First weekend in July

There are plenty of flowers in the garden finally. I still wish I had planted more among the vegetables. Next year, I'll add more, including more flowers for cutting. The sunflower seeds I planted were gobbled up quickly so I had to resort this year to seedlings from the nursery.

I planted them next to the beans and they've become friends. Those are purple podded bean flowers below.

The calendulas I planted from seed are doing well at least. I need to harvest them more quickly but so far the plants seem to be going strong.

The red flowers below are coreopsis tinctoria. Any plant with tinctoria in its latin name means it will be excellent for natural dyeing.

And you can't go wrong with marigolds growing next to tomatoes. These have all but been engulfed by the monster tomato plants surrounding it.

A lot of those early spring flowers have rapidly turned into ripe, luscious fruit. We have about two dozen santa rosa plums that are ripe. They taste beyond divine! We can only eat them outside leaning over because the juice content is so high.

We also have strawberries and blackberries ripening daily. I'd forgotten what those fruits tasted like right out of the garden.

And last but not least, the vegetable harvest is starting to pick up again. We still have way too many beets (not complaining there) and chard. We also had kale, carrots, padrone peppers (which were waaaayyy too hot) and the last of the broccoli.

And anyone want some herbs? I can finally say I have enough parsley to harvest nightly now that I've gopher proofed one of the beds. I am in the process of gopher proofing the carrot and parsnip bed. What carrots I have harvested (they left me a handful) have been huge and flavorful.

The transformation in the vegetable garden!

I was thrilled to step into my backyard last weekend to see this! Welcome to the newly mulched vegetable garden.

Morning glories are on their way up this arbor.

It looks even better than I imagined. Weeds all gone (I only wish the gopher was gone too, grrr).  I can now see lots more room for expanding those raised beds one day. The mulch will hold us over until we 'live' with the layout for a year and decide how to redesign it, if we even do. At the moment, we've got our hands full with the rest of the house as well.

A little seating area would be perfect right here.

 I spent the entire weekend going over the existing irrigation, updating and expanding it. I also mulched and netted the strawberry bed to keep those sweet birds off my food. I planted a first flush of pole bean seeds in their own bed. They'll be kept company with some love lies bleeding and calendula flowers tucked into the corners.

Kentucky Wonder beans on the outside and Purple Podded in the center.

The rest of the garden is filling in fast as well. The irises are in full bloom now. Not my first pick of flower colors but at least there's something. Beyond the irises is the vegetable garden area with broccoli, garlic and english peas reaching high.

Speaking of growing. I think we're more than set with chard plants. In addition to these babies I salvaged from the existing garden last year, my daughter's raised bed has twelve more that are almost ready for harvesting. Good thing we love chard!

And as if I didn't have enough raised beds, I built another one this month. This one will hold a lot of herbs. I plan to keep a fair amount of herbs in the main garden as well as natural pest deterrents but needed an extra spot for my tea herbs and those cuttings you need in a quick pinch when you're in the middle of cooking. The herb bed is located between our outdoor patio and covered porch.

We built the bed with cedar boards and plan to add a seating lip around it for parties. I can't tell you how many wheelbarrows or compost and soil it took to fill it. My back knows. The bed is filled with two determinate cherry tomatoes, chives, lemon balm, tarragon, savory, chamomile, four mints (in their own pots), thyme and allyssum. We also planted scarlet runner beans and perpetual spinach to climb up the trellis and block out some of the fierce afternoon sun.

And last but not least, the fruit is coming! These are cherry plums above that the previous owners used to make jam. Check out my flikr page to see all the other fruits developing in the garden. This weekend will be all about preparing the last two raised beds for melons plus some more inter and succession planting. It's settling down finally!

Spring break

Just a few images of the garden from the past few weeks. The cherry tree was in full bloom last week. Beautiful! This more than makes up for the terrible formatting blogger is having right now, grrrr.

There is fruit developing on some of the trees already, mostly the plums. The peach and nectarine trees were hit hard by the late rain leaving lots of peach leaf curl. I sprayed three times like I was supposed to but apparently that doesn't matter if the rains come late. No one is sure how much fruit we'll see this year. The same thing happened last year in Sonoma county.

Peach leaf curl on one of the peach trees.

The square foot garden beds are starting to fill in. I was able to plant some peppers this past week, fingers crossed no late freezes! I chose a red and yellow bell pepper and two padrone pepper plants. Padrones have been all the rage in the bay area the past few years. They're amazing grilled in some oil and salt.

Radishes, carrots, beets, lettuces, peppers, tarragon, calendula and cosmos.

Even though the ladybugs are everywhere in Sonoma this month, we let a few more free in the garden one evening. They seem to be especially happy in the artichokes.

My daughter's garden bed is growing quickly. It's the first bed we planted after moving in. She picked out two cherry tomato plants over the weekend at the Tomatomania festival here. We'll have to figure out where to squeeze those in. We chose eight more for the rest of the garden. I have no idea where I'll plant them.

Chard, broccoli, oregano, parsley, radishes, carrots and stray onions.

Fruit Trees!

One of the really appealing things about this property was the sheer number of fruit trees that had been planted by the previous owners. As we toured the property as potential buyers I knew that there were quite a few. But after buying the property we had the chance to walk around with the previous owners while they pointed out all of them and told us all the varieties. I hastily wrote things down as we wandered from tree to tree.

Here's the list:

A sixty year old cherry sits proudly on one side of the lawn. Cherry trees aren't supposed to do well in this area and this one isn't looking so beautiful anymore but apparently it still produces lots of tasty fruit. I just hope we can get to them before the birds do.

Golden Delicious apple

Fuji apple

White peach (I love white peaches and have a hard time finding them in markets here)

Yellow peach

Italian Plum

Santa Rosa Weeping Plum

Canning Plum (these grow all over the county but are great for canning)

Nectarine

Black Jack Fig

2 Lemon trees

Orange (more like a bush)

Fuji apple

Golden Delicious apple

Pear (perhaps a Comice or Bosc)

Asian Pear

Kumquat (a teeny, tiny one with no fruit yet)

Fuyu persimmon (also small and not sure how it will do)
3 Grape vines

Blackberry bushes (not a tree, obviously, but they're all entangled in the trees)

There is enough of everything for our small family plus extra to share with friends. It's better than an orchard of one variety. And they're all fruiting! It usually take about four years before you see a yield and we're coming in around year six. The oranges are almost ripe now, just a few more weeks and we can start harvesting those. And a few lemons are ripe too.