Chop Off Their Heads, and the Herbs Will Grow! from Morris Peplo (amateur gardener, jai alai enthusiast, hang glider pilot, and landscape artist focusing on exotic fungi)
Basil Chopping
Basil is an excellent herb to grow in the summertime, but if your plants are growing straight up without forming a broad base, you should consider decapitating them. Pruning is a kinder term, but this is a cooking and cinema site that reviews horror films, and I thought head-chopping was more characteristic of the site’s contents.
It’s best to lop off the heads when the plant is only a few months old, but you can prune basil at any time. If you live in the south, your basil may continue to produce leaves until October. In North Carolina, we usually get the first freeze around Halloween, and the herb won’t survive too many nights that dip below 43°F.
Some gardeners are hesitant to prune plants like herbs or vegetables and would rather have nature run its course. There’s nothing wrong with that method if you like small harvests, but several edible plants like peppers and herbs will produce more if you crop off the lanky stems.
Tree Stunting
On the subject of plant mutilation, I recommend decapitating fruit trees that may be too large for your yard. Some apple varieties can grow 17-20 ft. high and around 6 ft. wide. That’s fine if you have plenty of space in your yard and enjoy picking fruit with a ladder.
For backyards and community gardens, you don’t need to simulate an orchard layout to grow healthy fruit trees. I have Fuji and honey crisp apple trees in my backyard that were cropped before being planted.
My backyard is pretty small, but I have stunted apple trees, a fig tree and paw-paw tree on espalier lines, and seven blueberry bushes. The apple trees look more like shrubs or miniature trees that a Hobbit would be proud to own.
Both of the trees were over six feet tall and 18 months old. I could barely cram them in my Honda Civic for the ride home, and I remember the tip of the Fuji poking into my AC vent on my dashboard.
Yes, I realize that a wise man would chop the trees before shoving them in a compact car, but I like driving with branches scraping the back of my head. I really feel closer to nature.
It was like the trees and I had become one being. No, that’s rubbish. I’m lazy, and I appreciate challenges and suffering. I hope no one left the site when I started sounding like a weirdo, but the longhair music playing in the background was affecting my judgment…
I replaced the love tunes with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. It fits for this post since some of Zappa’s work focuses on food. His early masterpiece, “Call Any Vegetable,” is an excellent selection when you’re shucking corn with your loved ones, peeling spuds, extracting pine nuts, or thrashing wheat.
If you’re making homemade snow cones with the family, “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” is a good choice (and a valuable lesson for young children), and when you’re butchering a pig, cow, chicken, or squirrel, I think “Uncle Meat” is an ideal background song.
Back to Dismembering Fruit Trees
If you buy a fruit tree that’s under two years old, you’ll need to remove ¾ of the trunk. It seems extreme, but the pathetic, nubby, stick in the ground will eventually develop into a miniature tree. Your cropped tree should be about eighteen inches tall.
When you plant the runt, you should also trim the roots. If the root ball is bound in burlap, cut it off. The burlap can hinder the root’s growth. You want the roots to grow freely, but by trimming the roots, you can limit the space that the roots will occupy when the tree is more mature.
You might have to wait for two weeks or more before you see any growth on your Charlie Brown Christmas stick. My trees began to form branches after sixteen days, and it is agonizing to wonder before the tree grows if you made a bad decision.
If you’re patient, the sticks will turn into healthy trees. Fruit trees are not instant gratification plants. My apple trees have another year before they’ll produce fruit, and my paw-paw (a fruit tree native to North Carolina) will not produce for eight or nine more years.
However, my blueberry bushes produced edible berries after two years, and if you want a shrub that grows and flowers quickly, blueberry bushes may be for you. I had a massive harvest from my blueberries this summer.
My family and friends were happy to get baked goods, and I managed to feed a family of comical mockingbirds also.
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