Nature’s Bounty

Weather: Rain last Sunday from the north, followed by a week of July temperatures with no low-level water vapor. That means all the humidity is from water being sucked out of the ground and plants. Soil that’s not being watered every third day behaves like dry sand when it’s disturbed.

Leaves on a few area cottonwoods have turned yellow. Many of my cherry tree leaves are yellowing, and some spirea leaves have turned orange.

Last useful rain: 9/1. Week’s low: 50 degrees F. Week’s high: 95 degrees F in the shade.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red-tipped yuccas, Russian sage, buddleia, bird of paradise, roses of Sharon, datura, coreopsis, chrysanthemums, cultivated and Maximilian sunflowers.

One may has selling pears, apples, and peaches. One person has at least three large melons on the ground.

What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Buffalo gourd, bindweed, green leaf five eyes, alfalfa, white sweet clover, leather leaf globe mallow, goat’s head, yellow evening primrose, pigweed, Russian thistle, broom snakeweed, Hopi tea, native sunflowers, áñil del muerto, wild lettuce, horseweed, goldenrod, Tahoka daisies, golden hairy asters, quack grass, seven-weeks, side oats and black gramas.

Stems on Virginia creeper turned red.

What’s blooming in my yard: Betty Prior and miniature roses, yellow potentilla, garlic chives peaked, Royal Standard hosta, catmints, calamintha, lead plant, winecup mallow, sidalcea, white spurge, large-flowered soapwort, David phlox, perennial four o’clock, Mexican hats, African marigolds, chocolate flower, plains coreopsis, black-eyed Susan, anthemis, Mönch asters peaked, bachelor buttons, white Sensation cosmos

Bedding Plants: Wax begonia, pansies, sweet alyssum, nicotiana, snapdragons

Animal sightings: Rabbit, chickadees, magpie in cottonwood, geckos, small toad, monarch butterfly, bumble and small bees, heard crickets, grasshoppers, hornets, small ants

Weekly update: I’ve had trouble with aphids ever since I had someone do some yard work for me in 2013. The insecticides I’d used didn’t seem to help, so this year in May I tried systemics. They seemed worthless as well.

In mid-August I noticed some leaves on a cherry tree and a younger peach were distorted. As I mentioned last week, when I tried to find an insecticide locally I couldn’t.

So, Sunday I finally sprayed the trees with something from a Santa Fé big box that was supposed to handle insects, mites, and powder mildew. It even was supposed to last for 14 days.

I sprayed early in the morning when the bees weren’t out. And, while I sprayed as much of the yard as the bottle would do, I didn’t spray the garlic chives where they’re active.

The air was still. At most there was a 20% chance of rain in Los Alamos, and nothing less than 50% ever comes to my yard. Very little low-level water vapor lay over the state. It was so dry, the Forest Service was exploiting conditions to expand the fire in the caldera and was eyeing one at Canjilon.

Around 3 pm, the weather bureau reported heavy rain in Los Alamos County. At 5 pm, some thunder. Then, the wind started throwing water at my north facing windows. It didn’t last long, maybe 20 minutes, but everything was wet. So much for the insecticide.

When I went out Monday, there were peaches everywhere on the ground. It was trash day, and we’re limited to one of those plastic containers a week. Boxes had been accumulating for weeks, because I was getting rid of the weeds I’d cleaned and bagged.

I spent my yard time breaking down boxes and cursing tape. When I was a kid, sealing tape was considered a luxury and used sparingly. Now, people who ship cover every opening with tape, and sometimes the entire box. It’s dangerous and arduous to get boxes designed for easy opening to flatten.

I finally got out Tuesday. I began by sitting in the June grass under the main peach and picking up nearby fruit. That proved unproductive, so I got out a small hoe - its handle is about 4' long and the blade 3". I used it like an oar, pulling fruit in to where I was sitting.

The younger peaches had very thorny Dorothy Perkins and Woods roses growing under them. I stood with the hoe pulling the fruit out. I developed different techniques for guiding them between dead rose canes. It was more like miniature golf than a putting green or croquette court.

Random thoughts come when you’re doing mindless tasks. Earlier in the summer, when the fruit was just turning color, I speculated on fruit trees being the original model for Christmas trees. How else would someone think of hanging colored balls on a branch?

Later, as the boughs began to hang heavy I thought of the "Cherry Tree Carol" in which Mary asks Joseph to get her some fruit. He refuses, and tells her to get the father of her child to do it. Then, like magic, the fruit-laden bough bends down.

At that time I was going out every week or so and removing fruit to protect the tree. Because it wasn’t ripe, I had to use nippers to cut it. And, it only did so much good. I still had three branches break that had been damaged by aphids years ago. The last is still in the burn pile, where it has only been reduced by three firings.

This week, after I cleared the free fall from Sunday, I came out each morning to find more peaches on the ground. A number were half eaten. I had to wear rubber gloves to handle them.

The phrase "if you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree" ran through my mind. When I sat in the grass under the main tree, I wondered if it was possible to get some of the fruit before it fell without having to pick it. I took the hoe and used it to shake a branch. I was lucky nothing hit me on the head.

I now have about 250 pounds of peaches in plastic bags rotting in the burn area. I think the limit for those trash containers is about 50 pounds. That means, if I get rid of 30 pounds a week, it’s going to take more than a month to get rid of the harvest. Meantime, not everything has come down. I’m adding 10 to 15 pounds a day.

So far, the rabbit is only eating the day’s bounty. It comes out before there’s enough light to work, and eats its fill. Few ants have been interested, and the hornets are still over on the garlic chives.

But, of course, I can’t use the burn area until the bags are gone. That means, as I remove dead wood from the Russian olive and other trees, it’s going to accumulate and create its own kind of lure for vermin. Some carnivore left the remains of an animal on top of a grass clump in the pile last night.

Notes on photographs:
1. Maximilian sunflowers (Helianthus maximiliani) starting their annual sprawl, 7 September 2019.

2. Peaches as they fell Sunday night, 3 September 2019.

3. Peaches raked out from the grasses and dead wood, 4 September 2019.

Pink and White Trees

Weather: We got a little rain in the night. Earlier in the week, I think on Monday, a brief, very strong wind shook the house and completely dispersed my burn pile. Luckily it was primarily dead grass. However, the wind was strong enough to also move the partially burned sticks. Friday, when the weather felt a bit oppressive, I burned the grasses and dead wood that had accumulated since in the evening, instead of waiting for the next morning. Last rain: 4/8. Week’s low: 32 degrees F. Week’s high: 78 degrees F.

What’s blooming in the area: Sweet cherries, sand cherries, peaches, Bradford pear, purple leaf plum, flowering quince, forsythia, daffodils, alfilerillo, purple and tansy mustards, western stickseed, common and native dandelions

What’s reviving: Jackmanii potentilla, spirea, choke cherry, privet, Johnson’s Blue geranium, chamisa, Mönch aster, yellow yarrow, goat’s beard

Tasks: A couple weeks ago I bought some pansies and violas that were grown by a nursery in Alabama. Since then, they’ve been sitting on the back porch hardening off. I’m waiting because I still expect a morning too cold for them to handle. Contradictorily, I’m also waiting for plants to break dormancy in the beds where I’m planting them. It’s both too warm and not warm enough.

In the meantime, the seedlings are going though the usual bedding plant phase of no longer blooming. They’re a bit like drug addicts: they were raised in warm, moist conditions where they were sprayed with nutrients to compensate for the poor diet in their potting soil. On my porch, they’re undergoing detoxification: getting used to normal water and erratic temperature cycles. Some may never bloom again.

Animal sightings: Robin, flock of quail, small brown birds, sidewalk ants, bees heard in afternoons

Weekly update: ’Tis the season of pink and white flowering trees, or more precisely pink flowered trees and white flowered ones. I’ve only seen one at a closed Honstein gas station in Arroyo Seco that looked like it had both kinds of flowers on one plant.

When I first moved here in 1991 it was fairly easy to use color to determine the type of tree blooming in a yard. Apricots appeared before apples. In the past few years with our warm Aprils, the cherries have come between. In addition to the different flowering times, apricots and cherries tended to be much larger trees and only one or two were planted. Apples often appeared in rows.

It was always difficult to decide if the pink trees were peaches or flowering crab apples, but the redbuds were easier to identify by their more columnar shape and deeper colored flowers. I usually decided the species based on what I could tell about the owner: if there were other fruit trees in the yard, I assumed the pink was a peach, but if it was the only tree I assumed a crab.

This schema has become useless since the big box opened north of town, and propagated national taste: it carried more ornamentals than fruit trees. The variety was greater: there were several varieties of flowering crab and flowering cherries as well. Some crabs were white and some cherries were pink. This year, the local hardware has Oklahoma white redbuds as well as the usual purple Texas ones.

The distinction between utilitarian neighbors and decorative ones has been blurred by the introduction of small fruit trees for suburban yards. This year I bought a cherry marketed as ideal for growing in a container. It came in a cardboard sleeve about three inches wide. At least the grower was honest that it had few roots; I’ve bought too many that had recently been moved into gallon or larger containers to make it seem like they were more mature than they were.

Those people who wouldn’t grow an apricot or cherry because of the size, now could plant them. More important, the association of the small fruit trees with trendy decks made them acceptable to people who associated productive trees with their agrarian ancestors. They came with the hint they required little effort, and the fruit was easily available.

Even more important, the new varieties were labeled self-fruitful, so one didn’t need to have two, or depend on one’s neighbors to have a complimentary tree. I’m not sure though what they meant by a self-fruitful Bing. The tree I bought was the only one I’ve been able to find in the past few years that would pollinate a Bing.

Notes on photographs:
1. White Bradford pear with pink peach behind it at the left and an unknown neighbor’s white tree at the right, 6 April 2018.

2. Full sized Elberta peach planted in 1997, 6 April 2018.

3. My uphill neighbor planted this patio peach about the time I planted mine. The next neighbor moved it away from the porch to the 5' fence, where it remains fence high. This picture was taken 28 March 2012.

4. The root ball of the Coral Champaign cherry, 29 March 2018. Most of the roots were in an inner sleeve, so the actual roots ball was about 1.5" in diameter.

Peach Mortality

Weather: Jémez are so marbled with snow they look like limestone. Temperatures remained at least five degrees colder than normal in the mornings. Rained Monday night with snow in the air Wednesday.

What’s still green: Juniper, other evergreens; leaves on yuccas, grape hyacinth, garlic, vinca, hollyhock, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, snapdragon, anthemis, golden hairy asters, most low or buried; June, pampas, and cheat grasses.

What’s blue-green or gray: Leaves on Apache plumes, four-winged saltbushes, pinks.

What’s red or purple: Stems on roses, young peaches, sandbar willows; leaves on coral beard tongues, alfilerillo, purple asters.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae, stems of weeping willows.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Rabbits, small birds.

Weekly update: I’ve always been told the life expectancy of Prunus persica is 15 to 20 years, and my peach tree is now 18 years ago. The bark has begun to split, and aphids attacked a couple years ago.

I’ve been wondering when it will die, and why. All I could learn on the web were the likely causes of mortality, which were nematode infestations, peach borers, and consequences of split bark. I didn’t learn much about the inherent life cycle of the tree itself.

That information is equivalent to being told the life expectancy for men is 46 years and for women 48 because that’s what it was in 1900. In 1950 it was 71 years for women and 66 years for men. What changed wasn’t something inherent in the species but the ability of doctors and governmental agencies to control the spread of infectious diseases.

Now, with more people living beyond retirement age, medical researchers are studying the effects of aging, and more important, what constitutes aging, or senescence. One important factor is the hormonal changes that divide a woman’s reproductive years into childhood, maturity, and post-menopause. Equivalent changes occur in men’s bodies but aren’t as visible.

The known botanical hormones follow annual cycles, with some encouraging growth in spring, and others preparing plants to survive the winter. As Oliver Rackham made clear, the above ground portions of all trees die every year and are rebuilt from the roots each spring. So why, if a tree has survived its initial exposures to drought and heat and cold and wet, would it die?

I got one hint from a group of Chinese anthropologists who quoted one study that said the "modern peach loses considerable productivity after 10-15 years," and another that indicated "early Chinese records report that productivity declined in years 7-8."

There are, no doubt, as many factors affecting peach fertility as there are influencing human life expectancies. Climate has changed in the thousands of years of peach domestication in China, and so has the species. The differences might also have been as simple as differences in fertilization methods and subsequent soil depletion rates.

Still, when a group in India asked orchard growers about the economics of growing peaches in Punjab and Uttrakhand they discovered incomes declined after 17 years. The horticulturalists saw no returns for the first four years after they planted trees, then earned 22,927 in year five. That increased to 31,790 in year eight and to 42,838 in year eleven. Income dropped to 31,793 in orchards that were 18 years old, fell to 21,443 in year 22 and 13,633 in year 25.

The three researchers didn’t provide their currency unit. They also wrote about orchard ages, not average ages of trees within those orchards. Thus, incomes may have been higher in older orchards because new trees had been planted when ones died. Even so, their data suggested age phases existed.

I wonder if decreases in fertility in peaches covary with decreases in the abilities of plants to survive stress caused by insects, bacteria and weather, the way age and flexibility seem to in humans.

Christina Wells and Desmond Layne found trees produced new fine roots at least three times a year, with "a significant flush occurring immediately after harvest." The plants they observed were four- to six-years old and in their first years of fruiting. Do trees grown barren have the same spurt?

Wells and another team found the age of fine roots had less effect on their life spans than "seasonal factors." In Italy, a team led by Elena Baldi found the roots "born later in the summer lived longer than those born in the spring." That in part is because "root numbers declined in the fall and remained low over winter" according to Wells’ group.

Age was important when it meant roots were larger or reached lower depths in the soil. In addition, with time, roots become more fibrous and brown. Wells’ group suggested that made them less attractive to pests and better able to handle drought. But age for them was relative to the roots themselves, and not to the parent trees.

So, I really know no more about the metabolism of my tree than when I started, because researchers aren’t interested in what happens to commercially important plants when they no longer are productive. After all, Lal Singh Gangwar’s team recommended growers replace their old orchards when their maintenance costs were greater than their gross profits.

Notes:
Baldi, E., M. Toselli, D. M. Eissenstat, B. Marangoni, and Peter Millard. "Organic Fertilization Leads to Increased Peach Root Production and Lifespan," Tree Physiology 30:1373-1382:2010.

Faber, Joseph F. and Alice H. Wade. Life Tables for the United States: 1900-2050, 1983.

Gangwar, L. S., Dinesh Singh, and Goutam Mandal. "Economic Evaluation of Peach Cultivation in North Indian Plains," Agricultural Economics Research Review 21:123-129:2008.

Rackham, Oliver. See post for 19 October 2014.

Wells, Christina and Desmond Layne. "Irrigation Effects on Fine Root Dynamics in Peach (Prunus persica)," HortScience, July 2005.

_____, D. Michael Glenn, and David M. Eissenstat. "Changes in the Risk of Fine-root Mortality with Age: a Case Study in Peach, Prunus persica (Rosaceae)," American Journal of Botany 89:79-87:2002.

Zheng, Yunfei, Gary W. Crawford, and Xugao Chen. "Archaeological Evidence for Peach (Prunus persica) Cultivation and Domestication in China," Plos One, 5 September 2014.

Photographs:
1. Replacement peach trees, planted 19 May 2012.

2. Tree of left the next year, 19 June 2013.

3. Earliest picture I have of the main peach, 6 August 2006.

4. The worst thing that happened to my peach was a Russian olive hid in the middle, forcing its branches outward, 4 May 2012. After the olive was cut down, the tree was invaded by aphids in 2013 and the bark began splitting.