My how the garden grows...

It's incredible how quickly things grow in Portland's spring thanks to all the rain. Just one month had gone by since our last trip and the yard is ridiculous. This will be great once we're living there and able to work on it every day but we've pretty much given up on having any control over it this year. We spent Saturday of Memorial Day weekend in the yard with Dylan and Elizabeth joining us for much of the day. They are pros since they also have turned their yard into a fantastic urban farm. Also they have all the best yard and garden equipment like a weedeater and chainsaw.

We did some fruit tree pruning and think we figured out what we have:
- One dwarf pink lady apple tree (the only one we're sure of since it still has the tag on it)
- One very large and established plum tree
- Three pear trees
- A few small cherry trees that came from seeds fallen from the neighbor's yard
- The biggest surprise was finding out the 3 woody vines at the trellis in the east side yard are kiwi. KIWI! The actual fuzzy kind, not the smaller yet hardy fuzz-less kind usually grown in Oregon. But the vines seem to really be growing well and are definitely several years old. We'll see how they fruit.

And of course the grapes, golden raspberries, and thorn-less blackberries. There is also a small tree of some kind of mystery fruit at the base of one of the pear trees.

Here's what we walked in to on May 25th:

April 27th

May 25th

April 27th

View from the northwest corner looking over the garden boxes.

May 25th

Nick is under the plum tree in the back corner using the weedeater on the small grass patch area. Thanks to Dylan we have a sweet new push mower, but it doesn't work on foot-plus high grass.