The tree farm, a year later

About a year ago I first posted a blog about my backyard tree farm. I dug up a bunch of baby trees from my parents' house and church and one from my grandparents' house, then put them all in pots. If you want to see other blogs about this, then look for blogs tagged "backyard nursery." Well, here's an update (with pictures). If you click on any of the pictures you can enlarge them.

Everything is growing really well. Julie's bike is in the foreground of this shot, so you can get an idea of how big everything is. There are 7 trees that are decent sized. All are over 2 feet tall, and the tallest Japanese Maple is around 4 1/2 feet now.

Here's a close up of the Avocado tree. It is unfortunately being ravaged by bugs, but it's surviving OK. Behind it, you can make out a few other trees, and we also have some herbs growing in other pots.




There are a bunch of trees in this image, so I have a painted version separating the leaves from each other. In the bottom left corner and bottom right corner are the 2 redwood trees. The other 3 trees (bottom middle, top middle, and top right) are all Japanese Maples. These are the 5 biggest trees. The Japanese Maple in the back and the Redwood on the Left are the two biggest trees so far. The redwoods grow much faster than the Japanese Maples, of course. These are all from 2009 Spring and Summer, along with the Avocado and the Red or Silver Maple.

Here are all the small trees. Those are avocado leaves along the left side of the picture. The yellow dot is in the pot for the big redwood (3 1/2 ish feet tall). The green dot is in the big Japanese Maple's pot (4 1/2 feet or so). The Cyan and Blue dots are in the smaller Japanese Maples, which are around 3 to 3 1/2 feet tall. The Magenta dot is in the smaller redwood's pot, and that tree is around 2 feet tall. The white dot is in the Silver or Red Maple's pot, and that tree is also about 2 feet tall. The Red circle is around a Western Black Oak that I found growing in a different pot back in February. These grow painfully slowly. The pot right below it has a baby redwood in it, which is only 1 or 2 inches right now. There are some really sickly looking rosemary and basil plants in this picture too.

So that's the update. We'll see how well they make it through the winter this year, since they're probably too big to bring inside when it freezes. I may have to start selling or planting them in , 2011, because they're getting too big for my tiny backyard. We also have a grill, a patio table and chairs, and a bike. These are all crammed on a little concrete pad that's around 8'x20'.

Oh, the other cool thing is that the tomato plant I dug up from the compost pile has around 30 tomatoes on it. I found it in November and it survived over the winter. Last year we had a different plant that produced 2 tomatoes for us all year, and we were out of town when they got ripe. I think this year's are cherry tomatoes, but I'm not sure yet.