A successful graft!

Several months ago, this spring, we attempted around 8 grafts from cuttings from an apple tree at our old house onto some of the existing old apple's at our new house. I wasn't very optimistic due to it being our first time trying grafting, and due to it being a little later than seemed optimal in terms of the cuttings and trees to graft to already being a bit far along with budding out. We also didn't have the best grafting supplies, using syran wrap and elastic bands instead of more specialized grafting supplies. But, we went ahead and tried, because the apple from our old house had such yummy fruit that we didn't want to lose that variety.

And imagine my surprise late last week when wandering through the orchard I realized that behind the one remaining syran-wrapped graft there were green leaves trying to burst free! One of the grafts took! I quickly unwrapped the syran wrap from the tip where the green leaves were trying to emerge.

 Then I checked on how the graft area was doing under the plastic. It was looking good! definite scar tissue had developed, joining the grafted cutting onto the parent tree. Not a perfect seal yet, but a start! So exciting!

Most if not all of our other attempts this spring ended in failure - the syran wrap falling off, or the entire cutting falling out. But for some reason, this one has worked out so far, and it is even the first one we did out of the bunch we did this spring! I'm not certain that it will manage to survive into next year, let alone produce fruit ever, but what an encouraging start to our grafting journey! If you want to see how where we read up about grafting, and how we grafted, check out my first post on grafting. If you never start trying, you are never going to succeed, and this has been so true in our first grafting experiment!

Linking up to the Homestead Barn Hop.

Our Weekend & Spring Seedling Progress

Well, it was a warm and mostly sunny weekend here, and man did we enjoy it or what! Little M and I did all sorts of fun chores outside, and kept our time inside to a minimum. First we raked up the winter's worth of bark chunks and sawdust from the carport/woodshed area, pitched them into the back of the truck, and took a full load of them down into the burn pile area in the lower field.

Ahh... all raked out and ready for more wood to be split and stacked!

One evening last week, a work friend of my husband's was over with his family to help us prune our orchard trees and have supper, we had a whole mess of twigs and branches on the ground under the orchard trees. We had managed to get all the branches piled up, so during one of Little M's naps I filled the truck bed with branches and took two loads of them down to the burn pile too.

Normally we put the bark chips and orchard trimmings in a pile area across the creek to decompose on their own back to nature, but when we took the first load down there I realized there was still a couple feet of snow on the pile, plus a big snowbank at the edge of the road... So that was a big no-go! Oh well, I guess we'll burn them and not compost them this year!

I also moved the seedlings around under the grow light so that instead of having a plastic cover over them, they have a plastic tray under them so that they can stay a bit more moist. Little M of course kept a close eye on the proceedings. We've got some Kale sprouts, some peppers, lots of onions, a bunch of cilantro, and just yesterday some marigolds coming up too.

This week I'll likely start the tomatoes, some more Kale, and hopefully more peppers will have sprouted on top of the freezer. I'm really hoping that by next weekend we'll be down in the garden doing a bit of prep work! The snow was melting really fast over the weekend with the warm sun, but there were only a few patches melted through down in the garden, the majority of the garden still had a half foot to a foot of snow on it...

In terms of other chores we did, we also raked a bunch of weeds from the side field that got a bit out of hand last summer after the riding lawn mower died. Hopefully we'll get it back up and running soon so that I'm not attempting to use the push mower on our couple acres of fields! As Little M wandered here and there, often after whichever dog I had out with us, I meandered along after her, thinking about our long term plans for the property...

Last week Little M and I went over to a coworkers house, to see one of his ewes, who had given birth a couple days earlier. She had two 3 day old lambs, and there was a hour and a half old new lamb freshly birthed by his other lamb. My coworker and his wife have a really lovely set up, 2 donkeys, 2 ewes (and now 3 baby lambs), a flock of chickens, and in the summer, a nice garden. Not to mention their cute little house that they've been slowly remodelling. All on just an acre! It really made me stop and think about how much potential we've got here on our 3ish acres of farmable land! Ah dreams for the future! :) I hope you all had a great weekend, and that your garden seedlings are coming along as nicely as mine are!

Field apple harvest

Last night Little M and I took the truck down to the bottom field and parked under the apple tree that is hidden in the trees and shrubs of the riparian buffer at the edge of the creek. We had already taken the stroller down there and picked what I could reach from the ground, and being without a ladder (it's still up at the rental house), I suddenly realized that by standing in the bed of the truck, or up on the sides of the bed even, that I would be able to reach way more!

After maneuvering the truck to a couple of different locations (including backing it right into the branches of the shrubby understory and barely avoiding a hidden t-post - oops!), we had collected a whole lot of great apples! The backseat was full.

All told we had 2 cloth bags full to the brims (plus what we had gotten last week from ground level!). There is still one branch up there that I couldn't reach, but that can feed the deer or bears. Not a bad haul for a tree that we don't water or maintain at all! I see lots of applesauce in our future - yum!

And we still have 2 apple trees in our orchard with plenty of fruit on them. The majority of those apples though will be going to friends of ours who helped us move a lot of rocks on the rental property, they have a cider press and will be making them into cider.

Garden Crashing - A Full-Yard Garden

Earlier this week we visited some friends that my husband made sort of through work. Garth & Berri are glass blowers in town, and have this amazing garden that takes up pretty much all of their acre and a half property on the outskirts of town. When we arrived they welcomed us and then toured us through their gardens for over an hour - yup, their gardens are that extensive! We got to try out a cool garden tool they use that apparently makes their weeding lives way easier, we talked with them about their wheat crop, and they showed us how they efficiently water their plants.

They have a low little house that is built into the earth, and just installed a row of solar panels this spring. In front of the house they have a great herb garden with some ornamental plants & grasses in there too. In front of the herb garden, they have row upon row of veggies!

 

Below you can see the peas, onions & celery, peppers, tomatoes, more peppers, potatoes, and then corn.

Looking across from the house end of their property you can see their garage/shed and attached greenhouse, along with some fruit trees, more ornamentals (lots of flowers for cutting). Their raspberries, strawberries, and wheat are down at that end too.

They have numerous areas that are just great mixes of perennial plants. It was shocking just how short of a time they have been there working the gardens - about 3 years, the same length of time we've been at our place. They have accomplished so incredibly much in that time! I can't wait to see how much more function and beauty they accomplish in the next 3 years time.

  They have this neat little garden hoe-type tool that sits behind a wheel and you push it. As you push the wheel along the surface of the soil, the hoe rakes along just under the soil and cuts all the root and slightly disturbs the soil. Weeding without bending over, and without vigorous hoeing - perfect! I got to try it out, and it was easily done even with Little M on my back.

Here is a close up of the tool. They are made & sold by Valley Oak Tool Company, which is based out of California. You can check out their website if you are interested: valleyoaktool.com. They are a bit pricey, but think of the rows upon rows of weeds you could hoe quickly and easily with this thing! I suspect I would have to space my rows a little wee bit further apart to be able to make use of this, but maybe in the future I won't plant everything so close together :)

This is their wheat patch. This year they are just growing one variety, although in previous years they have tried several to see which one did best here and tasted best. I tried to remember which type this is, but I forgot - I'll just have to ask again if we visit again. The wheat variety is neat because it doesn't have the long spines off the seeds, so it is easier to deal with by hand. They use their wheat for baking - this past winter they made pancakes and other things with their home-grown wheat. How is that for self-sufficient living?!

They have irrigation shares in one of the valley ditches, it actually runs right between their land and the road. They have a great setup for watering all of their crops. They have their land divided into 8 zones, and they have a timer set up so that each of the zones gets watered at a certain time for a certain amount of time. Because they get their water off of an open ditch (unlike our piped gravity-fed irrigation water), they have to have an electric pump to pressurize the water. They also have several filters to get sediment and other things (for example we often get crayfish in our pipes...) out of their pipes so that their sprinklers don't clog up.

 Speaking of sprinklers, they have several different types that they use around the gardens, but these were the coolest. They had these jets that you can see, and then the top spun slowly around. but instead of the jets always spraying out water, when they got facing the shrubs on the right, they cut out! This sprinkler only watered in 180 degrees, even while rotating! Awesome, right?!

I definitely got lots of new ideas, both of veggies to try my hand at in the future (they sent us home with some kale and I had forgotten how much I loved it!), and also ideas for garden layout and irrigation set ups. We would have loved to stay longer, because there was still so much to see (including their root cellar!), but the sun was about to set and Little M was starting to get a bit fussy since it was past her bedtime.

Hopefully we will be able to go back and visit them again, and maybe they will be able to come over and visit our garden! I love touring around other people's gardens, seeing what plants they grow, how they organize their space, learning new ways to do things, and seeing what works for their spaces. I always learn a lot and come home feeling so inspired :) Thanks Garth & Berri for being so welcoming and friendly and for sharing all sorts of gardening tidbits!

Green & chilly spring days

We are in that glorious phase of spring where the open space around our house is greening up and starting to look really nice as if we spend a lot of time caring for it. Soon we will be in that stage where it's obvious that they are mostly non-native species, and lots of noxious weeds at that. We have a few areas of actual yard grass, 2 areas in fact, that we seeded last spring after doing a bit of moving dirt around with a day tractor rental.

One grass area is on the east side of the house by the fruit trees, making it really nice in the evenings in the heat of summer. The dogs and Little M and I go back there after summer suppers, when the shadows start getting long, and we relax in the shade. Sometime this spring & summer we are hoping to build a play structure, and it will go on the edge of this patch of grass, in the late evening shade from the house. I can imagine hot summer evenings spent pushing Little M on the swings and sending her down the slide, the dogs relaxing in cool green comfort beside us.

Ah, the warmth of summer... It has been rather windy and chilly the past couple days here. On Wednesday I volunteered at the region's Envirothon competition, which was fun as back when I was in high school my friends and I competed in Envirothon as well. In fact, I partly thank Envirothon for where I am today in the work world -  employed in the biology field. The poor students must have been pretty cold, though, and not all of them came prepared for the windy chilly weather we experienced. When the sun was out, it was nice, but unfortunately that wasn't all of the time!

At home, even though it has been cold some days and many nights (we even had a frost yesterday morning), we have had enough warm periods and sunny days to get the fruit trees up and going. The apricot in particular is almost ready to burst into bloom. I took a bunch of pictures that I was planning on sharing, but at the moment I think my computer is needing a reboot and I can't seem to upload anything... Oh well! I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Seedling progress & a lime!

Well on the weekend I had to add another bin tower to add space under the sunporch grow light. There wasn't any space for any more new starts! So far I've started 3 types of peppers - chocolate beauty, golden treasure, and now jalapeno too. I traded pepper seeds with a friend at work and now I need to start the marcono rossi peppers from her as well. I've got a bunch of marigolds, all 3 types of tomatoes that I will be growing this year, and some onions that I'm doing to test whether direct seeding or starting inside works better here for me. Oh, and some lavender sprouts to see whether I can grow them to larger plants or not!

Not really seedling related, but my husband ordered a dwarf lime tree with some sunflower seeds for his bird garden, and it came on the weekend. We potted it up in a planter and it will live on the sunporch year round, although when it gets bigger we will likely put it out at times over the summer. Maybe even for insect pollination when it starts to produce limes!

Pruning our fruit trees

I'm joining up (a little late) to this week's Homestead Barn Hop to share what I've been learning this week about pruning old unkept fruit trees!

Last year we meant to prune our fruit trees, really we did! But with a baby who was only a couple months old, and me still recovering all my core strength after an unanticipated C-Section birth, pruning just didn't happen.

Since then, I've done a lot of reading online, printed off a bunch of info brochures, and talked to people I know who have fruit trees.

Some things I have learned that I'm trying to follow:

 - prune branches that head into the center of the tree
 - prune new branches that head straight up
 - prune branches that you can't possibly pick fruit from even when standing on your tallest ladder
 - prune branches that are too crowded
 - prune branches that are overtaking the next tree over's space

I'm also trying to prune our pie cherry tree way back to reduce the amount of fruit this year, because I don't want to spray for the cherry fruit flies that it is infested with. Doing some research online I learned that the fly larvae can only survive 2 years in the soil, and the adults can't reproduce unless they have cherry fruit to lay their eggs in. Last summer I picked and froze all of the cherries to kill the wormy larvae, but there were a lot of cherries! I figure with less cherries, less will go to waste.

Here are some pictures of the start of my pruning handiwork. So far I've really only finished the cherry tree, and done some preliminary work on the apricot and the pear:

cherry is back left, pear front middle, apricot back middle

cherry tree is front center, apricot next back on the left, pear on the right

Our fruit trees

When we purchased our current home in the summer of 2009, there was an existing home orchard near the house containing 8 older fruit trees and 2 regrowth areas where there had obviously been a fruit tree that had died back. These fruit trees had been neglected for at least several years, and due to the timing of when we got possession, although all or nearly all had flowers and then fruit when we first visited the property, only the apple trees and the pear tree still had small hard fruit by harvest time. We had other priorities that first summer (making the house interior livable and starting a small vegetable garden) thus we didn't take time to water the trees, although it is likely that by the time (mid July) that we got possession, the fruit for that summer was already doomed. We were able to tell what most of the trees were that first summer though, and 2010 allowed us to get a more complete tally of what we had:

 2 apple trees, one greenish, one reddish.
1 pear (likely a bosc type)
1 pie cherry
1 apricot
1 plum
2 unknown at this time
2 unknown regrowth at this time

The reason there are still two full grown trees that we aren't completely positive what they are is that in spring 2010 we had a late hard frost that killed some of the blossoms, and the cold temperatures around that hard frost likely kept pollinators away from what we later realized was a very important pollination time for our trees. This late frost meant we had fruit on only 4 of our 8 trees - the plum and pie cherry had plenty of fruit, and both apples had some fruit.

However, after being neglected for so long, the pie cherries had a cherry fruit fly infestation so I had to remove and freeze all of the fruit in an attempt to stop their reproductive cycle (I will do the same next year although as there was no fruit in 2009 we may be ok - they can survive up to 2 years in the ground). Apart from becoming a bit over-ripe before I got the plums picked (with Little M gardening was often a challenge in 2010!), they were quite tasty, and a lady I work with made plum jam with what we picked. Although we watered every other day, I don't think the apples got quite enough water, as they never really got good, even after some light frosts. I'll have to do a better job of watering next summer!

In our small orchard there are now 2 rows of old trees, and also one row of new young trees. We planted these in 2010, some in the spring, and some in the fall. There is a Bing Cherry, a Polly Peach,  an Early 8-ball Peach, a D'Anjou Pear, and a Rubymac Apple. You may also have noticed that there is a grassy section (new this fall) at the end of my garden that is now incorporated within the garden fence, that has 2 more fruit trees - both apples - a Cortland and a Jonagold.

some of our 'unusual birds'!

This coming spring we plan to trim the trees, as we didn't get a chance with all that was going on this spring. In the meantime, though, all the overgrown branches are serving another purpose this winter. I have 2 bird seed feeders and one suet feeder hanging on one of the apples which is closest to the house. We keep an eye out for unusual birds, and have been very happy with the enhanced cover the overgrown trees provide!