Garden Report: May 24

We've been grazing the garden, lately.

That's a nice bowlful of Black Tartarian cherries, Fall Gold raspberries, and alpine strawberries. Sometimes we go out for a walk around the garden and just stand next to a plant eating until all the ripe fruit is gone. Occasionally we bring a bowl and some of the fruit makes it into the house. Only once has some of the fruit lasted overnight.

(This is more a reflection of how little fruit we have than voracious appetites, I admit.)

I really like the alpine strawberries. They have a muskier, earthier flavour. And more concentrated (they are a smaller berry). Also, they grow up off the ground. This is a benefit when you have this problem:

Yeah, Goldie spent much of the afternoon napping in the strawberry bed. This is why I planted the alpine strawberries outside the fence.

This is going to be a good year for fruit. Not for nectarines, because the nectarine trees have peach leaf curl something bad and I've made an executive decision to thin the trees to nothing this year to reduce stress.

In addition, this weekend we radically pruned the passiflora vine and relocated it,

That tiny little stick is all that is left of a fairly large vine. I'm guessing we're not going to have many passionfruit this year.

But we have apples:

And blueberries:

There are some flower things going on, too. I recently got a new camera that I can use my film lenses with, and hey, it does a great job of capturing some of the bright and crazy colours coming out in the garden right about now.

The rose hedge is in full bloom right now, and it just goes to show you that it's hard to mess up with roses in this climate; I didn't do the winter pruning I was supposed to, and yet the roses are going crazy and looking just fine.

And just as we start to get to the end of the raspberries, these poppies have started growing up in their midst. I suppose I must have planted those. Maybe it was when I was throwing poppy seedheads all over the place last year.

posted by ayse on 05/24/10