Leonard Moorehead, the Urban Gardener: Apricots Rule the Dog Days

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Leonard Moorehead, GoLocalWorcester Gardening Expert

Photo courtesy of Leonard Moorehead

Gardeners pressed for space need look no further than the apricot for compact size, vigorous growth and abundant yields. I started my garden in an empty vacant lot surrounded by tall wooden fences and filled with long neglected grass. Like so many gardeners, my fantasy garden has a huge lexicon of wishes. I knew that somewhere in my old city was a Paradise to be, if not found. For me, it was a spacious side lot, a tabula rosa, ready for a procession of dreams come true. In my mind’s eye I knew Oberon’s Midsummer bower, I knew Adam and Eve met God in a garden and became human. Babylon’s hanging gardens were one of the Great Wonders of the world, Boboli’s arbors shaded Da Vinci, and then personal moments of love in gardens. The lot was empty but already full.

Gardens are vertical as well as horizontal. Did I have the time to wait an eternity for fruit trees when annuals do so well right from the gate? Would they eat up precious sunshine, create shade, require cultural techniques such as pruning and thinning? Would biblical plagues blight the foliage or infest fruit? Apples shipped thousands of miles from long term storage were cheap enough. Why not plants that offered crops, blooms, or fruit that ship poorly at their prime and command carriage trade prices? I saw Asian pears wrapped in Styrofoam sell for dollars apiece and considered growing up, embrace hope for the future, and cultivate fruit trees first harvested in the wild and adopted by people in the mists of pre-history, the great divide between cave and city. If they could, so could I. I planted dwarf peaches, Asian pears, and apricots. Nothing less than Paradise on Earth is the premise and optimism my guide.

I first ate a fresh apricot as an adult. Until then they were Nana’s territory, the dried fruits, nuts and forbidden dash of brandy lovingly baked into Christmas fruit cakes, the most dreaded of holiday presents. Not hard sauce nor maraschino cherries could persuade us to eat the long lasting cake. On a date with someone I desperately wished to impress with brand new beard, countless sit-ups and savoir faire. They casually ate an apricot and I accepted a golden yellow fruit just a bit smaller than a peach but like peaches, fragrant and juicy. “I bit the small “stone” of course and sheepishly looked about for the proper Amy Vanderbilt pit disposal technique. People rely upon etiquette and I feared to appear gauche. The trials of love enter the garden, the route to the heart is a many forked road. Although many choices are at hand, since Adam the stomach is close to the heart, the shortest distance is always a straight line. I can still taste the first apricot. During July’s sultry dog days I taste them again and know happiness. You can too. The small pits? Fold in a napkin, not stuffed into tight jeans.

Prolong the harvest season and order two year saplings of early, mid and late season varieties for a trio of cross pollinating small trees. Despite a much larger areas to enrich with the immense stream of so called bio-degradable materials that flows through our cities often free for the taking as having no value, I purposely created the proverbial $100 hole for the $22.00 dollar meagre broomstick size saplings. I kept to the margins of the space with an eye to capturing as much sunlight as possible, in my case, along the northern edge against a tall face and a neighbor who preferred pavement over mowing. The holes were roughly a yard across and 2 feet deep. I mixed in peat moss, compost, bone meal, dolomite lime into the hole and sandy loam excavated onto a burlap bag and shoveled top soil back in. I molded a ring on the outside perimeter a few inches higher than the center with the mostly sandy under soil inclined to drain towards the sapling. I soaked the saplings in a re-purposed “Soy Sauce” five gallon bucket found behind a Chinese restaurant’s dumpster over-night. Once I had deluxe planting spaces, I liberally dusted the forlorn stick’s root end with rooting hormone. I planted the sapling with guide near the heap of soil on the burlap but soon left the illustration behind. Reverently and gently, I held the sapling and firmed up the soil just enough for the sapling to grow at the same ground level plain enough to see on the stem as at the nursery. To help restrain movement during windy days and stress new root systems, I drove 3 stakes securely into the outside edge of the planting hole, firmed down the soil around the sapling which began to look like a plant and tied stakes and sapling together with strips of burlap bag. I soaked the soil and managed to plant 9 trees over a weekend.

Paradise does appear in a day. However, the saplings soon had leaves and began to grow. The nursery sends saplings pruned to 3 or 4 branches. The first year these branches all leafed out and others sprouted as well. A late summer tropical storm blew done pole beans and branches off old trees in the neighborhood but the apricots were stalwart and withstood gales and heavy rain. A heavy mulch of hay kept erosion to a minimum.

Lots of snow and cold days were forgotten the next April when the small trees bloomed delicate white flowers just as the daffodils and grape hyacinths were bold enough to appear. There was virtually no fruit. However, the trees were obviously healthy and welcomed heavy mulches of wood chips when arborists dumped truckloads of chipped elm trees into the driveway. All compost guides warn wood chips are very slow to compost and it’s true. Equally true is that wood chips and if you’re lucky, chipped foliage as well, forms cohesive mats that bleach into pleasing colors in sunlight, are clean and quiet for gardener’s feet, their forgiving nature allows skunks and squirrels to dig holes with inpuny, and they form lovely humus during those times gardeners are hard at work elsewhere. I find wood chips are often free for the asking or found in heaps left after utilities workers or road maintence crews push back roadside tree growth.

Photo courtesy of Leonard Moorehead

I kept away from insecticides but did use nontoxic dormant oils to spray the fruit trees during the winter season. The oils smother insect eggs and spores over the seasons when the trees have no foliage. Inexpensive and easy to apply, none of the fruit trees have fallen victim to insects or disease. Their fast growth is pleasing, pruning more a matter of grooming, there are many illustrations to foster confidence. Soon, a neophyte learns to closely observe the habits of each plant and guide the apricot or other fruit tree towards open centers and evenly spaced branches. Sometimes, it takes courage to cut back annual growth measured in feet rather than inches.

During a snow storm I watched a Nature program which addressed the impact of mass applications of insecticides and pesticides in China and especially, the farmers need to respond to an almost complete absence of pollinating biota. Wind accounts for some pollination and widespread populations of species has offered many genetic variations. However, our industrialized application of slow degrading chemicals has no judgment, all perish except those adaptable life forms that survive ever stronger doses. Not so, our aquifers or soils which eventually carry toxins into our drinking supply or nearby waters and enter the chain of life long after a season’s outbreak of curly leaf mosaic. The farmers used small brushes to replace the absent bees and other insects’ role to transport pollen’s essential quota of genes between flowers to flower. An epiphany, I dug out a water color brush from an old paint set. Alone with my thoughts, often contemplative, I stood on a four foot ladder, brush in hand during fickle April weather and dusted pollen from one flower to another. Apricot flowers are not great masses of bloom, rather they are distinct and separate, each structure of the bloom clearly visible, stamen, pistol, anthers, a deep reddish purple center, golden pollen, delicate white petals which bloom for about 10 days. Although many insects thrive in my garden and I have never lost a species to infestation, I became a bee for a few days. It’s not tedious or boring, perhaps a gamble, maybe not. Virtually every bloom became fruit.

After four years, much growth and unmistakably, trees, the apricots return the modest time and energy given to them many times over. The nimble branches bend under the weight of ever heavier fruit. Behold the golden fruit that first enticed our ancestors thousands of years ago. A thunder storm or two and the natural drop of green fruit becomes a harvest, windfalls of just right fruit fall upon the old wood chip mulch or lawn clippings under the trees. Far from creating a shady desert beneath foliage, the apricots shelter hordes of muscari or grape hyacinths who thrive in the thick ever transforming wood chip mulch. Each spring they appear further and further away from the original planting in the deluxe planting hole. Spearmint colonizes rough mulch materials like no other, their cheerful fragrance and uplifting aroma overlooks the menthe family’s ability to pioneer through tough materials and create humus far faster than if pulled up and cast aside as far too independent. The apricots enjoy the company of mints and grape hyacinths, long after the muscari bloom, grow leaves, increase and multiply have apparently disappeared, their bulbs are prepared for next spring’s purple exuberance.

I compete with the squirrels for the apricot harvest. They can be heard gnawing on the small stone pits, the green and ripe fruit alike falling into the garden. I gather windfalls and invite friends to enjoy the lovely trees. We harvest in happy comradery. Often the ripe fruit drops from the branch and is eaten, honey sweet, juicy and wonderfully sun warm on the spot. One cannot predict a crop like the tides. However, the trio of early, mid and late trees forms a steady flood of fruit from a small number of trees, now essential elements in the old vacant lot. I can some for winter days, suffer much advice on jam making, ignorance prevails where education has not grown, it is possible to fail at jam making, but however kept, canned, frozen, or as jams, apricots are fine for urban gardeners. Future gardeners will thank you, your friends and family show ever more love, and unholy but a fact of life, the squirrels will enjoy your company. Like some relatives, we cannot pick one another, but we maintain civility. Don’t wait until adulthood and passion persuades you to try a new fruit. Apricots are perfect for tightly spaced urban gardens. They pay for themselves in one harvest and please each hot July, whether in hand, with ice cream, or preserved for off season delight. Is your garden still a fantasy, a dream to come true? Eden is within reach, plant apricots the first possible spring.

Leonard Moorehead is a life-long gardener. He practices organic-bio/dynamic gardening techniques in a side lot surrounded by city neighborhoods in Providence RI. His adventures in composting, wood chips, manure, seaweed, hay and enormous amounts of leaves are minor distractions to the joy of cultivating the soil with flowers, herbs, vegetables, berries, and dwarf fruit trees.