nectarine tree – Parsol Farms

First Strawberry ^__^

The garden has been growing CRAZY well the past few weeks. I’ve been pretty diligent about plucking off the flowers on the strawberry plants to encourage the plant growth – but it looks like one snuck by me!! I’m just gonna leave it since it’s getting close to June which is when we theoretically should stop plucking the leaves – and it’s pretty cute:

And here’s what the whole strawberry bed looks like. Aren’t these gigantic??? Those leaves are overflowing and it’s making me happy.

Speaking of overflowing – do you see this lettuce and scallions?? We’ve been harvesting them as we need them for various meals (we had our first salad this week with lettuce from the garden <3) but whoops we clearly planted too much stuff all at once. We’ll want to space out the plants a bit more next year.

This may be a bit hard to see (sorry for the bleh photo) but the Nectarine tree has a _ton_ of fruit growing on it. We are plucking off most of it since the roots haven’t really established themselves yet and we don’t want the tree to like destroy itself – but I think we’ll let a few grow.

The blueberries are mostly doing well. The one in the middle is a bit sad but that’s ok. The other two are pretty happy. Our mulch plan clearly didn’t work as well as I hoped, though – as there are weeds poking through that I’m battling. RAWR. Oh well – eventually may get rid of them and they give me more to do outside.

Our lavender is also experiencing a crazy growth spurt and now has stems larger than the pot itself. Maybe a new pot is in order at some point?

Last, but certainly not least, our sunflower is doing pretty well. It got a chunk bitten out of it but it still seems pretty happy and is growing fairly well.

So ya – that’s my update for now. Hope y’all are doing well. I’m looking forward to the strawberries om nom nom.

Garden update + new plants

It’s been quite some time since I’ve made a post about the garden – sorry about that! We haven’t been doing a whole lot with the garden other than just letting things progress and watering occasionally – but this weekend was a big weekend for outdoor work!

I finally bought a weed whacker and spent a long time this morning mowing + assaulting the weeds and the backyard really cleaned up nicely. Sadly I didn’t really think about taking photos to show the progression but the yard is looking much better. One of the big things with the weeds / just general lawn stuff is that they were definitely encroaching on some things like our blueberry bushes. You may have noticed this in previous photos – but today we decided to attempt to fix this!

We went to our garden store and bought some mulch along with some other things I’ll go into below. Kelsy helped trim around the blueberry bushes and then I layered on the mulch to try and make it so it’s both easier to mow around them and less things encroach on their space. I also just really like the look of mulch around the plants so woo.

Our row of blueberry bushes – now with bigger mulch rings!

A close up of one of the happiest of our blueberry bushes with more mulch

Before I get into the new plants, I also wanted to share a status update of some of our old ones. Our nectarine tree appears to be doing quite well and also appears to maybe have fruit forming on it? I’m a bit confused as it wasn’t supposed to produce fruit for 3 years. I’m unsure if this is like strawberries / blueberries where we should pull off the fruit to encourage plant growth or if we should just let it do its thing. More research will need to be done.

Surprisingly, to me, the strawberries that we planted just in the ground near the old tree stump appear to be quite happy as well. We hardly have done anything with these but I guess whatever is happening in the environment is pleasing to these plants so yay.

Our actual strawberry bed is also doing pretty well. While most of the marigolds are really struggling, the strawberries themselves appear to be really happy and there’s a never ending battle of me vs the flowers as I continue to rip them off.

The lavender is growing quite large now but still not much in the way of flowering. I wonder if we needed an even larger pot o_O

Last, but certainly not least, we added four new plants to our garden today!! We have 2 types of tomatoes, a bell pepper plant, and a Habanero plant. It’s been super hot so I think that these plants should be happy. I’ll let Kels fill you in more about these in her post. We also bought some cute supported for the plants to help as they grow.

Aside from those new plants in the middle – do you see the size of our onions and lettuce??? They’re getting crazy big. I’m glad we trimmed up some of the lettuce before cause wow.

Anywho that’s all for me today. Hope y’all have been well 🙂

Nectarine Tree!!

So I’ve been searching around for a nectarine tree for the past few weeks and haven’t been having much luck despite the fact that numerous articles online mention how well nectarines grow here. One of my best friends (Winx) was at a garden center near where she lives in Portland and texted me that they had a couple of nectarine trees! Since Kels and I were off today, we decided to drive on down and see about getting one ^_^

We found one there and it was even a fairly decent breed. While Fantasia Nectarines can be affected by Peach Leaf Curl (which is fairly common up here) – it sounds like there’s some fairly easy things we can do to help protect the tree.

Getting the tree into the car did pose a slight issue, though – as it was quite large but we managed to do it without any major incidents.

When we got home, I had to dig quite a large hole. It needed to be at least 2 feet in diameter and far enough down that the top of the root bulb would sit flush with the soil. Fortunately, I finally decided to order me a wheelbarrow type of thing and man did it help! Made it so we didn’t have this giant pile of dirt we had to pick up off the yard.

The pile of dirt + wheelbarrow + nectarine tree + Kels’ legs

After the hole was dug, we mixed some native soil with our good potting mix and some fertilizer and put that around the root bulb. We also added an inch or two of fertilizer on top of that and made sure it curved up around the edges to make a nice pit for some water

Aside from the nectarine tree, we also got an Azalea bush and planted it before realizing that they are toxic to dogs so we’re gonna have to move it to the front yard instead. Whoops ^^;;

While I’m posting, might as well give an update on the raised beds and other plants. Everything appears to be coming along well! Still need to clean up that lettuce <__<;;;

Strawberry bed with the pretty flowers blooming 😀

Shhhh just pretend you don’t see the lettuce

One of the blueberry bushes – look how many of the flowers we’ve had to pluck off so far!

Anyway that it’s for the the week. Things are still going well here ^_^ – hope all of you had a great week and thanks for reading!