December overview: Winter roses and regenerative pruning

We returned from a twelve-day vacation to find that Mr. Freeze had made an early visit to our backyard while we were gone, with eggplants, tomatoes, and peppers taking major hits. It wasn't cold enough to damage the produce, but the leaves took sufficient damage to end this fruiting season. I harvested most of the eggplant, but left the green tomatoes on the vine, where I hope they'll continue to ripen. One method I've successfully used to ripen green tomatoes involves pulling up the plants and hanging them upside down in the garage. I don't see why leaving them on the vine should make any difference, unless we get another freeze.

The freeze changed the asparagus fronds from green to golden, indicating it was time to cut it all off. Some people have trouble growing asparagus here, and I think it's because it's easy during our generally mild winters to ignore their need for regenerative pruning. The asparagus cycle begins in late winter or early spring, when the green shoots appear and can be harvested and eaten. After a month or two, you need to exercise restraint and let it go so the fernlike fronds can store up food in the roots for next season's harvest. If they don't die back on their own, as they will in colder climates, you must cut them back in order to force them into dormancy. I think last year's harvest was late because I didn't cut them back until January. I cut them back today, so we'll see what happens next year.

Although most things are dying back, the roses have fully recovered from their summer slump and are blooming profusely once again. They too will need a regenerative pruning, which we usually do in January.

It's hard to get a good overview picture in December as the lengthening shadows put a good bit of the yard in shade, even at midday when I took this picture. In the background you can see another winter success story: broccoli, which is coming along nicely, along with at least some of the spinach I planted a month ago.

More salad fixins

Various lettuces (and other things)

Spinach

Even if the tomatoes take a hit, we should have plenty of salad greens by Christmas. I'm not sure which kinds of lettuces are coming up in the picture to the left, but in addition to the ubiquitous nasturtiums, I see several tomato seedlings and I think a potato growing in their midst. Because spinach doesn't sprout very readily, at least for me, I started seedlings in peat pots a few weeks ago and moved them outside once they sprouted. Now that true leaves are appearing, it looks like I will actually have some spinach this year.

This little mandarin orange tree is loaded with fruit. In the winter months, when we generally don't have tomatoes, I like to use citrus sections in green salads. We should have plenty from this tree!

And the race is on...

As I continue to harvest way more eggplant than I can use or give away, there are dozens of green tomatoes on the surviving tomato plants. These include Roma, Early Girl, one of the heat-adapted varieties, a mystery plant with oddly shaped fruit that came up on its on, and a grape tomato.

The problem is that tomatoes ripen very slowly due to the shorter days of fall. There's been very little change in the color or size of the ones above for weeks, and temperatures are dipping into the forties at night. If we wind up having freezing temperatures in December, that will be the end of them. If mild weather continues for another month, we may have fresh tomatoes on the table for our Christmas dinner.

Only time will tell.

Plumeria- lots of leaves but no flowers.

We lost several of our plumerias last year due to frost damage. This one in particular had grown too tall to be transported into the garage, and the frost warnings weren't that severe. It lost about half its height and came back later than usual in the spring, but has leafed out nicely and really looks better than it did when it was bigger. Unfortunately, it hasn't bloomed yet and I expect it probably won't before it goes dormant for the winter.

So if you want to see our plumeria flowering, you'll have to go here and here.

Time to squeeze the key limes

Key lime tree

I'm not sure how old our Key lime tree is, but it is very prolific. Back when we planted it, I didn't consider that there was a size difference between Key limes and the fruit one usually sees labeled "lime" in grocery stores. The taste is similar, but Key limes are much smaller; they're ping-pong ball size or slightly larger. Also known as Mexican limes they're often served as a garnish for Mexican beers. When fully ripe, they are yellow rather than green.

Average-sized key lime

Yesterday we picked quite a few, and today I decided to juice them for limeade. It's a time consuming process because it takes about 100 of them to equal a pint of juice.

A sink full of limes

First, I threw them all in the sink to wash them. There are a few of the larger Bearrs limes in this batch, too.

Juicing limes

Then I cut them in half and started juicing. I've found that this kind of hand juicer works better on smaller fruits than the electric juicer I use for lemons, Bearrs limes, and oranges.

The juice of about 200 limes

It took about an hour to juice them all, and I got about 4 cups of juice...

Future compost

...and a big bowlful of rinds, which I'll pulverize in our Vitamix and recycle into the garden as compost.

Fresh limeade!

To make limeade, I used about 1 1/2 cups of sugar, 2 cups of juice, and 6 cups of water. It's really a "to taste" kind of thing, but this yielded what to me was a tasty glass of limeade. Cheers!

Taking the narrow road

Snap peas and nasturtiums

The snap peas are about three to four inches high now, and are in some danger of being distracted from their trellis by nasturtiums. Attractive as I know the nasturtiums will be when blooming, I probably need to go and remove them from the pea-growing area. Otherwise the peas will follow the path of least resistance and snake their tendrils around the nasturtiums instead of climbing the trellis as I intended. The result will be a tangled mess, and I'll wind up breaking the delicate pea vines at harvest time.

As sometimes happens when I'm wandering in the garden, my thoughts turn philosophical. Isn't that how life often works? Taking the easy way...the path of least resistance... often seems very attractive, yet it can lead to consequences that are not so attractive.

I think the key is thinking ahead. What is it I want to happen? If I want a harvest of peas, the nasturtiums (not to mention the hollyhocks) that sprouted here are going to have to go.

The peas can't think for themselves, or plan ahead. But I can. And sometimes I need to do things not because they are easy or attractive, but because they are right.

A little fall of rain

 We'll take all the rain we can get here.

Recovering roses

Our climbing roses seem none the worse for the wear after being blown down a few days ago. All our roses are getting a second wind after the heat of the summer. The blooms aren't quite as big or as prolific as they were in the spring, but we should see blooms well into December. In January, we'll prune them back severely to force them into dormancy so they can rest up before the cycle begins again.

"Don Juan" climbing rose

"Iceberg" climbing rose

Bearrs limes by the dozen, key limes by the score

Key limes

There must be hundreds of Key (Mexican) limes ripening on this tree. They are a pain in the neck to juice because they are so small. The best device I found for this purpose looks similar to a garlic press, but it's still time consuming to collect enough juice for any useful purpose. I have yet to make a key lime pie.

Bearrs limes

Our Bearrs lime tree is younger and there are probably a couple dozen limes on it this year. These are the larger, lemon-sized limes that can be juiced in an electric juicer, and they will most likely become limeade.

Confusions

Fruit cocktail tree (peach, plum, nectarine, apricot)

The plum graft on this fruit cocktail tree seems to be a little confused about the season. I saw a few blossoms on the apple tree, too. Both trees are young....we planted the fruit cocktail tree a year ago to replace a mature and prolific apricot that had died for no apparent reason, and the apple tree last spring to replace a dwarf nectarine that probably died from a recent pond renovation.

We have had better luck with citrus trees than stone fruit trees here. The lemon, orange, and grapefruit trees we planted in 2002 have grown quite large and seem healthy, but the lifespan of our stone fruit trees is in the single digits. Sometimes I can come up with a reason from their demise (drip irrigation failure, roots disturbances from nearby renovations) and sometimes not.

My current understanding is that our planting methods may not be ideal. Early in our gardening adventure, we lost several stone fruit trees that we had planted in the lawn. Because we had successfully grown them in grassy areas of our previous two Phoenix-area backyards, we attributed their deaths to especially poorly draining, heavily compacted clay soil here. In an attempt to give them better drainage, we constructed the raised beds and filled them with better-draining soil. The problem with this method is that it's difficult to water the trees to the recommended three-foot depth because the water runs out of the raised beds. As the trees grow, their roots spread out rather shallowly in the raised beds rather than going deep, and that has been a contributing factor in their early deaths. At least that's my current hypothesis, and I'm not sure there's a way around it.

A blustery day

We got a bit of wind yesterday afternoon and it took down the rose arbor (as well as the hollyhock in yesterday's post)

Hollyhock 2.0

Hollyhocks

We don't usually get a second round of hollyhocks, but here is a pink one.

Zinnias and tomatoes, round 2

We usually get two rounds of zinnias each year. The first shows up in late May and peaks in June and July. They're usually looking pretty bad in August, with more brown than green leaves, so I pull them up and scatter the seeds. By September new seedlings start appearing, and they'll usually bloom through November. I haven't bought zinnia seeds for several years because they reseed so readily. This tomato plant was also a volunteer, so I have no idea what kind it is, but it has several nice-sized, oddly shaped tomatoes which will hopefully ripen before freezing temperatures get here and destroy the vines. Fall tomatoes are always chancy. They won't set fruit when the temperatures are too hot, but as the days shorten, they ripen much more slowly, even with moderately warm daytime temperatures. I don't recommend buying plants to try in the fall, but I'm willing to give a volunteer a chance to see what it will do.

Broccoli beginnings

I've been watching for broccoli transplants and picked up the last two pony packs at Lowe's today. I planted them in the newly-cleared sweet potato bed in front of the upper pond, along with the spinach seedlings I sprouted in peat pots. Here they are, and you can see the drip irrigation grid we use to water our raised beds.

A disappointment of sweet potatoes

The rain we've had for the last few days means cooler temperatures and easier-to-dig garden beds, so I decided today would be a good day to dig up the bed in front of the upper pond. I didn't plant sweet potatoes here, but apparently we overlooked enough tubules for them to come up quite prolifically all on their own. The whole bed was full of luxuriant green vines, which spilled out and covered most of the walkway between the bed and the gazebo. I was looking forward to an equally abundant harvest of tasty sweet potatoes, but was surprised and disappointed to find only a few of edible size.

We'll plant spinach in this area in a few days. I don't usually have much success with it germinating when I try sow the seeds directly in the ground, so I started them in peat pots indoors a week ago. About half of them have sprouted, but they aren't big enough to brave the outdoors yet.

In other news, the article about our backyard is in the November issue of Phoenix Home and Garden. The new garden editor did a wonderful job of writing a very nice article on short notice, the photographs are lovely, and those who've seen it have been very complimentary. However it wasn't quite what I expected based on my conversations with the previous garden editor, who came out to our house several times over a period of three years, and planned to do a "garden of Eden" overview theme. The published article was more about our ponds than the system of raised beds and pathways, which we think is the most unique feature of our backyard.The pictures of our pond and streambed were very nice, though....they don't look nearly as good now!

The resurrection of the artichokes and the genesis of the peas

We've gotten some rain the last few days, which is helping new plantings and making weeding a bit easier. Of course, it also brings out ants, which makes attempts at weeding somewhat unpleasant. I cleared out a lot of mint and Mexican primrose from the area lining the streambed, and discovered that our oldest artichoke has already started to come back. There's no sign of the one I planted last year yet; we'll have to wait to see if it shows up.

The sugar snap and snow peas are beginning to break through the soil. I planted heavily because I didn't know how old the seeds were, but they're coming up pretty thickly. Nasturtiums and hollyhocks are popping up everywhere too. Perhaps this year will be the one I manage to keep them under control. The nasturtiums aren't as much of a problem as the hollyhocks as they are low growing (and edible) but the hollyhocks will crowd out everything else if I don't aggressively go after them.

Here's a line of lettuces (along with more nasturtiums) sprouting along the drip line where they were planted. As with the peas, I threw everything I had left over out there- a mixture of romaine, leaf, buttercrunch, and who knows what all else. Because I haven't had much luck with spinach germination, I'm attempting to start that inside in peat pots rather than sowing directly into the ground.

In other gardening news: I spent several hours Sunday afternoon precooking eggplant for parmigiana and freezing it, and now I need to pick eggplant again. I gave up on the tomatillos and honeydew as the vines were dying back, and pulled them out so they'd stop blocking the sun from the pepper plants, which are beginning to produce. And I noticed a young citrus tree growing behind the waterfall that I'm guessing came from a key lime seed, but who knows what it might turn out to be? Most citrus is grafted onto sour orange or lemon rootstock; it doesn't do well when grown from seed.

Eggplant anyone?

Eggplant love the heat, but in my experience they really take off bearing good-sized fruit once the weather cools a little. Here's what I picked this weekend, along with some melons and chile peppers. There are at least as many left on the plants that I'll need to pick in a few days. 

My favorite use for eggplant is in eggplant parmigiana. This year I found a recipe using baked rounds that taste-wise I actually thought was on a par with traditional fried versions. As usual, I didn't follow the recipe exactly. Here's a link to the recipe I used although as usual, I didn't follow the recipe exactly. I only let the salted eggplant sit out for two hours; I probably used closer to two than one tablespoon of oil on the baking sheet, and I used prepackaged shredded cheese and bottled marina sauce rather than making my own.

Obviously there is far more eggplant here than I could use in a reasonable length of time, so I'll need to freeze some of it. I've tried several methods in the past, including blanching the rounds, roasting cubes, and cooking and mashing. Because I've been dissatisfied with the taste and texture of the blanched frozen rounds, this year I'm going to try salting, breading, and baking them as I would for fresh eggplant parmigiana, then freezing the cooked rounds.

Fall Plantings 1

We've been working this week in the southeast corner of our yard, in an area which gets a fair amount of shade from a lemon tree. We cleared out the area of weeds and spent-plant debris, and enlarged the berm around the lemon tree so we can deep water it more efficiently. It has four high-capacity drip lines which run for several hours at a time (weekly in summer, monthly in the cooler seasons) and seems healthy and productive, but the water doesn't soak down three feet as it should with a tree of this size. We also gave it a final application of fertilizer for the year, which we should have done around Labor Day and as a result some of its leaves are looking rather chlorotic. After watering in the fertilizer, I'll sprinkle nasturtium seeds under the tree out to its dripline, and mulch with pine straw.

Because this area doesn't get much sunlight, especially in the winter, we have to be selective about what we plant here. Root and leaf crops work best, although I have successfully grown edible-pod peas. This year, I made two parallel trenches about a foot apart following the curve of the raised bed, and ran 6-inch drip emitter lines down the trenches. In the outermost trench, I planted several varieties of lettuce, and in the inner trench I planted snow and sugar snap peas. Behind the row of peas, we put up some trellis netting. The trellis netting is a new experiment this year; we've tried other methods of corralling pea vines and met with limited success. I haven't seen trellis netting in stores, but ordered this from Amazon.

And now we wait!

Taming the blackberry jungle

Cooler weather means it's more enjoyable to work outside (and less risk of succumbing inadvertently to heat stroke!) Today I worked on pruning, fertilizing, and mulching some sadly sun-stressed blackberries in a narrow raised bed between our lemon and orange trees. Blackberries do rather well here and spread like wildfire, but to produce fruit they need some shade during the summer. Otherwise they scorch and dry up before fully ripening. We didn't shade the ones in this location soon enough last May, so we didn't get any edible fruit.(Here's a link back to a post with a picture of the shade we constructed in another location and another one that discusses how to build shade screens. Next year, we'll put one in this location too)

After a given cane produces fruit, it's done. It won't produce any more from that cane, which will eventually die, and should be removed to give the new canes space to grow. This should be done right after fruiting, when it's relatively easy to differentiate this year's fruit-producing canes from the ones that will produce fruit next season. I didn't do it then, but better late than never.

After removing the floricanes, I attempted to remove as much of the Bermuda grass, nutsedge, and dollarweed invaders as possible, sprinkled the area with a little organic fertilizer, and mulched it with pine straw. I'm very appreciative of friends with a cabin in Flagstaff who regularly bring us bagfuls of the stuff. It's great for keeping weeds down, lowering the soil temperature, and conserving moisture. It doesn't break down as rapidly as bagged mulch, and as it does, it helps acidify our alkaline soil.

Here's a link to an article on blackberry cultivation in the low desert with detailed instructions and drawings explaining how to prune them.

 (Totally unrelated to gardening, but the source of my pine straw supply is a writer with several published mystery and Austen variation novels. If you enjoy reading those genres, you might be interested in the descriptions on her  blog  and website.)

Something new

Last year I decided to try growing tomatillos, and got none because I only planted one plant. I learned later that at least two plants are needed so that they will cross-pollinate, so this year I planted two. For months they've done nothing, but yesterday I noticed several dozen small fruits. They're really interesting in their papery shells. If you're interested in trying to grow them, here's a helpful link:http://bonnieplants.com/growing/growing-tomatillos/

Wheat and tares and melons

Jesus once told a story about a farmer who found his crop heavily infested with weeds. Rather than attempt to dig the offending plants out, possibly causing damage to the roots of his wanted crop in the process, he decided to allow wheat and tares to grow together until harvest time. When that time came, he reasoned, he could pull everything up at once, keep the good stuff, and throw away the bad.

September marks a "pull everything up and start over" season in our gardening year. During the long, hot summer, "weeding", if done at all, mostly meant chop-and-drop...that is, cut the weeds off close to the ground and toss their carcasses on the ground where they provide a cooling and water-conserving mulch for the roots of our fruit and vegetable plants. But as the weather cools and the days shorten, most of our summer crops are at the end of their life span, and it's time to get serious about digging up weeds, roots and all, prior to planting fall crops.

Bermuda grass is a particularly invasive and persistent enemy, one whose roots can go down several feet. We know it's impossible to eliminate entirely without the use of herbicides, which we really prefer not to use in close proximity to things we plan to eat. Mint, Mexican primrose and Mexican petunia, and a large cloverlike creeping plant are also invasive, although not as deep-rooted. Now is the time for these things to go away from places they are not wanted, at least until next spring when we'll repeat the process.

We're leaving some plants that are still producing in place...eggplant mostly, and a few surviving tomato plants that might be coaxed into setting a second crop. We thought about digging up this melon, which has produced nothing but rampant vegetative growth...or so we thought. As we peeked through its leaves this morning, we found two good-sized honeydew melons that were hidden by the leaves on its vines. I think we'll wait on digging up the Bermuda grass that is growing in here for a bit longer.

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Stayin' Alive

This year we're trying something new for us: temporary shade screens. I got the idea from some Facebook gardening groups I'm in, and Mike figured out how to build them. We have a couple of different designs. The simplest ones, shown above over the tomato plants, are just 30% shade cloth from Arizona Bag Company.. Here's a link to a Youtube video on how to construct these. The instructions are for young fruit trees (see picture below) but we just made a bigger one for the tomatoes.

Our new Ein Shemer apple tree (planted this spring) was really suffering from the heat. I'd painted the trunk earlier in the spring, but it just doesn't have enough of a canopy to protect it from the afternoon sun. The leaves were becoming dangerously singed around the edges as our temperatures soared into the teens. We hope that by providing it a little extra shade this summer, it will survive and grow big enough that it won't need the shade screen next summer.

We also expanded the shade screen over the blackberry bush to cover our new Brown Turkey fig tree (planted last fall). It was thriving until the heat set in, and produced several dozen figs which are ripening now. This design is made out of PVC pipe, with the shade screen held in place by grommets. It's a little sturdier, but also more time-consuming to construct. We purchased all the materials at Home Depot, and I'm not sure what percentage the shade screen is but it's more than 30%. I got the idea for this one from pictures people had posted in this Facebook group. and Mike adapted their designs for our needs. Once an engineer, always an engineer...and a very handy one!

This month in the garden

I've been neglecting this blog, but have been fairly diligent about posting a picture a day to my Facebook gardening album, which is easier than thinking of something clever, inspirational, or educational to post here. Plus I think most of those who read this blog are also my Facebook friends.

We've had an unusually mild spring so far, but summer is here, and I tend to let the garden go because it's too hot. As you can see, zinnias are taking over our largest raised bed, which we planted in February with tomatoes, squash, beans, and eggplant. We're working on thinning them by "chop-and-drop" method, which means cutting them off and ground level and cutting into smallish pieces to use as mulch. This time of year plants can use all the mulching they can get.

Mike built a shade structure for one of our blackberry bushes out of PVC pipe and shade screen. Here it is behind the fig tree.. It has been a success...we harvested blackberries for the first time this year. In the past they've dried up before ripening.

Speaking of figs, they are also beginning to ripen. We planted a Brown Turkey fig last fall to replace the Ein Shemer apple that died after we converted the grass lawn to gravel. The small tree is loaded with figs.

We continue to harvest tomatoes and squash, but they're fading fast. The green beans have about had it too, but the eggplant and melons are beginning to produce. I didn't even plant the melon..several vines came up as volunteers, including this one in the gravel pathway! Part of the fun of gardening for me is unplanned surprises like this.