Muscadine Harvest 2015

So, as expected, three quarters of this years muscadine harvest is represented in this picture. If you'll recall from April, or you can use the archive to check out the post entitled "Muscadines!" to help you recall, we weren't expecting much of a harvest this year.

The muscadines had not been trimmed in at least two years, possibly much longer. This past winter I trimmed them drastically and began the process of training them into a four arm kniffen style trellis system. I kept plenty of vines, unsure of their response to my trimming. All of them exploded into growth as soon as Spring hit. The muscadines, however, won't fruit on wood from this year, but will emerge from the one year old wood next year.

These three and one other muscadine on the same little vine represent the entire harvest, only because this one vine somehow managed to evade the drastic pruning this past winter. But it's cool to see what they look like!

These are Carlos Bronze muscadines (AKA Scuppernongs). This variety represents half of our vines. We haven't yet identified the other red variety of muscadines, but we aren't picky.

Next year we should see a ridiculously large harvest and then in subsequent years I plan on alternately pruning four of the eight vines more heavily in order to produce half the full capacity harvest annually, instead of a doubly large harvest biennially.

The Versatility of Privet

Don't mind the mess, you're looking at the beginning of a hedge. While clearing acres of Georgia pine forest clogged up with tall, scraggly looking privets it was brought to my attention by Meredithe's aunt, Nancy, that privet is extremely versatile and can be trained into many different shapes and forms. If you'll look back at the post titled "Clearing the Driveway Trees" you can see the privets coming up through the duct work around the base of the tree all tall and scraggly. The bush you see before you is the same exact group of privets, trimmed down to the ground in March. They immediately sprang back to life and started shooting for the sky. If, however, you continue to prune them hard (seriously, HARD, they're persistent) you can train them into a much more attractive bush or hedge. I trimmed these at least four or five times over the summer every time they reached two feet tall I knocked 'em back down to 18 inches or so. They learned rather quickly and began branching out horizontally rather than continuing their concerted effort to go vertical. I plan to keep allowing them to spread around the base of the tree and form a nice little hedge. I may even continue the hedge down the side of the driveway, new plants seem to spring up from everywhere! Removing them from the landscape seemed like a daunting task, turning them into hedges surprisingly seems more manageable.

On a side note, the rectangular area outlined in white in the foreground has two different ground cover transplants that were brought from Meredithe's cousin Tish's house in Monroe, GA. If you can pick them out, the bright green areas are Creeping Jenny and I believe the other ground cover which is the barely visible wider leaved plant is some variety of spiderwort. They seem to be doing ok, but maybe i'll pull out some of their competition next spring and see if I can't get them to really spread around the base of the hedge.

Apple Tree Update

Look at all of the growth on the apple tree! All of these leaves sprang from the apple tree almost immediately after the other leaves were eaten by deer. I don't know what effect all of this late growth will have on the tree's ability to store energy for the winter, but it looks even better than the untouched one with all of it's same old leaves. Keep those fingers crossed! Hopefully they'll both make it through this winter!

Apple Trees

So I learned the hard way that deer REALLY like apple trees. They like apples, they like the leaves, they like the bark, they like everything about these trees. Also, they aren't the gentle creatures from the Disney movies. The first picture is one of our apple trees which made it unscathed until I got the fence up around it. The second picture is of an apple tree that used to be the same size as the other one. We got these trees on sale outside of a Kroger for $3 each. We put them in the ground late in the Spring as a $6 gamble, long after we should have planted them. By the time I got the fences up two weeks later it was out of necessity to save them. Clearly, I should have made building the fences a priority. I cut off the damaged branches just above a promising looking bud and am hoping that they rebound. One is a Mollie's Delicious, the other is a Fuji. Not sure which one is which since I mixed up the tags at one point. Not my proudest project to date, but it'll be fun finding out which one is which if they make it to maturity.

Praying Mantis

Check out this little guy! Our pawpaws tend to attract all kinds of beneficial bugs. I've seen several different species of spider making webs on or around this particular plant before, but today I saw this little praying mantis. He doesn't eat leaves, he's an ambush predator waiting on other insects to try and eat our pawpaw and then WHAM! Go get 'em little guy, give 'em hell.