People either love or hate figs. Figs were grown long before wheat became a crop. They are members of the Ficus family, which includes such spectacular specimens as the famous Banyan tree that grows enormous roots and support trunks from air roots. The fig tree, and members of the ficus family such as the Bodhi tree, are mentioned in all three major religious texts.
However, figs are not fruit. Nope.
Figs are swollen, fleshy stems called syconiums.
Figs are swollen stems.
A fig is actually a swollen, hollow stem that has internal flowers!
The insides of figs show the flowers
When the flowers are ready for pollination, the end of the stem opens slightly to allow in the fig wasp, its only pollinator.
The end opens.
The syconium will then set seed inside, which is the time when they are usually harvested. Happily for fig eaters, many fig types are self-pollinating. Now you can amaze your friends and family with this interesting trivia over the dinner table!
The migration of the monarch butterfly covers an astounding 2500 miles. Instead of dying off in the cold of winter, these flimsy, light-as-air insects fly from parts of the US to groves of Oyamel fir trees in Mexico. They are the only insect to cover such territory. They are particular little beasties, for they rest only in the Oyamel firs and look for milkweed plants on which to lay their eggs. Milkweed exudes a sap toxic to animals which the Monarch caterpillars eat, obviously immune, making them toxic in turn. The caterpiller’s bright coloration is a warning.
Snazzy stripes mean 'eat at your own risk' (photo: M. Kennedy
In fact, the Viceroy butterfly, which is very tasty to predators, mimics the Monarch’s coloration to keep from being dinner.
Deforestation, insects, climate change and pollution have cut a huge swath through the Oyamel fir tree population, and the Monarchs are struggling to survive. They also combat the decrease in milkweed as human populations spread and plant lawns instead of weeds and wildflowers.
At the beginning of this year, in my efforts to change my property into habitat, I was determined to help the Monarchs. Every year I see maybe one or two of the majestic butterfly pass through my yard, and I’ve been sorry that I can’t offer he or she anything except nectar.
What I had been calling milkweed actually is sow thistle Sonchus oleraceus, which is an edible kitchen herb brought over from Europe with the settlers as food. It also has a milky sap in it’s hollow stem, thus the erroneous name of milkweed. There are over 100 varieties of real milkweed. So, I purchased two Balloon Plants, or Asclepias physocarpa (Asclepias is the botanical name for the milkweed family). They grew quite well, developing the balloon-shaped seed pods which, when ripe, burst open spreading small seeds with feathery wings attached that carry them everywhere.
Seeds burst and fly
To my great excitement my daughter spotted very tiny Monarch caterpillars on the leaves!
Tiny Monarch caterpillers (photo: M. Kennedy)
The caterpillars have been eating voraciously and growing big and fat.
Monarch caterpiller and milkweed (Photo: M. Kennedy)
We’ve seen Monarchs in the yard many more times than in the past. We are monitoring the caterpillars closely, waiting for them to metamorphosize. I’ll help the plants distribute seeds throughout my yard, and I’ll plant the native narrow-leafed milkweed as well. I’m so excited that within months this goal was achieved and that these wonderful creatures have one more place to find refuge.
This year I grew watermelons. I planted organic seed in my raised vegetable bed, protected from gophers by aviary wire, grown in excellent soil and fertilized with organic fertilizer, watered often, and the vines produced three melons the size of grapefruit. The chickens enjoyed them very much. However, a non-organic watermelon from a six-pack stuck in the ground under a bamboo, decided to take over the world. Not only did it’s foliage cover a good portion of the upper soil, but it grew and has grown enormous beasts of watermelons. One we call King Watermelon.
King Watermelon is in the foreground, laying in wait.
My daughter and I watched a YouTube video on how to tell if a melon is ripe. One way is to watch the tendril opposite the stem of the watermelon, and when it turns brown the melon should be ripe. The area where the stem connects to the fruit should also turn a little brown. Also, under the melon should be a pale spot where it rests on the ground, and when that area turns from white to yellowish, that is another sign. King Watermelon had no spot. We checked every few days for weeks as the beast grew larger and larger, it’d tendril tenaciously green. Then suddenly, it was brown. Much celebration. My petite collegiate daughter crept up on King Watermelon and swiftly cut it’s stem. Then staggering with it, brought it into the house where we weighed it. It was an incredible 28 pounds. It is a wonder that any other plant in the area got any irrigation! Normally we’d slice the melon on the countertop, but King Watermelon was so large that he had to go into the kitchen sink, and he barely fit! It was there that he was butchered, in consideration of all the juice that might come out.
So large it had to be 'butchered' in the kitchen sink!
The insides were perfectly sweet, juicy and crunchy. I couldn’t believe how perfect it was.
Beautiful inside; sweet and crisp.
My daughter cut and cut, saving some for our dinner (all that extra water before bedtime wasn’t a great idea, though), and wrapping the rest. The chunks had to be stored on cookie sheets to distribute the weight on the shelves and protect from leaking juice. We had watermelon the next day too, and fed some to our very grateful and thirsty tortoise during the heat wave. There is a lot of King Watermelon left. It is scary to look into the refrigerator and see it all. Even cut up and wrapped, that melon still has an attitude. And I think he won the battle after all.
Wrapped sections for infinite eating.
And there are more melons ripening with each passing minute. Gulp.
Cucharas served with hot rice and homemade dill pickle.
Cucharas is one of my favorite eggplant dishes. With several huge Black Beauty eggplants ready to eat, it is time to make these treats. There are several steps, but none of them difficult. The eggplant doesn’t need to be salted or oiled, and the result is tasty hot or as leftovers. It doesn’t taste particularly eggplanty, so for those who don’t think they like eggplant, they may want to try this recipe.
Halve, then quarter the eggplant.
The word ‘cuchara’ in Spanish means spoon or scoop. The eggplant ‘flesh’ is cooked then gently stripped away from the skins, which are reserved. The insides are then mashed with yummy ingredients and then plopped back on the skins, then baked. The process is very forgiving, so if the skins tear, it is okay. It all sticks together with filling in the end.
Scoop out the ‘flesh’ from the cooled skin, and save the skins.
If you are using larger eggplants, then when filling the skin, just cut them in half. The cucharas should be either small enough to be picked up and eaten out of hand, or eaten with a fork.
Cucharas make great finger – food as an appetizer.
The original recipe is from Sundays at Moosewood Cookbook.
Author: Diane C Kennedy (From Sundays at Moosewood Cookbook)
Recipe type: Main dish or appetizer
Prep time:
Cook time:
Total time:
Serves: 16 coucharas
Ingredients
2 medium eggplants with smooth skin
3 garlic cloves, minced
3 eggs beaten
2½ cups grated cheddar cheese
½ cup grated Romano cheese
¼ cup matzo meal or bread crumbs
2 Tablespoons olive oil
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
freshly grated nutmeg
Instructions
Stem the eggplants and cut each in half lengthwise.
Cut each half crosswise into four pieces.
In a covered suacepan, simmer the eggplant chunks in water to cover for 15 minutes until pulp is tender.
Drain the eggplant in a colander and set them aside to cool.
Whjen you can comfortably handle the eggplant, use a teaspoon to separate the pulp from the skins, taking care not to tear the rectangles of skin.
Reserve the skins. Should any tear apart, save them anyway because you can overlap two torn pieced to form a single iece and the filling will hold them together.
In a bowl, vigorously mash the eggplant pulp with the garlic, or use a food processor or blender.
Mix in the remaining ingredients, except for ½ cup cheddar cheese and nutmeg, and combine thoroughly. Add more matzo meal if the mixture seems too thin.
Place a skin, shiny side down, in the palm of your hand.
Mound it with the eggplant mixture about an inch thick.
Place it on a well-oiled baking sheet. Continue until all the skins and mixture are used.
Sprinkle a little of the reserved cheddar and a bit of nutmeg onto each couchara.
Bake 350 degrees F for 20 minutes or until golden brown on top.
The preparation can be done ahead of time and the coucharas baked just before serving.
Are your sunflowers being stripped? Are the leaves acquiring non-snail-like holes and then disappearing altogether? You may be feeding the birds, but not with the seeds!
Lesser goldfinches apparently are nuts over sunflower leaves. They will tear little bits of the leaves off and injest them, and within a day or so there will be nothing but a stem and a flower.
If your goal is to feed the birds, then this is okay. If you have bird problems on your vegetables such as peppers, then you may want to plant sunflowers off to the side to distract them.
Why do they eat sunflower leaves? They must like a little salad with their seeds, and sunflowers are particularly yummy for them. In searching the Internet for suggestions as to why they like sunflower leaves so much, there were many postings about the incidents, and yet most respondents insisted that the birds were after bugs on the leaves, or that snails came in the night and ate the leaves!
This occurrence seems to happen mostly in California, and other than bird nets (which one person said that the lesser goldfinches chewed through!) or planting sunflowers thickly (one for them, one for you), you may as well just enjoy the show. Ours come up from dropped or buried birdseed, and when the plants are growing their flowers, suddenly they are beset by birds who skeletonize the plant. We’re okay with that; it saves a little cost on the very expensive Niger thistle seed! (Oh, and by the way, Niger thistle isn’t thistle seed at all).
Plants have been enjoying the beautiful weather and the constant irrigation from the well, and the garden is flourishing. So, unfortunately, is the Bermuda grass, but that is another tale. Since I see it everyday I don’t notice the change so much, but when I show someone around I am thrilled all over again with the incredible change that has happened on this property. There are so many birds, insects, reptiles and other animals either already here or scouting it out that I know the project is a success. It is a habitat, not just for me and my family, but for native flora and fauna as well. It wasn’t so long ago that I had a cracked, weedy asphalt driveway, a termite-ridden rickety porch that needed pest control, a house with a stinky deteriorating carpet and old splotchy paint, a tile kitchen counter with the grout gone in between and a cleaning nightmare, and a yard full of snails, weeds and Washingtonia palm trees, with the embankment eroding each rainfall. Over the last four years we’ve survived some pretty intense construction projects (none of which were done on time, no matter what they promised!). My house still has some repairs that need to be done but I no longer am embarrassed to have anyone over. The garden is wonderful to walk in and explore. I’ve taken some photos this evening to show you how things are growing:
Bees enjoying purple coneflowers
The luffa squash has mighty asperations.
A luffa squash and bloom. They are edible small and green, but I’ll leave them to dry.
Five eggs today! Each laying hen participated for the first time! The little girls have grown up.
The small lower pond and the palm pathway.
The veggie bed.
Rushes, fleabane, waterlilies and other plants are growing in nicely around the big pond. The boat is still on loan from Aquascape.
A pumpkin tree? This apricot isn’t healthy, but the pumpkins sure are.
These bare areas I’ll fill with plants that will make up guilds, each plant filling a niche to help the others grow.
The entrance to the bee garden.
Native vinegar weed loves a place we left untouched, and so do the bees.
Sugar pumpkins ready a little early for Halloween.
A feral zucchini, still producing at least one a day.
Melons, passionfruit, pitcher plant and many others under the back porch we call the Poop Deck.
Very eager bamboo, sugarcane and hops.
Olive trees tied to painted PVC pipe to make a hut.
The ‘Nest’ beyond the dry stream bed.
A thud and a swish… with no warning the neighbor’s tree fell across the fence.
A green roof for the entranceway, just beginning to show.
The watermelons in the vegetable beds were tiny… these monsters are wild. That one grew on the rock on its own.
Entranceway flower tunnel… with dogs waiting to go inside!
In the August of one of my most successful years of vegetable growing, as the squash vines wither to reveal the graceful shapes of winter stews, and the cabbage moth caterpillers chew collards into lace, I am able to review and make notes on triumphs and things not-as-good-as-one-would-hope. Gardening is as much a practice as medicine, but healthier. What works one year may not work the next; for instance, there are melon years and no-melon years. A gardener can worry about the soil, the water, the sunlight and the bugs, but come to discuss the problem with enough other gardeners and there is sure to be at least one who didn’t have a good melon year either. Whether there is astrological truth in it or not, it matters not except to bring relief from the strain of worrying if there were no melons because of a fault in the gardener.
Here is my list of things that didn’t go as planned, and resolutions to improve next year:
1. Trim back foliage to make sure there isn’t something drinking all the water.
Ginormous Swiss chard root
2. Check for volunteers, especially those hitchhikers from the compost who decide to sprout.
One of three avocado volunteers in the collards
3. Don’t think you’re going to pinch the tomatoes back so that they grow onto a large trellis, especially since you don’t make the trellis. Tomatoes need some light to produce and ripen.
waArkansas Traveler just ripening
4. Warn visitors early about the rubber snakes.
Soybean and rubber snake
5. Count backwards from Halloween the estimated ripen days on the seed packet, and don’t plant too early. That way your pumpkins won’t be ripe in August. Also, plant herbs such as dill and cilantro early and thick long before cucumbers, so that you have the seed heads ready when it is time to make pickles.
Ripe pumpkins in August
6. There only needs to be one zucchini plant.
Monster zucchini
7. Prepare to stake everything. With wire-lined raised beds you can’t plunge a stick down into the soil next to a wobbly plant. You have to attach the stakes to the sides of the bed, or drive them down outside of the bed and make T’s. Whatever the choice, it is best done before the plants are mature.
Quinoa: pretty but floppy
8. Plant lots of kale. It is extremely tasty sauteed, and drying the oiled leaves to make kale chips (see recipe section) makes a nutritious and addicting snack.
Kale is yummy
9. Again, keep volunteers under control. This kabocha squash took over three vegetable beds and two pathways. However, it is producing some mighty fine squash.
Kabocha squash volunteer coming from the bed behind this one, around and into the end bed.
10. Rubber snakes are remarkably effective in preventing crows from eating seeds. However, besides warning visitors, don’t forget where you’ve tossed your rubber snakes if you are reaching into a leafy dark space at twilight!
I found a weed I loathe even more than Bermuda grass. I know that’s hard to believe. Bermuda grass has chased me out of my vegetable garden, and was part of the reason I laboriously built raised beds. It is even now working its way through some of my new planter beds and needs annihilation. I’ve seen Bermuda grass emerge from the top of a five foot hollow metal pole and cascade over the top. It survives under mulch, under rocks, under pavement. Think that is impressive? That’s nothing. Johnson grass has it beat.
I thought that the tall grass growing under the bird feeders was from the bird seed. I let it grow to see what seeds would come from it. The plant looked like corn stalks, and had a little tassel at the top. Pretty innocuous, huh? Then I started looking up on Google images what all the bird seed ingredients looked like in plant form. This stuff didn’t match any of it. Uh-oh. Then I started looking up invasive grasses. Bingo.
Looks like corn, or other weeds. Evil!
I read blogs where ranchers complain of having it on their land, and the general response is to burn, salt and run away from the land. Trying to be organic, I sprayed the tops of my Johnson grass with pure white vinegar, then covered them with black plastic during one of our hottest weeks. When I pulled it off the stalks were slightly pale, but boy they were angry. So I took a day and started digging them up and found tremendously thick roots that spread everywhere with such force that one had burrowed up into a log and I had to use a screwdriver to dig it out.
Johnson grass is the ultimate monster, it spreads by seed, by rhizome, and by any microscopic piece of the root left anywhere near the soil.
Roots worming through and around the wire
Last winter my daughter and I had built a new heirloom bulb bed, lined with black landscape fabric to deflect weeds, and on top of that aviary wire to deflect the gophers, mice and moles. Guess what emerged? The other day I spent a morning carefully digging out all the Johnson grass in and around the bed, following the roots and unwinding them from the wire which they embraced, while trying not to kill my bulbs. I thought I had won, but only two mornings later, there stood a four-inch tall sprout of Johnson grass! Aaaarrgghhh! So I dug it out, and dug more out, and more and more. Today I decided that I had to start from scratch, so I dug out all the bulbs and scratched out the soil (which I’m afraid to reuse because I know there will some miniscule rhizome just waiting. I think I’ll have to spread the soil out and cook it in the summer sun for a few years or so, just to make sure), and was glad I did. This was a task I was so eager to do in the hot sun while other chores stacked up, too! Not only was the JG entwined with the aviary wire, but it had solid, rooted rhizomes as fat as my thumb wriggling around under the black landscape fabric, consequently under five inches of soil, too.
Thick rhizomes under the landscape fabric
I’d use dynamite, but the weed would take advantage and all those bits would come up everywhere. An evil Sourcerer’s Apprentice.
Yes, that is a root sticking through the turned-over aviary wire
My fight against Johnson grass will apparently go on for some time. It is coming up in my pot filled with Christmas cactus, and in the midst of a thorny rose bush, and many other places, disguising itself as other weeds. I’ll not only have to keep digging it out, but cutting the stalks of the plants I can’t dig out without destroying a valued garden member. The question comes to mind: if I set Johnson grass against Bermuda grass, which would win? Whichever does win, it deserves burning and salting!
We’ve gathered seven eggs from the girls this week. We believe the first one was Evelyn’s, the beautiful blond Buff Orpington. The next ones are Miss Amelia’s, followed by a blue/green one from Chickpea and unbelievably, a brownish one from our other Americauna, Kakapo.
First three beautiful eggs, L-R Evelyn's, Miss Amelia's and Chickpea's
The two Barred Rocks are too young yet to lay, but they certainly are interested in what is suddenly so popular about the nesting boxes.
The Barred Rocks are curious teenagers
The nesting platform in the chicken tractor isn’t deep enough to keep straw from being kicked off, so I’ve put up three bee ‘supers’, which are four sides and no top or bottom. Until something else can be arranged, they do just fine.
Miss Amelia, tail up and ready to get it over
Watching the girls as they become hens has been interesting. Miss Amelia sat in the nesting box and panted.
As a mom, I know how she's feeling.
She allows me to pet her now, as she squats into the mating pose. It is a little disturbing, and doubtlessly frustrating for both her and Emerson who is caged separately.
Miss Amelia is desperate for... attention. Sorry!
Chickpea, the big girl, jumps from box to box annoying everyone trying to nest in there. She kicks as much bedding out as she can, sending it flying across the coop with her big feet. When she’s ready to lay she goes into a chicken trance. You can wave your hand in front of her eyes and there is no response, just some panting. Then, voila! A beautiful greenish egg.
Chickpea in a trance
Kakapo is the nest builder. She’ll squat down in one of the boxes then lean her head far out of it, almost losing her balance, to grab a wisp of straw to throw over her shoulder into the box.
We hadn’t seen Evelyn lay, but assumed the first egg which was pointier than Miss Amelia’s, was hers. She’d been in a mood for several days and had settled down. Yesterday, though, she sat down in the corner of the pen by her beau Emerson and took a nap in the daytime which was uncharacteristic. She appeared perfectly healthy; in fact, I commented on how red and full her wattles were. This morning we found our dear Evelyn dead on the floor in the corner of the coop. We also found two eggs with transparent shells in the lay box. There was no evidence of what made her die, but I’m guessing it had something to do with the egg-laying. We don’t know who laid the shell-less eggs, but that shouldn’t kill anyone. It is remedied with more calcium in their diets on top of their lay pellets. Perhaps she was egg-bound, or just couldn’t handle the eggs. We were horrified and greatly saddened. I buried Evelyn under the lime tree just behind the coop. Now we have five hens and a rooster. We gave the girls crushed egg shells and kale leaves, and I’ll sprinkle calcium on their food tomorrow. We’ll miss the beautiful Evelyn something terrible.
There was a surprise in our garden this afternoon. We were weeding and planting a flower seed mixture around the back of the house, and suddenly my daughter excitedly shouted, “Stinkhorn!” I didn’t take offence. I was excited, too. What she was referring to was a reddish, odd-looking fungus that had emerged from the ground next to a rose bush. This fungus makes a rather unpleasant odor, which attracts flies who then carry off the spores. A pretty tricky plant. We had our first and only stinkhorn emerge last year in a different part of our yard, and I was afraid that with all the walking and weeding done in that area, that it wouldn’t be back. Silly me. The fungus was traveling!
Flies enjoying the stink and spreading the spores
Then shortly after this discovery and only a few feet from it, I was digging up weeds and found what I thought was a reptile egg. We thought that maybe it was an egg from Mrs. Sabatini, the Western pond turtle that we found on our property and released into our upper pond, never to be seen again. Or perhaps a snake egg.
Not a reptile egg
When I felt it, however, it was firm and had a little give to it, like it was made of soft rubber. My daughter figured it out. She had read where the stinkhorn spores grow into an egg-shaped, um, thingy, which breaks open underground revealing the slimy gooey part which then pushes up through the ground and begins stinking. The slimy part has the spores on it.
The shiny green interior will thrust out of the ground
Fungus is incredible and wonderful. The threads of fungus hold together the soil, feed us, medicate us and yet we know so little about them. An incredible book to read is Mycelium Running: how mushrooms can help save the world, by Paul Stamets. Although most people wouldn’t welcome a stinkhorn into their perennial border, we think it is very cool, as long as there aren’t too many of them!
