Garden Pictures - August, 2010

Well, it's time for another update on our garden to see the changes and what's growing now. Hope you like the pictures.

This is our nectarine tree now! If you look at my March garden pics of this year, you'll see how much it's fluffed out. We're so proud of her. She produced one nectarine this year, and let me tell you, it was the most amazing, sweetest nectarine I've ever had. Everybody but G took a bite - he wanted the rest of us to enjoy it. I'm looking forward to more next Summer.

For Mother's Day, my family gave me these two avocado trees. The one on the left is a Stewart, and the one right in front here is a Bacon, so we've named it Kevin. Stewart and Kevin will have a long life together here on our plantation. Poor Kevin almost died when we first got him; that's how come he's so much shorter than his brother. On the fence is the grapevine that G planted a few weeks ago.

Here is just an example of our extensive pumpkin patch. They take up two short beds, a long bed, the ground, and stretch beyond the short fence onto our patio. The seeds came from our pumpkins from last Fall. GR's been cultivating her special pumpkins, while the rest of us maintain the rest. They are several varieties.


Here is an example of one of our white ones. We also have gray, orange, and striped.

Here is one of our strawberry plants. We didn't know it when we bought the seeds, but apparently this variety is small and tart. Hmm. I'll pay more attention next time, but they still are pretty.

Okay, there are several things in this picture. In the front right corner is our old artichoke plant. You can see the faded trunk extended several feet. It produced several artichokes for us, and they were all big and delicious. Well, I let an artichoke flower go into full bloom to see what it looked like, and it apparently killed the plant. I was going to pull it when G saw new growth at the bottom. Sure enough, we've got a bunch of new growth at the bottom there, and it's just as big as the plant next to it that we planted several months ago. It's coming back, and it's coming back strong! Behind the artichokes in the same bed are red cabbages and kale. We actually left our old kale plants in the bed to go to seed. I read that in Scotland it grows like a weed, so I wanted to see if it would replant itself. It seems to be doing so. In the bed behind this one, you can see our zucchini plants. We actually planted tomato seeds which had begun to sprout, but then the zukes totally surrounded them and they never took off. We've also grown and eaten sugar snap peas, as well. The children made an attempt at sunflowers, but they didn't do very well. I think I'm going to designate one plant to each bed from now on, except for beds with already established plants. We'll keep trying our hand at this gardening stuff!

This is our almond tree, which we were actually able to harvest a couple of dozen nuts from before the squirrel got them.

A new baby almond tree that SR is growing.

Our ruby red grapefruit tree is still growing...

...as is our mandarin tree.

We got this golden delicious apple tree free from a friend, and you can see white apple blossoms just beginning to grow on it.

SR is growing the pink lady apple tree in the middle, and G is growing the black walnuts on either side of it.

(The pics I posted of our furry family members showed their tags with all our info, so I had to delete them. Next time, I promise.) Hope you liked our photos and that they encourage you to keep on gardening!