Juliet Tomatoes and Garden Update

 Juliet tomatoes, thyme and garlic ready to be roasted with a little olive oil and blended with a basil for a wonderful tomato paste.  All fresh.  All from our garden. The only exception is the garlic, which we are growing but is not quit ready for prime time. 

We are on our third straight season with this same juliet tomato plant.  It just keeps going.  The fruit is a little bigger than a normal cherry tomato.  But the plant is just as prolific as a cherry tomato.  

There is just nothing like the taste of fresh fruits and vegetables and it is fun to mark the seasons with what we get to grow, harvest and eat around here.  

As I posted earlier, the citrus lasted well into the new year.  Now, the lemon, grapefruit and orange trees are though with flowering and have little green fruits.  The Fuerte avocado had a good year, but was done about a month ago.  Our stone fruit produced like crazy last year, but is less this year. The nectarine is done as is the early Eva's Pride peach -- we savored the last with dinner last and I saved a perfectly ripe one for this morning. We have a later bearing peach (Brittain's Peach) that is loaded and a few weeks away from picking as are the figs.  I am starting to pick the Reed avocado, which produces large night softball size fruit and everyone seems to enjoy. But, they are so big, we have to space out picking them.  We have some summer vegetables coming, but are having to fight the deer which, for some reason, have decided to frequent our neighborhood this year.       

Flying Squirrel

Grapefruit

Last weekend we picked a lot of grapefruit. I will leave it to you to figure out which of the grapefruit in the picture is Ruby Red and which is Oroblanco.  Both are a great mix of sweet and a bit tart.  Grapefruits are said to have originated in Jamaica around the 1700's as a natural hybrid of orange and pomelo trees that had been brought to the island.  Fresh grapefruit juice is a joy to have.

But, why do they call it grapefruit?  It doesn't taste anything like a grape and is ten times bigger.  The name "grapefruit" refers to the clusters of fruit on the tree that are said to resemble a cluster of green grapes.   That is a cluster of young ruby red on our tree right now.  An early name for the fruit was "forbidden fruit."  I wouldn't say either name makes a lot of sense or helps in the marketing.  

Rain? No. Weeds? Yes. --- Stinging Nettle in the Yard and on the Table.

Most of our rain falls from November through March. We might get rain in other months, but generally you can count on rain during these months.  What you can't count on is how much rain we'll get.   From 1906 to 2020, rainfall in Pasadena averaged 19.7 inches per year.  Looking just at the last 30 years, the highest yearly rainfall was 55 inches in 2004-05 and the lowest was 4.17 inches in 2006-07.  This year (20-21), we are trending to the low end with only 5.66 inches of rain received by end of March.  

Rain or not, about February/March weed season starts.  You don't have to water them or care for them at all.  The weeds just appear.  One of the weeds we get in our yard is stinging nettle.  That's a healthy little patch of nettle pictured above.  The nettle is easy to spot with its bright green color and jagged leaves.

And, as weeding goes, a nettle is fairly easy to pick out of the ground.  Root and all, the nettle plant comes right up.  But, there is one thing about stinging nettle -- and that's the stingers.  The leaves have some barbs, but its the barbs on the stalk that can really get you.  So, gloves are good when picking or handling nettle.   

The fun thing about stinging nettle is that it automatically arrives in our yard every year and is a legitimate food source. With a little seasoning, nettle tastes good and it is also good for you.  Think of nettle leaves as kind of like spinach in that it is a dark leafy green packed with nutrients.  When cooked, the nettle sting goes away and you can handle the plant without fear of stingers.  There are lots of nettle recipes but we generally just pick off the leaves and use the fresh nettle leaf like we would spinach.  
 

January sky

 Since it never (or rarely) rains in California, we mostly have to trudge along with blue skies.  Sometimes, though, we get treated to a beautiful sunset.    

The Last Mandarin Orange

Today I picked the season's last piece of fruit from our Satsuma Mandarin Orange tree.  The tree starts bearing in late November and has given us a steady supply of sweet and juicy mandarins all the way through to today.  The great thing about these is that they are easy to peel.  The even greater thing is that they are home grown, we can walk out and pick one anytime from about November - February and they taste far better than anything you can buy at the store.   

The Satsuma Mandarin has been called the "perfect" fruit tree.  For citrus, the trees are hearty and are said to tolerate below freezing temperatures.  They are self pollinating.  And, best of all, the fruit is delicious, super easy to peel and has no seeds.  In our garden, they are also the first of the citrus to bear, which means come Fall the Satsuma Mandarin gives us the welcome first taste of sweet and juicy citrus for the season. The only downside is that the tree tends to be alternate bearing with a heavy crop one year and light one the next.  We had a heavy crop this year, so I'm thinking next year is going to be light.   

Below you can see the loose orange peel that just breaks away clean from the fruit.  

 

Garden Update

Our cara cara tree was prolific this year -- about 80 oranges.  We picked a lot of the bounty today, but have been eating them for some time. These oranges are, I think, better than the regular Washington navels.  They are just as sweet but with a light tanginess.  Less than a tangarine, but more than regular navel.    Plus the color of the flesh is this deep orangy/red.  

The cara cara has an interesting history.   They are thought to be a cross between a Washington navel and a Bahia navel orange that grows in Brazil.  The orange was discovered in 1976 naturally growing at Hacienda Cara Cara in Venezuela.  So, the cara cara was an unplanned naturally growing hybrid.  It has been grown in the US since the 1980's but is still a speciality item in stores and restaurants.

Here is the Kona Sharwill avocado I picked a couple weeks back.  It seemed ripe enough, so we cut into it today and had it for lunch. This was my first avocado from our 3-4 year old tree.  The seed is a little smaller than other varieties and I thought the taste was excellent, just a bit different from our Fuerte avocados.  Also, this was much easier to peel since the peel on the Sharwill is thicker than the Fuertes.  We have been eating the Fuertes since late December and it is fun to have a slightly different avocado to try. There are a few more fruit on the Sharwill and I am going to leave them for couple more weeks before picking to see if the taste changes at all.   

I am watching the stone fruit trees for flowers and our Eva's Pride Peach is first up.  This tree really produced last year and we had jam, ice cream and froze some peaches.  Hopefully around late June we will have some peaches off this tree.