hours of research and shopping before I could decide what I was buying.

The two Zaiger cherries were cinches:  Minnie Royal and Royal Lee.  Bay Laurel Nursery hasn't opened its page for ordering yet which is too bad because I first found out about these new introductions from them. I would gladly have given them my money.  I wasn't thrilled with my experience ordering from Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply last time. But Bay Laurel's site emphasized that there'd be limited quantities available, so I was anxious.  Because the cost for shipping would be the same for 5 bareroot trees as for 1, and because there was a slight price break and bonus plants for ordering 5....I decided to order 5. Because the 7 apricots I got from my Blenheim apricot weren't enough to tide me over, I knew I had to get more apricots in.

My Berkeley coastal climate is one most folks would be envious of.  And it suits me just fine.  But it doesn't suit my favorite fruits. Most of the fruits I like prefer extremes of cold and heat that we don't get here.  The major concern here is a cultivar that doesn't need many winter chill hours.  Last year I winter I got a deal on a cherry tree for 10 bucks.  It was a Lapins cherry grafted on Colt stock and was labeled "Fogline".  So I figured it was meant for growing around here.  but when I looked up how many chill hours Lapins needed (800 hours), I knew it was too big a risk.  I'd be lucky if it bore once every 5 years.  So I donated it to the CRFG raffle and someone inland in Concord, CA (where they get more chill and more heat) gave it a better home.  It sucked, but I figured I'd never be able to grow cherries.  These new varieties only need 400 - 500 chill hours.  That's doable.  I won't get it every year, but I can get it most years, I think. Cherries!

Next came the apricots.  Zaiger has also come up with some low chill apricots that beaer earlier and later than Blenheim so that I can extend the very short apricot season. Since the Zaiger varieties are patented, I'll never be able to get them cheaply.  They're not going to show up (legally, anyway) at a CRFG Scion Exchange.  So those are the ones that make the most sense to buy at an elevated mail order price.   I settled on Gold Kist and Earli Autumn.  One more tree to pick.  When I went to Harbin for my birthday 2 years ago, I tasted my first Pink Lady apple.  I wasn't expecting much. I don't love most apples, or at least that's what I always thought, but I was desperate for fresh fruit to take to Harbin.  The apple was exactly the type I like: crisp, tart yet sweet and delicious.  I made a note to look into it for my garden.  It turns out that it's a patented variety, which also means it won't show up at a scion exchange.  So it was a good choice to buy compared to a variety I could get free as a scion.

Not only did I get a slight discount for picking 5 trees, but I could get 2 grape vines for free.  The varieties were limited, but them's the breaks.  I opted for Muscat of Alexandria, which might not do well here as it needs heat, and California Concord, which I already have one of.  Next I hemmed and hawed over whether to buy professional frost protection cloth or to try to figure out something cheaper to do.  Having lost 4 citrus trees to the record frosts last year, I decided that I had better pay more up front to keep from losing more later.  When you lose the trees, you don't just lose the cost of the tree itself.  You lose any money you paid a landscaper/gardener to take care of it, you lose the money you spent on water and fertilizer, you lose all the hours you yourself put into it, and you lose time because it'll be that much longer until you'll be getting fruit and it's that much longer until the trees grow tall enough to give you privacy from your neighbors.

There's an "early buyer" special on the frost cloth, but it's still expensive.  $167, not counting the cost of shipping a 42 lb. box, to be exact.  But it's a better deal than buying the smaller cloths piece by piece.  With a big roll, I can tailor the frost protection.  I better prepare ahead of time this year because doing it right means more time than I'll be able to come up with at the last minute.  You have to build frames because you don't want the cloth to actually touch the plants.

Now my total was such that I was entitled to 6 packs of seeds.  I bought celery, purple bush beans, Walla Walla onions, pickling cucumbers, and native California lupines.  Oh yeah, I also have a pound of Daikon radish seed in my order which I want to use to aerate the soil.  Oddly enough, the Daikon radish seed is taxable.  Edible plants are not supposed to be taxable in CA.  But I guess because they view it as primarily cover crop seed instead of anything to be eaten, they tax it.  I believe they're wrong.  Not that I'd be able to eat that radishes...

The shipping on this was $25, not counting the trees.  The trees they're going to figure out shipping for and add on later.  This order cost me a bit above 3 Cs.  Oy.

Bareroot season is coming up and I'm starting to peruse online catalogs.  And just the same way it works when I go into a comic book or record store, the more I see, the more I want.  Just "going in" is dangerous.  It's hard to limit myself to what is most time-sensitive instead of getting luxury plants like a Miracle Fruit bush.

Google Pedometer tells me I walked 4.5209 miles today (It said that worked off 837 calories.  Two slices of cake would put it all back on, I think. Not that I had any cake, but I wasn't eating super-healthy, either.)  That is a LOT for someone as out-of-shape as I am.  So when I got home I was too tired to garden (and, actually, it was too hot).  Now it's cooler but I don't want to water in the front yard because the neighbors are doing their usual yelling (instead of normal conversational tone), their relatives parking their cars in front of my driveway because they're too lazy to walk 10 feet further than they have to, and the kids going nuts outside 'til much later than my parents ever allowed me to stay up at that age.... When that happens, I just stay inside because otherwise my blood pressure starts climbing.

I was in the back yard for a short while to see whether the wanna-be general contractor my mom hired had finally (3.5 months after the fact) removed the soil his subcontractors poisoned by throwing their paint thinner all over it.  He finally had, although I wish he'd done a longer strip to be sure.  The feral cat and kitten are still hanging out in my backyard.  They seem to have adopted a shade-dappled space underneath the park bench.  I wanted to get them more used to me so I approached as close as I thought they'd take and sat there for a while.  I really don't do enough sitting and enjoying of my garden. That's supposed to be part of what a garden is for, right??

At Cross-Pollination,  a guy mentioned that one of his deciduous fruit trees had just bloomed again.  Idell explained a little of why that might be but I have trouble remembering why.  Anyway, today I noticed that one of my plum trees has done the same thing!  Not profuse blossoming, but at least a half dozen. I noticed the Pakistan mulberry leafing out a couple weeks ago and I just thought that was its normal habit but now that it's leafing and blossoming (they don't look much like flowers...they actually look a lot like green mulberries), I'm beginning to think it's doing the same.  I don't know why the plants are freaking out into a second spring.  I mean, a second flush of warmth is pretty normal Bay Area weather.  Our hottest month is usually October.  So why is it different this year?

The Dancy tangerine is bursting with blossoms and the honeybees are all over it. But that's normal for that citrus variety.

Oh!  I forgot to mention that I hit the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse to look for something I could use for plant tags.  I didn't find anything appropriate. But then I saw Frazee Paint and realized paint stirrers would be perfect.  I was prepared to buy some but they gave me a bunch for free.  Whoopee!