Easy Recipes From The Garden

I was happy to discover the other day that the peach tree on our property has many, many small peaches growing on it. The little green peaches are about the size of two side by side marbles, and are smooth and fuzzy to the touch.

What’s disappointing is that many of them have a tiny little hole in them, indicating a pest problem - oriental fruit moth. The moth lays an egg or two on the fruit, which hatch into little worms that dig into the fruit and set up camp.

I did some research, and it seems early and frequent spray applications with an insecticide like Imidan does the trick. You must begin spraying in very early spring to help alleviate the problem - immediately after petals drop, or even before all the blossoms are gone.

To keep spraying all summer long, it’s important to protect the fruit. It’s been recommended to bag the peaches in zip top sandwich bags with the corners cut off for drainage, and the plastic above the zip strip also cut off. After the final thinning of peaches and the fruits are bagged, they are safe from the pests; however, a new pest may emerge. Earwigs may crawl up the trunk and move their creepy little selves in the bags, so check the bags often.

As the price of groceries continue to climb, and our interest in organic and natural foods  also rises, the hubs and I have decided to implement a new plan: we will instill an edible landscape around our home. No more purchasing flowering trees just because they are pretty (sorry, yellow Magnolia tree - how I admired you so). Instead, we will plant trees that have pretty flowers that also bear fruit (hello, peach and apple trees, and aforementioned cherry trees). Many herbs are also quite nice to look at and interesting in a garden, such as rosemary (which is almost an evergreen shrub-like plant than an herb-looking plant) and parsley. And you can’t go wrong with a row or two of lettuce and some tomato plants.

No, we’re not going to just plant annuals to fill in the bare spots around the gardens. Instead, we’ll tuck in a few bunches of buttercrunch lettuce around the bare spots, and landscape with plants we can also eat from. However - we’re not going to pull what’s already planted; that seems counter-productive to me. What we will do is place edibles as new plants around the house, and maybe eventually replace the non-edibles over time.

For an early Mother’s Day gift for me, my husband ordered a Hansen’s Bush Pie Cherry Tree from Guerney’s. I was thrilled to find a long box with the trees tucked inside on the front porch the other day, and quickly followed the instructions to soak the roots in water, then plant the tree. Unfortunately, we live in a zone where we’re still getting freezing temps at night, so I believe a little extra care is in order to protect the three (!) fruit trees that just arrived.

First, rather than planting them directly into the ground, we planted them in large containers. This way, we can move them around and into a sheltered area if frost or if freezing temperatures threaten.

Second, a little burlap goes a long way to protect fruit trees. We also have two peach trees on the property, and before they began to form blooms, we covered them with burlap to protect them from the cold temps and encourage them to shoot blooms. They did, and now we have the teeny, tiniest little peach buds just beginning to grow.

The weather should warm a bit by end of week but I’ll be keeping an eye on my cherry trees.