I’ve always loved strawberries, but my attempts at growing the various hybrids have yielded nothing. Given that, I thought maybe species like these alpine strawberries might do better. About five years ago, I grew the red, white and yellow varieties from seed. It turns out they are really easy from seed and I had enough to plant all around the orchard bed. A few of them remain.

The red berries have a strong strawberry flavor, while the white ones have a subtle, almost pineapple taste.

I don’t have a lot of photos of these plants, but I’ll work to get more this year. It turns out Fragaria vesca is considered a native plant in Seattle, so I plan to grow more of them to spread around the native plant garden. They are 76 species of butterflies and moths that use Fragaria as a host plant!

Not well known in the US, these berries are grown more often in Europe and have been hybridized there. My plant is about seven years old from Raintree Nursery. Like the Goumi, it is a handsome shrub with simple, attractive foliage. The May flowers are attractive, if not showy, both to me and to pollinators. The berries ripen all at once, which is nice for harvesting, and up until last year, they didn’t seem to attract birds. Last year, I waited to harvest them a little too long and when I went out there one day every berry had vanished.

One advantage that Aronia has over Goumi is that the fall foliage is brilliant most years–reds and purples and oranges.

My 2020 plans for this plant are to cut away some of the natural layers at its base and plant them in other locations or pots to share.

This is an exotic member of a great plant family that grows tall like jewelweed and gets bulbs like a dahlia. I bought a little bulb of this plant about seven years ago from Strange Wonderful Things on eBay. It grew quickly the first couple of years and multiplied, and bloomed, but I find it tough to grow well–or maybe I just haven’t tried hard enough.

I get the sense that I’m growing these plants too warm in the summer and they get spider mites and dry out too much in-between waterings. For 2020, I’m going to try moving a few pots of these bulbs out to the back patio to see if they do better outside the greenhouse. I’m also going to plant some into the garden to see whether they winter over.

These plants did particularly well in 2020 on the back patio in partial shade. They were only in gallon-sized pots, but they bloomed much better than they ever have before.

The queen of my spring-flowring clematis vines, this was planted at the same time and on the same fence as C. alpina “Willy” and C. macropetala “Markham’s Pink”, but while those other vines are polite, elegant ladies, C. montana “Rubens” is more of a brassy dame. The vine is very vigorous and the flower show is extraordinary every year.

The only work to be done with this vine is to trim it back after flowering to keep it in bounds. I won’t fertilize it for fear it will knock the fence down!

Planted on the same fence at the same time as C. alpina “Willy,” this vine is very similar. It is possibly more vigorous and the flowers are a richer pinky-mauve. It puts on a pretty good show, especially wherever its vines find the sun.

There isn’t anything to be done with this vine except to enjoy it in 2020.

After we fenced off the back patio, I planted several vines, including this clematis, that I’ve been enjoying for over twenty years. The bloom time is short, but I really like their form.

The above pictures were taken this week.

The vine flowers mostly at the very top where it gets more light. I’m sure the neighbors on that side are enjoying it. Leon hacked it back good last summer, but it still came back in time to bloom well this spring. For 2020, I will fertilize it with Jobe’s spikes tucked at its base, trim it as needed, and watch it fill in more and more for an even bigger show next year.

This plant is the manifestation of two crimes–the crime of a mail order nursery catalog that told me how wonderful and fragrant this plant is; and the second crime, my inability to identify this as a shrub, not a vine, and as a thug, not a prize. I had two twigs originally that came in the mail and that I planted and grew on.

And grow they did. One of them was against the back fence because I assumed it would vine delicately and have hummingbird beloved blooms. Instead, it became this bushy shrub that had to be hacked back heavily every year. I finally removed that one. But the twig I stuck in the corner of the orchard garden still survives to this day. It has some good garden attributes, like how easy it is, attractive but plain foliage, and floriferous with mediocre pink flowers.

I made commitments lately to add native plants and to remove invasives, so this shrub, which is invasive in most of the US, needs to go. My 2020 plans for this shrub are to kill it, which is sad on some level, but necessary on all the other levels. I will replace it with a wonderful native shrub–a salmon berry or elderberry or something like that.

Every spring I trudge out to the greenhouse and pull out all of these Cape Primroses and clean them up and topdress or repot them. They really don’t look like much. I did this activity today, and here is what I ended up with:

In addition to these, I have three other blooming-sized plants that I planted on earlier, and three pots of starts that I got when I accidentally broke divisions off as I was removing spent flower stems (a hazard of cleaning the plants up, which is why smart people use clippers to cut the old stems).

Within a month, flower buds will be poking up on all of these plants and in six weeks and for the rest of the summer, they will be smothered in magnificent blooms.

Typical of me to not have these labeled and have no idea which varieties I own. But that doesn’t take away from their beauty.

My clean-up and repotting of the plants this spring included putting them in fresh Espoma organic potting mix with some grit and organic fertilizer, with a whole Jobe’s organic plant spike in each pot, broken in two and tucked on the sides at the top of the soil in each pot. I’m hoping this formula gives them the energy they need to be super floriferous.

May 2020 update–the unfurling flower spikes of my streptocarpus add a graceful element to the greenhouse.

A superstar small tree along the driveway bed, this cherry has impressed me from the start. Planted about five years ago, it fruited the first year. In fact, I’ve read warnings that growers should take the cherries off the first few years when they are tiny so the tree puts some energy into branch growth instead of fruit production.

Unlike the sweet cherries that seem to be hit-or-miss when it comes to setting fruit and ripening it, Morello sets loads of cherries every year. The tree is small enough that we can net the whole thing to keep the birds out. Well, almost. The crows still find a way.

This is how the tree looks today (5.2.20).

My 2020 plans for this plant are to fertilize it and net it early against thievery and make a pie from the cherries for the first time.

The second house my parents bought for the family had a small orchard, including apples, a pear, a cherry, and an Italian plum tree. I’m not naively nostaligic about that orchard. I saw all the work that went into it. But having fresh fruit was always such a treat and the trees had all-season beauty.

For my mini orchard at home, I wanted apple trees that would take up less space. I ended up adding two columnar apples at first in the orchard bed, then adding two more columnar apples along the driveway. The first two trees have grown well and they produce large crops every other year that I fight to keep from the squirrels. They varieties are Scarlet Sentinel and North Pole. The North Pole is really tall now–probably fifteen feet, and is only blooming at the top this year. The Scarlet Sentinel lost its original leader, so it is less columnar and more compact.

The second set of trees, planted about three years ago, haven’t produced apples yet–but it looks like this might be the year.

My 2020 plans for these trees are to feed them and to put nylon bags on the fruit early on. I may also create a net structure at the base of the trees so the squirrels might stay away.