BrotherJoe

October 2007 - Posts

• Don't Outlive Your Trees, and Other Lessons Learned.

  Work is always easier when you know you're helping someone out. Last weekend my older brother Ben and I descended on my parents' house to help them with some yard work. For years when  we were younger, our time in the summer was measured out in yard work; mowing, trimming, pruning, mulching, weeding, deadheading and so forth, all laid out on lists that were to be completed before any fun was to be had that day. Ah, the memories. Not surprisingly, it's been years since I made my services available to the parents. Sometime in the early 90's, my brothers and I gave my parents two weeping cherry trees and planted them on either side of their driveway. For years these trees were a harbinger of spring, exploding with pink blossoms - and the symmetry of their placement really tied the landscape together. This year has been a real bruiser around here. We're about 12" behind on rainfall, and these beautiful cherry trees took it on the chin. They had been inspected by Davey Tree last year, and the arborist said that these particular trees were in the autumn of their lives, so to speak. The drought this year was just the straw that broke the camel's back. That's 3 bad colloquialisms in 3 sentences, for those of you scoring at home. As sad as it seemed, it was time for the trees to come down, and with the aid of a chainsaw it went pretty quick. There's an idea in psychology called Weber's Law; basically it defines a "just noticable difference" for different exchanges. It's the law that explains why people who buy a $2,000 suit can be convinced to buy a $100 belt at the same time. In the same vein, once those two trees came down it was open season on a whole mess of overgrown shrubs on their property. We figured, "Hey, if we took down the cherry trees, these taxus might as well come out too..." In the absence of a Bobcat, we hooked chains up to a van and yanked the shrubs out by the roots. Good times, though the trailer hitch is a little worse for the wear... There's something unsettling about cutting down a tree you remember planting. I imagine this will happen more as I get older, but this was the first time that I've outlived a tree. The experience has reinforced to me how important it is to take care of trees in your landscape. Trees are slow moving, and it's easy to miss symptoms of problems when you see the tree everyday. I highly recommend having a certified arborist inspect all your trees. They know what to look for, and they can make recommendations about treatment if they do uncover any problems. The International Society of Arboriculture has a great locator tool on their website for finding a certified arborist in your area. Also, I'm a big believer in watering your trees and shrubs. Even if you let your lawn go dormant in the hot part of the summer, remember to water your trees. They're much harder to replace. I found an awesome tool that's specifically for watering the root zone of trees and shrubs. It's called the Ross Root Feeder, and you can use it for fertilizing as well, though I mainly use it for watering without worrying about evaporation. When it was all said and done, we had helped my parents take care of a lot of heavy lifting that they weren't going to tackle themselves. The whole thing was a stark contrast to my memories of summer labor in their yard. They were genuinely greatful, and since the help was freely given it was a lot more satisfying. The presence of cold beer helped as well... I encourage anyone to help out a friend, family member or loved one with yard work. If they really need the help you'll be surprised how happy you can make them with even a small amount of effort. Maybe you have a parent or grandparent, or an elderly neighbor who could use the help. If not, Project EverGreen has a really cool program called GreenCare for Troops that you can look into. They will match you up with a military family who is short handed around the yard because they have a member deployed overseas. These people are stretched thin enough, if you can offer your assistance with their yard work it will be much appreciated. Posted Oct 18 2007, 03:58 PM by BrotherJoe with no comments Filed under: Brother Joe's Garden Adventure, GreenCare for Troops, trees, arborists, drought

• Pulling the String with the Ed Wood Japanese Maple

  Ed Wood was an American film director who made some of the worst movies ever committed to acetate. He truly gave the term "B-Movie" a standard by which all others were judged. These movies were terrible to the point of being unwatchable, and by all accounts Ed Wood himself was a bit of an odd duck. He thought of himself as an Orson Wells type who could single handedly manage all aspects of a movie production - and attempted to do so with almost none of the required skills or talents, armed only with a determination to make movies and a comfortable angora sweater. No joke. His movies include "Glen or Glenda", a bizarre pseudo-documentary about transvestiteism, and more famously, "Plan 9 from Outer Space", a disjointed tale involving aliens, police, and the original Vampira. His life and work were brought back into the public eye by Tim Burton in the 1994 film, "Ed Wood", starring Johnny Depp, Martin Landau and Sarah Jessica Parker. I'm a huge fan of this movie. It portrays Ed Wood and his cohorts in an admirable light, and it includes a memorable scene where Landau, as an aged junkie Bela Lugosi, shouts "Pull the String!!" over and over again. It's a piece of work. Fast forward to last weekend when I visited a garden center that was advertising a 40% off tree sale for the fall. I think it's a raw deal that most garden centers are forced to deeply discount trees at the exact time of year when homeowners should be planting them. That's another matter, though. My wife and I had the general idea that we wanted a japanese maple for our back patio, but had no ideas beyond that. After a bit of nosing around, we found a 5 ft. maple that was unlike any that we'd seen before; it has green leaves instead of the more common red, it has bark that turns green in cool weather (how sweet is that?) and according to the sell tag it grows with an "open habit" - meaning that it can easily be coerced into growing with a lot of air space in between the branches. We were most impressed. I checked the tag and to my surprise it was labeled "Acer Palmatum 'Ed Wood'". This piqued my curiosity. It turns out that a gentleman by the name of Edsal Wood was the owner of a seedling nursery in Oregon called Bonsai Village. In addition specializing in bonsai and specialty conifers, Edsal Wood also developed new varieties of japanese maples. I know now that it has no relation to the movie, but at the store the name slowed me down enough to take another look and we decided to buy the tree. Proof that branded plants work, I suppose. The tree is home and planted and seems to be doing well so far. I was surprised about the relative lack of available online information about this type of tree. Last weekend was the first I'd seen one, and I can't think of any maples I've seen that look like this one. I'll have to post some pictures. On a related note, I encountered two different employees in the tree department as I was buying and picking up this tree. Both of them stopped to tell me that they were glad I picked Ed Wood variety, and mentioned that "not enough people appreciate the way they looked". In retrospect, there may be some comment here about my taste...but at the time it struck me that both of these guys were happy that the tree was going to get planted somewhere before the end of the season. They acted as if I was adopting the tree - and I think that's a great vibe to get off of a person who's selling you a living thing.   Posted Oct 09 2007, 04:49 PM by BrotherJoe with no comments Filed under: Brother Joe's Garden Adventure

• Honeysuckle

  "And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense bearing tree" Samuel Taylor Coleridge   In my corner of Ohio, there is a time every year in late May and early June that is as distinct as any holiday. When the honeysuckle blooms it's as if everything draws to a sweet, narcotic halt, and your senses are overtaken by a cloying sludginess that truly signals the beginning of summer. Even when I was fairly young, I measured the coming of spring in terms of the smells; Easter came with hyacinths and early magnolias, then the smell of lilacs on the evening breeze - right when you notice the days growing longer. Honeysuckle and locust blooms shared the job of scenting the warm June evenings, but it was always the honeysuckle that was really a knock-down olfactory experience. It turns out that there's a good reason for this phenomena; Bush Honeysuckle and Japanese Honeysuckle hold two seats in the top ten list of invasive plant species in Ohio. I find a certain irony in the fact that one of my most pleasant scent memories exists primarily because at some point honeysuckle was introduced to my region and decided to play bully with all the other underbrush. Today if I take a walk in the woods, easily 90% of the "non-tree" plant life is bush honeysuckle. While it's all well and good that the stuff smells so nice for a week or so every year, it's also seriously bad news if you happen to have it growing in your landscape. Bush Honeysuckle is a pernicious space invader. It's no small wonder that Ohio has it listed as an invasive species. In a landscape it has a tendency to crowd out everything around it and more to the point: it won't die. It's like a malignant growth. You can treat it terribly, cut it down to the ground, kick it, scream at it, and it simply grows back. This can be handy if you like having a shrub that rejuvenates itself, but for most of us, it's a tremendous pain. Last weekend I had the pleasure of removing a small (8" - 12") honeysuckle shrub from one of my landscape beds. It seemed like a small deal. I was using a pick and taking the opportunity to explain leverage to my son, leaning on the handle and prying up the roots, when suddenly there was a loud SNAP and the handle of my pick cracked in half. Times like this you have to laugh. The lesson in leverage was either totally lost, or incredibly effective. Time will tell. The honeysuckle finally came out of the ground, but not without a lot more effort than seemed logical for the size of the plant. To cap it off, the roots of the honeysuckle had become entwined with a butterfly bush - which I wanted to keep - and in removing one I destroyed the other.     Here's the tool I broke. Maybe there's a lesson here about buying quality hand tools. Maybe. What I take from it is that honeysuckle is kind of like a raging keg party - it's better in someone else's yard.  Posted Oct 04 2007, 02:06 AM by BrotherJoe with no comments Filed under: Brother Joe's Garden Adventure