Guess what is ready to eat....

O'Neil and Misty blueberries from our backyard!

Sweet Potato Mishap

So it sounded good. The people at the nursery recommended it! They should know, right?

Maybe not.

The experiment of quartering a sweet potato and planting it has not gone well. To my Orange County reader who asked what I did, that is it, and it did not work.

It is supposed to work.

But it did not.

However, I keep telling myself that the rotting sweet potato will be excellent compost.

There are very few companies who will ship plants into California because they need special tests etc. done. But there was one. The Sand Hill Preservation Center actually carries sweet potato slips and is willing to ship to CA. So I requested a catalog and we see what happens.

What I do know is that both girls love sweet potatoes, so this is something that I really do need to figure out!

Gardening in March

I wanted to let you know that I actually waited until March this year to start my summer garden. Okay, so I waited until the 1st, but technically it was March!

Yesterday afternoon after the nap to recover from Church (Baby always needs a long one), we went to the nursery and we bought strawberries! 8 plants of everbearing and 4 plants of June specific. We also picked up 2 more gerbera daisies for more color in the back and 3 ostesporiums for color in the front.

When we got home I put baby down for another nap while Mr Pear and Miss Pear prepared the soil. Then we planted the strawberries, sweet potatoes (apparently here you can just go the store, buy the potatoes and quarter them and plant them...who knew you did not need seed potatoes) and gerbera daisies. Then this morning I took the girls out front to quickly plant the ostesporiums before the rains come.

I did not pull up my pepper plants from last year and they are still growing peppers, albeit small ones, but still!

I do have to call the seed people today and order basil, carrots, pickling cucumber and tomato seeds to be planted the end of this month along with a hearty laying down of slug and snail bait!

Usually this is the end of our rainy season, but we need rain so badly that I have been praying fervently for more rain than expected and for additional storms through April or even May! While I know many areas need rain, California is not called the country's salad bowl for nothing, so I remind myself that as I pray for rain for us, it is also something that will help keep food prices down in other parts of the country and bless others too! Plus, storms that hit us tend to just meander across the country hitting those other dry areas too!

Winter Garden Update

Well, what do you know, it worked!

Forgive me if I sound a bit surprised, but the directions for planting garlic were to go to the grocery store, buy a bulb, break it into cloves, and plant said cloves bottom down, top up. That was all. No information on if I should use all the cloves or just compost the little ones in the middle. No information about how long it would take or what else I could expect.

So I am happy to report that after about 2 weeks almost all my garlic is up, and the cilantro is starting to sprout too.

I think I like this gardening business!

Fortunately these new little crops were protected from last week's strong Santa Ana winds that whipped through the area and blew down our tomatoes and broke our fence gate (which was repaired this weekend).

Winter Garden

A couple years ago I was blessed to receive a gardening book specific to Southern California and arranged in monthly chapters so that you know what to do each month without flipping all over the place and making your own list - it even has a check list at the back! I love it! Although at our old home we had very little and I had basically memorized what to do when. So the book got forgotten, unfortunately.

However, this weekend it was pulled back out as I started asking if I could plant a winter garden in this region. Not that I have the time or energy to do so, I was more curious.

It turns out that we can plant a whole host of things including: broccoli, cabbage, cilantro, garlic, carrots, potatoes, and that our tomatoes will go for a while longer!

I was thrilled - so I planted garlic and cilantro and called it done for this year!

I will let you know how it goes!

Can you plant a winter garden where you are? Where are you and what do you plant?

Happy Friday

I am looking so forward to the weekend. Mr. Pear has had such a long week that I think he is looking forward to it even more.

I have no creative ideas to post - oh sure, I have the hope chest list to write up, but to be honest, I only get computer time while Miss Pear naps, and I am at the point where I love to be horizontal as much as possible... :-)

We are all doing well. The house is getting back into shape, and our suitcase is packed for the hospital (except for those last minute things, but there is a list!) Miss Pear is exceedingly excited about baby arriving and is always giving my tummy hugs and kisses, and taking about baby! So sweet. It makes it easier to talk to her about it more and explain more.

The million dollar relish is canned, enough for the year. Unfortunately there are not enough cucumbers left for pickles. The first of the tomato sauce is being canned today, Miss Pear and I helped a bit, but it is mostly my MIL doing it. And pears are on sale this weekend, 3lbs for $1, so we will be getting some of those to can as well. But again, it will not be me doing most of the canning. We are also loving just munching the tomatoes as well. I will skip planting grape tomatoes next year but will definitely plant the romas and sweet baby girl cherry tomatoes!

This weekend we are planning on doing the few remaining tasks to prepare for babies arrival, all stuff that could technically be done after with no problem but that are nice to get out of the way early!

It is very hot here so I am hiding inside with the A/C and loving it. But impatience has kicked in. I am having a very hard time waiting to hold this little baby of ours. I hope she comes early!

Oh, and I officially have a pregnancy craving - Chinese food. There have been two nights in the last 3 weeks where I have been totally focused on it, and then it tasted SO delicious! This is a very pleasant treat because it means that some food might actually like me! :-)

Tomato Trials

Well, the other night I got a call from our neighbor - the traps they had put out to deal with the mice problem they were having in their tomatoes, similar to the problem we experienced, had caught a mouse.

Said mouse was 4 inches in body length and 5 inches in tail.

Yeah, I don't think it was a mouse either, but I am more than happy to humor her.

So last night after supper we were out once again harvesting all the not green tomatoes to bring them in the house to ripen on the counter. We did not discover additional damage, thankfully!

Also, no more visitors like this guy either!

What we cannot eat we are sharing and freezing to make crushed tomato sauce.

And we will be having Pasta Fasta for supper tonight - recipe to follow...

Although we did harvest green and yellow beans, which are very late because the snails kept eating them. Unfortunately we discovered that something was burrowing in and eating the beans inside. So we are going to have a rather lackluster bean crop this year.

Oh well.

This is really our first year of all out gardening in Southern California, my first ever, so we are just chalking things up to learning experiences and noting what we will do differently next year.

We will again plant tomatoes, beans, peppers, cucumbers and carrots, but no lettuce as it just attracts slugs and snails and were not able to eat it any ways, and hopefully next year our fruit trees will be established and give us fruit! (This year we got lots of blueberries, and it looks like we will get some mandarins, but that is about it).

How are your gardens going?

Being Flexible

Last night I had today all planned out, including two posts that I will be saving for next week's Kitchen Tips Tuesdays and WFMW, and finally working on the hope chest series again (I found my scribbled notes), and the thank you notes I made. I was going to finish said thank you notes, bake bread, and get lots of desk work done during nap time.

Yeah, go ahead and laugh.

Then we went out last night to harvest tomatoes, and something with teeth had been eating one of them - I am hoping it was mice, but guessing a rat. So I tossed that one in the composter and harvested everything that was not green, even if it was not red either, to ripen on the counter. I don't willingly share the garden with unwelcome visitors! However, that work did me in.

Then at 12:30 last night, we woke up to road work, and it had been going on for some time as Mr. Pear and I were both having weird dreams. So we closed up the house and turned on the air conditioning so that we could sleep, but clearly no one got enough.

So today turned into super easy light day. My only accomplishments are knitting while watching cartoons with Miss Pear (who clearly did not get enough sleep but cannot sleep in either), writing 3 thank you notes, and emailing in my stamping order it use up my hostess credit.

We are now going to all nap, hopefully for a long time, and supper will be apple pancakes.

I anticipate an afternoon of paint with water and puzzles.

This reminds me of what a friend used to tell me all the time when I would get up tight about my schedule. She would tell me that the Lord wants His people to be flexible - meaning committed to Him and what He is doing rather than our plans and schedules. And on days like today I am certainly glad He has a plan because I certainly don't! (Except maybe early to bed...)

Unwelcome Guest

While I love to extend hospitality, I do have my limits! Look who we found in the tomatoes!



If you are having trouble spotting the little invader, start with the tomato that looks like a large animal has been eating it, that thing attached is not a leaf..... (Enlarging the pictures helps too!) That thing is actually a tobacco hornworm, and if left unchecked will mow through the tomatoes.

Needless to say the tomato went in the compost and the the worm in the garbage. Although he was so attached to the tomato plant and refusing to let go so we clipped the whole branch end off!

That's what he gets for not asking first.....

At least he was polite enough to eat the green ones and not the nice juicy red ones....

Garden of Weeding

To date I have identified 4 ground cover weeds in our garden - this does not include the other kind of weeds...sigh.

The problem with the ground cover weeds is that they keep coming back - even in spots where we dug down over an inch! And weeding is becoming a problem as at 35 weeks the ground seems to be getting further and further away, so the weeds are growing where I cannot reach them.

Not to be outdone by weeds of all things, and refusing to go down in defeat. I decided to try an old trick used to kill grass - put down news paper!

So we carefully put down the newspaper.



Being certain to leave enough room around the fruit trees, plants and sprinklers. Then over top of that we spread compost, grass clippings and leaves.

We began this process a little over 5 weeks ago, and the weeds underneath are slowly dying as the newspaper suffocates them, but not our trees. Unfortunately some are growing out of the holes, but there are a lot less to deal with!

The newspaper is also acting like a mulch, so it is keeping things nice and moist in this heat, which is a nice benefit! Over time the newspaper will break down thanks to the sun, etc. In fact, we have already had to add more paper in some spots.

So the newspaper was part of our regular subscription - no addition money was spent. The water was part of our regular watering except for a bit the day we did the project, just enough to get the paper wet, and the whole project is chemical free.

That definitely sounds frugal to me! Head on over to Crystal's for Frugal Friday!

Garden Update

I realized that it has been a long time since I talked about our garden! While I don't have pictures, I can still update you!

The blueberries are almost done - one bush decided to give us a second crop. They were so delicious and such a treat. Miss Pear loved harvesting her snacks!

Most of the fruit trees will not produce fruit this year, despite the plethora of blooms. This is actually good as it establishes the trees better. It does appear that we will get mandarins though! And our lemon tree is working hard on a few little lemons, but no hints of yellow yet!

Our beans and cucumbers got off to a very rough start due to snails and slugs. Cucumbers required three replantings and beans at least 5. I finally found a snail and slug bait that works, so we are not actually seeing progress!

Our tomatoes are now over 3 feet tall except for one variety that is not doing so well. There are lots of blooms and small green tomatoes so I am looking forward to tomatoes in a few weeks. (And hopefully a bumper crop when my MIL is here with her expert canning knowledge!)

We are looking forward to carrots very soon too!

Our peppers are off to a rough start, but we may have some by the end of the season keeping in mind that September is the peak of our heat, and we will have warm weather into October and even early November.

So I have learned that:

1. Our soil is very poor and needs lots of compost this winter - fortunately because we do the yard waste material bins on garbage day we can get free compost if we just go pick it up.
2. Our yard is shadier than I realized making the growing season start a bit later than anticipated
3. Snails and slugs out eat any teenage boy I have ever met, and cannot be shown mercy of removing them as they just return and ravage what they missed the first time!
4. I will not grow lettuce again because even though it is doing very well it is encouraging snails and slugs to visit.
5. I will try again next year and hopefully do better!

All things considered, for our first year we are not doing too bad!

Garden Tour Conclusion

Alas, that is all of my garden pictures. The vegetable garden is not much to look at currently, in fact, I need to replant a few things that are not making it! Although I will certainly post pictures when there is more to see. But I thought I would finish up with a picture of my little orchard.

The Gala is way back there in the corner, and in the front is the peach tree, with the Meyer lemon tree right behind it.

The garden pictures were posted starting at the Gala and working my way towards the lemon, except for the peach which I featured first as I was thrilled to have baby peaches.
Oh, and please ignore the weeds! (Or stop by and help me pull them!)

Meyer Lemon

I am counting on this little guy keeping us in lemonade all summer - and maybe a couple lemon meringue pies too! The nice thing about the Meyer lemon is that it is ever fruiting, so down here that means lemons year round! If you click on the picture you can see the little lemons coming, and there is a larger one in the back about golf ballish size.


And for the amount of lemons coming on this one, it is surprisingly small, well under 2 feet high!

Mandarin Orange Trees

We have two dwarf mandarin orange trees in our little orchard. First we have the Satsuma mandarin which we had grown before and is delicious. If you click to make the picture larger you will see all the little buds that are now blooming.


We also have a kishu mini mandarin that was a housewarming gift. We are anxious to try it, and it is supposed to be seedless, so it will be great for little ones!


Of course, the mandarins are always ready for Christmas, so there will be a long wait on these guys...... (If they are ready on the early side we will be eating them for Thanksgiving, the American one, not the Canadian one, but in our families overdosing on Mandarins is a Christmas tradition, and who am I to buck tradition, especially one so yummy!

Navel Oranges

The dwarf navel orange tree looked so wonderful it warranted 2 pictures to try to catch the beautiful blooms! I think we will be eating a lot of oranges - no vitamin C deficiencies for us!


You can kind of see the boring resting tangelo tree in the top right of the bottom picture....

Valencia Orange

In this continuing virtual tour of my garden I am starting to show you the pictures of the dwarf citrus trees - a special reward for living in someplace as expensive as California!

You will not see pictures of the dwarf tangelo tree though as it was doing nothing interesting when I took the pictures. We had "stored" fruit on the tree and it delayed the appearance of new growth and buds. So I decided to skip showing you a picture of a boring tree.

Needless to say I look forward to making my family freshly squeezed orange juice!


Of course we were out there last night briefly, and the buds are huge now, and not the least bit hard to see...oh well.

Gala Apples

Way back in January we planted our dwarf Gala apple tree. The only problem I saw with it is that it looked more like a twig than a tree. But as the spring has ushered in some warmer weather the tree has started growing - from the bottom up!


The buds are a deep pink and then blossom into this!


I am fairly optimistic that we already have fruit setting and that it will be apples to eat of the tree and apple pies, strudels and danish in the spring!

Blueberries

As part of my gardening attempts, and decision to make the flower beds in the backyard pull their weight in our family, we planted three blueberry bushes in the swamp....I mean the patch where the air conditioner drips making it so wet that nothing else will grow there!

And so I am thrilled to show you that we actually have blueberries, on ALL THREE!


I am trying not to be shocked by this, but I am amazed! I had always heard how hard it was to grow blueberries, but thought that it was worth a shot!

The Lord is so good to bless my feeble gardening efforts!

Baby Peaches

One of the many things we have thought about when planting our backyard out is what we love to eat and what we can grow here. We all love peaches - especially if they find their way into a pie with some ice cream on top! So when we discovered that peaches would indeed fruit here, and were available in a dwarf variety, we were thrilled! We planted a honey peach, and were assured that the fruit would live up to the name.

If you look carefully at the pictures below you might be able to see baby peaches - they are green and look a bit out of focus because of the peach fuzz.....



Could you see them?

Being INhospitable...to germs, again

I am not really sure what the scoop is, but Miss Pear is under the weather and stuffy. Not a full blown cold, just enough to make her cranky and forget how to listen. I was suspicious all day yesterday that she was sick, and it was confirmed last night, at bed time, when she did not fall asleep until 11PM!!!!! We turned her lights off at 7:30 ish, and she just laid there and chatted to herself and her stuffed animal. Do we have the only child in the world who cannot fall asleep at bedtime when she is sick? And then still gets up at her normal time????

I tell ya, I could have inhaled a pot of coffee straight from the carafe today had it not be for the fact that I am pregnant.

We even took Miss Pear outside after supper to play in the backyard and burn off energy while I planted the last of the garden (woo hoo! although now I think I have found a place to plant some thyme, oregano, lavender, and possibly chamomile), and do some weeding with a handy tool that lets you stand up and do the work. Maybe I should have had Miss Pear do the weeding??? (just kidding).

So, I think I will go nap now.