July overview

This is not my favorite time of the year. because it's hot...hot...hot! It's not much fun to work in the garden, and the garden shows it. But since I made the commitment to myself to post overview photos around the first of each month, here's one from a different direction. I stood on top of the upper pond  to take this picture.

All good things...

Unless you shade them, tomatoes don't last very long in our summers. Pollen becomes inactive and the fruit and leaves become sunburned. These are probably the last slicing-size tomatoes we will get this summer, although the cherry types seem to go on and on.

Today I pulled up three tomato plants that were in significant decline. One was a plant that survived the winter and leafed out again, and the other two had their root systems compromised by the patio addition. I also picked almost a dozen ripe tomatoes from the plant in the picture above. There are a few more green ones remaining, and I'll probably take this plant out too after I pick them.

More on the road less blogged about

Our "backyard" is really fairly small. We do most of our gardening in the "side yard", so that's where most of the pictures on this blog were taken. The trees flanking the pathway are a pink grapefruit and an orange, and together with a lemon tree that isn't shown, are the oldest trees in our yard. They were planted as 15 gallon trees in the summer of 2002. Citrus trees have done much better for us than any kind of deciduous trees. They are on drip irrigation and we fertilize them three times a year. Here's the chart we use to calculate how much to feed them and when. You will note that they look more like bushes than trees because we allowed them to grow into their natural shapes. That's best for the trees, because the shade protects the bark from sunburn. Some say the fruit growing on the lowest branches is the sweetest.

And here's a picture of what the trees looked like when they were first planted! That's my mother in the picture. A breast cancer survivor since 1991, she is convinced that pink grapefruit played a part in her successful treatment. So when we moved here, one of the first things we planted was a pink grapefruit tree.

Armenian cucumber sprawl

My outdoor thermometer sensor says it's 109 in the shade, but the heat doesn't seem to faze this Armenian cucumber. Not only do the vines sprawl everywhere, but they also continue to set fruit. There's a foot-long cucumber hiding in those vines that wasn't there a few days ago.

Armenian cucumbers are actually in the melon family, but they taste like cucumbers and can be used as such in recipes. I like to chop them up and marinate with olive oil, basalmic vinegar, and fresh basil and/or oregano. Sometimes I add onions or tomatoes if I have some on hand. They don't need peeling and don't taste bitter when they get big.

That's my rescued basil plant cozying up to the Chardonnay bottle in the large pot. I have irrigation in the pot which comes on twice a day, but pots dry out quickly in our summer heat and I've found that wine bottles work well in allowing water to seep out slowly. The new foliage is coming in nice and green rather than mottled, so it apparently likes its new home.

Invasion of the sweet potatoes

If you're looking for something that thrives in the summer heat, may I recommend sweet potatoes? I planted two ornamental sweet potato vines in a small area between our lower pond and gazebo three years ago. They die back in cold weather, but come back with a vengeance as soon as it warms up. By midsummer, if left to their own devices, they would cover the floor of the gazebo, the surface of the pond, the streambed, and the raised beds that border it on the other side.

I keep cutting off the vines, sticking the cuttings in hanging baskets and pots, and they keep coming!

The road less blogged about

Since many edible plants are giving up for the summer, I thought I'd post some pictures of other things in our yard. Above is a photo of our second pond, or really the first one Mike built when we realized that the little prefabricated plastic one was too small for our liking. Below is a picture of this area as it appeared in 2003, with only the small prefabricated pond. We built it by removing dirt and plants from the raised bed between the patio and the block wall, and lining the hole with rubber pond liner. If you look closely, you can see  two newly planted one-gallon thevetia plants on either side.

Below is how the area looks today. The thevetia have grown into trees, and we added a prefabricated gazebo. It's much shadier and cooler (and also messier because thevetia are very messy trees!) but a very enjoyable place to sit and listen to the sound of trickling water, watch goldfish swim or birds at play, and smell rose, citrus, or plumeria blossoms.

Intruder alert!

It's too hot to garden in the afternoon, so I've been swimming laps for exercise and to cool off. While doing the backstroke one day, I noticed that a Chinese elm was growing in the bed behind the rock wall on the left. The HOA uses a lot of Chinese elms in landscaping the common areas, so this one must have rooted from a seed dropped over the block fence. It has multiple trunks and is about 6 feet high at this point. I missed seeing it earlier because its foliage at this point is somewhat similar to the cape honeysuckle I planted behind the waterfall. No wonder I wasn't seeing many blossoms from the cape honeysuckle! It has been nearly crowded out by the tree!