Here I am in Southern California

Finally, a Flower Bed

All that digging in the side yard is finally paying off. I love being out there now!

I got three pony packs of zinnias at Island Seed and Feed, and this is the first bloom. It's filled out a little bit since I took this, ans is a very pretty light lemon yellow color.

Another recent find from La Sumida, a Blue & Black Sage. Dan loves the colors of these flowers, and so do I.

I was thrilled to find this one at Island Seed & Feed. It's a perfect addition to my perennial bed. Dan thinks they should just be called "whites." :)

It makes me so happy to see the bees on them. There are always bees all over the side yard.

Here's a view of the mostly-perennial section:

This is a little further down on the same bed. Still a few holes, but the cosmos are starting to fill them in.

I'm planning to put some Icelandic and Oriental poppies in this section this fall.

Figlet

My poor little Panache fig tree... It's now survived a whole year with me, during which time it has dried out too much and lost all its leaves twice, dropped them for the winter once - causing me to think I had killed it dead, and put out new shoots several times.

Frankly, at this point I am thrilled that I haven't killed it. The fact that there is one, lonely, adorable figlet on it is just icing on the cake. As my niece Sophia says, it can be friends with the six blueberries I got this year.

Garlic, Squash & Peppers

Oh dear, fallen behind in my posting again! I started this next series of posts two weeks ago, and between the construction and Grandma Kitty's 100th birthday, I did not get back to them. Looking at our slate of projects for the next six months, I expect this will be par for the course.

I took this weekend (mostly) off from work around the house, and actually just spent a couple of hours on a quilting project. That's been quite a rarity this year!

Anyhow, here are the belated  garden posts, just in time for me to need to do a new round of them!

Don gave me some garlic last Christmas, which I planted in the early spring and have been harvesting. We've already used most of what's already out of the ground, but there are a few more to pull and I've also reserved some for planting in the fall.

They're beauties; Don tells me the variety is "German Hardneck."

And here are the flowers on my Kabocha squash. At least one of them is now well on its way to mature squashood.

And last, my first Marconi Red roasting pepper. It was a gorgeous deep red this week, and we just ate it last night. There are more coming, but much smaller. I'm not sure why this one matured so early.

Yellow Eye Beans

I had such good luck with the runner beans last year, that I decided to branch out to another variety this year: yellow-eye beans. These are a bush variety, so I planted them really densely in the far end of the raised bed.

These were the first few that I harvested from this years bean  patch.

Some  pods, before they were quite all the way dry.

I just think these are so pretty...

Another beauty shot.

I think I'm going to plant another crop,  since they grow so fast and we have plenty of time before it gets cold here.

Jam

This is my total haul of jam from June & July's canning frenzy. Nearly nine dozen jars in all!

That was an intense couple of weeks, while the apricot crop came in. I got a lot of plums and peaches from a friend's tree at about the same time. I had about a week straight where all I was doing, besides working and sleeping, was washing, and sorting fruit, cooking down puree (so it would hold a little longer) and then making batch after batch of jam.

The main goal was to lay in a large store of apricot butter: Dan's favorite, and our house specialty. I put up a LOT of this, mostly in full pint jars. We know we'll go through it quickly enough, so the big jars are OK.

This - the apricot/blackberry - seems to be the favorite among the people who have sampled the jams. I love that, since it seems so particular to our neighborhood: the apricots from our yard, the blackberries from our neighbor across the sheet.

After a few batches of the butter and the apricot/blackberry, I was feeling confident enough to improvise some new flavors: Ginger Peach, Plum/Cardamom, and Plum/Cardamom/Ginger Some new flavors I tried out this year. They were all pretty successful, but the ginger peach is my favorite.

I also made a large batch of the Brandied Apricot Preserves I made last year. It would be good on almost anything, but it's a pretty much perfect crepe filling right out of the jar. Dan's been having fun making crepes as dessert for our family and friends lately. We have a good division of labor in our kitchen. :)