Blackberries

This is blackberry season.  I have some named thornless cultivar bushes that have never really taken off (Navajos and Ouachitas).  Their berries are decent, but I planted them on a bank that I think had been very compacted... I remember when I first planted them it was like cutting clay for making pots.  So they haven't spread out into the 30' long thicket along the bank that I envisaged.  They put out one or two canes per year, and my harvest has remained small.  Interestingly, the deer seem to leave them alone.  I don't seem to have any predation when the berries ripen.  I do occasionally find stink bugs on them, and biting into a stink bug-fouled berry is not a good experience. :-(

Wild blackberries, in my experience, are a chancy thing.  Some produce very good berries, I've learned.  The ones in the photo at right are growing right along the road not far from my house.  I've been picking a few each day for a couple of weeks; nobody else seems interested in them.  The berries are varied in size but some are reasonably large.  They're sweet with a bit of a bitter aftertaste.  Ones growing in a corner of my garden--I let them go last year to see how they would turn out--aren't so good.  Ditto a small collection of canes that sprouted up near the corner of my garage last year.  This year they are producing berries that are small and mostly bitter.

I'm thinking I'd like to get cuttings off of some of the roadside canes.  There are plenty of first-year canes available.  As you probably know, blackberries are biennial--this year's new sprouts produce flowers and berries next year, then they shut down.  So if one sprouts somewhere, it takes over a year to find out if it'll be any good.

And the thorns...I've been stuck multiple times in the last couple of weeks.  Tonight I was pulling berries from another thicket on my property along the woods and a six-foot first-year cane snagged on the back of my shirt.  That was not so good.  I couldn't see it and couldn't get it off me for a minute.  I think I damaged it in the process, alas--that collection of bushes is also producing berries worth eating.

What do I do with them?  So far I just eat them fresh.  I tried canning some store-bought ones one year in syrup, and that was okay but not great.  I don't like dehydrating them.  In my limited repertoire, that leaves freezing or making preserves as the remaining alternatives.  So far I haven't done either.

Katydids

Another loud summer insect is just starting to emerge:  katydids.  They are also covered in Songsofinsects.com.  I'm talking about true katydids, although there are others in north GA--in August I hear what I think are red-headed meadow katydids singing mid-afternoon in the tall grass at the place I go running.  The nocturnal katydids are raucous and will become much more numerous in the coming weeks.  I heard one of the first this morning when walking the dog (at 5 am).  Their numbers will dwindle throughout the late summer and into the fall, but I often hear solitary ones some nights all the way up until a few days before Thanksgiving when it's warm enough.

These bugs are not particularly cool.  But they fill the night with sound, and they're starting to make their presence known.

Cicada Time

Ok, so this is a little random.  One of the cool summer insects we have in Georgia is cicadas. Probably almost every part of the country has at least one variety.  While nowhere near as cool as fireflies, they're pretty fun.  They have just started to emerge in the last couple of weeks, and now can be heard singing throughout the day (different species sing at different times, and they pretty much shut up after dusk when other loud insects come to the fore).

As probably everyone knows, they spend most of their lives underground, then emerge at dusk one evening once they've grown enough and the soil has warmed.  They climb a convenient vertical surface, split their skin, and pop out as an adult.  By dawn, their wings have unfurled and dried, and they fly off, to spend a short time in the trees looking for a mate.

We don't have the periodical cicadas where I am, but we have a number of varieties that are present every year.  Cicada songs can be heard at Songsofinsects.com (I have no affiliation with them, but if you like the page I hope you buy their book--I did).  According to the individual species pages, there are several varieties that should be here, and I think I've heard a lot of them (Hieroglyphic, Swamp, Scissor-Grinder, and Northeast Dusk-Singing for sure [the name of the latter suggests they shouldn't be here, but their range does extend this far south]).

So this evening while I was out moving a soaker hose (drought is my constant companion), I saw this individual heading for my apricot tree.  I have no idea what kind it is, and I'm not going to stay up as late as I would have to tonight to see it emerge.  I did that once when I was in junior high school, but work intrudes now--as do mosquitoes.

There are a few downsides to life here in the summer (every season has pluses and minuses)--so it's important to enjoy the nice things.

Edited to add:  I guess I wouldn't have had to wait long, after all.  I went out to shut the soaker hose down and looked for the cicada--it was getting close to dark (at the end of  'civil twilight') and was about 45 minutes after the above picture was taken.  The cicada had reached its final spot and was already most of the way out of its shell.  I snapped this, then left it alone to finish its emergence.

Protecting Young Trees from Deer

This is certainly not my idea, but works well: a circle of welded wire fencing, with one to three t-posts, will keep deer away from young trees.  As noted in my other post on deer, most protective measures have strengths and weaknesses, except for failures, which only have weaknesses.  The balance on this one is pretty decent: it helps.

The first time I saw this in action was at the Shiloh battlefield.  One of the sites there is the Peach Orchard, where Confederates attacked a Union line, finally breaking through.  At the time I was there, the field had just been planted with new peach trees.  Apparently there are deer at Shiloh.

I decided to try this myself, because I had planted a couple of things the deer had ravaged when young.  It was pretty depressing when I thought about the expense and hassle involved in planting new trees using this as a barrier.  I didn't protect the two peaches and apricot when I first planted them; for a couple of years the deer pressure was pretty light. Ditto the blueberry bushes--the deer very seldom bother them, even when they have a ripe crop.  With trees, however, all that I have planted in the last few years have gone into a circle of welded wire (or, in a few cases, some chicken wire).  Usually I use five-foot welded wire, but I have also used five-foot chicken wire and four-foot welded wire (this latter seems too short, except for very young trees).  I originally used three t-posts but now use two.  Some have suggested one would work, but the extra post seems to improve the stability and rigidity of the system.

Here's a picture of the first trees I used this tactic with, shortly after I planted them (two apples).  Those original posts were short u-posts; I've since standardized to t-posts since they're more versatile.  Nothing inside the wire has been bitten, but as the plants grow and stick branches through the wire, they tend to get nipped off.

That's the greatest problem with this approach: The trees eventually outgrow their enclosure.  At some point they have to be able to stand on their own without protection; in the background you can see the two peach trees and the apricot--all completely open to deer (who eat the ends of branches and help themselves to peaches in season, as well).  But for relatively young trees that are increasing in size, it's nice to keep the protection around them awhile longer.  So you have to either get more wire, moving the circle out, or do something else.

Another drawback:  it's hard to do things inside the circles.  I have adapted an approach of hooking the circle shut at the top and bottom, which is secure enough against the deer but which still allows relatively easy access, but it's still a hassle.  This is one of the disadvantages identified by Lee Reich, who mentions this approach as a deer defense in one of his books.

This can also be done without too much trouble for temporary protection.  I have a lilac bush that blooms faithfully every year (it's a traditional lilac, Syringa vulgaris, not a Miss Kim, or S. patula, which is more commonly recommended for the South [though I have a couple of those, too].  One year some miscreant deer browsed through the yard just as the purple buds on my lilac were set to open, and snipped off all of them in one night.  This was when the bush was relatively small, so there were only a few, but once was enough.  In subsequent years, I've thrown a quick five-foot-high chickenwire barrier around it just before the buds are visible, and take it down after bloom (in this case, I still use three posts because the chicken wire is relatively flexible and the bush is getting fairly large).  This is in my side yard and visible from the street, so it's not necessarily the most attractive for the neighbors, but it does protect the plant.  As you can see, the grass grows up inside the circle, but this one is temporary, so not a big deal.  I just cut it back once I pull the fencing.  It's only up for a month or less.  I pull out and re-drive the t-posts every year.  I have been doing this for three or four years at this point.

So that's one thing to do to defeat deer.  My welded wire doesn't do such a good job against rabbits--I have seen them sitting inside the fence rings on rare occasion--but they haven't caused much or any damage.  You can use hunks of septic tank drain piping to protect the trunks, and I have a few trees that I have done that with.  But this approach will work for white tails.

Update:  If you have deer pressure and decide you need to do this, do it.  Don't forget that deer damage trees in other ways, too. Even trees that may not be first choice for browsing can be taken out in one night (at least in the fall when bucks are rubbing the velvet off their antlers).

Deer

Deer are a problem.  For the upcoming 2015-2016 hunting season, the limit will be 12, which indicates how ubiquitous they are.  Few hunters fill their deer harvest, and some of the mountain counties have fairly severe restrictions.  Even so--they're plentiful.  They are definitely copious in my neighborhood.  Over the years I have lived here, there has been less deer pressure some years than there is currently.  I've used a variety of deer mitigation strategies, each of which has weaknesses, and most of which have strengths.  Some have been complete flops.

This is the biggest failure.  It's a little hard to see in the picture, but this is my annual garden.  There's an area that is fenced with three-foot-high chicken wire (to deter rabbits, which it does fairly successfully). The chicken wire is held up by the now-oxidized pale green posts.  For a few years, I had no deer trouble, even though three feet is obviously too short to be a deer barrier.  Then last summer they turned rapacious on me, stripping my okra and cucumbers (which were ascending the welded wire trellises) in one night.  So I got some mylar bird tape and mason twine, pounded in some seven-foot t-posts, and strung the pink lines you see.  I hung mylar streamers from the twine, and thought that might deter the deer.

As you can see, the deer soon realized there was an area they could slither through and still get to the salad bar.  It worked for maybe a week.  When I saw where they were entering, I strung more lines of twine to create a better barrier, but it did not work.   They left the corn alone for the most part, and didn't hit the tomatoes too hard, but everything else was a complete write-off.

The mylar tape is marketed to deter birds, and it might have done a good job of that--I put some in the tops of my blueberry bushes and had less bird action there.  But the deer weren't fooled or impressed.

Later in the summer they crashed through the twine, breaking some strands.  So they had no respect for it whatsoever.  You can also see what they thought of my barrier and my trail camera in this photo:

I've tried other things to deter deer that have been more successful.  More on those later.

Apricots-Growing and Processing

This can be pretty short and sweet: I've largely failed with apricots here.  I planted a semi-dwarf (allegedly) Goldcot apricot tree in early 2000, the same time I planted the two dwarf peach trees that have performed well.  In that entire time, I've gotten this, plus maybe one or two per year on average:

This was the harvest in 2011; it was a couple of pounds at the most (I didn't weigh it).  Other than this one year, I've had a lot of fruit set most of the time; they have grown to a size ranging from that of a blueberry to the size of the first joint of my thumb (sometimes developing the beginnings of a red blush), then while still green they fall off.

It doesn't seem to be a pollination issue: the tree is supposed to be self-fertile and most years the developing apricots grow more than I'd expect if they were infertile.  I've seen peaches that don't get pollinated, and they stay tiny.

It's also not a problem with late frosts.  North GA has plenty of those.  Every year I hold my breath once the blueberries and peaches bloom, and in a few years--like this one--all or most of the crop is wiped out.  That doesn't normally happen with the apricots (or peaches or blueberries), though.

It is undeniably an attractive tree.  There are plenty of flowering "fruit" trees that produce essentially no fruit (e.g., Yoshino cherry, Bradford pear), so it has some value as an ornamental.  That is the one thing that has saved it.

Plus, each year it holds forth the promise of a decent harvest.  Back in 2011, I thought that was the start of something good.  The next year: nothing...and nothing in 2013 or 2014, either.

I give the apricot the same care as I give the peaches: fungicide before, during, and after bloom, then Surround.  All to no avail.  I've seen brown rot on an apricot once or twice.  Does this mean it is less susceptible?  Not necessarily: what this means is that for one or two apricots in a typical year that get to the point that they turn orange, I've seen one or two with brown rot over the whole time I have had it.

Btw, I know the picture at the right suggests poor pruning for fruit production--there are too many upright branches.  However, the tree itself is very airy and the foliage isn't dense at all.

Ah, well.  I don't know that I'm going to try apricots again.  Early bloom / late frost is what allegedly dooms them most often, but there are other problems--and it might just be that this one tree is genetically flawed.  However, it's worth noting that as far as I know, there is no commercial apricot production here.  There are plenty of peach orchards (the big ones are down around Macon, but there are also smaller ones in north GA).

I do like apricots, however.  I buy them in the store--the season is pretty short--and can them.  I typically cut them into quarters, dip them in an ascorbic acid solution to deter browning, and put them into jars with a fairly light syrup (last time I used a 1:3 mixture of sugar/water; I think I have also used 1:2).  See:

Syrups for Canning (NCHFP)

So my mix is somewhere between light and medium...the NCHFP site suggests using heavy for apricots but I like the lighter preparation (though one person I offered some to recently thought they were too sour, so maybe my tastes are a little weird).

There's nothing special about canning apricots, with one caveat: The BBB says something like 2-2.5 lb. per quart jar, and the NCHFP splits the difference and says 2.25 lb. per quart.  I don't know how to do that.  I raw pack (almost always, unless doing something like preserves that require hot pack), but even so, the last time I did this, I cut up about 14 lb. and got 9 quarts.  I packed the jars pretty tightly, fitting the apricots in the jars together carefully.  I used 9 quarts of water (with 3 of sugar) as the syrup, so used about 1 cup per quart.  As you can see, my jars are decently filled, even after processing.  I'm not going to worry about it, but this happens a lot--I often am not able to get as much into jars as expected.

Other ways to process apricots include preserves (which I've never done) and dehydrating (which I tried once and didn't like).  So I just can them.

Peach Butter

One of the ways to deal with a rush of peaches is to make peach butter.  I have only done this a couple of summers, when I had a gross surplus.  Peach butter yields about half as much finished product (in terms of volume) as making peach preserves.  According to my records, I got about 4.5 pints out of 10 lb. of unprocessed peaches (the half pints I just put in the refrigerator and used right away).  I did several batches the one summer I got over 100 lb. off my trees (as well as dried some, made preservers with some, canned some sliced, froze some for pies, pickled some... it was a good problem to have).

With canning I'm not innovative--I just follow recipes out there from trusted sources, such as the Ball Blue Book (BBB), the National Center for Home Food Preservation (NCHFP):

National Center for Home Food Preservation

Or PickYourOwn.org,

Pickyourown.org

The latter mostly replicates the NCHFP, but has a few additional recipes.  The BBB does not list cinnamon, while PickYourOwn does.  I've made it both ways (though I haven't used the other spices mentioned); each recipe has strengths. One friend specifically requested no cinnamon because that's the way her mother made it.  I use less than amount of sugar indicated in the BBB, which calls for 1 cup per pound of peaches (vs. almost 2 cups per pound with peach preserves, so peach butter has about half as much sugar). I only use about 4 cups of sugar for the 10 lb. load.  Note, however, that my yield of finished product is much lower.  According to the BBB, my 10 lb. of peaches should have yielded about 9-10 pints.  That just hasn't happened for me any of the times I have made it.  Maybe I cook it down too much.  I like my finished product nonetheless. When I add cinnamon, I add up to 1/2 tablespoon per cup of sugar--in other words, maybe 4 tablespoons for a full batch.  This is the ratio in the PickYourOwn recipe.  One more thing about the sugar:  I have usually used mostly Belle of Georgia peaches for the butter, and it's a very sweet peach.  That might matter.

The first step in the BBB is to wash, blanch, peel, and pit the peaches.  I detest peeling peaches, so avoid that step.  I simply cut them into pieces, pit them, and toss them straight into the food mill (as it turns out, the one picture I have of this process was mostly the yellow cling peaches, not Belle of Georgia).






If the peaches are fully ripe and soft, you can mill them raw...it takes a little bit of work, but is not bad. Then again, in my laziness maybe I'm creating extra work for myself.  Also, maybe a lot of fruit sticks to the skins (which don't mill) and that's part of why I get a lower yield.  At any rate, it works for me.  The stuff that drains out of the food mill will be peach slurry with a thin consistency.  I fill the crock pot (10 lb. comes close to doing that) and heat it on medium initially, then drop it to low for a while--overnight. I add the sugar and cinnamon (if used) once it's in the pot.

I cook it down until I like the consistency.  Generally it takes about 18 hours.  As you can see, I've adopted the butter knife trick mentioned on the PickYourOwn page to hold the lid off the rim of the pot so the water can evaporate.

Eventually, the flavor seems to deteriorate a little and it heads towards having a scorched taste.  So one can only push it so far.  My peach butter is fairly thin as a finished product, but refrigerating it makes it thick enough (comparable to apple butter you might buy in the store).

Once it cooks down to the right consistency, simply ladle it into the jars and process in a boiling water bath canner for about 10 minutes (15 min where I live, over 1000' elevation in the Piedmont).

Note that the BBB does not call for added lemon juice to boost the acidity, as is indicated for the more-heavily sugared preserves (I assume the lemon juice is needed for the latter because all of the sugar raises the pH of the peaches to the point that they can't be canned in boiling water).

Last year my peach harvest was down so I just did preserves.  Since I will be buying any peaches I do anything with this year--due to the late freeze--I might make more peach butter.

I've given jars of this to a number of people and all have complimented it--meaning they are either very polite or it's reasonably good. 

Growing Peaches in the Peach State

I might as well start off first with one of the hardest things I've dealt with.  Getting a successful crop of peaches in the Southeast is tough.  Georgia is called the Peach State (many in South Carolina sneer at that; they produce more peaches there).  However, peaches are not a plant-and-harvest crop here, or at least, I have not found them to be.  I've had to deal with two things that work against getting a successful harvest: brown rot and plum curculio.

Brown rot is a plant disease that can infect peaches at or immediately after bloom, or later in the growing season.  As peaches ripen toward the end--when they become somewhat soft and smell peachy--they are particularly susceptible to brown rot infestation.

These are peaches I pulled off in a prior year because of brown rot.  Most years I lose about half my crop to it.  To mitigate brown rot damage, I have implemented several steps:

I mulch under my trees with cypress chips, and rake them up each winter in the dormant season and replace them.  This also rakes up fallen peaches from the prior season.  Brown rot can overwinter in twig and branch cankers, mummified peaches, and fallen peaches.

I spray fungicides.  I use a lot of products.  Daconil can be sprayed in the dormant season and up through full bloom--it's not considered organic.  Lime sulfur and copper sprays can be used, as well, as can captan (these latter ones are considered to be organic).  It's important to engage in dormant season spraying, at bud swell, first pink, full bloom, and post-bloom--until harvest.  Commercial orchards in this part of the country do 40 sprayings a year for plant diseases and insect pests.  After petal fall, I usually use captan exclusively.  It's a wettable powder.  It's not a panacea--the sad spectacle above happened when I was spraying captan frequently--but it does produce some control of the disease pressure.

I also harvest my peaches when not quite fully ripe and let them ripen indoors.  That seems to reduce the losses to brown rot dramatically.

This was my dining room table a couple of years ago with picked peaches finishing up.  Once brought indoors, I do occasionally lose peaches to brown rot, but it's much less of a problem.

As the peaches are starting to ripen, it's very important to scan the trees daily and pull off peaches starting to get brown rot.  A peach can be completely consumed in just a couple of days and while the brown rot is destroying that one peach, it will be throwing off thousands of spores that can infect adjacent peaches.  Twigs can also become infected and die; it took me a couple of years to figure this out, but I noticed that the leaves next to brown-rotted peaches would turn yellow.  These doomed twigs need to be pruned out or they'll serve as reservoirs for future infection.

Controlling insect damage is something that I have belatedly realized is important in controlling brown rot, too.  An insect bite on a peach that breaks the skin seems to open it up to injury.  I don't have a picture of this for you, but I frequently find that if brown rot is just starting on a peach, at the center of the lesion will be a hole bitten in the peach by some insect--it's not just plum curculios that victimize peaches.

Elberta is a variety that is somewhat brown rot resistant (table of varieties and their resistance can be found here: Varieties List-University of West Virginia ).  Another thing that I think would help is planting early varieties (this would be good for both insect damage and brown rot).  My two varieties at the house here are Belle of Georgia and some unknown early cling peach (it was supposed to be Elberta, but it ripens in mid-June and almost every time the pit has to be cut out; freestone it most definitely is not).  I love Belle of Georgia, but it's highly susceptible to brown rot--maybe that's not so bad for California, but it's not good here.  I get a crop out of my BG tree almost every year, but I lose a lot of it to disease.  The problems with early varieties are that 1) they're clingstone in most cases and 2) they're less available.

Next up:  plum curculio.  This nasty little bug attacks stone fruits most of all (as the name suggests), but it also goes after apples and pears.  It's a small snout-nosed beetle, and the female carves c-shaped flaps in the skin of developing peaches, then lays eggs.  The larvae burrow down to the pit and feed.  Curclio can be defeated a couple of ways:  barriers and insecticides.

Commercial orchards generally spray imidan, which is a pesticide not available in the small-scale retail market.  Malathion or Sevin work, as well--they just have to be applied frequently at the right times.

Most people I talk to don't want to spray insecticides.  That leaves barriers, and the only viable one I know of is Surround--a kaolin clay powder that can be mixed with water, then sprayed on the trees.  I use 1 cup per gallon (more clogs my sprayer), and at least three coats need to be put on to have a deterrent effect.  The goal is to make it so the curculio don't recognize a host tree when they land on it.  Reapplication is necessary after a heavy rain.

This sounds like a major pain, and it is--but a couple of coats can be applied in one day, then another one the next day.  I have gotten pretty good control with Surround--I generally have attack rates of about 5-20% with Surround vs. as high as 80% without it. One problem with Surround:  I sometimes spray just the developing fruit, and other times spray the foliage, too.  Plants can allegedly photosynthesize even with the clay on their leaves.  Belle of Georgia does not like Surround.  Whenever I have sprayed the foliage, I've soon gotten a lot of leaves turning yellow and dropping off.  So with BG I target just the fruit.

When to spray:  Basically, you have to have control in place before the wretches start laying eggs.  You can use degree days:

NC State Degree Day Model

It sounds complex but is not bad.  Take the second day when the temperature is over 70 and use that as your start date, then calculate degree days (DD) using a 50-degree basis.  The curculio are on the move from 50 to 400 DD and are laying between 100 and 700 DD; a second generation goes to work after 1100 DD.  Last year in my area, my start date was 3/31 (which was somewhat late) and I hit 728 DD on 5/26, at which point I suspended further Surround spraying.  You can calculate DD manually, or use calculators available online:

Pioneer GDU Calculator

Bizee Degree Days Calculator

The Pioneer calculator doesn't have a basis temp, but 50 is usually used for corn, too, so it should work ok. The Bizee calculator can do heating or cooling with a user-set basis temp and outputs a CSV file. Many states have weather station networks that have DD calculators, also.  In Georgia:

Georgia Automated Environmental Monitoring Network

What this all shows is that you need to start spraying very soon after petal fall.  My peaches are usually in bloom anytime between the first and third weeks of March.  Soon thereafter they need a barrier to deter curculio.

Surround can be bought online--a few places sell small bags; Seven Springs Farm has a decent price for 25 lb.  I got a single bag a few years ago and still have half of it.

Seven Springs Farm-Surround

Now, you might be able to grow peaches with no spraying whatsoever.  In California or the Desert Southwest, this might even be the norm. There are no curculio out there, but they do have coddling moth to contend with in some places (which have a similar impact). The low humidity mitigates against diseases. It can work even in the Southeast--I have a friend here in the Atlanta area with a tree in her front yard who doesn't do any spraying, and she still gets peaches.  With both of these pests, however, prevention is better than treatment.  I got some peaches my first couple of years with no spraying, too, then the curculio found me and brown rot came soon after.  Once either gets established in your orchard--even if it's only two trees--you can probably forget about getting a viable harvest with no spraying in future years.  It's probably best to start a good control program that will prevent outbreaks of either problem.

Another plant disease that hits peaches is bacterial spot; My BG got that one year but the peaches were still edible.  It's mostly cosmetic, but does make the skin of the peaches somewhat tough.

University Extension pages have a wealth of information about successful peach growing.  For example:

University of West Virginia

Peaches can be grown successfully--it's just a lot of work.  My first two trees--mentioned above--are on dwarf rootstock and I have gotten as much as 130 lb. off of the two combined.  70-100 lb. has happened several times.  This year: zero... a late frost after bloom wiped out the crop :-(  That has only happened a few times in the 15 years I've been growing them.

The background photo on this blog is from my BG tree last year. It can be done and it's satisfying to bring in a successful crop.  Then you just have to figure out what to do with all the peaches.  That will be the subject of future posts.

I've  now gotten another couple of trees that are standards; they're late-ripening freestones (Bounty and Contender).  They haven't started producing yet.  I'm thinking I should hunt up some early clingstones...

Welcome

Welcome!  As you can see, there's nothing here.  Eventually there will be; I'm hoping to use this to detail some of the things I've learned over the last few years in the kitchen and garden.  I don't make any representation that what I'll post here is the best way to do something or that it's even correct--in some cases it will be quite the opposite.  However, I hope that if you come across this site when searching for ways to get something done, what you find here will be useful.