New Plants
We order new plant starts from the Spokane County Conservation District to improve our garden or landscaping. The first time I ordered from them was right after I had placed our mobile home. We had a devastating Ice Storm in 1995 and lost half of our trees. I ordered as many firs as I could afford to replant with the next spring. I love that these horticulturist savvy people really understand our climate in the Inland Pacific Northwest. Their plants are economical small starts that have a real high success rate. They allow the poor folk to be able to care for the land. This year we got 4 different varieties to add to our landscape; 5 aspen, 3 juice grapes, 5 huckleberries, and 5 mock oranges.
Aspen
Above is a picture of some aspen we saw in Colorado. Hopefully, we will have some color where we planted our starts here at home.
Grapes
We hope to be able to harvest grapes soon, our vines have had some problems. I haven’t given up on them. There are two rows of grapes, the older row of grapes has two kinds and the second row hasn’t got a fence or rail yet.
Huckleberries
This is the splurge item that we bought this year. These huckleberry starts were grown in the Priest Lake Idaho area. Which is similar to us, so we hope we are going to be able to get them to grow over here in Elk. On a higher sloped area of the property, where we put in our border dog fence last year. Pete planted the huckleberries above a decaying log. We marked each of the five plant plugs with a stick to be able to find them. They seem to be doing real good without any help from us. Yay!
Mock Orange
These are planted on the east fence of our garden between the garden and the house as a decorative hedge. They require very little care wanting good drainage with lots of sunshine, so they have a lot of that where they are planted. Hopefully, this row will be able to slow down water going down the hill naturally. We are hoping to be having the fragrance of the white blossoms to help attract bees, butterflies, and birds during the summer.