Late harvests.

It has been a weird and unseasonably cold summer in these parts. Actually, I have been hearing that from a lot of parts this year. It's already September and the clouds have rolled it and it's chilly and wet. And just today I got my first tomato, and my first good Lemon Cucumber, and the first good batch of cherry tomatoes, and the apples are finally ripening. Summer harvest comes in the fall.

On the last day of March.

It was surprisingly sunny today. After several days of downpours of rain and cold temperatures, there was a break today and I got my gardening for the week done. I harvested the rest of the first batch of radishes, which will be turned into dinner tonight (one more day without the grocery store!).

I re-sowed radish seeds to replace the ones I harvested. I sowed some more onions and our first outdoor lettuce seeds as well as chard, carrot and broccoli seeds. And, I transplanted my broccoli starters into the garden. This one was pretty exciting. I was so proud of my little guys. I raised them from seed in the safety and warmth of the living room, and now they are outside in the big, bad world of the front yard. Good luck, little broccolis, I hope you fare well.

And, lastly, I'm starting my pepper seeds inside. These will probably be a colossal failure as I just read about how large varieties don't do well in our climate and the two varieties I bought have the words “Giant” and “Grande” in their names. Oops. That's what I get for impulse buying seeds.

The fruit trees are doing their thing. The plum tree has lost it's flowers and is in leaf stage now, but the cherry tree is in full bloom.

And so is the pear tree in the front yard. This one is my favorite; maybe it's because it's at eye level, but I think the blooms are just beautiful.

Although the don't smell very good.

And the sad little apple tree, whose prune job makes you want to cut it down and start over, is starting to bloom too. I'm hoping with a few years of loving pruning we can get this guy back on track.

Trees that make food.

Last summer I started volunteering for the Oregon Food Bank in their Learning Garden. They have two gardens where they grow fresh fruit and vegetables (and have chickens for eggs) to give to the Food Bank. I volunteered several times last year and learned a lot about gardening in the process. I got to mulch, plant watermelon starters, pick all varieties of beans, harvest Chard, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and feed chickens. I'm really looking forward to when the garden reopens this spring for the volunteers. But, this weekend they are hosting a fruit tree pruning workshop, which Mike and I are attending.

The last place I lived I learned what happens when you let a fruit tree go wild. My house becamse dubbed “Pearhouse”. In the backyard there was a pear tree, maybe 30 feet high. There was no way to get to the fruit that was growing and apparently if you let a fruit tree get that large it bitters the fruit. And also apparently when full grown pears drop from 30 feet they are scary!! It literally got to the point that I would put on my bicycle helmet if I had to do something in the yard. A couple pears grazed me and hit my side, but I thankfully never had a direct hit. Every few days I would go into the yard and load up all the fallen pears into baskets and throw them over the fence into the empty lot next door. It was ridiculous the amount of pears that would fall. And I would have to try and pressure wash the deck with the garden hose to get the pear guts off and the wasps away. It has a headache! And the worst part was I never got to eat one of the pears. They were too bitter and would pretty much explode when they hit the ground anyway.

One of the many selling points of my house now was that it already had four fruit trees on the property (and apparently my neighbor has a walnut tree that drops half in my yard). In the back yard there is a cherry tree (right) and an apple tree (left). They are both pretty large, but not so large that they can't be riegned in. In the front yard there is a small pear tree and a small apple tree and these are just the perfect size. The problem is none of these trees have been pruned well. They all need some love and some guidence, and the ones in the back do not need to get any bigger or else we'll have another “Pearhouse” on our hands.

So, I am really looking forward to heading over to the OFB Garden tomorrow morning to not only help them prune their trees in the little mini-orchard, but also to learn how to keep my trees in check so that next fall I can take all the fruits and use them and preserve them and get the most out of the food that my land is already producing for me.