Category: Hobbies

Things I do for fun

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April garden progress

The potatoes are continuing to grow and expand, although one of them seems to have lost a couple stems worth of leaves for some reason. Overall it seems like they’re doing pretty well though.

Potato plants growing in a raised bed
Potato plants growing in a raised bed

The butternut squash plants have grown quite a bit and have a bunch more leaves now compared to the two little leaves they had a few weeks ago. Some of them seem to have sprouted a lot more leaves than the others.

Butternut squash plants
Butternut squash plants

One of the raspberry plants got really bushy and practically exploded with leaves. No flowers or proto-fruits yet, but it’s really be growing like gangbusters and sending out runners through its half of the bed.

Wildly growing raspberry plant

The blueberry and blackberry plants, on the other hand, have flowers and berries all over them. I think in a month or two, there will be lots of blueberries to sample.

Blackberry and fig plants
Blueberry plants
Pink lemonade blueberry plant

Meanwhile, on the nectarine tree, some of flower blossoms have turned into these little things that look like might become fruits. There was one on the tree last year, but it disappeared and I think it got knocked off during a storm or something.

Little potential fruits on the nectarine tree
Little potential fruits on the nectarine tree
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Another year of roses

After about 7.5 years, the rose bushes are still going strong. Lots of rose buds to start the year off. These were the first three of the season that I spotted in full bloom.

Hopefully the Japanese beetles aren’t too bad this year. They always chew up the roses pretty badly.

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Squash sprouts

Some new leaves sprouted up in a few of the spots where I planted the butternut squash seeds a couple weeks ago.

Butternut squash seedlings growing in the raised beds
Butternut squash seedlings growing in the raised beds

They look like pictures of butternut squash seedlings that I see online, which seems like a good sign.

No sign of any sprouting activity where I planted the jalapeno seeds in the raised beds yet. Those might be duds.

The rest of the garden seems to be doing pretty well so far. The potatoes have grown quite a bit in the last couple of weeks.

The blueberry plants have had lots of blossoms and lots of berries on them right now. Maybe we’ll even get to some of them before the birds do.

Blueberry blossoms and blueberries
Blueberry blossoms and blueberries
Blueberries

No blossoms on the raspberry or black berry plants yet, but they’re starting to spread out in their beds now with a few new sprouts popping up.

The olive tree is still looking a little spindly, but seems to be doing ok, putting out a bunch of new leaves over the last few weeks.

Olive tree
Raised beds in the yard
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Garden experiments

I suppose since it’s only the second year of the raised beds and us trying to grow anything, everything is an experiment.

This year, we decided no more eggplants. We just don’t like them enough to grow a bunch.

I had a few red potatoes from the grocery store that sat on the counter for a little too long, After a bit of reading and watching a few potato growing videos on YouTube, they went into one of the raised beds a couple weeks ago. Yesterday, they looked like this:

Four potato plants growing in a raised bed garden
Four potato plants planted in one of the raised beds

I was pretty surprised to see just how much green they grew in just a couple of weeks. I’m excited to see how things go with the tubers.

While I was out, I planted some jalapeno seeds harvested from last year’s jalapeno crop and some butternut squash seeds from a grocery store squash. No idea if they’ll grow, but I guess I’ll find out in a few weeks.

The rest of the plants seem to be doing well and seem to have survived the frosts we had during January and February.

Blueberry and blackberry bushes planted in raised bed gardens
Blueberry and blackberry bushes planted in raised bed gardens
Two leaves sprouting from a fig plant
Two leaves sprouting from a fig plant
Leaf bud on a fig plant
Leaf bud on a fig plant
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Building raised beds

After a year in containers, it’s time to put some of the plants we got last year into the ground.

After making some plans, changing some plans, getting suggestions from friends, we decided to try the raised bed route so I built some boxes. Gardener Scott has some great YouTube videos covering raised bed gardening.

A trip to the nearby big box home improvement store (and a call to the wife after I discovered the boards I just bought wouldn’t all fit into the car) got me what I needed to build two 8 foot x 4 foot boxes for the raised beds.

Two wooden boxes on the lawn to be used for raised bed gardening

We’ll dig up the grass down to the “dirt” (heavy clay stuff) underneath and fill up the boxes with other dirt that the plants will hopefully like. Haven’t figured out where the new dirt is coming from yet. It will either be lots and lots of bags and several trips from the nearby big box hardware store, or maybe get a few cubic yards of dirt dumped on the driveway from somewhere.

The plan is to eventually have six raised bed boxes (three on either side of the tree). Four of them we’ll use for the blueberry and raspberry plants that are in pots right now. The other two we’ll use to try our hand at growing some veggies.