Dan's Papers - September 5, 2008

This has been one of the most spectacular Augusts I have ever experienced in decades. No one has complained about the weather, the heat and the humidity, even the farmers were happy. The regular thunderstorms and the associated rain kept the air clear and crisp just like the most gorgeous part of September. Only the dogs minded these rattling weather events that occasionally shook the house. They headed for the basement every afternoon when the clouds rolled in, another convenience that allowed us to get our garden chores done, one of which was not watering.

The frequent thundershowers saved us a lot of time, and hose dragging. Pots did not start to dry out after two days in the sun, hydrangeas rarely drooped in the mid afternoon heat. It was a relief to have one less thing to worry about and everything was so lush.

But there was one curious side affect of all the rain. In the old crab apple orchard, water would collect in the tree ring around the base of one of the apples and it would not drain into the soil. Moss started to grow rather robustly on the trunk of the tree. I scooped out the water and scraped out some mud.

I was concerned about the bottom of the tree trunk rotting or the roots around the tree drowning. There needs to be a certain amount of air in soil for plants to breath, so to speak. Although the chemical and structural relationship of plants to soil is more complex that that, without air pockets in the soil, the ground becomes stagnant and smells, roots cannot take up nutrients and die off.

The apples were planted in rows over 15 years ago and it would be impossible to replace one and have it match. As with most horticultural problems this all began with the soil, but it was a deductive process and several experiments that lead us to the real culprit.

I had a conversation with the pool cleaners first. He claimed not to have been draining the pool filter into that orchard, but had put the hose off in a different direction as he had noticed the water build up himself a week earlier. In years past we had put a dry well in for them that would take up any excess water and clear up an occasionally swampy low spot that was near a white pine. The pine itself had gotten chlorotic, meaning it turned yellow at various periods over time, but we seemed to be able to remedy that with nutrients.

So we put a drain in the tree ring to siphon off the water from around the base of the tree. The soil began to go anaerobic with the lack of oxygen and it stank, so we removed some of that too. After this, once the irrigation came on or it rained we found that our drain worked very well for the apple tree, but now the edge of the garden began to fill up with water and it was not draining either. Now mosquitoes started to breed in the stagnant water. In light of the frequent rains, the increased shade of the crab apple canopies that had spread over the years and the continued build up of water, we decided to turn off the irrigation for a while.

Then we changed the irrigation heads to a lighter spray with less gallons per hour. More water collected, the lawn got swampy with more rains, when the grass got cut the mower wheels left muddy tracks. We turned the irrigation off again.

Finally we looked in the dry well that had been installed so many years ago. To our amazement it was full of water. When we had originally dug down 5' through the topsoil we had never hit sand, the bottom of the dry well itself sits just above the very top layer of the water table. And that water table had risen dramatically with all the rain, which is why the lawn and the tree ring around the apple weren't draining, the water could not soak into the ground because the ground was already soaked.

More than likely this water build up was also responsible for the chlorosis of the pine in the past when the ground water level increased, but not to the same extent we were now experiencing. Finally a contractor who had excavated extensively in the area explained to me that there is a layer of clay underneath the topsoil, evidenced by all the natural ponds in the area. I remember hitting this clay at another location not far away one year. It is grey and smells like a marsh and in this case, it acts as a natural pond liner.

The English used to use puddling to create ponds out of clay. They would lay clay down in successive layers and then walk horses back and forth over it to compact it, thus sealing the pond liner. The clay layer under the pine and the crabapples was either a former marsh or was laid down by the glacier, but either way it was acting like a water proof barrier that held in all this year's rain.

Don't let the veggie garden go even if you are not in town. Allowing tomatoes to rot only means you will be weeding them out next year, and encouraging slugs in to feed on the overflow of cucumbers is not a good idea either. If you do not have enough friends and family to unload all the left overs on, consider the local food pantries which would happily accept your extra produce as long as it is all in good condition.

For more than 20 years, April Gonzales has been involved in garden design, installation and maintenance on the East End, as well as specimen plant scouting and site supervision for landscape architects.