Busy Week

This last week was a busy, but very satisfying one.

Tuesday was the Master Gardeners' monthly meeting and silent auction.  Cindy drafted me to take pictures since she had volunteered to work during the auction, and it was pretty revealing:  I discovered that what counts with the MGs is food, drink and.... oh, yeah, plants.

Then it was clean the house, prepare more food and drink, and celebrate Thanksgiving with friends.  Cindy cooked a turkey and made sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, cranberry jello and both pumpkin and cranberry-apple pies.  Then we all went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.   Good friends, good food and Harry Potter, too.  Can't beat that.

Yesterday we walked down to see the new neighborhood sign.  The original Kensington sign went up in the 1950's and had deteriorated to the point where only some of the letters would light up (no "sin" in Kensington?  Nobody really believed that one.).  Anyway, the new sign is finally up and it looks great.

Rainy Day

Actually a rainy weekend, soft, gentle rain.  The forecast was for one to three inches of rain, wind and hail, but so far we've had about half an inch, very little wind and (thank God) no hail.  The cover crop, shrubs and trees are loving it, but so, of course, are the weeds.

The ones who aren't loving it are the poor, sodden marchers and runners in the Susan G. Komen Three Day event.  Their website mentions San Diego's normally blue skies, gentle Mediterranean climate and 70 miles of beautiful beaches, but none of those are much in evidence for them today.  We've had a lot of friends who have fought breast cancer, so we wish them well.

Can't Beat Those Beets

Well, actually, we didn't care much for the Chioggia beets we had the other night; they were way too sweet.  They're sometimes called "Candystripe" for their concentric pinkish and white rings, but the "candy" part is also appropriate for the sweet taste of these beets.  It wasn't a bad tasting beet, but it just wasn't what I expected a beet to taste like.

Beet Greens

Cindy would be fine with just the beet greens from the Chioggias, but she likes Detroit Reds better, so I think she'll be planting some more of them soon and skip the Chioggias.

She made some beet gnocchi a couple of months ago that was as pretty as it was tasty, so I suspect we'll be having more of that some day.

One Tough Survivor

When our friend Joanne was visiting last month, a Western Fence Lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) approached her, stared directly at her, and appeared to be encouraging her in a difficult decision she was making.  It probably was doing no such thing, but the fact that the lizard had survived the loss of its tail and still appeared to be thriving did give her encouragement.

Joanne's Lizard

When I saw the lizard last week, I was surprised to see he had lost a foot, too, but he was still active and thriving, soaking up a few rays on our garden wall.

We had heard that these lizards could shed their tails in order to escape from predators, although according to the San Diego Natural History Museum, the Western Fence Lizard avoids dangerous predators through "constant vigilance and fast reflexes."  Mad-Eye Moody would be proud of this critter.

Some of our cats love these critters, too.  They spend hours at the front door, watching through the screen as a lizard taunts them through the security door.  Sometimes we have three cats lined up at the door intent on the lizard. We've actually had a couple of lizards in the past who were fool enough to get into the house, but we've always managed to round them up and evict them before the cats found them and did any damage to them. We had been told they could be toxic to pets who tried to eat them, so we've always tried to keep them and the cats apart, although the cats have other opinions about that.

The Lizard Patrol On Alert

These lizards are pretty common in our garden and in the San Diego area. In the summer we usually have four or five in the garden at any given time. Turns out that is probably a good thing:  they may reduce the incidence of Lyme Disease where they live, as the Western Fence Lizard blood will destroy the Lyme disease spirochetes when an infected tick bites the lizard. Western Fence Lizards apparently also eat crickets, which may explain what happened to all the brown crickets that hatched out last week--the cats were also fascinated by the crickets.

Covered-Up Cover Crop

Cindy decided to put a cover crop of beans, vetch and three or four other seeds in both the old and one of the new raised beds this winter that can be tilled under and worked into the soil as "green manure" in the spring.

So we were sitting in the hot tub one morning last weekend and soon saw that the California Towhees thought we had provided them with a grand new buffet.  They would fly up, perch on the edge of the plexiglas panels that are supposed to keep the varmints out of the raised beds, then swoop down, peck up a few seeds, and fly off, only to repeat the process moments later.  They managed to gobble quite a bit of seed while we were watching.  Since they're ground feeders, I guess they just got tired of waiting for the House Finches and Goldfinches to drop seed out of the bird feeders.  I thought it could have been worse; it could have been the whole flock of Mourning Doves.

However, Cindy was not prepared to see her whole cover crop go down the gullets of a gang of marauding Towhees.  She covered the bigger bed with a permeable cloth that will allow sun and rain through and used good old-fashioned clothes pins to clip it to the plexiglass panels.

Original raised bed with plexiglass panels

She made a cover for the new bed by cutting up some PVC piping, installing it upright in the soil in the new bed and then tucking half hoops made of black irrigation piping into the PVC pipes.  

New raised bed with hoops

 Then she covered the hoops with the same cloth, creating a simple little greenhouse for her cover crop.

Covered up crop

This should thwart both the birds and the squirrels, we hope, until the cover crop can mature.  

Meatballs

So, apparently under the influence of the moon, the stars, the record hot weather and two bottles of really excellent wine out on the patio Wednesday night, I apparently volunteered to make dinner Friday night.  Since my repertoire is limited to scrambled eggs and spaghetti, the latter looked like the obvious choice.  It seemed only fair since Cindy does all the cooking and needs a break from it every now and then.

However, my reckless mood of volunteering also allegedly included making meatballs.  I've never made meatballs in my life, but Cindy loves meatballs so I thought I'd give it a try.  The thought of making meatballs was intimidating, but Cindy had a good recipe for a meatball sandwich which turned out to be within my limited capabilities.

1 pound lean ground beef
4 pieces French bread or grinder rolls (whatever those are), each 5 inches long
1 egg, beaten to blend
1/4 cup finely chopped onion
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
1 garlic clove, minced
1/2 teaspoon salt, or less
hot-pepper sauce, as desired (it wasn't, so I didn't--there are some advantages to being the cook)


Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, then bake the meatballs for 30 minutes.  

It seemed pretty straightforward.

At Cindy's suggestion, I used panko breadcrumbs instead of the french bread and dried diced onion instead of the chopped onion, adding about a tablespoon of beef stock to the panko crumbs and the dried onion so they could soak up the stock before adding them to the other ingredients.

The parsley was nearly my downfall, though.  I went out and picked some out of the garden, but found that my "knife skills", as they call it on Top Chef, were nearly nonexistent.  It looks so smooth and easy on Top Chef; chopchopchopchopchopchop, and done, all in finely chopped, uniform pieces.   I hacked away at that parsley with the ulu for way too long and I don't think any two pieces were the same size, but at least I eventually had about a tablespoon of the parsley and added it to the other ingredients.

I'd never make it on Top Chef, but the meatballs came out well, as did the spaghetti and the salad Cindy made, and the whole dinner was delicious.  Now she's intimating that it would be nice for me to do this once a month, although it may take a lot more wine for me to get to that point.

Last of The Tomatoes

We ate the last of our Black Krim tomatoes last night.  The weather was cooler than usual most of the summer and we've had rain this fall, so the sugars in the tomatoes just never got as well developed as they could have, but we still had a pretty good crop of the tomatoes despite the best efforts of the squirrels and the raccoons to get them before we did.

Cindy was grilling burgers outside on the grill, using a recipe a friend at Hart Winery had given her last week.  We had mentioned that most of the wine clubs we belong to had sent us port wine, but that we never get around to drinking it because we're just not dessert wine drinkers, so it's been piling up in our wine storage area.  So she suggested we use some of the port the next time we made burgers, adding some blue cheese, some panko crumbs, the port and an egg.  Cindy decided to skip the egg, but the rest of it made delicious burgers, topped with the big juicy tomato from our garden.

It was a beautiful evening.  It's been hot the last couple of days, with temperatures in the low 90's, but this time of year the sun is so low in the sky that we can sit out on the patio in the evening and enjoy the garden without having the sun in our eyes.  We decided to just stay out on the patio and eat the burgers with a bottle of Hart's 2007 Grenach and some Danza Del Sol 2008 Merlot under the stars.

That's a great way to enjoy a garden.

To Bee Or Not To Bee...

You know I couldn't resist that pun.

Cindy went to a class on bees last week.  Since she can't have chickens, she's thinking she might like to have an apiary and keep honey bees.  I told her that, after the Monarch caterpillar fiasco, we'd better make sure first that Scrub Jays don't eat them.  We're still whacking our foreheads and saying "Duh" over that one.

One question that always worried Cindy was whether, by removing the honey from the hive, beekeepers were depriving the bees of food they would need for their own survival.  However, the presenter said that the lowest tray of a hive is where the queen and the baby bees are, the second level is the food for the hive, and if you add additional trays, the bees will continue to make excess honey and fill up the honeycombs.  So that part sounds good.

Another concern we've had is the possibility that Africanized bees could take over the hive.  Africanized bees can take over a hive when the queen become weakened or dies.  They tend to be highly defensive and more easily agitated than regular honey bees, according to the San Diego Natural History Museum.  I'm not sure that's something I want in my backyard.

I think we have more research to do.