I found a useful website from Washington State University describing when to pick nectarines and apples and how to store them. Here’s the link: Fruit Harvest & Storage.

I haven’t had much time to post lately, but my nectarines started coming ripe within the past week. I still have a bunch on the tree, and some are getting a little overdone, because I haven’t had time to pick them. But I’m going to pick them all tonight, unless there are still some green ones. I already picked two bowls of them and gave most away to friends. I’ll be making a nectarine cobbler this Saturday for a BBQ party we’re hosting. Mmmmm… Sounds so good! I did find a small worm in one of the ones I ate.…

So, like I posted earlier today, I went and got some clear plastic cups for planting some cuttings. I drilled a hole in the bottom of each one for drainage and filled each halfway with peat moss and perlite. Probably about 30% perlite. I took cuttings from a very nice looking yellow specimen of Gaillardia grandiflora, or Indian Blanket Flower. These come out pretty variable from seed, and this one has no red on the petals — just yellow. I like it a lot! I took these cups with the cuttings and placed them in a makeshift little mini-greenhouse made…

I’m having some troubles trying to grow some flowers and trees from cuttings. I have succeeded before in getting cuttings of flowers and shrubs to grow by putting them in one-gallon pots with a plastic bag over them to keep the moisture in. I dipped the stems in rooting hormone and planted them in peat moss mixed with vermiculite or perlite. That’s what I did in the past. This time, I thought I would do more in less space by planting the cuttings in those little six-pack cells I use for seed growing and put them under the plastic lid…

My garden hit its peak bloom about a week ago. Now several flowers are in decline, especially in the back flowerbed. Here’s a list of what I can remember off the top of my head: Shasta daisies are starting to shrivel up. I’m going to cut off the heads and see how much rebloom I can get. Campanula glomeratas are mostly declining. It’s funny — some of them are flowering later than the others, and I think a few got damaged by a grass killer spray that’s supposed to not harm other plants. I tested it out in a few…

I fertilized the lawn today. It was about a month overdue. I also sprayed Malathion on my apples and nectarines and then sprayed a small remaining amount on some flowers that had too many grasshoppers recently. Yesterday, I sprayed the rose hedge with “bloom booster” fertilizer as a foliar feeding. Those roses are actually finally producing more flowers, but they’re still not as thick in bloom as I would like. Yesterday, I also thinned the apples. The Granny Smiths didn’t need it much, but the Jonathans had a lot of clumps with three or four apples growing all in a…

I bought some chelated iron to spray on my maple that has chlorosis. It’s a 4.5% solution of EDDHA iron (that’s the kind of iron molecule it is derived from, which matters for our alkaline soils if I use it as a soil treatment). I sprayed it on the tree today, and we’ll see if it greens up within the next week or two. I did the spraying in the evening so it would be less likely to suffer leaf burn. I also sprayed the iron on my rose hedge, hoping it will improve the flowering, because I’m mystified about…