Invaders!

I'm working on a rather long post but I wanted to make a quick note that the city has been overrun this past week with grasshoppers!

They're everywhere and came from nowhere!  All of a sudden, you can't go for a walk without having a small horde of them leading you down the side walk.
I'm sure this is making a lot of gardeners out there very unhappy.

A Garden Again

Following the planting of the trees, we've been excited about growing things again.  Before we add other trees, while we wait for evidence that we can actually grow a tree, there is a whole garden bed begging to be planted with something, anything.  When soft dirt beckons, it's impossible not to pick up a trowel and heed it's loamy call.
And so, of the weekend, plants were planted.  In any of my previous gardens, this many plants would have filled all the available space nicely, even as little baby plants.  In our new giant garden bed, they hardly show up in the photo.

Hopefully, they'll fill in a bit.  Specifics and lots of photos after the break.

Call Me Johnny

Just for the record, my name's not Johnny.  But I feel like it could be today (as in Appleseed, get it?).  Yesterday, 4 days after I ordered them from Fast-Growing-Trees.com, I received a box in the mail with 2 little apple trees.  Really, they're no more than sticks but to my untrained eye they look happy and healthy.  One is a Scarlet Sentinel and the other a North Pole.  My grandparents have columnar trees like this in their yard and, though they look kind of unnatural and odd, they seemed like just the right thing to plant against this wall, under the powerlines.

Following directions I found online I dig holes in my new raised bed, planted my little trees, and watered them.  Hopefully they will take root, grow, and eventually make some nice fruit!  The planting process seemed simple.  Too simple.  I'm always suspicious of things that are too simple because it usually means I'm missing some critical detail.  Hopefully I did it right.

I hopefully they should be joined by friends soonish, one columnar tree in each 4 foot section of the bed.  There are lots of columnar varieties out there, and I'd like to get as many as possible, but I started with just these two because they were the ones offered by this particular nursery.  And this nursery seemed to have the best reviews online, the most responsive customer service, and offered a 1 year warranty.  The warranty was a big point for me because I've never planted a tree before, I live in a harsh desert, and I don't have the greenest thumb around.  If these survive the year and do well, I'll order some more varieties from some other companies.