Fruit and Vegetable Gardening

The unusually cold weather in April kept me from planting my vegetable beds too early for a change. However, on the one good day I could find I did fertilize my four apple trees.  I do not know if that has anything to do with it but all of them have leafed out and two of the four are blooming.  The odd thing about that is one tree was only planted last year and should not have had any blooms for another couple of years.

Starting last week I began preparing my vegetable beds.  I had to remove all of last years potting soil and any dead plants and put in new potting soil.  Mike helped with all of that.  I had also bought one more tall raised bed.  Mike helped me install that one also.

Then I planted five herbs, two bell pepper plants, one mucho nacho jalapeño pepper plant, six broccoli plants, two Japanese eggplants and four tomato plants.  This year I planted all the tomato plants in the raised bed directly on the ground.  I added a mixture of Epsom salts, dry milk and baking soda to each plant hole so that my plants will not have blossom end rot this year.  One of the ladies from church suggested this.  

So as always after my own spring planting, I am excited about the possibilities of having lots of tomatoes for making salsa and tomato jam and eggplants to make white bean and roasted eggplant hummus and apples to make applesauce, apple pies and apple butter.  Now I will just have to wait and see if my hope come to fruition.