Do you take before and after pictures with your garden?

I have a confession...

I'm a sucker for "Before and After" pics, but I like to take before and after pictures of my gardens.
It keeps me motivated when I'm weeding or trying to be patient while my seedlings and fruit trees to grow.

This is a Bosworth (Kwai Mai Pink) Lychee tree that I planted a few springs ago. The "Before pic" is from April of 2021 (a year after I planted it) and the "After" pic is from April of 2022. I will take another updated picture this upcoming spring.

Lychee was first cultivated in Asia around 1059 AD. It is sweet, fruity, and very juicy. If you've never had one before, it might look alarming when you open it and resemble an eyeball, but the fruit is worth it! Rambutan is it's flashier cousin, but if I had to choose, I think I'd still choose lychee.

I'm hoping to get some fruit soon, but I know that some of the best things in life take time... Until then I'll take progress pics

I want to see your garden gains! Sometimes I feel like they are the only gains that matter. Which plants or projects are you most proud of?

Have you ever had lychee before?

Lychee by Alanaana posted Feb 25, 2023 at 12:35

P.S. I should have kept that outfit, but I also go a little crazy with minimalism at times.

 

Phew! I thought I lost this post for a minute. I hit preview then the back button and it looked like I lost it for a minute. Thank goodness it was still in there. I was dangerously close to venting about it on the Redneck Twitter

 

Here is the B4 of 2023 star-date 2023-02-25-16:40 FC







If i remember I'll update it when the bees are back.
Picked up two more green houses and lots of plastic for hoop houses
Sloth

 

Good luck on fruit. Lychee is a favorite of ours. We hope to plant one too.

 

Good pics.

 

Mahalo!

 

@Hanzo Mahalo! I'm really looking forward to it. I learned after the fact that Bosworth is going to get really large. It's what they had at the nursery.
If you plan on growing lychee, I highly recommend Kaimana Lychee. My neighbor across the street has a small orchard and those trees stay smaller and have an abundant yield. The fruit is also a nice combination of sweet and tart.

 

@Cruisin Sloth You have a beautiful garden space to work with! What kinds of trees are those? Yes! Please share updates. Thank you for sharing! I'm hoping to get a hoop greenhouse soon. Everything here loves to nibble on garden plants.

 

Apple for the first pic
second pic is two gardens , tall fence is greens and raspberry
pony garden is squash , strawberry, potato in pots .
Behind those gardens is the white grape posts, concord.
last is pony garden that is the tree nursery , pine,cedar,aspen,fir,hemlock .
my canopy is 150 to 200 feet , so Im pruning them at a foot off the bottom .

This year the girls have me building a few more growing areas ..
I garden with chainsaw and backhoe or excavator.
Sloth

 

@Cruisin Sloth Your garden is a masterpiece and I can't wait to see it once the snow melts! How long did it take for you to get to this point?

I like your style! I did some land clearing last fall with a chainsaw and it felt like a piece of cake compared to the lopping and digging I was doing before.

I'm hoping to get a 1-3 acre lot in the near future and I want to clear and design it from start to finish to be more energy independent. I'll definitely need more heavy machinery for that. At this property I've been mostly hand clearing and adding planters with rocks and materials that are already here. The pigs love to snipe my pineapples so I'll have to make the next property a little less enticing to critter gypsies.

 

Thanks. We plan to keep it smallish.

 

@Hanzo smallish is a very good plan. There is so much value in being able to easily care and maintain your garden. Everything grows exceptionally well here especially the weeds. I think that the people who owned this property before me planted all of the palm trees when they were much smaller and they weren't taking future growth into consideration. I think I counted nearly 100 and still counting. When I got here the landscaping was suffering, the trees were all dying, and there was no meaningful soil.
I'm thankful that I've been able to revive everything. Sad that I lost some trees in the early days. It's a lot of landscaping / groundskeeping for one person to do so I've let it grow a little more wild than I would like, lately. My hands and joints are thanking me.

 

I bought a bunch of these :

VIVOSUN 20x10x6.6 ft. Large Walk in Greenhouse Tunnel Garden Plant Hot House

Its the Woman who run the gardens and ranch.
They have 6H of area to use .
S

 

This looks like a really nice and sturdy greenhouse. Thank you for sharing. I'll have to find out if they ship to the Tropics.

 

Grrrrrrr... My poor wife is also a hopelessly addicted Gardening addict...sigh. Unfortunately, my love for her knows no bounds and each year I allow myself to be enslaved, used as forced labor, in her addiction, while also being drained, not only of my blood, sweat and tears but financially. It's not a pretty sight, certainly not one for a sober man... However, I have great reason for hope as this year she has joined a group of other addicts called the "ABC Gardening Group." I hope with this group effort some progress can be made to combat this horrid addiction while also freeing me from seasonal slavery.
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man - Friedrich Nietzsche

Here's a few from last Spring/Summer 2022 and one (1) taken today, as we just got another 4 inches of snow and it's 33F. Sorry, they are mixed up but I messed up the upload. it's sort of nice looking at these and thinking of Spring...



Current photo:

 

@Bandit99 I think that your labors of love and toiling is worth-it because your garden is beautiful in both the winter and the spring time! Thank you so much for sharing. Gardening really can be addictive, but it is a lot of work and can get a little spendy. At least it is a healthy hobby that gets us outdoors. The flamingos in the flowers are so much fun! Your wife really knows what she's doing!
Happy Gardening!

 

Thank you so much for sharing! It's making my day to see your gardens here! I'll share more too. This is the driveway that leads to the front of the property. A little wild at the moment.

Jungle Vibes by Alanaana posted Feb 26, 2023 at 12:32

 

I am also forced labor and wallet for wife's addiction. We should form a support group where us poor hubbies can gather and shout encouragement from the shade and with cold drinks.

 

Same here men, Wifeys white slave/cabana boy
Haven't planted much but a couple of potatoes
Trying to buy an acre up on Toledo bend.This should satisfy her needs to dominate me and crack the whip across my rear portion that shall remain unmentioned at this point.
Marriage is never completely easy.

 

@Hanzo A support group is a great idea! It could be a luau support group. After year 3 I had to get a little more creative and learn how to make soil via composting and practice propagation. It's another set of fireworks to get whole plants from cuttings and rich soil from weeds.