Training Your Young, Skinny Pear Tree (5–7 Years Old)
✅ Training Goals
🍐 Encourage a strong central leader (if upright growth is desired). Develop 3–5 well-spaced scaffold branches (main limbs) around the trunk. Widen branch angles to about 45–60° to strengthen limbs and encourage fruit spurs.
🔧 Step-by-Step Plan
1. Choose Your Scaffold Limbs
Pick 3–5 strong, evenly spaced lateral branches starting from about 18”–24” up the trunk. Ideally, they should spiral around the trunk, not all from one side.
2. Use Limb Spreaders or Weights
Gently spread selected branches outward to 45–60° angles using: Notched wooden sticks Clothespins (for small soft shoots) Soft string + small weights (rocks in mesh bags work great) Do this in early summer when the wood is flexible.
3. Prune Competing Growth
Remove or shorten any shoots: Below your lowest scaffold Competing with the central leader (if you want one) Crowding other good laterals Don’t overdo it — leave plenty of leaves for energy.
4. Support the Central Leader
If the tree is too skinny to support itself, use a stake. If it’s too tall with no side branches up high, you can head it back by 6–12 inches to encourage branching next spring.
🕒 Timing
Spread branches now (June), while flexible. Prune lightly mid to late June if needed. Save major shaping or height reduction for dormant season (late winter).
Snakes (There are no poisonous snakes in our region (North-Central Ohio))
Stinging Nettle
This one is not originally from Ohio. It’s NOT NATIVE, but was actually brought here from Europe. Great job on that one… hindsight is 20/20. (Maybe Einstein’s quote would have helped…)
Nettle: Pro’s and Con’s
There are both good and bad things about this one! (Really, it’s the same with most plants and creatures in Ohio especially the ones on this list.)
The Bad: Personally, I think this one is WORSE THAN POISON IVY. The itchiness is really tedious and sharp. Also Tricky: Nettle can grow different heights, coloring can be light green to dark green, and depending on location might have more round or more narrow leaves. (See the images above for photos of various appearances. It’s ALL nettle.)
Personal Story: I did not learn to I.D. this plant, until I was in college, and actually suffered the itchiness of running into the leaves. It was to late for me! (already itching and regretful.) I swore i would learn to avoid Nettle, then and there.
The Good: Once it’s COOKED, it loses its itchiness causing compound. That’s right! It’s edible!!! I have tried it in a Spring Leek Soup from a foraged foods website… and it really was delicious.
Basic Recipe:
Boil some water or chicken broth. Add leeks and potatoes. turn the heat down to a simmer, then add the nettle … And … Voila! SOPA PRIMAVERA. (Springtime Soup)
The best time to gather nettle is when the leaves are newly spouting, typically this is in early spring. It’ more tender, and has sort of a light green, fresh earthy flavor. It feels like eating a grassy meadow.
Be sure you’re wearing thick gloves (leather work gloves, or deerskin driving gloves are my favorite for this kind of foraging.)
Keep your gloves on while you’re chopping in the kitchen, too!
Also edible: (But an entirely different plant: Dead Nettle.) It springs up early in Ohio, one of the first “weeds” to leaf out at the end of winter. It has purple flowers and looks similar to upright Creeping Charley.
Want to learn more about edible plants you can find in nature? Here some food-related posts I wrote on Native Joy Garden’s blog. Keep checking back for more.
Poison Ivy
Oops! One of those above images is NOT POISON IVY. Did you catch my mistake? (One is Nettle. Just trying to review what we learned, so far!) 😆
Just in case that tricked you… let’s learn three ways to identify poison ivy:
“Leaves of Three Leave it Be.”
“Berries White, Run in Fright.”
“Hairy Vine, No Friend of Mine.”
🍃 “Leaves of Three, Leave it Be.” Poison ivy usually grows with three leaflets, but sometimes the lower shoots or new growth may look different — don’t let it fool you! The rule still stands: If you see three, let it be.
🦌 Crazy but true: Deer can eat poison ivy with no problem at all! Their digestive systems handle the toxic oils just fine. So if you see nibbled vines, it doesn’t mean it’s safe for you — just that Bambi got there first!
🍃 “Berries White, Run in Fright.” These small, waxy white berries grow in clusters and are a warning sign of poison ivy or poison oak. They often appear in late summer to fall. While birds may eat them, they’re toxic to humans and can trigger a severe rash just like the leaves or vines.
🔍 What to Look For:
Small white or off-white berries
Growing from a thin, hairy vine or a woody stem
Often found along trails, fence lines, or wooded edges
🚫 Do Not Touch — Even Bare Branches Can Cause a Reaction!
🌿 “Hairy Vine, No Friend of Mine.” Poison ivy often grows as a fuzzy, hairy vine climbing up trees or fences. Those root-like hairs help it cling tightly — a big red flag!
🍇 Notice the Details! Some wild grapevines (and cultivated hydrangea vines) may look similar from a distance, but grapevines are a different texture, and their leaves are big, jagged, and very different from poison ivy.
☂️ Sneaky trick: The hairy vine might be hidden underneath a burst of three-leaf clusters that spread out like little green umbrellas. So while you’re hiking, brushing past a leafy branch might actually mean you’re touching poison ivy — even if the vine isn’t obvious.
Pictured Above: Burning Bush, Poison Hemlock, Pokeweed, Purple Nightshade. Only ONE of these Four Dangerous Plants is NATIVE to Ohio. Do you know which one?
(Answer: The Poke Berry was actually used by native americans and early pioneer settlers to dye fabrics.)
Poison Hemlock
This is the worst poisonous plant in all of Ohio.
It does stuff to your nervous system… and also smells like carrots!!! How rude.
Especially around dusk, when mosquitos are the worst.
Wear Lighter Colors
Do not wear DARK COLORS. Mosquitos tend to be attracted to darker clothing and fabrics. See the image below, from WoodlandWoman.ca an actual photo of her getting attacked by a swarm of mosquitos in Canada.
Bug sprays like DEET, picaridin (that’s another name for icaridin), and oil of lemon eucalyptus work well if you use the right amount on your skin or clothes. There’s also something called permethrin that keeps bugs away too, but permethrin should only be sprayed on clothes—not on your skin. TIP: Try not to combine bug spray with sunscreen because it may cause the bug spray chemicals to absorb into your skin more.
🐺 Coyote Safety Tip Coyotes are usually not a danger to humans and prefer to avoid people. But if you see a pack of them or if you’re injured, it’s important to stay calm.
🚫 DO NOT RUN. Running can trigger their chase instinct. Instead:
Back away slowly and quietly.
Avoid sudden movements or loud noises.
Make yourself look big if they get too close.
🍂 Why more sightings in fall? That’s when young coyotes are just old enough to leave the den and start exploring on their own — so you’re more likely to spot them out and about!
Aren’t these pups cute? Learn more facts about baby coyotes at this website: https://www.berrypatchfarms.net/coyote-babies-are-called/ (Photography credit: BerryPatchFarms)
I made this for a presentation at a local American Heritage Girls Troop Camp Out. The troop members are working on their badges for various skills, outdoor skills, survival, etc. This topic aligns with the AHG badgework requirement: “Learn about dangerous plants and animals in your area” Hope you found it helpful and informative!
Want to Learn More?
Check out the FREE Printable Booklet below.
Get a Free Printable Booklet: Ohio Dangerous Plants & Creatures
Keep Aware and Share this Tiny Booklet with your local troop, study group, or book club!
In North-Central Ohio, this is one of the best early native crops to be found.
Ramps: Ohio’s Wild Cousin of a Garlic
🧄🥬 I would describe the flavor profile of wild ramps as leafy with a garlic punch. More earthy and darker than a conventional green onion. Ramps are also a little “greener” and brighter than your typical garlic. It’s a pungent ingredient for any and all recipes! A great way to add flavor depth and interest without adding heat.
This tiny patch of ramps is too small to really harvest yet. You may clip some of the leaves with scissors, but be careful to leave enough to try more recipes next year!
Wild Ramp Recipes
My favorite way to cook with ramps is to chop the tops (green leafy parts) into small rectangles and toss with warm pasta and olive oil. Or use as a garnish (fresh) for topping a favorite meat
When adding ramps into a recipe, my favorite part is just the greenery, rather than the white bulb. they’re so fresh and deep, there is no need to really dig the bulbs in my opinion. It’s also faster to just clip the tops off with scissors and throw them in a bag to bring back to your kitchen! This *cutting rather than digging* is the best way to make sure ramps do not go extinct in your local area, too!
What a beautiful find! Wild ramps peeking up out of the ground in north-central Ohio in mid-April.
This post by Groovy Plants Ranch gives an outline over the decades of what types and styles of gardens and plants have been popular in our history since the 1940’s.
Have you seen one of these at your local library? It makes me so happy that these are being converted to a seed-sharing library! (Not to mention this is a wonderful way to re-purpose an outdated but amazing piece of furniture.)
New Uses for Old Technology
A card-catalogue drawer chest was once used to house that old school Dewey-Decimal-Style note card system to show where each book was located on the library shelves. But! In our modern digitized era, not only are you able to read about this on our blog, here at OrganicJOYgarden.com you are also able to take advantage of a NEW-useful-old chest-of-drawers. It also does a great service to a library’s surrounding yards ad gardens by encouraging local community gardening and seed-sharing.
A Seed-Saved is a Seed-Earned
Remember the old days when farmers and backyard gardeners alike used to harvest and re-use their very own hard-grown crops every year and would calculate what to keep back for next year’s garden starters? …Neither do I.
But now! We can refer back to those old practices and make those rituals and routines from history our own! Who would have guessed the local library was the perfect place to go to find the latest inspiration for gardens.
For centuries the only seeds available would have been those saved and/or traded. Not even mail-ordered and certainly not drop-shipped! Through many different ‘turns’ in our good and not-so-good history (not to mention when those ‘big-box’ version stores became popular) many of our regional-local and indigenous heirloom seeds were lost forever. (Read more about the importance of seed-saving)
These are a few of the seeds I am planting in my garden this year, can you tell which ones are from my local seed library?
The best thing about getting kids involved in gardening is the enthusiasm they bring. Any activity can become a game or a song, if allowed the full childlike-capability and creativity. The key is often to guides child’s energy and attention to details in a way that inspires them to tell their own story.
Winnie the Pooh is one such timeless character who has captures that imaginative play with a wonderfully educational ability to inform and give even the youngest listeners of stories a framework of story-telling to springboard from into their own land of hundred-acre-play.
Winnie the Pooh wanders in a pastoral landscape, observing a bird flying near an open – branched tree. -Excerpt from “Pooh Goes Visiting and Pooh and Piglet Nearly Catch a Woozle” By A.A. Milne, illustrated by ERNEST SHEPARD
C.S. Lewis shares a profound glimpse of nature’s processes in relationship to one who gardens. In his book The Four Loves, Lewis gives a brief shout-out about the experience of tending a garden in parallel to the ways we experience (or often diminish our experience of) love. Where is the glory of a garden? It is tended. Not completely wild. The gardener uses tools and necessary negatives to hone the outcome of what actually grows.
For an excerpt from the book, scroll down to read Lewis’s words. Read the quote.
The best place to read this book might be in a garden. 💚💚💚💚
Intro to C.S. Lewis’s writings
Although the author is famous for many different styles of writing, my favorite books he has written are the purely fictional kind. However, this book is much more oriented towards deep philosophical thought. That’s not exactly light reading.
Lewis is most well-known for his Narnia Books and Christian Insights, but he has written many genres including Allegories, Mythological Retellings, Political Commentaries, and much more!
Note about The Four Loves
Although the Four Loves is quite weighty in addressing the way that Love has four different guises (or divergent types of expression). Lewis goes to great depths in displaying these heavy concepts he has outlined, using practical examples.
He throws in dashes of word-pictures and imaginative illustrations every once in a while to keep it relatable. I feel the theoretical tone of this book is a bit tedious to wade through at times; however worth it – it is – to land on the height of a new epiphany hidden within the pages.
So, here is my blog entry to place a digital bookmark for later pondering.
The Illustration of a Garden
In the book, it comes as a welcome reprieve on page 116 & 117 that he turns to a simple illustration of a garden. This is so refreshing in the midst of the chapter called “Charity”. Of course it is not a new idea to point to the parallels between nature and spirituality. However, Lewis does it with such a unique angle that I couldn’t resist writing about it here.
Where the Glory is Found
“…It is no disparagement to a garden to say that it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns. A garden is a good thing but that is not the sort of goodness it has. It will remain a garden, as distinct from a wilderness, only if someone does all these things to it. It’s real glory is of quite a different kind. The very fact that it needs constant weeding and pruning bears witness to that glory. It teems with life. It glows with colour and smells like heaven and puts forward at every hours of a summer day beauties which man could never have created and could not even, on his own resources, have imagined. If you want to see the difference between its contribution and the gardener’s put the commonest weed it grows side by side with his hoes, rakes, shears, and packet of weed killer; you have put beauty, energy and fecundity beside dead, sterile things. Just so, our “decency and common sense” show grey and deathlike beside the geniality of love. And when the garden is in its full glory the gardener’s contributions to that glory will still have been in a sense paltry compared with those of nature.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves – p.p. 116-117
If Passionate Love = Nature…. 💚💚💚💚 Then Common Sense = Garden Tools.
The Earth Teems With Life
I think every time i read the above passage from this book, I land on a different thought. What amazing imagery of the importance of common sense. The simplicity of comparison here, is profound! Lewis contrasts the vibrant life found in plants with the sterile rake, shears, or lawnmower! The cruelty of killing some plants to allow a garden to be MORE fruitful.
When pondering the vast concept of *love* the argument for/against self-control is significant, to say the least. Although this book was written in 1960, it rings true today! The above words might ring true or hollow, depending on your personal answers to questions of morality.
“…a garden… will not… weed itself” -C.S. Lewis
But Wait, There’s More!
After the above quote on pages 116 & 117, Lewis’ focus shifts a bit. This time drawing comparisons between weather-patterns and grace. Check it out:
Grace Like Rain 🌧️
Without life springing from the earth, without rain, light and heat descending from the sky, he [person working as gardener] could do nothing. When he [the gardener] has done all, he has merely encouraged here and discouraged there, powers and beauties that have a different source. But his share, though small, is indispensable and laborious. When God planted a garden He set a man over it and set the man under Himself. When He planted the garden of our nature and caused the flowering, fruiting loves to grow there, He set our will to “dress” them. Compared with them it is dry and cold. And unless HIS GRACE COMES DOWN, LIKE THE RAIN AND THE SUNSHINE, WE SHALL USE THIS TOOL TO LITTLE PURPOSE. [Emphasis added]
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves – p. 116
Wow.
Lewis continues on down the garden analogy path, beyond this: comparing / contrasting our current fallen state to the original garden of Eden, but I’ll save that for you, dear Reader, to explore when you read the book for yourself. (Find The Four Loveson Goodreads.)
Re-Reading the Book a Decade Later
The first time I read this book, I was in high school. It was just after I read Till We Have Faces by Lewis, and the two books could not be more opposite. (See Till We have Faces on Goodreads)
Now, about ten years later, (ok maybe more 🧐) re-reading this has been really interesting. At a completely different stage of life, this one hits different. What a glimpse of Grace. Temperance. The way Lewis combines metaphor and philosophy is brilliant.
I am so thankful for someone like Lewis who has the ability to convert abstract emotions into thought-provoking words!
Take it to the Garden!
I hope that the next time you walk outside and into a garden, you take with you a small idea to ponder along the way.
Maybe from this very blog post.
If you liked the thoughts shared here, feel free to check out more of my blog:
Garden Meditations
Literary references.
thanks for stopping by OrganicJOYgarden.com
“The very fact that it needs constant weeding and pruning bears witness to that glory.” -C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
When I first started researching popcorn growing I ran into a few dead ends. My searches for “how to grow popcorn” and “backyard popcorn garden” were not exactly clear. I was trying to see if it was possible to pop regular sweet corn… or how to dry corn to make kernel for popping…? I know my kids and I LOVE eating popcorn, but didn’t really know where to start to add it into my garden.
Ornamental Corn is Popcorn
Glass Gem Corn is one of the most recently popular varieties with historic origins. (Photo: ThomasLENNE/Shutterstock)
It turns out all you need is ORNAMENTAL CORN to make popcorn! How awesome is that? So once I learned that fact, it was off to the races! Learning about types of native corn, or traditional maize was actually much simpler to navigate once I had the keyword of “ornamental corn”.
The next thing to do was choose a variety of popcorn! Or… I mean ornamental corn. Since the Cleveland Indians baseball team recently changed their name to the Guardians, I won’t even mention the name of this corn I grew up hearing in Ohio. But literally the indigenous people who lived here used this exact corn! I love that.
Historic Roots, Today’s World
For me, gardening with native plants is a way to “be patriotic” without being presumptuous. Read more about that soon, on my blog post about natives. Some of these heirloom seeds would be extinct or lost for good, without seed savers and people sharing with one another through trade, seed sharing groups, or other generous local gardeners helping a neighbor.
To read more about the importance of seed saving, go read this article about glass gem corn, on treehugger.org this gorgeous popcorn (traditional colored corn) was saved from extinction by someone honoring their own Cherokee roots. Today, it’s still rare, but went viral in 2019 for a photo that was shared of an especially vibrant-colored ear of corn.
So, when I discovered that ornamental corn was actually that, the original pop corn… It gives such an additional bonus of fascinating history. (Not to mention the tastiness that comes from making popcorn!!! )
Comparing Varieties of Popcorn to Grow
Types of Ornamental Corn:
Red Strawberry 🍓
Glass Gem 💎
Blue Maize 🪁
Standard White Popcorn 🍿
Standard Yellow Popcorn 🌮
These were the main ones I found. If you know another one, if you’ve tried it or had success growing it, let me know in a comment!! I love learning and would love to hear from you!
What does Glads Gem look like? Here is a cute example with photos.
🚫 Don’t Plant POP-corn and regular” Corn 🌽
Since both of these plants are so similar, but also pollinated by wind, the two types of corn (ornamental and any kind of sweet corn) should never be planted closer than 100 feet away from each other. This would cause cross-pollination, rendering both useless for each of their purposes. ***I repeat: DO NOT plant both POPcorn and REGULAR corn. ***
Here is a link explaining the above.
So, How do I grow a small patch of backyard popcorn?
This is my latest experiment. So, I’m relying on other growing tips I’ve found on this one. You can plant in HILLS, rather than rows! So if you’re like me, I’m planting corn in a smaller urban backyard… (read here: hobby gardener, rather than pro.) if you plant smaller hills containing 6-8 kernels in a circular pattern, they can grow all together and self pollinate.
Have you ever wondered if the old adage is true? If there are really a specific number of weeks from the first cricket song counting down to the first frosty morning of autumn?
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