soapbox

I like growing experimental things. Or at least experimenting with what I grow. As a kid in Alaska, I used to try to grow corn in our greenhouse, two or three whole plants!*

More long and boring story after the jump

This spring I decided that I wanted to try planting a fruit tree. Since I knew we weren’t going to be here in Baltimore for more than one more growing season, it made sense to plant something that had a chance of producing fruit this year. The nursery we went to had some little peach trees with tiny little peaches already attached so we got one of them. Kirsten and I sort of assumed that the baby peaches would just fall off, but hope springs eternal.

They didn’t fall off.

Now I have a little tiny tree loaded with a dozen or so peaches. The birds started noticing them about a week ago, so I’ve had to put netting over the tree to save the fruit for human consumption.

Cue the ominous music.

We had a big rain storm the other day and the combination of wet netting, growing peaches, and wet leaves proved to be too much for the tree and it completely bent in half. Luckily, being as the tree is very very young it bent instead of breaking and I was able to use a spare bird feeder support to tie the tree back up.

I think the tree is going to be happier when it’s not on crutches anymore. Mmm, when I’ve had the yummy yummy peaches.

*If you don’t know anything about corn, growing two or three plants isn’t enough to ensure pollination. Fields of it work a lot better. This is key because only pollinated kernels of corn actually grow. So, with my little greenhouse experiment, I would only get 2 kernels of corn on each ear. It wasn’t really worth the trouble.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 11:39 am and is filed under animals, food, pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.