June 6: The Fruit Garden

The fruit garden was created by Conor Johnson as his Eagle Scout project in Oct. 2011.  He cleared the area, and built rasied beds with railroad ties, then filled the beds with a layer of newspaper and well rotted manure.  That fall we planted blueberries and raspberries.  Last summer, we added grapes, strawberries, and dwarf apple trees.  And covered everything with landscape fabric and woodchips.  In 2012, there were a precious few strawberries, blueberries, and grapes, no apples, and quite a few raspberries.  This year, there's LOTS of everything on the way!  Here's one of the two grape vines; they have several clusters of tiny immature grapes already!

(Correction, added 6/7:  Realized today that I was not seeing grape clusters, but rather clusters of flower buds, because today I noticed their pollen stamens.  Hopefully, they get pollinated and so that the grape clusters will be next!)

 The dwarf apple trees had lots of blossoms and now tiny apples are forming!  I did a little research and found that we should remove some of the apples to give the little trees a chance to get stronger.

 The blueberries have been a challenge as they are supposed to have acidic soil.  We've layed pine needles on four times already, and each June have cooked up the lemon rinds from SummerFarmFest's lemon shakeup concession and added the "tea" to the bushes. 

Lemon Rinds!

Last year we also grew cantaloupe and one teeny watermelon in the raspberry patch.  This year I started some from seed but they didn't make it.  So I've bought some seedlings and will add a couple of cantaloupe, watermelon, and a hill of pie pumpkins to the vacant end of the long apple bed.

The strawberries are abundant and delicious!  Since I don't want to dig up the old patch for a couple of weeks, i.e. until we harvest all its berries, I planted corn and cucumbers in flats in the greenhouse today, so they won't get such a late start after we dig up the strawberry patch.