(slow beat music) - [Narrator] Oklahoma gardening is a production of the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service as part of the Land Grant Mission of the Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at Oklahoma State University, dedicated to improving the quality of life of the citizens of Oklahoma through research based information.

Underwriting assistance for our program is provided by the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, helping to keep Oklahoma green and growing.

- [Narrator] Today on the best of Oklahoma gardening, we revisit the multi-step process of how to espalier a fruit tree.

Jen Olson shares with us about apple rust on pears.

And then we switch gears to a larger tree, that's been repurposed even after its life in the landscape.

(soft beat music) - Espalier is a form of intense pruning where we actually train a tree into a two dimensional form.

You might see this out in the open on some wires or up against a brick wall.

It's a form that actually dates back to the Roman era, and there's a lot of reasons why you might espalier a tree.

One is for the acsthe, aesthetic value.

So it does add a lot of vegetation into a vertical space that might not otherwise be covered, another way or reason why you might espalier something is to capture a microclimate.

So a lot of times fruit trees are trained into espalier forms and so it allows you to grow fruit trees into a very narrow area and potentially capture, if it's up against a brick wall, capture that radiant heat in order to produce more fruit.

Now, typically fruit trees are espalier, but it is possible to do some other trees as well.

We have Kieffer pears here, but the one thing if you were to use apples, apples tend to have a softer wood longer, allowing it to be more flexible in order to tie that down.

When we first started this process, I'm gonna come down here and look at this tree.

When we first planted it, like a lot of fruit trees, we actually cut back that SEM to where we wanted to establish that first cordon or that canopy to establish.

This is a normal practice that you do with fruit trees.

And again, it can be a little scary to just cut the top of a tree off, but what that does is it initiateS some of these side shoots to start growing and we want to direct that growth outward onto our cordons.

So the first year we cut that off and that season we got new growth coming out, and we trimmed everything except for these two.

And then we trained them and tied them onto this first cordon.

We did take one of their shoots and redirect it as our new leader, also tying it to this second cordon.

So the second year as we come on up, this shoot that we trained to be our new leader, we did the same thing.

So again, we topped it off and it allowed for new shoots to grow.

We trained one going out each direction on the cordon and a third one to again be our new leader.

So you can see each one of these is a year.

The third year we did the same thing.

So we didn't get our cordons trained sooner after tied down, and so that's why there was a little bit of an arch.

It was sort of hard to bring them down and we do have some sucker growth here.

So we're gonna go ahead and cut these back because these are not gonna do anything, but create a lot of vegetation here.

We wanna maintain these growing outward.

Now last year in the gardening world, it got away from us like a lot of things.

And so we didn't actually get out here and trim this like we should have to train that new growth.

So as we look at this, it's not too far past that we can't still go ahead and produce some new sprouts, so we're going to cut this.

And when we make this cut, we wanna make sure that we're cutting it above the buds that we're wanting to sprout.

So we have a sprout on this, or excuse me, a bud on this side that we're gonna hopefully get to grow this direction.

This bud we'll likely, we'll train onto this cordon.

And then this bud will be our new leader.

So we're gonna go ahead and trim this off, and later on the season, we're gonna see a lot of these shoots develop, and we'll be training those along this cordon.

So on our next tree here, we have a very similar situation.

You can see this little defect.

This happened because we didn't get out here and tie this one down.

The thing about espalier, is they require a lot of, regular checking and training.

So because this one didn't get trained and we had to get another sprout, it kind of made this elbow here.

Now, now that there's no vegetation, you obviously notice it, but once there's some vegetation on here, it's not gonna be as noticeable.

- What we do notice here and wanna take care of are these water sprouts that have come up from the first cordon branch that we have going across here.

So we're gonna go ahead and remove those so that they don't distract from our overall form that we're trying to create.

Now, again, something you wanna keep in mind as you're doing this is whatever structure you're using you wanna make sure to have that trellis in place before you actually plant your plants, because it's nice just to have that to grow on.

We've used this four cordon wire system, which works really well.

And again, there's different styles of espalier you can do.

You can do a candelabra, you can do a fence style, you can do this horizontal look that we've done here, but regardless when you're setting up your trellis, what's nice on these wires is to put in a turnbuckle so that you can actually tighten this wire as it might soften in the heat, or as it gets more weight on it from the fruit tree.

And that allows you to create more tension, to really support that tree.

So regardless of whichever style you choose, you wanna make sure that you're constantly, regularly I should say, looking at directing that growth of those sprouts, especially as they're still supple, otherwise you might have some deformations.

We have just used some of this horticultural tape in order to train those and tie them to our cordons and make sure that they stay where they're supposed to be.

But in the winter time, this sort of creates green flags all over your plant.

So something that we have found that's a little more discreet are these black kind of rubber band like ties.

So you can easily kind of wrap this around and it ties within itself and it will hold that plant and doesn't cause any harm on that bark.

So it's a nice little discreet way to tie that cordon to your wire.

But espalier is a fun way to try to incorporate fruit trees in what might be an unlikely tight space.

(upbeat music) Back in February, we did some pruning on our espaliered pair trees, and now that it's May, and we're getting a new flush of growth this spring, it's time to re-evaluate some of our pruning that we're doing.

So you can see we've got a lot of different water sprouts that are shooting straight up off of our cordons.

Now we're gonna mess with those a little bit later.

The first thing that we wanna focus on is our primary leader here.

If you remember, some of these were cut a little misshaped and stuff, and so we chopped them back by taking a heading cut right there.

And by doing that, we've got other buds that have now pushed out.

So we've got several new little branches that are coming out.

The reason why we are looking at this at this time of year is because these little branches are still very supple.

And so as we start to look at training this next cordon, that's gonna grow on our wire here, we can easily move these and tie them down.

So we're gonna look at which ones we wanna do that.

Now there's one that's kind of in the way of us filming here.

So I'm gonna go ahead and take this one out of the way here.

You can see it actually is growing down lower off this center leader here.

So I'm just gonna snip that one off to get it out of the way so we can see what we're doing here.

This one, that's the lower one here, what I'm gonna do is go ahead and pull this one down, you can see it's flexible, so I'm gonna tie it a little bit closer to the base using these little rubber ties.

And that gives us a nice tight anchor to pull that down.

We probably should go ahead and anchor it again over here, just to really secure it better.

So as it goes through this season, this bark on this is gonna harden and really solidify and allow us to develop that cordon.

So once we have that side done, then it's time to look at the other side.

Now we have a couple of options here.

We have this one that's pretty small.

And as you can see, I can pull that one down and could tie it.

I'm a little concerned with how weak and established it is with the stem.

If you can see, as I pull it down, it sort of is breaking a little bit there.

So I'd rather not use that one just because of how weak that connection is.

Instead, I'm gonna pull this one down behind there.

You can see, I can easily that one down.

It's pretty solid as far as the connection and the crotch there on the main trunk of the tree.

So we're gonna go ahead and again tie this one down and go ahead.

As we're training it, you wanna make sure to tie it down maybe more than what you would have to later on.

Once this is sort of hard and we can take a couple of these off or at least one of them off so that it's not tied up so much.

At this point we're gonna look now at the next step.

So we're gonna go ahead and remove this one because we've decided we're not gonna use that one.

And here we only have one other option.

We're trying to train it to go up to the next level.

And so, because cut this one, we also need to establish a new leader.

So this will be our new leader.

So we're gonna go ahead and let it grow.

If it's tall enough, you can tie it.

I'm not too concerned about it.

It's obviously gonna grow straight up and so we can anchor it at another point.

Now this is what we will prune our head back next February in order to get more sprouts growing and then again, train these cordons here.

- Now it's time to look at the rest of this plant.

Again, I mentioned that we've got several water sprouts growing up from some of the other cordons, for example, right here.

So at this point, we wanna make sure that we're keeping that design, which is having these horizontal cordons growing out.

And so we're gonna go ahead and prune some of these back as well.

Basically anything that is longer than just a few inches, we're gonna go ahead and take them back.

And be careful, there's some that are right there at the center too.

So we'll go ahead and snip that back as well.

You can see here's a couple of more, we do have some that are just a few inches tall and those aren't water sprouts.

Those are good branches and we're gonna leave those, but we're gonna go ahead and remove some of these longer ones here, so that we can maintain our horizontal cordons.

So you can see now we've got our second level done and we're gonna work our way down to this level, our very first level, and go ahead and prune some of those out as well.

You also wanna make sure you're following along your cordons, and as they continue to grow, if you want to continue to allow your cordon to grow, you're gonna need to tie it down.

You can see here, we've got this one, and we're gonna tie it so that it maintains that horizontal growth.

But again, we've got another water sucker here, water sprout.

So we're gonna go ahead and trim that one off as well.

So you can see we've got a nice horizontal growth at this point.

The nice thing about these espaliers is while they do take some training, the bulk of that training is done in the spring time either when it's dormant, and then also when you've got this young, supple, vegetative growth later on in the spring time.

Like any plant, you need to check on it throughout the season.

But for the most part, we've got our espaliers trained for the season.

(lively country music) - The last few years, one of the number one calls that our extension educators receive, is about a problem on pears.

This happens to be an edible pear, but this could also be an ornamental pear problem.

If we look at those leaves, you'll notice that there are leaf spots or blemishes, and sometimes they can be excessive.

This is actually due to a disease called pear rust.

And there are at least three different Gymnosporangium species that can cause this type of damage on the pear tree.

Just looking at it, we can't tell which of them it is, but the management is the same.

Now, I am relatively certain that the infection period for the most common pear rust, Asian Pear rust, starts very early in the spring.

Basically from the time this Pear tree put out its first leaf.

And for Cedar Hawthorn rust and Cedar Apple rust, the timing may be a little bit later in April, possibly even into the first week of May.

It's somewhat weather dependent, so in a warmer spring, we may see things a little bit earlier in the month, in a cooler spring, we may see it a little bit later in the month.

This disease, the way it got here, is I live out a little bit on the edge of the country, and there are a lot of Juniper or Cedar trees, less than a half a mile from me.

And these Cedar trees will produce different types of rust galls.

So this is the rust gall of Cedar Apple rust.

They are the biggest, this one's still just a smaller version of Cedar Apple rust.

We also have Cedar Hawthorn rust, which is still that circular shape, but a lot smaller.

And then this one that is a little bit less obvious, I believe is Japanese or Asian Pear rust.

This is a newer rust that we've only found in Oklahoma the past few years.

So we don't know a lot about it in the sense that this is probably the first year where I've seen noticeable lesions on the cedar trees.

In the early part of the spring, so late March or April, these areas on the Cedar tree start to wake up and are exuding these orange masses.

So these are the rust spores, the fungal spores that are going to blow to the alternate host, which is pear, apple, hawthorne, quince, many plants that are in the Rosaceae plant family.

And they land on the leaves and start these infections.

So this is what it looks like in mid April.

We will continue to see these lesions in large.

They may coalesce.

A leaf that has a really high number of spots may actually defoliate.

The plant may just choose to drop that leaf due to the amount of damage.

On leaves that have less damage, you may see those leaves persist all the way through fall.

Later in the season, we're gonna see that on the underside of the leaves, right now, they're basically little bumps, almost like little blisters or pimples.

These are going to, usually in June or July, start to look a little bit different.

There will be little projections or tubes that spores are going to tumble out.

- And blow back and infect the juniper, our cedar trees the juniperus species.

The question is, do I need to worry about applying a fungicide for this disease?

And it's a little bit unknown in the sense that if this is, in fact, Asian or Japanese pear rust.

We don't know as much about this disease, as we do cedar apple rust and cedar-hawthorn rust.

For those diseases, yes, it is helpful to make a fungicide application in the spring about the time the leaves emerge or even 10 days after.

And the main goal is to protect that foliage for more and more blemishes.

As we move into May and June, you're gonna notice these shoots are gonna continue to expand, and you may notice that the leaves at the top of the branches are blemish-free and the lesions will be further down, just indicating that infection cycle earlier in the year.

So, once we get out of April, you wouldn't need to make any fungicide applications.

For this tree, since it's an edible pear, I do have some pear fruits on here, and I know that the time we're filming this it's still April, so I want to protect those pear fruits.

For an ornamental pear, I may not be as worried about that, unless you find these lesions just unsightly and want to prevent them.

So my goal, if I were to make a fungicide application now, would to protect any new infections, but it's not going to cure what's already has the problem.

It's always important when you're thinking about fungicides to identify your pear as either a fruiting-edible pear or an ornamental pear, your choice of fungicides may vary, depending on if you're going to be consuming the product or not.

And since every garden center may have a different offering, it is better to visit your garden center and communicate with your county extension educator for the best products to use on your trees.

These are a couple of the products that you will commonly find in garden centers in Oklahoma.

You can also treat the cedar trees, but the time to treat the cedar is in June or July, not early in the spring.

We wanna wait until those little projections develop on the underside of the leaves, that's the time we're worried about the disease cycling back to the junipers.

One other thing about the junipers, they spend about 18 to 20 months is how long these develop on the juniper.

So just because you spray this year it may be two years before it's actually realized if that was effective.

I also wanna to point out that different pears may have different susceptibility to rust.

I have three different edible pears and an Asian pear in my landscape.

I think this one is a Bosc, we also have a Bartlett and a Keiffer, and this is definitely the most severely affected.

Some of the other pears that we have, have a lot less damage.

(upbeat music) - Well, this is truly an exciting day for us here in the whole Oklahoma City Park Department office, where we have delivered this beautiful Walnut table into its final place where it's gonna provide years and years and years of just service to Oklahoma City.

It's been a long process.

And it first started when this tree was just a log in the middle of a park in Oklahoma City.

And it was this old dead log, didn't look like much, but the Oklahoma City Park Department wanted to do something with it.

And so it's taken so much time, where we first hauled it to a mill, and we had a mill operator slice it up into slabs, and it just really, at first time, it exposed just how beautiful the inside of this tree was.

I mean, hard to imagine what it looked like and what it looked like from the inside.

And so then that started the process of drying the wood.

And then we worked with some local providers, where they donated a lot of their time and the material, and they plained it out.

He started the smoothing out of the process, and after that it was sanded.

And one of the last things that we, of course, had to do to really enhance the beauty of the wood, is that final process of sealing it.

And it was really nice to have CURT's shutters out of stillwater do a wonderful job of this, where you would actually take the epoxy and you would pour it onto the wood and you would have to spread it out.

And then it had to be this process of all these little air bubbles were coming up.

And then you use the flame to knock those bubbles down, and then the final coat of epoxy to really give us this nice sheen.

Now, it's sitting here all beautiful in this conference room, but it wasn't easy getting it up here.

- Couldn't take it through the freight elevator because it was too small.

So Oklahoma City Park Department employed Oklahoma City Glass to come out here and they had to remove a glass window off of the second floor.

And they used a crane to carefully lift it up through the window.

And it went through, I don't know, three or four different offices, just to finally get in this conference room where it had to be put onto a steel frame.

So it fits in pieces that it had to be put together.

So when they got all the pieces in here, they attached it with screws, the base onto the underside of it, and then they lifted it up and self rided it.

And now it's just such a beautiful treasure that Oklahoma city will always have.

This is really something that started so long ago because we wanted to showcase the value of trees in cities.

So often our trees get cut down in your front yard, in a city park.

They just get chipped up or just hauled off to the landfill.

And this is really a showcase project that we want to promote the use of trees in urban areas to actually construct beautiful pieces of furniture or other items from.

So let's say you have a particular tree that you love that for whatever the reason it has to be removed.

One of the things that you can do is to go to Oklahoma forestry's webpage and find a map of where all the local saw mills are, scattered all across the state.

Reach out to them, ask them if they wouldn't be able to mill out that tree.

Then work with your tree care company, your local arborist, to make sure that they know what is needed at the mill so they can remove that tree to provide that mill with the most wood that they can make whatever product you'd like to make out of it.

And so we encourage you, if you have large trees that you're removing off of your property, city parks, think about the things that you can make out of it, whether it's a beautiful table like this, whether it's a bench, whether it's anything, just know that trees can have an extended life after they've lived their whole lives in our city parks or your front yard.

- Well, I think from the perspective of being a, a parks and recreation professional since 1976, basically a bicentennial professional in parks and recreation, it's always been my goals to make sure that we are on the cutting edge of recycling and reuse of anything that happens in a parks and rec profession.

So being able to have this table in the parks and recreation conference room is very dynamic to us.

It proves what can be done and not just throw things away, or if we can be proactive and have a tree harvesters on contracts so that we can get them out and get them to explore and see what the realities and the availability is that that makes us even better stewards of the land.

And we know that that old growth will be used for some productive measure rather than mulch.

(fast guitar music) - [Narrator] The January landscape can look a little drab, but next week on the best of Oklahoma gardening, you won't wanna miss our colorful annuals that we have to share.

To find out more information about show topics, as well as recipes, videos, articles, fact sheets, and other resources, including a directory of local extension offices, be sure to visit our website at oklahomagardening.okstate.edu.

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You can find this entire show and other recent shows as well as individual segments on our Oklahoma Gardening YouTube channel.

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Oklahoma Gardening is produced by the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service as part of the division of agricultural sciences and natural resources at Oklahoma State University.

The Botanic garden at OSU is home to our studio gardens, and we encourage you to come visit this beautiful Still water gem.

We would like to thank our generous underwriter, The Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Food and Forestry.

Additional support is also provided by Pond Pro shops, Greenleaf nursery, and the Garden Debut Plants, the Oklahoma Horticultural Society, and Tulsa Garden Club.

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