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.