Spring is finally here! We have been busy in the garden and caring for our fruit trees. To get the garden ready for spring, we fertilized with homemade compost as well as compost purchased from Singh Farms. After that was tilled in, we planted our veggies: cucumbers, green beans, corn, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cantaloupe, watermelon, potatoes, and herbs. We also have onions, peas, lettuce, and spinach left from the fall that are still producing. The wheat continues to thrive and will be ready to harvest in a few months. It is about 4 feet tall and a few heads are starting to show. Many small seedlings are sprouting so the garden is off to a great start!

Many of the fruit trees have been covered in beautiful blossoms over the past few weeks. The peaches blossomed first, followed by the apricots and apples, and now the pear and plums are covered in flowers. Our peaches, apricots, and apples have set fruit so we have been busy thinning the fruit. We thin each peach to about 6 inches apart and apricots about 3 inches apart. For the apples we leave 1 to 2 apples per cluster. This extra effort is beneficial to the fruit as well as the tree since the fruit will grow larger and thinning promotes tree growth. We have also been busy pruning our citrus trees. This winter was an especially cold one and hit the citrus hard. We lost a young lime, but the rest survived with the help of heat lamps and lots of blankets. Since the threat of frost is long gone, now is the perfect time to prune back dead branches and fertilize. All of the citrus are currently in full bloom and smell delicious!