Black Thumb Garden Journal

Kale is the surprise hit of my garden. I have so much kale. There are only so many smoothies and stir frys I can make with it. I am a California cliche. 

This suddenly shot up like a teenage boy and sprouted flowers

Did you know kale had flowers? I did not. 

Because I’m lazy with weeding, and you know, they’re pretty too as they wreak havoc on my garden like rogue sorcerers. 

Has it really been over 4 months since I last posted? Way too many changes have happened in that time. My brain is already frantic. So, you get a post on beets. Because, why not....

My beets went bonanzas after I finally thinned the poor creatures and then we had a spate of rare rain showers. And I had no idea beets could look like this. It was ridiculous. So I decided to harvest all of them. 

Some were still tiny, but I got a couple huge ones. Aren’t they so pretty? 

I sat there for a while separating the dead/yellow leaves (compost) from the super-hard stalks (compost) from the green leaves from the actual beets. The beets are in a bowl awaiting whenever I get around to making my special roasted veggies dish. Never had beet leaves before. I Googled it to make sure I wouldn’t poison myself, then cooked them the same way I would’ve cooked kale (olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, and basically stir fried it). Though, I cooked separated the green leaves from the harder stems and cooked the stems for way longer before adding the leaves in at the end. WASH them. I had hosed them down outside, but they were still ridiculously full of dirt when I washed them again in the sink. 

Made some shrimp, steamed corn, and rice to go along with it. Ended up being surprisingly good! 10/10 would make again.

So, this recipe was told to me over the phone by my mom (who saw it on some Chinese TV show; it’s not some vintage heirloom recipe or anything). 

Ingredients:

Lemons (obviously; I used like 15 lemons, but they varied in size, so I have no idea how much you would need. I suggest just cutting lemons until you get to the desired amount needed for the recipe, see step 3.)

Rock sugar (the yellow kind that comes in thick sticks that I buy from 99 Ranch or other Chinese supermarkets. I have no idea if you can use regular sugar. I just obeyed my mother like I was taught.)

Equipment:

Slow cooker

Recipe:

1. Slice the lemons into circles. Discard the ends (I threw mine into the compost bucket). As you’re slicing, pick the seeds out and discard them too, or it will end up too bitter.

2. Put the rock sugar into a ziplock bag and smash it into small--to-medium bits. I had my husband do it out on the back porch steps with a meat tenderizer (with strict instructions to NOT use the pointy sides), but I’m sure a hammer or anything similar would suffice as well.

3. Put a layer of lemons along the bottom of the slow cooker. Sprinkle a layer of smashed rock sugar. Repeat alternating lemon and sugar layers until the slow cooker is about 80% full. 

4. End with a layer of lemons on top.

5. Cover slow cooker and put on high for 2-3 hours. I did 3 hours, checking on it every so often mostly because I like watching the bubbling and making sure nothing was straight up burning. 

6. After 2-3 hours, turn off the slow cooker but DON”T open the lid. Let it rest for 12 hours. I did this recipe in the evening and let it sit overnight while I slept.

This is a time of harvest. Ok, I know that’s supposed to be Autumn, which, well, we haven’t quite hit the winter solstice yet, so I’m still counting us in Autumn. 

I should’ve done this WAY earlier, but I finally thinned out the beets. Half out of impatience to see what the beets even looked like, and half because I finally felt too bad about the situation. So, I got a lot of tiny little beets, which are probably useless to eat, because the biggest ones I got are maybe two-bite max. I mean, I like tiny things like miniature dollhouse furniture and people cooking food with hamsters, but as beets, they’re a bit disappointing. Maybe I should just give them to the people that cook food with hamsters. Still, they’re super cute to look at.

The biggest one of them all! 

I collected some kale to make a delicious smoothie. I also clipped some of the bigger pieces of rainbow chard, which made a delicious chard-mushroom-turkey stir-fry to use up the Thanksgiving leftovers. 

These are like the easiest growing plants. They just....keep at it without any help from me aside from regular watering. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do, honestly, aside from just harvesting them every so often. I’ll have to do more research. 

The tiny purple peppers are popping out! So pretty. Not sure what I can actually do with 3 tiny purple peppers, aside from admiring them, so I keep waiting to harvest them.

We had some huge winds recently, so got a ton of dead leaves piling up in the yard. To save my back some trouble, I got this super cool things where you just rake up all the leaves or whatever onto this plastic, and then I can pick it up, fold it like a taco, and dump them all in one go into the compost or plant waste bin. The neighbor cat was super curious as well. It came with this carry case, and it’s supposed to fold up like a windshield screen, but I can’t figure out how to fold it smaller than in half, so that carry case is useless. Oh well, I just keep it in the shed anyways.

And our lemon tree is going bonanzas! 

We’ve been giving lemons away left and right, but it’s still going strong, so I’ve started looking into different ways of preserving it. I found this cool recipe online on how to make preserved (or pickled) lemons (https://www.craftbeering.com/preserved-lemons-recipe/), which only needs kosher/sea salt and lemon juice and a ton of patience to cut all the lemons, remove their seeds, and hand juice a whole bunch more lemons (seriously considering getting a power juicer for the future). 

It’s super pretty though, and it’ll hopefully be done (and done correctly!) in about a month.

My mom also gave me this recipe for a lemon syrup, which I’ll write out in the next post (so I can have it with me for posterity). It turned out gorgeous, and the flavor profile was surprisingly complex with sweet, sour, and mildly bitter notes that worked well together.

Autumn really is my favorite season, and Nature has been gorgeous. I’ll leave you with a couple photos, plus, of course, a flower to round it out (a fallen Chrysanthemum bloom that looked perfect where it lay).

The clover is baaaaack! I’m just so conflicted about it. On one hand, it’s giving my front lawn a fuller look because the grass is pretty much kaput. But it’s taking over everything, and I just don’t think I have it in me to spend so much time pulling it from every crevice, but it might crowd out the legitimate plants I want to grow in the lawn (like poppies and other flowers). Ah well, I’m ultimately lazy, so it’ll be a fight for the strongest...short-term evolution, if you will. 

The paperwhites are really popping up though, which is amazing because some of the bulbs straight up popped back out of the dirt because I planted them too shallowly. 

See the clover? But it’s looking very meadow-y. Also, the purple clover has been growing too, so it gives the lawn a pop of color. 

And these little white flowers popped up out of nowhere. I have absolutely no idea if they are weeds or just random flower seeds I scattered a long time ago and they’re just growing now because I’m actually watering the lawn decently now.

The freesias are also appearing too, so this little part of the front looks like someone’s head sprouting hair.

Still waiting for any sign of the hyacinths, ixias, and poppies. Still also waiting for the wild ginger, but they’re not supposed to appear until spring anyways. I’ve been slacking on putting in the poppy seeds, because I just bought a new bag of dirt to sprinkle over the seeds and it’s heavy and (as stated before), I’m lazy. 

I also bought a manual aerator, which gives me a great workout, and I’m hoping it will slightly improve the quality of the soil. 

Moving on to  the side yard, here’s a picture of my chicken wire garden.

You’ll see that I have a couple extra plants. On a trip to Home Depot to pick up some home supplies, I couldn’t resist picking up a Bell Pepper plant and a Japanese Eggplant plant, just to try it out. The Japanese Eggplant especially had such pretty flowers. I planted the Bell Pepper with my other pepper plants (upper right), and the Japanese Eggplant got it’s own little bag. So far, they haven’t died yet, so I count that as a win. 

Speaking of my pepper plants, they’re not huge, but they’re actually flowering and little peppers are appearing, so that is way better than the last time I planted them. Every little improvement counts!

See how cute!

And isn’t this a gorgeous flower? Right after watering.

The Japanese Eggplant flower is pretty too.

I guess I like purple... It used to be my favorite color growing up, though it shifted to blue (specifically turquoise or peacock blue) in adulthood. I guess I still have a special place in my heart for a good purple.

The zucchini, pumpkin, and watermelon plants are pretty much kaput. Which, as I predicted, grew really well initially, didn’t produce anything, and is on its last legs. This seems to be my gardening MO... I have no idea why this is (maybe the dang clover that took over?), but, I’ll try again next time...

Ok, a LOT has happened. This post is going to be super unfocused because I just want to get it all out. I basically spent the last month preparing my garden for Fall. What I’ve pretty much learned is that gardeners focus on two seasons the most: fall plantings and spring plantings. There are some winter & summer plants, but not as much. So, like I said in the last post, I splurged on a bunch of seeds, and then all these fall bulbs that I totally forgot about ordering showed up at my door too. So, there was a lot of stuff to do preparing everything. 

I’m splitting this up into two posts because so much has happened. This will be the front yard post. And, well, I basically have no pictures, so....suck it up? The next post will have more pics. I promise!

The front yard does not look so much like the deathscape of doom anymore. I spent a few days actually sitting down and planning everything out. Like a proper gardening plan. Ok, so I changed things like constantly, but at least it’s more organized and I’ve paired fall plantings with things I’m planning to plant in the spring, so that there’s a constant rotating array of plants going on. I’ve been deep-watering the lawn out front once a week for the past month, and some of the grass has definitely been reviving. Where the grass is definitely dead (still brown or straight up just dirt), I’ve decided to plant things directly into the lawn. 

I’ve been thinking for a long time as to whether to revive the lawn as a lawn for my kid to play on, or to basically let it revert to wilderness (or death). I’ve decided to compromise between the two and go for a natural meadow look. My front lawn is split into two sections, with a path running through it to the sidewalk out front. The left side has a tree, and around the tree, I’ve decided to plant Purple Clover and Paperwhites (Ziva and Ariel varieties). The crazy clover from last year is also popping back up due to all my watering. Also, there are random plants popping up a well, and I have no idea what they are....I’m guessing maybe seeds I tossed a long time ago that never grew because I stopped watering my lawn... I’m also going to plant Love in a Mist seeds (isn’t that a wonderful name for a flower?), a portion every week for three weeks. My kid is already trampling through it, but whatever....if the plants aren’t hardy enough for that, then it’s not a true meadow. I find that I actually prefer bulbs to seeds (though I deliberately pick seeds that promise flowers that reseed themselves). I find the hefty nature of it seems more....I don’t know...real to me? I like its solid nature vs. the ephemeral nature of seeds. Seeds somehow...baffle me. 

For the right side of the lawn, I’m planning on putting in some ground cover plants: Creeping Thyme and Alyssum. Those are apparently tromp-hardy and pretty and they spread by themselves (*cross fingers*). I’m also planning on basically covering it with poppies, because I love poppies and planting them is essentially: throw seeds on ground, toss dirt over it, wait and see what happens... Even I can’t screw that up. In front of my kid’s window, where the irises have languished for an entire year without doing anything but drooping, I’ve added some Hyacinth and Freesia bulbs. I need to finish planting all the Freesia bulbs because it gets tiring digging holes in my dirt (and by digging....I mean hacking at the incredibly hard soil to get maybe a couple inches down). 

I was gonna do the Poppies in a side yard but we’re planning on getting a dog eventually, and I figured the dog should have some place to run without trampling my flowers, so I’m leaving it as bare dirt for now with the exception of two raised bed areas that I’m planning on putting all plants that are possibly invasive or will do better in a raised bed (Chinese Lanterns, Foxtail Lily, Milkweed and Foxgloves). I’m putting off on planting them because dang those raised beds need a lot of dirt!

My technique for planting these bulbs is something I randomly came up with to deal with the crappy clay soil that my yard apparently has. I hack a hole, then I toss in a little of the Miracle-Gro Moisture Control Potting Soil, then I put the bulb in, then I fill up the hole with more of the Miracle-Gro soil, then put the dirt I dug up on top. The reason I’m doing this is that I’m “amending” the soil without actually doing all the work, the bulbs start off in decent soil and then as it grows and becomes stronger, it can deal with my crappy soil. I also like putting my crappy soil back on top because I feel like, when I water it, some of the “feel” of my soil will leak into the fancy soil and the plant will start getting used to it before it has to somehow shove its roots through it. I have no idea if this is true....but it makes me feel better. 

I did order some live plants online as well. The Wild Ginger roots were planted beneath some larger tree-plants (I have no idea what they are...they’re like trees, but smaller and more tropical looking?) so that they can have shade and have the once-a-week watering that the tree-plants get instead of the daily watering all the other plants are getting until they become more established. The instructions say not to expect anything until Spring, so I’m whatever that it’s just dirt right now. The Vinca Minor I ordered basically arrive DOA...just brown-black and brittle and wrapped around each other, so I planted a few to see if they would revive, and when they didn’t, I threw them in the compost. I was a bit bummed by that, but they did go across the entire country to get to me, and well, it is what it is. Also, there was NO way, I would be able to hack 100 holes to get them all planted before whatever was barely holding on to life would make it into the ground. And now I know never to buy 100 of any kind of plant unless they’re poppy seeds and I can literally just throw them on the dirt.

So, that’s what’s happening out front through the next month or so. There are a few winter plants as well that I’ll eventually get in the ground. We’re lucky it doesn’t freeze at all in our climate zone so I never have to worry about digging bulbs out of the ground or thinking about when the “frost” time is for plantings. 

Once there is more happening than random mounds of dirt in my half-dead lawn that look like a groundhog family moved in, I’ll put more pictures up. 

Ok, here is part 2! The backyard! This was more of a tidying up thing. I basically pulled up all my tomato plants. They were mostly dead anyways, and I read online that that’s what you’re supposed to do every year and replant. Not sure if I want to replant them next year....the little tomatoes were super cute, but dang it was an awful lot of work to get them there. I kept putting it off because the tops of some of the tomato plants were still green and flowering even if the rest of the plant was dead and brown and pathetic looking. 

Pretty, right?

But, then my kid started trying to eat the gross wrinkly withered tomatoes remaining on it and almost ate a spiderweb, so eventually I sucked it up and pulled everything up. 

The local stray kitty liked hanging out in the dead branches.

There was a lot of space in the raised bed with the kale and chard, so I planted some bokchoy and fennel, as they’re fall plants. 

Notice the little cat-scratch preventer thingies I put in. They actually don’t prevent the cats from doing anything. In fact, one of the stray kitties was LYING on it straight up, like a bed of nails. But....no digging so far, so *knock on wood*

The kitties DID dig up my pepper plants and snapped one very promising one in half which PISSED me off. So, I bought some chicken wire and finagled a little fence around it. The pepper plants actually have a few flowers on them, which was much better than the batch from last year, which was why I was particularly mad at the kitties. When I told my husband about the chicken wire fence, he looked at me like....why did it take you so long? And yes, he’s right, but damn boy, why you gotta do me like that?

Pre-digging and pre-fence. Notice the darker colored leaves up front? Yeah, I have absolutely no idea what plants they are. They seem to be very sturdy and not like the other weeds around it, so I transplanted them to the back. That way they can grow in peace and not disturb my pepper plants. I’m curious as to what they’ll end up being....I’m REALLY hoping they aren’t some weird-ass toxic weed thing.

The other mini-trees are hanging in there. I planted some Anemone bulbs (I don’t know if I spelled this right....because aren’t these also sea-creatures?) next to the foundation mostly because I had no more room for them in the front and it will make the back look less bare. 

The lemon tree is almost ready for harvesting again. My husband has been salivating over the pretty lemons.

The first of the lemons. 

The pumpkins and zucchini were so promising, with big beautiful flowers, and then all the leaves withered and are turning brown. Plus, all the potential zucchinis that were appearing withered away without getting more than a couple inches big. Somehow I KNEW this was going to happen. I always get them started really well, and then they all die before producing anything. Should I be changing my watering habits after they sprout flowers? I literally don’t know what to do. Ugh....

At least there’s one plant that somehow is thriving despite my best efforts. I’ve had to cut them back twice already. Like, chopping them in half, and it just grows back. It’s pretty though, so I don’t mind. I just wish all my other plants were more resilient.

See where they’re growing right out of the cut section?

At least one piece of good news: the Chrysanthemums are blooming again! I guess I could’ve cut down the blooms until there were only a few of them to get the really big flowers, but I don’t mind having a lot of little cute flowers instead. 

The front yard is still the deathscape of doom. I went on a crazy shopping spree on Etsy for new seeds I could possible plant there. But, this time I tried to play it smarter. I decided to only buy seeds that fit at least 2 out of my 3 criteria: 

1. Drought-resistant (because I’m super lazy about watering, and I don’t like paying high water bills)

2. Heat-resistant (I live in climate zone 10b, which means we get some scorcher days, plus my yard doesn’t really have a lot of shade right now)

3. Tolerates clay soil (which is soil that doesn’t drain easily when wet, roots have a hard time penetrating, and can get super hard and cracked when dry...so terrible soil for most garden plants)

I’ve also started putting together an actual spreadsheet of my seeds so I can plan when/where to plant them rather than deciding randomly on a whim. So far, I only have the seeds I’ve received in the mail, but I’ll probably add in all the rest later.

On to the actual plants!

The fig tree keeps sprouting new leaves, so that it’s starting to look like a cool fractal.

The strawberry plants have actually “survived” two instances of the stray cat digging up the top layer. The pot is way too tall and narrow to poo in, so I have no idea why she keeps doing that. I managed to salvage at least half the seedlings, but it’s in wait and see mode. The side pockets are doing well though (no digging there), so I’m watching to see if anything actually develops fruit-wise.

My tomatillos plants have all died but one that’s hanging on by a thread....it needs to be propped up because it’s super top heavy. I read online that these and the tomato plants die and need to be replanted every season, so I’m not too bummed they’re looking dreadful. In the space around it, I added more gardening soil (plus the gardening soil from the dregs of my orange hat tomatoes), and I planted all my pepper seedlings. I am trying to be super watchful so the stray cats don’t dig them up and so far so good. There are the Japanese purple pepper plants, the Violet Sparkle pepper, and the Lipstick pepper. I completely failed last time with my pepper plants, so we’ll see what happens with these.

And finally, I like to end on a flower. My zucchini and pumpkin plants are starting to flower! The watermelon plants are down to two, and they look stunted in comparison to the others, but they’re holding on. 

Just a quick update with pics.

Plants doing well: 

Beets are thriving. I’m worries they’re too crowded and the resulting beets are going to be teeny-tiny.

Vining plants (pumpkins, watermelons, and zucchinis). They droop like that mid-afternoon (when the pic was taken) when the sun is crazy-hot but they pop back up around early evening. One of my watermelon plants got chomped, but the rest are growing quickly.

Close-up. The one closest is the watermelon one. I can’t really tell the pumpkin and zucchini ones apart.

Fig tree randomly sprouted more leaves after not doing anything for months. Not sure if that’s the way it grows or because I’ve started a new watering technique.

Aside from a couple pots, all the seedling are sprouted. I thinned them out a bit, so hopefully that’ll help.

Strawberry plants are hanging on. There’s one that’s much bigger than the others. I’m not sure if it’s actually a super-strong strawberry plant or a weed that managed to find an area to root. Time will tell.

This is what I call my Last Chance Pot. It contains that avocado seed that died on me, but is suddenly sprouting like crazy with multiple shoots, plus some of the pepper plants I thinned out. I pretty much let my toddler “take care of it” and she has fun watering it and messing with the dirt. Basically it lets my toddler “help” me with gardening without her uprooting everything else, and it helps me to feel less bad about thinning out stuff. If they grow, great! If not, no harm, no foul. 

Everything else is holding steady with the exception of my front yard, which is the deathscape of doom. I can not figure out the sprinkler system, and I’m lazy about watering. You would think grass would be the best at surviving because it doesn’t have to support any fruits or flowers, but it’s not. It’s terrible. 

And my usual flower picture to end my post:

We’re in the midst of a heatwave, which sucks for us, but is great for a lot of my plants. So, I decided to give it another try and plant some seeds that were recommended for a fall harvest. 

First, I’m trying to grow pepper plants again. I planted three types of peppers (Violet Sparkle, Lipstick, and the Japanese Purple). I had failed completely when I first started gardening. All of my pepper plants died. I had one last Japanese Purple (not real name, but I can’t remember off the top of my head) one remaining, but in the last couple of days, the last of the leaves fell off. I bought this interested self-watering seedling set-up, and it’s been great since I won’t accidentally overwater the seedlings. I check the dirt everyday to see if it’s still moist, and when it starts feeling dry, I re-fill with water. I’m seeing the first of the sprouts come out. 

I’ve been trying to be more hands-off with my watering. I bought a sprinkler contraption for my front lawn plus a bluetooth faucet timer, but the hoses keep  falling off with any sort of water pressure, so I need to figure that out. Meanwhile my lawn has completely turned brown, so, frankly, I’m not terribly rushed to fix the sprinkler. 

I also bought these plastic self-watering globes for my container plants. I thought I’d just fill it up, and then it would slowly water over a few days. So, when I ever get to go on vacation again, I won’t come back to dead plants. However, I’m not sure if I’m doing it wrong or because of the heat wave, but they drain super quickly and I have to re-fill it daily. It kind of defeats the purpose, but I do notice that my plants seem healthier since the water is coming from deep in the dirt, instead of showered from on top. 

The ceramic pot in the middle is my new (kind-of-expensive) strawberry pot. Yes, I’m trying to re-grow my strawberries because none of the plants survived from the first go-around. You can see the little pockets ringing the pot where I can plant seeds as well. I think the combination of the pot and the low-splash watering from the globe is actually helping as they seem to be sprouting all over.

It was also recommended that in my region to plant squash and other vining plants, so I cleared out a space in my side yard, added potting mix to the top to help with the seeds, and planted pumpkins, watermelons, and zucchini. I wasn’t expecting too much because the soil is so-so, so I planted double seeds in case only one sprouted. But, the combo of good watering and lots of sun, and all the seeds seem to be sprouting. I have no idea if I should thin them, or hope it doesn’t interfere with each other. I guess we’ll just have to see. 

Notice the black grids around it? They’re cat-proof plastic. It has little plastic nubs to make it uncomfortable for cats to go on them but not harm them. I didn’t want our local stray cats to accidentally dig up the seeds and use this cleared area as a litter box. It actually seems to be working. This area wasn’t disturbed at all. I actually had it fully covered until the plants sprouted, and then moved them to the outer perimeter. They’re held down with earth staples. 

Close look at the sprouts. This growth is just over a week or so, which is astounding to me. However, I won’t jump for joy quite yet, because I seem to have gotten the hang of getting the seeds to sprout, but I have yet to have a huge amount of luck getting plants to fruit. Plus, once the roots hit the native dirt and me not thinning them out could kill them before anything else happens as well. 

Also, my family has really gotten into beets recently. They’re actually relatively hard to find, unless one pays farmers market prices, and Trader Joes is ALWAYS out of frozen beets. So, when I saw that it was a good plant to try for fall, I decided to get some seeds and try myself. They’re actually doing well!

I did try to thin them out a bit (yes, this is post-thinning). I just feel so bad pulling them out by their roots! Who am I to decide who gets to live and who must die for the good of the rest? Just because some grow faster and bigger than the others doesn’t mean the smaller slower ones deserve death?! Ok, yes, I need to work out some stuff here. But, anyways, I sort-of thinned them out until I felt too badly and stopped. They’re in my grow bag because I figured it’ll be easier to harvest them and then reuse it for other root veggies later without me having to really dig too hard. 

So, a couple of weekends ago, we decided to go to a local antique/gardening shop because we’ve been trying to find a good front gate that not only fits the dimensions of our fence but also fits with the style of the house, and this is really the only antique shop near us that carries outdoor stuff (most antique shops just do indoor furniture at most). Anyways, long story short, we parked in front of this house with the most gorgeous garden. The owner, an older man with his white hair in a thin ponytail, was out front watering the garden, so I said, “Your garden is beautiful! I wish I could keep plants alive the way you’re doing.” We got to talking (turns out he’s a well-traveled photographer) and it ended up with him giving us a few plants! I was so thankful, but also super intimidated. I mean, what a wonderful gift! I can’t just kill it within a few months like my other plants! Anyways, I found some nooks to plant them. I believe one is a chili plant of some sort, one is a yellow guava plant, and I can’t remember what the third is supposed to be (a curry plant?? Is that a thing?).

The chili plant

The curry (?) plant. Not pictured is the yellow guava. For some reason, its leaves got this weird burnt look right in the center of some of the leaves. So far, all three of the plants seem to be, if not thriving, at least surviving.

What isn’t surviving are these cute flowers I planted out front to try to alleviate the dreariness of my dead lawn. The photo is slightly off-center because it was taken by my toddler (I will call it artistic!), as it’s the only decent photo I have of it.

So, they were all in one pot. I split them up by ripping them away from each other, but with as much of the original dirt as possible. Yeah, they’re now just as dreary as my front lawn, if not more dreary since they were so bright and cheerful, and now they are gray and drawn, like my mood through a lot of 2020. I refuse to take a picture of them. 

My avocado plant is also getting a weird burnt-ish look:

Weirdly, other flowers seem to be thriving. It’s hilarious that I try to hard to keep some plants alive and they fail miserably (even if I buy the ones that are “suited” for my climate region) and others just pop out of nowhere and thrive without any care. It’s a metaphor for life, I swear. Anyways, at least it adds a pop of color to my yard. So, I’ll leave you with my usual flower photo.

Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. For a while, I was too depressed by all the garden setbacks. This led to a period when I was like, “What is even the point?” and my watering schedule got really erratic, which probably led to more rapid death (and our lawns out front is completely dead, just an expanse of crackly brown). And then I was like, “I kind of want to try again but mid-summer in the middle of crazy heat probably isn’t the time to do it.” And then I received an email about a sale on fall bulbs (to bloom in the spring), and those advertisements are surprisingly effective, so I ordered some bulbs to come in the fall. I’ve also ordered some irrigation set-ups because I’ve become very lazy about watering. We also wanted to put in a faucet in the back, so we called some plumbers, and we were very embarrassed when the plumbers are like “you already have a faucet in the back”. We had been living in this house for 8 months and never knew that there was a faucet sticking out of our hot water heater. That’s the thing about being a first-time homeowner...you don’t know what you don’t know. 

Anyways, summer has been a period of mourning for the lost plants, some minor harvesting from the plants that have hung on, and a lot of maintenance. I pulled some minor weeds, cut back some crazy plants that were threatening to take over our shed and other trees, and “pruned” our trees (which involved me randomly cutting branches that were sticking out weirdly...conformity for all! This is turning out to be a bad dystopian novel for my plants). 

My cucumber plants produced a single cucumber and then promptly all died. I had no idea when to actually harvest the cucumber. But after a while, the plants were looking too pathetic, so I cut off the cucumber. 

As it isn’t a traditionally green cucumber, I was trying to figure out the exact shade of yellow/orange to wait. It still looks cool, right?

White on the inside. I’m trying to save the seeds to try again next year. I think next year, I’ll just plant directly into the ground.

The tomatillos are doing decently considering how shallow the dirt they’re rooted in. There aren’t a lot of fruit, but they turned out lovely.

And my tomato plants are doing the best. Surprisingly, half the tomatoes are red and half are orange. I’m thinking they got cross-pollinated with my orange hat tomato plants, which is what led to this weird hybrid plant. Makes for some lovely variety of colors though, especially with the purple shading. 

My kid loves tomatoes, and she has started plucking the tomatoes directly off the plant and popping them into her mouth while I work on other gardening chores. I don’t mind. A little dirt builds up immunity and I haven’t used any chemical pesticides since my first couple forays when they were seedlings. I did discover this randomly cool corpse of a bee on one of my tomatoes.

How interesting is that?

I gave some tomatoes to my parents since the harvest has been so abundant. Since some tomatillos were getting ripe, I harvested them and more tomatoes as well. 

Look at those colors! The tomatillos are also purple where they received a lot of sun. So, I decided to make a salsa out of them.

Recipe: Cut tomatillos into quarters and throw them in a blender. Add the tomatoes (washed, but uncut), my one cucumber (skin cut off, chopped into smaller pieces), the last jalopeno lingering in the fridge (de-seeded because I can’t really handle spice), a quarter of an onion (chopped into smaller bits; we already had half an onion just sitting there, so I cut that in half), a mango (an orange filipino-type mango, skin cut off and flesh just randomly sliced off), some lemon juice, and some salt (to taste). Put blender on low until it gets to a consistency you like. It turned out way more orange than I was expecting. I didn’t even need to add water because everything else had their own juices. It turned out better than I expected. My husband said it tasted really good, and he already ate half of it (so he wasn’t just saying that to make me feel better). 

Two of my avocado seeds actually sprouted after forever, and they got too big for the pot they were in, so I planted them directly into the ground. The dirt was full of weed seeds and super dry, so I just dug a hole, took out the plant from the pot with all its dirt, put it in the hole, and then filled the hole with potting soil (rather than using the dirt I dug out). 

You can see the difference in the color of the two soils.

And finally, my hibiscus bush is flowering like crazy. I can’t take any credit for this, as it was already here when we bought the house. It’s so lovely, and I have wonderful childhood memories of hibiscus flowers so it makes me happy whenever I see the blooms glowing against the dark green leaves. 

Some setbacks have occurred in the past week. It feels like every time I get somewhere in this thing called gardening, something else happens that discourages me. It’s pretty frustrating. 

My star jasmine disappeared. Like, one day it was doing well and thriving. The next, all that remains is a little bit of stem sticking out of the ground. I was really bummed because my dream was to have it get really big and climb over the fence in this fragrant profusion, and now it’s this dead stick in the ground. I wonder if I might be better off buying a larger version from home depot and hoping for the best. 

Also, one of my cucumber plants that has been hanging on for dear life is on its last death throes. All the leaves have fallen off, and the main stem is slowly shriveling up. 

Finally, while checking my plants, I came upon this behemoth, which to be frank, scared me so badly, I think my spirit temporarily left my body. I ran back inside, and made my husband put on gloves and take it two blocks down (I didn’t really want to outright kill it). 

Look at it! Look at that spike, that Cyclops eye, those chompers, and that size! Oh my god, if that’s what took out my star jasmine, I would not even be surprised. That thing could take out a small mammal, like a mouse or a baby squirrel. 

Anyways, I’m a bit demoralized. Plus, my kid trampled a couple plants due to her enthusiasm in showing me the “pretty flower”, and I can’t even be mad at her, because she’s happy in my garden. 

Things starting to happen now that we’ve hit the summer heat!

On the lemon cucumber front, they’re getting big. Like, bigger (and spikier) than I was expecting considering the picture in the seed catalog. One of the cucumber plants is doing amazing, one is possibly going to pop out a couple cucumbers maybe, and one is trying desperately to stay alive. It’s so strange to me how plants all planted at the same time in the same dirt with the same sun and water can grow so differently. 

The tomatillos are starting to pop up as little tiny green lanterns, and they are adorable.

And the first of my blueberry tomatoes turned red! But it was way tinier than I was expecting it to be (also because of the picture in the seed catalog). Maybe this was an early bloomer and the other tomatoes will get bigger? I have no idea. I harvested it, and cut the tiny thing in half to share with my daughter (who loves eating tomatoes). It was yummy (tasted like a tomato, so that was...good), but it was so tiny that I’m not 100% sure what I was tasting before it was gone. 

Some more flowers popping out (still don’t remember the name for this...I really need to go look for my bag of bulbs in the shed). Trying to decide if it’s way too late in the year to plant the rest of the bulbs, since I have two empty areas just waiting on dirt. 

And the first of my hibiscus flowers unfurled its petals. Unfortunately, the hibiscus bush (which is gigantic now, probably from daily watering) has an aphid infestation. There’s like thousands of tiny white & black dots on a lot of the buds, and like two lone ladybugs trying their hardest to eat all of them. I’ve been blasting the plant with strong streams of water to try to knock them off without buying pesticides or anything (sorry poor ladybugs who were just trying to help me out!), but not sure if it’s a good long-term plan despite it being surprisingly cathartic.

I did a few chores yesterday. I deadheaded most of the remaining chrysanthemums (they were kind of sickly looking blooms anyways, wilting before they were fully bloomed) and getting rid of any dead stems. I also read this thing about creating a mowing garden, where you plant clover or other similar plants that will help pollinators when they flower, but then are meant to be mowed down. Since my front lawn is mostly this dead brown crunchy expanse (like, seriously, the gardener doesn’t even show up anymore because there’s literally nothing to mow), I shook out my remaining half a container of grass seed and then added a couple of packets of clover and buckwheat that I had anyways (they were supposed to go in the spaces between the sidewalk and the street, but we’ve resorted to just cutting everything down). I’m hoping that these plants are hardier than whatever my grass was. Plus they’re supposed to be nitrogen-fixing, meaning that when you mow them when they flower, nitrogen goes into the ground (making it better? I’m hoping it’s better), so perfect for a mowing garden. We’ll see what happens. I didn’t really prepare the ground, just tossed them in my lawn and watered thoroughly. A little worried the abundance of birds outside are just going to eat it all before it sprouts, but whatever. They won’t even touch the fancy peanut-butter bird food I put outside, so their loss.