I Am My Garden's Biggest Pest, Apparently

Almost ten years ago my wife and I started looking for our first home.  It was a frustrating experience because it occurred right in the beginning of the housing boom in California.  Home prices were increasing on a weekly basis and even though we were offering more than the asking price we were getting outbid.  Our poor agent (who deserves nomination for sainthood) wrote something like 25 offers on houses for us.  At the time she said it was the most she’d ever had to write for a client. 

Depressed by our lack of success, we started grumbling about giving up and finding an apartment to rent.  But before we got carried away with our Plan B we decided to spend one more weekend checking out open houses.  And that is when we discovered our house.  I was immediately enchanted.  Although I was not yet a gardener, I had grown up under the shadows of trees.  And this house had trees. 

Well, it had six trees anyway.  In the front was a giant fruitless mulberry tree which cast a luxurious canopy of shade on the front of the house.

As I walked up to the front door that first time I remember the feeling of comfort that shade provided.  It felt almost like I had wandered into a forest.  In the back yard there were 3 aspen trees (or were they birch trees? I had no idea), some kind of palm tree, and a white peach tree.  I hated the palm immediately and never changed my opinion.  

This is what the corner garden looked like when we moved in.  

I loved the others.  It felt like home so we made an overly generous offer and, miracle of miracles, it was accepted.

A decade later there are now about 30 trees on my property.  The Aspen/Birch trees didn’t make it.  They were planted in the lawn and the grass grew right up to the trunks.  I don’t think the roots ever had a chance to get established so that first winter the trees bent to 45 degree angles after a few rain storms and some wind.  I tried propping them up and staking them but it was clear that they were the wrong trees in the wrong spaces.  The hated palm tree eventually started rotting.  I imagine it knew I didn’t care for it and decided to make it easy on me.  I spent a weekend cutting it down and digging out its roots.  There was never any manual labor I enjoyed more.    

Of the original 6 trees, only the Mulberry and Peach tree remain.  But I’m seriously considering changing that.  I will miss the size of the Mulberry tree but you know what I won’t miss?  I won’t miss the leaves clogging the gutters.  I won’t miss the roots coming to the surface and ruining everything in its wake.  I won’t miss how the roots occasionally crush the PVP sprinkler pipes.  And I won’t miss the annual bill for having the branches trimmed back.  Left to its own devices, the branches quickly grow to the point of touching our roof and extending over the neighbor’s yard.  The other day I watched from the window as the garbage truck lifted our can to dump it in only to have the can whack a bunch of gangly branches on the way up.  It’s only a matter of time before the county sends me a form letter saying they won’t pick up our trash unless we do something about that tree.  I will feel bad about seeing the tree go, but I think a smaller tree will eventually provide the kind of shade I first fell in love with without the unruly roots and annual costs associated with maintenance. 

As bad as I feel about the Mulberry, I feel terrible about the peach tree.  It’s not a tree I would choose to get rid of and the fact that I’m now faced with that possibility is an indictment on my early days as a homeowner.  The peach tree originally was a multi-stemmed specimen.  Someone once told me that trees only have one trunk.  So, I guess the correct way to say this is that there was one trunk but three main stems.

Here is the peach tree from "back in the day."  

Initially the tree gave us buckets and buckets of peaches.  For years I would spend a few minutes each August night picking up the fallen peaches before the ants and rodents could get to them.  It wasn’t uncommon to fill up an entire 5-gallon Homer Bucket.  There was so much fruit and I was so thrilled.  I never once considered that there could be too much fruit. 

Not this kind of Homer Bucket

This kind of Homer bucket!

Until it was too late.  The first stem cracked under the weight of its own bounty about five years ago. The crack was probably seven feet long and several inches deep.  At first I thought it would heal on its own but the leaves quickly browned and it was clear that the stem/trunk would need emergency surgery.  So I cut it off at the base.  Sometime later a similar fate happened to the second stem.  Now the tree looks like a traditional tree with just one trunk.  I have spent a lot of time trimming out dead branches trying to improve air circulation and feeding it compost.  It’s the least I can do, right?  I would also be very careful about removing some of the fruit to keep the weight down if only there were fruits to remove.  I harvested a grand total of zero peaches last year.  I figured it was due to the really bad case of peach leaf curl that all of Northern California succumbed to last year.  But here it is late June of the next year and it doesn’t look like there will be anything to harvest this year either.  

Last night I spent some time inspecting the tree to see if there was any hidden fruit.  I couldn’t find any but I did find some hidden problems.  Most notably, I found a couple holes which appear to have been made by insects.  Termites?  Carpenter ants?  I really don’t have a clue but I can’t imagine that this is a good sign.

And then I found this huge fungus growing at the base of the tree where the other stems had been cut off.  Clearly, there is rotting wood here providing this fungus with a steady diet.

I thought about calling in an arborist but then I thought it might be pointless.  The tree seems beyond hope now and that makes me want to kick rocks sullenly.  Ten years after moving into this house and I’ve gotten to the point where I’m about to either kill or remove all the trees I inherited.  That seems wrong to me.

What feels right to me, however, is the thought of picking new trees to take the place of those trees that will soon provide us with the fuel for S’mores.