New Plant Acquisitions and a Rare Visitor

I've been making the rounds at local nurseries and garden centers and made a few acquisitions this week, including 2 very large strawberry plants, an unnamed Plumeira, my first, and finally, a replacement for the nectarine.  After my friend and fellow Mesan made a recommendation that those of us on the Dave's Garden website who reside in the Phoenix area visit the Home Depot on Broadway and Val Vista to check out the wide array of plants not usually found at other HD stores, I just had to go, and I wasn't disappointed.    While the 2 HD's near my home have nothing but citrus in the fruit tree department at this time, this one also had apples, peaches, apricots, gauva, mango, almonds and avocado.  I've been thinking about avocados for some time, but wasn't keen on the thought of a massive 20'-30' tree dominating the front yard, so I was more than pleasantly surprised to find that they had a variety called Reed that only gets 8'-10', so I snapped up the best looking one of the bunch.  Knowing I wasn't planning on planting it for a few months, I decided to set up a temporary drip line for all the new plants.

Unnamed Plumeria

Avocado 'Reed'

Avovado, thornless boysenberries, bay laurel, plumeria and strawberries on temp drip line.

As you can see from the photos, I need to spend some time cleaning up the yard, and with the remodel almost completed on the kid's new place, I should be able to get out there on Sunday and tackle the yard.

This morning I had a rare visitor to the feeders, a melanistic White-Winged Dove, but unfortunately it flew off  out of camera range before I could get a picture.  Melanism is when an animal has excessively dark pigmentation, with the extreme form being totally black, but this one was almost a chocolate brown compared to the usually greyish tan of the normal individual of this species.  And speaking of the feeders, I added a new feeder filled with thistle seed for the song birds in the hopes of attracting additional species to add to my list.  While it hasn't brought any new species yet, it has brought back the house finches and house sparrows that were being bullied out by the doves.