peaches and payoffs

After our initial work in the garden last summer, it has been fun to see some of the plants beginning to take off this year. Many of our native and butterfly-attracting plants--Mexican Sage, Lantana, Liquorice Mint Hyssop, and others--had to be chopped down to the nub over the winter, either because that's how they best perform (as with the sage) or because our hard freezes killed all the plant above the ground. Lo and behold, most not only survived, but they are flourishing.

Liquorice Mint Hyssop

Another great surprise was the speedy and delicious fruiting of our J.H. Hale peach tree. We didn't get the tree in the ground until nearly April, despite many warnings in our garden books to plant trees in February and March. In addition, the J.H. Hale, a dwarf variety, is one of the few that require cross-pollination from a different variety of peach tree. Luckily, the tree was holed up at the Great Outdoors nursery with a number of other types of peach trees early in the spring, so it was duly pollinated and produced a lot of lovely flowers when we brought it home. Not 2 months later, we had a lovely crop of large, sweet, gold-to-red fleshed, freestone peaches!



Owen thought they were the best. (That's his finger reaching for another peach... )


Sometime in April, again throwing caution to the wind in terms of recommended planting timelines, we also put in a larger Loring peach tree not far from the first. This way, the two should cross-pollinate, creating more and tastier peaches as the years go by. The Loring, having been planted in late April, did not produce this year; but it seems to be surviving the heat so far and I have high hopes of having an excellent peach crop come 2012.