First, the bad news. It looks like the only trees that survived the transplant are the 2 apples and a couple of the pit-started peaches. The other dwarf fruit trees have given up the ghost between the heat and the off-season transplant. Bummer. We've also lost a few other plants but they will be easier to replace. Our lack of success transplanting the trees has made me hesitate to move the 5 grapes and the blackberries for fear of losing them also. At this point, we may leave them in the ground at home until the fall or when the house sells - whichever comes first.
Its not all bad though. We have some delicious looking cantaloupe growing from volunteers in the soil we moved. They look like they'll be ready to pick in the next week or two - yummy! The variety is Honey Rock and they really are incredibly sweet - by far the best cantaloupe we've ever grown.
Do you see the melons in the leaves?
Our first tomatoes are starting to turn red. All of our tomatoes went in late this year, so we're behind everyone else in getting our first fruits. We're so looking forward to the taste of fresh tomatoes from the garden again! On another note, these 2 plants have continued putting on fruit through the heat wave. We'll definitely be saving seed from these guys!
Tomatoes!!!!!
The strawberries and onions are also doing well (no pictures though). The onions are starting to bulb nicely and we haven't lost very many strawberry plants to the heat. Hopefully that means we'll have fresh strawberries again next year.
The blackberries at home produced a really nice crop of berries this year. The two varieties of thornless blackberries we have each have their own strengths. One produces larger berries, the other slightly smaller but sweeter berries. Both are wonderful though. The first grapes came ripe last week too - a really tasty white seedless table grape. The grapes were small but delicious. We're eyeing the other vines waiting for them to show signs of ripeness now! The hardest thing will be cutting them back hard to move them knowing that we may not have grapes next year.
I don't think I mentioned this before, but this was our first year to have sweet cherries from our sweet cherry tree. It is by far the largest fruit tree we have in town at nearly 15 feet but we had never gotten a cherry off of it. Last spring we planted another sweet cherry to cross polinate. I didn't see a single bloom on the new cherry tree, but apparently the old one knew it had company now. The kids got to climb in the branches to get some of the higher up cherries and we all enjoyed the new fruit. I'll be sad to leave this one behind now. I guess I'll just have to plant more at the farm!
We hope your garden is growing well despite the heat. Feel free to share your successes and challenges for this year in the comments!
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