Jujube

Starting in early May we get Jujube fruits. My Chinese and Korean friends love this fruit. It is sweet on the inside , a little more than 1.5cm in diameter. There are two seeds and the fruit has a skin like Mango that needs to be peeled off.
There is another variety of this fruit that is reddish in color.

The fruits are in a group of 8-20 fruits together and the leaves are long and dark green. The tree is full of fruits, more than we can eat. The squirrels are on the tree sometimes, looking for the seeds.



Jujube Fruit
(In the picture below, I have cut a fruit so that the seeds are visible).


Jujube fruits on the tree

Raspberries

We get a handful of fresh and sweet raspberries daily. It is fun picking them up and eating them fresh right off the plants (after rinsing them in water).

A number of birds visit the Raspberry plants too. The flowers attract bees and butterflies.

Raspberries



Raspberry plants have multiplied and are now rampant in one corner of the backyard. I will have to thin them out this fall.

Early Summer Flowers

This year I started the flowers from seed. Here are our first Marigold and Zinnia flowers.



Marigold



Zinnia

The roses are doing well too. They need constant care for fungal diseases at this time of the year.
Marigold is a very forgiving and disease resistant plant. It is relatively easy to transplant as well. Zinnia is more tricky. About 50% of transplants did fine. I use the Scott rooting and
transplanting solution to avoid shock for the transplants.

Nasturtium (June 07)

I found that it was fine to transplant the nasturtium after about 4-5 leaves. They did OK. I have put them in different parts of the yard, some in the pots and some in the ground. They are all doing fine. These are the ones from the pot in the porch growing in partial shade.



The leaves and flowers of nasturtium are edible. The leaves can be mixed in salads and the flowers are a rich source of vitamin C according to many websites.