The Future is Abundant
A Guide to Sustainable Agriculture

Back to the Table of Contents

A Wealth of Trees

Karen Hayden

Harvey Johnson lives with his brother Clarence on the farm their grandparents homesteaded in 1887. Their land is on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound. Cherry and pear trees their grandmother grafted and planted almost a hundred years ago still surround the farm house.

Harvey has been planting trees on the farm since he was twelve years old. Through the years of experimenting he has extended the range of several plant species beyond their established climatic zones, including the subtropical kiwi and persimmon. "It's just a hobby," Harvey says, "like some people go to music or dance."

One of the most surprising of Harvey's plants is his kiwi. The vines stretch along sixty feet of trellis: above the top wire, tangled coils of vine curl over, or arch and trail to the ground. Their trellis is on a north-facing slope which helps protect them from leafing too early in the spring. The kiwis begin growth sometime in April and flower in June. Bees are necessary for pollination. Harvey's two six year old female kiwis started bearing three years after they were planted, and have yielded a hundred pounds of fruit each season for the last three years. The plants are free from mildew or bug damage. Kiwis seem to have left behind the disease and insect predators they might have had in their native environment, the Yangtze Valley in China.

Harvey propagates kiwis from his established plants by layering the vines. The newly rooted vines generally are kept indoors for the first couple of winters as they have a better chance of surviving a freeze after they have some woodiness in their stems. Kiwis are vigorous and rampant growers. They set a lot of fruit which needs to be thinned in order to ripen large kiwi fruits. If the fruit is picked before the first frost and stored in a cool room, it will keep until February. The fruit is brought to room temperature to ripen. After the plant becomes dormant it can survive temperatures as low as ten degrees.

Young persimmon trees also can tolerate temperatures as low as ten degrees, and mature trees can survive temperatures down to zero. Harvey's first two persimmon trees were the Japanese Kaki variety grafted onto American rootstock. They were planted in 1955. One of the young trees survived a freeze that dropped to zero degrees Fahrenheit the winter after it was planted. The top growth of the other tree died, but the American rootstock survived and sent up a shoot, which is now a twenty-five foot high tree. One of its branches is an improved American variety that Harvey grafted onto it. These persimmon trees stand against a south-facing wall, which aids in ripening the fruit. The trees produce an average of twenty-five pounds of persimmons a season. Harvey picks the Japanese persimmons before the first frost and stores them at room temperature. The three inch long fruits ripen around Christmas time. The American persimmon tree has fruits about half an inch to an inch long that ripen on the tree before first frost.

The persimmon trees are planted down the hill from Harvey's newest orchard which includes young pearapple, plumcot and cherryplum trees. Across the road in the garage Harvey has started eucalyptus seedlings to "see what they'll do." Outside the garage there is a two year old pomegranate tree that Harvey planted for the same reason. Scattered around the farm are other trees unusual to the region, including several varieties of fig and a twenty year old almond that occasionally bears a good crop. In one orchard there are a couple of nitrogen-fixing trees, a silk tree (Albizia julibrissin) and a goldenchain tree (Laburnum anagyroides). Harvey commented, "I planted them in with the fruit trees and they seem to do real well." Beyond the orchard there is a small pond partially surrounded by native forest: a young Dawn Redwood overlooks the pond. After reading about this ancient species which survives from the Upper Cretaceous era 100 million years ago, Harvey decided to try one. "It's a fossil, just like me," he remarked. The six year old Dawn Redwood is now about eighteen feet tall. Delicate branches fringed with fine needles allow plenty of light to reach the ground cover.

The trees mentioned above are interspersed with trees more common to the region. On one of the original orchards are Cox Orange Pippin apple, Red Flemish pear, Green Gage and Sugar plums and Italian prunes. Near the house is a mixed grove which includes includes a Carmello walnut, a Daroga Red peach, two figs, a yew, elderberry, and a low trellis of Delaware grapes. Harvey's garden also contains a mixture of plants, many of them perennials-- asparagus, daylilies, Egyptian multiplier onions, yucca and cardoons. This intermingling of species and propagation of perennials is basic to permanent agriculture; Harvey, however, had not heard of the word "permaculture." His farm's design was guided mainly by curiosity: "There's plenty you can do with a piece of land if you just get to it and start experimenting."

Maintaining the orchards requires as much imagination and persistence as establishing them. For example, Stellar's jays and robins consume nearly all of Harvey's cherries and nuts, so his latest idea for protecting them is to fly an owl shaped helium balloon over the trees. Frost sometimes destroys the top growth of young kiwis, persimmons and figs, but with Harvey's care, many apparently dead plants have recovered. "The main thing is to protect the roots," Harvey emphasizes. He mulches the young frost-tender varieties or brings them indoors for their first few winters. Sensitive plants need diligent attention, and some varieties won't make it.

"Plant and thin," Harvey says, "just like thoughts in the head."

The Future is Abundant A Guide to Sustainable Agriculture

A Wealth of Trees

Karen Hayden

The Future is Abundant
A Guide to Sustainable Agriculture