Poolside in the garden

I haven't posted a picture of this corner of our yard in a while, so here is one. There are rosebushes along the block wall, and this year we added two new bare-root peach trees that we got from a Valley Permaculture Guild plant sale. We also added trellises for vines on the wall, made from recycled metal pieces of an old gazebo that had begun to deteriorate.

We planted two banana trees in the planter areas behind the pool last year. One died, but the other has come back nicely and appears to be multiplying...there's a baby banana tree next to this one which isn't visible in this photo.

I don't think we will get any key limes this year because of the freeze. The same thing happened a few years ago when we had another hard freeze. Limes are more susceptible to frost damage than other citrus fruits, but surprisingly enough we have a few limes on the Bears lime tree, which is a lot younger than the key lime. Luckily for my grapefruit-loving mother, grapefruit is the least susceptible and our Ruby Red tree wasn't affected at all.

The rosebushes are still blooming, but the nasturtiums and larkspur are gone, to be replaced with marigolds and zinnias. The large marigold directly behind the waterfall is a holdover from last fall which survived the frost. I've collected seeds from it and scattered them along the perimeter of this raised bed, the planters behind the pool, and other places in the yard.

The bushes in the center left edge of the picture are yellow and orange Tecomas ("Yellow bells") Like the banana, they were taken to the ground in last winter's frost, but have rebounded vigorously. The plants in the center right edge of the photo, and in the planter in the foreground, are Little John bottlebrushes, which seem to be quite frost-tolerant.

Flower mulch

Sadly, most of the hollyhocks, larkspur, nasturtiums, and bachelor's button are well past their prime, so I've been removing them from the garden. Since we had good success this year with an "accidental garden" created by composting spent flower stalks in place, I decided to create a few more piles elsewhere in the yard. We bought this small chopper several years ago at Harbor Freight, intending to use it on yard waste so that we could recycle more of it as compost. It's rather finicky...it can't handle wood materials any thicker than finger-width sticks, and green material causes it to jam. It did an admirable job of grinding up hollyhock stalks which, by the way, should not be used in a vegetable garden in a semi-composted state.

My piles of deceased flowers were looking rather messy, so Mike suggested we use the chopper on them. One of the places I think I'd like to see hollyhocks and larkspur next year is in the space between our gazebo and the block wall. We took the chopper directly to an area where I had one of my piles, and fed flower stalks into it, letting it spit out the chopped material directly on the ground. It handled dried larkspur spikes almost as well as the hollyhocks, but had a little trouble with the bushier bachelor's button plants. Now we have a lovely mulch full of seeds that I hope will become flowers that I will write about next spring!

Pond remodel progress

Here is the original (but remodeled) spillway into the streambed. The plants Paul gave us have really taken off, particularly the watercress. We're still working on the second (new) spillway which comes off the gazebo side of the pond.

The tree on the left side is a dwarf nectarine and the one on the right is an Asian pear. At the base of the pear is a plumbago and some invincible Mexican petunias that return like zombies no matter what I do to them. The dead branches in the upper center right belong to a thevetia which was frost damaged this winter. We haven't cut them off yet because (a) it would be a hassle, requiring the use of a ladder on an uneven surface and (b) Mike keeps hoping it will continue to green up.  The marigold in the foreground came from seeds I snagged while deadheading elsewhere and then played Johnny Appleseed in various locations in the yard.

More weeding and a strawberry update

I weeded the second half of this combined bed today. In addition to Bermuda grass, it contains several other troublesomely invasive weeds including mint and nutsedge. I made the mistake of planting mint last summer (you can read about that here, and also see how the bed looked last fall), but I have no idea how the nutsedge managed to sneak in. All three plants reproduce quite prolifically by stolons and runners, and don't even need to resort to the bother of producing flowers and seeds, although the sedge and mint can do that as well. The underground stolons are designed to break off easily when disturbed, which means that when I try to pull them out, some little piece is inevitably left behind. Each little piece will  then regenerate Hydra-like into many more obnoxious plants.

This bed contains small fig and almond trees and strawberry, artichoke, rosemary, Japanese eggplant, and pepper plants. The hollyhocks just appear as if by magic everywhere in the yard, and I leave them alone if they aren't crowding out something else. I think they may have actually helped the strawberry plants by shading them a little. It will be interesting to see if the strawberry plants survive the summer as most gardeners treat them as annuals here and replant each fall. We're still getting a few strawberries each day, most of which do not make it into the house. I ate the three I picked today while I was doing battle with the Bermuda grass.

The horror of Bermuda grass

"The horror of Bermuda grass" was the title of a PowerPoint slide shown in a Phoenix Permaculture Guild class we took a few years ago. I'm not as anti-grass as some people I know. I think it can have a place in an environmentally conscientious landscape; for example, in children's and pet's play areas, which is what this part of our yard was when we first moved here. But it does not have a place in the raised beds in which we are attempting to grow fruits, vegetables, and flowers, and keeping it at bay is horrible- a never-ending, sweaty, itchy, and time-consuming battle.

In an attempt to control its incursion into areas it is not wanted, I do a lot of hand-pulling, usually the day after the beds have been watered. In the summer  we run the drip irrigation tubing for an hour every three days. That's sufficient to moisten the soil to the one-foot level needed for most annuals, including vegetable plants, and unfortunately is also the ideal schedule to promote healthy deep-root growth in lawns. Weeding right after watering makes it easier to pull, and gets up more of the roots, although it's never possible to get it all out. I also plant things fairly thickly, especially around the perimeter where depending on the season, I plant nasturtiums, petunias, sweet alyssum, and/or marigolds. Some gardening sites recommend the use of glyphosphate as the only way to kill it roots and all, but I haven't found that method particularly useful. In general, I prefer to avoid the use of chemicals in places where I am growing things I plan to eat, and besides that, it doesn't work all that well! The few times I tried it, despite my careful attempts to spray only the Bermuda grass, desirable plants died while the grass responded as if it were fertilizer!

This bed is now our largest, created by joining two raised beds together. You can see where the old raised bed ended- the marigolds in the center of the photo formed the border of the old bed. In the back, next to the fence, is an asparagus bed, a small orange tree, and an apricot tree that produced about 20 pounds of fruit this year. We are currently growing tomatoes and green beans in this bed, along with zinnias, marigolds, and some petunias that have so far refused to die. The bare area is the newest part of the bed, but there are dozens of zinnia seedlings coming up, so it won't stay bare for long. The flagstones are for access for harvesting...and for weeding.

The last of the apricots and the first of the tomatoes

I canned about 10 pints of apricot preserves before taking the weekend off from gardening tasks. The birds enjoyed themselves, but I managed to salvage the few remaining today. And now the tomatoes are beginning to ripen! We tried a new varieties this year, with names like "Phoenix", "Solar Fire", and "Summer Set" that sounded like they would tolerate hot weather. I haven't done any taste comparisons yet, but the fruits are larger than we've gotten before, and they seem less susceptible to the blossom-end-rot issues that seem to plague our Early Girl fruits.

Putting up tomatoes is much less labor intensive than making preserves. Because we wind up using all of them within a few months, I just wash them and put them in ziplock bags, and into the freezer they go. When I'm ready to use them in soups, sauces, or salsa, I just thaw them out. The skins will slip right off...much easier than dealing with pots of boiling water!

My new favorite thing to do with the little red and orange cherry tomatoes is to halve them, toss with olive oil and basalmic vinegar, along with chopped basil and any other fresh herbs I'm in the mood to throw in, and refrigerate a few hours before serving.

Plumeria

This is the first time this plumeria has bloomed, and I was delighted to see that it was yellow as we also have the white and pink varieties. We bought them at Lowe's several years ago, and the colors weren't labeled. I love their fragrance...they smell like Hawaii!

Plumeria do surprisingly well here, but we can't grow them in the ground. We keep them in big pots that can be wheeled into the garage whenever there's a frost warning.

Apricot bounty

So far, we've picked about 11 pounds of apricots from our tree, and I estimate there are at least that many more remaining. I made a small batch of apricot preserves following the instructions here, and they turned out pretty good. The only ingredients are apricots, sugar, lemon juice, and water, and the preserves taste like fresh apricots. The preserves have a good spreading consistency even without added pectin, and they aren't too sweet. The recipe filled two pint jars, one which we are enjoying now, and one in the freezer for later. Now I just need to repeat the process about four more times for the remaining apricots....and go pick more of them before the birds get to them!

More listening to flowers

There is a time for everything,

    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

     a time to be born and a time to die,

    a time to plant and a time to uproot,

     a time to kill and a time to heal,

    a time to tear down and a time to build,

    a time to weep and a time to laugh,

    a time to mourn and a time to dance,

     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

     a time to search and a time to give up,

    a time to keep and a time to throw away,

    a time to tear and a time to mend,

    a time to be silent and a time to speak,

     a time to love and a time to hate,

    a time for war and a time for peace.

I have a love/hate relationship with social media. Most of the time I really enjoy Facebook; it allows me to keep up with friends old and new in ways that were never possible in the past. Among my Facebook friends, I have classmates I haven't seen since elementary school, friends (and a few former enemies) from high school, people I knew in college and seminary, former coworkers and church members, long-lost relatives, and many of my former students. It's usually fun to celebrate joys and sorrows with people I've known over the years; it's fun to see where life has led and is leading them; and it's interesting to be updated on their thoughts and what is important to them.

But some of the time, I'm saddened and bothered by what I read. People change, and grow apart, and sometimes you never really knew someone you thought you knew. I know some things about some of my Facebook friends that I wish I didn't know. (To be fair, some of them probably think the same about me!) When I see posts that are illogical,  intolerant, deliberately inflammatory, and/or designed to invoke fear and loathing of "the other", that's something I wish I didn't know about the person posting it. So, as I often do, I decided to walk away from the computer and work in our garden.

I started out deadheading coreopsis. Coreopsis is a large plant that thrives in our heat, and each plant has dozens of vibrantly yellow flowers on long stalks. Even after the flowers have faded and gone to seed, they're not unattractive, but I cut them off in order to extend the blooming period. I also throw the cutoff blossoms in places where I'd like for new plants to come up next spring. Since I hadn't deadheaded for several days, there was a lot of it to do, and as I cut back the stalks to a leafy part of the stem, I wondered if it would be a good idea to deadhead my Facebook friends list. There are people who I once knew who no longer bring joy to my life, and perhaps it is time to remove them.

Then I was surprised to see this yellow water lily. Possibly because of the aggressive way we went after the cattails that had taken over the pond, we haven't seen nearly as many blooms this year. Part of the reason we tried to remove the cattails was that the water lilies were being crowded out. However, since the cattail roots and the waterlily roots were intertwined, it was impossible to remove the cattails without disturbing the waterlily rhizomes. We've seen a few white blooms, but no pink, magenta, or yellow ones, and I wondered if those varieties were still alive. In the case of the waterlilies, the correct gardening technique as just to "let things lie".

Deadhead or let it be? That's always the question. There is a time for all things.

Grape leaf skeletonizers

Our grapevines are attacked by grapeleaf skeletonizers every year about this time. If you don't address the problem quickly, these caterpillars can defoliate the vines overnight. We generally avoid the use of pesticides in our garden, but this is an exception....handpicking and squashing hundreds of these critters just doesn't work. It's extremely time consuming and we never get them all. As soon as they make their annual appearance, we spray the grapes with Thuricide, which is actually considered organic pest control because it's a bacteria, not a chemical.

Endings and beginnings

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1)

"See, I will create a new heaven and a new earth" (Isaiah 65:10)

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth had passed away" (Revelation 21:1)

"In the year 8510, God's gonna shake his mighty head. He'll either say I'm pleased where man has been, or tear it down and start again" (In the Year 2525, Zager and Evans)

My "lilies of the field" garden (seen earlier this spring here, here and here) has been looking rather sad lately as the nasturtiums, bachelor's buttons, and larkspur have completed their short circle of life. I took advantage of the early morning shade in this area to clear it out, again throwing the spent flower carcasses in a heap to decompose and hopefully reseed. I also cleared out some London rocket, bermuda grasss, and other weeds that had managed to sneak in somehow. Surprisingly, I found some healthy strawberry plants that had been hidden by the showier and taller flowers. 

There's a lot of God-as-gardener imagery in the Bible, and sometimes I think that when God made humans in his own image, he might have been thinking along those lines. At least, that's what I thought of today when I was weeding and pulling up spent flowers! Part of gardening is continually tearing down and redoing, either in an effort to correct mistakes, make improvements, or like I was doing today, just removing what has finished its life cycle in order to make way for new growth.

Now, I need to deadhead some marigolds and zinnias and sprinkle their seeds in the area I cleaned out, so that later this summer I will have a new accidental garden!

Apricots and peaches

Apricots and peaches are ripening this week. I'm pleased with the results of the more-aggressive thinning we did on our Desert Gold peach tree. Although we only got a couple dozen peaches this year, they are larger and of better quality, and the tree seems healthier. Our younger apricot tree produced about a dozen apricots, which the birds enjoyed before they fully ripened, and now the fruit on our older apricot tree is ripening.

In order to circumvent the birds, we're picking peaches (and some of the apricots) before they fully ripen. They soften and sweeten nicely after a few days on the kitchen counter. This method works much better than trying to cover them with netting as we've done in the past, and it's a lot easier.

In this picture you can also see the new planting area created when we joined two raised beds. Because the bed is so large, we used flagstones to create pathways for weeding and harvesting access to the growing areas. We used all 6-inch drip tubing in this area as it seems to provide better coverage than the 12-inch variety. It's too late to plant a lot of the vegetables we like, so I put out some zinnia seeds.