Apples Varieties were viewable and tasty for learning what varieties are our favorites. Several weeks ago was the Heirloom Expo where one chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers had about a hundred different varieties named and yesterday the Redwood Empire chapter had it’s annual Apple Tasting event at the location of California’s original antique apple nursery in Healdsburg. We were delighted to get a tour of some of the trees that were used to bud and graft hundreds of new trees over several decades.

Here is a link to a YouTube video filmed at this year’s apple tasting. It is very informative!

Fall and Winter are great seasons to add to your food and beauty in your yard, big or small. We are featuring both modern and heirloom fruit tree varieties. Seven of the old apple types we are selling are as follows and the date after the variety name is an estimate of the year it has been enjoyed and protected since.
Arkansas Black 1886
Ashmead’s Kernal 1700
Northern Spy 1800
Bramley’s Seedling 1813
Golden Russet 1845
Belle de Boskoop 1856
Waltana 1910

Hop Vine at Main Street Trees Nursery

Hop vines are a treat in any garden and very easy to grow. This photo shows how big my vines are now—these are already 12 feet tall!  This variety is Nugget Hop. I’m also trying out 8 other varieties.

Multiple uses: Hops are of course an age-old key taste ingredient in beer brewing.  I like to trade some dried hop flowers with my home-beer-brewing friends—in exchange I get a taste of the beer!  The full bunches of greenish flowers are also worth the effort just for themselves. They can be dried for an arrangement or used herbally as a sleep aid, either in a tea or stuffed into a pillow.

Hops will get very tall and harvest can be done after the vines are brought low. Later in the year I’ll post harvest photos of the part that is used—the fragrant, sticky flower.  Over the winter the rhizome is dormant underground and the last year’s dried vines are clipped off.  Then in spring, the new vines quickly shoot up the string or wire used to train them upward.

Black Bamboo culms — Phyllostachys niger

No need to fear bamboo—it isn’t going to “take over.” Now that gardeners are finding out how useful bamboo can be for staking up peas, beans and tomatoes and for making a more private garden yard, they can see that the effort to keep on friendly terms with this big grass is well worth it.

Bamboo can be either “running” or “clumping” and both do fine in a container.  The running style gives the look many of us are trying to achieve and provides plenty of 3-year and older canes for uses such as curtain rods, fishing poles and trellises. Supervising the escape-artist rhizome is worth planning a strategy to contain it.

Bamboo comes in many sizes and colors.  It is also useful as an evergreen hedge and for shading your property.   Bamboo canes (culms) can be used as poles for temporary structures such as yurts, tents and tipis, if one knows how to harvest and dry them.  Pictured is a Black Bamboo which is a running style and very pleasant.  Very young culms are edible!

Click here to go to the Bamboo Section of the Main Street Trees website, for photos and descriptions of more bamboo species.

I learned a lot about growing mushrooms from Paul Stamates classes in WA at Fungi Perfecti and from Ken L at Merrit College in Oakland.  Ken’s mushroom growing classes are a very good low cost way of learning a lot of easy methods for growing and also proper and safe collecting of wild mushrooms.

Here is a picture of the oysters just as I was ready to harvest them.

Growing mushrooms in the yard compliments the vegetables, fruit, chicken eggs, and hive products we produce here in our backyard.   I plan to add mushroom blocks to a food hedge to show how much food can be grown on a small piece of land.  Even a renter or someone who may be moving soon can grow in containers to take ‘em along to the next home.

Momma Maran is doing a fantastic job of guarding the chicks from danger and showing them the ropes with finding weeds, chick feed, scratch and bugs.  At night she keeps them cozy under her belly, wings and tail.  They have their own language for letting each other know about great finds of snacks.  They are starting to roost at night as high up as they can fly.

Mushrooms such as shiitake are fun to grow in the yard. This batch was grown on oak sawdust and chips on a “block” or “cake.”

Below are shiitakes ready to harvest and enjoy.

More will come soon from the damp oak chips.

Mushrooms are great backyard food crops. With some care and time, and a bit of education on the growing culture, they will delight you with healthy food that is considered both gourmet and even medicinal.

Cuckoo Maran Hen (surrogate) and New Chicks

Our farm is surrounded by a residential neighborhood north of downtown Napa, so we don’t have any roosters here.   But we do have some beautiful hens, and now a bunch of cute new baby chicks!

I collected fertile eggs from some fellow chicken folks on the Wine Country Chicken List Forum.   Here are the fertile eggs I bought from Jess the Vet, John the Napaclucker, and Randy in Santa Rosa. I tried for variety: half are purebred and the rest are mutts. My chicken goals are to have enough eggs to eat and share, that the egg colors are of high variety and quality, and that the hens look different from each other so we can easily tell them apart.

The eggs were carefully sat upon and hatched by this beautiful Cuckoo Maran hen who had been broody. She is a fantastic mother—teaching, protecting and keeping them warm. Rob the Bordog helped out with the Mereks vaccinations on day one and the chicks are doing great living inside a coop inside the main coop. When they are three weeks old they will move to a bigger space.

Visitors are enjoying seeing the tiny chicks as they develop. This hatching project has been so much fun!

CITRUS TABLE

Lucky friends and customers visiting or shopping at Main Street Trees landed in front of this table full of a dozen different citrus that were ripe on that day last month. It’s helpful to taste the fruit before buying a tree. Grow what you and your family will most enjoy. Dozens of folks had a hands-on taste test of fruit ripe at that time.

New style gardeners are now growing plants in their yards that provide fruits and vegetables year round. To that, we add our backyard eggs and small-scale natural beekeeping for honey. And so we shop a little less. We know our food’s source and that it’s wholesome and good.

Link to Emma Prusch Park

Link to Fair Oaks Horticultural Park