Planting a tree should be simple. Throw an apple core out the car window, and if it lands in a good patch of soil, seven years later canny roadside harvesters will be munching apples.
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The feral avocados in our garden have been dropped by over-confident currawongs who try to carry the fruit off to a nearby branch where they don't have to share their booty. But those trees thrive because they have accidentally been dropped into exactly the right place.
Gardens often don't have "exactly the right place". Enthusiastic gardeners may have already filled every "exactly right place" they possess. Inexperienced ones may dig a hole just large enough to cram in the tree roots, inadvertently creating a semi bonsai as the roots struggle to spread in hard-packed soil.
"Perfect spots" can also change. A most desirable location for a row of our apple trees 10 years ago has now been shadowed by a grove of casuarinas. A sunny, well-drained spot for the olive trees was totally perfect, till a bit of landscaping meant they are now in a slight hollow, and it has rained for most of the last two-and-a-half years. Their tops are not looking happy. This may be possums - or it could be a sign that the roots can't cope with the surplus water and are rotting.
If your "spot" may become sodden in damp years, build it up with soil or compost, so the tree is planted in a mound. Survey the site too before you prepare it, in case the surrounding plants are going to steal most of the light and moisture.
Now dig. The old adage is "a $10 hole for a $5 tree". This should possibly be updated by a factor of ten - trees are expensive, unless you grow you own from seeds or cuttings.
The hole should be half as deep again as the longest root, and half as wide again as the widest root. Snip off damaged roots and hold the tree in place as you gently pack dirt around it, tamping it in well after the whole is full, then water gently for about 10 minutes so the loose dirt settles around the roots.
If it fails to rain, water. Feed about mid-summer, when the leaves are growing strongly, and water in well - or feed after rain. If the possums decide your tree is dinner, tie steel wool about the trunk for about a metre, so they don't want to clamber up it. If ants bring woolly aphids, splodge on a barrier of tree banding grease. A spray of lime sulphur just as the buds are swelling with help stop the many leaf rots young trees are prone to in cool, wet or misty springs, summers and autumns.
Keep feeding. A weekly spray of a seaweed-based foliar fertiliser, according to directions on the packet, will not go amiss. Cosseting your tree now may mean twice as much growth than a neglected tree will give you, and half the time to fruiting. Trees that have grown strongly when young tend to put out wide, healthy root systems, which make the tree more heat, cold and wind hardy.
And if this week's cold and damp doesn't tempt you out to do some gardening, leaf through catalogues of some of the new tree varieties available online or in garden centres, like red- or purple-fleshed dwarf apples, self-pollinating dwarf almonds, white fleshed peaches too tender and juicy to ever make it to sale, fruit fly-resistant peach/plum crosses, or frost-hardy apricots. I have never been able to find an apricot that doesn't taste like cotton wool in a supermarket. They even have the same mouthfeel.
It only takes 20 minutes to plant a tree. In return you get decades of deliciousness or beauty.
This week I am:
- Wishing I was the kind of gardener who could grow delphiniums. New delphinium varieties bloom gloriously from early spring right through to late autumn if you prune them heavily after their first spring flush. I wouldn't get around to the spring pruning, nor the weekly watering and regular feeding they need to look their luxurious best.
- Discovering that wallabies like rodanthe, also known as paper daisies, even though they don't nibble paper daisy's close relatives that grow wild here. Paper daisies tolerate drought, sun, heat, cold, and neglect, exactly my kind of plant. Sadly the wallabies have decided that they are their kind of plant too. NB You can never permanently fence out wallabies. You either have to get rid of the wallabies (do not get rid of the wallabies) or swap your garden for plants they don't find tasty, or can be hung or pruned to a height where their paws can't reach, even when they stand on tip toe.
- Muttering at Possum X who has begun to eat exactly one lettuce heart each night.
- Watching a long-legged puppy "prune" our agapanthus by pulling off all the long-stemmed dead flower heads and chewing them to shreds. Now to teach him how to prune the roses....
- Raking up layers of pink, red and white camellia blossoms when they begin to brown.
- Still waiting for the onion seeds to sprout, and picking the mini leaves of the bok choi I didn't get round to thinning out. I am now pretending I meant to grow "mini bok choi". Actually the tiny, tender leaves are so luscious stir fried I may plant them too thickly deliberately next year.
Jackie French
Twice weekly
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