This was taken on May 31st this year…
This photo was taken on July 25th. On May 31st, only the Armenian cucumbers were planted…no sunflowers, beans, or bush cucumbers. On May 31st there were no fig trees or Western sand cherry, and the globe artichokes were only tiny little things. Two months is all it takes to change the landscape.
May 28th 2011, the sunflowers and zucchini are the only things planted…
Two months later, sunflowers are totally head heavy, summer squash puts out copious amounts of fruit, snow peas are growing strong, honeydew melon vines are about to take over the back and the grey zucchini is coming to maturity and producing very big tasty fruit.
May 23rd, Noah helped me plant all the peppers that grace the walking path…
July 29th and some of the peppers are starting to ripen. Noah will be home on Sunday, so he will be able to harvest some of the first peppers when they are ripe. Next spring in place of the peppers and beans growing along the walking path, will be gooseberry, indigo and golden currants. I’ll be starting these berry bushes from seed this winter.
We’re also excited because soon our new shipment of baby trees will be arriving. We have seven Western Soapberry trees, three white Russian mulberry trees, and five wild honey locust trees! All of them will be planted in the chicken pasture. They are just little seedlings, so they will need to hang out with the Paulownia trees for a while.
Soapberry trees actually produce soap that can be used in laundry, to wash your hair and also anything else that needs to be cleaned. How awesome is that? We will be growing our very own soap! I first saw a soapberry tree at a nursery in Albuquerque and the flowers on it were intoxicating to the bees. Bees can not stay away from this tree’s blossoms. I thought to myself, “this is a keeper tree! great for the bees” and I also thought it was a winged sumac tree. So I started to search for winged sumac trees to no avail! I went back to the nursery and asked if they would be getting any more winged sumac trees and that is when the guy working there told me that it was actually a soapberry tree! I asked if they had any seedlings, nope! Just the full grown trees growing gracefully in the nursery. So the search online began and I found a company that actually does have some Western soapberry trees. These are not the soapberry trees from Asia, these trees are native to Texas, New Mexico and other southwestern states.
Here are a few photos of a winged sumac and a soapberry tree to see how similar they are:
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