This is a photo of Romaine lettuce, taken early last spring. We harvested all but one of the plants, which we let go to seed. Now, I am reaping the results from those seeds--our new "volunteer" Romaine lettuce is up and providing us with baby lettuce.
I just picked the first small, green leaves of our fall/winter Romaine lettuce. I worried that the hard frosts we’ve been having would burn it, but it is much hardier than I expected. We had enough to put in our tacos, tonight.
Leonel and I filled five heavy-duty black plastic garbage bags with leaves, added compost starter, a small amount of compost and a little dirt to see how quickly we can create compost of our own. It is another of what he’s convinced are my harebrained ideas (although most of them work out well). He doesn’t think much of the creative things I want to try. I read about this method of quick composting with little financial outlay online. We will eventually build a box for our compost, but this is as good as it gets this year.
We walked through the sad, sad, brown and shriveling yard this afternoon; yet we still found some green areas to rejoice over. We have a Hebe speciosa that we planted last spring, and while it didn’t flower this year, probably because a hibiscus relative out-competed the slow-growing plant, it looks great now that it has more space. We’re going to plant several more Hebes in the spring. They are beautiful evergreens that give us a place to put our attention when the rest of the yard is barren.
I lost my Daphne—and have no idea why. It was beautiful and growing well, then it just died very quickly in late October-early November. I’ll plant another Daphne, though, as I planted in honor of my mother, just as the fig is the tree that memorializes my grandfather. Perhaps our yard is just too hot for shade-loving plants. The heat, I think gets to them. I have lost azaleas regularly (I have three right now, but they never look very healthy).
We are going to start on our new beds next spring, too. We have the first of two circular rings of wood stumps that constitute raised tree beds built and have planted a kumquat and lemon in this bed. We will add a mandarin and an orange tree as well, this winter. In the other ring raised bed, yet to be built, we are going to plant a Fuji apple, a Bartlett pear, and a Santa Rosa plum. Along with all our peach and nectarine trees, we will have a hearty abundance of fruit from our yard.
I would like to find more perennial vegetables to join the asparagus, but we will probably run out of space for all we want to plant and grow. So far, my desire for an almond tree has been vetoed by Leonel.
(We just finished dinner—and the Romaine was wonderful in the tacos. The chiles and tomatillos in the salsa were from our garden, too. It is so nice still to have home-raised “stuff” to eat, although it doesn’t account for a very large portion of our food.)
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