Zucchini Cream Pie

Sunday for dinner we had grilled flank steak, a tomato, basil and mozzarella salad and mascarpone mashed potatoes.  The tomato in the salad was one giant juicy Carbon tomato, and it was as delicious as the description of Carbons had led us to believe it would be.

For dessert Cindy had made a beautiful cream pie.  She didn't tell me until we were a couple of bites into it that it was a zucchini cream pie, made with part of the monster three pounder she had harvested a few days before.  It wasn't anything like the taste I would have expected if I had known ahead of time that it was made with zucchini.  A little cinnamon, a little nutmeg, yummmm.

Fortunately, there's still some of it left.

Squirrel Wars--Episode 3,253

SQUIRREL WARS

EPISODE 3,253

Not long ago

In a galaxy 'way too close to home...

When we built the original raised bed garden about ten years ago, it wasn't long before the local ground squirrels (Spermophilus beecheyi) decided we had opened a new restaurant especially for them. Cindy was so disgusted when, time after time, she would decide that a juicy tomato was just about ripe for the picking--tomorrow. And that night the squirrel would decide, "Tonight," and leave the half eaten remains behind for her to find the next morning.

When she finally picked the first ungnawed tomato off the vines, I joked that it had cost us about a thousand dollars to get that tomato.

That stiffened her resolve to keep the varmints out and led her to develop a brilliant system of three foot tall plexiglass panels that fit inside the edge of the bed. Each panel is screwed to garden stakes on each side that can be pushed down into the dirt of the bed, although getting them down into the dirt was awkward and sometimes difficult. Since the stakes are inside the plexiglass, the squirrels can't get traction on anything to climb up and get at the sweet, juicy tomatoes. The panels can be lifted out to work on the garden and then replaced to keep the critters out. She later refined that system by adding PVC tubes for each of the stakes to slide into to make panel removal and replacement easier. That system has worked pretty well and we've enjoyed many, many tomatoes since without having to look for squirrel bites.

However, when we built the new beds this year, she decided to rotate the tomato patch into the first new bed, but not build panels to surround it. Of course the varmints applauded that decision. Today she had to throw away a big, fat, juicy Carbon, supposed to be one of the tastiest black heirloom tomatoes. Evidently the squirrel agreed with that description of it, because only half of it was left.

We keep hoping the red shouldered hawk that works our canyon will take out the squirrel some day, but so far the critter is thriving. It's illegal to trap and deport them, and we can't bring ourselves to poison any creature, so I think next year's tomato garden will have panels again.

When Life Hands You Lemons...

Or, in our case, limes. Our friend Judy came over today and asked how Cindy's Meyers lemon tree was doing, so we had to tell her that we had come to the conclusion that the tree was really a lime tree.

Turned out she had gone with Cindy to the nursery a year ago and bought what she thought was a Meyers lemon tree, too. Hers have stubbornly refused to turn yellow, too, so now we know that the nursery mislabeled the plants. Now we're wondering about the other two trees Cindy bought--are they both oranges? Is one actually a lemon? She thought she was buying a Meyers lemon, a blood orange and a lime. The other two trees have little nubs on them, but the fruit is not developed enough to tell what it is yet.

I would say they'd bought a lemon, but it turns out they didn't.

Fortunately, limes go really well with Corona beer.

In Praise of Clarimore Zucchini

Cindy came in this morning from the garden with her hands full of tomatoes and zucchini. The tomatoes finally are taking off in the suddenly hot weather. The San Diego June Gloom stretched well into July and August this year, with temperatures in the upper sixties or low seventies; the tomatoes did their best, but it was clear they were struggling. But now that it's in the upper eighties and mid-nineties, the humans are melting and the tomatoes are saying "Finally! It's about time."

She also brought in a couple of zucchini. One of them had managed to avoid detection until it had grown to monstrous proportions--it weighed in at three pounds, but the other one was a more reasonable size.

These are both Clarimore Zucchini. They have a pale green skin, lightly speckled. Unlike the zucchini you buy in the grocery stores, the skin of Clarimores is tender and not bitter. They saute nicely and Cindy has used them several times to make a cold zucchini soup, although the three pound monster would probably make enough to last us all through fall and winter.

Danger: Plant Eating Cat

Cindy's friend Lorraine, also a Master Gardener, makes beautiful container succulent gardens and gave one to Cindy recently. It's a study in subtle blues, greens and pinks and looks like one of Monet's famous water lilies paintings. At least, that's what it did look like....

We put it on the tea cart in the dining room so we could admire it every day. Then one day last week we found our kitten, Jenna, downstairs under the table with a strange looking toy in her mouth; of course, it was one of the plants from the succulent garden. We took it away from her and Cindy replanted it, but the next day we found several plants missing and pieces of them all over the dining room and family room downstairs. So, we had to take the beautiful succulent garden into protective custody in the garage.

The next day the neighbors across the street gave us a pot with orange, red and pink bromeliads. We thought it was big enough to be safe on the tea cart, but it wasn't long before Jenna was back up there sniffing the bromeliad leaves and pulling decorative moss out of the pot. So now it's outside, too.

We can't figure out why this kitten has suddenly decided to become a vegetarian (except at mealtimes, of course, when she's definitely a carnivore).

Of Lemons and Limes

Cindy has been nursing her Meyers Lemon tree along for about a year now. It's never looked particularly robust; the leaves have had a tinge of yellow, but the fruit stubbornly refused to change from green to yellow.

So we repotted it a couple of months ago, hoping that would do the trick. We also repotted the lime and the dwarf orange tree at the same time. Actually, we didn't change the pots, we simply took them out of the pots, drilled more holes in the bottoms of the plastic pots they were in and put them back to improve the drainage in the pots.

But still no lemons. Lots of green fruit, but nothing that looked like a Meyers lemon. Hmmm. Cindy, recalling her friend Lorraine's question, "why don't you pick those limes?" checked the blossoms. Pink blossoms. Lime blossoms. And, of course, the blossoms on the presumed lime tree are white: lemon blossoms?

So the question is: did we mix them up when we repotted them? Did the nursery mix up the labels?

Another question: what kind of lime is this? It has seeds, when we were expecting seedless limes, or at least fewer seeds.

At least now we've got plenty of limes. Something tells me it's margarita time....

Background

First, let me make it clear that Cindy is the gardener in this household. She became a Master Gardener through the University of California extension Master Gardener program two years ago and does the gardening work. I do most of the carpentry and occasional unskilled labor.

About ten years ago we built a raised bed garden in the back yard so that Cindy could grow vegetables in some decent soil. We built it from 2 x 6s stacked three high in a sort of curved "L" shape. We sank 4 x 4 posts in cement to bolster the sides of the bed. In retrospect, that was probably overkill, but we were concerned about the weight of the soil pushing against the sides of the bed and possibly causing it to collapse. Fortunately, that has never happened.

We also put 2 x 6s along the top of the sides to make a seat all around the edge so we could sit on it, but we've never used it for that. Instead, it's probably helped with our critter exclusion.

Because we did have critters, right from the start. As our tomatoes grew, the ground squirrels were watching from the shrubbery. Cindy began a mostly losing battle with the varmints, but we did get a few tomatoes that year. Nothing better than a home grown tomato. Yummm. The battle with the squirrels got so bad that the next year Cindy decided to enclose the whole bed with plexiglass panels. That worked so well that we were able to have tomatoes without squirrel bites out of them, although we expected to see the squirrels bungee jumping into the bed from the nearby shrubbery to get those tomatoes.

As a result of all this work, we've had years of tomatoes, zuccini, squash and basil, and enjoyed them all. So this year we've built two more smaller raised beds. These two beds are rectangular and only twelve inches high and don't have the horizontal seat around the edges, but the first one has produced great tomatoes this season. That allowed Cindy to grow beets and green beans in the original bed.

The original raised bed is on the left in the picture above and the new ones are on the right. We got the flexible connectors we used for the corners of all the raised beds from Improvements at http://www.improvementscatalog.com , item # 142380 .

The black weed blocking fabric is there to kill off the bermuda grass and will eventually be covered with decomposed granite at some point.

In The Beginning...

Well, ours wasn't quite that impressive. When we moved into the house thirteen years ago, the front yard was a motley lawn of Bermuda grass, crab grass and assorted weeds. The back yard was much the same.

I made the mistake of leaving the sprinklers on the front yard one day for about six hours and returned to find that the water, as water usually does, had all flowed downhill, under the house and into the basement. That was partly due to the composition of the soil here, which is part sand, part clay and a whole lot of rocks.

The front yard had some small shrubs up against the front of the house. The back yard had a boxwood hedge across the back and on the north side. There was also an enormous Eugenia hedge running along the east side from the front of the house back to the edge of the canyon. There will be more about this monster later.

Oh, and did I mention the canyon? We're on a slope that ends about thirty feet from the edge of the patio and falls off abruptly about a hundred feet or so into the canyon out behind the house. Right on the edge of the canyon is a beautiful Chinaberry tree. Its roots cling to the very edge. It's a precarious feeling and we're exploring ways to stabilize the hillside.

Anyway, that's what Cindy and I started with. We've been working on it for the last thirteen years. It's different now, a lot different, but it's still a work in process, and, since it's a garden, it always will be.