Category Archives: FRUIT

Prune grapes in late winter-early spring

Today I’m gonna attempt to explain grape pruning. I found grape pruning very confusing at first. But not to worry-you will start to understand as you do it. Also look at the many videos on youtube on this subject. If you haven’t pruned your grape plants yet, now is a good time to do it. The best time to prune grape vines is in late winter and early spring, when the leaf buds on the tips of last year’s canes start to swell. There are 2 styles of pruning-cordon pruning and cane pruning. If your not sure what kind of grapes you have, then try cane pruning.

Cane pruning-This is how I prune my table eating grapes. My variety is Himrod, a green seedless table eating grape that does well here in Santa Fe. I have trained my grapes to grow on a fence but you can make supports as seen in the video below if you want.

I started with 2 main vines (called cordons) from the main plant years ago. They’re basically in a T shape off the main. A few years later I let 2 more canes grow on a lower level. Kinda a modified cane pruning because I let more than 2 grow off the main plant–2 cordons on the top and 2 lower. Off these cordons, each year new smaller cane vines will grow vertically from which the grapes come. I will trim back (but not off) these vertical canes before the growing season. I cut the old 1 year growth from last year canes (which are lighter brown than older growth) back to 3 buds on each cane to grow again. Each bud will put out new canes and off these new canes will grow grapes. I try to have at least 6″ to 12″ of space between the canes along the 4 main cordons so as not to overcrowd. Sometimes a cane will grow 4-10′ or more in length. I cut these back the same way. You may think you are cutting off too much, but grape plants are very forgiving and I rather not have a grape plant that is out of control with too many canes growing every which way. Besides your grapes will be bigger.

Look at this video that I found online. I Hope it helps visualize this process:

Pruning Fruit Trees and growing advice

Some years ago I had tree arborist, Tracy Neal, (now retired) out to the house to help me with pruning my fruit trees and give me advice on care of them. Not that I hadn’t already pruned (butchered) them that year, it’s just that I needed some tweaking with my pruning skills. Hmm..

When I put them in 30 years ago, I thought all fruit trees should be pruned in a open vase shape but that’s not true. Apple trees should have one central leader up the middle with all the branches off of it (kinda like a xmas tree) while apricots, peaches and plums have the open vase shape or modified vase shape. Sorry the photo is a little blurred. So what did I find out besides that?

 

-We had to trim up the four semi-dwarf apple trees and still do almost every year. At least I didn’t just top them off with shears (bad-no-no). At this age of the trees, it’s too late to do any major adjustment without drastically hurting the tree. (Thank god as I was afraid we might have to cut off some branches as big as my wrist). I told him I had cut off about a third of the top smaller branches of the Granny Smith apple as they grew about 6 feet tall last year and put out LOTS of apples. So much so that many of the branches got too heavy and broke off. So I put 1×4 boards or 2×4 boards that were tall enough with a V cut on the top end (to rest the limb vertically into) and had each heavy branch supported by the board that went to the ground. The weight of the branches on the board should hold the board up.

-Also I didn’t want the trees to get too high and out of control.  When I asked how much to trim off each year, Tracy said you can trim back to the top of where you stand on the ladder (LOL) to help keep it contained. Also I was trimming out too much in the interior. I had to put cages around the apples as well to keep the deer from rutting on them as they killed one-half of one of my apple trees by rubbing their antlers on a limb in fall but the tree survived.

-I need to expand the wells around the trees a little, put some Yum-Yum mix fertilizer around them, sprinkle either Planters II mix or Azomite for minerals on top of soil and scratched in . Then innoculate soil with some mycorrhizal. Pound holes into ground to root area and put mycorrhizal in holes-then water well. Add 2-4 inches of mulch on top of soil keeping it 3″ away from the base of the trunk (if you smother the tree trunk with dirt up to the trunk, it will die).

-The apricot tree is fine and he said each apricot tree is a piece of art. Just had to trim out a few branches that were growing in a walking path and add the above amendments. Unfortunately my one apricot tree is now growing in the shadows of pinyon trees, so now it doesn’t produce fruit. But you know what I call an apricot tree? A good shade tree! Plus it has fantastic color in the fall. Any tree that can grow here is good!

-I have one young pear tree that produced 2 pears last year and hopefully will produce more this year. The deer ate one of the fruit so now they have a cage around it to keep off the deer.

-I asked him about how to water an established tree and he suggested using a soaker hose on each tree at the drip line and inside the well. Water deeply (longer) instead of shallow watering. My spaghetti drip line is not enough anymore.

-I had 2 dead peach trees and 1 dead plum tree. I’m NOT going to replace them as they all require more moisture and are not very drought tolerant. I’ll turn off the drip system to the dead ones and take them out. So the only producing fruit trees left are four apple and one pear.

Cauliflower gratin-A cooking day

A cooking day-

Purple cauliflower gratin

One of my cauliflowers I picked this week was purple. Today I made a cauliflower gratin. Letting it cool now. Can’t wait to try it!

 

Apricot-Blueberry Claufutis

Also I made an apricot/blueberry Claufutis for dessert. The apricots were from our tree at work. The blueberries were from the store.

How to tell when to pick apricots off your trees

Bumper crop of apricots this year!

Apricot season is here and even though I didn’t get any on my apricot trees this year, many of my friends have offered me lots of them for which I am grateful. So far I’ve made 16 jars of apricot jam, dried a couple of gallons of them and I plan on making a apricot clafouti and an apricot/berry cobbler.

People ask me when they should pick apricots?

Should they wait till they are completely ripe or pick a little earlier. If you wait till they are completely colored up still on the trees, then you will be competing with the birds for them. Apricots are not like cherries where once you pick them, they stop ripening. The good news is you can pick earlier and most of them will continue to ripen if left out on trays in your kitchen. Then as they turn their beautiful apricot color and give to finger pressure, they are ripe and you can store them in a zip lock baggie in the refrigerator and keep adding more to the bag as the rest ripen. Of course they will only last a few days in the refrigerator but this will give you time to get enough of them and think about what to do with them.

Left-all green, 2nd light green-yellow, 3rd one starting to color, 4th one ripe but still needs a day to give to finger pressure

Above is a photo I took of apricots in various stages. The one on the far left is still ALL green and will NEVER ripen so throw those out or compost them. The 2nd one (from left) has a faint light green-yellow color and it will ripen up completely if left out on a counter. The 3rd one (from left) is definitely ripening and turning more yellow and the 4th one is ripe but still a bit hard so I wait till they give to finger pressure-just a touch of give before I use them in a recipe. Now you don’t have to compete with the birds!

First raspberries of the season!

raspberries_irst harvest 07-25

First small harvest of raspberries was yesterday, July 25. It seems early this year as this variety, called Polana, is usually a fall bearing raspberry, not mid summer. Hopefully we have a long raspberry season this year.  Ate them with vanilla ice cream-yummy! Last year, I started harvesting blackberries before raspberries but not this year.  One good thing is all the berries are getting lots of water from our monsoons this year. Blessed be.

October Veggie Garden Update

 

Here’s the latest update in my garden as of Sunday October 18th. The season is winding down fast now, and so am I. The pics above are what we harvested today.

Some warm season crops like cucumbers, summer squash, green beans, dry beans, butternut winter squash and corn are finished. Today’s harvest of the warm season crops like tomatoes and peppers were picked, including some green tomatoes which I will ripen indoors. I got a couple of butternut squash and cucumbers too. I turned off the drip systems to all of them today.

The perennial fruit crops-strawberries, grapes, rhubarb and blackberries are also done. But the raspberries, which are a fall crop are still giving up some berries but are slowing way down now too. I will leave the drip systems on the perennials till it freezes.

Other cool season crops in the garden are still shining, loving the cooler weather we have right now. These include cabbage, chard, another winter squash (sweetmeat) and kale are still in the main garden and ready to harvest. I’ve been harvesting the kale, cabbage and chard for a long time.

I am harvesting broccoli heads, warm season lettuces and radishes that I planted as succession crops in August in my garlic bed which has been vacant since July. I figured I would have enough time to harvest them before I plant a new garlic crop back in it. The garlic heads are coming this week and I will plant them by the end of October in that bed once the other veggies are harvested.

But the season doesn’t end yet. I currently have some cool season crops that I started inside under lights like lettuces, spinach, arugula and Pak Choi. They will go into my cold frame and greenhouse this week but not in the main garden. I’ve actually been waiting till both the greenhouse and cold frame are cool enough in the day to put them in so they don’t bolt and this week with the daytime temperatures in the 70’s and the nighttime temperatures in the 40s is now perfect to put them out. They should last till December using row cover when the temperatures drop to freezing at night to extend their lives. It will be nice to get greens and lettuce from the garden in November. My last hurrah!

 

Perennial fruit vignette tour

 

Here is a vignette of a short tour of perennial fruit in my garden and what varieties work here for me in Santa Fe, NM. I forgot to show I also have a rhubarb variety called Victoria which does well here. I found it in a nursery here in Santa Fe.

More information on this vignette tour:

You’ll see I keep a 30% sunscreen on many of my plants in the video as I find some plants here in our high altitude like a little shade from our intense UV light here in Santa Fe. I’m hoping it will give the plants some hail protection as well from our summer monsoon storms. I got it at Johnnyseeds listed under shade cloth.

My raspberry variety is Polana. It is a fall bearing variety that I cut down to 3 inches high every March and it gets about 40 inches tall each year and doesn’t need trellising but does like a fence to grow next to. I got it 3 years ago from Nourse Nursery online. Another friend, Mike, turned me on to them. I’ve had some different varieties of raspberries but this one is the only one that kicks ass in fruit production here in my garden.

My blackberry is a thornless variety called Triple Crown.  I got it from Newmans Nursery here in Santa Fe but discovered it in one of our Santa Fe Extension Master Gardener gardens. I love it doesn’t have any thorns and it is also 3 years old. This year is the first year that it is very productive. It is a semi-erect variety and does need a trellis to grow on to keep it from spreading too much with runners.

My strawberries are a June-bearing variety that I got some starts from a friend some years ago and I don’t know exactly which variety it is. I like the fact it bears all it’s fruit in June so I only have to keep birds away during the month of June vs everbearing varieties that bear smaller fruit all season. There are many different varieties of June-bearing strawberries to choose from online.

My grape vine variety is called Himrod. It is a green, seedless table grape for fresh eating not winemaking. It has incredible flavor that can’t be found in the grocery store. I have one plant that is about 40′ long along a fence and is very productive. I’ve also tried other varieties of grapes that didn’t do as well here in our climate but this one is a winner.

2019 Garden Gratitude

In this topsy-turvey time in the world where everything is chaotic and polarized, I feel the need to reflect on the garden and what I was grateful for in the garden in 2019.

First and foremost is that I’m blessed with a big 3000 square ft garden that is almost finished-is anything really finished in one’s garden or is a garden something always in transition?

This last year I had a wonderful helper, named Janine (I always said I wanted a clone!) who I was blessed by meeting her at a class I taught.  Janine came out and weeded ALL the gardens while she was here for 2.5 weeks. Then I put landscape fabric down on the paths and wood mulch over the them to keep the weeds out. Works great. Now I’m not spending all my time battling weeds.

I finished up the last of my raised beds by framing them with wood. Now the soil and amendments don’t run off like my raked raised beds use to do, but instead stay contained inside the bed. Much better.

I bought hail netting which I’m sure will be great but we didn’t get hail here last season!  Go figure! Made me more relaxed though when a storm came rolling in and it kept the deer off of my crops which decided to come into the garden in the fall to nibble.

I am grateful for the abundant fruit crops my friends and I had this past season in 2019. And although we got no apples this year here at the mini farm from the apple trees, (they must be taking off a year after producing hundreds of lbs the previous year,) there was still so much fruit to harvest and share this year. Biggest year ever for me!

We got:

Cherries-10 lbs (from a friend)

Apricots-(last harvest was 7 years ago from our trees) canned lots of apricot jam

Peaches-30 lbs (from a friend’s peach trees)

Pears-20 lbs (from a friends pear trees)

Grapes, strawberries, rhubarb, blackberries and raspberries-all from my own garden. Abundant harvests.

I said when I planted raspberries 2 seasons ago that I wanted so many raspberries that I would get sick of them. Well, I didn’t get sick of them but was so overwhelmed by the number of raspberries that I opened up that patch to some friends to harvest some as our freezer filled up fast. Actually you can never get too many raspberries (or blackberries for that matter).

So what the veggie garden lacked in 2019, the fruit harvest was incredible.

Looking forward to a new gardening season!

Peaches galore!

This was the a great year for peach harvests. A friend called me and told me they picked over 200 lbs of peaches off of their two peach trees! The tree variety is called Contender, and she bought them from Tooley’s Trees up in Truchas. She invited me to come and get some and I took about 15 lbs of peaches.

I made two wonderful galettes with peaches and raspberries. I used Deborah Madison’s recipe for the galette crust from her Seasonal Fruit Desserts book. Really simple to do and the best crust ever-light and flaky!

I also made 24 jars of peach-raspberry jam with honey–Delicious!

The rest of the fresh peaches were eaten within the week! What a treat!

2019 Garden pics!

Here are some pics of my garden this year. Now that we are in September, I wanted to capture it in all it’s glory before it’s gone. I’ve worked hard tweaking out the infrastructure with new framed beds and weed barriers and wood chips in the paths this year. Having retired from the Santa Fe Farmers Market two seasons ago has allowed me to do more in the garden. I also added some perennial fruit like raspberries and blackberries since I don’t need space for 125 tomato plants anymore! By mid-October or sooner, it will be toast with the first frost so might as well enjoy it while I have it. I have an abundance of flowers this year that I grew for my edible flower class and besides being beautiful and edible, they attract many beneficial insects and pollinators. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Polana raspberries
Rosso de Lucca dry beans
Nasturiums
Entrance into the garden
Lemon Gem marigolds-edible!
Edible cosmos-sulphureus variety
Santorini tomatoes
Waltham butternuts
More edible flowers
Kalibos cabbage-Eastern European heirloom
Rugosa Friulana summer squash from Italy
Borage flowers in strawberry patch
Polana raspberries
Flowers by entrance
me-The Tomato Lady with harvest
harvest time
Dutch shallots
Large Barred Boar-seeds from Wild Boar Farms
Jimmy Nardello sweet pepper
Chiogga beets
Leek flower
June bearing strawberries
morning glories gone wild
beets-chiogga on left/Cylindra on right
Dutch shallots curing
Black cherry tomatoes and Santorini tomatoes
Mystery yellow tomato with Purple Cherokee tomatoes
Goliath tomatoes
Himrod grapes
Pollinator flowers
tomato harvest

Salmonberries

If you live in the Northwest, you probably heard of Salmonberries but I have not heard of them here in Santa Fe. My neighbor has a Salmonberry bush that produced heavily this year and I got some.

At first I thought it was a gold raspberry but it is not.  It’s a beautiful berry similar to a raspberry but more delicate in flavor and is gold-salmon-pinkish color.

The salmonberry, Rubus spectabilis is native to the US Northwest moist coastal regions and some parts of Europe. I wouldn’t think they would thrive in our drier conditions and yet here is one and it is not in a wet area. Traditionally, the berries were eaten by Native Americans with salmon or salmon roe, hence the name. It is sometimes called the Joffelberry as well. What a wonderful treat! They don’t freeze well so we just gobbled them all up!

Apricots galore!

It’s apricot season and I’ve been picking lots! It’s unusual to get apricots here in Santa Fe (about every 7 years for me) as usually a late freeze comes in spring and freezes all the blossoms, but not this year!

I have a wonderful apricot jam recipe that has St. Germain’s liquor in it. St Germain’s is a liquor made out of elderberries and is delicious by itself but when added to apricot jam while cooking, it gives a wonderful floral nuance to the jam that is delicious. So I am excited to make more this year as I’m down to my last jar of apricot jam. The recipe can be found here.

Wow, what a fruit season it’s been so far-first mega strawberries, then thousands of cherries, now apricots and my neighbor has salmonberries now and coming up right behind will be raspberries and blackberries in another month and then apples in the fall.

AND we haven’t even gotten to the veggies being produced right now but that’s for another post!

 

Abundant year for Cherries too! Check out this cherry pitter

My friend, Bob Z has an abundance of Bing cherries on his tree this year. I went by yesterday and helped pick some. Anybody who knows Bob, call him if you want to go pick cherries-pick some for yourself.

I took home 6 lbs of cherries. I use to use a cherry pitter that you did one at a time but a few years ago I got a new NORPRO Deluxe Cherry Pitter that makes it much easier and faster to pit cherries. It took less than 10 minutes to do 3 lbs! Above is a video of it in action.

STRAWBERRIES-a bumper crop this year!

June bearing strawberries

My strawberries are going nuts this year. This is the biggest crop I’ve ever had in 25 years! I think we’ve harvested about 6 GALLONS of them so far and still more to go. I think it’s because of all the moisture we had this winter and spring AND the Azomite mineral supplement I gave them last year. I’ve taken them to parties, given them to friends who froze some, and I’m am going to make some galettes and strawberry-balsamic jam with some of them and trading Bob’s cherries for some as well (I hope-are you listening Bob?)

Perennial fruit care in spring

Strawberries grew unbelievably with the addition of Azomite last year

As far as perennial fruit goes, I already cut back the new raspberry plants a few days ago. They are a fall variety called Polana from Norse nursery online. They were fantastic last year with us harvesting lots of raspberries in their first year. So this is their first trimming. I trimmed them back within an inch or two of the ground and they are all still alive. I wasn’t sure as I forgot to water them last fall for a few months but with all the precipitation we got this winter, they are fine.

I also cut back the new blackberry plants called Triple Crown, and saw lots of new start-ups that rooted that I will move. Now I won’t have to buy some to finish up the blackberry row. Hopefully I will get blackberries in their second year.

Today I pulled away all the dead leaves around the rhubarb (Victoria) and they are starting to come up too. A very hardy perennial plant.

I checked the strawberries and pulled all the dead borage plants that grow up in the strawberry patch each year from dropped seeds. Borage is a good companion plant for strawberries and the bees love them. The strawberries need a haircut too-but not too short. The strawberries did fantastic last year.

The verdict is out on the artichoke. It came back last year in its second year but I don’t see any signs of life yet this year. They actually are not supposed to be grown here as a perennial because we are in a colder zone than they like, so we will see if it makes it or not.

Next up is to prune back the grapes and the apple trees and other fruit trees. I’m late on the apple trees but they need to be desperately thinned and pruned now before they come back to life. Last year I put Azomite, a mineral supplement, in my veggie garden which really helped the crops and I have some leftover which I will sprinkle around the fruit trees this year.