Not that I really want onions

Do I really care about Texas Sweet Onions? No, not really. But, there exists a patch of harsh clay adjoining the NE part of my structure (house). Well, in reality harsh clay exists throughout my yard. But a mountain is conquered one step at a time. So, one step would be to deal with this chunk on the NE that is right under the drip.

They had the Bonnie bulbs for sale - 80 of them for a dollar. Some one hundred days from now, that crisp dollar bill plus 2 hours of weeding and burying these bulbs should turun into 5-10lbs of onions. But these onions have it cut out for them - no mercy in this clay; this is a test in resilience for them. If not, its another step in cultivating that area and keeping it fungus free for the season.

Dolly is growing it for Vaishnavi

I was sure that I was done buying tomato plants twice this season. But the third time is a charm - you can take my word for it. Yesterday, we brought home a grown (defined as something taller than 4 inches) Early Girl tomato. The selection critera were: as woody as possible, as few branches as possible, healthy (disease free), as tall as possible and ideally, with some flowers. The winner was about a foot tall, had poor posture (which I will address with aggressive staking) and three yellow flowers.

This morning, hubby and I drove to landfill to bring it some fresh compost and mulch. She is now in the ground, watered and well. All this preparation is to welcome Vaishnavi to San Diego on May 3. Generally speaking, Early Girls deliver a ripe fruit some 40 days from flowering. If that does pan out, Vaishnavi can step out to the garden, harvest her tomato and eat it in her salad. I think she is going to like it :)

My versatile tomato cage

Last year, I'd purchased this redwood lattice duly spliced in three (two for me and one for Rachel) from Home Depot fully expecting that they'd see me through the next five years of pole beans and sweet peas. It turns out that San Diego's dense (not!) rainfall and perpetual humidity has over powered the resilient redwood and I expect to at best derive two growing seasons out of these immaculate works of carpentry. So, the new experiment for the year - grow pole beans on a tomato cage. I've transplanted four saplings to a cage - one for the cutworms (or whatever other magical creature that likes to eat the first four inches of a five foot tall vine), one for bad weather (or any other such natural misfortunes) and two to feed my family.

The cage is 54"H x 18" (diameter) of heavy duty galvanized steel wire, seems sufficiently sturdy to support my rigorous beans. Isn't that what I'd said about the lattice? I will report at the end of the season.
Some other time, I plan on letting sunflowers shoot some 8-10 feet into the sky and let my beans climb on them - wouldn't that be a visual delight? Hold that thought; I still don't have a way to harvest the beans regularly...
PS: Tomorrow will be a busy day - off the landfill for my square yard of mulch.

My navel orange tree costed $5 in the 1870's

Did you know that all the Washington Navel Trees in California came from two mother plants (of which only one survives to this date)?

In 1873, Eliza Tibbets has convinced William Saunders at The Department of Agriculture to give her the two navel trees that originated from Brazil’s Bahia Province. Saunders hoped the foreign trees would thrive in Riverside, and indeed they did. The oranges produced by the parent navel trees were not only sweet tasting, but were seedless as well. Rumors about the seedless oranges, later named “Riverside Navel,” spread like wildfire amongst local area residents. Demand was so robust that Eliza Tibbets selling budstock for $5 a bud, a fortune for that time in history.

I offer my humble obeissances to this mother plant as I get ready to pull out my own Washington Navel Oranges from my baby plant. My plant is about three and half feet tall, a foot taller than what it was when I brought it home some eighteen months ago. As you may know it takes a few months for an orange to mature on a plant, so it has been several months of graciously contained eagerness. Boy, doesn't gardening moderate that incessant pursuit of instant gratification in the world!

Thee inches tall and counting

I'm dreaming of grated radish in yoghurt. I can think of grated radish with falafels and humus. I can continue thinking many more yummy thoughts - but that's not what this is all about. This is about my radish saplings that have put out some real leaves and stand a majestic three inches above the ground. That dense brown mulch is caffeine (courtesy: Starbucks). I seem to think that they might be weed deterrents; I will let you know how true that hypothesis is at the end of the growing season. ps: In case you've noticed the green shoots behind the radish, those are onions. I hope the sulfur in the big bulbs would keep us fungus free this growing season.

The Quail Gardens Tomato Plant Sale

So I was at my desk at work this week when I received an email from my sister. Jenny, our neighbor had invited one of us to join her to a trip to the Quail Gardens Tomato Plant sale. The kicker - my sister's email mentioned, in line with her post on "no more tomato plants", that I was barred from bringing more tomato plants home.

Come Saturday morning, I walked over to Jenny's and she had another surprise for me - a coupon that allowed me 1 free tomato plant. Ah, now there's no way I'm going to return with no tomato plants.

For the exotic variety seeker, the annual tomato-mania event at Quail offers a plethora of choices. From the garden variety early girls and better boys, I found tomatoes with the word chocolate in their names - irresistable. That said, since there was no promise of cocoa blended tomatoes, I figured I would finally step out armed with 2 tomato plants - a pear tomato and a type with a name called "banana legs".

The pear tomato is a cherry, supposedly a profilic producer, but what drew me to it was the promise of vitamin C loaded tomatoes which look like christmas lights. Let's see how that pans out in the yard - will be rather cool to have Xmas in the summer, and mimic the southern hemisphere.

After this week's foul short tournament at work, and the term spaghetti arms that went with it, I was somehow attracted to the banana legs moniker. How does a tomato get associated with a banana? Apparently, this one is pasty and meaty. The shape tends to be longer than not, and a yellow color suddenly scream banana. All the 6" pots had plants with baby flower buds in them, and we promptly put them in the ground yesterday. After this morning's Starbuck's run for used coffee grounds, and the mild drizzles, I'm anxiously waiting for those first banana legs to get going

Keeping up with the Loffts

Conspicuous consumption they say occurs when "households care about their relative standard of living" in relation to their societal peers (J Gali, 1994). But what I did shouldn't concern the Loffts or the ivory tower researchers.

I'd built this outstanding trellis from pieces of wood that are about to be composted and earmarked it for my beans. Instead of the beans, I put in a bunch of Sweet Ann Snap Peas. It was me following Jenn's bright example of pretty flowers and nitrogen fixing with the last little "not-frying hot yet" weather we have. I'm unsure whether the April sun might roast these tender vines. Even if they're not roasted brown, I am unsure if it might be too warm to produce. If nothing, we will will assign it to being a curious character's nature-defying experiment. By late April, it will still not be too late to put more beans in the ground.