Blog Archives

Strawberries - Fragaria × ananassa

3/30/2011

Sweet Charlie Strawberries

It's strawberry time! As I mentioned in a previous post, we're growing Sweet Charlie strawberries in raised beds around the deck. I planted 50 pants back in January, and of those approximately 35 have survived and are growing well. They send out runners in the summer that I will use to fill in any bare areas.

We haven't picked buckets of berries yet, but Dr. Wife and Boy #1 have been able to pick a couple every day at snack time. Considering how young and small the plants are, I think that's pretty good. I think it will be like growing the blueberries, where I got 8 berries the first year, and 4 quarts the second.

I would say they are definitely better than your average supermarket strawberry, at least to my taste buds. But then again, I've only eaten two o them. Boy #1 eats most of them, and he loves them so much he wants to pick and eat them before they're fully ripe. If you can wait to eat one until it is fully deep red all over, and just a little soft, then you will have tasted something very few people ever get to experience.

I'm growing Sweet Charlie, but there are several other varieties such as Earliglow that are reported to do well here and taste good. I've also grown Chandler which produced well for me, and I thought was pretty tasty, but others say it doesn't have great flavor. Regardless, I think everyone with a flower bed should grow strawberries. They're really fairly low maintenance, are cheap plants (25 plants for ~ $10), reproduce easily, and produce delicious fruit enjoyed by almost everyone.

Strawberry ready to pick.

Maybe I can sneak one away from Boy #1....

Why I grow fruit.

2 Comments

Blueberries - Genus Vaccinium

3/25/2011

2 Comments

2010 Blueberries

Blueberries can be grown in Houston, if you get a couple of things right. I happened to luck into a good berry-growing technique that will hopefully be even more productive this year than last year. My first crop in 2009 consisted of 6 blueberries. In 2010, we picked somewhere around 2-3 gallons. This year, I'm hoping for the mother lode, and based on what I've seen so far, we just might get it.

Here's what works in my yard:

1. Plant the bushes in the biggest pots you can get filled with a 1/2 peat moss and 1/2 potting soil mix. I get big 30-gallon black plastic pots from Plants for All Seasons. They'll give them to you for free if you ask nicely.

2. Place the pots in an area where they get sun until around 1:30 pm, and then shade for the rest of the afternoon. For me, this is by the fence on the northeast side of my house. Making sure they have shade in hottest part of the afternoon will help get them through the worst parts of the summer. A thick layer of mulch helps too.

3. Whenever possible, irrigate with rainwater. Blueberries like acidic conditions, and our alkaline Houston tap water has a pretty high pH. Also, as Dr. Bob Randall points out, they probably don't like the chlorine or fluoride either. I have a 300-gallon rain tank and a home-rigged drip irrigation system that is pretty much dedicated to the blueberries. I realize not everyone can do this, but it really is amazing what a big difference it makes.

We have 8 bushes that are doing very very well so far. The bumblebees in particular have been working the flowers pretty hard. There were so many that I was afraid to mow the grass over there. I think we have Tiftblue, Woodard, Brightwell, Premier, and Climax. Over time I lost the tags, or the tags got buried under the mulch, so I'm not sure anymore which bush is what variety. But I am sure that they are all delicious, and I can attest that they make a wonderful pie.

Last year, every day when I got home my one-year-old son would grab my hand and want to go out to the blueberry bushes to get a snack. This year the bushes are LOADED. Hopefully we'll have enough berries for all of us this year. I've found the best source of bare-root plants to be Ison's nursery, but potted southern highbush varieties can be found at almost all the area nurseries right now.

Blueberry Blossoms

Unripe Blueberries

Summer 2010

February 2011

Blueberry Pie

2 Comments

Jujubes - Ziziphus zizyphus

3/22/2011

6 Comments

Jujubes - photo from www.ediblelandscaping.com

I've only eaten one jujube in my entire life, and I didn't really like it. It was a Lang jujube, and it to me it tasted like a wooden apple. So why plant some? Well first of all, I'm a crazy person who can't stand not growing something. Second, after reading more about jujubes, I realized that I probably shouldn't let one experience sour me on a potentially amazing fruit for Houston.

I read that Lang is actually a variety that it better for drying, not fresh eating. According to several sources, the varieties 'Honey Jar', 'Sherwood', 'Sugarcane', and 'Tigertooth' are the best for fresh eating. Unfortunately, they're very hard to find. Since I have young children, it's very hard for me to make it to the big fruit tree sales, and forget about finding some of the best varieities from online nurseries.

So what can you do? Email Roger Meyer at [email protected]. His website is kind of weird, if not incomplete, but he has varieties of jujubes you won't find anywhere else. Before ordering, I got lots of mixed feedback from other members of the Texas Rare Fruit Growers Club, so I wasn't sure I wanted to risk ordering from him. In the end, my compulsion to grow fruit trees won out, so I emailed Roger and ordered a 'Honey Jar' and a 'Sugar Cane.' $22 each plus $10 shipping. Pretty good deal, all things considered. I also added a 'Honey Jar' to my order for a fellow fruit enthusiast so we could save a little on shipping.

Just a few days later, a packaged arrived from California. I got home from work, anxious to see whether or not the trees were in good shape or not. I was very happy to open up the box, and find just what I had hoped for. The bare-rooted jujubes looked fine, and the grafts looked good to me. I quickly placed them in 3-gallon pots with potting soil to keep the roots moist until I could transplant them to their permanent home in the yard. I can't wait for them to fruit so I can taste the unique flavors of these varieties. If any one else is growing these, let me know how they taste.

Delivery from Roger Meyer.

Three bare root jujube trees. 2 Honey Jar, and 1 Sugarcane.

Roots packed with wet grass clippings and mulch to keep them moist.

Potted jujube trees.

Close up of one of the grafts.

6 Comments

Fertilizer

3/20/2011

5 Comments

Feed Mill - Great Source of Fertilizer

I have a lot of plants and trees to fertilize, and fertilizers can be expensive. In addition, I want to use organic fertilizers, not chemical/petroleum based ones. In his book, former director of Urban Harvest Dr. Bob Randall recommends cottonseed meal as the cheapest organic (debatable) fertilizer readily available, and recommends MicroLife balanced organic fertilizer as an even better option.

The best source of these fertilizers in my area is Hieden Feed and Supply on Stuebner Airline Road. I was able to pick up two 50-lb sack of cottonseed meal for $14.75 each ($0.30/lb), and one 40-lb sack of MicroLife 6-2-4 for $25.95 ($0.65/lb). I hauled it all home and mixed it up in an old 55-gallon steel drum (mouse-proof), and added just a little garden sulfur to help with soil pH. The final mix made approximately 30 gallons, or 480 cups of fertilizer, costing around $0.12 per cup. I have somewhere around 50 trees and plants, so this works out to be a very economical way to fertilize and add organic matter to the soil.

According to the EPA, the average N-P-K of cottonseed meal is approximately 6-2-1, and the N-P-K of Microlife 6-2-4 is 6-2-4. By combining 100 pounds of cottonseed meal with 40 pounds of Microlife, I wound up with a 6-2-2 mix. MicroLife is great fertilizer, but this hardly seems worth the extra cost of the MicroLife. I'm told that MicroLife also contains lots of other micronutrients and minerals, but since I also mulch and supplement with composted kitchen scraps, I'm probably already getting these.

The next time I go for fertilizer, I'll probably just get cottonseed meal. Considering the cost difference, it would be cheaper to add more cottonseed meal per tree than to buy the MicroLife. Leave a comment and let me know what experience you've had with different fertilizers.

MircroLife 6-2-4

Cottonseed Meal

My Fertilizer Mixing Drum

Sulfur to lower soil pH.

Monarch Butterfly

5 Comments

Avocados - Persea americana

3/16/2011

25 Comments

Avocado Blossoms

My goal is to have the first fruiting avocado tree in Houston north of I-10. If you know of someone who already has one, please send me an email, I'd love to see it (and take a cutting). Two years ago I planted Mexicola Grande and Fuerte avocado trees. The Fuerte was killed by the '09-'10 freeze, and the Mexicola took significant damage. I replaced the Fuerte with a Lila avocado. The bad freezes this year only slightly damaged the Lila, but the Mexicola was hit pretty hard again.

I was at Plants for All Seasons this weekend, and their avocados looked so good, I couldn't help myself. Plus, they were about $20 cheaper than I had seen them at other places. I picked up a Brazos Belle and a Poncho, both reputed to be especially cold hardy varieties. They were both in bloom, and really tall and skinny, so my guess is that they've been in a warm greenhouse all year. The environment in my backyard is a little more demanding, so I hope they can cope with our Houston winds and weather.

Several nurseries such as RCW now advertise cold hardy avocados, many varieties of which were developed by Devine Avocados near San Antonio, Texas. What they don't tell you is that often, these cold hardy cultivars are grafted onto Lula rootstock, a vigorous but frost-sensitive variety. So if you plant the cold hardy tree, but the rootstock is exposed, freezes can still kill it. To get around this, avocados need to be planted deep in order to bury the graft, and thus protect it from hard freezes.

My agreement with Dr. Wife is that I can plant whatever I want, as long as I don't take up any more real estate in the yard. Since I don't have any more room, I decided to plant the new avocados in 30-gallon pots under my big pine trees. The pots will ensure good drainage, and the pine trees will protect the young trees from sunburn.

Brazos Belle and Poncho Avcoados

Graft Union

Buried Graft Union

Avocado planted in 30-gallon pot.

New growth on the freeze-damaged Mexicola Grande.

25 Comments

More Grafting

3/12/2011

3 Comments

Everhard navel orange before grafting.

In addition to top-working my lemon tree, I also grafted several different varieties onto my other trees. I've had an Everhard navel orange in a large pot by the rain tank for awhile, and it fruited last year. The oranges were Ok, but not spectacular. They pretty much tasted like your standard supermarket orange, so I decided add some more flavorful blood oranges.

The bark was slipping well, so I added Ruby, Moro, and Tarocco blood oranges using Joe Real's citrus bark graft. I left one small branch of the Everhard navel, but if I can ever get a sanguinelli blood orange budstick, I'll probably add it and remove the Everhard entirely. If you've never tasted a blood orange, you need to. To me they taste like an mixture of citrus and red wine. I'm told that they don't develop their distinctive 'blood' pigmentation in Houston, but that doesn't affect their flavor.There's debate among the local citrus gurus as to which is the best, with John Panzarella (Lake Jackson) preferring the Tarocco, Mr. Texas (Beaumont) preferring the Sanguinelli, and many Houstonians preferring the Moro.

I also ordered Minneola tangelo and Chandler pummelo budwood. I added the Minneola tanglo to my Orlando tangelo and Wekiwa tangelo trees, and the Chanlder pummelo to my sad looking Sarawak pummelo tree. The bark of the Sarawak tree split during this last really hard freeze, and I'm worried they tree may not survive. The bark of these trees weren't slipping because they're on trifoliate rootstock, so I used the cleft graft to attach the scions.

I had a lot of little pieces of budsticks leftover after all the bark and cleft grafting. They were too small to use, so I decided to trim the buds and practice t-budding. T-budding is where you cut an upside-down "T" into the stock, lift the bark, and insert a bud. The practice stock I chose was only half-slipping, so it may not work. But it was still good to practice making the cut and trimming and inserting the bud. I'll let you know if they all take. I did learn that it's very difficult to keep everything straight when you're t-budding 6-7 kinds of citrus onto one stock! I'm not sure I know what is what. I guess I'll find out when it fruits.

Everhard navel orange top-worked with Ruby, Tarocco, and Moro blood oranges.

Cleft graft of Minneola tangelo onto Wekiwa tangelo.

After dark grafting set-up.

Cut and upside-down 'T' into the stock.

Kinnow mandarin bud trimmed from budstick.

Bud inserted into stock and wrapped with parafilm.

3 Comments

Topworking the Meyer Lemon

3/9/2011

1 Comment

Budwood from Texas A&M Citrus Center

There was already a Meyer lemon tree in our yard when we moved in October 2007. It was being shaded out the wax-leaf legustrums, so I cut those back to let sun onto the lemon tree. Bam! That thing grew like crazy, and the next year we had somewhere on the order of 200-300 lemons.

What do you do with that many lemons? We made jar after jar of marmalade, froze tons of lemon juice (still have some), gave away grocery sacks of lemons, lemonade, lemon pie, and on and on. That many lemons is a lot of work because you can't just eat them!

We haven't had that many lemons again thanks to the hard freezes we've had the past few years, but the experience got me thinking. Could I graft something else onto the lemon tree, something the kids and I could eat without preparation? Could I change it into a different kind of tree altogether? I later learned that this was called top-working, and not only was it possible, it was a common way for growers to change whole groves of fruit trees to new varieties without harming the root systems.

So this year I finally built up the courage, and decided to top-work that lemon tree into a multiple-variety mandarin tree. I chose mandarins because I wanted to grow something that would produce fruit almost every year, even if there was a bad freeze, and mandarins are some of the most cold hardy citrus you can grow. After much deliberation, I contacted the Texas A&M Citrus Center in Weslaco, Texas, and ordered Kinnow, Pixie, and Fairchild mandarin budwood. I also ordered Page, but they didn't have any mature budwood. A fellow fruit grower gave me some Dobashi Beni Satsuma budwood from his tree, so I still had four varieties to work with.

I chopped the tree back to the main trunks, and used Joe Real's citrus bark graft method to join the budwood scions to the stocks. It was much easier than I thought it would be. The bark of Meyer lemon slipped very easily, and I was very very careful to sanitize my knife before each cut. It took a little over an hour to do two to three grafts of each variety, but I was being very deliberate and cautious. In a few weeks I should know if my grafts were successful or not. If the grafts failed, there is still time to place another budwood order and try again, or just let the lemon tree take over again until next year.

Special thanks to Dr. Wife for taking the close up shots with her macro lens!

Meyer lemon tree before topworking.

After being cut back.

Making the incision and peeling back the bark.

Prepared stock, ready for scion.

Inserting the scion.

Finished citrus bark graft.

Meyer lemon topworked to 'Multi-Mandarin' tree.

1 Comment

Loquats - Eriobotrya japonica

3/5/2011

4 Comments

Loquats are probably the most common fruit tree that people have in their yards in my neighborhood. However, most people don't realize that they produce fruit, or that the fruit can be delicious. To most people, loquats trees are just a nice evergreen, tropical-looking landscape plant.

The loquat fruit tastes something like an apricot, but they're a little more acidic. Not everyone likes them, but I sure do. They're really low maintenance trees, and very special because they fruit in February/March when nothing else is in season. Also, since they're very common and most people don't pick the fruit, you don't need a loquat tree to harvest several pounds. (Ask permission before you pick!)

The bad thing about loquats is that if a hard freeze blows in at the wrong time, all the fruit can be ruined. There's a big loquat tree by my community pool, and last year I bet I was able to harvest 3-4 pounds of fruit, in spite of a really hard freeze (in early January 2010). Unfortunately, this year a really hard freeze blew in much later (early February 2011), and the fruit didn't make it. I don't know why they survived last year but not this year.

Too bad. They're great for fresh eating, make a great jam, they can be used to make wine, and the seeds can even be used to make a 'Loquat Grappa'. Fingers crossed for next year.

4 small loquat trees out front.

Genoa loquat seedling from John Panzarella.

Big loquat tree by the community swimming pool.

Immature loquats before the big freezes.

Loquat fruit ruined by hard freezes.

4 Comments

Chill Hours

3/2/2011

10 Comments

Red Baron Peach Blossoms

Many fruit trees, such as peaches, apples, pears, and plums, have what is called a 'chilling requirement'. This means that after the tree goes dormant for the winter, it needs to accumulate a certain number of 'chill hours' before it will be ready to grow again in the spring. A chill hour is loosely defined as one hour below 45 degrees Fahrenheit. This chill requirement is important, because it helps ensure the tree won't break dormancy too early if there are just a few warm mid-winter days.

It is very important to know the chill requirements when selecting a fruit tree. My area usually receives between 600 and 700 chill hours on average, which is why I wouldn't plant Red Delicious apples (1400 chill hours) or Redglobe Peaches (850 chill hours).

If a tree doesn't receive enough chill hours, it will be slow to break dormancy, have reduced fruit set (or none at all), and the fruit quality is lower. It's OK if the tree receives more chill hours, but at a minimum most trees need to receive their specific chill requirements to be healthy and productive.

The Texas A&M Horticulture website gives two ways to estimate the accumulated chill hours of an area, based on readily available weather data. The first method uses the mean January temperature to chill, and the second method uses the average of the mean December and January temperatures:

January Mean Method:
Estimated Chill Accumulation = 3547-54 x (January Mean Temperature)

December/January Mean Method:
Estimated Chill Accumulation = 4280-68.8 x (December+January mean temperature/2)

However, it is important to note that these methods do not consider late cold snaps in February, like the one we had this year. I used both methods to estimate the chill hours my area received for the past 20 years, and the results are surprisingly variable. Even though my area receives and average of 600 chill hours, a Red Baron peach tree would only receive it's full chill requirement roughly 60% of the time. Much better to plant something with a chill requirement of less than 400 hours, like Midpride or Tropic Snow.