Fruit Tree & Berries (The Gifts that Will Keep Giving)

We now have a a peach tree and three blueberry bushes. They were all gifts, ones that with proper (but minimal care) will keep on giving year after year. The Reliance Peach tree was a gift from Julia's parents. The Reliance is the variety that the kids helped me choose, one that is known for as a consistent cropper of sweet, juicy, yellow-fleshed, freestone peaches.

The three blueberry bushes were a birthday present to me from Julia. The bushes are three different varieties that will yield fruit at different times, so hopefully giving us a more or less continuous supply of blueberries through the growing season. The Reka is the early season, Bluecrop the mid season, and Darrow the late-mid season.

The kids picked out and then started the seeds for the plants that they chose to grow. Antonio was super excited to start his "Pizza Garden" that our friends the Klein's gave him last summer when we moved away from Georgia. He carefully wrote out all the labels himself for the seeds, which consist of all the main ingredients to make a pizza.

Broccoli and Raised Beds

The kids are very excited about planting in their own personal raised bed. They now have to decide what they are going to want to grow in it.

This evening the kids and I transplanted all of our broccoli and cauliflower starts that we had growing in the seed starting shelves in the basement.

Cold Frame

Two nights ago, I finally got out and sowed peas in the raised beds. It wasn't until 11 pm that I was able to find time to do so. So I bundled up, and lit my kerosene lantern, and finished the strings that demarcate the square feet of my raised beds, and then planted 5 cubic feet worth of peas. Then last night, I put two windows that I salvaged from when we replaced our windows on our house over the peas, to help them germinate and help get the seeds going, even though we are still having nights in the upper 20's and low 30's.