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.

The independence of plants

Last year I carefully saved the seeds from a bright red hollyhock that appeared in our yard for the first time. I'm not sure what the genetics of hollyhock color is, but it must be more complex than that of Mendel's pea flowers as i see new color combinations pop up all the time.

None of them came up in the places I scattered seeds. Instead, they came up in the gravel part of the yard where they were lucky not to get sprayed with Roundup in their infancy. Sometimes being a lazy gardener has its advantages.

May 1 Overview

As the peak gardening season begins in other parts of the country, it's winding down here. I removed the last of the broccoli and cilantro yesterday, and planted another melon in their place. I've stopped harvesting asparagus and let the ferns grow to provide food to sustain the plant for next year's crop. Very few lemons remain on the tree, the first flush of rose blooms have come and gone, and nasturtiums and petunias are pretty scraggly looking. In their place, zinnias, marigolds, alyssum, coreopsis, and galliardia are appearing. Hollyhocks are still going strong, and sweet potato vines are spreading into the streambed and the floor of the gazebo,

I harvested the first of the green beans, tomatoes, and eggplant this week, and should be picking yellow squash in another week. I've picked the half-dozen apricots our young tree produced, along with about two dozen smallish peaches. The remaining ones are even smaller, so I think I'll let the birds enjoy them. There are about a half-dozen green plums on our Santa Rosa plum, which is somewhat of an improvement over most years, and dozens of developing Asian pears. The apple tree is, surprisingly, still alive, but unlikely to produce any fruit.

The black metal structure in the upper left is the framework for one of our two portable gazebos that we use to shade the side patio in summer. We have to take down the canopy when the wind kicks up, as it has been doing for the past week. One of our future projects will be to replace these with a permanent pergola, which should be more functional, attractive, and stable.

Nasturtiums in unusual places

One of the things I enjoy the most about or garden is taking a stroll and seeing what's new or surprising. I tend to be somewhat of a guided laissez-faire, serendipitous gardener. I let plants go to seed, wait to see where they come up, remove the ones that aren't where I want them, and fill in the bare spots with things I think will be attractive in those spots. 

Since I've been doing this for several years now, I often find plants growing in areas where I didn't plant them. This morning I spotted nasturtiums growing up a trellis intended for a snail vine, and nasturtiums springing from the rocks surrounding one of our ponds.

Nasturtiums and hollyhocks are the most prolific of my "let it be" plants, but this time of year I also find larkspur and lettuce in various locations. My most unusual discovery was a viola growing in the nonplanted, nonwatered gravel pathways.

Giant hollyhock

We had to get a sturdier stake for this pink hollyhock, which is about 10 feet tall.

First hollyhock blossoms

I don't plant hollyhocks: they mysteriously arise all over the yard. This one is so tall we had to stake it so it wouldn't block the pathway to the gazebo.

Under the lemon tree

We recently revamped this area under the lemon tree, which had originally consisted of two tiers. We combined the two tiers into one, higher tier, and planted onions and potatoes. The nasturtiums and hollyhocks are volunteers. I'd originally planted nasturtiums as tier borders, and they have reseeded and spread. I doubt this area will ever be free of hollyhocks after the mistake I made several years ago of using homemade compost made of ground up hollyhock stalks.

Citrus is starting to bloom and fill the air with fragrance, and the lemon tree is no exception, so here's my earworm for the day: "Lemon tree, very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet. But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat."

Unless, of course, you add sugar and make lemonade, in which case it is very tasty.

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.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Larkspur, snapdragon, hollyhock, petunia, bachelor's button, and coreopsis. There are some nice yellow pear tomatoes setting fruit inside the tomato cage, too.

More roses

We have three tea rosebushes in this raised bed adjoining our patio, along with various herbs, asparagus, tomatoes, hollyhocks, petunias, and marigolds. The tree in the background is a Santa Rosa plum

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.

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.

A long overdue gardening update

I've neglected posting updates here for several months, primarily because I've essentially been working as a long-term sub for most of this school year. Where time constraints force me to choose between writing about my garden, and actually working in my garden, I usually choose to work in my garden. But I'm inspired to start posting again, because I just submitted our garden as a possibility for a future Master Gardener Real Gardens for Real People tour. If our garden is selected for the tour, I think it would be fun to do a kind of "Julie and Julia" blog and try to write something nearly every day for the next year (or two...they plan these things quite a ways in advance!) There is a science and an art to gardening, but there is also a lot of trial and error and experiments that don't work. I think people might be entertained and informed by reading about those- not just seeing the finished product, and thinking "I could never do that!".
So here's the several-months-overdue update: Yellow squash was a smashing success, producing a continuous and abundant crop until this year's December frost, as did our one Japanese eggplant. The six summer-planted tomato plants that I coddled with shade screen until late September were loaded with green tomatoes at the time of the frost, which was earlier than usual this year. We experimented with various suggestions as to how to save the tomatoes. We attempted to protect two of the plants with frost cloth and left them in the ground, we pulled up two of them by the roots and hung them upside down in the garage, and we picked all the green tomatoes off two of them and put them in baskets on the kitchen counter to ripen. The counter and garage tomatoes ripened gradually over a period of weeks; we still have of some of those left. The frost-protected plants were still hit pretty hard, and the tomatoes never ripened. I finally gave up on them so I would have room to plant another crop of lettuce as the first one went to seed in January. (I almost never have to buy grocery-store lettuce, except in the summer.)

We planted broccoli, cauliflower, and bush sugar snap peas in place of the tomatoes, eggplant, and squash. The broccoli did really well....we enjoyed fresh roasted broccoli, broccoli cheese soup, and wound up freezing 23 quarts to enjoy later. (Here's a link to my favorite roasted broccoli recipe. If you haven't tried it that way, it's amazing!) The cauliflower didn't do as well, although we did up with a bit fuller heads than we did last year. Because I was working, I didn't have sufficient time to address the never-ending Mexican primrose invasion into the place we'd planted the sugar snap peas, so the number of surviving plants was limited. However, the half-dozen plants that weren't choked out produced a surprising number of pea pods.

What didn't work? The picture above shows where I planted several varieties of lettuce and spinach, along with the vining variety of sugar snap peas. Note to self for next year: If you are going to put ground-up spent hollyhock plants in the compost bin, make sure all is well-composted before using it as mulch. There are actually a few lettuce and pea plants among the fine crop of hollyhocks you see growing here. Not exactly what I had planned, but then a garden seldom is.

June Harvest

Today I'm eating nectarines from a dwarf tree we planted a couple of years ago. This is the first edible fruit we've gotten from the tree, and it's pretty good. We picked two bunches of red seedless grapes from the arbor in front of the pool equipment, and they were actually grape-sized rather than the match head sized ones we've gotten from the older vines under the lemon tree. There are lots of tomatoes, but they probably won't last long in the summer heat. We also have several smallish bell peppers. No snapbeans, butterbeans, or corn yet...I probably planted those too late. The snapbeans are about halfway up the trellis now; I'm waiting to post a picture when they reach the top and/or start producing. I cleaned out the withered nasturtiums around the pool today, and found a volunteer leaf lettuce plant that decided to grow there. I'll leave it alone and see what happens, as I am doing with the volunteer snap peas.

The zinnias look really good, and there are a lot of interesting blooms in the "hummingbird and butterfly mix) that I haven't identified. It's always fun to plant a mix like that and see the different things that come up. I pulled up the hollyhocks which are done for the season, and Mike ran them through the new shredder. It's a budget version we found at Harbor Freight tools that was suggested in a Phoenix Permaculture Guild post. We were disappointed in how it did when we tried to shred the pea vines and bolted lettuce, but it did a nice job on the hollyhock canes, and popped all the seeds out of the cases. We're trying to compost yard waste more seriously this year- it seems a shame to send all we produce to a landfill and then go to Home Depot and buy several dozen bags of mulch.

Backyard wanderings and musings

Enjoyed my backyard walk today, although I'm feeling rather morose in general about many things. Lots of zinnias coming up in the raised beds; most other things unrecognizable. Spent some time deadheading marigolds and snapdragons and scattering their seeds, in hopes that they will grow.

Roses are in full glory now; mostly Queen Elizabeth and Iceberg. The Black Cherry looks really good; Mr. Lincoln and Peace aren't doing much yet. Won't be long before the heat gets them, though.

Speaking of full glory, the invasive Mexican primroses look wonderful now. This includes the ones in the lawn and growing up the hibiscus, thevitia, and other places they do not belong. Too bad they won't (a) stay where I put them and (b) bloom for more than a few weeks in the year.

Grapevines over the arbor trellis may actually make it into an arbor this year. We're trying to prune the older ones, on the fence behind the lemon tree in hopes of actually getting edible fruit this year.

Hollyhocks are blooming; mostly yellow, some tinged with pink. No Punnet square representation here. I guess if I want red ones again I need to purchase new seed.

Romaine lettuce is still edible; everything else has gone to seed. We've picked a few strawberries, mostly from the hanging basket thing...those in the ground have been eaten by various nonvertebrate species. Peaches are golf ball size and although we aggressively thinned this year, probably too many for the tree. Apricots and nectarines are much smaller; a little more than marble sized for the most part. There are some mystery plants growing in the vegetable garden area that I haven't identified as yet.

One of the plumeria looks like it may actually put forth leaves. The other one has a dead-looking top that I cut off, hoping to inspire growth on some of the lower nodes. There are blossoms (I think) on the avocado tree that we are trying this year. The Carolina Jessamine I cut back is vigorously regrowing; that was obviously the correct thing to do and I should attack the others when I get the time and energy to do so.