“Staying Alive” is a Bee Gees song most recently popular for its use in CPR training. The beat is supposed to be the frequency of chest compressions you use when trying to save someone’s life. If it only took a song to resuscitate some of what I thought were dying plants.
I’ve had a Prunus glandulosa (Dwarf Flowering Almond) struggling to do much for three years. It would flower a bit each spring, barely get leaves, and stayed the same size as when I planted it. Too much clay? Wrong place? I was ready to pull it out. But this year, after one of my master gardener classes on mulch where I heard the downsides of using landscape fabric (yes, my bad,) I decided to have a look. I pulled away the mulch to see a barely 14-inch diameter hole cut in the fabric, the nasty clay beneath, and my almond root ball in the exact same shape and size when I took it out of its original nursery pot. My embarrassment was followed by profuse apologies to the almond and I cleared a 4 foot diameter chunk of fabric around its trunk, amending the clay with compost. Within only a few weeks with only bark mulch around it, the almond was springing into action. It had been suffocating all this time.
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| Photo: Nancy Shepard Weak Dwarf Flowering Almond |
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| Photo: Nancy Shepard Dwarf Flowering Almond After |
Leatherleaf Viburnum
I have tried to resuscitate my Viburnum rhytidophyllum (Leatherleaf Viburnum) shrub for three years now, moving it out of the shade into sun, only to have it look as bad as ever. It shows glimmers of promise with new growth, but later in the summer the leaves turn brown and it just doesn’t thrive.
But even when I thought this one was a sure failure, something in my head whispered, “I’m staying alive.” I trimmed dead branches, fertilized it and gave it some deep watering and it’s seems to want to prove to me that it never wanted to give up.
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| Photo: Nancy Shepard Struggling Viburnum |
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| Photo: Nancy Shepard Viburnum After |
Hail of All Hails
Last July 7, my neighborhood was hit with a hail storm so bad that all of us neighbors had to replace our roofs, repair fences, replace grills, and of course sob when we saw our gardens. I had the biggest bounty of cool weather vegetables going strong – snow peas, snap peas, chard and beets, along with great-looking tomatoes and gung-ho potatoes – almost all smashed and slashed flat on the ground. The tomato plants were left with bare stalks of main stems.
We were scheduled to go on vacation in two days and I was almost ready to admit defeat when I remembered a chapter I had read in Lauren Springer’s “The Undaunted Garden – Planting for Weather-Resilient Beauty.” I reread the chapter on hail. It seems that the biggest threat to hail damaged plants is disease and pests taking hold. She says, “Cutting back, cleaning up, prudent watering and a quick-release fertilizer will help in the mid-summer garden” hit with hail. While she is not an advocate of fertilizer, she says hail damage is a justifiable reason to use it.
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| Photo: Nancy Shepard July 7th Hail |
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| Photo: Nancy Shepard Garden After Hail Comeback |
So now I just hum “Staying Alive” when I encounter bedraggled and failing plants. Just like CPR, sometimes you have to be persistent and not give up.
