Raspberries, Cherries, Apricots, and a Raised Bed

These are some riveting pictures, so get ready:

One of my purple raspberries ("Royalty"). It was bare-root, so I dug a hole about 10 inches across and about a foot deep, amended the soil with better soil plus peat moss, and planted the little puppy in there. I found two earthworms while digging. Yay! Earthworms.

Here's Boris with my new raised bed. I bought four corners and two connectors made of high-quality aluminum (really nice stuff), and then bought six boards (2"x4'x10"). I had to use our drill to screw the boards in, which was not a success. But the whole thing came together quite easily, and the metal pieces are re-usable. So when these boards rot out (usually in a couple of years), I'll just replace them with new boards and start again.

Dave brought me a truckload of topsoil, and I'll pop in my blueberries today. The rest of the bed will be tomatoes, beans, peppers, and herbs.

This is my sweet little apricot tree. Last night we enjoyed a scrumptious dinner at Callie's house, where Woody GuthTree warned us that apricots might be hard to grow here. No surprise there, since our soil is poor and it gets freezy quite late here, but it's worth a try.

And here's the cherry tree. It doesn't look like much, but it's a nice size and has already been pruned by the folks at the nursery. So all we do now is sit back and wait for it to decide whether it's willing to grow here.

Juno, tracking prey. She's not what you'd call super-stealthy. Also, note the lovely brown patches that emerged from our hard, long, icy winter. I can't wait to see some new grass popping up.