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.