In the Bleak Midwinter . . . .

While that title will ring painfully true for many right now (even a couple of my friends in Portland, Oregon, who were so excited a few days ago about snow, are complaining about cabin fever), here in Tucson we've hardly had anything worth the name of winter. I actually miss it, though I can't complain about sitting outside right now, enjoying 74 degrees or so.

I've had this adenium obesum in my kitchen window for a couple of years, and every winter it drops leaves for a period of relative dormancy (and I try not to get too alarmed), but it's never bloomed before. There are still a couple of buds left to open to add to the already pretty showy cluster of blossoms - I am so excited!

But I'm even more excited about what I picked from the garden yesterday! We've had pepper plants survive for up to 5 years by protecting them from frosts, but never tomatoes or eggplants. (The larger peppers are Cubanelles, the smaller ones very hot jalapeños.) In fact, raising tomatoes here is problematic at best - some years I don't even try, and I almost didn't this year. The Big Boys and wonderful heirlooms that grow well elsewhere . . . well, I've never had any luck with them here, but cherry tomatoes . . . sometimes. Sometimes not. Everything on this platter was planted early last spring and the plants are still going strong. It's very strange and no doubt, like so much of the rest of the strange weather this year, related to global warming, so my gratitude for this beautiful harvest is necessarily tinged with unease. But I can't not appreciate the beauty and abundance.

 This is the blossom of the Golden Sweet Snow Pea, an heirloom variety from India. I purchased the seeds from Pinetree Garden Seeds, a small, family-owned seed company with very reasonable prices and packets sized right for small family gardens like ours, and a selection of seeds and other garden-related items one might not find elsewhere, like these gorgeous yellow snow peas! I picked a few this morning and there are lots more on the vines that aren't quite ready.

 A friend gave me a small plant of this strange and very prickly euphorbia whose last name I don't know. Hard to believe it's in the same family as poinsettia. Anyway, I have several larger pots of it now (just break off a piece and stick it in the soil) and they're all getting ready to bloom - just look at all the little pale green buds.

And the Meyer lemon, that's had a rather rough and unproductive year, is also bursting into bloom. I've been watching the buds and today found the first open blossom.

So the weather is crazy but lovely and I'm trying to just enjoy what we have and not think about the heat that's coming or the lack of rainfall here this "winter." I wish winter wasn't hitting so hard in other places, and if you're in one of those places, I hope things let up soon, and I wish you warmth, comfort, and good company.

Changing Times

Joe went back to work on Tuesday and I didn't; up till then it had just felt like our usual summer break rather than the R word. And I still don't feel retired, since my vision of that was days alone to pursue my creative and domestic projects. I'm not complaining, just acknowledging that, as John Lennon said, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans," like when the wind blows down a tree and the only practical, reasonable thing to do is to cut and stack it for firewood (and a playground for cactus wrens).

A week ago yesterday my mother had what fortunately turned out to be a small stroke-type event, a TIA or transient ischemic attack, but unlike that tree, she got back up and is recovering well. She spent two days in the hospital and has been with us since then, though she'll be going home on Sunday. I'm so glad to be able to be here for her, and she's a wonderful, undemanding "guest." My problem is in my own head: I feel guilty about taking time for myself to write or paint or whatever, though she's perfectly able to entertain herself. In fact, she'll probably be relieved to be free of my anxious hovering.
       One thing we enjoy together is wildlife in the backyard. While I'm watering, she circles the patio with her walker, and we observe things like the Texas ranger blooming in response to recent rains (this picture is from yesterday and already the blossoms are fading and dropping),

the goldfinches at their new feeder full of nyjer seed,

and the doves vacuuming up whatever falls to the ground.

Nyjer seed is pretty expensive, but I finally broke down and bought a sock feeder to see if it would attract the goldfinches that have been absent since our sunflower crop failed this year - usually we have lots of sunflowers and thus lots of these beautiful birds. You can see that the sock feeder worked: here are two female lesser goldfinches and a house finch (top right) on it,

 and here are a female and a male, in his lovely black tuxedo.

 But put the sock feeder up against a good monsoon and the monsoon wins, especially when they come three days in a row. The birds kept coming, but the seed in the middle would have been sprouting or fermenting or something, so we visited Wild Birds Unlimited http://www.wbu.com/, and bought the pretty yellow feeder for about $20 - we talked about making one but I don't think we could have done it for any less - and now not only does less seed fall to the ground but what's in the feeder has some protection from the rain, not necessarily from real hard-pounding rain with tree-whipping wind, but all in all better than the sock. In fact, it just began to rain again as I wrote that last sentence!
     Another change the last couple of days is that finally - finally! - my pepper plants are actually producing something! Here's a jalapeño (can you see the face on it?),

and here's a Cubanelle, a variety I've never planted before but when I saw them at Home Depot I liked the name, so here we are -

this one (and more, I hope!) will get bigger and turn red. Heat- and spice-wise, it's apparently fairly mild; I've read they're sometimes used in place of poblanos.
    I received the seeds I ordered for the fall/winter garden but it's still too hot to plant them, so I must be patient. Any number of garden chores await some cooling weather, which we'll have a taste of next week, according to the most recent forecast, and I look forward to digging and planting and transplanting, mostly various herbs and cacti. Of course when it cools the tomatoes will start setting fruit again - this one must have had its hormones triggered in some recent brief cool interval.

Bigger than a dime and smaller than a nickel, I see it as a sign of hope and faith that summer will soon be giving way to what passes for fall here in the desert southwest. I even changed my hair color in anticipation of the changing season; it's very, very red and I haven't decided whether to call it merlot or chianti, but I know autumn leaves come in this color.

Elvis Has Left the Building

Okay, not exactly, but the remaining dove hatchling has left the nest, well and healthy and within the 11 to however many days the Sibley Guide to Birds said is normal.
      There are, however, now 16 quail eggs in the fern in the front entryway and no sign of either of the parents, also not unusual according to Sibley. Given the time that's elapsed since the last eggs were laid (nearly a week) and the parents' absence since then, I think it's safe to say they've abandoned the nest, either by choice or by mischance. Though you'd never know it by looking around the neighborhood, quail don't have a very high survival rate. I've written about that before, in a poem called "Borrowed Days," from which these stanzas are excerpted:

Here in the desert, in these borrowed days before the heat,

we plant and hope for a brief flowering.

Here our flowers are red, yellow, orange, the hot colors. 

Here birds nest and mate frantically.

Some of their young, got in these borrowed days,

may even survive the summer. 

It does not pay to watch too closely, to count the tiny quail,

to watch their numbers shrink as the heat grows.

It shrivels the heart and urges us to tears.

We cannot spare the water.

But the summer, hot as it is, provides beauty, as in the crops we grow during this time. The greens are gone now, except the chard, which is more resilient than it looks. We'll have to buy our lettuces - I pulled out the last plants the other day. The aphids of April arrived right on schedule to take over the kale, and the beets, parsnips, and rutabagas are crowding the refrigerator, soon to be joined by the last of the carrots.

     This morning, very early, before work, in one raised bed I planted Armenian cucumbers, which tolerate our temperatures, and two kinds of melons - Kazakh, which I've neither grown nor tasted, and the Spanish Piel de Sapo, which I grew successfully a few years ago. They're delicious, and apparently if you say "melon" in Spain, that's what people assume you mean. In the other I planted my two favorite winter squashes, the Italian Marina di Chioggia, big, blue-green, and warty, and the French Muscat de Provence, which looks like Cinderella's pumpkin (but should not be confused with the Rouge Vif d'Etampes pumpkin, which is brighter-colored on the outside and according to some sources less tasty, though I don't actually know about that, having never seen or tasted one). 

 

Tomorrow I'll plant grey zucchini, which are sold here in the markets as Mexican zucchini; I think they have more and better flavor than the regular dark green ones.

Then we'll plant tepary beans along the trellises in the west garden. I've written about those amazing beans before http://morning-glory-garden.blogspot.com/2009/11/gardens-yesterday-and-today.html. Even though many people flee northward at this time of year, I'm looking forward to it. I'll just have to make sure to get up early to do whatever needs doing outdoors in the cool of the morning!

Rain, rain, please stay

We've been blessed by a couple of days of rain - good news for the garden - and even cooler weather - good news for knitters (I'll be wearing a sweater and hot pink hand-knitted socks to work today).
     The first planting of vegetables is doing very well, though the fennel, snow peas, and second planting of mesclun have yet to show their heads.  The yarrow that I transplanted in the spring and that struggled through the summer seems to be looking more lively.  It was big and beautiful and totally out of control in its previous location at the four corners of the medicine wheel garden.  Here's a picture of Cosmo with a bouquet that I picked back then.
     The medicine wheel garden is looking much better.  It was very sad, with a number of things looking ragged and weedy after the summer, and then it looked pretty empty after I cleaned those plants out.  Now the nasturtiums are doing well (though no blossoms yet), as are the chrysanthemums, which are proving to be perennial mainstays, and new plantings of petunias and pansies, as well as the alyssum that I waited a bit too long to plant so it's having a harder time getting established.  The garden column in yesterday's newspaper tells us that since November was excessively warm (we already knew that), there's still plenty of planting time left, and that's good news, I guess, though bedding plants like alyssum have pretty much disappeared from the bigger home and garden stores.  I'll trust Saint Fiacre, shown here in last spring's glory days in the medicine wheel garden, to keep everything growing and, I hope, thriving.  That white mum is much bigger now and the red flowers are all gone, replaced with a deep red mum, the aforementioned Cherry Belle nasturtiums, and a border of dianthus in the front of the red section.  Eventually I'll get it all into perennials, as soon as I decide which ones they'll be.  In the meantime, the medicine wheel evolves as the seasons change. And I suppose that's as it should be.

Gardens Yesterday and Today

Yesterday was the kind of winter day that makes snowbirds flock to Arizona, and makes those of us who live here year-round (almost) forget the blazing summers.  It was a perfect day for gardening, and for harvesting the last of the tepary beans, a traditional crop of the native Tohono O'odham people, who have lived here for centuries and whose vast reservation stretches from a few miles below Tucson south to the Mexican border and even farther west, a total of 4,453.307 square miles.  Long before development sucked away much of the water and global warming made it so much harder to live off the land, they farmed here. The tepary beans they've raised for centuries (and still raise on the tribe's cooperative farm) have been shown to be useful against diabetes, a gift of Western culture that came along with white flour, white sugar and sugary soft drinks and other foods that have replaced much of the traditional diet, especially since World War II. The beans are higher in protein than most other legumes and their complex carbohydrates help maintain steady, healthy blood sugar levels.

     Tepary beans are an ideal desert crop.  They need very little water; the manager of the tribe's cooperative farm told me a few years ago that they only irrigated them twice during the summer, though that may have changed since then, as the last few summers have gotten progressively hotter and drier.  They thrive in the heat; in fact, they're a traditional monsoon crop, planted with the first of the summer storms.  They also come in a number of different varieties: this picture shows brown, speckled blue, and black, all of which I've grown in my own garden.  For a couple of years I let them trail over the ground in masses of  tough, wiry vines, much tougher than those of any other bean or pea I've encountered.  This year Joe built a splendid trellis that may outlive us both, which made the beans much easier to harvest. It's important to keep them picked so the pods don't split and release them into the mulch where they'll be lost (but not forever, since next year they'll be back--they're still quite close to their hardy wild ancestors, I suspect).
       I'm sure the tribe has at least one bean combine, but for the small-scale home gardener, this is a very labor-intensive crop, and that's why I've decided this summer's was my last planting of teparies.  I can buy them from the tribe at local farmers' markets (along with amazing melons during the season) or from Native Seed Search (www.nativeseeds.org), a locally based organization dedicated to maintaining traditional seed varieties of many kinds that are adapted to the southwest. NSS has a special diabetes project to promote the use of tepary beans and other native crops among the tribes.
      The last teparies I bought (some to eat and some for this year's planting) were $4 a pound and well worth it, considering the work of raising and picking them and cleaning them of the dried pods, etc., as well as their superior nutritional value.  Although they are smaller than, for example, pinto or black beans, they take longer to cook, but once cooked you can use them as you would those other beans in pretty much any recipe calling for plain cooked beans, and you'll have the satisfactions of taste, a healthy meal, and knowing you've done your bit to help preserve another traditional (and environmentally friendly and organically raised, since insect pests don't seem to be a problem) crop against the onslaught of the so-called progress of monoculture agribusiness.

Radishes

These are the first radishes from our winter garden, with a sprig of epazote in front.  Like the old gardeners recommend, I planted radishes and carrots in the same row, to mark the row since carrots take so much longer to come up, and they are coming up, their fern-like leaves so small and delicate next to the rowdy radishes.  These are d'Avignon (French breakfast) radishes, which have charmed me since I saw a picture in a French cookbook, years and years ago, of a slice of baguette spread with butter and topped with a layer of sliced radishes (maybe with a little coarse sea salt sprinkled on?).  They're so delicious, I'll have to plant more this weekend.  Even if I didn't like to eat them, I think I'd plant them just because they're so pretty!

      You can cook radish greens, too, just like any other green, or with another green.  They don't need to cook long and they have a mildly sharp, peppery flavor, not surprisingly.  I learned that from an old Adele Davis cookbook.  Wonder if her books are still in print?  I've tossed thinly sliced radish leaves into the water I was boiling for couscous, or into a stir-fry in the last couple of minutes.  Like all greens they cook down to much, much less than their original volume, but they add some vitamins and flavor, even if a bunch of radishes doesn't furnish enough greens for a real side dish.

     The epazote's gotten completely out of hand - again.  Even if I pulled it all up, there'd soon be more, since it reseeds itself so enthusiastically.  I'll cook some beans this weekend and use up some of it, though the conventional wisdom seems to be true, that if you eat beans fairly often, there's less of a problem with the, ah, anti-social qualities some people fear, and that a bit of epazote significantly reduces.