As I continued to walk around the yard, I noticed lots of spring. The grass is growing and in need of mowing. But it is the trees that really caught my attention. At the border of our property right next to a big pile of wood chips that has been composting for two years is a little clump of wild peach trees. They always put on a ton of blooms before the first leaves appear. The blooms are strikingly beautiful.
These blooms will develop into peaches this summer. We normally blanch them and make peach cobblers - my favorite way to enjoy fresh peaches.
As we move from the edible to the inedible, the Bradford Pear tree is in full bloom. More of a decorative tree, it doesn't produce edible fruit. I originally got this tree for free from the Arbor Day Foundation, planted it intending to move it and then it grew too big to move!
And finally, the Redbud tree. It has small blooms all along its branches. This tree soon grows big, heart-shaped leaves.
Everything is budding out and then I look at our citrus trees - brown, every leaf on them dead and falling off. The freeze really put a hurting on them. On the bright side, I scraped a small part of the trunks of each of the trees - I think it is called the cambium layer, and I noticed green. So the trees are still alive, despite the dead leaves.
And today we got our first indication of new growth. Here are some green growth on the navel orange:
And these are some shoots on the tangerine...
Finally, on the grapefruit!
So temperatures down to 14 degrees a few weeks ago and it didn't kill the citrus. That is great news. Now, what I'm interested to see is if they will put on leaves, bloom and fruit this year or will it skip a year? We'll have to wait and see.
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