Which Tomato?

We may not have snow here in San Diego, but we have been having some very welcome rain over the last several weeks.

The only problem with that is that the ground is too wet for the resident gardener to get outside and do anything in the garden.  As Cindy says, farmers are never happy with the weather:  Not enough chill hours for the fruit trees, not hot enough for the sugars to form in the tomatoes, too wet for some things, too dry for something else.

So what does a vegetable farmer do when she can't be outside?  Well, she reads some of the endless avalanche of gardening and seed catalogues that have descended upon us now that that Christmas is over.  She also goes back through her gardener's journal, which she has kept diligently for several years now, to see what has worked in past years and what plants didn't work out so well.

Right now she's trying to pick out the tomato plants she wants to start for the coming year, so what will it be this year?  Carbon?  Black Krim?  Stupice?  I think we're done with the Mortgage Lifter--I don't know whose mortgage they lifted, but they've never really done much for us.

She usually tries to grow one variety of cherry tomatoes for salads, a medium sized tomato for cooking and sauces and a larger tomato for burgers and BLTs.

Past Successes, Future Anticipated

Unfortunately, our yard is too small to plant all the varieties she would like to try; it requires detailed planning to determine what to plant in our limited space.

She usually gets a pretty good variety  of tomatoes and we've been very happy with them.  They definitely beat anything you can buy at the grocery store.

Happy New Year!  May your garden grow and flourish in the new year.

Snow, Snow, Snow

Just not here in San Diego, though.

Cindy's dad called to tell us that it had snowed several inches in Fort Wayne, and asked if I would come scrape the snow off his windshield.

We would not be able to make it there before the snow melted, so I'm rerunning this picture from earlier in the year instead.

Sorry, but that's as close as I want to get to snow for a while.

Longhorn Roundup

Eucalyptus Longhorned Borer

We found a very odd looking bug on our front walk the other night--I'd never seen anything like it.

Its two most noticeable characteristics were its two-toned body color and its extremely long antennae, which were even longer than its body.

The bug wasn't going anywhere, so I had time to take a couple of pictures of it.

Turns out it's a Eucalyptus Longhorned Borer, Phoracantha semipunctata or Phoracantha recurva, a beetle that attacks (guess what?) eucalyptus trees.

These beetles bore into the bark of eucalyptus trees and lay hundreds of eggs.  When the eggs hatch, the larvae create entire galleries of tunnels in the cambium layer of the bark and their activities can stress and eventually kill the eucalyptus tree.

We don't have any eucalyptus trees in our yard, but there are many of them in the neighborhood, including several out in the canyon behind of us.  We've never been very fond of them; if eucalyptus trees catch fire the oils in the leaves and bark tend to turn them into gigantic flaming bombs that can send embers shooting off to spread the fire.  Not a comforting thought, and dead euchs would burn even faster than live ones.

Knowing that we have a pest insect working on the trees out behind us to turn them into dead trees is even less comforting, so once we identified the bug, we made sure it was a dead bug.  Probably too late to stop any damage, though.

It's too bad that this bug is such a destructive pest because the black and gold or cream color scheme is really striking and very pretty.  I may have to try to make some beads with that color scheme.  I'm not doing antennae on them, though.

Potato Haiku

My brother, whose nickname in the Navy was "Spud Taters", was inspired by my recent posts about our potato harvest to create these two haiku:

So, Cindy Struck Spuds! 

And, Since Teeters Eat Taters, 

Felicity Ensues. 

Tubers hid, dormant

While bold Basil claimed the sun.

Surprise! A gift of gold!

More Potatoes

Yesterday we, and by "we" I mean Cindy and her sister Mary, harvested more potatoes, this time from the second grow bag.

Cindy planted these German Butterball yellow potato plants last January, then pretty much wrote them off later in the season when  the plants seemed to die back and some basil plants took hold in the bags.  So she was very surprised last week when she went to clean out the bags to discover that there were indeed potatoes in there.

We got over two pounds of potatoes out of the first bag, and about four and a half pounds out of this one.  Considering how much I love potatoes, that should last for about a week.  We had some for dinner last night and they were delicious.

Some of them will probably go back into the bags as seed potatoes for the next crop.

More Seasonal Color

Toyon

Other areas of the world have the seasonal reds and greens of Holly and Mistletoe berries and leaves at this time of year; San Diego gets the same colors with the leaves and berries of the Toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia) and Pyracantha (Pyracantha coccinea) shrubs.

The birds, especially Mocking Birds, love the berries from these two plants, and they are welcome to them.

Some gardeners like the Pyracantha for its ability to thrive in conditions of drought and neglect, but its nickname of Firethorn graphically describes why we're not too fond of this plant; its thorns make it difficult and painful to try to prune this plant.

Late Harvest

Cindy did some cleaning up in the garden recently and picked the first of our current lettuce crop and the last of the peppers and shallots.

I thought it made a very colorful seasonal display.

Potatoes!

Our Potato Crop

Cindy planted some seed potatoes in two grow bags almost a year ago, and they've been quietly growing away ever since.

We were initially afraid that the varmint that stole the False Sea Onion bulb last January would also go after the potatoes, but Cindy created some of her anti-varmint cages out of hardware cloth and electrical ties to protect the plants until they were big enough to fend for themselves.

Today she pulled out the plants in one of the bags, dug around and found that we really do have potatoes.  In fact, she pulled up two pounds of them, and that's just from one of the two grow bags.

Considering how fond I am of potatoes in almost every form, this is really good news.

Who's Home?

A New Varmint Hole

Cindy has been waging a fierce battle with gophers in the raised beds out behind the garage, so when she found this new hole in the planter beside the garage, her first conclusion was that the gophers had moved around to the side of the garage.

However, I'm thinking it's probably not gophers; the one we saw filching blades of grass up at Temecula a couple of weeks ago (see Black Friday, No Thanks) was very careful to fill the hole up behind him when he had enough vegetation, whereas this varmint has brazenly left the doorway wide open.

Also, the gophers left neat mounds along the course of their tunnels, while this critter just scattered the dirt from the hole all over the planter, burying several other plants.

So this varmint is probably our old nemesis, the California Ground Squirrel.

I'm just hoping they haven't completely undermined the garage by now.