Joshua’s old home on Eastern Avenue. Water was cut off five years prior. Q. I am sending some pictures of a Joshua tree that I transplanted. It survived in its old location off of Eastern Avenue for five years after the water was shut off. It also survived with its trunk buried with about a foot of soil. I am adding it to my drip system but I need to optimize my watering so the tree has its best chance at survival. I amended the planting hole with sulfur and bone meal. I watered it deeply every three to four weeks by hand. Now I have drippers that are watering for one hour every four days.  In addition I frequently wet the top portion of the plant up to 5 times a week in hot weather to keep it from drying out. A. These are tough to transplant and this tree was abused and still survived. It shows you how well adapted these plants are to our desert environment if they are not watered too often and carefully relocated. Joshua lifted with engine hoist and seatbelts by reader             The key will be watering with lots of water but not very often or you may rot the trunk and any roots that might grow. I would suggest watering about every two weeks with about ten to twenty gallons in a depression around the trunk.             After the plant shows signs of new growth then the frequency of your watering will dictate how it looks and grows. If you want a Joshua tree with limbs that are long, kind of spindly and solid green then continue watering every two weeks during the summer. I have a hard time aesthetically liking this in appearance I guess because they do not look this way in nature. Old soil level just below orange belt. Roots covered with burlap.             If you want a Joshua tree with a tuft of green growth at the ends of the branches and the rest of the limb brown (more like you see in nature) then don’t put it on drip irrigation. After signs of new growth, begin watering seasonally by hand with a large volume of water around its base. What I mean by seasonally is water deeply perhaps once or twice in the spring, once during the summer and once during the winter. At some future date you may elect to eliminate the summer watering if you want more brown on the limbs. Joshua in its new desert landscape.             Make sure it is staked securely in the soil so the trunk at soil level does not move for one growing season. This plant will respond to a new location if you use soil that has been amended with compost or other soil improvements.             Wetting any part of the aboveground tree with water like spraying it with a hose or mister is a waste of time, not needed and may prove to be detrimental to the plant.

Q. I have a 1/2 acre on the east side of the valley ( Las Vegas), the lot is divided in quadrants with the house in one, a barn in another, yard/parking in the third, and the fourth is my chicken run. I was researching the idea of putting an orchard in that area and your work in NLV keeps popping up, but I can’t find your list of trees or an article on your high density planting techniques. I know the soil needs improving so I am currently trying green manuring with buckwheat and soybeans. I figure that one way or the other my chickens will like it. Any help you can point me towards I would appreciate. A. If you will go to my blog Xtremehorticulture of the Desert and in the search engine type “recommended fruit trees” you will see my recommended fruit tree list posted twice; once as a downloadable pdf document and the other posted in its entirety. This past year the only nursery to carry my recommended fruit trees was Plant World Nursery on Charleston Blvd. Any of their fruit trees with a hanger or tag from Dave Wilson Nursery, a large commercial grower of fruit trees, is from my list. A local producer sold my recommended fruit trees to the public as bareroot trees but will not be doing that this fall. Anyone want to take it on? Contact me. The idea of high density planting is not mine but adapted from Dave Wilson Nursery out of the Modesto, California area.You can find more information on concept of multiple trees planted in a single hole at davewilsonnursery.com, along with a lot of great information on growing fruit trees. I produced some YouTube videos on growing fruit trees which can be found by typing “UNCE orchard” at the YouTube video website, another resource. Here is a sample on controlling the size of fruit trees. Green manure crops are plants that can be started from seed which will either capture low amounts of nitrogen that exist in the soil or capture nitrogen from the air and return it to the soil. They also decompose and add organic matter. I have mixed feelings about using green manure crops in the desert. Although they are tremendously beneficial to our soils and highly advantageous in most areas of the country, they may or may not make sense when using them in the desert depending on your situation. The principle reason is water use. A secondary reason is the time that green manure crops take out of production. And thirdly is their cost. Green manure crops take time for the seed to germinate and the plants to grow to a size where they can be beneficial when turned back into the soil. Normally plants are allowed to get to a juvenile or early mature stage before they are turned back into the soil. This takes time, perhaps 5 to 6 weeks or longer which is time taken away from your production. If you have plenty of space and the cost of water is not a concern then this makes a lot of sense. But if your space is limited and water is costly then this will probably not make a lot of sense for you. It may make more sense to concentrate your space and water into making compost. Seed can be very expensive so look for inexpensive seed locally that you can use rather than to have it shipped in from some other location in the country. This also helps to lower your carbon expenditures for your small farm or garden. A very good green manure crop that is inexpensive is annual rye grass. This is the same inexpensive rye that is used for overseeding Bermudagrass in the fall. Grasses, and in particular annual ryegrass, are fast to germinate when temperatures are at least 60° F. You can even speed up its germination by soaking the seed for 24 hours before planting it. The seed must then be carefully dried so that it is dry to the touch but not overly dried or the seed may be ruined. Legumes harvest nitrogen from the air primarily and are not that terribly good at taking residual nitrogen from the soil. But they are an excellent choice for poor soils if you can get the seed inexpensively. Annual grasses are wonderful at finding nitrogen in the soil that vegetable crops miss and they take this nitrogen and bioaccumulate it or, in other words, put it into its own plant tissue. The grass is watered and allowed to get about 6 to 10 inches tall and then turned into the soil just before it produces a seedhead. This nitrogen in the plant tissue is then slowly released as the rye plant decomposes in the soil. However, using a green manure crop in a mixed planting where you are combining an orchard with chickens or other fowl makes a lot of sense provided these animals do not ruin in your production. I could see how you might be able to have a small orchard and, using the existing water required to irrigate your fruit trees, grow some green manure crops for soil improvement and that would also double as food for your fowl. Keep your costs low by growing winter and summer green manure crops from seed that are inexpensive and that will do well in our climate. Some manure crops for our area might include annual ryegreass, timothy, wheat, oats, alfalfa, peas and Kentucky 31 tall fescue. But if you use tall fescue be sure to turn it into the soil while it is still young. Just about any inexpensive seed will work if you know the germination temperature of the seed. Don’t use bermudagrass. Recommended green manure crops from other climates may or may not work well here and it may be difficult to find inexpensive seed.  

Orchard todo One of our “white” figs There is lots to pick but please pick up fallen fruit under the trees before picking fruit or doing anything else in the orchard. Once it gets stepped on it is much, much harder to pick up. It is extremely important to keep a clean orchard floor. Use one of the small rakes in the tool shed to rake the fruit to the aisle and then follow that by picking the fruit up from the center of the aisle rather than bending down and picking the fruit up from under the canopy. The yellow or “white” figs are coming in now and need to be checked. Figs are nonclimacteric fruit so will not ripen once picked. They must be picked when fully ripe and the neck begins to collapse. We have lots of peaches coming in right now so please pick and get them in the cooler before the birds hammer them. Jobs will be posted on yellow postit notes in the office with the number of volunteers needed on the note. Dont forget to sign in and sign out! Tuesday todo • Irrigate. We are irrigation three times a week now. Todo List on Postit Notes in the Orchard office • Pick up fallen fruit. This helps keeps some damaging insects from getting to damaging numbers. • Check figs • Pick Anna apple at 18/1 (Row 18 is along the south fence) • Red Haven peaches fully ripe and must be picked now • Mid Pride peaches are coming in and should be picked now • Stark Saturn (donut peaches) should be picked • Double Delight nectarines should be picked. Badly scarred and suitable for juice, jelly, jams, etc. • Evaluate the following: La Feliciana peach; Babcock peach; Double Jewel peach • Change pheremone traps and put new pheremones in

Bottlebrush yellowing in rock mulch Q. I have several miniature bottle brush plants, some of which are a very pale or faded green as compared to the others.  The red “brush” that is the flower seems pale as well.  Do you think “ironite” will take care of that? I used a liquid concentrate of iron and soil acidifier and that seems to have helped a lot. A. Ironite may or may not take care of it. It may be a bit more of a deep-seated problem than just the iron alone and the Ironite may give the plant a temporary fix. Ironite relies on this product to increase soil acidity so that the iron in Ironite can be used by the plant. This will sometimes work depending on the situation but it is a “Band-Aid” approach to fixing the problem.             Because Ironite works only “fairly often” I hesitate to recommend it for that reason. It usually works best on woody plants when applied in late winter or early to mid spring. Applications this time of the year of any product that adds iron to the soil may or may not work. At this time of the year you should focus on getting iron directly into the foliage. This requires spraying iron directly on the plant along with something that helps move the iron inside the foliage.             You might try some multiple applications of iron sprays at this time of year combined with a liquid detergent or surfactant. The surfactant would be a liquid spreader/sticker combined with the iron spray. Spreader Sticker Example             You may be able to substitute a teaspoon of Ivory liquid per gallon of spray solution. This may require perhaps five or six applications about a week apart to get some re-greening. This varies from plant to plant. Some plants re-green easily while others are more difficult to re-green. Do this ONLY when air temperatures are cool and there is a chance of some leaf burning on some plants so don’t apply it hog wild.             More of a long term fix is focused on improving the soil with amendments and the use of organic fertilizers. A better source of iron but more expensive would be iron 138 applied in late winter. I know that Plant World Nursery and Grow Well have carried it in the past. This is expensive but it goes a long way and requires only one small application of a few ounces per year in the early spring.             You might consider fertilizer sources such as Miracle Gro, Peters or Osmocote applied a few weeks after growth resumes in the spring. These are good quality fertilizers which are not organic. One of the iron 138 products             Try your Ironite first but I think it may be a crap shoot at this time of year. The liquid foliar iron can be just about any liquid iron and does not have to be the expensive138 form. The 138 iron is really works best if applied to the soil more than a foliar spray.

 Readers yellow squash with fruit turning oranage and dying Q. I have had great success growing both yellow and green squash in my garden for the past five or six years.  Last month I harvested about ten nice pieces, but in the past couple of weeks they have all been turning very hard and the yellow pieces have turned dark and almost orange.  I have attached a couple of pictures of both the fruit and the plants.  Please let me know if you any suggestions. A. Your summer squash looks nice.  You will get more blemish free fruits with twice to three times a week sprays of insecticidal soaps including spraying the undersides of the leaves. The lack of squash development is due to poor pollination most likely due to cool weather and poor bee activity. Readers yellow summer squash when it is producing             You can attract more bees to the area by planting plants that bees love and flower at the times your vegetable garden needs pollination. Bee loving plants include many of the herbs which are allowed to flower. These might include rosemary, basil, lavender, oregano and thyme to name a few.             Woody ornamental plants typically flower for short periods of time but there are some like Texas Ranger, brooms like Scotch broom, lantana, verbena, and others. Go to your nursery and see what is in bloom, particularly reds, purples, pinks and start planting.

Q. Can peppers and tomatoes be planted next to each other? I printed a companion list off the internet that says “Yes”. An Ortho vegetable book I got from the library says tomatoes can’t be planted near peppers because they are in the same family. I have a yellow bell pepper plant next to a Heatwave tomato plant and although it has 2 peppers on it, it’s not growing in height. Just bushier than when I bought it. My banana pepper plant is tall and thin and every time it gets blossoms, they die and fall off. It was hiding under a pear tomato (I had no idea the tomato plants would get that huge!) so I moved it out and into the sun. Still nothing. A. Companion planting can mean different things to different people. Yes, you can plant vegetables in the same family next to each other typically with no problems. These two are in the nightshade family. It is recommended however to rotate your vegetables so that vegetables of the same family are not grown in the same location year after year. Not rotating the spots where you grow your vegetables can lead to a buildup of soil problems primarily diseases. Get to know which vegetables are in different families and try to group them so that you rotate them in different locations. I posted the families for vegetables on my blogspot. Make sure that you follow recommended spacings for your plants. Tomatoes can vary in size tremendously due to whether they are determinate or indeterminate and their genetic potential (crossbreeding that was done). If they are too close together they will hinder in each other’s production. Make sure you follow the spacing on the seed packet or if you bought them as transplants look the variety name up on the Internet for spacing. Usually transplant tags will give you the correct the spacing.

Q. Last fall, I planted about 2 dozen iris corms. I followed the directions explicitly. All the plants appear to be healthy, growing green and straight but no blooms!! I was advised that they need greater sun exposure. I had planted them in an interior courtyard that has sun and shade. Some of my plants were in a planter so I moved them to a southern exposure but they haven’t bloomed. I have the same problem with some day lilies I purchased in LV, green, healthy, lots of leaves but no flowers. A. Two thoughts come to mind. In many cases iris need a year to get established before they will bloom. Much depends on the size of the rhizome that was planted and how it was planted. Sometimes late spring freezes can interrupt a flowering cycle as well. Give them another year to get established and my guess they will bloom nicely. Try not to overfertilize them or they may tend to be juvenile and grow leaves with no or few flowers. Fertilize them after blooming rather than before.

Q. My fruitless olive tree is losing leaves branches on the south side of the tree. It has been in the ground since December 2010 having been planted from a 36″ box. I have been watering it 3 times a week for 20 minutes each time since March, less frequently the past winter. It has 4 emitters. Since I noticed the bare branches, I have started to hand water once a week for an hour with a bubbler. The wind usually blows through the tree from the south where the bare branches are located. Drip emitters are measured in gallons per hour A. Let’s assume your drip emitters are three gallons per hour, a very common rate for drip emitters which are not adjustable. You have four of them. That makes 12 gallons per hour. You water for 20 minutes that means you water the olive with four gallons. To fill a 36 inch boxed tree with soil I would guess would take about 25 to 30 gallons or more. This tree is way underwatered. Run the hose on the tree in a four inch deep basin surrounding the planting hole and fill the basin twice every time you water. This tree will require somewhere around 30 gallons or more each time you water. You will need to add emitters to the tree or run the drip for at least 2 to 3 hours each time you water as it is presently configured. Right now you should be watering twice a week with that volume. I want to add that if you are planting trees and shrubs you should ALWAYS hand water them in for two to three weeks after planting and then begin your drip system. Do not just turn them over to drip irrigation after planting.

 Pup growing from base Q. The ‘pups’ that grow off of the mother plant, you said to cut them off and let them dry out for a period of time. What is the time to leave them dry out and unplanted? A. In most cacti when we take a pad, offshoot or a pup (young offshoot that comes up from the ground right next to the mother plant) we just want some time for the damaged tissue to heal and begin callusing over after separating the plants. This helps in disease problems that might enter the wound once in contact with the soil. In warm weather this can be just several days. This can be out of doors but should be in the shade. Some take an extra precaution and dip the callused end into a fungicide before planting. If you are taking a pad from a cactus such as an opuntia (bunny ears or prickly pear) then while it is healing put the pad on end and don’t lie it flat on the ground or a table. If you lie it flat it can begin curving or cupping toward the light and makes it kind of hard to plant a curved pad. Sever a pad at the base of the pad exactly at the “joint” or where the two pads come together. I have used a sterilized, very sharp knife and even a pruning shears.  Removing pad from Opuntia with sharp knife  If you are planting a healed pad from a cactus such as an Opuntia then I would make sure you plant the pad so that its flattened sides face East/West, not North/South. If the flattened sides both receive light about equally then the pad is more likely grow more uniformly.  On pups and chollas they are three dimensional in shape so there really is no “flattened” sides. Plant healed pads during the warm or hot months, not the winter months. Plant pads so that one third of the pad is below the soil level. Now is an excellent time. Make sure you add compost to the planting soil and water infrequently, about once every two weeks in the summer. If you water too often you will rot the bottom of the pad or the pups. Pads from Opuntia cupping when laid flat

Yuccas and agaves will look better if treated more nicely Q. I have an agave in the yard that shows signs of stress where the outer leaf starts dying from the tip and progressing back toward the base of the leaf. Are they lacking water? (I only water it once every 2-3 months). Is there a nutrient that I can get for it and how often would it be applied?  A. Agaves, yuccas and other cacti and succulents look better with improved soils and regular waterings. They don’t like our unimproved desert soils but are very successful at surviving in them (even though they may not look very good). Even though they are desert plants and do not receive much water in the desert they will perform better and look better with more frequent waterings. Water about once every two weeks in the summer; once a month or longer in the winter.  Harsh location even for a desert plant to look good  They should improve unless they have other problems. If you plant more cacti and agaves, or replant this one, then make sure the soil is improved with compost at the time of planting. Adding compost to the soil surface will help but is not as effective as putting it in the planting soil.