Our 5-in-1 peach/nectarine tree flowered earlier this spring and now has a few fruits on it. I think there is one nectarine but the peach limb has produced the most fruit so far. Technically I think you are supposed to pick the fruit off the first year in the ground in an effort to get the tree to have better growth but with only three or four fruits we decided to leave them on. I guess in another month or so I’ll get to taste the peaches and savor our teeny harvest.

I shared the View From The Potting Bench last week, but here’s what is actually going on *on* the potting bench. This potting bench was actually here when we arrived. It really needs to be rebuilt and fixed. The legs of the table are bent in a few areas and it isn’t quite stable. I miss the potting bench we had in Florida. I found it via Freecycle and picked it up from someone else when we lived in Pembroke Pines. They had two at the time, a small and large one, but I was only able to take the larger one as it would only fit on our little…

Last night I spent an hour or so working around the potting bench, cleaning up seed trays and 4″ pots that hadn’t sprouted or that had already been transplanted. I started a round of more seeds from our stash, trying to germinate some old seeds in an effort to get some new plants for the garden but also an effort to get a fresh batch seeds from that too. Some of that effort is probably futile as some of the seeds are many years old and are likely not going to germinate at all. Oh well. I find myself outside until 8pm these days, working until almost dark and then…

You might remember back when I wrote about getting this hydrangea on Sprout Dispatch. If not click and you can see it in its original place before the garden was put in. Well, the deer visited it shortly after it was planted and then winter came on and no new growth was put on in the meantime. After putting the garden in and with the lengthening days the hydrangea took off and put on a ton of new growth. A flower spike came out in the last week or so and the flower began opening within the last few days. A few nights ago I decided I needed to get…

Oh goodness. Trees. I should have bought a house on a prairie. Yesterday was a good work day outside. I went and picked up a truck load of mulch for $10 at a local landscaping place, came home and did some mowing, and then spent some peaceful time weeding the makeshift veggie area by the side of the house. I’m letting the dill finish flowering and go to seed while the black swallowtails finish their life cycle of caterpillar and chrysalis before turing into beautiful butterflies. The onions and garlic have another month and the collards are almost done, bolting as we ‘speak’. Chris came home in mid-afternoon and we…

This is the back of our middle building, the shed/carport/my studio building. When we had our inspection last year before moving in the inspector mentioned that bees had been boring holes into the wood on the back of the building along the top near the roof. I mentioned this to Chris after we moved in but we never really saw the bees and coupled with the busyness of moving into we didn’t investigate into it. A few weeks ago I noticed that what I suspected to be mason bees hovering in the area. Since then we realized they were heavily utilizing that area and sure enough Chris found them chomping…

We got up this morning, stopped for breakfast tacos at the gas station, and drove through rural Montgomery and Grimes Counties to get to R. Weaver Apiaries just outside of Navasota. If you are looking for bluebonnets, you Texans out there, FM 2 in Grimes County has a ton of bluebonnets in the ranch pastures, sweeping vistas of them. Very beautiful! The bees were very quiet on our way home, not a buzz, and then, as you see in the video above we put them into the hive. They are doing well, bees flitting about the garden right now. We’re doing a bunch of yard work today so we’ll be…