My Half Acre of Paradise

These photos were taken on November 1st — four days before the snow pictures that are a few posts below. These tall Swedish aspens get some nice color in the fall. I thought they were cool enough to post now, even though I’m out of order with some of the stuff below. We had wanted to take some family photos out by the arbor, but the next day was too rainy. Then it got windy, then snowy. Too bad our fall color can’t last a little longer!

I walked out the front door a few days ago in the evening, and the setting sun was making the tiny crabapples on my tree glow and sparkle. I ran back in to get the camera!

This is a Prairiefire crabapple. Sometimes I’ve called in Prairie Fire, but I think the proper name is one word. These fruit are “persistent,” meaning they stay on the tree well into the winter. The birds eat some of them. There are even some left in the spring, when the robins return.  These are a nice small ornamental tree. They’ve been in the ground for seven years, but they’re still only 10′ tall or so, with a spread of about 15′. They have great flowers in the spring, too. Click here to see some photos from spring 2007.

A few more shots from the other day:

We had quite a snowy day today, with snow accumulating last night and all through the day. This evening at around 7:00, my outside thermometer said it was 25°, so I’m expecting a very cold night! Winter, here we come! But I don’t mind too much, because we have new skis and a six-pack of lift tickets to Solitude for every member of the family except baby McKay. That’ll take the dreary out of winter!

For a run-down of several predictions on how hard or mild this winter will be, take a look here.

I missed the perfect week to take a shot of the red maples — they had lost too many leaves this week, but here’s a cool closeup. We’ve actually been quite warm this week and much of last — over 70° for seven of the past 12 days. That’s pretty impressive for late October on the Wasatch Front, don’t you think?

This is probably the official Last Rose of Autumn for me. Well, it’s the last in my hedge of Pink Simplicity roses, although I still do have some sprays of Ruby Meidiland roses blooming along the front walkway to our house. Actually, this particular rose is on a plant that I suspect isn’t even a Pink Simplicity. It’s part of that hedge, but this one blooms earlier and longer than any of the other 17 shrubs in that hedge. It looks nearly identical, but I believe the nursery got the plant mixed up, because it’s a little shorter than the others and has that different bloom timing.

Here are some of the other shots from last weekend:

Winter rushed in this weekend like a dandelion going to seed. OK, maybe that’s a silly simile. But it did come really fast! My remote thermometer said it got down to 26° on Sunday morning, and it’s been at or below 30° each morning for the past three days. We had some snow on Sunday morning, including this interesting juxtaposition of snow on the pretty little Meidiland roses along my front walk. The snow melted by Sunday afternoon.

It’s actually supposed to warm up again this week, getting back into the 70s. But these hard freezes have done their damage, and the zucchini squash plants are dead, as are the petunias and other tender annuals. The tomatoes were hurt the first night, and then I covered them, so we’ll see if they can keep going as it warms back up. Not sure they’ll get over that initial freeze, though.

Anyway, here are a couple shots of my Autumn Blaze maples in my backyard. The pale one is the one that I’ve had some chlorosis problems with. Now that I look at these photos, I realize I need to prune these trees better to develop a good healthy scaffold form. Not sure exactly how to do that, but I bet I’ll learn something about it in my master gardener class.

Earlier this week, I took my camera to work and took a walk to Temple Square during my lunch hour. I wanted to get a few shots of the long, narrow flowerbeds by the lawn between Temple Square and the church office building. I could use some ideas to make my long, narrow beds look better next year.

Here’s an example I can learn a few things from. Note how it has that curvy line of red/magenta undulating through the bed, tying it all together. All of that red color is from the same type of geranium, repeated over and over. Even though I tried to create more unity in my narrow flowerbeds this year, I still succumbed to the temptation to use too many different plants. I repeated quite a few of them, but not in a way that creates this kind of curve running through the bed. I think next spring I need to plant with more unity — repeat the same plant throughout the flowerbed like they did with these geraniums (pelargoniums).

Here are the plants I recognized in these beds at Temple Square:

• Pelargonium (annual garden geraniums)
• Nierembergia - short, purple flowers
• Orange, single-flowered zinnia
• Pink and purple petunias
• Blue salvia
• Annual vinca, white with a red center and some purple/lavender ones
• Funny-looking ornamental cabbage or kale
• Here and there a few widely spaced Gerber daisies

There isn’t much in the beds besides these, and these plants are repeated quite frequently.

While I was there, I saw one of the Peregrine falcons that are known for nesting nearby. My new 300m zoom lens allowed me to zoom in fairly close on it. Very cool.

Here are some other photos I took while there:

That last photo is some blue-flowered ground cover growing in a large planter with a tree in the middle of it. I don’t know what it is, but I may be interested in planting some of it at my place, as long as it’s not too invasive.

This is the first time I’ve grown green beans, and they turned out pretty good. I harvested most of them on Sunday, October 5th. They were planted on July 23rd, so that made 74 days till harvest. The package said they’d be ripe in 60 days, but I imagine the cold nights have slowed them down, since it was a late planting. Plus, I probably could have fertilized that soil, although I did grow peas there in the spring, and they’re supposed to add nitrogen to the soil, so perhaps it was more fertile than I thought.

The harvest wasn’t huge, but it was enough to mostly fill one big pocket in my jacket. I probably could have picked them sooner, because some were a little big and fat. But they taste good. And this is coming from a guy who never really learned to eat his veggies as a kid!

My wife, Dana, said the other day that she had cooked them all (boiled them) because she didn’t want to see them shrivel up on the counter. But she hadn’t tried them — she just put them in a container in the fridge after cooking them. I think she thought they’d be tough, since some were pretty big. So, we got them out of the fridge and just popped a few of them in our mouths cold. She got a surprised look on her face and said, “These are actually good!”

I’m having some with my lunch today. I’m looking forward to it. Imagine that — me, looking forward to eating my vegetables! My, how gardening can change a person.

Last Thursday, I started the Master Gardener class with Utah State University Extension at Thanksgiving Point. Larry Sagers is the primary instructor — he’s the guy who does the KSL Radio Greenhouse Show on Saturday mornings and writes a gardening column in the Deseret News. By the way, I want to know why the D-News doesn’t give him a columnist page for looking up his archived columns! But you can see several of his latest on their Home & Garden page.

I’m looking foward to learning a lot more technical horticulture stuff in this class. I’m also happy to be able (required, actually) to volunteer through the extension to help people with garden problems. I’ll have to do at least 40 hours of service work in the next year to get my Master Gardener certificate.

After the class, I asked Larry about my apple problem this year. I don’t recall if I wrote that I had no blossoms at all from my two apple trees this year. It was a huge disappointment, after they’d produced well for around five years straight. Larry said that I didn’t thin the blossoms enough last spring. Even before the June thinning, you’re supposed to pluck out some of the blossoms. He said there is a “king” blossom in the middle of a cluster and smaller blossoms around it. The king should be the only one allowed to produce fruit. By allowing too many blossoms to remain on the tree and to start developing, it took too much energy out of the tree for next year’s crop of blossoms. Who knew apple trees were so picky? I thought they were darn tough! He also said this next spring will be a “snowball” blossom experience on these trees, and it will be important to thin out that snowball.

Here’s an example of a king blossom from spring of 2007. I’m not sure if his advice about plucking out the non-king blossoms will apply in other years or just this coming year when I’m trying to get the tree back to annual production. I’ll have to ask.

Also, I inspected my nectarine tree this weekend and noticed three or four spots where a gummy, clear sap had oozed out of the trunk. They were not down by the ground but up a few feet, where the main branches begin. I hope these aren’t signs of peach tree borers. I was lax in my spraying this summer, because the apples weren’t producing, so I didn’t have my regular bi-weekly spraying going on. Usually, when I spray the apples, I’ll go over to the nectarine and just spray the trunk to keep the borers out. I don’t usually spray the nectarine fruit, because they don’t get a lot of bugs. But since I didn’t have a regular spraying routine once the cherries were done around the 1st of July, I haven’t sprayed the nectarine trunk since then. I’ll have to watch for any signs of disease in the tree next year.

With my new zoom lens, I can capture some very close images up on the mountains from my backyard. The fall colors are really peaking right now. I’m actually surprised how close I can get with this lens, because those mountain tops are pretty far up there!

Sometimes, I’ve been sad as fall arrives, because summer is gone, and I’m really a summer person. Give me a day in the garden, with another day of boating, fishing, and water skiing, and I’ve had a perfect week! But this year, I don’t feel so down about fall. Maybe it’s even a little relief, because I’ve been working so hard in the basement this year that I haven’t had time to keep the flowerbeds and yard all weeded and up to my usual standards. We did have an OK year, with some nice flowers and some good veggies. But I’m a little glad it’s all coming to a close, so I can focus on the one hobby that’s really consuming all of my attention — finishing the basement!

OK, well, going to the master gardener class this fall is going to get in the way of some of that basement work, too, so I guess I won’t be *totally* focused.

For my birthday, I got a great Sigma 70-300mm APO DG zoom lens for my Canon digital SLR. With this digital camera, that lens is almost an 11x zoom! Pretty darn cool. It has a nice macro function that allows you to take these ultra closeups from four feet away. I’m having a lot of fun with it, both in macro mode and otherwise, as you can see:

Starting at the top, from left to right, these are:

1. A spreading petunia I grew from cuttings taken a year ago in downtown Salt Lake City
2. Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’ - a great fall flower
3. A bee on Caryopteris clandonensis - these are VERY attractive to bees and are constantly buzzing once they start to flower in August
4. Zinnia ‘Profusion White’ in a closeup
5. The same zinnias
6. Another spreading petunia grown from last year’s cuttings - this one grows taller but still spreads out
7. The view of my arbor with Pink Simplicity roses in their second wave of bloom - this wave was at its peak a few weeks ago
8. Some very nice ‘Golden Vicary’ Privet shrubs (the tall ones) - these have proven to be a great plant in my yard; I didn’t appreciate them much at first, but they add a nice texture and color to the greenery