Summer/Fall Garden

With all the busy craziness happening here, my poor garden (and yard) has been shamefully neglected.  Our hydroponics experiment had many successes and a few failures.  Earlier this year we reevaluated my garden and decided to redo a few things.  This worked great when we decided to start the chicken nugget adventure…our redesign didn’t take much to adjust for the chickens.  Unfortunately, redesigning also delayed my garden this year.  Not ideal, but life happens and we move on.  🙂

Garden Hair Cut

Another step in the “Operation Fix the Garden” is complete. Last weekend we finished the winter pruning. We’re still feel like novices, but after watching a true Master Gardener prune his trees I think we’re feeling quite a bit more confident. I don’t have pictures of the citrus yet. Most of the pruning on those was shaping anyways. But here are pictures of the apple, pomegranate and grape vines.

Pomegranate Harvest — Removing the Seeds

The red juicy seeds are the edible part of the pomegranate fruit. And anyone who has spent a warm summer/fall afternoon digging them out with minimal mess, knows this can be a tall task. But those delicious tidbits are sooooo worth it. They’re good for snacking, as toppings for salads and ice cream, and make very yummy juice and syrup.

Pomegranate Harvest

My pomegranate tree is only 3 years old, but we’ve already had 2 years of harvest from this bushy tree. Technically, the pomegranate tree is really a bush…but it can be trained as a tree, which is what we’re aiming for. Each winter/spring pruning season a few more branches are removed from the lower section (along with any suckers and dead and stray limbs). It’s amazing how much this tree grows in a season.

Introducing my Garden

Maybe I should have titled this embarrassing confessions. My sister was asking if my garden was still green, so I figured this was probably as good a time as any to introduce my garden to all of you. Before you shake your head in shock and disappointment, and ask how I could ever consider myself a gardener, know that my garden doesn’t always look like this. The nasty bermuda grass, spurge and other weeds have gotten out of control because I haven’t been able to do all the gardening I need to because of a back injury I got while having the baby. We have plans that will should address the weed problem and hopefully make my garden productive and efficient again. I’ll post the progress and updates as we go…and maybe all my adventures will inspire someone else to start their own garden. Besides…as GadgetMan once told me, we can’t all have gardens like Martha Stewart…some of us have to pull all our own weeds and squish our own bugs — 2 things that remind this optimistic gardener that the Garden of Eden I do not have. But I try, and that’s what’s important.