08 Wednesday Oct 2014
Posted in summer, Uncategorized, vegetables
We had one good eggplant in our summer garden this year. I just ate it last week! Breaded it and fried it up! We had lots of tomatoes too but the eggplant only started to grow at the end of August and then it took off. I hope we get some more eggplants from it. There are more blooms.
It was so hot this summer that everything in our regular vegetable garden died. This eggplant grew in my daughter’s fairy garden and was shaded by a peach tree.
21 Thursday Aug 2014
Posted in eggplant, gardening, grilled vegetables, summer, tomatoes, vegetables
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Remember too much squash? Well, too much tomato is happening now in my house. My friend up in Huntington Beach grew these amazing tomato trees. She had way too many tomatoes. Her recommendation is to dehydrate them and turn them into sundried tomatoes that you can freeze. You can do this in your oven.
The solution I seletect: Gazpacho. Homemade gazpacho from fresh tomatoes is especially delicious. I was facing a situation where all my tomatoes ripened at once and were starting to go bad. I made yummy gazpacho and took it to a concert in the park.
We drank it out of big red cups and added toppings of croutons and avocados. Delicious!
Here is the link to the recipe I used. It is very simple to make but you do need a blender.
Another favorite dish to make is ratatouille. The Silver Palate cookbook has my favorite recipe.
Enjoy those tomatos!
Thanks to my friend Marina who gave me these photos. Look at these crazy tomato trees! you can’t tell from this photo, but they were about six feet high.
02 Sunday Sep 2012
I wake up and I’m outside a lot earlier these days because of the puppy. While I wish I could sleep in, the morning sunrise and the stillness is something I love. I remember the mornings on the ranch when my mother would wake me in the dark, and my father would already be awake drinking his second cup of coffee and listening to the weather radio. The weather was what set his mood—rain was a happy morning and a brisk walk to the barn. When it was bad news, we’d drive the truck, late from listening more to make sure the radio hadn’t changed the forecast in those last few minutes.
The barn was dark and still with only one light on in the tack room, and in the dark corrals, the horses stamped and shuffled, waiting for us to saddle them.
The sunrise would build behind the western hills and the sky would turn from dusky lavender to yellow then orange. The sun was seemed like it didn’t come up for hours (even though it was probably only one hour) as we rode out to find the cattle. When the sun did come, it was blinding and its rays seemed to ignite the sharp yucca leaves and grasses.
The sound of dark morning was always peaceful and silent even with birds chirping and the jingle of spurs, the slushing of horse legs and saddles. Maybe a whistle or low whisper of Spanish about the weather of the work to come.
Unfortunately I get about ten minutes of silence nowadays—from the time I sat down to write this until here on the page.
Now dogs are barking in my house. The senior grandma dog just woke up and she is wheezing and puffing. Chairs are rattling. The kids are humming and buzzing and building fairy houses and singing a song about the puppy to Ode to Joy (boy, that is a big theme in my house). The chickens are cackling to be let out of the pen. Feet are scuffling across our hardwood floors. And my husband is calling my name with a question mark at the end trying to find me to cook breakfast or bring him a dustpan.
Fortunately, I was already outside at 6:30 a.m. and caught this picture of silence (below). See the pretty morning moon. And here are some pictures (2nd and 3rd down) of the ranch so you can get an idea of what it was like. You can look at them and imagine the silence.
09 Thursday Aug 2012
Posted in bee, pumpkins, summer, vegetables
Here lies my glorious pumpkin, taking up my whole herb garden. I celebrate its robustness–for the first time I actually planted and grew the plants on time and it is a magnificent vine, full of giant leaves, yellow flowers and tiny fruit. See the picture below–it looks almost mysterious in the morning light, shrouded in mist, flowing down my hill and sending its twining feelers out across the rock steps and over to the apple tree. But if you scroll down to the bottom of the picture below, you will see things are not as they seem. This is not the vital fecund fruit bearing plant it appears to be! No, the baby pumpkins are shriveling!
Gasp! They turn brown and shrivel up and fall off. Not good. I have no words.
Why do I go through this every year? Why can’t I grow pumpkins? This morning after I took this picture, I decided to put on my bee hat and pollinate. I figured that out last year, but I thought that with this giant plant, I wouldn’t have to. But I did and there was one bee with me. Go little bee, do your stuff!
Wow! There’s a lot of pollen in there–some ants too. Well, all of you, sprinkle that stuff around! Look at it! I think that’s the male flower. In my rudimentary understanding of the nature of pollination, I put a Q-tip in there and took pollen and stuffed it in the female flower. The female flower, well, looks female and has a baby pumpkin at the end of it. I found lots of males and only three females at my pumpkin fraternity this morning. You get my drift! I have an overpopulation of males–every year, the same situation! Reminds me of my undergrad days, but I suppose that was to my advantage. (Anyway, I didn’t make pumpkins!)
(By the way, morning is good because the flowers are open).
Now what? Really, what I want to know is–what’s wrong? Last year I got one or two pumpkins (from three plants). The year before I got one Cinderella pumpkin. Last year I fertilized them. Last year I planted late and I surely did not have a plant like this. Oh yeah, I fertilized it with something called GROW BIG this morning after I did the pollinating. Geez. All this work for one pumpkin. Now I have to wait and see. It is very hot and humid now so maybe that will help, too.
Honestly, I think the coastal air does something to them. I figured out it’s nearly impossible to grow Echinacea and Black Eyed Susans. That one year I grew Black Eyed Susans was a miracle. This year I bought the seeds from Burpee, I planted them in the ground, I planted a second control group in peat pots–guess what? One flower. ONE flower from all that.
Hey, I also harvested this watermelon too early. Have you ever seen a kid who told her mom not to pick her watermelon look at you after you pick her watermelon when she told you it wasn’t ripe? You don’t want to see that face, belive me.
It didn’t taste that bad. (But it didn’t taste quite right either so no one else would eat it but me pretending that I had done the right thing.) There are three more left safely on the vine, waiting ripeness.
So, while my garden isn’t going exactly how I planned, I finished a draft of my 2nd novel this week. Yipee!
28 Saturday Jul 2012
Posted in roses, summer, tomatoes, Uncategorized, vegetables
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Today is a perfect July day. The sky is pure blue, the air is warm, but the breeze is cool. It’s a day to be thankful that I am in San Diego. There are flowers in my patio garden and vegetables in the back. The tomatoes are ripe and the watermelons are getting round and full. We have more green beans and squash than we can eat and my daughter figured out how to play Ode to Joy on the piano. What could be more perfect! Maybe getting outside to do some gardening or just read a book.
I took a walk around the garden and snapped some pictures:
Green beans on trellis
Three tomato plants growing together–Roma, cherry and a beefsteak.
Pumpkin vines growing over mint.
Watermelons-the vines are all over the place!
Summer bouquet picked from garden–yarrow, roses, sunflowers, feverfew, and verbena bonariensis, which is an incredible bloomer.
I don’t know what this blue flowering plant is, but I love it for a container garden. I bought it at Summer’s Past Farms. I need to go back there and buy some more (and figure out what it is). It looks like a mini vitex.
Dogs happy for the shade and cool grass.
04 Wednesday Jul 2012
Posted in Australian shepherd, dog, garden, palm trees, squash, summer, tomatoes, Uncategorized, vegetables
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First, my headline is misleading. This is not really a blog about how to grow a rainforest. This is a blog about why I don’t garden much in the summer in San Diego.
San Diego summers mean beach, visitors, house guests, theme parks, no rain, watering, restricted watering, the beach, house guests, theme parks, visitors. Should I continue?
I go into maintenance mode. Plus you need a break! We could grow something amazing and significant here every month of the year. When I first started gardening here and realized this, it was a little overwhelming. Then I hit summer–I remember running around trying to garden while my house guests ate breakfast. It was stressful. I had to stop trying to have a perfect yard and let things be (as best I could).
Watering is still a priority and my vegetable garden, which really needs fertilizing.
But once you get things growing, you can take a rest. Here’s my favorite story about that — One day at my old house, while I was walking through the neighborhood, I found a house that intrigued me. There was a stand of unique lime green palm trees in the front, some orchids growing in the shade and other tropical. I walked by there every day, trying to figure out this interesting house and the palms, which I realized also grew to enormous heights behind the house. I told my husband about it and soon he was walking by there too and we discussed it, trying to figure out what was going on. The person had a license plate on his/her car that said “Palms.” Clearly this was not some minor experiment in horticulture. This was serious.
Well, one day, my hubby being the kind of talk-to-strangers with ease guy that he is, got us an invitation to tour the property. It was in fact owned by an expert in palm trees and his wife was a landscape architect.
The backyard contained a bona fide rainforest. It was tremendous. They had bought the house next door and knocked out the walls so the rainforest could take over two back yards. They had what must have been 60 foot palms with a treehouse half-way up. I think there were hundreds of palm trees of all varieties and paths and orchids and impatients and all kinds of wonderous flora.
Our tour guide explained, “Once the canopy was established, it was easy to grow all the other rainforest plants beneath it.”
That stuck with us. In our wonder, we found a bit of humor. We repeated the phrase because it was so far out and so ridiculous to us–being from Michigan and Arizona–that someone could establish a rainforest with a canopy right in our neighborhood.
We use that phrase a lot in our marriage. It comes up two or three times a year one of us will say to the other– “Once the canopy is established,” and laugh. It has become one of those inside jokes that only the two of us can understand. And that’s nice. But really, back to gardening, I think once your garden gets to a certain point, it can keep going with only a little bit of care here and there and a few seasonal clean up days. If you think you don’t have time to garden, consider that. Once you get your “canopy” in place, you can just watch it grow.
Anyway, that’s what I am saying about my garden right now! Good thing, because I have a house full of guests waiting for breakfast!
Here are some pictures from my vegetable garden and one of my naughty puppy. I really need to fence her out of my vegetables–that’s one job that really shouldn’t wait.
Garden of Delights Blog 