February overview

 It's still pretty barren-looking, but our garden is beginning to show signs of life. The bed on the right contains broccoli, lettuces, and Swiss chard. I've harvested the main stalks of most of the broccoli, but we should be able to enjoy another meal or two from the secondary stalks that are forming. Some of the lettuce that we planted last fall is bolting, so I put out more transplants a few weeks ago. I also took a chance and put out tomato transplants a week early. Since our last frost date is around Valentine's Day, I usually wait until then, but temperatures have been in the high 70s and even into the 80s over the last week, with overnight lows in the upper 40s and 50s. This year we planted Yellow Pear, Sweet 100, Early Girl, Roma, Phoenix, and Heatmaster varieties.

I've been working on cleaning out the Mexican primrose invasion in the bed on the left. Currently it contains  a few hollyhocks, an artichoke, a couple of pepper plants and a Japanese eggplant that I think are still alive, and hopefully green beans. I planted those last week in the mulched area to the right of the pear tree, but they have yet to show themselves. Yesterday I sprinkled sweet allyssum seeds around the border of this bed.

This is the view from our side patio. You can see more of the broccoli/lettuces bed on the left. I put petunia transplants around it last fall, but none of them are blooming yet. In the bed on the right, the roses we pruned back in January are beginning to leaf out, and there are hundreds of larkspur seedlings that are about an inch high. No sign of asparagus yet, though, which concerns me a little. Last year we picked our first spears at the end of January. It's possible that I cut them back later this year than last, and that might be a factor.

We planted red seed potatoes in the bed in the middle of the picture, in front of the upper pond. A few of the potato plants have emerged. This bed should eventually have a nasturtium border, but I don't see any of those coming up yet.

This view is taken from the pool deck area. You can see the roses better from this angle, as well as the larkspur seedling carpet. The climbing rose on the right side of this picture already has several buds on it.

This photo is of the pool area. We have several rosebushes behind the waterfall, in a raised bed along the block wall. They usually bloom around Easter. In addition to the Key Lime tree in the back corner, we have a couple of young peach trees and a blackberry bush in this area. One of the peach trees began to bloom yesterday.

Cherries, take two

The cherry trees we planted last year got scalded and died in the summer heat. We're trying them again in a new location, an area between the gazebo and the upper pond which gets some afternoon shade. The peach tree that was in this area finally died, and we took it out to make room for the cherry trees. These came from the Urban Farm and are on a rootstock that is hopefully more tolerant of desert soil and heat. We dug a trench around the trees and mulched it heavily, per Greg's instructions. We planted an apricot tree, also from the Urban Farm tree sale, on the other side of the pond where we tried the cherry trees last year. When Mike dug up that area for the tree, he found about a dozen more sweet potatoes I'd missed when I harvested them in November. I expect to see sweet potato vines return again in the hot weather as there are probably still more of them we didn't find.

We're continuing with general cleanup and soil preparation for spring planting. I jumped the gun a little this year and planted Blue Lake bush beans and nasturtiums a couple of weeks earlier than usual, because rain was predicted and I wanted to take advantage of that. This year's winter was rather mild; temperatures dropped into the 30s for a few days in December, but we never got a hard freeze. Hopefully we won't get a late freeze in February, which has happened before.


We're continuing to harvest citrus, lettuce, and Swiss chard, and enjoyed the first of the broccoli for dinner last night. The artichoke has returned, but no sign of any asparagus yet.

Broccoli is almost ready to pick!

When life gives you lemons...

Our lemon tree, planted in the summer of 2002, is very prolific. We give some away and usually freeze enough lemon juice to enjoy fresh lemonade year round. In the past I've used ziplock bags to freeze the juice, but this year I'm using pint Mason jars, which fit nicely on the door shelves of our freezer.

I've tried several recipes for making lemonade, most of which involve the extra step of making a simple syrup with boiling water and sugar. My favorite, a Chick Fil a copycat recipe, is probably the easiest and involves no boiling water. Here's a link to instructions for it:

January overview

I've been rather neglectful in terms of posting for a while, as it's not a particularly photogenic time in our garden. So much for my intent to publish the bad as well as the good!

Most of what we've  been doing involves getting ready for spring planting, which we usually do around Valentine's Day. We had a December frost which killed off the zinnias, so I've been pulling those up and scattering their seeds in several new locations. About the only color in the garden now is from the still-blooming 99-cent Home Depot Black Friday poinsettias, which I moved here from the front yard.

We are harvesting and enjoying salads made from Swiss chard and Romaine, Bibb, and leaf lettuces, and will be harvesting broccoli soon. We're also harvesting lots of citrus. I like to put orange or tangerine sections in winter salads instead of tomatoes.  It's especially good with poppyseed dressing, and tastes much better than store-bought cardboard-tasting tomatoes. I'll wait for my own, thank you.I'm also freezing lemon juice from our very prolific lemon tree so we can enjoy homemade lemonade all year long.

Today I planted red potatoes in the bed in front of the upper pond. Last year I tried them for the first time in another area, and I think this one will be better. While planting them, I found several large sweet potatoes I'd missed when we dug up the bed in November, so I expect sweet potatoe vines will show up here eventually too.  I'm also going to take a chance and plant nasturtium seeds around its border, although if we get another frost they won't make it.

November gardening

I've been enjoying watching butterflies enjoying the zinnias...

...digging up sweet potatoes...

...and planting broccoli and several different lettuces in the bed formerly occupied by melons and butternut squash.

A harvest of fallen corn

 

Today I decided to pick corn. I wasn't expecting much, because the germination rate of the seeds I planted was so poor. For a few days, I attempted to compensate by hand-pollinating, but then we got hit by a windstorm that flattened most of the stalks. I unsuccessfully tried propping them back up with upside down tomato cages before giving up and leaving them to fend for themselves.

I have not had much success with corn in the past; I'm lucky to see a dozen kernels on one ear.  They usually look more like the ear on the far right than the one on the left. That's because corn is wind-pollinated and each silk must meet up with a pollen grain to grow into a kernel.  That's hard to do with only a few plants; you really need a larger block of plants than is practical in a backyard garden. Although I wasn't anticipating any more in the way of edible results this year, I thought I'd try using the stalks as supports for the snap peas I planned to plant later. The windstorm put an end to that idea. I resigned myself to using the cornstalks for outdoor fall decorating purposes.

When I pulled up the cornstalks today so that they'd have time to dry out before Halloween, I was surprised to find the most filled-out ears of corn my garden has ever produced, and it seemed that some of the fullest ears were the ones lying on the ground! How did that happen? I can only guess that when the pollen fell from the tassels, it wound up in a higher-than-normal concentration near the ground where the embryonic ears now lay.

Then, as I sometimes do, I started thinking about what life lesson I could learn from these plants. Sometimes the ill winds that beat us down actually serve to make us better human beings. Sometimes people who have suffered the most are the kindest, and sometimes the people who have the least are the most giving.

It's an upside-down world sometimes, and not just for corn plants after a windstorm. And sometimes being upside-down is a good thing.