Things Are Growing

There have been a few happenings around the Casa over the past few weeks. That’s what happens when time passes; things, things happen. The summer is a somewhat quiet, slow time in Tucson. Those who live here year-round appreciate that. Just as the heat of June hits its crescendo, and even the most stalwart Tucsonan thinks wistfully of Flagstaff, the monsoon begins to ramp up. This year has been a particularly rewarding season. The desert has turned green and lush and the air is moist and humid and the temperature has been averaging in the coolish upper 90’s. Pleasant.

The garden is in its post-peak downward cycle. All but one of the tomato bushes have been reduced to forked six inch stumps by The Lovely Gail. This year the ongoing garden experiment will explore the possibility of a second crop of tomatoes from the same plants. We have heard that it can be done here, successfully, so we’ll attempt it this year and see what sprouts.

The last of the cucumbers are just about ready to be taken. They have been a constant surprise in the thicket of the garden. We check often and do not see any, not even small starts, than seemingly out of thin air there will be a fully grown vegetable hanging there. As if someone went to Safeway, bought it and hung it there over night for us to find. Surprising, rewarding and tasty too!

A couple pickeling cucumbers approaching their peak. The Lovely One took these and a couple regular cumbers and made a fresh cold cucumber soup. The soup also had chives an mint from our backyard. Yummy!

The Lovely One tried her hand at cantaloupes this year. It wasn’t looking very good at the start. She had planted them outside of the raised bed, near the fence and towards the pool pump and equipment. The desert mice, squirrels and pack rats would regularly come by and nibble the blossoms and shoots. She constructed a two foot tall chicken wire fence in a three foot radius around it and that seemed to be a huge help. Well, that and all the trapping we did of mice, squirrels and the two pack rats living nearby. My happy gardener now has some rather impressive melons for anyone who wishes to stop by and admire. Three are nearly ready to harvest and three more the size of baseballs have appeared. We’ll be enjoying garden fresh cantaloupes within a week to ten days it seems.

Here you can see the three cantaloupes from about a week prior to this post. there are three others in there but they're about the size of baseballs.

And finally, the yellow squash has started producing. We had all but given up on it. They need to be pollinated in order to produce but the bees were few and far between early in the season. The Lovely Gail tried her hand at pollinating the plant with a fine tipped artists brush but soon the tomatoes were bearing and we needed to cover the garden with shade cloth to shield it from the intense June sun and the various creatures and critters that would seek a free lunch. Well, over the course of the summer a colony of bees somewhere off in the wild found a way creep up on the water in a far corner of the pool. They gather the pool water and take it to the hive, we suppose. This increase in bee traffic at the Casa has been a pollination plus! We’re seeing a significant increase in bee traffic at the garden and as a result the yellow squash plant has suddenly gone ballistic with vegetables. Yet another positive as a result of getting a pool.

The second half of the summer garden season is shaping up well, due in no small part to the hand and persistence of The Lovely Gail. We’ll look forward to what the late summer brings and I’m sure she has already started planning what the winter garden will produce.

This was taken about an hour prior to this post. The Lovely Gail plucked this bad boy today. There are two more that look just like it still out there and three more the size of grapefruit. The wine bottle is for perspective, that's a nice melon! Not bad for her first cantaloupe ever.

Click the pics to see them in a larger size!