Spring Flowers

 

I planted some new tulip and hyacinth bulbs in my new flowerbed last fall. They are lovely.

 

They are already passed their prime (the hyacinths). I took this photo weeks ago.

The older front flower bed has had lots of spring tulips, then the grape hyacinths showed up, next up are some little shorty purple  iris. I got those from a neighbor down the street. They are so cute! I think they are a dwarf bearded Iris.

The back yard had lots of tulips. These are a nice red/orange blend. Quite a bit past their prime, too, but pretty none-the-less. I had a lot of red and yellow ones wrestle their way up through two feet of soil!!  That was soil we moved during construction of our addition. I meant to dig them up and move them before they were buried, but the diggers were too fast and they were soon entombed under many inches of heavy clay-like soil.  But they are persistent!  Up they came AND they bloomed! I figured they'd use all their energy just pushing leaves up through all that dirt.

And then the fruit trees are gorgeous, too.  Apples and peaches and pears, Oh My!  And plums, cherries and apricots, too, though I missed some of those blossoms. I think our apple crop will be next to nothing this year. Our Jonathan tree tends to only produce every-other year, and it always depends on if blossoms are nipped during a hard freeze.  But we have very few blossoms, so if they don't get frozen, there will be very few fruits on that tree this year.  We may be able to take a break from juicing apples this year!

Apples

Blurry pink peach blossoms. We did a really good job, Mike and I, watching tree-pruning You Tube tutorials.  I did the peach tree in our yard, and he did the apple tree in Levi's yard (and butchered it, if I must say so!).

Jim and Belinda Harrison's cherry tree has some stunning blossoms on it, but it also has many dead branches. Sadly for us, the dead ones are on our side of the fence and Mike really needs to get up there and get them out before disease spreads and kills the rest of the tree.  But we won't be picking cherries from our side of the wall this year. <sniff>

Levi's pear tree hangs on our side of the wall, too. Lovely white blossoms. His apricot tree branch that hangs over our wall also had blossomed and just lost all the white petals. There were fewer this year as much of that large very old apricot tree died off last year.