Backyard Orchard: Year 2

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May 29, 2015 by Sarah

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I decided recently that my all time favorite season is spring. I love how everything comes to life at the end of winter, and it’s the greenest time of the year before summer turns everything very brown. This year especially it was so much fun to see how our fruit trees and plants took off! I’m learning more and more with gardening that there are a good number of things that will die, because of mistakes that you made or for absolutely no reason that you can think of. So, when things make it and grow a lot bigger in size, it’s really exciting! Even more when fruit starts coming off branches and vines.

Last year I did a few posts (phase 1 and phase 2) about the foundations of our backyard orchard. We still have the dream to one day get all our produce from our yard. We live in a place where it’s doable, but it takes a lot of planning and waiting. Getting enough fruit to feed our family, or even just my kids who devour enough for a small army, is going to take a number of years. And so, we wait. And we get excited about any sort of progress.

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Here’s a peek at what’s going on in year 2 of our orchard. I returned maybe 4-5 trees that just didn’t make it, I have no idea why. We also had to move around things, an orange and avocado because they weren’t getting enough sun. The top photo shows blackberries starting to ripen on the vine. I tried one this morning and oh. my. gosh. It was the sweetest, juiciest, most delicious blackberry I’ve eaten in my entire life!

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Our avocado tree has new growth, yay! This one was given to us by a friend, started from a seed.

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We’ve gotten baskets and baskets of strawberries! They’ve slowed down a bit recently, but there are new flowers on the plants ready to make more.

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We have a few fuji apples and asian pears growing on our fruit trees that we just planted last year. And we got our first cherries!

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Our three remaining grapevines are starting to take off, one of them is giving us grapes this year.

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Our blueberry bushes are a little underwhelming, but I’m hoping more a better harvest next year.

I was itching to get some more trees and plants in the ground this year, I can’t look at our yard without imagining what else could go here and there. But, I’ve been mostly good about putting things on hold while we prepare to majorly dig up our yard for an upcoming remodel. I’ll just have to wait until next year! More waiting.

 

 


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