Trying something different

My daughter helped me set up a garden two springs ago at our house.  We planted a variety of things, but the two things that did the best in the first two years were the sunflowers and the tomatoes.  The sunflowers did better the first year, the tomatoes did better the second year.  This year, I'm hoping they both do well.

In the past, at least on my 365 project, I've posted about my battles with tomato worms.  After several postings of worm shots, a friend of mine got tired of me ranting about my battles with the worms, so he bought me a Topsy Turvy.  The premise is the tomatoes grow upside down.  But the real reason he bought it for me was to get me to stop complaining about the tomato worms.

Tomato worms pupate in the soil, then just climb up the tomato plant to lay their eggs.  With this device, I shouldn't get any tomato worms this year.  I hope it works, because I really hate those things.  And besides, nothing's better than homegrown tomatoes, bar none.  If this thing really works, there's a spot in the same general area where I can hang a second one, so I can have two different varieties.  Right now I went with a beefsteak tomato.

If you look in the background, you can see the planter where I had our tomatoes and sunflowers last year.  This year, that planter is just sunflowers.  I amended the soil today and planted about six different varieties of sunflowers, all of which are supposed to grow at least five feet high.  One is supposed to have flowers that are at least a foot in diameter.  If all goes well, I'm going to have lots of sunflower seeds for the birds to enjoy later in the summer.

The second photo is a special photo, although it's not really much to locate.  That's Kathryn's nectarine tree.  My daughter planted that two springs ago.  She was working with her hands and she really needed to do something and so we decided that it was a good spot for a nectarine tree in the back yard.  The first year, it had a couple of blossoms, but we didn't get any fruit off of it, which is probably a good thing.

Last year, I think there were about 10 to 12 fruit on the tree, but we had a really nasty heat wave of over 100˚ for about 10 days in a row and the fruit just shriveled up and fell off the tree no matter how much water I was pumping into the soil.  With only two years of growth, it was probably a good thing.  This is the third year for the tree and hopefully some of those blossoms will give us some sweet nectarines to eat.

Looking at the photo, I see I need to do some pruning on the tree.  There are a couple of sucker branches down below that need to be removed.  The tree was a bare root we got at a local nursery. It's now about a foot taller than I am, so I need to address that as well to keep it under control.  That should be too difficult to deal with and we'll still have a good looking fruit tree.

Here's to a successful year for anyone out there who has a green thumb or wished they had a green thumb.