JANUARY GARDEN UPDATE

Last month, Jill and Hal from Sweet Life Gardens, built another garden box for us--this time for herbs. It is now filled with English thyme, cilantro, chives, Spanish lavender, French lavender, basil, dill, and oregano. And since I had a little bit of room left I added more spinach.


I have already used the cilantro (for more Mexican Tortilla Soup), chives (Buttermilk Salad Dressing), and thyme (for Ellie's chicken dish).

Planting by seed has been interesting. I think I should have started about two weeks earlier. We have enjoyed great salads with our lettuce varieties, spinach, napa cabbage, beet tops, and radishes. But still no broccoli, green onions, sugar snap beans, or carrots. And I have faithfully been applying fish emulsion to the soil! These must be some poky vegetables.

I have a pot of rosemary and love to pinch off a bit every time I walk by, the fragrance is beautiful. Considering the rosemary started off as three tiny twigs it is looking quite lush to me.

This past week we added three new fruit trees to our backyard. Two Anna apple espaliers and one Mid-Pride peach tree. Then I did something really scary. I (or actually Leslie) whacked off the top branches of our new peach tree. That is because Saturday morning Tammy, Leslie, and I attrended the Master Citrus Gardener clinic at Greenfield Citrus. One of the speakers, Terry Mikel from Maricopa Cooperative Extension, said an open center peach tree is the best for keeping the tree size under control. Since I was a chicken, Leslie bravely took the clippers and cut the top of the tree off--yikes!

There are no photos of our new young trees since everything in our backyard is a bit rough looking right now. But you get the idea of how the gardens (sounds rather grand, doesn't it?) and fruit trees are looking. And I can't forget about our two citrus trees--one Oro Blanco grapefruit and one Mineola tangelo--both planted three years ago. The grapefruit aren't ready yet but we did enjoy four really sweet tangelos, yea!