To start off, here are my smallest and easiest plants: the cute little indoor herb aerogarden. It's my first attempt at growing herbs, so it's good to start small. I'm growing Genovese Basil, Savory, and Thyme. I planted it 1/28/10, and this is it's progress as of 2/15/10. We'll be cooking in a few weeks!
The beginnings of our maybe future orchard. They will be planted when it warms up a bit. It may take a year for any of them to fruit, but after that they should be pretty established.
The first tree is my favorite little citrus, a calamondin. The fruit looks like an orange but is very tart and can be substituted for key limes to make a similar pie. My grandpa has always had a tree and when I was younger I loved picking these and eating them in the yard. They're very sour but their skin is thin, edible, and sweet! This is my baby and I love him.
Next is another delicious citrus, a Kimbrough variety satsuma tree. It's a type of tangerine and is usually seedless. Everyone knows how good these are.
This is a flame red grapefruit tree. It's supposed to be fairly sweet for a grapefruit, but I'm not sure I've ever tried this variety. When I was young we had a pink grapefruit tree, which I usually ate sprinkled with sugar.
The last tree is a shell apple. It looks sad now, but I was promised it would branch out and become a real tree shortly! We've never grown apples before so this will be an experiment. Shell is a self-fertilizing variety, which means you only need 1 tree to be able to produce fruit. Many of the more common varieties require 2 or more trees in close proximity to each other to fruit. The apples are supposed to be crisp and a bit tart, mixed red and green, and similar to a Fuji apple. I guess we'll see how they turn out!
All the trees came from Just Fruits & Exotics Nursery. It's an awesome nursery with a great variety of trees to choose from, the staff was very friendly and I really enjoyed walking through their grounds. They also guarantee their trees for a year. Visit them here.
And lastly for now is my old friend, the cactus. He's definitely not a 2010 model, but I love him just the same. I've had him about 5 years now, and he started out with 1 main stalk about 10 inches high. Every summer since then he's had tiny baby cacti sprout out all over him. He's a monster now, riding out the winter inside the house. It's not easy moving this heavy, prickly, very awkward to carry thing around, so once I move him he tends to stay for a while. He needs to be re-potted this spring, but it's a daunting task that requires gloves and an extra set of hands to accomplish. I've told a couple people I would cut them a "baby" off my granddaddy cactus, but I haven't had the heart to cut him yet. Maybe one day.
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