I was so happy this spring. There where little peaches on our peach tree for the first time since we planted the tree, but …
the little peaches are all drying in and falling off. A part of the leaves also look wilted. Was it the late frost, or does this tree have another problem? I don’t know.
Trying to save the blueberries with a thick layer of leaves
My Blueberry bushes looked miserable last year and they gave only a handful of fruit. When we bought them the year before they where packed with fruit, so there must be a reason the blueberry bushes are not very happy.
One problem could be lack of water. We did not water them last growing season. Although the soil is very moisture retaining, there could have been too little moisture.
Another problem could have been the fact that they where overgrown last spring. We just timely did not manage to maintain the berry garden.
Another problem could be that the soil is not acidic enough. An indication for that are the leaves, which are not a nice bright green, but tend to a slightly yellower green. This could indicate that the ph-level is not to there liking.
To improve the berry garden we mowed the grass and weeds short and divided a thick layer of leaves over the entire patch. Obviously it will take some time for the leaves to decompose and for the ph-level to change, but the thick layer of leaves will also retain moisture much better and will keep the weed pressure down. This way we tackle 3 problems at once.
After a few weeks some weeds still came trough, so we will have to pull these out and improve the mulch layer. Since we do not have any more leaves we will use woodchips for that.
We interplant the blueberries with currants after clearing and removing some of the raised beds from our garden 2. That might have been a bad idea, but at the moment we do not have a suitable place from them. We are planning to expand our berry garden, but we have to get rid of all of the couch grass and the weeds there first. After we succeed with that we will relocate the currant bushes to give the blueberry bushes there needed space back.
Here are some impressions taken on 2 different dates:
Oh no, not again. Lots of dried little fruits and the good looking ones have a little hole in them.
The season started of so wonderful with most of the fruit trees blossoming beautifully and after a few weeks we can see lots of fruit starting to form. We always have a lot of the caterpillars of the Apple tree spider moth in our apple trees, so we checked and collected them of our smaller apple trees as much as possible. The bigger apple trees can cope with them and they are too high and there are too many to collect them anyway. In the middle of this job we noticed dried in fruits on our plum trees. Last year the plum moth maggots cost us almost all of our plum fruit and it looks like this year will be no different. We collected all of the dried in fruit and all of the fruit with a hole in it we could find, but will it be enough…
I do hope nature will find a balance soon. I do not mind sharing our produce with nature, but I would like to harvest some of it too.
Beautiful Chaos 