Oklahoma Dreaming: The Cherry Tree
by Donna Schoenkopf
I hear something.
I can tell it’s a truck and it’s pulled up my driveway and parked.
I am taking a shower under my outdoor shower at the back of the house. It’s a HOT day. I have been “working” in the “yard” and now I am cooling off and getting cleaned up.
I turn off the water, grab my towel and peek around the corner of the house.
It is Peewee. And he has something on the back of his truck. Saplings.
Yipes! I better get dressed! But he is already out of his truck and I don’t have time to get dressed so I wrap my flimsy towel around my old, fat body and holler from around the corner, “I’m in the outdoor shower!”
Since it would take me some time to get dressed and I am sopping wet, I decide to just be as modest as possible, fat arms over the sides of the towel, my splotchy, old lady legs exposed to human eyes for the first time in a LONG time, and go to the back door because he looks like he’s in a hurry. He’s already unloading trees.
I open the back door, a sight to be seen.
Now THAT startles him.
I excuse myself to go get dressed after finding out briefly what is going on.
(The trees are from Judy and Carole. They had sent money to Peewee secretly to buy me one tree as a housewarming gift from them last winter. But he has managed to squeeze three out of the deal. Two apples and a cherry.)
A cherry!
I LOVE cherries!!
Cherry Memories
My first cherries: a huge flat of them when my newly formed family stopped in Banning. New Stepfather bought them. We children ate them all, in the 1953 light green Cadillac Deville, in 110 degree heat, on our way to Indio, California to begin a new life.
They were indescribably delicious.
Another cherry experience: son John and I are on our way to Orcas Island to see Susan. John is the age I was when I ate the cherries in Banning, so when we saw the sign that said Cherries alongside a cherry orchard, we stopped and bought a huge flat of them and ate them till they were gone.
They were indescribably delicious.
And now here stood my very own cherry tree. (The two other trees faded into second place in my consciousness.)
Where? To? Plant? It?
I had eliminated the first possibility—near the pond—a few months before when Peewee showed me Judy’s and Carole’s letters. Too hard to water them so far away from my water source, even though they would have been dazzling down there along the water’s edge in spring time.
I quickly realized, as I stood wondering what to do with them, that I wanted them close to the house. Near my Masanobu Fukuoka compost pile. Might as well have all my fruit and vegetables in one place, right outside my kitchen window.
It’s a flat piece of land out there and the sun beats down on it. The clay has been pounded by all kinds of trucks and cars that moved across it and parked on it while the house was being built. It was going to be really hard soil to plant in. The clay in that area is parched. Just scraggly weeds, clay, no shade. There are long, wide cracks everywhere. It’s got lots of good minerals in it, but it’s also so compacted that drainage is impossible and it is also one of the most horrible things to dig in. It’s as hard as cement. I mean LITERALLY. And if you wet it down, it turns into glue, LITERALLY.
I decided to take a modified Masanobu Fukuoka approach and dig as big a hole as I could without killing myself and put into the hole whatever nutritious additives I could, like rocks or (it turns out) peat moss.
“These trees better have a damn good life force,” I thought. I was putting them to the test, that’s for sure.
I planted the two apple trees at some distance from the house and I planted the cherry tree closer in, next to the driveway. A place, I thought, of honor. It would welcome people driving up to the house with its halo of cherry blossoms in the spring.
Hah. I was to find out later what a mistake that was.
I dug (I reeeeeeeeeeally hate digging) a circular trench around each tree and filled it with water.
The water stood in the trenches for a day or two. The clay wouldn’t drain. Those trees were standing ankle-deep in water. This couldn’t be good.
The apple trees struggled on. They endured wind and heat and wet feet. They weren’t thriving, but they were alive and not dying any time soon.
But the cherry tree ...
At first its leaves looked like they were wilting and then they began to turn yellow and then slowly they lost their grips on the branches. It was June. This was not a good sign.
I thought, “I bet it’s because the water isn’t draining properly and that means it’s drowning.”
So I packed some peat moss around it and over it. To kind of soak up the extra water.
It kept dropping leaves.
Hmmm.
So I dug it up. Whew!! It stunk!! And planted it in the biggest pot I could find with lots of delicious potting soil.
THAT should do the trick! I’ll have a BONSAI cherry tree! Sort of.
It kept dropping leaves. I felt the soil. I was nice and wet, but it was boiling hot. I mean boiling hot. The further I stuck my hand down into the soil, the hotter it got. It was an inferno!
Oh, my God. I had killed my cherry tree! But being the eternal optimist, I peeled some of the bark off the sapling with my thumb nail and sure enough it was green.
How could I cool the soil down?
Reflect the heat away. Yes!
So I got some aluminum foil for heat-reflecting purposes and covered the top of the pot almost up to the trunk, crimping and folding the silver around the edges of the pot. It looked like a giant pie with a cherry tree growing out of the middle of it, on its way to a potluck dinner.
The next morning I went out on the back patio to see how Cherry Tree was doing.
SOMETHING, maybe a possum or a raccoon, a MAMMAL of some sort, I could just TELL, something with hands or a snout, had ripped open the foil.
Damn.
The reflective quality of the tin foil had worked. But if it’s going to tempt those mammals (whoever they are) into ripping it up every night, it’s not going to work.
So I got some white paper instead and covered the soil again.
By now there were no leaves on the tree.
No shit.
Duh!
I went on the Internet and found out that Vitamin B1would promote good root growth.
Vitamin B1. What has Vitamin B1 in it? Among other things like dairy and meat, it is found in brown rice and yeast.
So, it being at the end of the month and me not having a lot of cash to spare, I got out my yeast packets and brown rice and mixed them together in a bowl and went out to the back deck and kneaded the mixture into the soil and recovered everything with the white paper.
I watered it for a couple of days, testing every day to see if the soil was dry or hot or otherwise inhospitable to my darling cherry tree.
Things were wet and cool. The bark still had green underneath its outer skin.
Then yesterday I peeled some of the white paper back and ...
The brown rice had rooted! It loved it in there with the yeast and soil and wetness, under cover of all that nice, white paper.
It made me smile. Good old Masanobu Fukuoka. If conditions were good, plants would grow. And that means conditions were good because the rice was growing.
Today I looked under the white paper and found ...
Grayish white fluffs of some kind of fungi. You know ... the kind that grows in your refrigerator? Could it be yeast? Rice? Aliens?
I scooped out the gray fluff. I checked the bark on Cherry Tree‘s trunk. I re-installed the white paper.
So that’s where it stands.
If Cherry Tree has enough Life Force it will eventually settle down and push out some new, tender leaves.
After all, Fig Tree made it, and I had just thrown IT on that hard, cracked ground and watered it once in a while.
I’ll let you know if my baby makes it.
Send good thoughts.
donna@fourstory.org
Comments
Great lessons for getting trees to grow in Oklahoma.
Your story reminded me of my first home in Norman when I tried to grow a dogwood. Should be easy - you see them wild all through the woods.
After 6 dead trees in 6 years of trying I finally learned the secret - plant them in the shade and water them twice a day for the entire summer. Today there is a beautiful dogwood in Norman but it wasn’t easy.
I gave up trying to get azaleas to survive. In Oklahoma they require shade and specific soil conditions.
Here in DC dogwoods, redbuds, and azaleas literally grow like weeds. It’s hard to kill them. Abandoned houses have them growing out of control.
I don’t recall the first cherries I ate, but I remember the big sackful you bought and we all shared when The Cell was strolling the byways of Vancouver. I don’t know if the cherries were sweet—but the memory certainly is.
2009-07-02 by Donny
Root, root, root for the cherry tree in Donna’s pot in Oklahoma. Good thoughts coming your way :-)
2009-06-30 by JoAnne Sanger