Renovation, Part 1

Colleen asked how the turtle made its way to our front porch. Well, I'll tell you.

It's a long story.

You might have read about our oleanders. All of the oleanders in the area are going to die of oleander leaf scorch. Ours were showing signs of the disease. Instead of waiting until we had a lot of ugly sticks in the ground like many people in the area, we decided to take the oleanders out now and get it over with.

In my story with the time-lapse video of my cutting down a large clump of oleanders, I mentioned that a neighbor had stopped by to say that he is in the tree trimming business and could help finish the job. We got the oleanders cut down to nasty stumps and had all of the bushes lying on the ground.

We needed help finishing the job.

That was a lot more oleander debris than we could handle. And there was no way that we could take out all those stumps.

We hired our neighbor's Lumberjack Services to clean up our mess. And to clear out the row of oleanders that we hadn't yet gotten to. You can see a lot of brown leaves in these oleanders. They shouldn't look that way.

After they cut down the rest of the oleanders, they chipped them all up and hauled them away.

Finally, they brought in the big stump grinder and took out the stumps!

What's this got to do with a turtle on the porch, you ask? That's more of the story.

For another day...

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This has never happened to me before

An orchid has survived and bloomed a second time!

Beauty is fleeting

A couple of years ago I posted a picture of a cactus blossom we had outside our family room. Our cactus patch usually produces one blossom at a time. And only a handful of them in a season.

This year was different.

Some years, we would have a bunch of buds start to form but only a few would develop. The rest would just fall off. This year there were a lot of buds and they all developed. They all bloomed almost at once.

Here's our little cactus patch with the flowers starting to open on Tuesday evening.

Here they are about an hour later.

And here they are yesterday morning.

Here's a close-up of the show at the top of the tall cactuses.

These flowers last a day then collapse. I was going to show the pictures of the aftermath yesterday evening but I had to wait till tonight. A second batch of flowers opened last night.

Here you get to see the first day's flowers starting to droop alongside the flowers that are starting to open.

The top clump, some closing and some opening.

Here we see this morning's new flowers with yesterday's finished flowers.

And tonight the show's over.

We've never had a show like this one. It was pretty while it lasted.

(There are a few buds that will open in a few days but we won't have such an opulent show again this year.)

Some Pretty Flowers

And some past-their-prime-but-still-fascinating flowers.

Mom wants to see pictures of flowers so here we go.

First, flowers that are past their prime.

Last month I told the story of the return of our Pride of Madiera field. They are now finishing up their show. Here's what they look like today.

I had said that I didn't see much variation among the flowers. It turned out that there were some with purple flowers, some with blue, and some with very pale blue, almost white, flowers. Some of the flower heads were pointy and some were rounded. So I guess the two varieties we had originally planted had mixed and produced some nice variants.

I'll have to go out and chop off their big heads now that they're finished blooming. That's what the books say to do.

A couple of years ago I showed (again, at Mom's request) pictures of flowers around the yard. One of them was a Matilija Poppy. The patch of poppies is very happy this year.

The plants in front of the poppies to the left of the roses are the giant squills whose flowers I showed off last year. I hope they have a good year, too!

Here's a close-up of poppies.

They're at the top of an 8-foot tall plant. They smell real good!

OK, one last picture.  Last year I showed you our tabebuia.  I said that it was putting on a better show than ever before. Well, I think this year's show was better yet.

This picture is a month old. It's wrapping things up now. It's got fewer flowers and a lot of leaves. But it's still pretty!

Another miraculous resurrection!

Not only have outdoor plants been rising from the dead, but one in the house also came back from the great beyond.

A few years ago, I got some African violets from The Home Depot. I planted them in a couple of those two-piece pots where an unglazed pot holding the plant sits in water (and fertilizer) held by the outer pot. The water seeps through the inner pot's wall and keeps the plant watered but not soggy.

One of the plants promptly died. I ended up with a pot of potting soil.

Being the lazy sort, I just left the pot of soil on the coffee table with the other violet. After some time, a couple of months?, some tiny leaves appeared in the soil. My violet lived!

Years came and went and the violet continued to grow.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that it had some blossoms forming. The first one has opened!

There is one more blossom on the stalk.

It's a start.

Here's the other violet I planted at the same time. It's been more successful.

Kind of makes you proud!

Years ago, we planted six Pride of Madeira plants (not to be confused with "Pride of Madeira") in the back yard (three each of two varieties). These plants are seen a lot on the sides of Southern California freeways. They produce large spikes blue of flowers. They don't need good soil or a lot of water. They were perfect for our yard.

They grew and produced pretty flowers for several years.

The product description for their seeds on Amazon.com says that they can withstand temperatures down to 24-26°F. That is colder than we ever got.

Then came Sunday, January 14, 2007.

At 6:30 that Sunday morning we got down to 21.6°! We had never experienced such a freeze here. Ten or eleven valves on our water line broke. Those cost about $12 each to replace.

The Prides of Madeira didn't survive.

We were back to bare ground.

In the spring of 2008, I was mowing down the weeds. Among the weeds I noticed a bunch of fuzzy-leafed plants growing where the Prides of Madeira had been. I quit mowing there and let the little plants grow. It turned out that they were indeed baby Prides of Madeira.

They grew into cute knee high plants that year. Last year they grew larger and a few actually bloomed.

This year they are going to put on a spectacular show. They are starting to open up.

Here's a close-up.

It will be interesting to see how the two varieties mixed. So far, I don't see a lot of variation.

A spectacular tree in our yard

Well, it was supposed to be a spectacular tree.

Our Floss Silk tree is blooming. For the first time. Ever.

Poor little tree. It was supposed to be huge by now.

Floss silk trees are "resistant to drought and moderate cold" according to the Wikipedia article. Apparently our cold is more severe than "moderate." The frost burns it down to stubs each year. It comes back and grows out again. Then frost strikes it down again.

We keep saying that we ought to just get rid of the tree.

Poor thing. Frost's a-comin'.

Autumn is Icumen in

Here we go again.

This year's pomegranate harvest was much better than last year's. Last year I didn't grow quite enough pomegranates to make one batch of jelly. This year I got a lot of pomegranates. I made three batches of jelly and one of syrup. Pancakes like pomegranates, too.

That took a gallon of juice. That took getting a lot of little arils out of the tough rinds.

I made a movie of the process.

Thrills ahead!

Squill trying to satisfy requests

Poss wanted me or Jerry in a picture of the squills to show the scale better.  Your wish is my command!

Squill growing

I showed you my giant squills a few days ago. They're about finished blooming for this year. The tallest one is now 6'7" tall.

This is what they look like today.

Colleen's comment suggested that I should have added something that gives you the scale of the flowers so I did just that this time. You'll notice two Papo fantasy figures that Peggy and Michele gave us. There's Rhino Man on the left and Werewolf on the right. They wear skintight shorts are are very well endowed. Thanks, Peggy and Michele!

Squill blooming after all these years

Our giant squills are blooming this year! They took last year off so I was hoping for an exceptional show. But there are only three stalks. We planted three bulbs and each has divided so I was hoping for six flowers. Maybe next year.

The stalk on the left is 5'11" tall.

These are fun flowers to put in a vase. They sway back and forth. One would be pointing far to the left when we leave for work and by the time we get home in the evening it would be peeking around the corner to the right. They last a long time after you've cut them. If you want to make a statement in your grand foyer, these are the flowers to use. Of course, if you don't live in aMediterranean climate, you won't have a lot of luck growing them.

The flowers open from the bottom of the stalk and work their way to the top. Here's what the section with the open flowers looks like.

The bulbs each weighed about 10 pounds. That worked out to be about a dollar a pound. Such a deal!

Orchids

My friend, Ray, from the beginning of my career at NCR/AT&T/NCR/Teradata, gave me some orchids that divide like crazy. Jerry potted them up and put them on a table on the north side of the house. They seem to like it there. They're blooming like crazy! The view out of the family room window has improved.

Here's the view from the family room window:

(As you can tell, it's not really a presentation table.)

And just the blossoms (prettier):

And a close-up (prettier still):

They're tiny flowers.

Thanks, Ray!

Butterfly Amaryllis (again)

Our visitors missed seeing this year's Butterfly Amaryllis blossoms by just a few days. This opened up today.

Happy Bloomin' Spring!

The Tabebuia is putting on a better display than last year's.


I wonder if it will get even better in the next few weeks.

A little autumn color

My Haemanthus albiflos is blooming. It is a confused plant. It doesn't really know when to bloom. I remember that it was blooming around my birthday one year. It blooms when it wants to. It knows best.

It's got white petals (or are they bracts?) with a bunch of bright yellow stamens poking out. I gave it a bigger pot this year and I think it appreciated that. It's putting on its best show ever.

Harvest Time

It is autumn and that means pomegranates are getting ripe. Today was pomegranate harvest and canning. Here's the bush before the harvest.

Too bad it didn't perform as well as it did last year. This is the entire harvest.

And here is what was inside the fruits.
The pomegranate is a "Utah Sweet." This type has very sweet, light pinkish pulp and nonstaining pink juice.

I made pomegranate jelly. First I had to get the juice out of the seeds. I fed them through the food strainer attachment of the KitchenAid mixer. I made a little video of the process and shortened it so show only the start and the finish. Blogger's video processor thought it was still too long and sped it up a lot. That's OK, you get the gist of the process. They didn't speed up the audio part. So, if you have 47 seconds to spare, you can watch my latest little movie.



I ended up with 3¼ cups of juice.
The recipe for a batch of jelly calls for 4 cups of juice. Since I knew the harvest was not great, I had a contingency plan. I bought a bottle of Trader Joe's pure pomegranate juice from concentrate. I added some of that to bring the juice up to 4 cups.

I then stood over the hot stove on this hot day (it got up to 88.4 today) stirring the juice, pectin, and sugar and ended up with six half-pint jars of jelly.
Yum!

Better than zucchini

It's that time of the year. The time of the year when you open your front door and there it is. A large grocery bag. Filled. With. Zucchini.

I like zucchini as much as the next man. Maybe not as much as Mombert does (Mombert isn't a man but you know what I mean), but I like them. But after a while they lose their charm.

Yesterday I got home and there was a variation on that theme. Our neighbor left us two large bags filled with Valencia oranges. Eighteen pounds of them.

We had fresh squeezed orange juice with breakfast this morning.


Are you jealous or what?

Naked ladies

Back in March, I mentioned that I had transplanted some naked ladies around the yard. In that post I said that they take a few years to get established before they'd bloom so I probably wouldn't be posting pictures of them this year.

I was wrong.

Imagine my surprise when I walked passed our overgrown acacia this morning and happened to see some pink beneath it. There was a naked lady! Blooming! Its first year after being transplanted! A month after everybody else's naked ladies have bloomed!

So here is the picture I promised I wouldn't be posting this year.

Ladies (naked or clothed) and gentlemen, my naked lady.

Grendel makes peanut butter

We love peanut butter. And we're not talking that Skippy and Jif crap. We want real peanut butter. You know, peanuts and salt. Our Thursday evening pancakes wouldn't be the same without peanut butter.

Grendel, our Blendtec blender, can make peanut butter. I tried it out with peanuts from Trader Joe's. It was good. But a pound bag of peanuts costs more than a pound jar of Trader Joe's peanut butter. That just didn't make a lot of sense somehow.

I took a vacation day yesterday (I've accumulated all the vacation I can so I had to use some lest I lose some that I would have otherwise earned) and spent some of the day shopping at Costco. They had a five pound bag of unsalted peanuts in their shells for $5.49. I decided to try my hand at making peanut butter from peanuts I shell myself.

I started out with two pounds of peanuts in their shells.
Two pounds of peanuts plus an hour and five minutes equals one pound, eight and a half ounces of shelled peanuts. If you do your arithmetic, you'll discover that this comes out to be $1.44/pound of shelled peanuts (don't consider the time it took me to shell them, time is not money!). If this turns out to be good peanut butter this will be a good value!

A pound and a half of peanuts.

I took out six ounces of the peanuts and had Grendel coarsly chop them so I could add chunks to the peanut butter so we could have crunchy peanut butter.


Here is the finished product.This is good peanut butter. We have achieved good peanut butter value! And we don't have jars that we have to recycle. We have the bag the peanuts came in that isn't recyclable. But I think that amount of petrochemicals in the bag might be less than what would be used to make another jar and to transport the jar from place to place. So I think this might be a little better for the environment than store bought stuff.

Here's my latest YouTube masterpiece: Grendel Makes Peanut Butter!



I ended up with almost eight ounces of peanut shells.
Nothing goes to waste, the shells are in the compost bin.

Trees a crowd

This time we're only trimming trees. Well, we're not doing it, we've hired Artistic Tree Care to make them pretty. They came today. I came home this evening and my jaw dropped.

Here are some before and after pictures of some of their work.

The big, backyard ash from the front yard before it got trimmed:
Here's the backyard ash after the trimming. The lighting is way different but you'll get the idea:
There were a lot of branches in this tree that had finished their jobs and had died. I guess that's what ash trees do. (A lot of dead stuff blows out of them when we have heavy winds.)

This is the ash tree in the front yard before the trimming:
And after:

And another ash tree on the side of the garage before its trimming:
I don't think you can see it but there was a huge branch that broke in the winds that drove October's fires. Good thing it stayed in the tree otherwise it probably would have taken down the power and telephone lines.

And after:

Then we had the oleanders under that last ash severely shortened. Here they are before:
And here they are with what was cut down on the ground in front of them:

What I first saw when I got home were the piles of ash branches that were in the front front yard and across the street. They ran out of room in our yard to store the debris. There are more heaps of ash on the other side of the oleanders below and along the fence by the neighbor's garage. I guess they're coming back tomorrow to shred all the piles.

They also ground the pine and juniper stumps you've seen earlier. And they ground out the palm stump that was left in the backyard after the hideous palms were removed years ago. The person who did that work decided that we'd like a big, ugly planter made out of a palm stump. We never used it as an ugly planter and ivy grew over it. It's gone now.