One Word

Limes

One word:  Tequila!

These may not look much like it, but these fruits are the harvest from our lime tree.

We've had really strange luck with the three dwarf citrus trees Cindy bought four years ago.  She thought she was buying a Meyers Lemon, a seedless lime and a Blood Orange tree (see Of Lemons And Limes), but the presumed lemons steadfastly refused to turn yellow, so we eventually concluded they were actually the limes.

Then, about a year and half ago, some critter stripped almost all the leaves off both this tree and the presumptive Blood Orange as well (see New Garden Mystery).  As intriguing as the image of the elderly neighbor next door running amok with her garden shears was, we eventually concluded that it most likely was a deer that did all the damage, especially after another deer crashed through the window of the IHOP a couple of miles down the San Diego River from us.

The trees recovered and actually came back more vigorous than before, but so far this is the only one that has produced very much fruit.

Although they are yellow, they really are limes.

So now the question is what to do with them.  Did anyone say Margaritas?

Other Gardens

Pomegranates

Cindy got a call from a neighbor recently wanting some advice about her rose bushes, which she thought might have a fungus, so Cindy put on her Master Gardener name tag and went over to look at the plants.  It turned out that the neighbor's gardener had used a fungicide product on the plants, which were already stressed from lack of sufficient water, that hadn't done them any good.  As a precaution Cindy took specimens over to County Ag which eventually confirmed Cindy's opinion that it was not a fungus but the fungicide that did the damage.

So the neighbor gave Cindy some pomegranates.  Neither of us had ever had pomegranate seeds before, so it was a new experience for us.

My next door neighbor when I lived in northern California had a pomegranate tree (Punica granatum) and I used to watch the squirrels perform entertaining acrobatic acts to get the pomegranates.  One squirrel in particular would flip upside down and hang from the branch by his back feet while he ripped off hunks of pomegranate; then he would flip back up while he ate the seeds, repeating the process until he had stuffed his cheeks.

This article from the San Diego Edible Garden Society has more information on pomegranate varieties that do well in this area:  http://www.sdedible.org/pomegranate-trees.html.

A World Without Butterflies

Gulf Fritillary

We get a lot of pleasure watching the butterflies in our garden, hopefully enjoying the various butterfly-friendly plants we've included in the garden.

The other day while I was looking in vain for Monarch caterpillars, I did see several other species, including a Gulf Fritillary (Agraulis vanillae), a Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui), a Fiery Skipper and one of the yellow Sulphur type butterflies, probably a California Dogface (Zerene eurydice), although it was moving too fast for me to get a good look at it.

I found that very encouraging after the absence of Monarch caterpillars.

Painted Lady

A world without beautiful butterflies would be too bleak to contemplate.

A Garden Without Caterpillars

Monarch Caterpillar

We've had plenty of Monarch butterflies visiting our front yard butterfly garden all summer, but until recently we had seen no Monarch caterpillars.  The Asclepia plants are all thriving this year, although by now they should have been nibbled down to bare stalks by the caterpillars.

We would think it was just our yard, but other Master Gardeners in San Diego are reporting the same problem in their gardens:  no Monarch caterpillars.

We saw two small ones about a week ago, but they are gone now.  They were both too small to have pupated already, so something is clearly still nobbling our caterpillars (I learned that word from watching the delectable British TV series Pie In The Sky).

It might be the Lesser Goldfinches, as we saw one trying to imitate a hummingbird as she attacked a huge Tomato Hornworm in the back yard a couple of weeks ago.  She wasn't afraid to go after that enormous worm, but she also didn't succeed in getting it off the tomato vine.

Another suspect is the same one we considered last year at this time:  wasps.  We haven't seen any of the Mud Dauber wasp nests this year, but the Paper Wasps in the back yard not only revived their old nest from last year, but also constructed a large three part wasp condo under the patio cover.  You would think they could have taken out that hornworm, but noooo.

One thing I don't think we'll try again is the caterpillar cage we tried last year when we were having the same problem (See Co-dependent to Caterpillars, Part II).  As the subsequent posts from October and November of last year show, that effort was pretty much of a disaster, so I think they'll just have to figure it out on their own.

We'll probably have to hire a pro to get those wasp nests down, though.

Beans, Beans, Beans

Last of the Pole Bean Plants

Cindy's Pole Beans did very well this year; she planted Blue Lake and Kentucky Wonder, and both varieties produced LOTS of delicious beans.

But the plants are done for the year and she pulled the vines out this week.  She decided to leave on the vines some of the pods that grew so large while she left me in charge of the garden for a couple of weeks this summer (see "The Three Foot Long Green Bean").

Dried Pods and Beans

There weren't any that were quite that long, but the longer pods tend to be tougher to eat, so she left some of them to dry out on the vines to provide seeds for next year's garden.

The pods were so dry they crackled like paper when we broke them open to remove the beans, and the beans themselves had a tendency to shoot across the table when the pods were opened.

Blue Lake and a few Kentucky Wonder Beans

The white beans are the Blue Lake and the brown ones are the Kentucky Wonder; the whole lot of them weighed in at a pound and a half of beans.

That seemed to me to be quite a lot of beans, more than the quantity it seems reasonable to assume you might want to plant in a relatively small garden, so I suspect there will be a recipe or two involving dried beans in the near future.

Or maybe we'll have bean soup sometime this winter.

Plenty of Pumpkin

The pumpkin harvest is in, and it looks like we'll have plenty of pumpkin for the fall and winter.

We had pumpkin soup for lunch the other day, thickened with rice.

Yummy!