In This Month’s Blog:

Making Lemonade

Treats from the June Kitchen

Garden Update

The June Gallery

Making Lemonade

Chris:

How to make the best of a bad situation?  The latest drought, now two years old, is hitting us really hard. Temps were over 100 4 days last week, with a high of 110 in our part of the Valley. More 100+ days are forecast for the coming week.  It has been particularly painful to hold back from giving extra water to the veggies–which are suffering, and look it.

I’ve tried to hold to my regular pattern of every-other-day hand watering of the veggies, but when the temp gets to 95 or above, I water some of them every day, especially those tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, zucchini, and cucumbers (17 plants total) that get full sun up to 14 hours a day. Meanwhile, the rest of the garden, much of which is on drip irrigation, continues to be watered twice a week, unless I see the need for a more ambitious program.

No mandatory water restrictions on homeowners have been issued as yet, but that’s probably just a matter of time.  The state and local governments are in the ironic position of just having fully reopened from COVID on the 15th–and don’t want to impose restrictions of another kind, even if they are justified.

On the other hand, those who use by far the most water (80+%) in the state, the large farmers, have already had their annual portions of river water cut back. This limitation, however, means even further stress on the sinking underground aquifer, because drilling ever-deeper wells has never been regulated by the state. Why not is a great question, and is part of the tumultuous, utterly complex history of water in California. (Mark Arax’s The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California is the latest excellent book on this subject. I recommend it.) 

Then, of course, the other annual weather crisis, fire danger, is looming, and everyone in California and across the West has that in mind. That climate change is making fires worse every year, as we reported in 2020 (see entries for August and September), just adds to the anxiety.

So how do those of us who love plants and growing them keep from going bonkers in this annual stress? Well, this one gardener makes lemonade! 

Yes, literally. We have been so fortunate in our meyer lemon crop this season. Our ever-expanding bush has given us close to 300 large, juicy bright yellow lemons from December through June (and maybe even into July)–about 2-3 months longer than usual. And the bush is teeming with little green lemons ripening toward this coming December’s harvest. So in a dry land we have this wonderful gift that helps to nourish us and keep us looking on the bright side.

Treats from the June Kitchen

Jean:

Also helping to keep our spirits bright are the treats that come from the oven and stovetop. Here are a few from this month:

My lemon squares, decorated with mint and lemon verbena from the garden. Lemon curd is a favorite, versatile way that we use some of our beautiful meyer lemons.

Chris picks them, pits them, and cooks them down on the stove, with water added as needed, plus sugar and stevia to moderate the tang of these sour/sweet stone fruit, and with fruit pectin for thickening. Read about our process.

June Garden Update

Chris:

While the drought and the lemons are the lead stories this month, a few other items are worth reporting.

Tomatoes: The harvest of ripe cherry tomatoes, Stupice cherry tomatoes, and Early Girl mid-size tomatoes has begun, with a handful being picked every few days. Most intriguing is the Sunrise Bumble Bee plant, which went in at the end of April: it is finally fruiting, though none of the fruit is red as yet.

Peppers: Our four mild pepper plants have been taking their time to fruit this season in the challenging conditions. All have produced several small fruit, and all have numerous white buds. The strangest plant was the Anaheim hot pepper that I was trying out in this garden. It produced two beautiful, tasty fruit in early May, but expired in the heat of mid June and is no more. I’ve now replaced it with a healthy Fresno. We’ll see how it does the rest of the summer.

Cucumbers: The most disappointing veggy in this troubled season is the Burpless cucumber. The three plants started off beautifully in April and produced a mass of yellow flowers in May. They produced two large fruit in June–but both were uncharacteristically very bitter, really inedible. These plants, which I grow as usual in full sun, have been devastated by the heat this season. I’ll nurture them along, and hope the results improve.

Zucchini: Even this summer, our zucchini plant is a marvel, though it, too, has been stressed by the heat. It has already produced three prodigious, delicious fruit, with another on the way, and more yellow flowers.

Peaches: Our tree is bending down with many green fruit, though not so much that I fear breakage of limbs at this point. Harvest time is usually late July. What I worry more about this season is the fruit drying out before harvest. Drying out has not occurred in prior years. So far, so good.

Strawberries: The four new plants, all in pots, keep steadily producing ripening berries, a few at a time. The pots allow me to move them around in the garden to avoid the most intense heat, and the pots also retain the acid treatments the plants need each week.

The June Gallery

 

And on to July, with more lemonade…