My Half Acre of Paradise

Yesterday was officially the first day of fall, and voila — we got snow on the mountains for the first time this season. I’m usually sad to see summer go and to know winter is on the way, but this year it isn’t so bad. With our baby last spring, this summer has not been as active a time for our family. We didn’t even go boating this summer once, and that’s a big deal for us. And likewise, our gardens have had minimal attention this year.

In the vegetable garden, we only grew two tomato plants: a ‘Better Bush’ for large tomatoes and a ‘Husky Red’ for cherry tomatoes. The ‘Better Bush’ was beginning to disappoint but finally started ripening in mid-August. It had a lot of fruit on it yesterday. It probably will only keep producing for another few weeks. The ‘Husky Red’ started producing earlier and has been a strong performer. Both bushes have not looked all that healthy, even though they’ve produced well in the past month. They have a lot of brown on them and lost most of their lower leaves. I think this comes from watering them with a sprinkling system, which tomatoes evidently don’t like.

Also, I picked some more Jonathan apples yesterday and the day before. I had picked most of them on Sept. 7th, but I left some clusters to see if they’d ripen more and they did. I still have maybe 15-20 on some branches that bent down and got shaded between some adjacent shrubs, so they haven’t turned red since they didn’t get enough sun exposure. I left them on the tree for now, but I don’t know if maybe they’re actually ripe but just not red.

I am working to transplant a bunch of perennials before we get too far into fall. I’ve drawn up a new design for my front flowerbed, and I need to divide some plants to put in there and outright transplant some others. It’s going to look very nice next year. I hope so, at least!

The Deseret Morning News published an editorial on Sept. 15 calling on Salt Lakers to participate in planting one million trees by 2017. The county and a number of cities have endorsed the effort. I hope there is some plan in place. They need something like the Sacramento Tree Foundation, which did great work when I lived out there. It had partnerships with the local electric utility to provide free trees to homeowners as a way of conserving energy. They would make the homeowners attend a class on tree planting and care, or they would send an arborist to a neighborhood to do a demonstration for a bunch of people. They would even mark the spots on your lawn where a tree would do the most good in terms of energy savings by shading windows. Maybe I should start such a foundation.

Did you know apples need pollination from a different kind of apple tree? Or that crabapples are good pollen sources for apple trees? I knew cherries were particular like this, but I didn’t realize that apples had the same kind of issues. I planted two different kinds of apple trees right next to each other (Granny Smith and Jonathan), which turns out to have been a very smart decision. These are good pollinators for each other. I also have two Prairie Fire crabapples in the front yard, which probably help, too.

Anyway, I found a good resource that explains the varieties of apples, cherries, and other trees that are useful for cross pollination. It’s from the Colorado State University Extension, and you can click here to view it. It has a handy table on apple tree compatibility, as well as one for cherries and some other great info.

Last winter, I traded seeds with a guy from New York on Gardenweb.com’s perennial forum. He had seeds for these wonderful Hibiscus moscheutos ‘Blue River’ and I had to give them a try. I don’t usually go for large, gaudy flowers, but these were just too cool to pass up. I had about a dozen of them and have given some away to relatives. There are still six or so in little pots on my deck, and now that the weather has finally cooled a bit, I can put them in the ground. Just need to decide where to put them!

These two are in large pots on the deck where they will remain as permanent container plantings. These ones in the large pots got a lot bigger than the ones still in the 4″ pots, and the smaller ones won’t be flowering this year. It was nice to get flowers out of these ones the first year from seed.

These are enormous flowers — they’re about seven inches across!

Check out these babies — three really big bowls like this, filled with Jonathan apples. I like these apples a lot; they taste more like green apples than red ones and they ripen a lot earlier than my Granny Smith apples. I believe we harvested these last Thursday, September 6th. That was even a little late, because there were a lot on the ground that we left out there for birds and other animals to eat. I was surprised they were falling off the tree so much, but we still got a lot for our use.

I made an apple pie yesterday and shared with some friends who invited us to dinner. It came out pretty good, although next time, I’m going to try a different recipe I have that doesn’t have so much cinnamon and has a little more allspice. Allspice is the classic apple pie enhancer.