Artichoke Flower or Sea Anemone

Naw, it's an artichoke flower. My neighbor's beautiful yard was blooming on July 4th, but this gorgeous plant, uneaten, rewarded us with color.

Pretty In Pink

Leucadia is bursting forth with flowers after a moderately rainy winter. Everyone's garden is showing blooms, except mine, which has lots of weeds. But no where is the color quite as vibrant as along the cliffs down at the beach.
Stairway to heaven.
Here's a closeup of these lovely pink ice plant flowers.
Pink is spilling down the steep cliffs.

Christmas Cactus for the Holidays

Every year my Christmas Cactus blooms in time for the holidays and every year I marvel at its timeliness.

Merry Christmas, Everyone.

On the occasion of the one hundredth post

On the occasion of the One Hundredth Post
I’m thinking of fall leaves.
It’s December—normally our trees are bare.
But these leaves cling stubbornly on.
They wait for the cold to float them down.
Screaming color, they mark the season
with red, yellow, orange, and brown.

Pumpkins on Parade

High on a slopping hill overlooking the sea a couple of blocks up from the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) Temple and Ashram Center in Encinitas, a plot of land brings forth the fruits of fall. Pumpkins brighten the coastal scenery and provide a peaceful setting to admire the wonderful crop. The true miracle is seeing the land being used for agriculture. The ocean views make this a prime piece of real estate.

The land is owned by SRF and is used year-round to grow vegetables. It is attended by the monks who live at the temple.

When my children were young, we used to attend the SRF’s annual Halloween festival. Hundreds of intricately carved pumpkins greeted Halloween celebrants on all hallowed night. As we entered the fellowship grounds, a wonderful world of good and evil, make-believe and real-life lessons greeted us. Plays, musical numbers, characters, wish-granting queens and villainous plotters barraged our senses. The festival grew and grew in popularity, until the thousands of people it attracted made it too popular. After 2001, SRF no longer hosted the festival.

The Downtown Encinitas MainStreet Association still hosts its Safe Trick or Treat, where businesses along Highway 101 remain open and provide treats to youngsters in costume. Halloween activities are provided in the Lumberyard and SRF still provides carved pumpkins for Encinitas.

So, although I miss the SRF-hosted Halloween Festival, I am thankful that the monks still own the land and use it to grow these glorious pumpkins.

Luscious Tomatoes

and other veggies too. While I certainly try, I cannot possibly eat all of these tomatoes. Even after multiple pasta sauces, roasted vegetable ratatouille, minestrone soup, fresh tomato and cucumber salad, and fresh tomato slices on ... everything. I am thinking of a roasted tomato garlic purée ...











Recipe: Roasted Tomato Garlic Soup

1 head garlic, cloves separated and peeled

8 (approx.) medium tomatoes, preferably home grown

5 cups water or stock, divided

1 Ω teaspoon dried thyme leaves

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon coarse sea salt

4 tablespoons olive oil, divided

4 medium onions, thinly sliced

2 tablespoons chopped fresh Italian parsley, for garnish

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.


2. Quarter the tomatoes and place them in a shallow roasting pan. Add the peeled garlic cloves. Drizzle with approximately 1 tablespoon olive oil. Add 3 cups of the water/stock. Sprinkle with the thyme, pepper, and salt.


3. Cover the pan with aluminum foil and bake for 60 minutes, stirring once during the baking.


4. Remove the foil, stir again, and bake for another 30 minutes.


5. While the tomatoes and garlic are baking, heat 3 tablespoons olive oil in a soup pot. Add the sliced onions, cover and cook over medium heat until tender and lightly colored, about 15 minutes.


6. Add the remaining 2 cups of water/stock to the onions and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat, cover, and simmer for about 30 minutes.


7. When the tomatoes and garlic have finished baking, transfer them to the soup pot. Using a stick blender, purÈe the soup until smooth.


8. Adjust the seasonings, ladle into soup bowls and sprinkle each bowl with fresh parsley.
   

6-8 servings.

Anza-Borrego Pull

And thank you all for dropping by today. Let’s give the band a hand . . . yes, yes—aren’t they wonderful! I hope you are enjoying the food; I spent hours picking out today’s menu. My friends all said “You better choose something with a bit of ham. People always like a little ham.” Okay, okay.

Today is my one year blogiversary. So I am celebrating. (Here is my first post.)

Yeah, yeah. Thanks so much. And as such, I’d like to say a few words about the glowing silver cholla cactus that sits atop my blog header (a larger version of the same photo appears above).Back in March of 2005 when the California deserts were experiencing a centennial rainfall year, the desert wildflowers bloomed like never before. I saw whole valleys covered with yellow Desert Sunflowers, purple Sand Verbena and white Dune Primrose. The Ocotillo produce gorgeous red blooms that fly like flags against the blue sky. Jimson weed grows white trumpet-like flowers and cacti of all kinds sprout colorful flowers that emerge from the cactus spikes.
I love the Anza-Borrego desert. It glows in its own starkness. It’s big and clean. I have never seen more stars than the night I slept outside in the desert. It was August and it didn’t cool down until about 3:00 in the morning. Since I couldn’t sleep anyway, I just looked up. No moon. But the sky was littered with diamonds and the Milky Way arced across the heavens.
The next day my friends wanted to go hiking (they were obviously delirious from lack of sleep), but I talked them into retreating to the cool mountains for breakfast instead. Day time temperatures would sore to over 110 degrees F and ground temperatures can reach 140. I didn’t think we could carry enough water. I didn't think it was safe.
The only time to see wild flowers in the desert (there are none in August) is in spring, which can start as early as February. Things are pretty much gone by the end of April, but it always depends on the winter’s rainfall.

Summertime Greenery

Summer time is fun for gardeners. Above you see chives (wonderful for garnishing soups and of course they are great with baked potatoes) and sweet basil (I'm a big pesto fan). Here in Southern California we can grow vegetables and herbs year-round, but summer is when we grow the good stuff: tomatoes, basil, beans, peas, zucchini, and cucumber. I use the Square-Foot Gardening technique by Mel Bartholomew (or the updated one is here). There are differences in the books; some reviewers recommend them both for the most complete reference.

Here's the big picture: you build raised garden boxes (I made mine four feet by six feet out of two-by-twelve redwood boards and lined on the bottom with chicken wire to keep out root-loving gophers). You import nutrient-rich soil and divide the boxes into one-foot squares. How many plants per square depends on the vegetable. Lettuce, basil, chives all are four plants per square. Tomato is one per square. Zucchini requires nine squares (a three-by-three portion of your garden box, as shown above).

Chives have beautiful flowers and buds that give your garden a bit of color.

These tomatoes are getting there. And, here are my pole beans, just beginning their climb to the sky.

Stop and Smell the Ranunculi

Over 50 acres spread across a coastal hillside above Interstate 5 in Carlsbad (southern California) erupt every spring into splashy ribbons of color. The Ranunculus bulbs bloom early March to May. Actually, very few of the flowers are sold—these plants are primarily grown to harvest the bulbs (approximately 200,000 bulbs per acre).

I see these fields every year and every time I drive by I tell myself, "Gee, I should go walk among these blooms and take a few photos."

The coastal area around Carlsbad (site of the Ranunculus flower fields) and Encinitas (self-proclaimed flower capital of the world) boasts greenhouses and flower fields to rival The Netherlands. Property values, however, have put a strain on the maintainability of flower growing. I have seen more than a few greenhouses in my area leveled to make room for new housing developments.


And again I tell myself, "Gee, I should go walk among these blooms and take a few photos."


Fortunately, the Flower Fields in Carlsbad have evolved into a tourist attraction—they charge admission if you want to walk the fields, admire the blooms, and take pictures. If turning the fields into a tourist destination (hey, Legoland is right around the corner) saves them from becoming housing slab, I’m happy to pay.

And so I did walk among these blooms and take a few photos.

When you visit, you'll get a brochure explaining the history of these flowers, the history of the fields, and more than you'll ever want to know about Edwin Frazee and his Ranunculus flowers. Through selection and breeding by said Frazee, the flowers today are multi-petaled and boast 16 different shades—before today I did not know that.

But don't stop and smell the ranunculi—these beauts have no fragrance.

Sassy Sorrel

I confess that I had never heard of sorrel until I picked up a couple plants at my local nursery to add to my nascent vegetable garden. Sorrel has a lemony tartness that startled me and I started searching for interesting recipes. I currently have two favorites: Sorrel Soup and Sorrel Salsa, both from Rosso and Lukins New Basics Cookbook. I modified the Sorrel Soup to make it vegan (substitute olive oil for butter and use vegetable stock instead of chicken stock), but the salsa recipe is already vegan-friendly. The soup includes onions, garlic, sorrel leaves (of course), stock, pepper, nutmeg, and cayenne pepper. It’s a purée and can be served hot or cold (I prefer hot). The salsa is great for a party appetizer (serve it with crackers) or to accompany fish (uh, sometimes I eat fish). It is simply made with sorrel leaves, chopped tomatoes, red onion, olive oil, fresh lemon juice, and salt and pepper.

And for a literary reference, in Émile Zola’s Germinal: ‘Oh, the soup!’ said Maheude wearily, ‘that means picking sorrel and pulling some leeks . . .’ (’Tis incubating in the Book Club Possibility Bin.)
Recipe: Sorrel Soup

Nectar-Laden Blossoms

Since late January this tree in my front yard has erupted in a snowy show of white blossoms. My poor tree is clearly confused. It's Springtime! We enjoy the warm weather—how can you not?

As I stood beneath the blossom-laden branches, a low-pitched humming emanated about my head. Bees, lots of bees, were taking advantage of the nectar bounty on this tree.

Winter Garden Gallery

The neglect I heaped upon my garden so far this winter while away seemed to suit it well. Indeed, “How can I miss you when you won’t go away?” (reference: Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks) may apply to gardens/gardeners as well as people. I did go away and apparently the garden didn’t miss me one bit.*

I have been (perhaps unworthily) rewarded with a bountiful winter crop of parsley, cauliflower, broccoli, and various types of lettuce.

Even the rosemary bush is blooming. There must have been just the right amount of sunshine, moisture, and cold to nourish my winter plots. Curiously, Encinitas had six hours of a 24-degree freeze early on January 15th (perhaps the collective shudder after the Chargers loss—you see, I’m still getting over that one).

I am not a Constant Gardener, but a casual caretaker, and I guess left on their own, the veggies grew just fine.

*I noticed more than one blogger using Dan Hicks’ song title for their blog titles without even a nod to the phrase’s author. I’m a Dan Hicks fan and know the source, but hey, how hard is it to perform a simple google check?

Killer Combo

Summer brings out the most delicious vegetable garden combo: tomato and basil. I'm not an expert gardener by any means, but am blessed with year-round mild climate. I am able to grow many herbs and lettuce all year; summer time, however, brings luscious tomatoes and delicate basil. Sweet and aromatic. Growing edibles makes you more attentive in the kitchen. The best use, by far, for this killer combo is sliced tomatoes (not to be confused with Attack of the Killer Tomatoes), fresh slivered basil, a bit of olive oil, and fresh ground pepper.
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