This is the third part of a three part series on choosing perennials for your home and bugout locations.
When Salty mentioned developing a new category of posts about “If We Had it to Do Over Again”, it wasn’t hard to come up with candidates. I’ve done some of my best remembered learning ‘the hard way’ after all. My first installment revolves around some choices made about perennial plants, despite a considerable amount of time and thought put into the choices ahead of time.
You can read the other parts of this series by clicking HERE and HERE.
Choosing perennials: Oops!
My biggest problem when I started choosing perennials was I got too caught up in all the things written by all the horticulturalists who live in nice, tame suburbs. I forgot to select for a setting that could have been used in the book Where the Wild Things Are. If I had it to do over again, I’d give the wild denizens of the place their due when considering their neighbors.
The biggest oversight when choosing perennials was factoring in naturally occurring diseases; viruses and fungi and such. Plants are prone to such things of course; they have names like ‘blights’ and ‘smuts’ and ‘rusts’. Many of these plant diseases are transmitted by little insects called aphids that suck plant juices, much like mosquitoes and ticks spread human diseases. Others depend on airborne spores.
One of my problems was a known issue. I’d read you’re not supposed to plant black raspberries within a hundred yards or so (aphids are small and don’t get around too much) of wild blackberries, due to a disease that commonly infects but not kills wild blackberries but will kill raspberries.
Two problems
I had two problems with that: I had an overflow of black raspberry sprouts at the in-town house that I needed to cut back anyway, and there is no place other than deep woods along my fence line at The Place that is a hundred yards from wild blackberries.
Pre-death raspberry
So I tried it anyway.
I had nothing to lose but some labor. Who’s to say My wild blackberries had this disease?
Time.
Time will tell, they say; and so it was. The transplants grew great for about six weeks, then 90% wilted and died in unison. I had, indeed, lost the labor. A couple of the transplants barely survived; I’m letting them be and wishing them well to see if they have or developed some immunity and may eventually do OK.
Dead raspberry plant – what the transplants look like 7 weeks in…
But wait, that’s not all
I suspect the gooseberries had the same problem, although my reading didn’t warn me. Lots of wild ones at The Place. (If you’re wondering why I’m planting tame versions when wild ones abound, it’s because tame varieties have been chosen for much better yields and bigger, tastier, more abundant fruit.) My purchased pair looked so Very good…until they went from thriving to quite dead between one week and the next. Their spots are going to some species that Doesn’t grow wild out there.
Well, OK, choosing perennials may not be rocket science… but…
The third I feel pretty stupid about. Sure, I looked for apple varieties with disease resistance; but you can’t get one variety that resists everything. So why didn’t I put more weight on resistance to ‘cedar apple rust’ when planting a stone’s throw from cedar trees? You’d *think* the name would have clued me in. But I didn’t; I went with more generically hardy species.
Fortunately this disease tends to be more of a blemish than a killer, so even if my apples do get hit it shouldn’t be too awful. This will be the first year I have a hope of harvesting apples from The Place. (Excitement! Apple blossoms the last trip out, and bees buzzing around them!)
On the up side, I did get to take some advantage of my wild neighbors. Peaches like blackberries, so the tame peach trees got planted among a blackberry patch; and nut trees prefer a lot of nitrogen so they got placed next to the locust trees that add nitrogen to the soil.
So here’s the take-away for today: Don’t forget to think about what grows wild near where you’re planting the tame species. Companion planting guides can help here. Closely related wild species are more likely to be a disease risk than a help, although crabapples may serve as cross-pollinators for tame apples.