Garden: Goodbye Wong Bok!

Recently the wong bok in our square foot garden has gone a little wild.  After that impressive flowering display, a somewhat large storm rolled through San Diego and pretty much uprooted the plant.  I decided to rip it out:

Please excuse my outfit - I had just gotten back from spin class and Dana thought this was worthy of a picture.  

I am planning on transplanting some of the brussel sprout seedlings from the front yard to the new open spot.  The wong bok ended up in the compost pile.

Garden: Flowering Wong Bok

We recently pulled up some of our first generation of plants from our SFG and planted some more leafy veggies.  We left the Wong Bok, Chard, and Basil.  The Wong Bok has been going through a pretty interesting transition the last week or so.  It has grown about three feet straight up in that time and is flowering - pretty cool!

Dinner and Tomato Eater

Recently I've been working on my salad dressing. Normally Dana always makes the salad dressing for our dinners because she has a natural talent for it. Over the last seven years, after closely and carefully watching her prepare her dressings, I am starting to feel comfortable making them myself. So far I've just been doing the basic balsamic vinaigrette. The last couple of attempts have gone really well so I am going to start branching out into mustards and who knows what else!

Below is a recent dinner we made - spinach salad with avocado, onions, home-grown cherry tomatoes and a balsamic vinaigrette, and wheat-flax pasta with a sausage tomato sauce topped with coarsely grated parm.

Our heirloom tomato plant on the back deck has stopped trying to grow fruit, but the cherry tomato plant growing out of our driveway is still going strong. Dana found this little guy hanging out on one of the branches - a tomato hornworm. We just pick them off.

Fruits of our Yard

This morning we ate our first bananas from the banana tree in our yard. The tree has had bunches of green bananas on it since we moved in at the end of June, but they were nowhere near ripe enough until recently. Unfortunately the fruit from the tree hangs mostly into our back neighbor's yard, but fortunately the back neighbors are really cool and have always offered to send us over a bunch once the fruit was ready. Today was the day! Back neighbor Scotty hacked a bunch of bananas off and sent them over the fence - and one of them was yellow, soft and ready to be sampled. Here is the bunch:


It's a little hard to tell from this picture, but the bananas are small, only about 4-5 inches long. They are pretty good! Here I am peeling one of them:


A little later in the day we bought a fig tree to plant in our yard. We were inspired by the delicious figs that Michael Brown harvests from his yard and graces us with every now and then. The trick was finding the sunniest spot for it since a fig tree prefers as much sun as possible. We settled on a spot in the corner of the front yard, dug a big hole, roughed up the root ball a bit and then planted it. The tree is the Black Mission variety, and it fruits from May - October. We are at the tail end of the season this year, but the tree should be settled enough by next year to produce a nice crop.


Next, Dylan reseeded some spots in the front yard and the entire back yard. We are trying to fill in the spots that didn't grow grass earlier this summer:


I inspected the passion fruit vine for new fruit and flowers. The fruit is taking a long time to ripen, but we are in for a treat once it does:

Garden Update

I haven't posted much progress on my various gardening endeavors here - it's been ups and downs. Let's start with the Square Foot Garden:


As you can see we've had some moderate success here. The failures were:

• Spinach - never really worked - always looked sickly and recently just sunk back into the dirt
• Onions - same - sprouted but never thrived
• Radishes - this was my fault for not pulling them out in time. At one point they looked pretty good but I thought they would keep getting bigger and left them in the ground too long and they got really gross

Doing 'OK' are the carrots. The yellow pepper was very slow to get started and unfortunately got clobbered by an ill-placed wrench that fell from the deck railing. I don't think it's going to be able to bounch back from that. The basil, cabbage, and chard are doing pretty good.

So today or tomorrow I'm going to pull out the remains of the yellow pepper, spinach and onion and plant some more chard and some lettuce varieties.

Moving on...here is a pic of our heirloom tomato plant and our passion-fruit vine:


The tomato plant has had some real issues. It grew really well at first but I wasn't looking at it very closely for bugs and it got infested with these green worms that ate all the fruit. After pruning a lot of the branches and getting rid of the bad fruit, it's doing a little better. The passion-fruit vine is the same - still growing and making fruit but none have yet ripened. We think we're about a month away on those.

I've also planted some basil, cilantro (just last weekend for this), and lavender - I'm going to make pesto tonight!


Here is a closer look at some of the heirloom's tomatoes - it's the 'Mortgage Lifter' variety - the fruit can be up to two pounds!

In the front yard, we've had a nice surprise. On the edge of our driveway a random tomato plant has grown out of the side of the yard - you can see it in the foreground below:


It's doing really well - I think mainly b/c it's in the reach of the sprinklers for the yard:


Here are some of its fruits:

There are tons on there!

We have Fruit!

Something very exciting happened last night on our back deck. Readers of our blog may recall when we first brought home our passionfruit vine and more recently, the first flower that appeared. Since then, thanks to Dylan's amazing self-watering container, the vine has almost doubled in size, is happily climbing her trellis, and has exploded with tons of beautiful flowers:
Last night while Dylan was watering the gardens and plants on the deck, he called for me to come outside and see something very exciting. Our little vine has started producing her first fruit! The fruits are growing out of where the flowers used to be. If the progress continues, we should have lots of fruit coming our way in the next few months!

Garden Updates

The Square Foot Garden is coming along...this past weekend I had to thin out the sprouted plants. This is right before I got down to business:

I felt I was pretty conservative - I don't really like cutting the little plants! I will probably have to do some more in a week or so.

Also, yesterday one of the little pods that had been growing on our passion fruit vine opened into this flower:


The plant is going to be covered with these in a week or so - should be pretty!

Gardening Improvements

Last weekend Dylan built a self-watering container for my passionfruit vine. This is something that he had read about in a book and on the web, and is a fairly inexpensive project that allows your plants to self-regulate their water intake.


We also added basil and lavender to our plant collection:


And were delighted at the first signs of life in the square foot garden, mostly from the radish square (and a little wong bok action):

SFG: Day 1

This afternoon we finally put together our Square Foot Garden (SFG). The process started with a trip to our local nursery for the seeds. While we were there we picked up a passion fruit plant (Dana hasn't forgotten about eating these in New Zealand), which we hope will grow up the trellis on our deck:


After a slow drive home with the passion fruit plant sticking out of the sunroof, we were ready to put together the garden. We mixed the compost, vermiculite, and peat moss:


And the moved the box onto the deck where we think it will get a good amount of sun:


Then I attached the grid and we dropped the seeds in:


It may be hard to see from that picture, but each square is a different plant. From top left, going clock-wise we planted (per square):

• 16 yellow onions
• 1 cabbage
• 1 bell pepper
• 4 swiss chard
• 16 radishes
• 4 basils
• 16 carrots
• 9 spinach

We labeled the squares so we wouldn't forget:


I'm expecting to see the first sprouts within one to two weeks. Waiting is...

Garage Clean-out & Flower Boxes

After our long walk and stop at Bird Rock Coffee this morning, we set up our garage and put some of the least-used things in the attic. After sending a round of stuff up to the attic, we were able to fit a large red desk, lamp and chair in the corner of the garage. This means that we can now work on projects out there! I can be the artist and Dylan the mad scientist that we've each always dreamed of :-)

In the early afternoon, we did our first bit of gardening at the new house. A trip to Green Gardens on Cass St. led us to pick out 12 pots of African Daisies in white, yellow and royal purple:


Dylan pulled out the dead begonias from the last tenants, and also got rid of some of the dead soil, mixing in new potting soil and organic compost:


Streak then came outside briefly to do a bit of sniffing around:


About 30 minutes later we finished up, and gave them a good watering. They look nice:


And I was able to create a fun new hairdo for the BBQ at the Wildrick's this afternoon: