First peach blossom of the year!

 The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.  He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry.  He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”

I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.”

It's always exciting to see the first peach blossom of the year, and I was particularly pleased to see this one on our oldest peach tree. Peach trees have a short lifespan in the desert...maybe ten years or so, and we've already lost several limbs on this one. This blossom arose from a large limb that I thought was dead as it lost all its leaves late last summer. We'd considered removing it then, but decided to wait and see what happened in the spring. And as you can see, what I thought was dead has come back to life!

I'm not sure what kind of peach tree this is, but it both flowers and fruits very early, and produces small, but very tasty cling peaches.  Sometimes we can pick the first peach in April, with the bulk of the crop ripening in May.

We planted two new bare-root peach trees this year, a Mid Pride yellow and a Tropic Snow white, that we bought from Root Phoenix. This is the first time we've attempted planting bare root fruit trees rather than potted ones from the nursery or big-box stores. They look like dead sticks now, but so did the peach tree in this photo only a few days ago. Appearances can be deceiving.