Category Archives: My home garden

Wednesday Wisdom. Bringing the Joy of Nature Indoors

I love nature. Gardening, going for drives to check out beautiful scenery, visiting farmers markets, going for walks, these are all things that I love to do. I drag my family with me to all these activities, and despite their initial grumbling, they come along and end up having a great time.

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Planting the Seed for Sweet Peas

It’s fall and now is the perfect time to sow sweet pea seeds in our gardens. I know it’s hard to think of planting seeds for flowers that won’t bloom for another 6 months, but spring flowering bulbs and seeds like to be planted in fall so they can develop strong roots and get established before spring arrives when they produce their buxom blooms. In this case it’s sweet pea seeds, which give the lushest blooms when planted in the fall timeframe.

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Fried Green Tomatoes. Last Harvest of the Season

Well, I waited as long as I could to take out all the summer vegetable plants, especially the tomato plants that were looking pretty sad but still had plenty of fruit. I thought the tomatoes would get ripe since we have been getting some 90-degree temperatures lately, but nothing is happening on those bushes, nada. The tomatoes are just sitting happily on the vines, doing absolutely nothing. They are just green, and it looks like time stood still. I couldn’t stand it anymore, and finally this past weekend I harvested all the green tomatoes and chopped down the tomato plants. I noticed with a batch of green tomatoes that we harvested a couple of weeks ago, that when they sit in a bowl indoors they do slowly start ripening. I’ll do the same with this last tomato harvest of the season.

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Last harvest of the season

Looking at these green tomatoes I recalled a movie I watched years ago back in 1991 called Fried Green Tomatoes. I remembered liking the movie a lot as it had a great storyline set in Alabama about an unlikely friendship between a young waitress at a local diner and an elderly lady she volunteers to give company to at a Senior Citizen’s Home. I also remembered that it was the first time I had heard of fried green tomatoes. Continue reading Fried Green Tomatoes. Last Harvest of the Season

Fruit Picking in our Gardens

If you live in the Bay Area you probably have not one but multiple fruit trees in your backyard.  After all, this area used to be covered in fruit orchards before it slowly became Silicon Valley. So you would expect that there would be an abundance of fruit trees to be found all over the Bay Area, especially here in the South Bay. Continue reading Fruit Picking in our Gardens