My Half Acre of Paradise

Last night, my remote thermometer says it got down to 26° (actually it was this morning at 6:30 that was the coldest). I’m concerned about my cherry and nectarine blossoms. Mostly, it’s the cherries that concern me, because not many of the nectarine blossoms have opened yet. I’ll keep an eye on them, but I hope that’s the last of the serious sub-freezing temps now. The next week is supposed to be better than that, but still there are several nights around freezing in the prediction.

I found some info online that describes the temperatures that will produce 10% damage and 90% damage to various types of fruit blossoms. It says sweet cherries can experience 10% loss at 28° and 90% loss at 25°. Peaches (which I assume would probaby approximate the nectarine hardiness) are damaged at 26° (10% loss) and 21° (90% loss). So, I am worried about the cherries. I do think there are plenty of unopened cherry blossoms, though, and hopefully they’ll be enough if the open ones were nipped by this.

I just have to make quick mention of this; I’ve seen this before and meant to post about it, but someone’s comment about planting a tree on their neighbor’s lot made me think about it again. It’s called guerrilla gardening, and there’s a great website about it from England at www.guerrillagardening.org. Especially read the post about almost getting arrested on April 16, 2008.

Note that May 1st is International Sunflower Guerrilla Day. Very cool!

This is my first year trying winter sowing (see my description here), and some of the seeds have sprouted, though I have 12 containers out and only four have shown signs of life so far. Here are my results so far:

At top left is Alyssum ‘Oriental Nights.’ Top right is Lychnis ‘Rose Campion.’ Bottom left is Iceland poppies (they sure need some thinning!), and bottom right is California poppy, ‘Summer Sorbet’ variety (well, they’re the seeds off of ‘Summer Sorbet’ and I can’t guarantee they’re the pure strain anymore).

My cherries and the nectarine tree are just starting to bloom, with the cherries (at left) opening a little quicker. The nectarine (below) has quite attractive pink blossoms, and you can see they’re just getting ready to open.

The apple trees aren’t quite as close to blooming, and the crabapples have a little ways to go as well.

Many of our shrubs are starting to leaf out. This photo shows a group of Alpine Currant shrubs that have leafed out pretty well. I gotta get those weeds and wild grass removed from the gravel area in front of them! It’s a tough year for garden work, because I promised my wife I would finish our basement this spring.

At left is my Forsythia shrub this week. It’s not doing as well as in past years. I don’t know if it’s because of our unusually cold winter/spring or if I didn’t give it enough water or fertilizer last year. I don’t think I’ve given it fertilizer since maybe 2006. I’ll have to change that this year. This flowering plum is the earliest flowering of all the flowering or fruit trees I have. I need try pruning this tree this year to thin out some of the crowded branches.

The blooms below show my penchant for purple. I really need to branch out to other colors a little more! On the first row, there is Vinca minor at left, also called Periwinkle. It’s a great, vigorous groundcover. I have it by my fruit trees. On the right is Arabis caucasica, or rockcress. This was transplanted last year from my mother-in-law’s place when she sold the house. It’s drought tolerant, I believe, and I had another clump that I think died last year from too much water.

On the second row left is Muscari, or grape hyacinth. On the right is Anemone blanda, or Grecian windflower. It’s a bulb, and these flowers are very small. I wish they were a little bigger and would spread a little faster and wider.

Everything is a little later blooming than normal, because our spring has continued to feel like winter. They say it’s a “La Nina” weather pattern that’s made us so cold this year.  It’s not like we got severe low temps, just that the low temps we’ve had have lasted a long time, and the snow lasted on the ground an amazingly long time this winter.

Hey, I just found a good resource on raspberry pruning in response to a conversation with a friend about his berries. I think it provides a good description of how to prune the different types (once-bearing versus “everbearing” types), because the two types require significantly different treatment. Here’s the link. It seems a little complicated when it distinguishes between red raspberries and black or purple ones. I prune my Canby raspberries the way they describe for red summer-bearing types, and it’s working well for me. OK, I just searched a little more, and I was correct that mine are a summer-bearing (or once-bearing) red type. Here’s a link to a site describing different types.

I “oiled” my fruit trees and some of my roses last Saturday. By “oiled” I mean that I sprayed dormant oil all over the trunks and branches to kill overwintering insect eggs and things. I believe it kills some diseases, too, like fungal spores. The oil I used was Volck Oil Spray from Ortho. It’s mixed with water in a sprayer, according to instructions, and then applied. It’s important to apply this before the blossoms open on the fruit trees or it could damage the future fruit.

I’ve been doing this every spring since I planted these trees, and I think it’s helped quite a bit. I have a number of neighbors who have experienced damage to peach trees from peach tree borers. They’re a moth larva that bores into the base of the trunk, causing sap to ooze out and often causing the crippling or death of the tree. I haven’t had any problem with borers yet, except on an ornamental flowering cherry. I also spray the fruit tree trunks really well each time I’m applying pesticides to the fruit during the summer months. That actually may do more good than the dormant oil, but my neighbors have said they do the same.