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Yesterday I planted the pea plants I started indoors a few weeks ago. And I finally got the potatoes in the ground, too. AND I sprinkled a lot of lettuce, carrot, spinach, & chard seed on top of a wide row I hilled up. It was supposed to rain today (and has) so I didn't even bother covering them. I figure they'll get washed down into the soil and start that way. The ground was really still too wet to till, but we did it anyway, so it was really clumpy. When it's dry enough, it's like potting soil after we till it, but it hasn't been dry in two months now.

I've also planted new this year a couple of rose bushes. One shrub rose beside where we park the cars and a climber by the house.

After I was done putting the vegetables in, I pounded some t posts into the ground and strung multiple rows of ribbon around the planted plot. It makes an effective deer fence. I think the ribbon bouncing in the breeze freaks out the deer or something. Or they think its a trap. It worked like a charm 2 years ago, though, so I plan on doing this every year we have a garden.

Anyway, it was nice to feel dirt between my toes again!

I'm horribly behind schedule. There's just too much to do what with moving and all.

It's so rainy here, we are also very behind schedule. We are now just past our frost free date for my gardening zone, and I can't till the garden and plant anything, it's too darn mucky! I managed to plant strawberry plants yesterday by digging up a plot of ground with a shovel, but that just won't do for seeds. Too much area involved.

Besides 75 strawberry plants yesterday, I also planted 3 blueberrry plants, one raspberry, one black berry, a forsythia start, and 2 maple trees. The order came in from the nursery, and I had to get them in the ground. The ground was sopping wet, but it was better than letting them wait even longer than they had in transit. I didn't have room in my fridge to keep them dormant.

I also found that the black berry plant I thought was dead was actually alive. The main cane was knocked over and new shoots were coming up from the base. So, I dug up the ground under where I wanted the cane to take root, moved the cane over and and layered dirt and mulch over the cane leaving the leaves exposed. This should cause the cane to take root several places along the stem. I've never done this before, but theoretically it should work. If it does, I'm going to try it with the new blackberry and raspberry plant later on if they are doing well and can spare a cane. I'm tired of buying blackberry and raspberry plants and having them die so often.

Good luck with the raspberries! They'll take over your whole property if you let them! (well, there are worse fates )

Anyone know anything about growing cherry trees?

Both cherry trees I planted years ago died the second season, so no, I can't help you.

For what it's worth, the spot I planted them on had thin topsoil and a lot of clay. The other fruit trees I planted at the time were in deeper topsoil, and less clay. Most of them lived.

Hm. The topsoil here is at least 1.5-2 feet think, but there's some pretty serious clay beneath that. But it's the middle of cherry country, and I can't imagine all those farmers spent the time and money to dig the clay out of their orchards. I guess I'll plant it at the top of a slope, loosen the soil around it, throw down a bunch of gypsum and hope for the best.

Our land is an old farm, where they created berms and drainage points to slow down the water and allow the soil to silt out. This means that on the berms the soil is really deep, and right beside them, really thin. I planted the cherry trees on either side of our driveway, which seemed a nice idea at the time. However, now that I think about it, the driveway runs on the top of one of these berms, and the soil to either side of it is only a couple of inches before you hit clay.

We planted 3 pecan trees in our yard way back when, and the two that are furthest from the berm are twice as big as the one that is in the zone where soil got scooped up to make the berm with. It adds up to significant differences.

We also put our garden right next to a berm before we realized what that meant. We spent a lot of effort at first amending the mostly clay soil. We had a dump truck full of sand brought in, and we scattered it all over the garden, and also hired a guy with a bobcat and a dump truck to haul some soil from a place in the pasture and bring it to the garden site. After years of messing with it, most of the garden has good tilth now, but at first it was just *clay*. Black clay, at that, so I didn't realize it was clay until after we tilled it up. I'd only seen red clay before.

My area's official frost-free date is April 21. I delayed starting up for several weeks after that, feeling guilty the whole time, but finally got around to it. Now we're forecast to have frost both tonight and tomorrow night. May 28 and 29! And it's been 60/40 cold for weeks on end, so everything's been growing slowly or not at all.

Frost at the end of May! Will you put blankets over stuff? That can help with a light freeze.

I covered what I could; time will tell whether it was enough. Fortunately my town is close enough to the lake that it usually stays a few degrees more moderate than the rest of the zip code, and it didn't quite get cold enough for actual frost.

How did your plants fare?

I'm probably going to plant something this weekend. It's been too wet to do anything prior to this. Of the stuff I planted earlier, only the potatoes have done well. We got a little bit of lettuce and the peas were pathetic.

On a positive note, our apple trees bloomed for the first time this year, and one of them has itsy bitsy apples on it. And one of our pecans bloomed for the first time, too! We might have pecans this year!

That's awesome!

I have flowers to plant still. That is the extent of my gardening. I am not a very good gardener at all.

We are enjoying the firstfruits of our local cooperative sustainable agriculture, though. We received several different kinds of lettuce, green onions, and radishes, and they were all very good. I chopped off the tops of the green onions and dried them in the oven. I have never done that before, but I think I could use them in soups and such.

After all of the rain and storms we've had, I feel lucky that we got anything from our friends' farm! He said that he was fishing in his zucchini patch just the other day!


Lali

MariaHobbit wrote:

How did your plants fare?

None of them died. Some things never came up, but that's pretty normal. Others, particularly the peppers, are growing very slowly and there's a marked difference between the ones in the garden and the ones in containers we were able to take into the garage, so I suspect the cold did at least stunt a few things.

Otherwise, we've already harvested a number of radishes (they grow fast), and the beans, broccoli, and tomatoes seem to be doing really well.

We pulled up fence posts in our garden yesterday, and the muck still stuck to the posts smelled rotten. I've seen where other people in Missouri have had to keep replanting their gardens because everything keeps rotting. I guess it's just as well I never got much put in yet.

I'll get stuff planted right before the dry season starts. :

Quote:

Anyone know anything about growing cherry trees?

Dave, I'm a forestry major, so I should know this. Uummmmm....


I wouldn't worry about the clay. 2 feet of topsoil sounds like a lot...That's maybe why it's cherry country. The roots of trees tend to only grow within the top 10 inches of soil anyway....except for some species that put down a taproot.

It's best to plant trees in the fall when the tree is going dormant and has no leaves, because by then trees have replenished their store of food in their roots from when they used it up in the previous spring to put out new leaves & flowers, and the tree is not photosynthesizing b/c it has no leaves. There needs to be reserves in the roots so that the tree can quickly establish good roots in the spring after dormancy, b/c it's also gonna want to be putting some new leaves out (if it wants to put new leaves out, but also has to spend energy on establish roots, it needs as much stored food as possible). So, plant in Fall.

I stubbornly planted a nursery grown red maple seedling (about 4 feet tall) at my mom's house in May. But it's made it alright thru the summer. Next spring will be the test.

Dave, do you know what species of cherry you want? Black cherry (Prunus serotina)? According to my textbook, the tree prefers "rich, deep, moist soils..." 2 feet of topsoil sound deep to me. Make sure the tree is planted in the open....they don't like shade.

It is a Stella cherry tree. They're supposed to be pretty tolerant of different soil conditions, which is one of the main reasons I chose that variety (the other being the fact that they are self-fertile). I planted it early this spring. It did well during the summer and probably added half its original height; Japanese beetles did chew the leaves pretty badly, though. Of course, the big test now is whether it will survive the winter.

The fact it grew alot during the summer may be a good sign, because it may mean it was able to get adequate roots established. I think trees have a priority of 1st establishing the roots before they grow much......growth happens when their is "excess" nutrients produced by the tree (after root, flower, leaf, etc. are made). So growth is a good sign. My maple tree didn't grow much over the summer. Hopefully it was able to make enough roots and then store food in them to have enough energy to be able to "come alive" again in the spring.

Your tree doesn't appear to have heard the old saying about perrenial and tree growth, Dave: "First year sleep, second year creep, third year leap."

The cherry tree appears to have survived the winter, judging by the number and size of the buds on it.