No, Nooooo, NOOOOO!!!!!

Sigh.

Cindy came in yesterday with this.

First Harvest

It's the first green bean from the volunteer plant that started coming up in September from beans that fell from the previous plant.  This is about the third generation to voluntarily regenerate from a plant Cindy put in about two years ago.

That wouldn't be a problem, except that these plants seem to be exceptionally prolific and we already have a freezer that is still stuffed with the two previous harvests.

It's a good thing we like green beans.

Along Came A Spider...

We were sitting on our tuffets on the front porch a few days ago admiring the huge circular web created by the Western Spotted Orb Weaver across our driveway, when the spider apparently decided to check on the security of her stabilizing threads.

...And Sat Down Beside Her

She crawled down the web and sat down on the fence railing beside me.

Spots Are Visible From This Angle

Actually, she wasn't resting, she was pretty busy the whole time checking on the webbing.  She even dropped down to the floor and either added some more webbing to the base structure, or else she gobbled up some of the chiggers or mites or whatever has been biting me on the ankles recently; it's hard to tell with spiders.

View From Another Angle

We've been calling the spider "she"; apparently both the females and the males of this species look much the same with the females being the larger of the two, about 11-17mm.  Since this spider was fairly large, we concluded that it was probably female.

I've always been fascinated by the engineering required to construct an Orb Weaver's web.  Because they construct most of the the webbing at night, I've never seen one actually construct it.  This spider's webbing stretches from the neighbor's tall Pyracantha bush on the other side of our driveway all the way across the driveway to our porch fence railing.  I still don't know how they get webbing across such a distance; this web was already constructed before we noticed it at all.

Hello, There!

They are fascinating animals, and she's welcome to all the mites, chiggers and black flies she can eat.

Got Spiders?

We were sitting on the front porch the other night, when I noticed a spider web on the porch railing that looked like a swarm of gnats caught in the web.

When I looked closer, I found that it was a nest of tiny spiders that must have just hatched out of their egg case.

Just Hatched

I usually just deport spiders if I find them inside the house.  I leave most spiders alone if they are outdoors; they eat other bugs and anything that will take out Black Flies is pretty much fine with me.  Black Flies are small, biting flies that love me for some reason and I do not like the way they fly into my ears.

However, two exceptions to this Spider Tolerance Policy are Black Widow Spiders and Brown Widow Spiders.  The Brown Widows in particular seem to love our front porch, building their messy webs all over the railings around the porch and all over the porch furniture, the porch light and pretty much anything else they can use to anchor their webs.  Their egg sacs are white spheres covered with spiky protrusions; there was an empty sac and another full one just next to where these tiny spiders were, so we knew that's what they were.

We joke that we contract out our Halloween decorations to the spiders because they use locally sourced, organic webbing, but there were just too many of these Brown Widows, so that was the last of them.

We'll leave the decorating to the Orb Weavers, one of whom seems to have designs on entrapping our car.

More on local spiders:  http://waynesword.palomar.edu/redmite.htm

Wine Delivery

We were up in Temecula recently visiting wineries, and saw this scene--the sign reads "Wine Club Members Parking".

Now that's a serious wine delivery system--roll up the windows, open the sun roof and let 'er rip.

Salad Bar

Cindy had the members of her Seed-Starting Guild over a couple of weeks ago to plant some seeds for winter crops.  Their idea was to each start some of the same seeds at the same time, take them home and then compare notes about how the plants progressed.

Winter crops, such as the broccoli, Brussels sprouts, beets and cabbage she planted, prefer cool weather, so when we had a warm spell a few days later, she brought them into the house and I got to babysit them on my desk for a couple of days before she took them back outside.

Sprouts Up

They were doing very well, germinating in a few days and beginning to develop true leaves.  But then it got hot again, and Cindy took the tray out of the little green house we made out behind the garage, thinking it would be too hot in there for them.

Looking Good

She left the tray on the platform that holds our rain barrels, and when she came back a couple of hours later, she was saddened to find a scene of complete devastation.

But Not Much Left

Some varmint, probably one of the many California Ground Squirrels, had decided to treat the tray as its own private micro-green salad bar.  Almost everything had been chewed off at the roots, not yanked out as if the birds had done it, so it was most likely a veggie-loving squirrel.

The only thing the critter didn't eat was the Arugula.

Let's Play "What's My Tomato?"

"Enter, Mystery Tomato, and sign in, please."

When we did the tomato grafting this Spring, the results were not quite as successful as we had hoped they would be; only one of the ten grafted plants survived.  See:  http://plantagarden-itllgrowonyou.blogspot.com/2016/04/not-quite-as-successful-as-we-hoped.html.

The one tomato plant that did survive was supposed to be a Rose de Berne on Estamino root stock.
We were a little surprised when the surviving plant put on a huge growth spurt and began rambling all over that end of the raised bed.  It produced very large yellow flowers that attracted the attention of an industrious bumble bee and of the California Towhees, but as time went on, not much in the way of tomatoes appeared.

Grafted Plant on the Left

When tomatoes did begin to appear, they were small, clustered and yellow.  We kept waiting for them to ripen, but they stayed yellow.  When they began dropping off the vine, Cindy started picking them and determined that they were actually ripe.  They tasted all right, but were just small and yellow.

Mystery Tomatoes

The Rose de Berne tomato is described as a dark pink tomato weighing between 6 to 8 ounces with good, sweet flavor.  The plant right next to the mystery plant is from the same lot of seeds labeled "Rose de Berne" and appears to be an actual Rose de Berne plant and is certainly producing the big round dark pink tomatoes we expect from that plant.

Actual Rose de Berne Tomato

So then what is the mystery plant and how did we end up with it?  Was it a bad seed?  Did the seeds get mixed up?  I'm not buying the bad seed explanation because the mystery tomato produces clusters of small tomatoes, while the Rose de Berne produces a single tomato on a stem, not a clump.

Cindy doesn't remember ever ordering any seeds for tomato plants that produce small yellow tomatoes, although it's possible that the seeds got mixed up by the grower Cindy bought the seeds from.

Two possibilities are the Galena's tomato  http://www.tomatogrowers.com/GALINAS/productinfo/5882/ and the Garden Peach  http://www.tomatogrowers.com/GARDEN-PEACH/productinfo/5324/.

The yellow tomatoes do have a faint bit of fuzz on them like the Garden Peach, but not what I would call "abundant clusters" of fruit.

It may just remain a mystery.

The Nest Itself

We took the House Finch nest down from the beam over our front porch Friday morning.  The last two fledgling birds flew off on Monday morning, so there was no reason for the nest itself to stay up there; if these same parents or other finches decide to have a nest there, they will construct a new one.

Good thing, too--the growing baby birds don't wear diapers, so the inside of the nest is pretty well coated with bird poop by the time they fly off.

I was curious about the construction of the nest, so I told Cindy I wanted a picture of it before it went into the trash.

House Finch Nest

This shot is of the underside of the nest.  It looks like the birds used twigs and Asparagus Fern to tie the nest together and probably to anchor it to the plastic bird spikes on the beam, and used dead leaves as cushioning for the eggs and nestlings.

We were never quite sure exactly how many eggs and birds were in the nest; we didn't want to disturb the birds any more than was necessary and even when Cindy climbed up to replace the nestling that had fallen out she did it so quickly that she didn't stop to count the number of chicks in the nest.  In any case, the nest was big enough to accommodate them and kept them safe until they could fly.

Empty Nest

The last two fledgling House Finches flew off from the nest this morning.  One or two others had left a day or two ago, but we didn't think these two were quite ready to leave the nest yet.  Although the larger one appeared to have pretty good feathers and was stretching its wings, the smaller bird didn't really look quite ready.  http://plantagarden-itllgrowonyou.blogspot.com/2016/05/location-location-location.html

They both took off anyway when we stepped out onto the porch this morning to say goodbye to a friend who had been visiting.  The larger chick flew across the driveway into the neighbors' shrubbery, but the smaller one hadn't quite got that flying thing down yet and only flew as far as the driveway, where it sat looking a bit dazed for a few minutes.  Then it sort of hopped and flew under our rose bushes and then into the pomegranate container on our front porch.  Cindy later saw it fluttering off toward the neighbors on the other side.  Since the parent birds continue to protect and feed their chicks for a few days after they leave the nest, we're hoping that they will be able to reconnect with it and continue to feed it.

Last week one of the chicks fell out of the nest and landed in our driveway.  Since the chick at that point was still in the nestling stage, mostly covered with down and only a few true feathers, we followed the advice of the Audubon Society and the National Wildlife Federation, dragged the ladder out and returned the chick to the nest.  Because birds have a poor sense of smell, returning a nestling bird won't discourage the parents from continuing to feed it.

However, both organizations advise against returning a fledgling bird, with fully formed feathers, to the nest since they're just beginning to learn to fly at that stage and need to spend some time on the ground practicing their flying skills.

We're feeling bad that we accidentally scared the fledglings out of the nest today, but Project Wildlife says the parents will continue to search for their babies and even resume feeding them if they've been gone a day or two, so we'll continue to hope that all the chicks will be all right.

Now that they've gone, we'll be able sit on our front porch again.

Of Course...

Of course, we're not the only ones around here who love blueberries.  Most of our blueberry bushes are protected by Cindy's anti-varmint panels from attack from the ground and by bird netting from depredations by marauding California Towhees, who like a little fruit with their bird seed.

The three bushes in pots in front of the garage, on the other hand, have no protection.  I was looking out the window the other day and saw the leaves of one of those bushes being agitated as if by the wind, but there was no wind blowing.

And then I noticed that Big Mama, the matriarch of the California Ground Squirrel population, seems to have produced her annual brood serially this year instead of all at once as she usually does.

That means that she now has some adolescent juvenile delinquents as well as a couple of very cute baby squirrels just out of the den, and she's teaching all of them where the free bird seed buffet is located.

Big Mama and Brood

Unfortunately, it also means that the juveniles have started ranging a bit further out and have discovered....Blueberries!

Fortunately, we collected most of the blueberries from the the garage bushes before the squirrels finally stripped them, and we also had a very good yield from the bushes in the protected area, too.

"I Found My Thrill....On Blueberry Hill..."

It's Blueberry Season!

We now have our original four blueberry bushes and three more Cindy got from her friend Janet when she moved.  All of the bushes have been flowering and producing berries for months, and now the berries are ripening.

Some varieties of blueberry require more "chill hours" than our San Diego climate has, but there are several varieties that do very well here.

Good thing we love blueberries.

Location, Location, Location

Last week we noticed a pair of House Finches inspecting the beam over our front porch.  They flew on and off of it for several days, first at one end of the beam, then at the other.

We were rather hoping they wouldn't decide to build a nest there, but they ultimately did build one at the far end of the beam.

On The Nest

 We've had birds nest on that beam before, and to some extent it's a good choice for them; it's easily accessible, it's protected from the elements, it's concealed from the view of predators and the plastic spikes we've installed on top of the beam provide some real stability for the nest.  So for those reasons it's a good choice of location.

However, we put the spikes up there to discourage birds from nesting there several years ago after  Mourning Doves had nested there several times and proved themselves to be terrible bird parents.  They build flimsy nests  consisting of a few twigs thrown together on the beam and one time one of the parent doves turned around and swept its fledgling right off the beam onto the porch below.  We scooped that one up and made an emergency run to Project Wildlife, the wildlife rehabilitation center, because it looked to us like the chick had a broken leg.  So we put up the plastic spikes to discourage nesting.

That effort has been moderately successful; the Mourning Doves have stayed away, but we have had House Finches nest there occasionally since we put up the spikes.  They are much better bird parents and build substantial nests, carefully weaving the nesting materials around the plastic spikes to give it stability.  The problem is that they tend to be shy of humans and Mama bird will fly off the nest whenever we go in or out the front door.  They will also stay away from the nest if we decide to sit on our front porch in the evening.  Since we don't want to be responsible for the eggs not hatching, we tend to avoid using the front door or sitting on the porch.  They have an incubation period of 13 to 14 days and then about another week of feeding the chicks when they hatch.

It's fun to watch the chicks develop into fledglings and begin to try their wings, but it's a pain in the tush to avoid the front door for that long.  We'll do it, because we don't want to be bad neighbors, but we really hope they'll find a different location in the future.

Loquats

We were looking at a tree in the neighbors' back yard the other day and wondering what the fruit hanging all over it was.

Loquats

Turned out it's a Loquat tree.  And Loquats are producing fruit right now--lots of fruit.  A friend who  has more Loquats than she can use gave Cindy some, so she needed to find a way to use them.

Here's the recipe Cindy came up with for Loquat Fried Rice:

Loquat Fried Rice
4 servings

Ingredients:
3 Tbsp. low-sodium soy sauce or low-sodium tamarin
1 Tbsp. sesame oil
1/4 to 1/2 tsp ginger powder
1/4 tsp. white pepper
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 clove minced garlic
 ------

1 Tbsp. olive oil
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup frozen corn
1/2 cup frozen peas
-------
3 cups cold, pre-cooked brown or white rice
2 cups diced loquats
3/4 cup roasted, unsalted cashews
2 green onions, sliced

Directions:

1.  In a small bowl, whisk together soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger powder, white pepper, olive oil and garlic.  Set aside or refrigerate until ready to use.
2.  Heat 1 Tbsp. olive oil in a large non-stick skillet over medium high heat.  Add onion to the skillet and cook, stirring often, until onions have become translucent, about 3 to 4 minutes.  Stir in corn and peas.  Stirring constantly, cook until vegetables are tender, about 3 minutes.  Stir in rice, loquats, cashews, green onions and soy sauce mixture.  Cook, stirring constantly, until heated through.  Serve immediately.

Tomato Report

This year's effort at tomato grafting was not as successful as we had wanted it to be; Cindy was hoping for a 30% success rate, but only one out of the 10 grafted plants survived for more than a few days.  See:  Not Quite as Successful As We Hoped.

However, 10% is better than 0%, so we'll take it.

Better yet, the surviving tomato plant, a Rose de Berne on Estamino root stock, is thriving.  In fact, it's doing so well that it's almost twice as tall as the ungrafted Rose de Berne plant next to it.

Grafted Tomato on Left, Ungrafted on Right

Not only is the plant taller, but the blossoms and the leaves are much larger on the grafted plant as well.

Grafted

Ungrafted

The leaves in the top photo are from the grafted Rose de Berne, the ungrafted Rose de Berne leaves are in the bottom photo.  The plants are side-by-side in the bed and I took the photos from the same spot.

Grafted Plant's Blossoms

The blossoms on the grafted plant are also much larger.  They're very pretty and they've also been attracting a bumblebee performing "buzz pollination".  I had never heard of this, but Cindy had recently read an article about bees and realized that the bumblebee she saw on the tomato blossom was loosening the pollen by buzzing over the flower's anther.  The bee rapidly contracts her flight muscles to create the buzz, then collects the loose pollen and transmits some of it to the next flower she visits.  BumblebeeConservation.org has a video of bumblebees doing this.

Tomatoes and blueberries both can benefit from buzz pollination, although because tomatoes have both male and female parts in the flower, they can also be pollinated by shaking the tomato cage, which will mix the pollen.  

We're happy to have the bumblebees, though, and looking forward to tomatoes later.

Pea Pickin' Peas

Although they've been outdone by the green beans, the Sugar Snap and Oregon Giant peas have also produced a pretty good crop this year.

Peas

They were succulent and tender, but now they're done for the year.

Sorcerer's Apprentice?

A couple of months ago, we noticed that a volunteer green bean plant was sprouting in the raised bed.  (See: Nobody Told Them ).

Sprouting

It's easy to lose track of green bean pods on the vine; one day it's a little pod too small to pick, and the next day it's three feet long and too tough to eat.  That's what it seems like, anyway.  And sometimes one of them gets missed and stays on the vine until it dries up and the seeds fall on the ground and sprout when the rains come, even though they're not supposed to want to germinate until the weather gets warmer.

Mature Plant

 So now the vine is fully mature and producing green beans.  Lots and lots of green beans.  Every day, more beans.

One of Many

We're still working on all the green beans Cindy picked and froze last summer, and probably some from the summer before that.  The plant is not only showing no signs of slowing down its production, but seems to be going into overdrive.

Lots and Lots of Beans

It's a good thing we like green beans.

Not Quite As Successful As We Hoped

Unfortunately, that's the verdict on this year's effort at grafting heirloom tomato plants to tomato root stock.

Cindy started the seeds several weeks ago, transporting them from the small greenhouse out behind the garage to inside the garage at night.  When the plants were big enough, she began the process of grafting them.

Setting Up For the Operation

First she matches up tomato and root plant with stems that are approximately the same width, then slices off the top of one tomato and one root plant; she keeps the tomato top and discards the top of the root plant.  She also cuts off most of the leaves of the tomato top so that the plant will put most of its energy into healing the graft instead of producing more leaves.

Then she makes the grafting cuts with a razor blade in both stems and clips both halves together.

Trimming the Tops

Grafted Plants

The plants go into a dark space overnight with a plastic bin over the top of the tray to keep the humidity up and the plants moist.

Humid Environment

Inspected By Miss Mia

After that they go into dim light in the garage for a couple of days and continue to grow.

At least that was the plan.

After a couple of days, all but one of the plants had keeled over and it was clear they had not survived.

Lone Survivor

And the winner is.... Rose de Berne on Estamino root stock.

Fortunately, Cindy still has quite a few ungrafted tomato plants, so it doesn't all depend on this one plant and we should still have plenty of tomatoes this summer.

All Choked Up

Sorry, couldn't resist that title.  Yes, it's about artichokes.

We've tried to grow artichokes before with limited success.  Cindy planted another one this year although she was afraid that our climate didn't have enough "chill hours" for the plant to flower, but the plant proved her wrong and has produced six buds so far.

Artichoke Flowers

Is this not a thing of beauty?

And it was even better for lunch.

Good-bye To Cousin Itt

Cindy planted an ornamental grass plant in a container next to the garage door  a couple of years ago.

It became pretty bushy and I started calling it "Cousin Itt" because it reminded me of the character in the Addams Family.

Cousin Itt flourished for a while, but unfortunately began to dry out and shrivel up recently, so Cindy pulled it out and replaced it with some new blueberry plants.

That's fine with me; neither we nor the bees eat the ornamental grasses, but we do like blueberries.

"Hold This....Again"

Our blueberry bushes are currently loaded with blossoms and unripened berries.  That makes the El Nino storm we are told will arrive tomorrow a matter of concern; we don't want to lose those berries.

So Cindy, a former Girl Scout, was prepared to take measures to protect them from a hard rain by putting a cover of shade cloth over the bed by clipping it to some wire frames she had installed a couple of months ago.  We pulled the cloth over the frame and it worked beautifully.

I think it should work as long as the wind doesn't get too bad; there are certainly enough clothes pins securing the cloth to the wire frame.

The Color Purple

Purple is the color that predominates in our garden at this time of year.  I don't think the iris have looked any better, although it turns out that they are probably doing so well because of an irrigation malfunction.  When Cindy checked the drip irrigation systems she discovered that one line was getting no water and the irises were getting lots of it.  No wonder they were happy.

Iris

The lavender is also in full flower at this time of year and the bees love it.

Lavender

Lavender Flower

I'm Not Sure What This Is, But It's Pretty

And a few other colors, as well.

The only drawback to this climate is that lilacs generally don't do well here because there aren't enough chill hours.

My Favorite Season

I've said before that San Diego has three seasons:  rainy, fog and fire.  The rainy season usually lasts from November through about April.  Fog season is May and June, called May Gray and June Gloom, and fire season, our least favorite season, is the months of August, September and October.

There is another season here, though, that's my favorite:  avocado season.

I love avocados almost as much as I love potatoes.  Sometimes more, and that's saying something.

Unfortunately, avocados require quite a bit of water and the prolonged California drought has taken a heavy toll on them.  A friend who owns an avocado grove told us last year that they had to "stump out" half their trees to cut down on their water usage.  Another friend who has one tree says his tree's productivity is way down this year.  That may be due to the drought, or it might be that the tree is just going through a cycle of low productivity.

But the good news is that the avocados the trees are producing are still big and luscious and wonderful.  Yum.

Bees Can't Swim

When a new neighbor moved his bee hives in across the canyon, we noticed that the bees were soon drowning in our birdbath, so last year I created a bee landing platform out of cedar boards with holes drilled through them for the bees that was supposed to alleviate the problem.  See: Water For Bees

It worked...sort of.  The bucket we initially had the platform in turned out to be much too deep; it was a pain to fill and the platform got stuck in the bucket as the water level sank.  So Cindy found a shallower bowl to put inside the bucket and that worked for a while.

Eventually, though, the cedar platform became so water logged that it sank below the water level and became even more of a hazard to the bees than the birdbath was, so Cindy took it out and we forgot about it for a while.

Since we've been having unseasonably warm weather lately, though, we've both been fishing drowning bees out of the birdbath again, so we've filled the bowl back up and the bees seem to be re-discovering it.

Bees On The Edge

We're hoping it works better this time.  We want all our critter friends--both avian and apian-- to be happy and safe.

Regicide?

We found a couple of Monarch butterfly caterpillars recently, both just sort of trucking along far from any Asclepia plants, their chief food source, so we transferred them to the one healthy Asclepia plant in the yard.

They both happily set to chewing away on the leaves and eventually the larger of the two set off to find a place to form a chrysalis.

Looking For A Location

The site it finally selected was the underside of a rail on one of Cindy's anti-varmint panels.

Chrysalis

That was OK; it should be fine there as long as we remember it's there.

We continued to keep an eye on the second caterpillar, but today I found it wrapped up in spider web, looking dried out and dead.

Spiders Got This One

I guess the spiders have to eat, too, but I wish they would pick on the less beneficial insects and leave the pollinators, including the Monarch caterpillars, alone.

Onions

Out in the garden the other day I noticed Cindy planting some onion sets among the beets.

I thought they looked very interesting, so I asked Cindy what the differences were between the red ones and the white ones.  She said, "Well.... some of them are red... and some are white."

Oh, duh, red onions and white onions.  Got it.