Gardening
Obligatory photo of surfers at the Eisbachwelle in Munich’s English Garden.
Cooler weather today meant I could finally cleanup the backyard garden. I can’t believe how hardy pepper plants are. Most were still alive despite a few months of zero irrigation.
Edible garden update: we continue to harvest lots of red & ripe peppers for hot sauce. The tomatoes are basically done for the season at 195 tomatoes weighing in at 34 pounds. We froze most. And finally, our figs are starting to ripen and we’re on nectarine watch 2021🌱
First ripe backyard garden tomato of the year. 🌱🍅 There’ll be many more to come!
Peppers and tomatoes garden update: tomatoes are flowering and peppers are finally growing post-transplant. The Drip Depot crop row irrigation kit is ace. 🌱
Took a Potensic D58 drone photo today of the backyard (bottom photo) to compare against January 2020 (top photo). Looking real nice. Fun to have unusual views of the yard.
How it started (Mar 2020) and how it’s going (Mar 2021) in the backyard. All lawn is removed! Garden rows are ready for our indoor started peppers and tomatoes. 🌱
Slowly preparing the backyard garden rows over the past few months 😅 Almost time to plant the peppers, tomatoes, and direct sow the herbs. No more lawn!!!!!! Tilling is amazing at removing thatch and dead lawn. 🌱
Started prepping the garden rows today. Great weather and perfect soil moisture. Was surprised how well the electric tiller did. 🌱
Frosty garden grown hot peppers (from the freezer) about to become hot sauce. We harvest over the summer and freeze until ready.
Anaheim pepper with a surprise mantis for scale. Then a jalapeño. Just popped out of nowhere while I inspected the peppers this morning. It’s protecting our garden!
Garden Update
Experimental pepper garden update: Cayenne, jalapeño, Anaheim, Hungarian wax. We will ripen all peppers to red for making hot sauce and tastier eating. Direct seeded March 29.
Falafel soft tacos tonight since we had dry chickpeas, the herb garden was begging for it, and we always have corn tortillas. Topped with red onion quick pickle and herbed buttermilk 🧆
Was prepping the vegetable garden bed and had to dodge lots of ladybugs.
Front yard (mostly) native garden update.
The California native plant garden is very green right now and soon there will be plenty of flowers. The blue oak will wake up near end of February.
Tree Chilling Hours and a Bad Bug
We’re around 770 chilling hours this season — almost 100 more than last year at this time. We hope this means we get a good crop off our ~800 chilll hour apricot (it was our first fruit tree and we had no concept of chill hours; with the usual climate and especially with climate change we’re now focusing on <500 chill hour trees). I put compost around the new nectarine, the new asparagus bed, and on the edible garden in advance of last night's rain; the clay loam soil needs some organic matter. We got 0.5 inches of rain last night. Meanwhile, here is a photo of the larval form of a beetle eating our poor cherry tree’s sap wood. It was a few centimeters long. Reminds me of Star Trek: Wrath of Khan.
The birds are gorging on seeds in our front and backyard gardens. So happy to provide them sustenance rather than a lawn desert!
A front yard native garden update! Fuchsias & Cal Buckwheat are still flowering. Coyote bushes are struggling to flower (tiny pollinators love them). The Blue Oak has no complaints. Poppies & yarrow are back after a couple of soggy thunderstorms. Toyon barely has berries.
Apple knew what they were doing delaying Deep Fusion photography feature in iPhone 11. After I saw real world results, I needed to upgrade from my blurry XS. Garden and cat pictures will be amazing. Deep Fusion certainly kept the iPhone 11 in the news cycle longer.