Potato aphids

I discovered several stalks of these pesky red bugs on one of my potato plants. I cut the entire stalk down from where the aphids were. The cut stalk went to the garbage dump, and the aphids came to life in the blazing sun. Hahaha those guys had been in the comfortable shade and now they are going to die in the heat like the rest of this garden.

There's a Cat4 hurricane off the Baja California coast. Hopefully in another week we can get some rain off of that one.

Monsoonal rebloom

My yellow palo verde has regrown its leaves. The orange honeysuckle is now in bright orange bloom as well as the Texas sage. Two days of intermittent rain was all it took. Even my potato bush is finally blooming its purple blossoms.

Our Bermuda grass is lush green across the yard.

I volunteered at the county extension office again yesterday for 3.5 hours. It was steady work, from knowing why an apple tree's leaves are curling upward to black spots on cherry leaves or how to determine a ripe watermelon. I probably won't be volunteering as much now that school's back in session.

While I was at the office an elderly woman came by to donate her young fruitless mulberry tree. "I'm sure someone will want to take it home" said Joyce, the UA office manager, and that "someone" was me. Now I have TWO potted mulberries in my front yard. The new one has two cutoff branches. The elderly woman told me she uprooted it because it was growing under a rose bush and her husband had twice cut its branches back. These trees are fast growers and make excellent shade trees, but does our yard have room for one more tree?

The stray willow tree popping up on the west side of the house will be competing with the larger mesquite tree nearby in another five years. If anything, we won't be lacking shade on the southwestern side of the house!

I stopped at KMart after my volunteer shift and bought a bunch of plastic containers for 75% off. Garden stores in town are discounting all their garden ware; something that didn't happen until Labor Day weekend.

The puncture vine is still growing rather profusely in the back yard. Just when I think I've pulled an entire patch of that stuff, new yellow flowers pop up elsewhere. It's a never ending chore!

Today I planted two more small strawberry transplants. That's fine with me because I also picked up four more long planters ideal for the strawberries, from KMart. We are going to be feasting on those luscious fruits next summer. (Well, at least I will be).

Our first decent monsoonal rain

Rain fell hard, as forecasted, late yesterday afternoon. Once the rain started just before sun set, it lingered for hours afterwards. That is why by 7am I was out pulling weeds, then bought three large Thompson seedless vines. Kevin dug the holes, I watered the hole. Tomorrow the grapes will get planted. They are going between two photonias against our northern wall.

More rain is forecasted today and Sunday, but sofar the skies have been clear.

The yellow palo verde is growing new leaves now that it's gotten more rain. I scattered a bunch of palo verde seeds along the eastern perimeter. Just like with my Red Birds of Paradise, if one seed out of 50 germinates, I will be happy.

I'm not planting anything new in the front yard unless it's a stray or from seed.

One of my Engleman prickly pears has Phyllosticta pad spot, which I treated with Neem. I scraped as much of the black "stuff" off. I hope I can save the plant.

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Finally, some rain!

Forecasters were saying rain would return Wednesday. It came early this afternoon instead, just after leaving my shift at the county extension office where I volunteered for four hours (a total of ten hours this year so far).

It rained hard and intensely, but by the time I got home the rain had stopped, leaving small flooded pools around in the back yard. The water barrels were full, too. Although this wasn't enough rain, it's enough to keep the shrubs from going into drought stress. We won't need to spend our own water for a few days.

Hopefully we'll get rain for another month.

Neem II

I finally decided to spray down all the pepper and tomato plants with Neem II, an organic insecticide/fungicide that contains true Neem oil from the Neem tree seeds for prevention as well as pyrethrin to help kill live bugs. I'm tired of seeing my pepper and tomato plants with growing holes in the leaves.

I'm also going to apply insecticide in the soil next spring to control grasshoppers and grubs.

Potatoes and Tomatoes

I just dug up a large handfull of Yukon Golds. It's not as much as I thought I'd get, but perhaps we didn't allow the plants to "pile up" with soil during their growth spurts. There's still time this year to grow more, and that's just what I did with some cut potato skins Kevin had kept aside for planting. In two more months we'll get another harvest. WE still have eight other plants piling up and they should be ready in another month.

The four tomato plants that I planted last week, the two German Queens, one Mr, Stripey and one Beefsteak are all doing much better, thanks to the coffee grounds I placed around the plants. (Their dull light green color when I bought them were an indicator the plants needed nitrogen.)

My Quinalts are multiplying!

My strawberries this year have been very prolific. I ate a cup of berries with my Special K and then helped plant at least six more runners that will be bearing fruit next summer. At the rate the plants have been reproducing, we are going to have four times the plants we started with. I am going to need more planters at this rate!

Strawberries are my favorite fruit. And I am going to focus on the fruits from now on, as the area we picked in the garden for the strawberries apparently is ideal: morning sun and afternoon shade.

Kevin has more turnips and beets coming up. I also planted four spinach plants around the cabbage.

Unfortunately, we still haven't had any decent rains in two weeks. We got a nice overnight drizzle which was nice and kept the grass a little greener this morning. Storm clouds that teased us late this afternoon proved to be just that: a tease.

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Seedlings coming up

The echinacea that I planted over a week ago are now sprouting in the front yard. Kevin's turnips and beets in the back yard are also coming up. But otherwise it was a dry and hot weekend, so hot and dry that even the weeds are drying up. This has been such a dry July and August has been dry so far as well.

At 6:30am it's 74F with 56% humidity.

Prickly pear juice

I have a huge prickly pear cactus in my front yard that is encroaching on the public street. I know I need to trim it back three feet this year before someone gets hurts. Since this giant cactus is on my property, I can legally harvest the fruit of this prickly pear without a permit. Otherwise all cactus and succulents are protected under Arizona's Native Plant law, which forbids the harvesting of any cactus or succulent on public lands without a permit. Cactus and succulents on private property can be harvested for its fruit without a permit.

I was waiting for this year's fruit to ripen first, before removing any of the pads. Fruits tend to mature in late July, early August and there were enough dark purple fruit this morning to harvest my first two-gallon bucket of the fruit.

There are plenty of good recipes on-line to follow for prickly pear jellies. I wanted the juice instead, as it's known to be full of anti-oxidants and vitamin C.

I scrubbed the fruit in cold water, using a new scouring pad to remove the small glochids off the skin, those nearly invisible little spines on the fruit that easily get dislodged in skin and clothing.

Then I soaked the fruit for 30 minutes, and then peeled the skins off each fruit one-by one. The skins were about 1/3-inch thick, often half the fruit's size, and once the skin was removed, revealed small pulps of thick seed masses encased in magenta pulp. By the time all the fruit were skinned, there was very little of the fruit there. The fruit reminded me of a pomegranate: more seeds than flesh!

I dumped all the skinned fruit into my blender and pressed the "liquify" button. Within a few minutes I had a tasty mass of pulpy juice, leaving the heavy seeds, another 1/3 of the fruit, to through out in the front yard. By the time I was done I had two 12-ounce glasses of fruit juice, which I sweetened with a tablespoon of sugar and a dash of lemon juice.

The juice tasted like cranberry laced with water mellon.

In two weeks the rest of the fruit will be harvestable and once again I'll make some juice. Or maybe I'll try my luck at making some jellies? I now have found a tasty and easy recipe for the prickly pear in my front yard. It's no longer a nuisance weed, but a plant that brings me tasty tart juice.

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