Tag Archives: feijoa

Balmy with bread and honey.

my garden, work, , , , , , , , ,

The sun was hot on my back as I reached up on the trellis to gather the dried Painted Lady runner beans. I separated the beans from the vines and carried loads of still vigorous leafy matter to the green bin. After a while the sun went behind the pine tree, but the balminess hung on.

It was quite a workout climbing up and balancing on the planter box, hauling vines back over the fence from the neighbor’s yard where they always wander. So when I had stashed a five gallon bucket full of bean pods into the garage, I leaned back in my orange plastic Adirondack chair (stained from being out in the weather for years) that I’d moved away from the bean corner, and drank a can of sparkling water.

I was intensely aware of my riches. This morning I had picked another several dozen feijoas, and we put them and what remained from the last week into the dehydrator. Reading ideas for how to use a heavy crop, I learned that people do eat the skins. So I tried a few with their skins on and they are nice that way. The skins are a little more tart than the flesh, but they add another layer of complexity to the overall flavor, and a little crunch. The neighbor’s redwood tree looms over my pineapple guava, so that the dried and prickly twigs that fall are always interspersed with the fruit, and usually tangled in my hair when I come inside from picking.

Below, parsley, which I was prepping to put into the Parsley-Tarragon Salsa Verde, and in which I was exulting. When I have a good sized parsley patch it feels like the most versatile resource. Plus the swallowtails love it!

tarragon

Last year I never got around to harvesting those runner beans until they had been rained on a few times and ruined. So it felt good to have put them under cover, and also to not let the feijoas go to waste. I had made that extra batch of salsa before the tarragon went into dormancy. I could sit back and relax, and just be in the garden. The awareness of my wealth brought to mind the king who was in his counting house, counting out his money, the queen in the parlor, eating bread and honey, and the maid in the garden getting her nose bitten off.

Well, I was the king, taking account of my bounty. But in the garden. And the queen, feasting on the most satisfying and sweet soul food — in the garden. Some days I hang the laundry in the sun, as does the maid, but that also makes me feel rich.

The king was in the counting house,
Counting out his money.
The queen was in the parlor,
Eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes,
When along came a blackbird,
And snipped off her nose.

-Sing a Song of Sixpence

The first of the newer white Japanese anemones buds opened today, October 16! I’d have to say I’m rich with anemones at this point. The pincushion flower plants that I cut down to stubs and moved to the planter boxes have started blooming again amongst the basil that also won’t stop.

Back to the feijoas:

Bea blended up some pulp with an apple to make fruit leather, and I sliced the rest with the skin on. Now all of that experimental goodness is in process in the dehydrator, and filling the garage with its aroma.

One last thing to illustrate my brimming treasure stores: The rudbeckia is still blooming!! It has been showing off its gold since May 22, and I expect it will go another week at least, which will add up to five months of opulence. Not only are its flowers still lovely, but the leaves are turning all purply and mottled at the end of the season, a patina of autumn. Because it sits close to the street for everyone to see as they drive by, it’s the part of my abundance that gets shared with the most people. I hope it might cause some of them to say, Glory to God for His most generous gifts!

The feijoas are falling.

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I had in mind to do a bit of gardening today, but since it is hot, I’d need to do it early. Early came and went, and even the shady places I had planned to work with my little trowel were not shady enough. Typically our shady places are much cooler than in the full sun, but not this week.

So I just went out and wandered a little while eating a popsicle, and saw that dozens of pineapple guavas had dropped on the ground. That means that they are ripe. So I fetched a bowl from the kitchen and crawled around to gather them — four pounds!

The little squash in the photo above is the only and stunted kabocha that resulted from my first attempt. Next year maybe I will try them again, but in the front yard instead of butternuts. I brought in three of the latter whose stems were not green any longer. After I trimmed off the portions of the long squash vines that are not bearing fruits, I can see spaces into which to insert the starts of leafy greens that I’ve had in the greenhouse.

The fruits of the arbutus (Strawberry Tree) have also been falling for some time, but they usually are overripe before that happens. Right now the bush is covered with ripening fruits, flowers for next year, and pine needles that have fallen — currently including a whole stem of them — as they do on everything that grows on that side of the yard. If I were a terribly tidy sort of gardener I’d need to spend an hour every day picking off the needles of the constantly shedding Canary Island Pine.

I showed Bea how I eat the feijoas/pineapple guavas, and she and I stood around for awhile savoring these exotic gift of late summer.  It’s 101 degrees as I type, and I’m thinking this fruit would be nice about now blended with coconut water and poured over ice…. But I’m headed to Vespers, so I’m glad to see that as to temperature, tomorrow promises to be a similar day in which to enjoy such a drink!

From seals to snapdragons.

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On Saturday I drove my out-of-town friend to the coast. We have several times made this trip when she is visiting her family for Thanksgiving. The weather was forecast to be sunny all day, which we received as a wonderful gift, though we are used to fog out there at any time of the year.

When we arrived it was truly a gorgeous day. No wind, and plenty of sunshine and blue skies. The long road to the parking lot next to the beach was closed to cars, with no explanatory signage. Maybe it was because of the king tides still happening, which make these already dangerous beaches even more so. But we were allowed to walk down, which just gave us more good exercise coming back, so that was okay.

Only about two dozen harbor seals were lying by the mouth of the Russian River. But throngs of gulls were coming and going above us, and then making a racket as they swam in huge flotillas of white specks on the river, the whole scene sparkling.

Suddenly, the fog arrived! Unexpected, but not surprising.
That’s how it goes on the North Coast.

After watching the seals and gulls for a while longer, Mother S. and I began our long, slower this time, walk back up to the car, and our long drive home again. We were well satisfied.

Moving on to this morning… When I was adding water to the fountain I heard a woodpecker up in the redwood tree in the neighbor’s yard behind mine. I rarely do hear those birds around here so it was a pleasant encounter, though I couldn’t get my eyes on him.

I did see a hummingbird checking out my new abutilon that is in a pot; I wonder if that is a flower that actually offers any drink to the hummers? Seems like they would have to fly upside down while drinking…

Today I cooked up the first batch of greens from the planting by the driveway. It’s convenient having them growing there, because I notice them at least several days a week when I get in and out of the car. These I picked Saturday morning, and stuck them in the fridge to wait a couple of days. Yum! The flowers are on either the Chinese broccoli or the kalettes; I got them mixed up. But they taste good so they went into the pot, too.

When Pathfinder was here he was looking at my olive trees that are growing in pots. One of them he gave me fifteen years ago, and the other I bought in a little pot at the grocery store a couple of years later. I also got them mixed up, because after years of careful pruning, they have the same shape, which they didn’t at first.

Pathfinder asked me what type of olive I had bought for myself, and I said it started with an “A.” That would be an Arbequina, he told me. And he knew that he had given me a Manzanillo; then he pointed out the different shapes of the olives that are right now on the trees. He knows the Manzanillo, which is this one with pointier fruits:

Which means that the Arbequina is this one:

I never noticed the difference before! They are on opposite sides of the path from each other, so I don’t see them closely at the same time. That’s my only excuse for my inattention, but it saddens me that I don’t know my beloved trees very well. Pathfinder cures olives, so he has an eye for them. And now I know them better.

The last unripe fruits to show you are my pineapple guavas. Last week I harvested six ripe ones from the ground under the bush. Today I searched, but no more had fallen, and even the largest of the hundreds still hanging on were hard. Probably few if any more will come of age; their mini climate is just not ideal for them.

At least the snapdragons are being beautiful along the front walk.

This week I’m joining quite a few people in the parish for a Thanksgiving dinner in our church hall. I’m bringing a large quantity of the famous Orange Yams, adapted from my mother-in-law’s recipe. I see that I’ve never shared that recipe here before, so I’ll try to remember to take a couple of pictures to go with a recipe to be posted later.

December is almost here… And then 2025 will be history!
We must breathe deeply and make the most of every day ❤

Another tree I have known.

nature, trees, , ,
November 2015

This morning I got out into the fresh fresh, rain washed air, still damp and loaded with nourishment from a mysterious and secret recipe, and I walked to and along the creek, and heard an unfamiliar and curious bird song. I wasn’t prepared for that, not having my phone and its Merlin bird app with me — I was trying to be a little bit un-modern.

I heard several bird songs, as it turned out, and saw a flurry of tiny birds on the paved path, scurrying under the privets. There was to be no sunshine today, but I still felt the pull of the reality, “Light of Light, True God of True God,” my own Source of Life.

I looked forward to a lunch date in a short while, so I couldn’t explore as long as I’d have liked; I turned back, along my usual route, past the pineapple guava that I have known and noticed for as long as I can remember. Many huge fruits were on the ground, much larger than anything mine ever produces… probably because it gets full sun all day long. I bent over to pick up one that hadn’t been bruised, but it was hard. Odd, that it hadn’t ripened….  and then I saw, a few feet away, the horror: the whole tree had been hacked to the ground, and I became aware of a large empty space above me.

Construction workers — or was it a demolition crew? — were in the driveway of the property on which the tree had lived, modestly, on the very corner of the lot, where it was not in the way of anything. Maybe a new owner was starting Something New. There the Modern attitude hit me where it had hit the feijoa, the idea we have of thinking that the best way is, Cut it all down and start over.

I looked through my old posts just now for a picture of that tall bush. I had mentioned it several times, but never took its picture. The owner of the property did not live in the house on that property, I learned that much some years ago. I also know that he never appreciated the guava for what it was; he always pruned it at exactly the wrong time, so that it rarely had a chance to show how many fruits all that sunshine could have sweetened to lusciousness.

I did love that tree. A few times I gathered a few of its fruits off the ground, and once my grandson and I picked its blooms to take home and add to our breakfast. I wonder if anyone else in the neighborhood will notice its absence?