Beauty Farming Life

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been shopping at a local nursery that is putting all their stuff on 70% off.  I'm lucky to have one near my office and so I can go at lunch, load a couple of trees in the car and take them home.  So far, this is our fruit inventory: Tropic Snow Peach Dorsett Golden Apple Kieffer Pear Pineapple Pear Santa Rosa Plum Celeste Fig Texas Everbearing Fig Arapaho Blackberry Navajo Blackberry Carlos Muscadine Grape Vine Cowart Muscadine Grape This is in addition to the trees I already have at home:  Desirable Pecan Choctaw Pecan Mexicola Grande Avocado Arbequina Olive So as you can see, we have a lot of potential for fruit, berry and nut production.  There are more that we want, notice the lack of citrus.  We would love a lemon, lime and orange...also want to try some blueberries, but for now, this is what we have.  They are best planted in their dormant season, usually from December to March, so if I can just baby...

Got two more fruit trees today at lunch... Wonderful Pomegranate Page Mandarin Orange We'll have quite the orchard going if we can just keep them alive and get them in the ground in time for Spring.  Now watering them "long distance" will be another issue but we'll figure it out.  We can always hold out hope for a wet Spring!

HERE . We have kept them in the city until the time is right to plant them out at the farm.  Today when I left for work, I looked and to my surprise, the pear tree has already started budding out and putting on flowers...s o much for that groundhog! Of course, none of the trees  are in the ground yet, and we're only in early February.  A freeze is definitely still possible.  Somewhere deep down in its genetic makeup, this tree thinks it is time to bud out.  I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do at this point?  If we do get a freeze, should I cover it and protect this new growth?  Not worry about it?  Any suggestions?

Well what do we have here?  Apples?  Cherry tomatoes?  Cherries?  No, they are a fruit called the "Barbados Cherry" or also "Acerola Cherry". Not actual cherries though, they are just called that because they look like them.  It's a perennial fruit tree/bush native to Barbados and the Caribbean, that grows dozens of these little bright red (and dare I say, beautiful) fruits. They start off as these pink blossoms that, as a side note, smell wonderful. They fruit and ripen at different times so the tree has blossoms, unripe and ripe fruit on it at the same time. They go from blossom to fruit in about 25 days.  It can be grown as a tree up to 15' high, or an easily managed shrub.  Ours is currently a shrub, ha. They look kind of like beautiful, perfect red apples in this picture don't they?  Of course with no frame of reference you can't really determine the size.  See the picture below, they are about the size of an actual cherry.  Be...

Muscadine grapevine This was a pleasant little surprise.  It's a Muscadine grape vine that I bought last year on end of Summer clearance.  I didn't put it in the ground because I can't just put it anywhere without some planning for a trellis and it got so hot so fast this year, I was concentrating on the fruit trees themselves.  So I've been babysitting it in the backyard in town, keeping it watered.  It's not the most attractive plant at the moment since all I've done is water it and it's kind of gangly, but notice the little surprise we found... ...an actual small cluster of grapes!  Only three here, but hiding behind another set of leaves were... ...four more ripe grapes!  We're excited that it actually produced fruit, while still in their small, plastic, garden center container. Then we ate them. OH. MY. GOODNESS. The grapey-est (new word) grape flavor we've ever had.  Wow.  I had no idea they were s...

It was a weekend of digging and prepping the garden.  The grass needed to be mowed but we had almost 4 inches of rain at the farm last week and there were some muddy areas.  I didn't want to get the Zen Machine stuck in the mud down one of the trails, so I decided to save that for the next weekend.  Instead, I decided to dig holes to get some of our fruit trees in the ground. OK, so I didn't have to dig quite THIS many, but it sure felt like it a few times.  Really though, it was only a few holes.  I decided to get five of our trees into the ground this weekend.  First up was the fence line in the front yard  (2nd Family's back pasture fence) so that all the citrus would be together.  If you'll remember THIS POST  last Summer, this was part of my planning, to get all the citrus in this spot.  And now I have.  Yay! First up, I planted the Mexican Lime tree.  It's a great lime tree that is well s...

The first thing I planted this weekend was our "Ginger" in a clearing I've recently created by edging and mowing.  This is the best for our part of the country, hoping we have some good Pomegranates in our future. Next up was the Here is where I got some fruit off of it last year, while it was still in the container.  Hard to see in this picture but it's a small bush shape. And lastly, I planted the Santa Rosa Plum .  It's supposed to be an easy to grow plum and we both love plums, so I have hope for this one.  Found a nice clearing to plant it in so it will get plenty of sunshine.

It was a good weekend, for the most part.  I will share more of the events in the next post.  For now, I'll share these pictures.   Hope I don't bore you all with my fruit tree plantings.  I do this to share of course on the blog and also to give me some sort of record of what we've got planted and where. So this weekend I put in five more trees: Pear trees The first two I planted were pear trees, two varieties.  One, a " Kieffer Pear " and the other, a " Pineapple Pear ".  I put them together as they benefit from mutual pollination.  They are on the side of the property behind the area of the barn site and at the back of what I'm calling the future "chicken yard". Dorsett Golden Apple Tree Here is one that I really hope does well.  It's a " Dorsett Golden Apple ".  It's about the only variety of apple that does well in our semi-tropical climate.  I planted it away from the house but still close enou...

Was roaming around after the rains and checking the fruit trees.   The Pomegranate tree has buds all over it, probably ten or twelve. There is a pear coming in on one of the pear trees and  a couple of flowers on the other one. Here are some Satsuma Mandarins coming in. These are tiny Barbados Cherries that are starting to bud out. The dewberries are SLOWLY coming in, we've usually harvested in mid April, these look like mid May. Even a few Meyer lemons are starting to develop.  They could all just drop off in a few weeks, ha, but fingers crossed that everything keeps growing.

Well, I might have given up the garden temporarily, but my green thumb, so far anyway , is at least extending to the fruit trees.  I roamed around this weekend checking them out, watering, and looking for signs of stress, and other than the Satsuma that appears to be struggling, the others are doing well.  In fact, several, as documented below, are putting on fruit! There were several figs on this fig tree, about seven total... ...and then the other fig tree has a couple of large ones growing on it too. Here is one pomegranate (blurry photo, the wind starting blowing) that is currently going from bloom to fruit.  There are two other flowers on the tree that I hope will do the same soon. One of the pear trees has put on two large pears... ...and the other one has a nice, large pear growing on it as well. The apple and plum are both healthy and putting on leaves, the mayhaws have grown about six ...

Muscadine grapes I FINALLY found some more Muscadines! You may recall when I blogged HERE about our surprise of some fresh grapes from a vine I had kept in the original container for a year, planning on planting it next Spring since it got too hot too fast this year.  They were so delicious, and unexpectedly hardy, I've been looking for more ever since so I can plan a grape area at the farm. Of course, it's not the best time of year to find them since everything is on sale for end of season and practically sold out, but because they are on sale, I was determined.  So on Saturday, I ran to another garden center I hadn't tried yet.  The problem I ran into is that I would find plenty, fifteen or twenty at each garden center, but they always had a generic tag on them that just said "Muscadine Grape".  It didn't mention the variety.  Since some are self pollinating and others require different varieties to fruit, I didn't want to take the chance...

When I was at the farm, I roamed around to check the fruit trees we planted last year.  It was time to see how everything fared after the first year "in the ground" at the farm.  We had a hot and fairly dry Summer, and then we had a colder than usual Winter, so we needed to see how hardy the tree varieties were that we chose.  I took the first batch of these photos a couple of weeks before the 'big ice storm' so read through for the final outcome of all. This is a the beginning of a peach blossom.  There are quite a few of these on the tree.  This will be the second year for the peach but our first Spring with it and I understand the flowers are beautiful. This is one of the two fig trees, about ready to leaf out (the other is the same).  We can't wait to get some figs (hopefully anyway) this year. This is one of the two pear trees we planted, it made it through the Summer and Winter as well, not to mention the bark damage f...

The garden is doing well!  At first we were watering too much.  I noticed a lot of standing water outside the garden area and the mulch (on the ground) was wet as well.  Last week, we changed it to MWF for about 15 minutes (the weather was nice and cool).  I noticed that they were still doing well but with the heat coming back, the soil seemed to dry out quicker so I decided to change it  to MWF for 30 mins in the morning. The poblano pepper has a pepper on it!  Yay!  Hopefully there will be more, as there are a couple more flowers and buds on it and of course it's still pretty small. This is the TAM jalapeño, it also has a little pepper on it and a bunch of flowers and buds just waiting to become peppers.  So far so good on this one as well. This is a tomatillo.  It's probably doing the best of everything so far, covered in flowers.  Here is one that is already becoming the fruit that will be co...