This year started off like many others; however, it soon became apparent that spring 2015 was going to be early. One of my daughters went skiing in February and the folks at Whitewater in Nelson described it as good spring skiing conditions, meaning the snow was melting fast and we were in for another early gardening season.
As most of the annuals are grown from seed on a preplanned schedule attempting to maximize the use of heated greenhouse space, one can only push them ahead by a week or two. The nursery stock held up well, given that early seasons always hit us with late frosts. The orchard crops all received good pollination.
As the season progressed, the heat units kept building up and the continuous sunshine and lack of rain dried everything out. It was a real chore to keep all the new trees and shrubs moist enough to establish this year, even with automatic watering in some areas.
Another real challenge this year was the insects. They grow based on heat units. Pests were a lot earlier than normal. This makes it harder to find them on time and even harder to control them. Some bugs even have an extra life cycle in warm years.
The only real plus to the warm and dry weather in the garden seems to have been a suppression of fungal disease like scab on apples or blight on tomatoes.
By now, the air has cleared up and the kids are heading back to school. There are fall crops of apples, pears and plums to harvest, along with the garden. After about a year of not having any spare time to plant in my test orchard, we put in four kinds of hazelnut trees developed in Oregon to be resistant to the eastern filbert blight. Oregon grows about 99 per cent of the hazelnuts in the U.S.A. and most of them are for export, according to the growers there. These little trees were tissue cultured — grown in a lab and tested to be free of the disease. That is how they were allowed into the country.
Another import tree that I’m testing out is the Balaton sour cherry. It is from Hungary originally and has a sweet tart taste that is becoming more popular for eating fresh. Most folks think sour cherries are for processing. We also planted some of the more common tart cherries, Montmorency. They are known to be rich in antioxidants and can help to fight heart disease and cancer. To my knowledge, cherries all have some anti-inflammatory properties that help relieve the pain of arthritis and gout.
We also took advantage of the lull in nursery activity in the last week of August to plant a hedge of Sky Rocket junipers. These low-maintenance plants are drought tolerant and deer resistant. They won’t grow too wide so they were planted on a four-foot spacing. The rain even came along and helped water them in. I’ll still make sure they get a good soak once a week until freeze-up.
Remember that any containerized plants can be planted throughout the growing season. They aren’t losing any roots, just gaining extra space to grow into. Digging plants from the field is a little different, though. Think fall or spring for those operations.
Evan Davies owns Beltane Nursery at 2915 Highway 3 in Erickson.
