How Does Your Garden Grow?

Winter Offers  a Time to Rest, Reflect and Get Ready

By Amy Rice-Jones

Life in the edible garden takes on a different pace during the winter months that exemplifies the synchronicity of nature with our human tendencies to draw inward during the colder, darker months, taking the opportunity to rest, reflect and prepare for the next year. During this season, more focus is on perennial edibles, as the speed of harvesting seasonal vegetables slows considerably.

These are some gardening tasks that will ensure that your garden is protected during the colder weather, and primed and ready to ramp up its productivity again come spring:

Clean
Winter is a good time for “garden sanitation.” Mummified fruit, rotten vegetables and diseased plants and leaves you may have neglected to pull out of the garden or off the tree during fall can harbor and propagate disease and provide habitat for pests. Revisit your fruit trees and edible garden to remove these remnants and dispose of them in your green-waste bin.
 
Protect the Soil
If you decided to hang on to your summer garden until the rains handed down a final death sentence on your tomatoes, you may not have been able to plant a fall garden or a cover crop like fava beans. Don’t despair: You can still protect your garden soil from the nutrient-leaching effects of winter rains by applying a protective covering.

Spread a thin layer (a quarter-inch thick) of  compost or straw over your garden soil. (Note: Take care that you do not use “hay,” as hay has seeds in it that will sprout to become a weed—ask your garden supply store to help you find the correct material.) A layer of leaves  from a deciduous, non-fruiting tree (including maple and alder) may also be used if you prefer not to purchase any outside material.

Winter is also the time to spread a thin layer of compost around your fruit trees and berry plants. This includes cane-type berries like raspberries and blackberries as well as bush berries like blueberries. Here, it is good to add a thicker layer (one to two inches thick) of wood chips on top of the compost. Leave a six-inch circle around the tree trunk or plant stem that is free of any mulch, as direct contact with the trunk or stem can lead to rot or other fungal disease problems.

Prune Deciduous Fruit Trees to Stimulate Growth
Pruning deciduous fruit trees like apples, pears, peaches, apricots and plums can seem a bit intimidating, but this is a necessary task to ensure their continued health and productivity. In fact, for many home gardeners the hardest thing about pruning seems to be mustering the courage to make the first cut.

Why Prune?
Pruning fruit trees stimulates growth (or stops growth in certain areas or directions in order to shape the tree) to establish the tree’s structure, thickens and lengthens branches, encourages fruit wood development (on most fruit trees, fruit only grows on second-year or older wood), manages sunlight penetration in the canopy of the tree and maintains overall health.

When to Prune?
While the tree is dormant, meaning after leaf drop and before bud break. In our area, that is sometime during January and February.

What to Prune?
Begin by carefully assessing your tree and asking these questions:
•    How is the overall form, vigor and balance of the tree, including taking into consideration its proximity to other trees? Keep an eye out for any of the four Ds—dead, diseased, damaged or “disoriented,” aka growing downward or crooked.
•    If you have a central-leader (aka trunk) type of fruit tree, does the leader have any competition from lower branches.
•    If you have a open-center type tree, is the center still open or are there branches growing into the center?
•    Is there sufficient space between the tree’s “scaffolds,” or primary branches? The ideal fruit tree will have four to six evenly spaced scaffolds. Are these thick enough to bear a heavy fruit load? Does their length seem appropriate for the height of the tree and the other branches? Are they growing at a correct angle? Note that the ideal angle would be 45° from the trunk.
•    Are the tree’s “laterals,” or branches coming off the scaffolds, an appropriate length and width to support fruit? Are any of them crossing each other?
•    What is the specific fruiting habit of the type of tree? It is important to know the growing and fruiting habits of the specific fruit tree you are pruning or you may inadvertently prune out too much of the fruit-bearing wood. In most cases, fruit-bearing wood is two-year or older wood. You should be able to see small “fruit spurs” emerging.
   
How and Where to Prune?
Once you’ve made the above assessments, you can begin the actual pruning.

There are two main types of pruning cuts. The first are “heading” cuts, where a quarter to a half of the new growth (from last year) from the branch is pruned out. These cuts should be made above an outward=facing bud at a 45° angle. Choose a bud that is pointing in the direction you want the branch to grow. Note that the more you prune, the more stimulating the cut will be. This is counterintuitive, but it means that if you are trying to manage the height of your tree, don’t prune off as much new growth. On the other hand, if you have a young tree and are trying to promote more growth, make a larger heading cut. You may remove up to half of the new growth from last year.

“Thinning” cuts are as they sound: used to thin out a branch entirely. Use these in the case of the four D’s . If a branch is dead, diseased, damaged or disoriented, cut it out. Thin out branches that are growing straight up (except in the case of pear trees), straight down, or in toward the center, as well as branches that are touching or crossing each other. When making a thinning cut, make your cut close to that branch’s junction with the main branch or trunk. Never leave a stub.

Finally, if some of your main scaffolds are growing too closely together or at a 30° angle to the trunk, you may need to spread the distance between the two branches or expand the angle of a scaffold so it is closer to a 45° angle by tying the branches using wooden stakes and string.

Plant Fruits and Perennial Herbs
The winter and early spring are the best times to plant bare-root fruit trees, fruit-bearing vines, berries (raspberries, blueberries and blackberries) and perennial herbs. Seasonal rains, if not torrential, make planting easier, and moist soil is better for establishing the roots of new plants. For instructions on how to plant a bare-root fruit tree, check out the helpful guide at TreesOfAntiquity.com, under Planting and Pruning.

Plan for Spring
Visit the Petaluma Seed Bank, profiled in the Summer 2018 issue of Edible Marin & Wine Country, or your favorite local garden supply store, or order a catalog from one of the many seed companies offering exciting new vegetables and fruits as well as old favorites and cozy up by the fire this winter to peruse and plan your spring and summer gardens—and recipes. Growing season will be here again before you know it!

Amy Rice-Jones is a longtime garden educator and local food activist. She currently mentors families in how to grow their own food through Marin-based The Backyard Farm Company. TheBackyardFarmCompany.com