Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Uh Oh... The Downside of Gardening



Peach leaf curl! Aaaauuuggghhhh!!!


ChickenKnittle told us that's what the problem is with our peach tree, so today I dutifully removed all of the affected leaves and put them in zip-locks, then threw them in the garbage can, far away from where the trees are.


Unfortunately, our neighbor, the one behind us, the one with nectarines, the one with nectarines that we deliberately planted our peach tree next to... her tree is full of this stuff. I didn't see one leaf that wasn't affected, and it looked to be pretty far along in its progress - all the leaves were curled in on themselves, and they were all pale. It looked pretty gruesome.


Don't know if our tree can be saved if it's in such close proximity to such a diseased one. We may need to do a mid-spring transplant to another location farther away from the nectarine.


Bummer.

Monday, April 18, 2011

The Greening of the Back 40

Yes, I know it's been a while, so here are pictures of the Back 40, taken today. Lots of things are bursting out, and DH finished putting up the supports for 2 of the 3 rows of grapes.

Looking down one row of grapes



The view of the Back 40 from the back of the Back 40



The view of the Back 40 from the lemon tree corner



The blood orange bush has a ton of blossoms this year



Three of the 7 grape vines have baby grapes!



The apples are still going strong


Unfortunately, some of the leaves on the peach tree are doing this weird bubbling thing, so I'll have to take a sample to Johnson Garden Center to see if they can diagnose it (or see if ChickenKnittle knows what's wrong - if anything).


We also bought one more grape vine today. We currently have two rows of three vines each, plus one guy off to the side near the cherries, all by himself. We used to have one more row with three more, but two of the three went kaput in the first year or two, so now the one that survived is all by himself. We found another vine today, though, so we'll plant him in one of the previous holes and then put up supports for both of them. I think it looks really neat now, almost like we're serious about growing grapes!