Gardening With The BeesWatch our garden (and knowledge) grow!

Yay! We took advantage of the early warm weather today to prune our fruit trees. We’re nearly a month ahead of last year, so we’re doing good!

With the surprising 64-degree weather, I took a walk around the yard today with the dogs to see how things fared the winter months. Here are some observations:

• All five of our blueberry bushes were nibbled down to within an inch of the ground. Yikes! Stay tuned to hear if they come back. I’ll have to read up about protecting them from hungry creatures. I found it funny that whatever ate them completely ignored the forsythia plants interspersed among the blueberries.
• My tulips are already four inches high! Wow, last I looked they were just peeking out of the soil. Suddenly their wide, thick leaves are fully formed and reaching for sun. Likewise, the thin leaves of the daffodils have shot up around ten inches. The sunny warm location must be the trick. I greeted them all with smiles and removed stray twigs and bark to help them feel comfortable.
• No asparagus sprouts observed yet.
• Although no green buds yet, the first-year grape vines feel flexible. I hope they made it through their first winter in the ground.
• Need to decide if we will spray the fruit trees this year or let them be “organic”. The buds on the trees are definitely more obvious than last time I looked. Can easily see the bud size difference when comparing a pruned/fallen branch to a live one. Exciting!
• The irises are already back to life, with flat triangular spikes poking up all over.

Joy.

Just a quick log entry to document that yes, I was late getting to the fruit tree pruning AGAIN. Two evenings of work cleaned up the seven trees, and they should be ready for spring!

I’ve been taking photos of the fruit trees so we can gauge their growth at different times of the season.  Here are today’s shots of one of the apple trees and the pear tree.  Looks like we should have a nice turnout this year!

Although we don’t fully condone it, we do spray our fruit trees.  The quality of the fruit is much better without pests and molds involved.  Please wash thoroughly!

Tonight Ryan spread all the remaining pine branch wood chips under the pine trees in our back yard.  Took a long time, but looks a lot better!  No sign of hostas yet.

This was a great use for these particular wood chips, because they would not be as attractive around flowers or bushes.  The pine needles and cones look natural here.

This past weekend I was on a mission was to transplant the two smokebushes from the front porch area to the yard somewhere.

They are beautiful trees, and just too close to the house… not to mention the front door.  By mid-summer, they hang over the sidewalk, reach up over the roof of the house, and block visitor visibility from the house.

Well, after I got started, I found there a few more than two!  The “one” that I started to dig up soon became two, then three, and in the end, four!  Who knows how many the other “one” is?!  Thus, I had more work ahead of me than I thought…

I planted two in the front yard and one in the back.  I left the last one where it was, because I was completely exhausted.  It’ll have to wait for another day.

Got a lot done this weekend!  I finished pruning the remaining fruit trees – my count was incorrect… there were 3 apple trees remaining, plus the plum.  That was a lot of work.

Ryan backed our cars out of the garage and set to work improving the rickety shelves in the garage.  Two 12-foot shelves are done… 2 more to go!

Besides pruning the fruit trees too late, I broke another rule this weekend… I planted fall bulbs in spring.  We’ll see what happens.  I ran out of time last year to get them in the ground.  I kept the bulbs in the garage so they would be nice and cold all winter.  I saw them beginning to bud already, so I figured I may as well give it a try – I hope they do okay!  I accomplished this by digging the first few inches of unfrozen soil from the bed on Saturday, and letting the sun warm the ground for a day.  This worked well – come Sunday, I had a few more unfrozen inches, so I amended the soil and dropped the bulbs in with some fertilizer.  I’ll let you know how it goes (grows).

On Sunday, Ryan got the chainsaw out and helped me trim a shrub (fun stuff!) and then cleaned up the lower dead branches on a big pine in our back yard.  Looking better every week!

We took the dogs for their first morning walk of the season this morning.  Yay!

We got to it a little late, but at least we got to it.  Ryan and I managed to prune 2 apple trees and the pear tree before we were caught in a complete white-out of snow today.  We have 2 apple trees and 1 plum tree left to go.

The pruning should happen while the fruit tree is still dormant – I could tell we were late because there are already buds all over the tree!  Very exciting to see.  (But I did feel bad lopping off branches with buds.  Gotta be cruel to get the best fruit.)  

I’m new at this, so if anyone has any info on pruning fruit trees after buds are formed, please share.  Otherwise I’ll finish the job next weekend.

I know it may be hard to appreciate what is going on here with just these cropped photos, but Ryan and I spent a few hours this past Sunday trimming back this enormous shrub in our front yard.

It went from WILD to WOW!  What you see here is only the base of it.  This super-wide evergreen reaches over 7′ high.

Thanks go to my Mom for this clean-up idea.

While I changed out the plugs, wires, & distributor cap on the old truck, Ryan mowed the entire yard AND got the push-mower running and did trim clean-up.  Looks GREAT!  We took the truck out for a test spin around the (huge) block, and it’s running like new.  How awesome is that!?

We then proceeded to mulch and water the entire vegetable garden, and plant the 2 wedding trees.  In there somewhere, I changed my oil and Ryan worked with the compost bins.  Wow, it’s 7:30 and we never ate lunch?  Time to make supper then.

We are hurtin’!  Sore and tired, Ryan fell asleep on the couch during an episode of Seinfeld.  That’s how I know he’s had a hard day.

Watch for more photos on Wednesday!