Squeaky Clean! They have such bright color to them!

The end of July/first part of August was the time for picking fruit from our ornamental thundercloud plum tree, a cultivated variety of the cherry plum native to Europe and Asia.

But now we are not most people! :)
So being told by the previous owner of our home that the tree grew fruit we eagerly watched and checked to see when it was ready for harvesting. And a very rewarding harvest it turned out to be!

In another post I will show you some of the things I made with them.

Here are the potatoes after they have had dirt added only a couple of times

As you can see, they keep right on growing as the dirt keeps being added in around them.

Time to add another layer of dirt!

 We will only be able to add dirt maybe one more time and then they will be all the way full.

The summer pruning is to keep any strait up growth cleared away and keep the middle of the tree open. 

As soon as they started ripening the Robins decided it was potluck only they didn't want to share anything! :) So to try and keep some of the cherries long enough for them to ripen up all the way we put up this sparkly bird scare tape. it did not stop them but it did slow them down some.

Finely some red ones

Cherry Picking with uncle Richard!

Here you can see the seed that the birds have eaten the cherry off of

I had some little hands to help too!
You have no idea how exiting a cherry pitter can be until you see it through the eyes of a 3 year old! :)

Here is a pic of  when the tress first started blooming.
I love apple blossoms. the back yard  smelled so good!

the first fuzzy baby apples

time to thin the apples

We tried to thin them down to one apple per cluster removing the smaller and or blemished fruit so the strongest in each cluster is left.

You thin the trees to enable the remaining apples to grow better. Thinning also reduces the weight on the tree's branches to avoid broken limbs. ( And here on the islands that also helps keep the branches from being so low that the deer can eat them.) As well as helping make sure that your next years crop is good too!

Yep that's the hubby, where he would love to spend his whole life!
Well... or I wonder if the riding lawn mower
might win out over the trees? ;)

We got a lot of cherries starting!

The big question will be who gets them first? The Robins already seem to be staking out a clam to the tree! so we will have to see who wins the ownership dispute! :) lol

I am ok with sharing, but will they be? The word around the island is that the birds can totally strip a tree the day before you think it's ready to pick. so we will have see how it goes. :)

I got the buckets, Richard got the dirt & the Drill & we got the  seed potatoes!

Everything needed to grow buckets full of potatoes! :)

we got what are called blue potatoes but they really look more purple than blue!

We put in a 1/2 of potato in each bucket. you just want to have an eye on each 1/2 that you are panting

For growing in buckets you want just a few inches of dirt/compost  in the bottom of you buckets to start you potatoes in.

then of course cover them up with the dirt and wait for them to sprout!

The first little sprout! it is cute and fuzzy! :)

So the trick to getting lots of potatoes is as the potato plants grow, continue putting more dirt onto/around the plants. This will forces the plants to supercharge their root growth to keep up. and the roots are what we call potatoes! :)

I will update as the growing progress continues