Fruit Tree Sale Season

It's that time of year again, the time to buy fruit trees. I have noticed a spike in hits on my blog the past few weeks, despite not blogging for the last 6 months or so, no doubt because of my 2011 series on growing fruit trees in Houston. I wrote three articles on growing fruit trees and one that will give you an idea of what the Urban Harvest Fruit Tree sale is like. You can also check out some fruit tree descriptions on the Urban Harvest website.

If you missed last weekend's Urban Harvest sale, you still have time to catch some of the local master gardeners' sales.

This weekend, January 26th, both Harris County Master Gardeners at Bear Creek
and Montgomery County Master Gardeners are having their sales.

The Galveston County Master Gardeners sale is on February 2nd and the Harris County Master Gardeners in Pasadena sale is on February 16th (where they also have a great variety of peppers and tomatoes).

And if you are not a get up early to stand in line to buy a fruit tree kind of person, many of our local nurseries are carrying some of the same trees you can get at the fruit tree sales. Some of the nurseries to check out are Arbor Gate (Tomball), Buchanan's (Heights), Wabash (inside I-610), Maas (Seabrook), & Papershell (Richmond) to name a few. If you don't know a lot about fruit trees, in general, I would advise you to buy from a local nursery rather than a big box store. Many of the big box stores sell fruit trees, however they are not typically the right kind of trees for our area.

So, my friends, go forth and buy fruit trees. Have fun. You'll be enjoying fruit from your very own backyard in a couple of years.

Garden Bloggers Fling and a Book Giveaway

It’s that time of year again, time to fling. Garden Bloggers Fling that is. This year we are heading to Asheville, North Carolina. The home of the Biltmore House, surrounded by National Forests, and filled with a bunch of cool funky stuff.

My first Fling was in Buffalo, NY. I had only been blogging for a couple of months and really had no idea what I was getting into. Who knew bloggers were such a fun and friendly group of people to hang out with? We were treated like royalty by the local press and all of a sudden a ton of people were reading my brand new baby blog. Here are my posts from that Fling, it was called Buffa10.

Last year we flung up to Seattle. Where us southern bloggers had a respite from the heat. I saw some familiar faces from Buffalo along with a lot of new garden bloggers joining us. Our time in Seattle was jam-pack with garden goodness. Check it out.

One of the Seattle Fling organizers, Lorene Edwards Forkner released a book last year called Handmade Garden Projects. You can see some great examples of her projects on many of last years blog posts: Houston Garden Girl, Commonweeder, Bonney Lassie, and Rock Rose.

Here’s a few more pictures from her backyard to wet your appetite.

 

 

Timber Press is having a promotion right now and has provided me with one copy of Lorene’s book to give away. Leave a comment by May 26th to enter the drawing to receive a free copy.

As you can see, many talented garden bloggers are involved every year in Flinging. Keep up with all of us and our travels around Asheville by visiting the Fling blog.

May Garden Bloggers Bloom Day

I have been out of town for the last week or so, back in Oman for another stage of the project I've been working on for my company. I was pleasantly surprised by the gardens when I arrived back home on Wednesday afternoon. The rain we received while I was gone really set everything into motion.



I bought this little one on clearance at Lowes. It's doing well so far this year with some shade from an oak tree.



Perennial Pentas, definitely better than the annuals

Practically everything is in bloom

 

The group of crinums in the foreground aren't blooming, but the two in the background are.

Belinda's Dream with Nature's Way compost as a topdressing that I spread before I left on my trip

 

I’m in Asheville now for the 2012 Garden Bloggers Fling. Stay tuned, more pictures to come.

And a big thanks for Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting garden bloggers bloom day.

Have a Look Around

The great thing about daylight savings time is how late it stays light outside. After work today I puttered around the gardens, finishing up cutting the dead stuff back and doing some light weeding. This year there was not nearly as much to cut back. At least not because it was dead. This year I was cutting a lot of plants back because they were getting leggy or were just too big. That’s what happens when they get to grow year-round. No hard freezes for us this past winter!

Tonight, I took a moment to stop and take in the scenery. I am thrilled that my garden is looking so good and I have not had to expend much energy to make it that way (at least this spring). Every year for the past 8 years, I (and members of my family) have put in a lot of hard labor building new beds and trucking in massive amounts of dirt. So far this year, its just been weeding and fertilizing, nothing back-breaking. I do still need to mulch all the beds…maybe next weekend.

About a third of the grass you see in the above picture is new sod. This is the only lawn area that didn’t get watered last summer, the other grass survived because it was close enough to trees or flowerbeds that were getting watered. In the distance are my two new rain cisterns that I need to get in place before the rain stops.

Here’s a view of the veggie gardens, fruit orchard, and new rose garden.

Behind the oak tree is the rain garden and the part of the yard that stays the wettest when we get a lot of rain. That’s where the Louisiana Iris were blooming a few weeks ago.

Everything is so green right now. We have been getting lots of rain, let’s just hope it continues for a while. Thanks for stopping by, have a great weekend!