After a long, hot summer

Something new and amazing in my garden, Armenian cucumbers. They're really big!

A Hint about Tomato Plants

If your struggling tomato plant all of sudden looks like this:

You've been visited by this guy:

































Aiiieee! The dreaded tomato hornworm. This one was as big and long as my index finger. 


It's difficult to bring myself to touch these little monsters. Even though I know they won't do anything, I always imagine they are going to roar like a little mini T-Rex and rear back to bite or sting me when I pluck them off my plants. 


They have the most incredibly soft, marshmallow-y yucky skin feel. Like your fingers are going to go right through them and squirt bright-green goo all over yourself.


Shudder. I got the man of the house to use a stick to scrape this one off.

Easy Poppy

When I grew poppies this year, I was unsure exactly what would happen, or where the delicious seeds would emerge from.

This was the first one to bloom, 'Hungarian Blue', after months of waiting.

I had planted the seedlings in October or so. And they took a while to get going.

The gorgeous flower lost its petals in a couple days, after which it looked like this for a month or so. The plant withered and the seed pod began to turn brown.



I had a lot of brown pods at that point, so I cut them all off and got out one of the clean, empty baby food jars that had been waiting to make itself useful (in my cupboard for a few years).

I used a sharp knife to carefully saw off the top of the seed pod. Then I poured the contents into the jar.

About 2 tablespoons worth of seeds came out of the 5 pods I had. One of the pods was still a bit greenish, so the seeds hadn't turned to the magnificent dark grey blue yet. They were still a bit reddish.





It was just enough to make a batch of lemon-poppyseed muffins.

Time to press "RESET"

I unintentionally took a few months off of blogging here, it appears!

Well, I plan to start up again soon. Got lots of plans for a summer garden. Plus, I have loads of pictures from the last few months that are in need of posting.

Face palm

The "face palm" is that I wrote this last year and never posted it:

I really love where I live. This was taken looking east down the street at sunrise in early October.

I went to a talk recently that changed the way I look at the two main species of palm I see every day around the desert.

Now I notice the differences and I feel confident knowing which palm is which!

Desert ecologist Jim Cornett -- an expert on all things desert, and an expert expert on palms and snakes -- gave the talk about palms to the local horticultural society.

Here in California, our native palm is Washingtonia filifera, the desert fan palm. Cornett says our palm is special for a number of reasons: Its signature "skirt" of fronds that it wears. Its frost hardiness. Its size -- biggest (mass) native palm in the United States.

Then there's Washingtonia robusta, the Mexican fan palm. It's indistinguishable from the desert fan palm when the two are juveniles, but once they mature, the differences are striking. Have you ever seen a reeeeeaaaallly tall fan palm with a slender trunk? It's W. robusta. Our desert fan palm W. filifera can reach about 50 feet, but the Mexican fan palm can be up to 100 feet tall. Also, the Mexican fan palm is obviously skinny compared to the desert fan palm. The differences become very apparent when you see two mature specimens next to each other.

So ...

Washingtonia filifera: Large girth, magnificent plume, dry fronds against trunk, medium height.

Washingtonia robusta: Skinnier trunk, smaller plume, loses fronds easily, super-duper tall. We have nine of them in our backyard.

What is a desert hike like?

First frost

Yesterday morning was the first (light) frost of the year. I was not even aware it was going to get that cold! I guess I was just not paying attention, i.e. watching the news. The temps officially got down to 33 degrees F, which to me means in some areas it did freeze.

Happily, it didn't do too much damage to my more tender plants at home. Just a  twinge of grey and wilt on a few spaghetti squash leaves. The tomatoes stayed relatively unscathed.

However, my tomatoes at the community garden raised bed (ORB) were affected. When I visited I noted a good amount of dieback in the outermost, newest leaves.

So, last night I was paying attention, and I laid protective sheets over all my tomatoes last night -- both at home and in the ORB. I'm going to do what it takes to shield my tomatoes through the winter this year.

Anybody know the right thing to do with dead/frozen tomato leaves? Remove or let remain?

Chomping the calliandra

Can you count all the caterpillars and the hoverfly in this picture?

We planted pink powder puff calliandras to trail up the two patio support posts in our back yard. The one with the most new growth attracted tons of green caterpillars ... which quickly became big green caterpillars. None of them has gone into a cocoon yet. Once they get big the birds eat them. They are always replaced by new baby caterpillars.

I was picking the caterpillars off at first, because I did not want them to wreck my plant. But my mom -- who is a beneficial bug expert -- convinced me to let them do their thing. It's been fun for me and the kids to watch them get big ... and then become food for all the birdies in our yard.

 1 big greenie

1 little fuzzy

2 big greenies and a hoverfly

The bells are ringin'

We thought this was some sort of weedy tree when we first moved in. The home inspector said we should trim it back because it was so close to the house and roof. Then a month or so ago it started blooming spectacularly.

It's called Tecoma stans, or Yellow Bells. It's also known as esperanza, which is a name I just love. In general it's a shrub, meant to grow about 12 feet tall and 6 feet wide. But here it is at least 20 feet tall, towering over our home. The branches are so loaded down with these fantastic, sweet-smelling flower clusters that some of the branches have bent and broken.

The bees and hummingbirds are going absolutely nuts over this Southwest native. And I am too! It's going to bloom all through the winter.

I'm going to try trimming some of the long branches with blooms on the end and using them inside as cut flowers.

We misjudged you!

Here we thought it was just an old, crochety grapefruit tree (among 3 grapefruit trees on the property) that might not live out the year. We pruned it back hard and almost cut it down.

Really, we were standing around holding large chopping/cutting implements after pruning off three-quarters of the tree. The topic of just putting the tree out of its misery was brought up and seriously considered. But we held off, deciding that we may as well see how good the grapefruits were before taking the tree out.

Then today, I took a close look at the fruits. Do I detect a hint of orange!?