Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Gardening

So, after cutting down a million lilac trees and trimming the whole back yard trees they have been cluttering the yard all spring.. then getting a bunch of people to remove cement from a unusable pond made of it (cement) We finally got to woodchipping all the of the trees that were taken down and removed.

 What a relief. Now we have a small pile of woodchips. (funny how little woodchips a huge mass of tree branches actually creates)



So a garden update.

This year is the first year we are not gardening using strawbales. since they are $5-$10 per bale at 20 bales you can do the math on why we skipped them this year.
 However I did build some raised garden beds. We have 1/3rd of our garden is rows of corn.. which was5 packets worth of corn seeds planted (to give you a rough estimate of size) about 1/2 to 1 foot apart. (will thin out as needed)

The smaller and first raised garden bed I built for the garden this year was strictly to transfer our strawberries out of the ground to a more weed and strawberry-spreading manageable location.



The frost this weekend only killed 1 plant.

Our Blueberries someone survived being eaten completly to near nothing by rabbits and we will actually get quite a few berries this year. But they are now protected from rabbits, so next year will be great.

The honeysuckle plant I planted in memory of my mom for the hummingbirds is doing great and I expect flowers soon.

Holly split a lot of plants from our perennial garden and redid the garden in front of the house (below our picture window) and completly finished that. and woodchipped and tidied up the perennial garden.

Last year I late in the season raised some milkweed from seeds. and doubted they would flower, but I transplanted them outside in the fall anyhow, just to get them out of the house since they were a lost cause. But i noticed this week they started growing and are about 3 inches tall... so that is exciting for my butterflies.  I also removed all the non fruiting currants we had and planted a bunch more flowers for hummingbirds and butterflies. we will see how that works out. and last years butterfly/hummingbird garden i decided not to touch and just see what comes up. So far I recognize a lot of echinacea and bee balm for sure and have two butterfly flower plants for sure. so that is great as far as I am concerned.

We have not yet had bluebirds return to next this year, I am in hopes they will come to us for their second batch in later summer. Our house Wren is back for his third year and happy as can be, though his mulberry tree may not have survived the frost. (Luckily it survived my massive pruning prior to the frost)  So we will see what happens there.

I took out about 1/3 of our apple trees to help with their health, i will have to do this again for the next 2 years before they become fully manageable. There was not much flowers on our haraldson, but the mcintosh had a bunch of flowers, hopfully they were pollinated this year. We have a bunch of smoking wood chips from the tree's we will see if they last the summer of grilling. (Plus I owe some to a few people)

All in all we have had a very productive spring, and still have an entire summer to go.

I hope the garden produces a lot. And I am in high hopes to get the pond finished being re-built this summer.




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