Signs of Life

How I love watching things grow!! I really don’t have much of a green thumb, and I’m not a huge outdoors person. But, planting trees and bushes and then watching them grow and bloom is amazing!

As promised, here are a few pictures. I showed one of the blueberry bushes yesterday. We have two more tiny bushes that didn’t do well last year, but they seem to be trying this year. I know they won’t produce this year.

And, the strawberries and peanuts didn’t make it. They flooded out. So, we’re on the lookout for some straw bales in hopes we can plant more strawberries in the bales to keep them from flooding out again. We’ve yet to decide what to do about the peanuts.

So, for today’s pictures, we’ll start with the grapes. A couple of weeks ago, even as the weather couldn’t decide between hot and frigid, we began to see the first signs of life on our grape vines. This one turned green first, and we wondered if the other one was even still alive.

But it was! Here you can see a picture from this past weekend of them side by side. The slower one (on the right) is working hard to catch up!

Then we have our clippings. When we pruned the vines this winter, Doug stuck a couple of the clippings in the ground to see what they would do. Sure enough, they’re turning green too! Here’s one – you can see the green leaf, but there are also several more buds trying to pop up.

Next we have the apple trees. One is huge and flourishing nicely, two more much smaller ones are beginning to bud, and a fourth one that we thought was dead is actually showing signs of life. Aren’t these blossoms gorgeous?

I don’t know if we’ll have any fruit this year from the apples or grapes, but the growth has been beautiful to watch, just the same.

The peach trees, on the other hand…

These gorgeous blossoms popped up everywhere on the peach trees.

And now just about every blossom on both trees has given way to this:

On the bigger of the two trees, there are at least 15 dozen little peaches, and probably around ten dozen on the smaller tree! The trees are still babies, so I have no idea how many of these peaches they can carry to maturity. Last year we had a couple dozen baby peaches between the two trees, and only one peach made it to maturity. We’ll see this year!

Just posting these pictures makes me want to go out and look at everything again. So much changes in just a few days!