Did I miss a couple of months?  Whew doggie it’s hot out!  Last night the weatherman was predicting it to be one hundred and two degrees here today!  Yowza!  I decided to have my coffee at five o’clock this morning, and headed out to give the orchard a much needed drink before the sun came up.

By the time I’d watered all the fruit trees, the grapes, blackberries and blueberries, the sun was up and I’d been watering for almost three hours straight.  That should make for a painful water bill if I have to do that several times!

I ate enough blackberries while watering them to make myself sick this morning, tomorrow I’ll need to go out again bright and early and pick a bowl, they are just beginning to ripen and we have OMG what were we thinking so many!  Three seventy foot rows… and they are quite prolific here in the River Valley.

I went out and dug up the remainder of the garlic (yum yum yum!) and then turned the sprinkler on for the beds. Another cup of coffee, then I’ll shut the water off and hit the shower.

Rain please!

Is there anything better than fresh fruit out of your garden?  I can’t wait until next year, when our orchard trees will be old enough we no longer have to pick all the fruit off of them, this year I think Jim and I probably picked a hundred apples off, it was so hard to do it too!

My picture is a bit blurry, but this is the first bowl of strawberries this year.  And since Jim is down in New Orleans gorging himself on gourmet food, I get to eat the entire bowl myself!

Smothered in pure cream with a sprinkling of sugar… now that’s bliss.  Absolute bliss.

All I need is a croissant!

 

It’s been two years and seventeen days since Jim and I bought this house.  I thought I’d post a few before and after shots, we did a lot of planting last year!

I wanted a small garden area, off the kitchen.

We laid a few boards out there, and some plants in pots to get an idea:

And here it is one year later:

Someday, the fence will be gone, it’s been a top priority since we moved it, but other more pressing things keep getting in the way!

A wall of blackberries!  Actually, three of them!  Each of the three rows is sixty feet long.  I don’t know what we were thinking!  Anyone want to come pick blackberries?

And two years ago, after we tilled the area and began to set the posts.  Let me tell you, this was a job!  We did this in August, because we had thirty starts that were beginning to die, that came from plants we gave my folks starts off of, from our farm:

There are three 24 foot rows of grapes here.  They are just starting to take off this year, they struggled last year.  We planted these last spring.

I didn’t get back far enough to get the entire orchard in the picture, but we planted, about one and half years ago, 4 apple trees, 4 cherry trees, 3 pear trees, 3 peach trees, 2 apricot trees, and one mulberry tree.  This area includes the grapes and the blackberries, sits in front of Jim’s shop, and we’ve dubbed it the “orchard”.

Here’s what the “orchard” looked like when we started, right after we dug the holes for the trees.  The blackberries were in the ground already, but the grapes didn’t get planted until the following spring.   The trees were planted on Thanksgiving day, 2008.

And as you can see in this next photo, Jim and I cleared the wooded area out behind the blackberries, and that’s where we built his shop:

We still have tons and tons we want to do.  Lots of flowers and ornamentals to be added, but the “hardscaping” has to come first, and we’re still at it!  I hope you enjoyed my before and after shots.

What would I do without the tractor?  Having had a couple tractors before this one, I did all the research and shopping and picked this baby out for myself… not my darling hubby, although I’m sure he thinks it’s his tractor, LOL.  I think it’s around 5 or 6 years old now, and since we ended buying this place with only 5 acres, it doesn’t get a lot of use.

But when I need to do some work, like finish moving this mulch pile, it sure comes in handy!

I dragged the remaining limbs and branches off the hillside between the shop and the orchard, and burned them, so the hillside is finally all cleaned up and ready for me to landscape!

Only I have no ambition this year!

Mine’s coming along nicely so far this year… last year it was pretty much a dud, since we put the beds in late spring, and the soil we mixed was lacking.  The dirt still has a long ways to go to get it right, but that comes with years, not months.

I love chives, I think they are so pretty!

Can you see a couple of the azaleas we planted along the edge of the woods peeking out here, behind the lettuce and garlic beds?  Not all of them made it.  Strangely enough, all the white flowered ones died, and the red ones appear to have survived.

The two beds in front are planted in potatoes.  We’ll see how that goes.

Since I have no idea if Jim is going to be working from here this year or elsewhere (it keeps changing) I’m not planting a whole lot.  I picked up four tomato plants and a couple of pepper plants and put them in this bed.  Normally we grow about twenty tomato bushes, but we do them in pots.

I just put these in the ground this morning, so they look rather sad at the moment.

And this shot is obviously not from my garden area, but out front, but I just had to show you these gorgeous flax flowers!  I am just crazy over these, and want to add more!

Sadly, we did so much work around here last year that I got a bit burned out, and I’m not enjoying Spring as much this year… in the sense of getting out and going wild planting things, I love doing that, but just can’t find the energy this year.