A walk through my garden - Thursday, 4/11/13

Welcome to the garden.  It’s a beautiful place that is just getting more and more lovely as the season goes on. 

We just built the first half of this grape arbor a couple weekends ago.  It was warm Easter weekend, but since then it has been dumping rain nearly every day.  So it stays half finished… which is fine for now.  The grapes are only 10 inches tall.  We also have a rouge Clematis that has decided to come back to life after dying year before last.  No, not last year.  2011.  Odd huh?  I hope it will bring pretty flowers to the front of the grape arbor.

At the top of the garden is my mini orchard.

This is the spot where I planted trees on the wrong root stock and had to replace them.  It was sad, but honestly, if it works out, I will be very grateful not to have to babysit these trees like I did the others.

I also added pears!  All of them are on M11 root stock, which is supposed to be 110% of standard size.  So these babies should have no issue growing here and should produce as early as I let them. 

These are some blossoms on the pear tree right now.

These are some blossoms that are almost ready on my Liberty apple tree.

This is the West side of the garden.  There are 6 beds this year instead of just the 4 we had last year, although the final two do not have soil in them yet.  Along the back fence is some raspberries.  They, like everything else in my yard, were stunted by the nasty soil and the tons of rocks.  I have been piling homemade compost on them all winter long in hopes that they will do some serious growing this year, and they have shoots for the very first time!

In the left corner there is the chicken coop.  It is a temporary home for my three remaining older chickens so that I can get the new coop built in the shed.  The tiny chicks are in the shed now.  Eventually everyone will be in the coop together. 

I have ten 6X4ft beds, four 4x4ft beds, and one 10x2ft bed.  When the chickens move I will have a long skinny bed built where the temporary coop is that will be dedicated to perennial herbs.

The apple tree next to the chicken coop in this photo has also just started to leaf out.  It’s such a sweet little tree!  I am really hoping to get apples off of it this year.  The last two years they have had a bad case of Scab, but I took some precautions this year and I am feeling good about the health of the leaves I see coming out.

That’s it for now!  Happy Gardening!