Sisyphus Acres

Dishing the dirt...

It has been ages since I’ve posted, and it’s gardening time again!  It looks like spring may actually be finding us here in NH, even though we had another dusting of the white stuff last night!!

I have a lot of planning and planting to do over the next few weeks ~ I am having knee surgery in June, so I have to lay the garden in and all my trees in before then.  I’ll be about 6 weeks until ready to resume duties ~ just in time to harvest!!  Looks like Hannah may have to step up and do a bit more of  her mom’s weeding chores this year…lol.  Actually, since we started using the photodegradeable mulch, the veggie garden needs very little weeding, and this year I am going to throw some in the herb patch (the weed garden, as it’s affectionately known) to make that more manageable this year.

This will be the first of a few entries about this year’s gardening tasks…this one will cover trees, fruit trees, and fruiting bushes…

We are finishing planting the windbreak this year, so we have 25 balsam firs and 10 maple (or oak, I can’t remember) coming in to finish of the second row of the windbreak, the mid-yard sugar bush orchard, and the backyard oak treeline.

Late fall, shortly before the freeze, we planted 2 carpathian (white) walnuts, 2 northern pecans, and 2 chestnut trees.

Just arrived at the house is the Honeycrisp apple and 7 blueberry bushes ~ I’ve also ordered 2 hardy nectarines (Hardired from Kelly nurseries, supposed to be good to zone 4 ~ we’ll see). This bring the “orchard” (more like a tree-lined driveway) to 5 apples (diff. Var.), 2 pears (luscious and Bartlett), 2 plums (Stanley and prune), 3 manchurian apricots, and the 2 nectarines.

For fruit bushes we have the 4 surviving cherries (although one of the ones thrashed by the weedwhacker may survive, making 5), 18 blueberries, 1 blackberry, and 18 raspberries (if they survived, they are in a really wet spot). I also have a patio pomegranate coming in to have as a houseplant which I’ll move inside during the winter.

That’s it for the “big” plantings, next entries will be about the veggies and the herbies…