My secret to a stunning Dogwood

It was love at first sight when I saw my first dogwood in Yosemite valley 13 years ago.  It was late may and the Pacific Dogwood (Cornus nuttallii) was covered in enormous white cream colored flowers.  The tree already had leaves, but the flowers were still the star of the show.  When we moved to Washington and I was told there was a dogwood on the property, I was ecstatic.  I could hardly wait all winter to see this amazing tree covered in gorgeous flowers.  Well along came spring and all I saw was tiny, very light pink flowers. Not at all stunning, well at first. After some searching I found I had a Flowering Dogwood (Cornus florida).  I noticed my neighbor also had a dogwood, but hers had a gorgeous dark pink color.  
  She told me her secret was Epsom salt.  She said to put on two applications, one in early spring before the petal like bracts open, and a second in early fall when the next years bracts are forming.  And there you have it! After one year I had my own spectacular dogwood, super stunning!

After

   

Before

  

Dogwood anatomy:

Dogwood flowering head

*other plants with smilar petal like bracts are, poinsettia and Bougainvillea

Summer is out; Fall is in.

I’m not sure how it happened, but summer is over and fall is quickly getting underway. I had planned on blogging about the garden, chickens and kids through out the summer; but somehow at the end of the day those three had worn me out!

The kids have gotten so big, and matured so much. AppleBelle has joined Girl Scouts and is currently filling out the paper work for 4-H. She has been a big help this summer, taking on so much more responsibility (finally!). She entered several items at the County Fair and won Reserve Grand Champion for her ‘Sushi play dough’.
We decided not to enter chickens this year; she needs to work with them a lot more if she wants to win any awards. Last week we drove out to Spokane to pick up some true Ameraucana chicks (they lay blue eggs!) from a breeder we found online, Pips&Peeps. She has decided these will be the chickens she will show next year and has been handling them every day to get them ready.




Rosey has gone from toddler to little girl so quickly. She is singing her ABC’s and can count to twenty (after that it gets kinda funny!). She still loves to work with flashcards; she whizzed through shapes & colors so we have moved on to sight words. One of the problems with being so remote is that she has no one her age to play with. We’ve tried story time at the local Library, but have yet to find any buddies. While AppleBelle is at school we sneak into her room and play PetShops, which Rosey enjoys very much (I think it’s the sneaking in she enjoys the most!).

The chickens seemed to have multiplied. We went from 2 to 20 in less then a year. They have been very addicting. In the spring I built a incubator out of a Styrofoam ice chest. The directions were found on my favorite chicken website, BackYardChickens.com, and after a trip to HomeDepot and digging out a few parts from the garage, I have a working incubator for only 20 bucks!! After a few trials and errors (on my part) we had a 100% hatch and then the Mr. made me put it away. He just finished the chicken ark for the ten chicks we hatched out. Soooo, I guess now I can plug the incubator back in! I’m thinking of adding quail to the family, their eggs are so tiny and cute!

The Garden has become so much work. Next year I will be installing a watering system with an automatic timer so that watering wont be so time consuming. We did learn a lot this year though. Timing is everything when dealing with frosts. I should have started the corn, tomatoes, cucumbers and pumpkins a month earlier, as the first frost is creeping up on me and I’m still harvesting a ton of tomatoes. The carrots, potatoes and cabbages did wonderful. Last weekend we cleared out the root cellar and we are airing it out and checking the temp/humidity to get ready for storage. This year the chickens share a part of the garden, and one of them has realized that she can fly over the fence and get to the veggies, so we lost several cabbages and all the eggplant. Next year I hope to have a larger coop and a larger fence to keep them in their own area. All in all we had a wonderful harvest and have gained some knowledge for next year.



The fruit trees are another story. We didn’t want to spray, I was hoping that it wouldn’t be necessary. It is. I have found some organic sprays that we will try next year, and if that doesn’t work I give up. The apples and plums actually did excellent without any sprays or fertilizers. They will get a hard pruning once the leaves drop; it seems the trees I cut back hard last year did better then the ones I gave a light pruning to. The cherry tree is the one I had the hardest time with. We maybe got 10 good cherries. What the birds didn’t get the bugs did. I will be getting fake snakes for all the trees next year, as the one I used in the plum tree worked wonderfully! The deer ate their fair share of green plums and apples. We let one apple tree drop all the fruit in the hopes that they will ignore the other trees. It has worked to far, only one more apple tree to harvest! All the fruit has also attracted a bear. We have found bear scat in the orchard, and he has done some damage to the plum trees, I think he might be pretty good size. Because of this the dog will be sleeping outside until the bear goes to sleep for the winter. This has been a great trial season and I can’t wait for next year’s garden!

2009 Garden Catalogs are here!

I feel like I've been waiting months for these to arrive, and now they are finally here! I only ordered a few because I hate being bombarded with catalogs that I never order from. Now I know it would be best to just order them online, but with dial-up this slow it would take years to view a few pages. I've requested: Territorial Seed Co., Kitazawa Seed Co., Park Seed, Seeds of Change, Burpee, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, and Sand Hill Preservation Center.





I'm trying not to go crazy this first year, because I know there will be a learning curve. With all this land I can't help but want one of very veggie that our family eats. I'm really excited about Kitazawa Seed Co., they sell a wide variety of our favorite Asian veggies.

I can grow snow

So far I'm only growing snow. Although I have some plans to grow other things, it seems that at this time of year the only thing that is growing is the snow. I'm awaiting the spring gardening catalogs, I'll be growing everything from seed this year. We had a lot of problems last year with the started plants we bought from Home Depot. It seems the little tags that tell you what kind of plants you are growing are not always what they say. So this year we are sticking with seeds. I'm still searching for a good source of Japanese veggie seeds. Now that I think of it, I'm still searching for a good source of anything Japanese. Two hours is too far to drive for Miso paste.

When we first arrived at the house these planters were bare; but with some love and time I now have a beautiful snow hedge.