It's beginning to look a lot like spring

March 1, 2016

"As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease."

As blossoms on peach and apricot trees fade and begin to (hopefully) set fruit, the pear tree behind the gazebo is white with blossoms, and the surviving cherry tree is also flowering.  Citrus blossoms should follow within a few days; I can smell them already. A freesia, which I planted several years ago pondside and comes back year after year, is blooming, as are many of the nasturtiums and the first larkspur.

It's fun to stroll through the garden this time of year and see what new surprises it has for me. I picked enough asparagus for tonight's dinner today, which we'll have with the peas I picked earlier this week. Bush beans are beginning to poke their way to the surface, along with squash, melon, and cucumber seedlings. New leaves are appearing on the fig trees and grapevines.

Today is "Super Tuesday" and the news on TV and social media is full of opinions and predictions, I think I'd rather spend time in our backyard. Gardening keeps me grounded.

Asparagus

Royal Lee Cherry blossoms

Freesia

Green Bush Beans

Nasturtium

Larkspur

Artichoke

Pear blossoms

Spring blooms

Things are starting to wake up around here. Each day when I walk through the garden, I see something new. Most of the fruit trees- peach, apricot, pear, apple, plum, lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit- have begun to bud and bloom. The rose bushes have leafed out and are full of buds; the fig tree and grape vines are showing their first leaves, and zinnia, hollyhock, larkspur, nasturtium, coreopsis, and galliardia seedlings are popping up all over the place. I like to let the flowers come up where they will, and fill in the blanks with transplants. 

Lemon blossoms

First rose of the season

Peach blossoms

Pear blossoms

Nasturtiums

Petunias and Swiss chard


The words of an old hymn we used to sing in the sixties kept playing through my head as I wandered through and worked in the garden this week:

What a wondrous time is spring, when all the trees are budding. 
The birds begin to sing; the flowers start their blooming. 
That's how it is with God's love, once you've experienced it. You want to sing; it's fresh like spring; you want to pass it on.

Plumbago and pears

The blue plumbago at the base of our Asian pear tree looks particularly good this year, probably due to the mild winter. There are dozens of ping-pong ball size fruits on the tree, too.

A blustery day

It's too windy to work outside today, almost like monsoon season, but unfortunately with no rain. I still get a childish thrill from being outside in the wind, and it's fun to watch things blowing around. The Hall's honeysuckle is beginning to bloom, and the wind is lifting it up the part overhanging the fence like a sail. That's a Keiffer pear tree in the upper right, bending in the wind next to the gazebo.

Asian pear tree in bloom

Our Asian pear tree is loaded with blooms this year. Last year, it didn't produce a single pear. It is my understanding that some fruit trees bear heavy crops in alternate years. Maybe we will get some this year!

I noticed the first bachelor's button flowers open this morning, and a few of the larkspur as well. There are also blossoms on many of the citrus trees, and their fragrance is beginning to fill the air. We had a nice dinner last night of roasted asparagus and steamed sugar snap peas, and today I will need to pick them again.

We found the pond plants Paul gave us Saturday new homes in the streambed. The larger ones look a bit droopy, but the watercress wasn't fazed by its abrupt relocation.

What a difference a week makes!

I've been gone for a week visiting my family in Alabama, and there have been quite a few changes in just a week. Things are finally waking up! There are blossoms on the apricot, apple, nectarine, almond, pear, and plum trees, and leaves on the crape myrtle. The roses have leafed out and should begin blooming in a couple of weeks. The three tomato plants I thought were dead have put out new growth, nasturtiums are blooming and some of the other annuals won't be far behind. Hollyhock plants are about two feet high. Even the grass is beginning to green up somewhat.

No beans or squash yet; I think that last cold snap hit at the wrong time for successful germination so I'll need to replant. The potato bush has come back nicely from the frost and the plumbago and snail vine are showing growth at the roots. The thevetia hedge hasn't really come back yet, although it's beginning to show signs of life. We pruned back the hibiscus and bougainvillea even further and never did find green wood, so it will be a long time before they come back.

We had Paul from The Pond Gnome over yesterday for a consultation and got some good ideas for projects to improve our ponds and streambed. We used flagstones to line the pond banks and streambed, and a lot of them have deteriorated. He suggested replacing them with rip rap, which will give us the same red rocks look and be more stable, and also replacing some of our pond plants with less invasive species.

"You can do anything for 15 minutes"

One of my favorite "Flylady" motivational quotes is "You can do anything for 15 minutes." I really do not enjoy the digging part of gardening, but this bed was particularly overrun by Mexican primrose (see Things I Wish I Hadn't Planted" here). It's a nice day here, sunny with temperatures in the high sixties, the ground still has enough moisture in it to be worked easily, and our prime spring planting season begins in mid-February. So I set my timer for 15 minutes and went to work and as you can see, I was able to get quite a bit of the bed dug up. The timer is a great motivator for overcoming inertia; I tell myself I can quit after 15 minutes and that usually gets me up from my nice comfortable chair in front of the computer.

The tree in front of the bed is a young Comice pear we planted when we put in the raised beds a couple of years ago which so far has not produced any fruit.  When we originally put in the raised beds, we had just taken a class from the Phoenix Permaculture Guild where the instructor suggested that some shade is helpful in the summer for vegetable plants here, and we thought that deciduous fruit trees would be a nice option as they would lose their leaves in the winter when more sun was desirable. Since then I have heard from at least three other instructors from the Master Gardener Program, Phoenix Permaculture Guild, and Urban Farm that it isn't a good idea to plant fruit trees where you grow grass, vegetables, or flowers because the watering needs are too different. This may be why we lost several trees this summer. For now this one seems healthy, so we are leaving it where it is.

Behind the tree are kale and Veronica romanesco cauliflower plants. This is the first time we've planted kale, and it did rather well, but neither one of us particularly likes kale so we probably won't plant it again. I tried this recipe for kale chips and it was okay, but I was the only one who ate them. The cauliflower are heading and should be ready to harvest soon, but they are really strange looking with kind of a seashell pattern of growth to the florets.

As you can see, the hibiscus plants lining the block wall have significant frost damage. They are unsightly to see, but we have to leave them this way for another month or so. Frost-damaged plants should not be pruned until new growth resumes in the spring.

Of springtime and ashes

"What a wondrous time in spring, when all the trees are budding. The birds begin to sing; the flowers start their blooming. That's how it is with God's love, once you've experienced it. You want to sing; it's fresh like spring; you want to pass it on."

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, which I never have fully understood, perhaps because of my non-liturgical upbringing. Our pastor says Lent is her favorite season...I can't say that I feel the same way. Lent is sackcloth and ashes and repenting our sinful nature, which may be necessary, but is not enjoyable, and (I hope I don't get struck by lightning) seems somewhat masochistic to me. Maybe it works better in more temperate climates, where February is still winter, rather than in Phoenix, where it marks the beginning of spring.

Our earliest-bearing peach tree is setting fruit; a later bearing variety is covered in blossoms; and the apricot and almond trees are also beginning to blossom. I've already picked a nice batch of sugar snap peas and a few asparagus shoots (only because I only planted two plants....must remedy that!) and our second planting of lettuce is reaching harvest-size leaves. Pear, plum, fig, and apple have not yet blossomed, but have full buds I expect to see open any day now. Some of the nasturtiums are blooming (maybe I should pick a few and add to the lettuce for a salad tonight); lilac vines are blooming, and the air is becoming heady with the fragrance of citrus. Calla lilies, which I'd wondered if had survived, are emerging from the ground...larkspur and hollyhock are coming up everywhere, in unexpected locations. Even in the gravel part of the yard I'm seeing marigolds, hollyhocks, nasturtiums...to quote my favorite Jurassic Park quote, "life will find a way."

And, there are a few weeds that need to be pulled. There are always a few weeds to be pulled, and it's generally best to pull them early before they have a chance to grow to giant size and set seed. I can see that part of Lent. There are weeds to be pulled in our lives, and with weeds, it's generally best to pull them when they are small and manageable. But in my garden, and I think also in our lives, it's an ongoing process. And I don't want to concentrate so much on the weeds that I can't enjoy the flowers.