Itsy bitsy eggs! I got 5 yesterday! The little girls aren't so little anymore. I can barely tell them apart from the old girls.
Jimmy and I went on a fruit tasting walk in our back yard yesterday. It appears we have 4 classic native Washington apple trees and one of them is a crab apple. They are all tasty but very small. Pruning is in order this fall. It wont help next years crop but 2014 should be bumper. Two plum trees: one huge yellow plum and another with tiny elongated purple plums. Should be enough purple to make plum wine. Then we have two pears trees. I need to research these. They are only about 7 feet tall and they have about 5 or 6 pears each. The pears are pretty sickly looking. I don't know anything about pear trees or how to help them thrive. So, more new info has to go into this old brain. The blueberries are just now ripening. This too has to be fixed. They are in some serious shade and are being overgrown by blackberries. And Blackberries. We have blackberries everywhere. Big, fat, juicy ones. We really need a couple of goats to get these things under control!
As for the garden we planted? We have broccoli and green beans. We feel fortunate that at least something worked in the garden this year. There is a huge cherry tree limb hanging over the beds that was oh so naked in the spring and didn't seem like it would block all the sun from the garden. This thing is old enough and tall enough that we will need a professional with a crane thingy to cut it off. It looks like that might be high on our list this fall. We have a lot of 'widow maker' (Jimmy's words) limbs that need to come off before they come down on their own this winter. Just one more project to add to the list!
Jimmy and I went on a fruit tasting walk in our back yard yesterday. It appears we have 4 classic native Washington apple trees and one of them is a crab apple. They are all tasty but very small. Pruning is in order this fall. It wont help next years crop but 2014 should be bumper. Two plum trees: one huge yellow plum and another with tiny elongated purple plums. Should be enough purple to make plum wine. Then we have two pears trees. I need to research these. They are only about 7 feet tall and they have about 5 or 6 pears each. The pears are pretty sickly looking. I don't know anything about pear trees or how to help them thrive. So, more new info has to go into this old brain. The blueberries are just now ripening. This too has to be fixed. They are in some serious shade and are being overgrown by blackberries. And Blackberries. We have blackberries everywhere. Big, fat, juicy ones. We really need a couple of goats to get these things under control!
As for the garden we planted? We have broccoli and green beans. We feel fortunate that at least something worked in the garden this year. There is a huge cherry tree limb hanging over the beds that was oh so naked in the spring and didn't seem like it would block all the sun from the garden. This thing is old enough and tall enough that we will need a professional with a crane thingy to cut it off. It looks like that might be high on our list this fall. We have a lot of 'widow maker' (Jimmy's words) limbs that need to come off before they come down on their own this winter. Just one more project to add to the list!
