Bye-bye broccoli

February 19, 2016

This week I harvested the last of the broccoli, which was beginning to flower, and removed the plants. Rather than pulling them up, I used the permaculture technique of cutting them off at ground level and leaving the roots to compost in place. That way I didn't uproot the larkspur seedlings that were hiding among the broccoli plants.

Peas, please!

Asparagus

Our days of eating fresh roasted broccoli for dinner are over for this year, but I picked the first of the snap peas and saw the first stalk of asparagus emerge from the ground.

Peach blossoms

Apricot blossoms

Almond blossoms

Almost all the fruit trees are beginning to bud and blossom now, with the exception of the Royal Minnie cherry and an unknown species of pear tree which is always the last to show signs of life. The cherry is probably dead above the graft line, but we're leaving it in the ground for now as there are still green sprouts from the rootstock.

Spring blooms

Things are starting to wake up around here. Each day when I walk through the garden, I see something new. Most of the fruit trees- peach, apricot, pear, apple, plum, lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit- have begun to bud and bloom. The rose bushes have leafed out and are full of buds; the fig tree and grape vines are showing their first leaves, and zinnia, hollyhock, larkspur, nasturtium, coreopsis, and galliardia seedlings are popping up all over the place. I like to let the flowers come up where they will, and fill in the blanks with transplants. 

Lemon blossoms

First rose of the season

Peach blossoms

Pear blossoms

Nasturtiums

Petunias and Swiss chard


The words of an old hymn we used to sing in the sixties kept playing through my head as I wandered through and worked in the garden this week:

What a wondrous time is spring, when all the trees are budding. 
The birds begin to sing; the flowers start their blooming. 
That's how it is with God's love, once you've experienced it. You want to sing; it's fresh like spring; you want to pass it on.

Almond blossom time

There are lots of blossoms on the almond tree now, but I'm not sure if it will produce any almonds. The mild winter that spared the hibiscus and other frost-sensitive plants from frost damage this year probably didn't provide enough chilling hours for it to set fruit.

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!

More weeding and a strawberry update

I weeded the second half of this combined bed today. In addition to Bermuda grass, it contains several other troublesomely invasive weeds including mint and nutsedge. I made the mistake of planting mint last summer (you can read about that here, and also see how the bed looked last fall), but I have no idea how the nutsedge managed to sneak in. All three plants reproduce quite prolifically by stolons and runners, and don't even need to resort to the bother of producing flowers and seeds, although the sedge and mint can do that as well. The underground stolons are designed to break off easily when disturbed, which means that when I try to pull them out, some little piece is inevitably left behind. Each little piece will  then regenerate Hydra-like into many more obnoxious plants.

This bed contains small fig and almond trees and strawberry, artichoke, rosemary, Japanese eggplant, and pepper plants. The hollyhocks just appear as if by magic everywhere in the yard, and I leave them alone if they aren't crowding out something else. I think they may have actually helped the strawberry plants by shading them a little. It will be interesting to see if the strawberry plants survive the summer as most gardeners treat them as annuals here and replant each fall. We're still getting a few strawberries each day, most of which do not make it into the house. I ate the three I picked today while I was doing battle with the Bermuda grass.

Almond tree

It looks like we will get a few almonds this year for the first time!

What a difference a week makes!

I've been gone for a week visiting my family in Alabama, and there have been quite a few changes in just a week. Things are finally waking up! There are blossoms on the apricot, apple, nectarine, almond, pear, and plum trees, and leaves on the crape myrtle. The roses have leafed out and should begin blooming in a couple of weeks. The three tomato plants I thought were dead have put out new growth, nasturtiums are blooming and some of the other annuals won't be far behind. Hollyhock plants are about two feet high. Even the grass is beginning to green up somewhat.

No beans or squash yet; I think that last cold snap hit at the wrong time for successful germination so I'll need to replant. The potato bush has come back nicely from the frost and the plumbago and snail vine are showing growth at the roots. The thevetia hedge hasn't really come back yet, although it's beginning to show signs of life. We pruned back the hibiscus and bougainvillea even further and never did find green wood, so it will be a long time before they come back.

We had Paul from The Pond Gnome over yesterday for a consultation and got some good ideas for projects to improve our ponds and streambed. We used flagstones to line the pond banks and streambed, and a lot of them have deteriorated. He suggested replacing them with rip rap, which will give us the same red rocks look and be more stable, and also replacing some of our pond plants with less invasive species.

Strawberry fields aren't forever (but mint patches are)

I took a break today from putting up Christmas decorations to mulch the strawberries Mike planted a few weeks ago. We've not had good luck with strawberries in the past, but so far they seem to like the new drip irrigation layout. It's also possible they prefer cooler weather. This is the first time we've attempted to plant them in the fall rather than early spring, and we hope these two changes make a difference. Past plantings have resulted in only a couple dozen strawberries before the plants burned up in the summer heat. By the way, strawberries are delicious in salads. In the cooler months, when we have no home-grown tomatoes, we often enjoy strawberries and/or oranges in their place. I dislike the store-bought tomatoes available in the winter; they taste like cardboard.

This bed also contains broccoli which is beginning to head, and some petunias and nasturtiums for color. What you don't see is the back of the bed, where I planted one small mint plant last spring. It has completely taken over the rear part of the bed, and we had to pull quite a bit out of the front to plant the strawberries. We whacked it off to the ground about a month ago, and it's back stronger than ever; I am quite sure it will be an ongoing battle to restrain it from spreading indefinitely. In case you are thinking of planting mint, take a suggestion I learned too late in a Master Gardener class: plant it in a pot rather than directly in the ground. That way you will have some hope of keeping it at contained. Another idea that I think I may try this year with mint and other invasive but tasty herbs: put it in a hanging basket.

The tree in the foreground is a fig tree, and the one in the rear is a self-fruiting almond. We've gotten a few figs and no almonds so far. Some gardeners make take issue with our trees-in-the-middle-of-the-garden design. Assuming they survive, the trees will eventually produce so much shade that we won't be able to grow the things we're growing now. We know that, but why not use the space now to grow something beautiful and delicious?

Gardens evolve not only with the seasons, but with the years....just like humans, they change and age, and it's good to appreciate what one has in the present moment. Activities I enjoyed in my twenties (skiing and rock climbing come to mind) do not hold the same fascination in my sixties. So I think I'll enjoy the strawberries while I can, and the figs later...but I'll probably be fighting the mint for the rest of my life!

Of springtime and ashes

"What a wondrous time in spring, when all the trees are budding. The birds begin to sing; the flowers start their blooming. That's how it is with God's love, once you've experienced it. You want to sing; it's fresh like spring; you want to pass it on."

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, which I never have fully understood, perhaps because of my non-liturgical upbringing. Our pastor says Lent is her favorite season...I can't say that I feel the same way. Lent is sackcloth and ashes and repenting our sinful nature, which may be necessary, but is not enjoyable, and (I hope I don't get struck by lightning) seems somewhat masochistic to me. Maybe it works better in more temperate climates, where February is still winter, rather than in Phoenix, where it marks the beginning of spring.

Our earliest-bearing peach tree is setting fruit; a later bearing variety is covered in blossoms; and the apricot and almond trees are also beginning to blossom. I've already picked a nice batch of sugar snap peas and a few asparagus shoots (only because I only planted two plants....must remedy that!) and our second planting of lettuce is reaching harvest-size leaves. Pear, plum, fig, and apple have not yet blossomed, but have full buds I expect to see open any day now. Some of the nasturtiums are blooming (maybe I should pick a few and add to the lettuce for a salad tonight); lilac vines are blooming, and the air is becoming heady with the fragrance of citrus. Calla lilies, which I'd wondered if had survived, are emerging from the ground...larkspur and hollyhock are coming up everywhere, in unexpected locations. Even in the gravel part of the yard I'm seeing marigolds, hollyhocks, nasturtiums...to quote my favorite Jurassic Park quote, "life will find a way."

And, there are a few weeds that need to be pulled. There are always a few weeds to be pulled, and it's generally best to pull them early before they have a chance to grow to giant size and set seed. I can see that part of Lent. There are weeds to be pulled in our lives, and with weeds, it's generally best to pull them when they are small and manageable. But in my garden, and I think also in our lives, it's an ongoing process. And I don't want to concentrate so much on the weeds that I can't enjoy the flowers.