June in our Sunnyvale garden 2019

June in our Sunnyvale garden is full of flowers, ripe fruit and ripening vegetables. For more of the story, see below the photo gallery.

We have two Blenheim apricot trees. One is a volunteer from a discarded pit. It grows in a two-foot wide trench. It produces hundreds of fruit. Which is good because a couple dozen fruit every day are lost to visits by squirrels and finches. The second tree is a young 9-foot tree planted this year as a replacement for a 20 year old tree. It produced a fair crop this year and, according to one of our tasters, its fruit are better tasting.

Our 48 tomato plants are producing fruit. Two of the plants I bought as transplants from a nursery. I harvested some ripe yellow cherry tomatoes and zebra cherry tomatoes already in June. Any time you get tomatoes before July 4th is great. Last month I picked up two tomatillo plants at the Sunnyvale Garden meetup at the St. Charles Community garden. They have produced a fair number of fruit in the husks.

Our two plum trees usually produce more fruit on a two year cycle. Last year was the boom year. This year is the bust.

Our two fig trees (Black Mission and Tiger) have a lot of figs for the main harvest later this summer.

New to 2019: I planted two passion-flower vines in a very large pot. They have been producing very spectacular flowers and even some fruit.

Our marionberry and blackberry harvest is down this year and it is my own fault. Berries are biennial: The first year canes grow but produce no fruit. In the second year, the first year canes produce fruit and the second year canes grow. After the harvest of fruit, the fruit-producing canes should be pruned back to the ground. It is easiest to distinguish the canes in the summer time. If you wait until winter, like I did, you risk pruning next year canes.

Marie bought me a seed pack of different melons. I am so short of ground space that I planted some in 5-gallon pots and the rest in the soil under the apricot tree. The first melons are forming.

Marie also bought me a seed pack of different sunflowers. They are now flowering in our former fire-pit.

I have over a dozen chile plants now flowering. Some, like the cayenne, were started from last year’s seeds. Others, like the habanero and ghost pepper, are from small transplants.

Our dahlias are very pretty this year: a tangerine ball dahlia and a pink semi-cactus dahlia.

Other perennials are reliably producing. Every winter I acidify the soil for our hydrangea. So the first flowers are blue and as the season progresses, the later flowers are pink. Salvias, like the Black-n-Blue, are always pretty, but they like partial shade.

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