Sanhedrin Nursery – Garden Blog

• Holiday Amaryllis are easy to bring into bloom and they make lovely gifts.

• Fragrant daphne is an early-blooming shrub that will delight you with its strongly scented blooms each spring. Plant it in well-drained soil.

• Primroses and pansies will add color to your flower beds and containers all winter.

• Feed the birds this winter and enjoy the pleasure of their company. Bird feeders come in many styles and make wonderful gifts.

• Dogwood trees, flowering magnolias (or tulip trees), and Japanese maples are some of the balled and burlapped items you will find available now.

Spruce Up for Christmas

The holiday season is here and, for many of us, it’s time to choose a Christmas tree to be the center of light and warmth throughout the season. A living Christmas tree adds a special feeling to the Christmas season, and watching it grow throughout the year will bring you lots of pleasure.

Spruce trees are the most popular living Christmas trees. They are slow-growing and will live for several years in a container before they need to be planted in the ground.

Colorado spruce, Picea pungens, are the most popular. These sturdy, symmetrical evergreen trees are usually grown from seed, so they vary in color from green to blue green. Only a few turn out to be a steely blue. These are called Colorado Blue Spruce and command a higher price than their green brothers.

Allow plenty of room for this tree to spread out. Plant it at least 15 feet from a building, fences or walkways. It should never be controlled by pruning. Colorado spruce can be used in lawns, as an accent plant in large spaces or as a background tree with contrasting foliage color. They will grow in any type of soil but need good drainage.

A number of varieties are now propagated that have pronounced silver-blue needles. ‘Baby Blue Eyes’ is a slow-growing dwarf tree reaching 15 feet tall by 10 feet wide at maturity. It has light blue needles and a dense growth habit. ‘Fastigiata’ is unique in the spruce world. It has a tight, columnar shape, and intense blue color and grows to 20 feet tall by only 6 feet wide.

Dwarf Alberta spruce, Picea glauca ‘Conica’, is a compact, pyramidal tree growing six to ten feet tall at maturity. It has short, fine needles that are soft to touch, and bright green foliage that is attractive year-round. It is a good container plant and can be used as a Christmas tree for many years.

Alberta spruces are very hardy to cold but need protection from hot drying winds and from strong reflected sunlight, which will burn the foliage.

True Cedar trees are silvery blue in color. Deodar Cedars are soft and pendulous when young, and grow to be large graceful landscape trees. Atlas Cedars are more stiff with very blue needles. They are pyramidal in youth but more broad and picturesque when mature. Horstmann Blue Atlas Cedar is a semi-dwarf tree with densely-spaced icy-blue needles and an irregular outline. It is slow-growing and compact reaching 8 feet in 10 years.

A living Christmas tree should be placed in a well-lighted room for not more than two weeks. Water it regularly using ice cubes or cold water. Place it away from heater vents and never let it dry out. Miniature lights may be used.

Start a living tree tradition this year that you can enjoy for years to come.

• Stop peach leaf curl by spraying now with copper sulfate to help prevent this disfiguring disease from attacking your trees next spring.

• Choose living Christmas trees now. Most will be able to be kept in their containers and used for one or two more years as a Christmas tree.

• Clean up rose bushes by removing spent flowers and raking up old leaves, but wait until February for heavy pruning.

• Plant bright red amaryllis in pots now for Christmas gifts.

• Rake and destroy leaves from fruit trees that were diseased this year.

Bewitching Hazels

Native to Great Britain, hazels have been cultivated for their nutritious nuts and useful branches for centuries. Hazel branches were once used for fences and wattle-and-daub walls, but are used today mostly for basketry as they send up many slender limbs remarkable for their brown bark and their great flexibility. 

In Britain, hazels have been coppiced for centuries. This woodland management technique involves cutting all the branches down to the stump every 7 years. Cut limbs are used for firewood, walking-sticks, fishing-rods and rustic furniture. The new growth is vigorous and coppicing actually extends the life of the tree.

The subject of many superstitions, hazel twigs were said to protect houses from lightning, and forked branches are commonly chosen in Europe as dowsing rods to locate ground water. Grown as hedges, hazels make excellent cover for birds and small wildlife.

Hazels are most commonly seen as shrubs and will grow 15 to 20 feet tall at maturity. Also known as filberts and hazelnuts, these large shrubs can produce delicious nuts. They are long-lived and begin bearing in about four years, but it takes about seven years for filberts to become fully productive.

Filberts like sun, average summer watering and deep well-drained soil. Don’t let them dry out during our long, hot summers. Allow the nuts to drop to the ground and then gather them up. You must have two different varieties for good pollination. Check with your nurseryman for varieties that will do well together.

There are also some very decorative ornamental hazels. The best known is the Contorted Hazel, or Henry Lauder’s Walking Stick. Twisted and spiraling stems give this variety the common name of corkscrew hazel. In winter it is a striking addition to the garden and should be planted alone where its unusual form can be enjoyed. It grows slowly and gains character as it ages, eventually reaching a height and spread of about 10 feet.

Similar in habit is the purple-leaved corkscrew hazel called ‘Red Majestic.’ In spring bright red foliage emerges along with large purple catkins. As summer approaches and temperatures rise, the red deepens to a dark burgundy until, by late-summer, the mature foliage turns a beautiful dark green. The large crinkled round leaves turn an outstanding red in the fall. The twisted dark brown bark and brown branches are extremely showy and add significant winter interest. Shrubs grow to about 7 feet tall and wide. Cut branches are excellent in floral arrangements.

Hazels look lovely with bulbs, like crocus and daffodils, planted underneath them. Good companion shrubs include Forsythia and Witch hazel, with their yellow spring flowers, and red-leaved Japanese barberry or bright green Viburnum ‘Spring Bouquet’.

Enjoy these useful and ornamental shrubs on your property.

• Empty birdbaths and fountains and cover them for the winter, to prevent water freezing and cracking the bowls.

• Liquidambar and Japanese maple trees can’t be beat for fall color. Choose them now while you can see their bright colors.

• Transplant shrubs that need to be moved this month. It’s also a good time to transplant natives.

• Clean up dead foliage on perennials like peonies, daylilies and balloon flower and cut back dead flower stems on Echinacea, blanket flower and penstemon.

• Persimmons look beautiful hanging on the bare branches of trees. Consider planting one in your orchard.

Spreading Chestnut Trees

The cold, crisp days of fall are the time when spiny chestnut balls pop open to reveal the sweet nuts inside ready to be roasted or cooked and made into delightful stuffings and desserts. The trees which grow these delicious nuts are large and spreading and make fine shade trees, growing 40 to 50 feet tall and wide.

Only a century ago, the American chestnut was one of the most prized of the eastern hardwoods. Because its wood was durable and rot resistant, it was used for home siding and shingles, furniture and fencing, as well as other uses. The chestnut blight, which was introduced in 1904 from Asia, has virtually eliminated the American chestnut tree from its original range. Fortunately, this disease does not occur west of the Rocky Mountains.

Four species of chestnuts have been grown in the West: European, American, Chinese and Japanese chestnuts. There are also hybrids which do very well here. One of them is named ‘Colossal’ for the extra large nuts it bears which average 16 nuts per pound. They are sweet and easy to peel and they dry and store well. It makes a fine, fast-growing tree.

Two varieties of chestnuts, or two seedling trees are needed to insure pollination. Grafted trees will begin bearing in 2 to 3 years, and seedlings in 5 to 7 years. A mature tree will produce hundreds of pounds of nuts each year in October and November.

Chestnuts are beautiful trees. Their long, toothed, green leaves turn golden yellow in the fall. Flowers grow in long, slender clusters that completely cover the tree with sweet-smelling, creamy-pink sprays in June or July. Trees live for hundreds of years.

They grow best in well-drained sandy loam, and require better drainage than apples. They will, however, grow in heavy soil on sloping terrain, and grow wherever pine trees do well.

The nuts are rich in sugar and starch, but unlike other nuts, they are low in fat. They are used for food or for animal feed. When chestnuts drop to the ground, they should be gathered every day wearing gloves to protect your hands from the prickly burrs. (These prickly hulls deter squirrels and rodents from gathering the nuts before you.) You can store nuts in a sealed container in the refrigerator for several months.

Chestnuts can be boiled, roasted over an open fire, baked in the oven, and steamed. They can also be eaten raw after the two skins are removed.

Chestnut trees can be grown for a commercial crop. The value of the nuts is directly related to the size, but is usually at least $5.00 per pound wholesale and up to $8.00 per pound retail. Trees will start to give a significant yield at about 10 years old, and yields range from 14 pounds to 130 pounds per tree.

Chestnuts are a good food source, and a few acres can yield nuts for your own enjoyment, or for sale to your local market.