Tag Archives: asparagus

Pests, popcorn and pie.

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I didn’t bake this apple pie, and I won’t be at the event where it will be eaten this evening, but it is a product of my kitchen and came out of my oven, so I feel invested in it. Its beauty is obvious, but its butteriness you can only imagine.

After the pie went out the door, I popped some popcorn. I have taken to eating this snack in the last few months, whereas I didn’t for many years previous. I like to cook it in beef tallow in a heavy saucepan, shaking it frequently as it pops away on the gas range. How do you pop corn? And do you like yellow or white popcorn? The last time I bought it, I tried the white variety, and was disappointed to find that the popped kernels are smaller than the yellow. I can’t decide if I like the relative softness better or not.

You can see behind the popcorn that I have my sewing machine on the table. This used to be a common sight, in the long, long ago. Yesterday I tried to start on a Christmas sewing project upstairs in my Sewing-Morning Room, but the old Kenmore in a cabinet there is not working right. So I took my other old machine out of the cupboard and after a little oiling it is running like a dream.

This machine I bought when a freshman in college, at a sewing and fabric store in Santa Barbara. It had been retired from its first life in a high school home economics class, and sold for $40. I am very fond of it, as it has been the most reliable of all the machines I’ve owned. But little things show its age. The pads serving as feet, that might project one’s table from the screws, are hard as rocks and crumbling. I don’t know if any shop would want to attempt a refurbishing of them…. I have the machine sitting on a towel for now.

The ferny asparagus of summer 2021

Joyous news: All the work I did to “sanitize” my asparagus bed last fall seems to have paid off. I was trying to mitigate the horrid infestation of aphids my plants had suffered in their ferny stage, two years in a row, forcing me to cut them down several months earlier than is best; one wants them to carry on photosynthesis for the nourishment of the crowns underground.

What I did was to remove all the mulch, apply a fresh layer of topsoil, and finally a thick layer of fresh mulch. This year the fronds are naturally turning yellow, at the appropriate time, and I haven’t see a single aphid. It is such a relief. This picture of the neighbor cat on the renewed asparagus bed is from last October.

On the subject of pests, you might remember that I was wondering why the fruit of my fig tree was dropping when still hard and unripe. Nikkipolani suggested that Black Fig Fly might be the problem, and after researching online and looking carefully at the fruit and my tree, I discovered both the larva and the fly on site. Ugh! It seems that sanitation is once again the main thing I can do to try to solve this problem, so I’m going to remove all the (wood chip or “arbor”) mulch and old fruit from under the fig and keep the soil bare. I will spare you photos of all the damage done by these insects. It’s not pretty.

My sister Nancy was visiting recently from California’s agricultural heartland, and she and I shopped at two nurseries. I bought some heuchera plants that are just the thing I was looking for to put in this area where I also had planted white Japanese anemones and violas and some blue grass. Other finds from this fall I will wait to show you when they are looking like something next spring. I replanted the area by the front door just before the rains came.

In the pot by the doorstep, I popped in more of those orange violas with succulents. I’m thinking I need to find a tall box or planter to put there, in which I can display whatever pretty thing I can find, even if I have to switch it out every month when it fades. The current pot-within-a-broken-pot system leaves something to be desired.

I don’t have much fall decor, but I did put up this garland that my daughter-in-law Joy made for me several years ago. We were given a giant pumpkin that we kept by the front door for a few days, and then Bea roasted it into 29 cups of puree for the freezer. So far we’ve used it for muffins, pumpkin chia seed pudding, and pumpkin pancakes.

I baked hefty loaves of Chocolate Banana Bread, the recipe for which I’ll try to post soon.

When I was waiting in an office the other day, I was seated just opposite this painting, which appears to be a depiction of the local scenery right now.

It’s a glorious autumn!

Monday rain and flowers.

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So many little tasks need doing before setting off on a journey. Of course there is the packing of supplies to use while I’m away, but there is also the making ready of Home. It needs quite a bit of tidying up, just to show the homemaker that she does love this place. Being extra nice to the garden by deadheading and cleaning up also does a lot to ease my sore heart, because it dreads saying good-bye once again.

And I’m in the middle of my biggest garden project ever, that is, the biggest I’ve ever taken on by myself. Ten areas of the garden will have been changed in different ways, when I’m finished. That sounds like it is almost everything, but it’s not. I won’t be finished for a few more weeks, mostly because October and November are better months for planting perennials around here, but also because I plain ran out of time this month.

Last fall I planted three clary sage plants, which are biennials and will bloom next June. I hope I can remember to start a few every fall so that I can keep them coming. Below you can see one of the older ones in the foreground, next to the pincushion flower I planted last week, and in the background two of the younger clary sages I was able to get from a local nursery recently.

As three big conifers to the south of me, including my own Canary Island Pine, keep growing taller, the amount of “full sun” in the back garden has been shrinking. It was a case of bit by bit, and then all at once. All at once I realized why the purple coneflower barely blooms, and even the recently planted Mexican Evening Primrose is not happy.

apple mint

Also there is the problem of the unpleasing design, or lack of design, from the last landscaper, of the area near my front door. I’m unwilling to live with it, so it’s taken hours and hours of thinking and thinking and reading on the Pacific Horticulture site, researching and shopping for plants, imagining how they will look if I put them here or there. I’m moving several plants installed last year to better places.

When I get new gallons or 4″ pots on site, I arrange them still in the pots where I think they work, and then I think better of it, and carry them elsewhere. To the front yard — No, the back yard — how will it look alongside this other plant that can take part shade? Weird? Probably… Oh well, they will have to get along. It can be exhausting being so unsystematic.

Naked Buckwheat

I’m excited to have my very own Naked Buckwheats — this is a California native that I often see in the mountains. My daughter Pippin has them growing wild around her place. And now me!

I decided to grow annual vegetables in the front garden near the perennial asparagus, because they will be sure to get enough sun there; but I need to add more soil first. I should have waited to buy the kalettes and Chinese Broccoli until that bed was ready, but I didn’t, and they were in little six packs, so I spent an hour transferring them to larger pots so they won’t get rootbound while they’re waiting.

I have cut down the asparagus a few times, first because of the aphids, and then so that I could rake away all the mulch and add more soil, and new mulch. But spears keep coming up, and looking ferny lovely:

When I cut them, I throw away the fronds or chop them up for the worms, but there are always several that haven’t become fronds yet, and that are the right size for eating. I accumulated enough to roast a panful this afternoon.

And I made a batch of Jammy Eggs to have for snacks on the journey.

It’s to Wisconsin I am going, because my granddaughter Miss Maggie is getting married! It was barely over a year ago that her brother’s wedding took me to that state, and now back I go. It will be a very happy time, and I will be over my leavinghomesickness before you know it.

One of the asparagus beds.

It started raining this afternoon. Early autumn rains are just the best. I can leave the windows and doors open and breathe the rain, and hear it pitter patter. The drops began to fall when I was still in the middle of planting my Bouteloua gracilis, or blue grama grass (“Blonde Ambition”), and after I cleaned up my tools I still had to put out all the trash cans, plus an extra green bin a neighbor is letting me use. Four neighbors, two on either side of me, are always letting me use extra space in their green waste bins for my overflow.

Blue Grama Grass

Do you find that when you are getting ready for a trip, not only do you have the packing for the actual trip, and the everyday housework and cooking that has nothing to do with the trip, but also extra, surprise things that come up that take some of your precious time? I realized last week that I needed to lay in some firewood, and that took a whole day to deal with. I got a half cord and stacked it almost entirely by myself. In the course of that my neighbor Eric lent me his wheelbarrow and offered to repair my wheelbarrow. He noticed in going through my gate that it didn’t latch behind him, so I spent an hour figuring out how to adjust that latch. I don’t want the gate to fail to close when I’m away, if he should come for the wheelbarrow.

And what do you know, I also got inconvenient visitors this week — ants! They have been mostly crawling around on my computer table and keyboard — and my hands — so I am going to cut this shorter than it might have been, stopping at long instead of longer, and I’ll hope to check in from Wisconsin soon. But I still don’t have a tablet or anything larger than my little phone to work on, so I don’t know…

Happy Autumn Days to you all.

Ladybugs warned me.

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A picture from my garden in springtime:

It seems I never wrote last summer about how I had to prune my asparagus early. I didn’t have time, because of how that project consumed me. The same phenomenon is forcing me to do it again this year: an infestation of aphids in the thick jungle of fronds. Last week I saw a few ladybugs on the plants, and thought, Oh, no, I bet it’s happening again. I looked more closely, but the invasion wasn’t obviously imminent.

Then today, as I was trimming the irises, I noticed that some of their leaves had the sticky “honeydew” sign of aphids. That’s exactly what I was doing last year when, as today, I looked up at the asparagus fronds bouncing off my head — Why oh why hadn’t I worn a hat? — and saw the shiny mess everywhere. I had taken a lot of pictures last year (including two I’m posting now), but never got around to sharing anything of that experience; there were immensely more pleasant things to tell about.

Searching online, I did not discover any tricks to prevent this happening every year, though I did learn that much of California is so mild that aphids are a problem with many crops; there are aphids specific to many plants, a fact I didn’t know before. Maybe I have the European Asparagus Aphids.

A single adult ladybug can eat up to 50 aphids per day, and the ones that arrived in my garden this month have feasted well, but they can’t keep up. One is supposed to wait to prune asparagus after cold weather makes the fronds turn brown, so that they have as long as possible to carry on photosynthesis. But if aphids are destroying them anyway, not much is lost by doing it early.

Ladybugs in ’24 after I took away much of their food.

Jacques the Gardener in San Diego shows in his video how he had the same problem I do, in his much smaller plot, and his reasoning about having to cut down the plants months before the usual time helped me to feel better about doing the same. Last year there were so many mild-weather months remaining after I removed the decimated fronds, a whole new crop of them sprouted, which I knew would start over the process of turning the fall sunshine into food for the crowns. Eventually they had to be cut off also. My spring crop following all that was pretty good this year, but it’s possible that a continued aphid plague will weaken the plants.

August 2024, after one of two beds had been cut back.

Today, I only cut off a few of the stalks, to clear the way for me to finish cleaning up the irises. In the process aphids and aphid carcasses drifted down on my hair and clothes. In the next couple of months I’m dividing and replanting the irises and changing things around in that area, so I think after cutting all the asparagus to the ground I’ll take the mulch off the whole space as well and start with fresh everything. I hope that might reduce next year’s aphid population a little.

In the meantime, I will close with a more positive visual reminder of why I do all this work: