Mary Appleseed

I am notorious for having a black thumb, heck, even a black hand.  I've killed hundreds of dollars worth of plants in my lifetime.  I made a promise to myself and to Doug to honestly try harder at the new house, since the previous owners had already planted so many beautiful flowers.  I've killed some, maimed a few, but overall, I think I'm doing fairly well.   

OK, enough about me.  Let me get on with the main theme of this post...Mary's apple tree.  Back in December, we ate some delicious Honey Crisp Apples.  I'm not exactly sure what started the idea, but all of a sudden, Doug and Mary were doing research on how to grow trees from apple seeds.  Apparently, you wrap the seeds in a damp paper towel.  Put in it a Ziploc and place in the refrigerator until you forget about it...just kidding it's like 27 days or something.  They then planted them and surprise to all of us, we had 11 seedlings!  

Yes, some died.  Some did not like being transferred to other pots to have more room.  Some did not like 2 yr olds playing with them (who would have figured that?).  Some were just runts and they had to go.  By the time June rolled around, we had 6 strong little trees.  Um, what do we do with so many?  We really don't have the space for them and the black thumb part of me hates throwing out a perfectly good, healthy plant.  So, for the end of the school year, we bought cheap Terracotta pots and painted them and gave one to Mary's teacher, one to her teacher's aide, and one to her principle.  Perfect!  I just had to keep the Jayhawk for us.  It's now Adam's tree.

 So now it's the end of July and the largest of the trees is outgrowing it's pot, so we bought a bigger one and ended up transferring all 3 into the next size up, so there's room to grow.  I thought Adam's was a goner a few weeks ago, but it seems to be hanging in there.  My fingers are crossed.

This is the largest one pre-transfer.  Mary is currently 3'8.5", so that gives you an idea of how tall it is.  It's so cool!

Helping me water all the newly potted trees.  Hopefully, they'll continue to flourish.

And I can't leave out little man.  He was a big helper pulling and sweeping weeds.  He's terrible at putting away the broom though.  Oh well, maybe when he's 3...