Nothing much was happening for a couple of months while we waited for the snow to melt.
We have a ton of work planned for the garden. And we thought about finding some yard minions but decided we would simply give up that plan and just do everything ourselves.
So while we waited for the snow to melt I fixed things we really love.
Our favorite soup.
The fruit trees and bushes, and strawberries we ordered arrived and the snow melted just in time for us to start digging holes and planting them where they belong. There are more rocks in the ground than seems totally necessary, but a very long pry bar, a shovel, and a big guy made it possible to make places for trees and plants to live. The fruit trees are all semi-dwarf, so they won’t get so big.
We had to plan on the spacing as if the trees were full grown and not the wee babies they are now. So there is a lot of bare ground around the baby plants. Eventually we will have to smooth out all the ground and remove all the rocks, then lay out ground cloth and cover everything with several inches at least of bark mulch. This will do several things for the garden, besides looking neat. It will keep the ground moist, very important in the hot dry summers here, and keep the weeds down to a dull roar.
Both these trees have a really good shape and so all we had to do was add top soil and compost to the holes, then plant the bare root plants.
I love to make peach butter and apricot butter. It will be at least four years before we get any fruit from these baby trees.
These plants are well armed with thorns but we found that the thornless varieties don’t have the same flavor. We opted for combat berry picking.
We might see some raspberries this year, but both varieties bear fruit on the 2-year old canes and a smaller fall crop from the 1-year old canes. Next year it will be all the raspberries we can eat and freeze, and make jam and pies and pancakes, and muffins. Yum!
Jostaberry is a cross between a black currant and a gooseberry and it’s Dan’s favorite jam as it is very tart. It will be two years before I have anything to play with in jam-making but in three years I should be back to having more fruit than I know what to do with. And to make things more interesting we have ordered a second jostaberry plant and two blueberry bushes. Those haven’t arrived yet.
Each raised bed is four feet by eight feet, and we will have twelve of them once all is said and done. Four are built, so far, and the 2×12 cedar boards for the remaining eight beds are sitting in the yard waiting for us to fill the first four.
Today we filled the second raised bed.
An hour later the second bed was filled, we added a bag of compost to the top of each bed and raked it in to mix it up. Then we soaked baby strawberry plants in water for about fifteen minutes and then laid them out on the topsoil and planted them.
We will get some strawberries this year and then next year it will be full steam ahead. These plants produce really big strawberries which are perfect for chocolate covered strawberries.