Garden Report: April 7

Hey, we went on a trip, Internet Friends! I know, how shocking, how could we stand to leave our home and go stay in hotels with functional heat and no holes to the outdoors? How could we bear the comfort of staying with friends and family who had more than one bathroom? How did we manage with cable television? We could hardly bear it, friends. It was torture. How the world lives like that is beyond us.

Anyway, lots of stuff happened while we were away, including entire trees blooming and the lawn growing, oh, 12 inches or so. And more good stuff, to be discussed in a post later this week, but enough about that now.

Did you disbelieve me about the lawn? Look at the grass by the side steps:

And that geranium kind of went nuts, too. You can sort of see that there are a pair of pots under there -- they are 12" tall for a bit of scale.

We got back to find that the quince tree has quinces on it already. This tree is unstoppable. I mean, I removed half the thing last summer because of fireblight, and it is still going strong.

When we left, the apples didn't even have a single bud or leaf out. But now they're in full bloom.

These are Jonathan blossoms. I'm hoping for lots and lots of apples, hopefully not all eaten by dogs.

And these:

...are the cherry trees. Sure, not every flower turns into a fruit, but that's more flowers than we've had before which means somebody is going to spend July eating sweet cherries fresh off the tree.

We also have our first large lemon on the pink variegated lemon tree. We've had a lot of baby lemons that drop off when they get to be an inch across. This one is a real lemon size, and looks quite firmly attached.

I think it's my amazing AMAZING discovery that citrus trees are not, in fact, drought tolerant and need to be irrigated. In my own defense, most people in California treat their citrus with benign neglect, but those are established trees, not babies like ours.

Also, looks like we'll have a few raspberries this year:

Raspberries are not even worth buying at the store here, they are so expensive and so incredibly poor in quality. I. Can. Not. Wait. It's never going to be like my parents' killer raspberry patch of my youth, but a quart of homegrown berries would be awesome.

The decorative parts of the garden are also going nuts. The rose at the back of the garden has secretly been growing out of control.

You'd hardly think that thing was covered in aphids, but in fact it is. They don't seem to have much effect on the plant, though, so I have not yet bothered to do anything with them.

That pretty little purple flower? That's my Blue Skies lilac in bloom. Smells nice, too. That is my personal triumph in Zone Denial.

The ranunculus are almost at the end of their bloom. We missed the peak of the anemones, and got home just in time for these guys.

And right next to those ranunculus is one of this summer's projects: widening this path.

I didn't think through the pathways very well when I made them: they're wide enough to walk along, but to be more useful for moving materials to the back yard, we need it to be more like four feet wide rather than three. (Note the totally overgrown grass weeds there, too.)

And while I was walking around checking out the garden, Goldie made herself at home under the quince tree.

The dogs came with us on our trip, and they were both very happy to be back in their own garden again, sniffing all their usual spots and finding where neighborhood cats took advantage of their absence.

This is the part of the year when I wish we had a winter freeze here to knock the weeds back a little.

Technorati Tags: apples, berries, dogs, flowers, fruit, gardening, lilac, paths, quince, raspberries, roses, springtime, trees, weeds

posted by ayse on 04/07/10