Here it is April and spring is in full swing at the nursery and at home. Although, everyone in business expects this year to be tough because of the economic climate, it seems that people still want to get into the garden. Certainly the fruit tree interest is up and so is the vegetable interest. People seem to be swarming in to plant tomatoes, peppers, squash and other vegetables. We don’t seem to be able to reorder vegetable seeds quick enough. 

At home, Donna and I have noticed that our four-year fruit bush orchard seems to be ready to keep us in fruit this year. Our cherry had a lot of flowers for the first time and our persimmon seems to have a lot of buds, though I don’t know how many will set. Our peaches and nectarines bloomed well and the pluots were in heavy bloom. That leaves the apricot, and it had a good number of flowers, though it seems to be lagging behind the other fruit trees so far, and the pomegranate that is not supposed to be blooming yet.

Our Geranium incanum is just coming into bloom. No, these aren’t the geraniums your grandmother grew, but rather, a fine textured ground cover or spilling plant with lavender pink blooms. If you haven’t seen them, you can come in and see them spilling out of our bedding table blocks.

Our narcissus are mostly finished blooming, but our species tulips are just coming into bloom. Especially satisfying are the plantings of the small flowered Tulip clusiana which seems to be naturalizing and increasing nicely. 

Our landscape roses are budded and getting ready to bloom. We have Starry Night, Pink Drift, White Drift and Day Dream growing plus a couple of Ballerina growing as climbers spilling over our courtyard fence. These are going to be spectacular.

We are planting the inside of our courtyard now and have added several additional maples to make a total of thirteen so far. (That’s plus the two that I have as bonsai.) We are developing the inside as more of a collector garden, as opposed to the outside area that is being developed as a viewing garden from the street. 

As we find new interesting things we will be testing them in our garden. As I have mentioned before, we get regular shipments from Annie’s Annuals. We go over them to see what we want to try and get in the ground to see how it performs. We’ve just added some different poppies, including some california poppies as opposed to CALIFORNIA POPPIES. The common name for these poppies is “frying pans”. Yes, we do have some real California Poppies in the ground, but these Frying Pans were irresistible.

In any case as we get them in the ground I will report on our successes. Our failures will be “shipped to sea” in the dead of night. 

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