While it’s still cold out and the buds have yet to break on the fruit trees, my attention has turned to our ailing apple tree. I noted late in the summer how terrible it was looking-it was being attacked by bugs and had a black infection of some sort on many of the already scarce leaves. Over the months I have concluded the issue needed a coordinated plan: gophers were having a hay day around the roots, the soil was packed from hundreds of little feet beating it down, and weeds extended right up to the trunck-it hadn’t been fed in a long time.
Over the course of three days, students came out and helped me weed, cultivate, and fertilize with a root-building fertilizer within the large garden edging circle I’d installed at the base of the tree. They also planted vetch to enrich the soil, borage and mullein that will attract bees while in bloom, and improve the soil when they are cut back for the winter and some flower bulbs..just because! Finally, we mulched with chips, and the result can be seen below!
A visible project like this is such a rich source for conversations and teaching. We talked about plant nutrition, and what our bodies need. We talked about how this plant’s diseases were symptoms of a larger problem with getting the right food and having too much stress-with obvious parallels to human health. We looked at roots, we looked at the plants we were transplanting, we found five large butterfly cocoons in the branches and it hit us all how important it was to save this tree!
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