Spring Gardening

It's Spring in my garden again and everything is starting to grow and bloom!

The crab apple tree has lovely pink and white blossoms.

The honey crisp apple tree when it was getting ready to bloom.

Here's what appeared afterwards!  A future apple!

The blueberry bush has lovely green and pink honeysuckle-like flowers.

Pretty white and yellow strawberry flowers.

Even the brussel sprout plants left over from last year are blooming!  As a side note, I recently discovered that you can eat brussel sprout leaves, not just the brussel sprouts.  These leaves are actually quite tasty, so what a plus that you can basically eat that plant all year long!

Here's a Kale plant that is still growing from last year. 

This a a parsley plant that also survived Winter. 

Pretty purple chive blooms (you can eat those!). 

This is some strange leafy prickly plant that my mom calls "Gao Choi" in Chinese.  She picks the leaves off and makes a soup filled with it.  It doesn't taste half bad, but I have no idea what it's called in English. 

My sister's in-laws gave us two persimmon trees that they grew from seeds.  They are still small as bushes, but the leaves look pretty. 

The raspberry bushes are starting to fill out.  I can hardly wait for when they start to produce fruit. 

The oregano and thyme plants from last year are multiplying. 

Some kind of kale-like plant that grew last year from seeds.  I cannot be sure that it is Kale since it seems much shorter than the other kale plants we have, but it tastes good.  It might be the mustard plants we planted last year?  Anyways, it's not just a weed and we have been eating it all Spring. 

There's a whole plot of them growing among the English mint and Lemon Balm. 

The seed potatoes on the shelves outside got raided by the local rodents, but it looks like some seed potatoes got left behind in the plot since some healthy potato plants are growing out of the soil already.

Here are some pansies that look quite pretty.  I guess we must have had a very mild Winter since almost everything survived this year.  I'm excitedly waiting for other good stuff to pop out of the ground.  

So far I have planted different kinds of peas and beans, beets (first time!), and kale.  We put crushed egg shell around the sprouts to deter snails and slugs.

There are some store-bought tomato plants that need to be put in the ground too.

Happy Gardening!

Gardening Bliss

There are so many yummy things growing in the garden lately!  I love it!

I have eaten so many raspberries!  We started off with one bush and now there are quite a few bushes.  It made friends!  I think we will have even more by next year because I can't seem to eat the berries fast enough.

We have cooked so many different kinds of peas and beans too.

If you don't want to cook them, you can eat them fresh and crisp from the plant.  I have done that a couple times and it is fun to pick snow peas and to eat them immediately  :)

There are strawberries too.  Very little ones with lots of fragrance and flavour.  They are so sweet!  I wish I could grow them bigger, but they are so yummy in their little forms too.

We planted an apple tree and it actually grew some apples this year! 

There are 7 apples on the short, stick-like tree.  Not bad  :) 

For the first time this year, I am trying to grow eggplants.  They actually look pretty amazing!  They have lovely purple flowers and then this dark purple, shiny fruit starts to grow out.

My mom has been fertilizing the flowers with pollen from the other squash plants... apparently that works because we have a lot of eggplants growing!

I think this is a Mo Qua squash.  It's very fuzzy!

Here is a yellow squash I picked today.  I can't wait to find out what it tastes like!

We have a lot of different tomato plants with giant clusters of fruit.  Grape-like tomatoes and then some beefy tomatoes.  There is a small animal that keeps taste-testing the tomatoes.  This is what I found today... tsk tsk! 

I dug up some potatoes today!  It's so fun to dig up potatoes! 

We left the potatoes from last year in the soil and they must have seeded. 

Look at the all the potatoes it grew!  These are just the bigger ones.  I replanted all the little ones.  Maybe I can have a second crop later in the summer!  The original plants are still there too.  They had lots of little tubers still attached so those will probably make more for me later too.

I am having so much fun in the garden.  I hope you are having a good growing season too!

Take care, 

Marie