The April Garden

So much has happened in our garden these last few weeks and our April Garden is looking promising. Our sweet peas are producing; I just love the flowers. I didn’t plant a lot and I planted really late, kind of spur of the moment really, but we’ve been enjoying a few a day as an in-the-garden snack. It’s starting to get pretty warm here, yesterday afternoon when I took these photos it was 80°F. Who knows how long these sweet peas will last but we’re enjoying them while they’re here. 

We bought an avocado tree. Actually, my mom and her husband gave us a gift card for Christmas to buy fruit trees. We bought the avocado and a pulmello (old grapefruit variety) tree. The owner of the nursery told us to leave it in a pot until all the trunk was covered with brown bark. It will probably be another year or so. It’s blooming so it will be fun to see if we actually get avocados this year. I know nothing about growing avocados, I need to make an avocado page in our gardening notebook. 

All of the citrus trees except the grapefruit have bloomed and have fruit on them. I’m sure some will drop but it’s looking like a very promising citrus year. 

The key lime blooms are so tiny. It’s fun to see how different the blooms on each citrus tree looks. These are by far the smallest and least fragrant. 

Our mulberries are starting to ripen. Actually the tree is on our neighbor’s property but it overhangs our fence line and he doesn’t mind us picking them. It’s a daily treat. 

We have several small pears on a pear tree we just planted; we had to replace one that didn’t make it last year. I’m wondering if these pears will actually grow or if the tree will drop them. I should probably pick them so the tree will put it’s effort into a root system instead of growing fruit. I’ll have to ponder that one….

We have our first peaches! We planted four peach trees in January 2013. I’ve never grown peaches before and hear they are somewhat finicky when it comes to trying to grow them organically but I’m up for the challenge. Feel free to leave me some peach growing tips in the comments. 

Can I just say that my family is doing the happy dance over these bean flowers? We’ve been eating greens (mainly kale and chard) and brassicas every day since November. We love them but are ready for something else and green beans will do nicely. 

And because we’re all about keeping it real, I thought I’d give you a wide angle shot of my green bean beds. They have carrots and beets planted with them. And a squash volunteer plant came up in each bed. I’ll leave them until we figure out what they are. 

We had this volunteer tomato plant come up in our front flower bed last fall. I left it until I cleaned out and replanted the beds in January. Then we put it in a pot for a few weeks and finally put it in the garden once we were past our frost dates. And we now have little tomatoes on it. Who know what variety it is but I do believe they are some kind of grape or cherry tomato. 

We planted strawberries for the first time this year. One bed is doing really good, the other, not so much. I’ve been in contact with the company and they have a 100% guarantee on their plants so if the others don’t come up I’ll have to email them. 

Our squash and zucchini plants are doing well, in fact a few of the plants have unopened blooms on them. This is the lazy way to succession plant which is why I chose this photo. When we planted our transplants, I sowed a couple of seeds near each plant – this one might be a little too close. If we get hit with vine borers, hopefully the smaller plants won’t get hit since their stems are so small and we won’t loose our entire crop. If I direct sow instead of using transplants I usually wait until the first flowers appear and then sow some seeds with the plants. I do the same thing with bush beans. 

Our seed potatoes rotted. Have I mentioned that we had the second wettest March on record? Potatoes don’t like that much water just after they’ve been planted. So I moved the one plant that wasn’t with the others and I sowed some luffa seeds in the other side of the bed. I’ll try a fall potato crop and see what happens. 

Our onions are looking good, although some are going to seed. It’s ok, they were volunteers from last year and I’ll collect the seeds to plant in the fall. All the other onions were planted by seed and they look great. 

Here’s another “keeping it real” photo. I had squash and zucchini planted in this bed, then a week later I asked Carl and Josiah to plant some onions transplants for me since I was going to be in town with Phoebe and Benjamin all day. I even told them where – the big cedar bed. And they did. At one point Carl asked Josiah what was planted in the mounds and he said, “squash.” So they just planted the onions around the mounds. I had forgotten we had sown squash seeds in that bed. Last weekend we dug the squash plants up and moved them. There are doing fine. 

We planted asparagus this year, too. I’ve been told to just keep it watered and weeded and leave it alone. I think we can do that. I kind of planted it on whim, I had some seeds from the Seeds of the Month Club and then I saw a pack of roots at Walmart. I bought the roots and then planted them and the seeds right before we got all the rain. 

We’ve built 10 new boxes for our raised beds. I really wished we could have just used large tree limbs but we are having trouble finding them. We put the boxes over the beds we’ve been using and buried the box a little. We’re not adding dirt to them. We’re using the soil that is there plus the compost we’ve been making. Over time the soil in each box will be really amazing. 

Oh, and just so you know, this is probably the tidiest our garden will be all year. 

So tell me, what is going on in your garden? 

Thanks for sharing with your friends!