Category: Propagation

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Dwarf fruit grove additions

Quality assurance inspector
Paula found a loofah deep underground while digging one hole. How?? Why????
Four new trees all dwarf or semi dwarf: Liberty apple, Seckel pear, Kieffer Pear, and McIntosh Apple. We’re supposed to be on the edge of conditions for those apple varieties but with three other well adapted types already planted last year, I figured why not try. I really love McIntosh and they’re so rare around here.
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Transplant successes from earlier

Rudbeckia lacinata from Abby.
Viola bicolor is an annual, but I moved some last year from the front yard (where I am gradually removing the lawn but I want to rescue the few native plants) to the backyard in hopes they’d seed. They did!
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Tiny greenhouse

A little centipede in the garden dirt. Hopefully it’s an earwig predator.
Hoops in!
Seeds planted, cover on! We put lots of extra and smelly plants like cilantro and parsley among the carrots and bok choy and beets in hopes of earwig distraction.
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Earwigs indoors 😤

We mixed up neem oil concentrate with water according to the directions (~0.4 g oil per 2 oz water ie the size of our little glass spritzer bottles), and spritzed all the baby plants. We’ve seen three earwigs inside near the plants since repotting last night and several tomatillos, peppers, and chamomile look a bit worse for the wear.

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Indoor repotting

We got almost an inch of sleet today.
Briar’s toes provide excellent grip.
Squirrel tree in our neighborhood.
This evening we repotted baby tomatoes and peppers. Mid last week I forgot some other repotted tomatoes outside and they froze. So those three varieties are being germinated again. But meanwhile these babies needed new pots.
One dwarf tomato is thriving and fruiting; the other is drying up and has spider mites. Paula bought a basil and is keeping it alive. The indoor peppers have a good head start for spring but I doubt will fully fruit by then.
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Straw bale gardening

I read a book about straw bale gardening. The bale requires a bit of composting first. So one is wrapped in plastic to accelerate. Once it’s happy we’ll move to other bale. Next month seed potatoes will be sold at feed store and we can put them in. Thanks to friends of blog for donating their leftover fall decoration bales to this experiment.