My Half Acre of Paradise

Hey folks! Is anybody out there watching anymore? It’s been nine or ten months since I last posted about moving from my former home and leaving my gardens behind to my ex-wife. If you have read this blog in the past, you know that it would be nearly impossible for me to not find some way to garden, even in my rented townhouse. So, this summer, I set up two large pots on the front porch and jammed them full of green beans (bush style), a pepper, a cherry tomato, and some fragrant petunias to fill in the gaps. Yeah, quite a bit in two pots. I’d take a pic, but they got a little ragged when I was gone to California for a long weekend and they didn’t get watered. Oh well, the tomato is still going strong, and I harvested most of the beans this week. Here are photos of this week’s little harvest. :)

I actually got three more cherry tomatoes this week, too, but you know, you can’t take pictures of every little cherry tomato, right? The beans were a great late-night snack, stir-fried in olive oil, with some chicken strips thrown in and a stir-fry sauce added after they cooked a bit. Nice, even without rice. I hope your harvests are going well! Next year’s garden will surely be bigger… :)

All things must come to an end, it seems. My time in this half acre of paradise was good. I had eight years of watching my new landscape come to life, establish and evolve, and develop its own unique personality. Gardens are metaphors for so many things in life, and this one was no exception. I poured my heart and soul into this garden, and I like what it produced. It responded well to the nurturing that it received. But there was another part of my life that was slowly dying on the vine over many years, and the time has come to clear the ground and make way for new life. My wife will keep this house and its gardens, while I have moved on to another home. My new home is a rental townhome, without room to garden, except in containers on the porch and deck. Perhaps I will blog about my containers next year. Or maybe this blog will sit idle during a year of transitions and I’ll pick it back up in 2011. I do believe I will start it up again one day.

Thank you for your interest in this blog over the almost four years I’ve been writing. It was a pleasure to share it with you.

Take care,
Steve

Hey, hey, my friends! My nectarines are ripe now! Been sampling some over the past several days, and it now looks like harvest time has come! Come and get ‘em! We don’t can them, so we really do like to share with friends. We’ll eat a big bowl full, make a cobbler or something, and that’s about it. I’m inviting friends to come over on Thursday evening this week to pick your own. Let me know if you’re coming.

Also, I just wanted to show how enormous those Hibiscus moscheutos flowers really are. Here’s a photo with my hand in it to give some perspective:

Early Saturday morning, before dawn, our Lacebark Elm (Ulmus parvifolia) suffered a major break from some heavy wind. We’ve had wind like this many times, but there was a weak crotch where two major scaffold branches were growing in too deep of a V-shape. When branches grow with narrow crotch angles, they end up with “included bark” which means a line of bark is sandwiched betwen the branches as they grow thicker and thicker. This line prevents the two branches from being knitted together, and it creates a major weakness that someday can turn into this kind of break. It’s heartbreaking to have this happen to a tree we’ve loved so much. It will survive, but I’m not sure if the remaining branch is strong enough where the break is to continue supporting all the growth on that side of the tree. We might end up with another break and another major section of the tree missing.

On a brighter note, check out these beautiful Hibiscus moscheutos blooms. These plants are in large pots on my deck, and they make a great accent there.

My nectarines are almost ripe! I actually picked one yesterday and ate it today, but it was still just a bit green. They should all be ripe in a week or so. Tasted good, even though it wasn’t completely ripe! I’ll also throw in a shot of our second veggie garden on the side of our basement walkout. Those zucchini plants sure are getting huge! And finally, here’s a closeup of some Caryopteris shrub blooms. It’s nice having some things that bloom late in the season like these. They add new life to the garden at the end of summer.

This is one of my Hibscus moscheutos plants in large pots on my deck. The first two blooms opened up today. I love the purity of the white contrasted with the deep, rich red in the center and blended with the soft lemon color of the stamen. Such beauty!

All the Hibiscus shrubs have burst into bloom this week. I love the one above — I think it’s Hibiscus syriacus ‘Aphrodite.’ I also have some double-flowered ones — they’re quite frilly and don’t really look like Hibscuses at all. Oh, and one more of the Aphrodite shrub, too:

And I finally got my ‘Pink Simplicity’ rose hedge blooming well this week. I’ve written before about how some rose experts advised me to give them much more water and fertilize often with a high-nitrogen fertilizer. Well, I neglected to give them the extra care this spring, and so the tiny flower buds mostly fell off in June. Just like in the past. So, about three-and-a-half weeks ago, I trimmed the hedge down a few feet with a power trimmer (thanks neighbor!), and then all this new growth came up and produced flowerbuds. I’ll have to remember that timing of about 3 1/2 weeks if my daughters ever have a wedding reception in our backyard! Hopefully, we could trim them like that again and expect a full bloom 3-4 weeks later!

Here are some other shots from this evening, including my cute son, McKay, some Granny Smith apples that are developing well, and assorted flowers:

Hey, I should mention that middle photo in the last row is an annual called Angelonia (whenever I say the name, I start singing in my mind a blues song called “Angelina” by Keb’ Mo’ — I know, the name is slightly different, but it still happens!). I haven’t grown Angelonia before, but I got the seeds from Park’s last winter and tried it out. I like it so far. I think they’ll get quite a bit bigger by the end of the season.

This is the upper part of my backyard today, experimenting with a stitched-together panoramic shot.

I also took some other photos of things blooming or looking good in my garden. Too many pictures to comment on right now (it’s late at night!), so I’ll just add them all as a gallery below. What do you think? Do you have a favorite photo in this batch? Post a comment below; if you have questions about any particular photo, I’ll answer them in the comments.

I had a lot of catching up to do on weeding and stuff today:

• Weeded the veggie garden (I still need to create some kind of trellis for the green beans, which are only about 3″ tall so far)
• Weeded some flowerbeds
• Mowed the lawn
• Picked a bunch of cherries from our second tree which is much later than the first tree
• Picked a big bowl of raspberries
• Froze some of the berries and cherries for friends who are visiting next month
• Fertilized the flowerbeds and veggie areas with a 16-16-16 granular fertilizer
• Applied some Bayer Advanced 2-in-1 Systemic Rose Care fertilizer/pesticide to my simplicity rose hedge. The roses hardly bloomed at all last month, so I trimmed all the green “blind” growth down a bit and I’m trying to get them to bloom well as they grow back in the coming month. I didn’t give them enough extra water this spring to help them avoid aborting all those tiny rosebuds (see my earlier post about this).
• Tied the growing grape vines up on the sides of the backyard arbor
• Yesterday, I finished thinning the nectarines. I’m trying to be more aggressive than in past years to ensure bigger, sweeter fruit, but I’m a little late finishing it this year, so I don’t know how much good it will do.

I still have more to do this coming week, including fertilizing the lawn and spraying some pesticide on all the stinking grasshoppers out there! In the flowerbeds, I’ll use some Orthenex to give them systemic protection (kill those darn hoppers when they bite the plants), and in the areas around edible stuff, I’ll probably try Malathion. They’ve been eating the little bean plants a bit.

So, I can’t have a post without a photo, right? Here’s something cool. My friend Rich was visiting this week and decided to play with his Nikon on a slow shutter speed while cranking the zoom. This is actually a ‘Rocket’ Larkspur growing in my front flowerbed. Seems kind of rockety now, doesn’t it?

Little McKay finally decided to try raspberries (we’d been trying for a few days), and he LOVES them! Now, he says “I want some of that candy!” While we were out in the garden picking them, he said to my wife, “Will we have them with some ‘licious ‘nilla?” That’s delicious vanilla ice cream, if you didn’t get it. :) He’s so funny with what he remembers sometimes. We had talked about how good they are with ice cream on Sunday with some friends. So, yes, we did have them with some ‘licious ‘nilla, and they were awesome! I still think these raspberries on top of Breyer’s Extra Creamy Vanilla is the world’s most perfect food combination.

And here’s something I really laughed about yesterday — our twins actually found a good use for bindweed! I told them they could pick bindweed wreaths every day if they want to.

First, meet my little garden buddy, McKay. He’s our cute, smart, hilarious two-year old. He’s fun to have along in the garden, although I often need to clean up the messes he makes, like today, when I swept the sidewalk off after he shoveled dirt all over it from a nearby flowerbed. But no problem, really. I mean, who could get mad at a face like this???

All right, on to the cherries. I don’t know why, but one of my cherry trees is ripe before the other this year, and it’s about 10 days early. We usually see these ripen around the beginning of July, sometimes right at the Fourth of July, which is nice and festive. These are ‘Lapins’ cherries, which is French for rabbit. It signifies how fruitful they are, and believe me, they’ve clearly been fruitful this year! Many of the branches are bending over sharply under the weight of all the fruit. Probably another reason for the ‘Lapins’ name is that these cherries are fairly unique in being self-fruitful — you don’t have to plant a different variety nearby for pollenization like with most cherries (finicky things!).

Every year, when I pick the cherries, I spot check for worms (western fruit fly larvae) by cutting a bunch open. This is the best year yet — I cut open six or seven and saw no signs of worms at all, so as far as I’m concerned, they’re all good, and I’m just going to eat them! I did spray them with Malathion, but I only had to do it twice, since it’s been such a cool, wet June and I think the fruit flies haven’t been very active.