Recycling your Real Christmas Tree

Good news on the environmental front: there are many ways a real Christmas tree can be recycled after its job is done in your home. Many municipalities offer curbside tree pickup on certain dates after Christmas, and some of those use the trees in chippings for mulch. In the city of Grand Blanc, for instance, the mulch collection program picks up right after the holiday just for Christmas tree collection.

You can check with your city or township to see what they offer; in my experience a web search for "recycle Christmas tree (city name)" is the best way to check it out. But...if your pickup doesn't include Christmas trees for recycling in Oakland County, you can do something about it yourself: take the tree to a county park. The Oakland County Parks have a great drop-off program that includes 11 park locations. You can take your undecorated tree to any of these parks during their normal hours and add it to the stacks of other residents' trees. You can check out their web site, Destination Oakland, to learn about hours and other details.

This photo from the Oakland Press shows a Parks staffer
helping with Christmas tree dropoff.

After helping a friend recycle his tree this way a couple of times, I can say that as the end date of the program, January 16, rolls around, those stacks of Christmas trees are pretty impressive! It feels good to know that so many people are interested in keeping this recyclable resource out of our landfills. And the best part is, the wood chips made from these trees is made available to the public free of charge starting just a few weeks later. They can be useful for making paths in the yard/garden, and if applied after composting for a few months can also add some great nutrients to the garden soil.

Curious about other methods of recycling a real Christmas tree? The National Christmas Tree Association has some very interesting reports to share, from rebuilding coastlines to manufacturing flu vaccines.

Cauliflower and Other Delightful Fall Veggies

It's recipe day!

Our CSA members are getting a treat today: the first of our cauliflower harvest. I've been looking forward to cauliflower ever since I started watching for these white heads on the plants back in August. They're finally coming into their own! Cauliflower is delicious, surprisingly nutritious for a white vegetable (B6 and C, anyone?), and it's versatile. It can be steamed, roasted, served as raw florets in a salad or on a relish tray.

As it happens, an interesting web site that I visit occasionally has Cauliflower for it's food of the week this week. "World's Healthiest Foods" has a lot of information about hundreds of foods, so it's one of the places I go to get info on the quick. Today, one of the recipes they're featuring is 5-Minute Healthy Sauteed Cauliflower. It looks delicious!

But my favorite is Faux-tay-toes. Some months ago, my favorite food author, Dinner Diva Leanne Ely wrote about making some stand-by side dishes healthier, and giving their flavor a new, tasty twist. Mashed faux-tay-toes are easy to make (plus it's just fun to say faux-tay-toes), and my family's been enjoying them for years. All you need to do is steam  your head of cauliflower, broken into large florets, until it's really tender. Then drain it, and grab your favorite potato mashing device: masher, blender, food processor, or hand mixer. Add a touch of butter, a bit of cream cheese, salt and pepper to taste, and smash away until the texture is right for you. My food experiment for the week: I plan to add a handful of finely diced, colored sweet peppers. I'll let you know how it turns out!

More cauliflower are on their way...as are tomatoes, peppers, sweet corn, Brussels sprouts and more! We still have a couple of weeks of harvest here at the farm. And all this diversity of produce makes me want to make a great vegetable soup. My soups are never the same twice. I like to grab a couple of handfuls of whatever vegetables I have on hand, make sure to add a nice big handful of chopped onion and a crushed clove or three of garlic, and then saute it all in the soup pot for a few minutes with a little olive oil. This time of year, I might even add a handful of chopped walnuts or hickory nuts. Follow that up with a nice chicken broth or stock, about a quart of stock per quart of veggies, and I've got a unique, tasty treat every time.

Fall Color in Evergreen Trees? You Bet!

Now is the time when independent garden centers and nurseries all around the Midwest are fielding phone calls from new tree owners asking "Why are my trees turning brown??" Almost every time, once we see the photos, we can reassure them: it's just their fall color. And once you know what to look for, it can be quite a show.

Like the deciduous trees - maples, oaks, cherries and the like - all the evergreens we see around us also go through a fall color change and leaf drop each autumn. The leaves that fall aren't big and splashy, and of course they don't drop from the entire tree either. What happens instead, is that each tree species removes from its branches a certain age of needles every year. For most Pine species, the needles that are falling are either two or three years old. You can see that in the Red Pine shown below:

 

Spruces tend to hang on to their needles for 3 or 4 years, depending on what kind of spruce you're talking about. The White Spruce below is shedding what look to be four-year-old needles. And some Fir trees shed four-year-old needles, while other Fir species, like the Concolor, may hang on to their needles for as many as seven years. Other evergreens like Yews, Junipers and Arborvitae also experience fall needle drop. 

Fortunately for us, the color display can help remind us to pay attention to our trees in the fall. There are three things to manage in the fall: mulch, nutrition and water. Newly-planted trees (those in the ground for 3 years or less) should have mulch covering the root ball and roots for the winter, so they have the benefit of the soil's warmth for as long as possible. If it's there already, just check that it's 3-4" deep and not covering the trunk. If a little more is needed, October is better than November for an application - retain as much of that heat as possible.

Watering new trees doesn't necessarily end just because the air has cooled. Dormant trees are still using water, just not as much as they were in the summer. Performing a soil moisture check willhelp deicde whether to irrigate - they may want water right up through November 1.

Lastly, while you're putting on some water, a fall dose of root stimulator fertilizer is great for those new trees. A product with indole-3-burytic acid in a liquid or granular form can be applied to the surface fairly easily.

The fall color show provided by our evergreens can be a lot like the one we get from our deciduous trees. The range of color shades, as well as the timing and texture of the needles that drop all combine to add a bit more drama to the season. While it never hurts to ask us about it, I think it's one more reason to enjoy Autumn!

Tree of the Week: Kentucky Coffee Tree

This week seemed like a good time to link to our Tree of the Week list, and what better way than to link directly to one of my favorite trees? I just love the Kentucky Coffee Tree. Not only is it unusual and beautiful, it has a bonus for a plant geek: a really cool Latin name, Gymnocladus dioicus (hear it pronounced here). Legend has it that Native Americans and settlers drank a beverage made from the roasted seeds as a coffee replacement, which led to land developers using the tree as a marketing tool. That didn't last long, as the drink didn't come close to coffee's drink-ability!

Native to the Midwest, KCT has a nice light to medium green leaf color that contrasts really well with the shade that the leaves give, making a very "woodland" feel under the tree. That leaf color turns yellow in the fall and in some years is very striking, then the leaves, which are doubly-compound, come off to leave behind a strong, coarsely-textured outline.




Ok, so what's doubly-compound? Well, the leaf is composed of a stem, which has smaller stems coming off of it. Those smaller stems, in turn, contain leaflets. There are dozens of leaflets per leaf, and the whole structure is about 3' long!




Now for my favorite part of the tree: its fruit. The seeds (on female trees only!) come in a great big, bean-like pod that starts off a lighter green than the leaves, and then as it matures becomes a deep, rich, russet or chestnut color. They hang on the tree most of the winter, breaking off and apart late in the season. The tree only grows a couple here and there while it's young, then as it gets to be a 10-12" trunk diameter or so, you start seeing them pop up around more of the tree's crown. As it grows older, the tree fruits heavily only every 2-3 years.


So, back to Tree of the Week. We feature dozens of species of trees in this listing of good - and not so good - trees to plant in our area. Kentucky Coffee Tree is one of them, and we like to go through the list for a weekly feature. Descriptions are a bit more objective than you see here, but we try to provide a nice overview of how the tree can perform in the landscape. Enjoy!

Roasted tomato soup

So I think this might be tomato month, as two posts in a row are about them. Let's see what inspires next time. Maybe broccoli greens, or planting spruces. Ya never know.

Anyhow, here is a great way to use those tomatoes that have gotten really ripe before you had a chance to eat them! Roasted tomato soup has just a tad bit different flavor from other tomato soups. It's still got the great creamy richness, but there's a hint of the darkened flavor that you get from roasting instead of just boiling.




The ingredients for about 3 quarts of soup:
a nice, heaping panful of ripe tomatoes: enough to layer one 9x13 pan and a 6x9, too.
olive oil
1 to 1.5 teaspoons dried thyme
a couple of pinches of dried parsley
a couple of pinches of dried tarragon
a pinch of seasalt (or whatever salt you have on hand)
Heavy cream - or a 3:1 mixture of evaporated milk and milk from the fridge

How it's done:
Core the tomatoes and place them in the baking dishes, while preheating the oven to 425F. If the tomatoes have blemishes, remove them before roasting, to make them easier to peel later.

Drizzle olive oil over the tomatoes - for this lot, I used about 2 tablespoons. Then pop the pan(s) into oven, and roast for about an hour or until they're browning on top. These large tomatoes took that hour, plus about 40 minutes at 200F before I was satisfied.


Let the tomatoes cool enough to handle, and peel them. Place them in a blender with their juice, and add about 3/4 to 1 cup of cream for every quart of tomato/juice combo. Add the spices, then hit the cream button until it's good and smooth. For this batch, I blended in halves: a little over a quart of tomatoes with an appropriate portion of the spices & cream.

Heat what you're going to eat, and enjoy!

I'm going to play around with this a bit. More spices, maybe a bit of garlic, perhaps adding a cup or two of chicken broth. I'd love to hear how you vary it, too!

This sounds like one of those recipes that takes a long time, and it can. But check this out: I roasted the tomatoes while doing other things, and stuck them in the fridge until I could create the soup. Then, when ready, I peeled them and the rest is history.

Veggie Tip - Storing Tomatoes

Tomatoes taste best at room temperature and can be damaged by cold temps, so I find it best to store at room temperature and out of direct exposure to sunlight. They will keep up to 5 days, and maybe more, depending on the variety and how ripe they are. However, refrigerating can help an overripe tomato keep for one or two more days. If you must refrigerate, try the butter compartment, where it's warmer When you're ready to use it, take it out 30 minutes ahead of time so it can regain some of its flavor.

If you venture out into your yard this hot, muggy afternoon, you'll probably see some of what I saw in the field today: droopy leaves. I tell ya, I felt just as droopy as those leaves looked! You'd think we'd all be used to it by now, but with 8 weeks of low/no rainfall - it reminded me, it's time to check the soil moisture.

So I've been going around, digging into gardens, fields, pots, root balls - anything that might need my help with some water.

I'm going to suggest you do the same, especially on your trees that have been in the ground three years or less and those that have been growing in place for decades. Since we only have about a 40% chance of rain for the week, now is the time to get these trees good & wet, if you haven't recently. Our moisture monitoring tutorial can help you get the hang of checking the soil, and our watering instructions will tell you how to put the water on.

Now if your tree's root area is already wet, it could still show some sign of wilting this afternoon. That's just because it's darn hot. If you look at the tree in the morning, before the mercury rises much, you should see that the leaves have perked up quite a bit overnight. Another hot day might influence trees to use more water than usual, so don't be afraid to check on them a couple times this week.

Some newly-planted trees - anything moved within the last three years - are displaying a bit of their fall color. That could just be a "normal" part of the transplant recovery process - or it could indicate some other issue. So feel free to comment here if you have any concerns! We'll step you through some care and yard questions that can help clear things up.

Honey Lavender Lemonade

Wow, I just went to beverage Heaven! I made my first drinkable batch of lemonade. Like so many, I've tried a few times to make lemonade from scratch...only to pour it down the drain because it was either bitter, or way too sweet. I'll tell you what made the difference this time. Two things: raw honey and lavender water.

So...what the heck is lavender water? It's where you take a handful of organic lavender and steep it in a quart of boiling water. In my case, it was ten long-ish stems with the fully blooming flowers still on. After about ten minutes, strain the lavender out, and voila! You have lavender water, also known as an infusion of lavender. By the way, when using lavender for cooking you do need to make sure it's organic, or culinary grade. Any lavender marketed for crafts may contain chemicals that you do not want to put in your mouth.



In case you want to try it yourself, here is what I did to give myself a rush of YUM:

5 cups water, not quite tap-cold
3/4 cup raw honey
Juice of 3 lemons, plus chopped peel of one
1 1/2 cups lavender water, chilled
Ice to fill pitcher to 2 quarts

Add honey to the water, and shake it up - it might take a couple of minutes for the honey to dissolve. Warmer water will dissolve the honey more quickly. Then, add the lemon juice and lavender water. Follow those with ice cubes to make 2 quarts, and the chopped lemon peel. Give it another good shake, and pour over ice.

My lemon peels are still in the pitcher - it's only been a half hour so far. I'll let you know when I take them out. If you're trying this, I'd love to hear how long you leave in the peels. Or what else you like to use lavender in!

Spring Tree Care: Mulching and Fertilizing

Thanks to Tom & Dawn for asking me the following question last week about their trees:
The Autumn Blaze Maple & Aristocrat Pear trees buds are appearing. Is it time to remulch and fertilize?

Well, yes. And maybe not, too! This wishy-washy answer really applies to everyone's trees as we head further into spring and are enjoying (finally!) some warmer weather. The fertilizer question is the easier part of this to answer: Sure, go ahead and apply your starter/root-stimulating fertilizer now on your new trees. New trees are those that have been in the ground for three years or less; starter fertilizer has a low nitrogen content and higher phosphorus for promoting root growth after transplanting. Tree roots will grow whenever the soil temperature is above 40F, so even early April would have been an ok time to put on the root stimulator. Nitrogen based fertilizers, on the other hand, should only be used for trees after a soil test indicates it's needed. If you want to have your soil tested, talk to the MSU Extension Office about how they can perform those tests for you.

Now for the mulch half of the question. There are a few variables here that need to be addressed. The first is - does the tree actually need more mulch? If the existing mulch has decomposed to 2" depth or less, the answer is yes. In that case, now we want to consider whether the soil is starting to dry out from all these massive rainfalls we've been having. Soils that are still pretty wet under the surface should probably wait a week or two before they get any new mulch. Damp or dry soils can definitely be treated with mulch now. What's best to use? Bark mulches - hardwood or red pine - for their acidifying and health promoting qualities are my favorites.

And here's a thought about adding to size of the mulch area - I like to increase the size of a mulch bed around evergreen trees every couple of years, to keep mowers away from the branches. Now is a good time to do that, again thinking about how wet the soil is below. You can use your favorite lawn-removal method: newspaper, roundup, or a shovel - and add up to 4" depth of fresh bark-based mulch. A one-foot strip around the perimeter of the tree does wonders for its branch safety!

News from the MSU Landscape Alert

The big melt and your turfgrass

posted on February 14, 2011 10:36

Shoveling snow from poorly draining areas to help water quickly escape from greens could reduce the risk of winterkill injury

Kevin Frank, Crop and Soil Sciences

There was significant snow melting last weekend and it will continue throughout the week with high temperatures expected in the low 40's to near 50. Currently, the night time lows are forecast to be near or above freezing almost every night (except tonight), which should help the water keep moving and minimize ice formation.

As the snow melts, do whatever you can to facilitate water movement off putting greens to prevent overnight freezing and ice formation. Shoveling snow from poorly draining areas or shoveling channels or paths to help water quickly escape from greens could reduce the risk of winterkill injury. Melting snow and overnight freezing and ice formation is one of the times of highest risk for crown hydration winterkill injury on Poa annua putting greens.

Additional information on winterkill injury of turfgrass can be found at www.turf.msu.edu/winterkill-of-turfgrass.

Photo 1. A path is shoveled to let water drain and reduce the risk of winterkill injury.

Snowy Tree Protection

With Snowstorm 2011 just ended, most of us are thinking about the basics - digging out the driveways, sidewalks, and roads. We should also take a minute to stand up & rest against the shovel, and look around at our trees. The heaviest snow loads on their branches can cause some breakage. This is especially true of evergreens, with their needles that can help hold a lot of snow, and multiple-stem trees like birches, whose trunks are often a little less than vertical.

It can be important to remove the snow from the branches, especially the wetter, heavier snows. But be careful not to just knock it off with a broom - that can break branches, too. Upward strokes, gently shaking the branches is safer for the tree. A firm, gentle tap from beneath can jostle some of the snow from the tree limb.

Photo courtesy Joseph O'Brien, USDA Forest Service, Bugwood.org