Dallas Fruit and Vegetable Grower

Fauna in the Garden

I have not seen any black swallowtail butterflies flying in our garden this year, but it is evident that they have been visiting.  I noticed today that our fennel plants are getting chomped on by three enormous swallowtail caterpillars.  It the wasps don't get them first, these caterpillars should go into their cocoons in another week or two.

Our two passion vines are really doing much better this year and are starting to get more mature.  In fact, we are getting some nice blooms.

 

I was thinking to myself this morning that the passion vines are doing so well that we should expect some gulf fritillary caterpillars and butterflies in the near future.  Within forty-five minutes of having that thought, this little gulf fritillary butterfly started flying all around the vegetable garden and visiting our culinary sage that is blooming like crazy.

 

 

Our asparagus plants are full sized already and are filled with tiny, dainty greenish-yellow flowers that are really attracting the bees.  The flowers are so small that I would not think that a bee could get much pollen out of them; however, they are plentiful.

The bees working on these flowers this morning appeared unusual to me.  In particular, they all had these bulbous orange sack-looking things on their back legs.  The orange bulbs were different for each individual bee.  Some were larger than others.  Here are a few photographs of different bees in which you can see these sacks.  As you can see, the sack is much more pronounced in the second photograph.  It almost looks like a tiny little orange balloon attached to the leg.

 

 

In doing some looking on the internet, it appears that these bees are just normal bumble bees, genus Bombus, and the orange bulbous looking bags on their hind legs are "loads of pollen and nectar that they pack into their 'pollen baskets.'"  

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Entomology-Study-Bugs-665/2008/6/Multi-coloured-bees.htm

This pollen basket is also called a corbicula.   It is a "polished concavity" surrounded by hairs, into which the pollen is placed.  The pollen is "combed, pressed, compacted, and transferred to the corbicula . . . ."  A single hair secures the pollen load.  Wikipedia (citing Cedric Gillott, Entomology, Springer, 1995; 798 pages; pg. 79; Dorothy Hodges, The Pollen Loads of the Honeybee, published by Bee Research Association Limited, 1952).

I have been watching bees and insects pretty closely in the garden for at least the last fifteen years or so, and I have never noticed this before.  I am very surprised that I hadn't.  I wonder if it is the particularly light colored pollen that they are collecting from the asparagus that made the pollen basket appear so striking this morning.  Or maybe some of these bees were being overly industrious in filling up their pollen baskets to the point of looking like they were going to explode, that made them more noticeable today as opposed to other days.  I am definitely going to keep my eye out in the future to see if I notice these little pollen baskets on other bees in the garden from here on out.

Apple blossoms

Our apple trees are finally starting to bloom.  Our peaches, plums, apricots, and hybrids have already finished blooming.

Our Anna apple is in full bloom and really has a lot of blooms in comparison to years past and given that it is only three years old.  Our Granny Smith is also starting to bloom, but it does not have anywhere near the number of blooms as the Anna.  Our Newtown Pippin similarly starting to bloom, but I will not allow these blooms to fruit given that the tree is only one year old.  I want the Newtown Pippin to direct its energy to building its root system and branch structure - not fruit.

The remainder of our apple trees have not yet started blooming.

The photograph below is the Anna.  I had a hard time exposing this photograph so you could clearly see the blooms.  Given the background in this photograph, they are difficult to see.

 

Spring Vegetable Garden

Our late winter / early spring vegetable garden has been a little hit or miss.  However, our asparagus is definitely a hit.  This is the third year since I planted our asparagus crowns and they are going bonkers.  This is on target with what the "experts" say; expect your first truly big crop in the third spring.

I left the asparagus unattended for a couple of days, and some of the spears were already too mature to harvest.  These spears are really stout . . . about as wide as a big toe!  And so sweet.  They have so much sugar content that I like to eat them raw.  Our 8 year old daughter even likes them, and she is pretty discerning.  I definitely include asparagus in the category of foods that definitely rewards growing food at home.

The other vegetables that have done well are our perennial artichoke plants.  Over the winter, I moved seven artichoke plants from a flower bed with fairly anemic soil into two of our raised beds.  It is unbelievable how big these plants have gotten in a few short months.  One reason is because we did not have a killing freeze this winter, so the plants did not go dormant.  Additionally, I think the plants have enjoyed the raised bed soil which is heavily enriched with compost and composted manure.

The only problem is that these plants have gotten so large that they preclude me from growing anything else in two of my nine large raised beds.  Consequently, this past weekend, I moved them back into another flower bed.  I cut the leaves way back, but the plants still suffered some shock from the transplanting.  The torrential rain that we received the other night, however, brought them right back, and they look very healthy.

 

 We have some cauliflower, brussel sprouts, lettuce, spinach, and kale growing from seed; however, a lot of the seed did not germinate for me.  I was a very lazy gardener this winter and did not use the greenhouse tunnels.  Nevertheless, given how mild our winter was, I don't really think it impacted the garden that significantly.

Our sweet and red onions that I planted from onion starts are doing great.  They should be ready in another month or so.

It is a different story with the garlic.  I planted my garlic cloves saved from last year's harvest, two months late!  They do not look good.   I am still holding out hope that more will sprout shoots from the ground, but it may be a lost cause.

This is a photograph of our blooming rosemary with a blooming plum tree barely visible in the background.  The rosemary is blooming a lot more than in past years.  In fact, I don't recall it blooming before.  The sage is also blooming, and our cool weather herbs like dill, fennel, cilantro, and parsley are all growing like gangbusters.

 

Our lone, surviving alpine strawberry is already producing its tiny, sweet berries.  I lost the remainder to last years remarkable heat and drought.  I transplanted this plant into the asparagus bed, and I am going to plant about 10 more plants with it.  On the other side of the asparagus bed, I transplanted about 15 musk strawberry plants to make them easier to harvest.

This past weekend, given the warm temperatures that appear to be here to stay, I started interplanting hot temperature vegetables.   I planted my favorite, charentais melon, from seed among the onions.   I am interplanting cucumbers into the garlic.  And I planted about 12 tomato plants and pepper plants (I am shamed to admit that I bought tomato starts from the nursery, but we were too busy to start the plants from seed this january).

I will try to get the rest of my seeds planted in the next few weeks: eggplants, squash, corn, pumpkin, etc.

 

Early Fruit Set

After being out of town for close to a week, I came back to find several of our fruit trees having set small immature fruit.

When I left, the majority of our spring blossoming fruit trees and bushes were blossoming with the exception of our apples and a few of our pear trees.  Upon our return, most of them continue to bloom, including the peaches, several  of our pears, plums, cherries, nanking cherry, blueberries, honeyberries, and grape vines.  Our apricots have finished blooming.  Several of the earlier blooming peach trees are starting to have their blossoms fade.

But in walking through the garden, I was very, very surprised to see many of the earliest blooming fruit trees already setting fruit on March 18th.  This is much earlier than in years past.

The photograph above is of some of the immature fruit on our Reliance peach.  I frankly do not remember the reliance producing very many blooms, so I was surprised to see these fruit.  Our other peaches are also showing immature fruit, but on a much smaller scale.

 

Both our Moorpark and Blenheim have also set a lot of small immature apricots.  This is gratifying to see given that we really did not have any production from either of these trees last year.  The photograph above is from the Blenheim.

 

 

Our hybrids are also showing small fruit, including the pluots, apriums, and nectaplums.  The fruit in the photograph above is from our Spice-Zee Nectaplum.

 

Our figs are also starting to show some breba fruit.

 

I am just blown away by how early the fruit are coming in.  I was somewhat worried by our mild winter and early spring that we would not get much fruit this year.  However, it appears that some of my fears were misplaced.  While the jury is still out on how our apples and pears will do, we should get a pretty good crop from our apricots, plums, hybrids, and peaches . . . as long as we can fend off the varmits and insects.

This also goes to show that pollination was not an issue.  Our local insect population is doing their job, whether it be honeybees, mason bees, other bee types, or moths.

Cool video on pollinators

I just watched this pretty cool video on pollinators that "konrad_far_north" posted on the GardenWeb Fruit and Orchards Forum.  It is worth watching.

 

  

Dallas Fruit Trees in Bloom - March 5, 2012

A week ago, some of my plums, pluots, and apricots were beginning to bloom, and I wrote about how I was worried that they would not be pollinated because of the lack of pollinators that had emerged from winter and because there were not enough cross-pollinating fruit trees to lend a hand.

I went out of town at the end of the week and returned to an abundance of blooms.  Also, the native bees were out in force, industriously visiting all of the blooms.  If you look very closely at the Morris plum in the photograph above, you can count at least eight bees swarming in the air around these blossoms.

A large number of our plums are now in bloom, including the Morris, the Bruce, the Santa Rosa, and the Allred.  Here is another photograph of the Morris along with a photo of the Allred in bloom seen through the still-dormant fuzzy kiwi vines and burgeoning Jefferson peach blossoms.

 

 

 

Although the Allred above has pink blossoms, our other plums have beautiful, white blossoms as you can see below. 

 

 

Our Royal Lee low-chill cherries also have lovely white blossoms as featured below.

 

 

 

 

I must say, however, that our Royal Lee and Minnie Royal trees have been very disappointing to me this spring.  We planted 5 of them last spring in 2011.  They did very well during the growing season despite the intense heat and drought, and they put on significant growth.  Nevertheless, this spring, the majority went straight to leafing out without any blossoms.   A single Royal Lee was the sole exception, producing the blossoms that you see above.   

If you look very closely at the photograph below, though, you can see that the tree has very few blossoms.  It is not clear to me why these trees did not produce more blooms.  It should not be a result of the mild winter weather because these cherry varieties should only require 200 to 300 chill hours, which we had.  It is not the result of my pruning, which was very light.  I am perplexed.

 

 

Our remaining cherry tree, the Compact Stella, has neither leafed out nor blossomed at this point.

 

In contrast, all of our peach trees have burst into bloom, or are about to do so.  Our Sentinel peach  has the greatest number of blooms followed by our Saturn.  The Springold, Ranger, Jefferson, Redhaven, and Reliance are just a bit behind the Sentinel.

 

The tree and blossoms below are of the Sentinel peach.  As you can see from at least one of these photographs, our local bee population is hard at work.

 

 

   

 

 

 

The photograph below is of Redhaven peach blossom buds that are very close to blooming.

 

 

As I mentioned a bit earlier, the Saturn peach -- also known as a Peento -- has really had a dramatic bloom this Spring.  It is still a very small tree, but the number of blooms and the striking color of the blooms have impressed me.

 

 

Our two mature apricot trees continue to flourish in bloom.  The Blenheim added more blossoms since the last photographs that I shared, and the Moorpark apricot is also now in bloom.  The first photograph is of the Blenheim and the remainder are from the Moorpark.  My guess is that I'm going to get a good set of fruit from these two --- but we'll see.

 

 

 

 

These apricot blossoms remind me somewhat of fuschia flowers with their combination of red and white coloring.  The blossoms are also somewhat akin to an apple blossom that starts pink and matures to white, but differ in that the apricot blossoms maintain the red coloration much longer.

Nearby, our Cot-N-Candy aprium has really had unusual bloom structure this year.  With the way that the blooms completely cover the branches, it almost reminds me of a delphinium flower.  You can see what I mean from the photograph below.

 

 

 

These blooms have been particularly attractive to the bees.

The apricots, apriums, and pluots are all near each other, and they are producing a heavenly scent in the air.

 

 

 

We have several Blue Velvet and Blue Pacific honeyberry bushes growing around the vegetable garden.   Although they are three years old, they are still very petite bushes.   Indigenous to northern climates, I think they may be stunted by our intense summer heat.

The photograph above is of a honeyberry blossom before it opens.  The photograph below is of opened blossoms.

Also known as blue honeysuckle, you can see the similarities between its blossoms and a honeysuckle blossom.

 

 

Our blueberry bushes have set many, many blossoms.  I love the bell shaped look of blueberry blossoms because they are so unique.

 

 

Our Nanking cherry bushes are also filling with delicate white blossoms.  These are still very young bushes, so they look rather sparse in the photographs.  Later in the year, these 8 or 9 bushes will produce white cherries which are less attractive to the birds; however, I also plan on planting two red cherry varieties to help with pollination.  Last year, although the white Nanking cherry bushes bloomed prodigiously, they did not produce any fruit.

 

Last, but not least, at least one of our pear trees is blooming.  Our Orient pear has set a fair number of blooms.   Because of the sunlight, you have to look very carefully to see the blooms in this tree, but it actually has a decent number of blooms.

 

 

We have a fair number of pear varieties growing in our yard -- Orient, Warren, Monterrey, Moonglow, Pineapple, Kiepfer, Seckle, and Magness -- however, only the Orient has bloomed this Spring.  Last year, we did not have very many blooms, either.  I am concerned that the trees may not be getting enough sunlight because they essentially have a northern exposure resulting from nearby ornamental trees and bushes.  Until these pear trees grow a little taller, they may continue to be sunlight challenged.