Tag Archives: Cherries

Cherry Tree Surrender

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Cherry tree with multiple yellow leaves with brown spots.

I planted this Lapins Cherry seven years ago, and did all kinds of care for it over the years. Holistic sprays, pruning, copper spray this spring. But we only had one cherry ever to eat from it, and each year it continues to have problems. Each time, I looked up what to do, and tried all sorts of things. It seems to be a fungal disease. The latest advice I read was to pick off all the diseased leaves from the branches and the ground. I seem to remember trying that last year. But you can see that would be an enormous amount of work, and maybe it wouldn’t even fix the problem. We had very few blossoms, and saw very few green cherries, maybe two or three.

close up of yellow cherry leaves with brown spots

So today I made the sad decision to give up. Some things in the garden seem to do well, even on their own. The raspberries just started ripening. The chives are perennially yummy. Even the peach tree has given us a harvest some years. Today I ate a mulberry from our mulberry tree! The third principle of Permaculture Design is “Obtain a Yield.” But this tree has never given a yield, no matter how much time and energy I put into it. I probably hung on too long, and tried too hard over the years. I don’t tend to give up easily. Sadly, this also means giving up on the other cherry, with similar problems. While the Lapins can be self-fertile, the Black Tartarian needs another cherry for fertilization. It too has issues, though I don’t see it as often because it sits behind the Lapins when I look out my window. One more thing I feel sad about is that the birds love to perch in the tree on their way to the bird feeder or bird bath.

Because the diseases are fungal, we won’t want to compost the leaves or branches. So my current “plan” is to prune off smaller branches one by one and bag them to go out in the trash. It takes quite a bit of energy in any case, so I will work on it bit by bit over the summer. I started today.

cherry leaves and branches in trash bag

So this post isn’t like the many websites that offer suggestions for saving dying cherry trees. This is about letting go. This is about accepting failure. This is about sadness and grief, and recognizing our limitations. This is about surrender to the larger forces in the natural world that determine which plants thrive in which places, and which plants cannot. This is about humility in our relationship to the earth community.

I am reminded of a song that meant a lot to me when I was wrestling with chronic illness and the decision to retire from work. Colbie Caillat, Try. In the lyrics is this constant refrain, “You don’t have to try so hard, you don’t have to bend until you break…” The song is mostly about trying to get other people to like you, but it spoke to me about trying so hard to keep up with work that I loved, when I truly did not have the energy for anything like full-time work anymore. It was okay to let go. I was lucky. I had reached the age of 65 where I could access Medicare and Social Security. I feel for all of my fellow chronic illness buddies who have had much harder survival journeys. We live in such a cruel society that offers so little support for people with illness. None of us should have to try so hard, to bend until we break.

“Your body is also a planet”

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Catbird in the mulberry tree-a dark silhouette amid green leaves and berries

Two weeks ago, I had terrible cramping in my lower abdomen. Over a few days, it gradually localized to the lower left of my abdomen, particularly when I had to poop. My medical practitioner did some blood tests, and found high inflammation, but not infection, and scheduled a CT scan. They determined that I was having a bout of diverticulitis, which, even as it was diagnosed, thankfully began to ease up. It was scary and discouraging to have yet another illness keep me down for over a week, and add to the complications I already have with eating food. A little research showed that 50% of people over 60 in the US deal with this disease. We must have a cultural taboo against talking about it, because I was very surprised to realize it was that common.

After all that, I explored some herbal options for healing, and discovered that licorice root is one of the recommended herbs–which I have already been using for energy issues. This spring I harvested and dried some from the plant in our yard that I had planted a few years ago. (I use much more than that in a year, but it is exciting to be starting to harvest it here.) I have been drinking tea made by boiling a couple tablespoons of the root in a quart of water.

Dried licorice root-first harvest

Because of all this, I was feeling discouraged, and then I remembered the challenging wise words of Indigenous writer Paula Gunn Allen, in an excerpt from “The Woman I Love Is a Planet; The Planet I Love Is a Tree,” from her book, Off the Reservation. 

“Our physicality—which always and everywhere includes our spirituality, mentality, emotionality, social institutions, and processes—is a microform of all physicality. Each of us reflects, in our attitudes toward our body and the bodies of other planetary creatures and plants, our inner attitude toward the planet. And, as we believe, so we are. A society that believes that the body is somehow diseased, painful, sinful, or wrong, a people that spends its time trying to deny the body’s needs, aims, goals, and processes—whether these be called health or disease—is going to misunderstand the nature of its existence and of the planet’s and is going to create social institutions out of those body-denying attitudes that wreak destruction not only on human, plant, and other creaturely bodies but on the body of the Earth herself….

“Being good, holy, and/or politically responsible means being able to accept whatever life brings—and that includes just about everything you usually think of as unacceptable, like disease, death, and violence. Walking in balance, in harmony, and in a sacred manner requires staying in your body, accepting its discomforts, decayings, witherings, and blossomings and respecting them. Your body is also a planet, replete with creatures that live in and on it. Walking in balance requires knowing that living and dying are two beings, gifts of our mother, the Earth, and honoring her ways does not mean cheating her of your flesh, your pain, your joy, your sensuality, your desires, your frustrations, your unmet and met needs, your emotions, your life.”

Paula Gunn Allen

It is so easy to identify events in the yard, or in my body, as beautiful or ugly, gifts or challenges, positives or negatives. But coming into a harmonious relationship with all beings of this earth requires letting go of that polarity–not denying the difficulties or pains, but going deeper with my responses. How can I embrace all that life offers, in the yard, and in my body?

We have seen two frogs in the pond, one bold and the other cautious. Yesterday a neighborhood cat was stalking the pond. Today, I only saw the cautious one. Is the bold one gone? The cherries that appeared green in the trees are getting brown spots on them. The cardinal couple seems now to frequent the feeder every day. The robin that abandoned her nest, is back in the nest trying again with new eggs. Today I saw her partner bring her a bite to eat. A dragonfly was dipping her tail in the water, while perched on a lily pad–laying her eggs in the pond. Something took a few leaves off two of my kale plants, but did not destroy the whole plants. Can I begin to see all of it as wholeness, as beauty?

Dragonfly on a lily pad in the pond, dipping her tail in the water.

Early Harvesting

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Photo: two cherries and a bowl of raspberries

Well, after all my efforts with the sweet cherry trees, I harvested a total of three cherries. Very sad. That is all for the season. I had given them foliar sprays, compost and seaweed on the ground, and companion plants. I sprayed them with kaolin clay to guard against pests, put out yellow sticky paper for black cherry aphids, and hung about 50 red wooden fake cherries to deter birds coming round. I watered them when we were having this drought. We didn’t start out with a lot of blossoms, and I think there were only 10-20 cherries that started forming this season–not very many. But by the time they ripened, I could only find three. I ate one, and the other two are in the photo next to the raspberries.

The raspberries, on the other hand, I do hardly anything for–I pruned out the old canes in the fall, and they got a couple foliar sprays when there was some left from the trees. I watered them a couple times during the drought. But now they are producing abundant berries, and this harvest was just the one day’s worth. So frustrating. Especially since I like cherries more than raspberries. I’ve grown raspberries before, but cherries are still new. I do not seem to know the secret. If anyone can tell me, please comment!

I also harvested a big bunch of kale today. After the groundhog sighting, I covered that raised bed with netting and stakes. And a good thing I did! The next day, I caught sight of the groundhog standing up against the framing looking through the netting at the kale. I chased him off, and I haven’t seen him the last few days. I’ve also put urine liquid around the area. So far it seems to be working.

Today, I took off the netting, harvested a bunch of the lower leaves of the kale, did a bit of weeding, and finished thinning the carrots that are also growing there. With kale, I will sauté a bunch of it, and then immediately freeze, for use in winter. I eat kale almost every day! I’m so happy it is doing well. But if you know the secret for sweet cherries, please tell me!

Photo: kale harvest from today