lizards

Our house is prime habitat for many sizes of lizards. David caught this small one on the wall today. So cute.

lemons

We haven't planted a grapefruit tree yet, but we did have a lemon tree already at the house. It bloomed for a few weeks, and in the last few days has been making these small green fruits all over the tree. Hopefullly lots of lemons in about 6 months or so..

Earth boxes update

Our earth boxes are also prospering, although all we have is one pepper so far. It's grown from a tiny nub to this 1 1/2 inch pepper in a week!

Planting update

Many of our plants have been growing like crazy. The tomatillo above has many blooms, so we expect fruit soon. The tomato that has been planted for almost 2 months has plenty of fruit, it just needs to ripen. The temperature has been going back up, so hopefully that will happen soon.

Garage organization

We've finally tracked down all the pieces of the organization system we were using and finished the garage. It's amazing how much stuff fits there - we moved boxes in from other parts of the house and even have some empty shelves. Ours cars fit as well. Although we've been looking for a replacement for the PT and realizing that it is hard to find one with as much functionality that will fit in 180". Any ideas?

Create your own visitor map!

A surprise in the garden

So the previous owners of the house left us several huge pots out by the pool, all of them with some form of plant in it. Most of them we presumed dead when we moved in. We've since found that that no, actually, that's not true. However, one of them is actually wholly and completely dead. Well, last weekend when putting some of the new plants in, we went to rip it out of the pot so we could re-use it. I reach my hand down to get the plant by it's core and... well, picture says it all.

A couple of days ago while standing in the kitchen making coffee, I found out which bird is watching over these. From the kitchen window I saw one of our quail hovering around, and eventually entering the pot.

It's like the planet... in a box

So we have friends out in San Diego (hi, Nancy!) who I (David) was talking to the other day about some planting we'd done recently (the herbs and tomatoes mentioned earlier). She mentioned that there's a great product out and about for people who have limited garden space that grows stuff like mad. Enter the Earthbox. We picked up a couple of these this past weekend and supplemented our vegetable and herb planting a bit. Top pic shows two more Spanish roma tomato variants, and the bottom pic has a serrano chile plant, oregano, a stronger thai basil variant, finishing up with a plain old bell pepper.

More planting!

Here are our roma tomato on the right and our tomatillo plant on the left. The roma's been in the pot now for for around 6 weeks and finally is showing some veggies. The tomatillo was actually a gift from our produce co-op we belong to. Erika showed up with the week's veggies... and a plant. He's about a week or so old.

Flexing some green thumbs

The convention here in Tucson is that you can grow anything... if you give it enough water. Imagine that. Anyway, me (David) being the food geek I am, I wanted to get some herbs going. There's some things we just go through a lot of. That's what's here. Right side... spearmint for summer suntea, middle has our cilantro for all things southwest/mexican and the thai basil for some happy fried rice, and then finally the left has our three sweet basil plants.

As you can see, the cilantro is going absolutely insane, and finally the basil has started really showing strength this week. Good stuff.

bloomin' cactus - Now with More Blooms!!!

This one's for Pauline. Yes, the Prickly Pear out front finally decided to dress up for the season a bit more and gave us 6, count 'em, 6 blooms at once. It's kind of amazing how such a... homely plant can have such absolutely beautiful blooms.

Bloomin' cactus

Most of the time cacti just sit around looking green and spiky. But a few days of the year they have prety flowers. This is from the prickly pear in our front yard.