Sage in bloom

This sage is in our front yard, where we have more low-maintenance and desert-adapted plants. The Texas sage is a common landscaping plant here which produces lovely purple flowers when the humidity rises. Unfortunately, in most landscapes it is kept pruned into geometric shapes, so you don't see a display of flowers like this.

This location doesn't follow the "right plant in the right place" rule as it is really too large for for this spot, but I wanted to post a picture of it blooming as it will do when allowed to assume its natural shape and size. 

Not the melon!

I've been waiting for what I thought was a honeydew melon vine to set fruit. Surprise, surprise! It wasn't a melon, but an Armenian cucumber vine. No sign of melons anywhere...now I'm wondering if the vines growing on the trellis are melons instead of cucumbers!

And of course, the never-ending battle with Bermuda grass continues....

Almond harvest

When doing my daily walkabout in the backyard today, I noticed that the almonds are ready to be harvested. This is the first time any have appeared on our tree, which is a self-fertile semi-dwarf All in One cultivar. They look like shriveled dried up peaches, which isn't particularly surprising since they are in the same Prunus family. The outer hulls start splitting when they are ripe, as you can see in this picture. Peel off the splitting hull and you will find something that looks like a peach pit; the almond kernel is inside that. The tree was planted in 2010, so it's still young. It looks like we should get two or three dozen almonds from it.

The label description reads, "Hot summers required to ripen; 500 chilling hours". It must surely have been in its happy place this year as we had an exceptionally cold spell this winter, followed by an inferno of a summer that broke temperature records on several days.I literally fried an egg on a table on the patio the day the official high was 120 and my backyard thermometer read 125.

 Don't believe me? Here's a picture of the egg after about 20 minutes in the midafternoon sun. Gardening is a definite challenge in the summer here!

Winter squash vines

A couple of winter squash vines have escaped their raised bed and are snaking about eight feet across the grass under the apple tree. This is the first time I've tried winter squash, and I planted them in late February when I planted everything else. They've bloomed, but not set any fruit so far.

We finally got some rain from the monsoon activity yesterday. Rain is particularly welcome here because the high mineral content of the water coming through the drip lines can cause salt buildup in the soil, and burn the plants. A good monsoon storm helps wash all that stuff down away from the root zone.

Yesterday was the first day of the fall Master Gardener training class. I completed the class in 2010, so I'm volunteering as a mentor to interns taking the class, and Mike is taking the class as an intern. It's an intensive training, much like a college class in scope, and runs for three hours once a week for seventeen weeks. Each week we have a lecturer on a different topic, chosen from experts in that particular area. It's a very worthwhile experience and I'd recommend it for anyone seriously interested in gardening.

Gardens do not thrive on neglect

We just returned from a week in California leading a group of young people to work on repairs to a couple of aging city church buildings and some houses of low income and/or elderly members of the community. It was nice to sleep in a bed instead of a church floor surrounded by giggly teenagers, but it was not nice to take a stroll around our backyard garden! If a giant asteroid hit the earth and wiped out most life, I don't think the last thing alive would be cockroaches...it would be Bermuda grass. Yikes! I am not looking forward to the task of getting it out of the raised beds.

We have everything on drip irrigation, but this time of year I usually do a daily walkabout and provide supplemental water on an as-needed basis. Other than the Bermuda grass invasion, most things are still alive. I haven't seen any major casualties, other than the tomatoes, but I don't think I can blame their demise on lack of water. Because we took our portable pop-up canopies on the trip to shade people,  the poor tomatoes had none, and they really need it this time of year. There are some yellow squash and Japanese eggplant which grew to a harvestable size while we were gone, and the sweet potato vines are thriving. There are nice long vines on the winter squash, yardlong beans, zipper cream peas, and Armenian cucumbers, but no fruit yet.

One of the churches where our team works has a number of pocket gardens on the property, worked by people who live in a nearby subsidized apartment building populated by refugees from Eastern Europe and Asia. Many of these refugees suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, and gardening is therapeutic as well as a source of economical and nutritious food. Some plots are maintained by homeless people. The church has a "Co-Op Cafe" serving the homeless which utilizes some of the produce. Here's a picture of some of these pocket gardens at the edge of the church parking lot. Anywhere there is a patch of dirt, someone will use it to grow food! I'd love to see this idea spread to other communities.

A quail family sets up housekeeping in our garden

One of the unexpected benefits of backyard gardening is that it provides an attractive habitat for wildlife. Once, a hummingbird built its nest about five feet from the ground in an orange tree, and we watched the eggs hatch and two tiny babies grow up and fly away. Many times when I go outside in the evening, a particular one will fly right up to me as if to say hello, and I imagine it is one of those babies I watched grow up.

 Today when I walked outside to pick peppers and tomatoes, I heard high-pitched baby bird sounds followed by an urgent, lower-pitched parental warning. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a mama quail leading her babies, which appeared to be quite young, to safety beneath some asparagus ferns in one of our raised beds. You can see Papa Quail keeping watch in the picture above on some tree stakes that used to hold an orchid tree in place. (The orchid tree was killed to the ground in last winter's frost, but that's another story)

The picture below shows both parents in another part of the yard. They've been diligent in their efforts to distract me from where their babies are hidden, and they're hidden well enough that I haven't been able to get a picture yet. When I walked out to the gazebo to prune back the snail vine which was daring to creep over the block wall into HOA territory, I ran into the entire quail family. I think maybe the parents had taken their babies to the streambed for a drink. Mama Quail quickly hustled her brood into the dense growth at the bottom of the honeysuckle vines, and then both parents started loudly vocalizing in attempts to lead me away from where the babies were hiding. The babies were very quiet, and the parents very determined.

Sometimes I think human beings could take lessons in family living from creatures like these. I like the way Mama and Papa Quail work together to nurture and protect their brood, and the parents seem to put their parenting duties ahead of other priorities, even their own safety. Not to mention the fact that the babies apparently do what their parents tell them to do, or not do....

Crockpot apple butter

At this time of year, I really hate living in Phoenix. It's much too hot for me to enjoy working in the yard. I ventured outdoors long enough this morning to pick enough Ein Shemer apples to try out this apple butter recipe: http://frugalliving.about.com/od/fruitbutters/r/Apple-Butter-Recipe.htm

I was a bit concerned about how it would turn out, because I think the apples were precooked to some extent. I had to cut out a lot of sunburned spots as I was peeling, coring, and chopping, and some were rather mealy in texture. I wound up making a few changes to this recipe, too. After the chopped apples had cooked for a few hours, I pureed them with an immersion blender. I also added some apple cider to the mixture because I thought they were drying out too quickly in the uncovered crockpot. It turned out somewhat chunky, but still quite tasty, and the house smells wonderful!