Tips from the Potting Bench

All this rain and cool weather sure has the trees and bushes looking real good not to mention how great it is to see the rivers and creeks still flowing strong. Out in the garden I haven’t had to water once! That has been really great and the raspberries, blueberries, and fruit trees all look happy and lush. Ok, so the fruit set on the trees is pretty thin, surely that’s a fair trade off for all this life giving water. Besides the last few years have been pretty great fruit years.

Peach leaf curl is a definite problem this year even though I sprayed this past winter. If you are having a problem with peach leaf curl don’t despair, get out there and pick as many of the infected leaves off the trees as you can and rake up any that have fallen to the ground. Put the infected leaves in a trash bag and send it to the dump or burn them to a crisp. You want to remove and destroy as many of the fungal spores as humanly possible so re-infection this winter is kept to a minimum. The next step is to make sure you get a good spray routine down starting this fall. Fall is when the spores take residence in the bud sites, they overwinter there and wait for just the right conditions in spring to bloom and infect your trees. Spraying in the fall, sometime around Thanksgiving when the tree is just entering dormancy, will destroy many of the overwintering spores making it easier to keep the disease under control. The next spray should happen sometime around New Year’s when the tree is fully dormant, and the third and last spray takes place just as the tree is coming out of dormancy and the buds are just beginning to swell, usually right around Valentine’s Day. We spray an organic dormant oil combined with lime sulfur and haven’t had peach leaf curl in years. Don’t worry; I’ll remind you when the time comes.

It is a late spring, people coming to the nursery are concerned they are getting a late start and all I can say is no actually, and this is perfect timing for this year. Using the calendar to time your gardening activities is only marginally helpful, much better that you should watch the weather and make decisions based on what is happening outside your window. There is plenty of time to get your garden in, even tomatoes and peppers, although at this point you may want to concentrate of planting faster maturing varieties. Green beans mature pretty quick, some as early as 55 days so planting them now is not a problem, in fact you can succession plant them every few weeks right up until mid July for a continuous harvest right into autumn. The same goes for cucumbers, eggplant and summer squash these too, are fast maturing crops, some cukes come in at under 50 days! If it’s winter squash you are after then choose faster maturing varieties, same with corn. The point I’m trying make here is that it is not too late to get your garden planted so get out there, gardening is act of faith and hope and we sure could use as much of that as we can generate.