Category: Garden

In my community garden this seems to be the standard design for a bean support structure.  I haven’t really seen them before, so it’s probably not a really wide spread thing, and a lot of people in my garden are from other countries so this may not even be a Dutch design per se.

In my case, it’s 10 poles on each side intersecting at the top and tied to a horizontal pole.  In addition, on both sides are diagonal poles for extra support.  Wind is a real issue here, and this is clearly intended to stand up to a lot of it.  I see some people using single poles, but otherwise everyone else uses this design.

I didn’t have any pole beans last year in the garden, so this is my first year trying this.  Does anyone else use this design, or something similar?

Does anyone have any idea what might be wrong with the apple tree on the right in the picture above?  I’m sorry because of the background it’s hard to see, but it looks like it’s almost dead.

Here’s a close up of one of the branches.  You can see the leaves have almost completely turned brown.

Below is a close up of the smaller apple tree on the left, and while it looks a lot healthier, perhaps it has an infection of some sort?  Small brown spots and slightly withering leaves?  Maybe it’s the same thing that is causing the problem with the almost dead looking tree?

The smaller, healthier looking tree on the left is the same tree I posted about several days ago that has the canker infection.

Here’s a little more information about the tree on the right:

Last year it produced apples, but after they were about 2cm in diameter they turned brown and fell off the tree.  This year it didn’t set any fruit, but it did bloom.

I plan to remove the tree anyway, because it’s too close to the tree next to it (about 1m away) and it’s in the wrong part of the garden.  Mostly I’m interested in understanding what’s happening.  I’m pretty sure it’s the only pollinator available for the tree on the left, so I can’t remove it until I replace it with another tree of the same flowering period, or I won’t get any apples on the remaining tree.

The ground in this part of the garden is very poor and on the wet side, and the previous gardener was keeping these fruit trees alive with chemical fertilizer which I’ve stopped using.  I did put quite a bit of compost around these trees this year.  The previous gardener never pruned his trees, but I have been pruning them for the last 2 years since I’ve had this garden.  I’ve planted some nitrogen fixing trees nearby, but they are too young and haven’t had a chance to fix any nitrogen yet.  I also removed a nearby tree over the winter, so this tree has a little more space than it had last year.

The pH in my garden is mostly 6-6.5, and I did give these trees a few handfulls of lime this spring.  While I don’t know exactly what the pH is here, it’s probably close enough to being right for apple trees.

Frank just sent me some pictures of canker on his apple trees.

Canker is a fungal infection that often infects apple trees and I think other fruit trees as well.  I did a post on this a few days ago.  What I understand is the infection tends to enter the tree through open wounds, as well as the scars left behind when leaves come off the tree in the fall.

First Frank gives three examples of canker at progressively worse stages on different trees:

This last picture is what Frank uses as an example here to show how he treats it, and he pointed out that this is not really that bad.  The yellow-green stuff you see in the picture is lichen and unrelated to the canker infection.

In a comment on my previous post, Frank mentioned you should never cut more than half way through a branch or the tree trunk.

Here I’ve already started to clean up the wound, use a sharp knife, a chisel, drawknife, or whatever you like to work with, as long as it’s sharp.

In the next picture, the wound has been cleaned up, the brown patch in the middle is actually the ‘true’ apple wood, the white wood surrounding it is ‘spint’, the new wood that hasn’t turned into real wood already.

Here the wood has been treated with the tree paste, obviously something is wrong with it, this should give a smooth result (I suspect the tree paste has been frozen this winter), instead of the sort of bubbly aspect it gives now. This is a method I learned over ten years ago, nowadays many tree pastes are based not on a sealing aspect, but on a breathing aspect, and are mostly oil-based. These new products are indeed better, but I don’t know if in this specific case the oil-based pastes would work as good as the older-style ones.

It’s interesting Frank mentioning the changing composition of tree paste.  Since making my last post I’ve been reading a little bit about this on the Internet.  It seems the older tree pastes were mostly asphalt or latex like materials, but many people concluded they were not only on the toxic side but trees were able to heal their wounds faster without them. I remember using these kinds of pastes in my family when I was a child.

This seems to go along with Søren’s suggestion in my last post that I could also just leave the canker alone and let it kill the tree slowly.  If the canker infection enters the tree through open wounds, and you conclude it’s best not to use tree paste, than I could also see why you wouldn’t want to create a wound by cutting a spot of canker away.  Perhaps this is also what Frank was referring to when he mentioned the older sealing style tree pastes might work better in this case.

I recently read a recipe for home made organic tree paste made with equal parts of sand, clay and manure (one place suggested this should be composted first).  This will clearly wash away, and need to be reapplied after rain.

I am completely undecided as to what to do.  Does anyone else have any experiences or suggestions?