The Peach Tree is Peaching

Apart from berries, none of our fruit trees have produced yet even though we’ve had some for a few years now. The peach tree which we only planted last year decided to bloom this Spring, and look at that, we have some peaches growing! Very exciting! We did get flowers on our Nanking cherry trees, and the Aronia flowered only to be eaten by deer. The plum, apple, and pawpaw trees have yet to flower and they’ve been here the longest. We are still learning with the fruit, so I guess that is to be expected.

Once we saw the fruit on the peach tree I decided to fence it so the deer couldn’t enjoy them before us. I also enclosed the Aronia in the event it flowered again, but sadly it hasn’t. If Jessica and I each get a peach or two, we’ll be happy. We also found our gooseberry and currants were being attacked by currant worms which had almost completely stripped the leaves off the gooseberry and was quickly working at the currants. We hand picked them but to try to save the plants we resorted to an organic certified neem oil spray (a plant based oil), which is a very rare thing for us to do since we prefer to not spray anything on our plants even if it is organic certified.

This year the odd weather has affected the growth of many things in our gardens and on our land. Early Spring began warm, then got cold again, and once it warmed up again we entered a drought period which still continues. It almost feels like we are back in Colorado, except for the humidity and bugs… well and lack of dramatic scenery and amazing hiking and mountain biking… but I digress.

Hopefully some of the rain that we see passing by will actually reach the ground again one of these days. Last year we had several storms were it dumped four inches of rain in about an hour, that was a bit extreme, but we’d welcome a nice downpour once a week to help the plants on our land.