Okra time

According to my plant it was okra time.  I haven’t ever had okra time before, so I didn’t really know what the moves were.  I ended up putting these into a quart jar with dill pickle brine and straight into the refrigerator.  They’re pretty good that way.

Isn’t the okra flower beautiful?

Green Tomato with Style

Image reproduced from web site: http://www.kdcomm.net/~tomato/Tomato/xingtom.html

Thistle Weed

Thistle Flower

The last time I was about to mow the grass, my son ran out to me and begged me to spare the life of this weed.  He said he wanted to let it grow so that he could see what kind of flower it would make. I played along and mowed around it, and this purple flower was our reward.

It grew a little over a foot tall–maybe 18 inches–and I have noticed our neighbors eyeing it from their side of the fence, wondering if we planned on letting the seeds blow around.

We actually cut it and brought it inside as a table centerpiece!

Peanut Flower

Our potted peanut plant is flowering.

Garlic Scapes have arrived

My 32 square feet of hardneck garlic (approximately 100 plants) have sent up flower stalks, or scapes.

I removed most of them, and we’ll eat as many as we can. They have a taste somewhere between garlic and an onion and are a nice treat in a salad or stir fry.

Poorly pollinated cherry tree flowers

As you may be able to see from this photo, most of the cherry flowers on my little trees did not get pollenated this year. It seems that somewhere between 10 and 20% of the blossoms have turned into green fruit. The rest of the flowers did not produce anything beyond the pretty white show they put on. The forecast calls for a 29 degree low overnight, so I’ll cover these (again) as a precaution.

Will I get grapes this year?

In 2010 I ordered and planted a grape “vine”.  It was the sorriest excuse for a plant I’ve ever seen…nothing more than a twig.  I planted it next to my fence with room to sprawl several feet in each direction.  The first year, 2010, it lived.  That was good enough.

Last year, in 2011, I expected bigger things from this vine.  Basically it grew one longish stem and a few leaves (which were then attacked like candy by Japanese beetles), and had a flower or two that didn’t come to anything.

Now we’re here in 2012.  I looked up many resources on pruning grape vines and they all said the same thing.  You need to select one or two branches of last year’s wood to grow this year’s grape vines on.

This vine is in it’s third spring in my yard but it’s still so small you can barely see it against the fence there.  It is leafing out and beginning to send up new stems.  Those horizontal vines are one year old wood that will produce this year’s new shoots, flowers and fruit (if any).

Let’s pray that, magically, all the Japanese beetles are absent this year.  One can dream.

Apple Flower Blossom

Yellow Delicious Apple Flower Bud

I pruned the Apple tree this year. It was it’s first pruning since we planted it two years ago. It’s still a bit lopsided, but I’ll do more next year. I just want to make sure it’s establishing itself well before I give it a big setback.

Why does a yellow fruited apple tree have pink flowers?

[I like this photo with the garden in the background.]

Cherry Flower Blossom

We are still 2 to 3 weeks away from our average last frost date.  I really, really hope the warm weather holds out, for the sake of my fruit trees.  A night below 30 degrees (F) could kill all these flowers and the fruit they bring.