Buying Bareroot About five years ago, I purchased two fruit trees, a Weeping Santa Rosa Plum and an Ultra Dwarf Blenheim Apricot tree at OSH on clearance at the end of bare root season. Discounted plants are rarely worth the trouble and I probably should not have wasted any money on it, but I am really glad I did. In a weird way, I kind of enjoy taking the risk. And a few of my favorite plants have been clearance…
I know, I know, I shouldn’t be thinking about buying and adding more bare root fruit trees, since my yard is already crammed full, but it is hard to not collect one of everything, and even more so, after K shared some of her Spice Zee nectaplums last summer. Back in early July, K generously gave me a half-dozen Spice Zee fruits, even though she didn’t have much of a crop yet since the tree is only 3 years old….
By Southern California gardening standards, we are already half way through Spring, and as usual, the Hanbury edible landscape and ornamental garden continues to evolve. Every winter and Spring I change out things that under performed or plant new varieties of things I never tried before. For last couple of months I have kept pretty busy with chores in the garden, the kid’s activities, local plant shopping, two landscape designs for others, and with home improvement projects around the house. …
This past growing season, despite the fact we only had a half dozen male flowers on the Kiwi vines, we still had a bountiful crop of Vincent Kiwis, way more than the previous year when we only had two male flowers for cross pollination. Since we are limited on our cold storage space here at Hanbury House, rather than completely harvest all the fruit at once this year, I decided to let the fruit continue to hang on the vines,…
Am I imagining it or are edible plants at the nurseries going way up in price due to the increased popularity of backyard food gardening, sustainability, and homesteading? I was running errands this morning, and one of them took me past a Garden Center; it’s a chain, but I won’t name names. I love browsing at new plant selections and I am in process of helping a friend with a backyard garden design that includes some fruit trees, so…
Depending on what garden resource I read or who I listen to, what I do around our property is referred to by a variety of names…urban homesteading, Permaculture, backyard orchard culture, edible landscaping, victory gardening, etc. I really don’t care what it is called, except when my husband calls it an addiction. This is a small sample of what’s growing around here, and more pictures can be found throughout my blog. We live on a 1/12th of an acre, smack…
About 5 years ago, I read about promising early results with newly developed low chill sweet cherries called Minnie Royal cherry and Royal Lee cherry. Well, when I told my neighbor/ friend / fellow gardener about the new trees, she was up for the experiment and had a little bit of room. I grow all sorts of low chill fruit trees, but ran out of room myself for new stuff quite awhile ago. After 3 years of her “testing” the…