Our urge to plant trees magnified our drive to purchase land. Every day through the hot summer, we would walk past our pear trees and fig trees suffocating in their black-plastic shells and we would beg forgiveness and patience.
And so, when our closing day finally came, we piled our menagerie into our U-Haul, and though it was after 10 at night, after a long day of moving furniture, we (ok, it was me) insisted on digging out our headlamps and shovel. We hastily measured out two spots in our front yard and planted our two pear trees as midnight approached.
As their bound roots breathe into the surrounding clay, green sprouts of life have emerged from their juvenile trunks. Unfortunately, they’ve sprouted beneath their graft, prompting our preventative snips. As Lauren wrote in Roots and Shoots, the cultivars of most popular fruit trees are propagated by grafting. Snipping these below-graft sprouts prevents the roots from diverting energy away from the genetically foreign stalk.
And then, of course, we have our berries and figs.
As of this writing, we’re sitting pretty with 8 blueberry bushes and 8 fig trees. Because I love the varietal names, I can’t help but list them here, each with a touch of history:
Blueberries:
- Ochlockonee: Variety out of the University of Georgia
- Powderblue: Good in southern climates
- Pink Lemonade: Pink fruits!
- Vernon: Another Unversity of Georgia special
- Jersey: One of the oldest cultivated varieties
- Reka: Northern variety with burgundy-red leaves in fall
- Columbus (x2): We won these in a raffle
Figs:
- Honeymoon: Unknown variety propagated from Monticello
- Celeste: In my opinion, one of the tastiest varieties
- Hardy Chicago: Legendary for its cold hardiness, from a fig grown in Chicago
- Brown Turkey: Well-known commercial variety
- LSU Purple: Glossy, purple fruit, introduced by LSU
- Ischia Green: Fruit not as easily spotted by animals because it is green when ripe
- Magnolia: Produces some of the largest figs
- Kadota: Very sweet, also known as Peter’s Honey fig
The (only somewhat apocryphal) lore on why we moved to Charlottesville was for the ability to grow blueberries and figs. But even for the hardiest figs, Charlottesville sits at the northern edge of their range. With their vigorous roots, figs will often sprout back to life if their above-ground stalks die off in a winter freeze. But most figs will not fruit on first-year growth. To grow fruit, the above-ground tree needs to survive the winter. As we navigate into our first winter here, we’ll try wrapping our baby trees with a combination of burlap, cardboard, and straw. Give them a “winter coat”, so to speak.
We also wanted to plant trees native to the area. Native trees are an easy choice because they are predisposed to thrive in these conditions. Conversely, many popular Asian fruits like plums and peaches struggle here. They have not developed natural defenses to the local pests and almost uniformly have to be sprayed. And compared to their Asian homelands, our early spring weather can fluctuate wildly. We had weeks in February with highs in the 60’s and 70’s, followed immediately by a series of hard freezes. Not accustomed to these fluctuations, many Asian trees will bud out too early during a warm spell, making their buds vulnerable to late freezes. No buds, no fruit that year. Native fruit trees will wait out the fluctuating freeze cycles and bud out in April or even May.
The two best (by taste and size) native fruits: American persimmons and pawpaws.
We’ve so far planted two of each, but with plans for more if they’ll fit. Only last month did we try our first American persimmon and pawpaw. Tasted uh-may-zing. The American persimmon has a soft, pudding-like texture and a rich maple-syrup flavor. Ripeness is important. An unripe persimmon will flood your mouth with an extreme astringency, almost like a spoonful of pure tannins. We’ve so far planted a Prok and a Nikita, which is a unique Asian-American hybrid.
Pawpaws are the new hotness. But they’ve been around forever. George Washington’s favorite dessert was chilled pawpaw with its mango-banana flavor. They’re North America’s largest native fruit, related to tropical fruits like cherimoya and soursop, but can be found growing wild in forests as far north as Ontario. The texture is also pudding-like if you get the ripeness just right. They’ve never been commercialized because their very short shelf life and ease of bruising do not conform well to a globalized food supply where food is grown for its ability to survive thousands of miles of shipping.
Another native fruit: muscadines. Basically, large, thick-skinned grapes. Common in the American Southeast but relatively unknown elsewhere. Wine grapes and common table grapes will grow in Virginia, but not without boatloads of effort and either spraying or tedious bagging to protect them from pests. We’ve planted two muscadine varieties along our fence but hope to plant more if they do well. The varieties: Ison’s and Delicious, a variety developed at the University of Florida.
Then there are the other trees and bushes that we’ve planted out of curiosity and for diversity’s sake.
- One bitter orange, also known as trifoliate orange, the hardiest citrus tree
- One crabapple, a volunteer tree gifted to us by a neighbor.
- One che fruit tree, also known as a Chinese mulberry
- Two Nanking cherry bushes
- Two elderberry bushes, Johns and Adams varieties
- Many Triple Crown blackberries, a thornless variety
- Six varieties of strawberries sprinkled throughout the yard
Though not technically a tree, I would be remiss not to include our banana plant. If someone asks how we decided to buy the house we did, our first answer is this banana plant. When we first looked at the property, I wandered off from the house tour and noticed a large banana plant in the next-door neighbor’s yard. An older woman was out gardening, so I commented appreciatively on her burgeoning garden, and specifically the banana. It quickly became obvious that a language barrier would make it impossible to communicate in the traditional ways (they’re from Bhutan, we later learned). But in a beautiful example of how the language of life and growing food can transcend all barriers (or some other cheesy thing), through a series of hand motions, beckonings, and smiles, I found myself thirty seconds later, spade in hand, hacking at the roots of this woman’s banana plant.
Bananas propagate themselves vegetatively, meaning that new plants, known as pups, will sprout from the roots of other, established plants. In our case, we were separating a three-foot-tall pup from its twelve-foot mother plant. We, well, mostly she, cleared the dirt from the roots and severed the pup. When Lauren came around the corner looking for me, she saw me triumphantly holding up a three-foot banana pup. What more sign of a garden welcome could we want?
We planted it into a bucket until we could return it to its original neighborhood. We stressed as the leaves died one-by-one, the plant slowly going necrotic. We made dramatic inferences about what this was supposed to signal. Should we not pull out of the house purchase? Finally, we could no longer deny its death. We didn’t have the heart to toss it though, so the sad bucket remained on our stoop.
And then one morning, a new sprout popped from beneath the dead banana leaves. A new pup! This pup now thrives in our backyard, a stone’s throw from its “grandmother” next door. Already, it’s three feet tall and provides shade for its own next-generation pup who recently poked its head above ground.
While bananas will survive our climate, they need over a year from bud to flower to fruit. Any freeze will kill the budding fruit. So without drastic interventions, we will never harvest bananas. The plant will die to the ground each winter but sprout from its roots in the spring.
Speaking of tropical plants, we have a few oddities who are completely inappropriate for our climate and will never be planted because they would not survive our winter.
- Meyer lemon tree, our first tree upon moving to Virginia, gifted to us by a friend. It even produced two lemons for us this year
- A guava tree is currently thriving in its pot on our front stoop, alongside our festive pumpkin
- An avocado tree, plucked by a friend who found it growing out of their compost pile
- Dozens of baby papaya trees planted from seed as an experiment this summer
I would be lying if I said I had a grand plan for these. In the same way that growing butternut squash seedlings this early spring inspired us to provide them with a garden, I wonder how caring for these out-of-place trees will force our hand. Will we build them a grand greenhouse? Will we drive down to Florida and rogue-plant them in one of our family member’s backyards? We’ll see.
Vegetable annuals, perennial herbs, and flowers round out our additions to our mini ecosystem. We’ll have to save them for a future post.
Berries and Figs 