Sometimes I feel like a rock farmer; other days — even though the To-Do list never grows shorter — it turns out progress is happening.
I have roughly a million baby amsonia tabernaemontana (blue star)1 so I need to start a craze or make more friends, else we’ll just line the road with ‘em, I guess. All but one of the baby key lime trees survived winter. And nearly all of the citrus trifoliata (flying dragon) survived, while the ones already in the ground look like this may be their year to leap. A vague idea is to see if I can graft a bit of unhardy lime onto very hardy bitter orange. Worth a shot, nothing much to lose.
Speaking of splits and grafts, slightly surprising success so far among the Blacktwig Mammoth clippings (malus domestica) I’d rather randomly stuck in the ground or pots. Pruning was more miss than hit again this year, but I did cut back my best apple tree over the winter, and snipped a few others here and there.2 Some of them are putting out new growth, which is more than I expected. It does seem the ones in the ground are doing better, even though those were the larger ones I thought were hardly worth the effort to poke in. We’ll see in the longer run.
One of our bulls came home last week, and he was not pleased at separation from the lady cows.
Complaints continued for several days.
My sole vitus rotundifolia (muscadine) doing well end of last year is kinda going nuts already. It is really going to have to go in the ground somewhere this year, meaning not only the agony of deciding where, but also decisions about arbor or trellis and all the details to be decided from that point on. I haven’t given up hope that some other muscadine/scuppernong twigs will decide to live this spring, but so far it is hard to tell.
An entire row broadforked between finishing work and starting dinner one day last week, removing rocks and roots while avoiding violets. The pollen is fierce but overall weather is edging into perfect.
The violets are making vinegar, with many more being picked now likely to become my first attempt at jelly.
Pears, figs, and more on the way.
And these were just an experimental container; way too many seeds still on the bin.
I know they’re supposed to be put on different rootstock, but since I’m so bad at proper pruning, seems like a good idea to have a few spares going, regardless. Maybe I’ll figure the rest out later.