Secret Garden, or Secret Town?

This summer my family took an incredible trip throughout the Southwest. We hiked, rafted, shopped. We started in New Mexico, did a bit of Colorado, then a lot of Utah, and finally Arizona. On the advice of a friend, we stopped in a small town outside of Taos, called Arroyo Seco. I don't even know if it is a town. You drive through, and if you're changing the radio station at the time, you might miss it.

It's small, but filled with galleries and cute shops. We stopped at Taos Cow for some ice cream. The ice cream was wonderful, but there was a bit of a fly problem in the store. We had to move it outside to the front porch, and then of course my daughter had to explore the back by the water and trees. She can always find things to climb.

I wandered down the street and found this incredible little garden. Nestled between two stores, it's just perfect to sit and relax. Not that you're not already relaxed in this cute little town.

 

 

My daughter still found something to climb on.

 

We learned this is called a coyote fence. You see them all over Taos. Are coyotes still a problem? I don't know, but I think the fences are really beautiful.



This old pioneer home was moved to the site. There's a plaque that tells the name of the family who lived in it.

 

Hope you enjoyed my visit to this little garden. We drove through Arroyo Seco on the was from Taos to Taos Ski Valley. We had an amazing hike up to Williams Lake there, and picnicked at the top.

 



How Does Your Garden Grow?

I think we've all been experiencing a mild Winter, up until about this week when finally some areas received snow. We get our share of cold days, but this year we've had about ... 2. That's it. Two days. One of them was exactly a week ago, but then each day we warm up, warmer and warmer, until another cold front comes in. Yesterday we broke records -- it hit 87 degrees. Today we got a cold front and it was 63 in the morning. That's about what it's like for us in Florida.

Did you know that we grow our backyard vegetable gardens the opposite time than the rest of the country? Being a Florida native, I hadn't really put that together. We can't grow a lot in the summer, unless you really work it, because it's too hot and buggy. We have to grow our vegetables from October through May.

Since we finished our pool in the backyard, we needed to plant new sod to cover the dirt yard from having 6 months of trucks driving back there. We planned a vegetable garden in the dirt, surrounded it with wood, and planted the sod around that. We put the seeds in a little before Christmas. We actually could have done it sooner, but that's how it worked for us.

This is our garden after about a month:


And this is it today:


So far, we've eaten and given away a ton of bibb lettuce, spinach, and mesclun mix. Recently we've gotten a few red and green peppers, and soon we'll have tomatoes. We've also planted corn, sunflowers, green beans, and snap peas.

We're loving making salads every day. I picked up a cookbook from the library that has some great, simple, salad dressings, and I've tried a few of them. It's called "Young and Hungry" by Dave Lieberman. He's a young bachelor who's all about making simple meals using fresh ingredients. The perfect book for someone with a garden in the backyard or a farmer's market down the street.

Here's a lunch I made one day using one of his dressings:


I don't remember all the cheeses that I used, but I have cucumber with cheese and fig jam, some Spanish Manchego cheese (love that! especially when it's aged and crumbly), roast chicken, sliced capiccolo and prosciutto, and fresh mozzarella drizzled with olive oil and fresh rosemary.

Are you enjoying your weather? Maybe you'll get to start your garden a little early this year.

Halloween, Part 2

It's the beginning of July, 85+ degrees out, and once again I'm thinking of Halloween. (You can see my other June Halloween post here.)

Recently we added quite a few new tropical trees to her backyard. We have a mango, an avocado, lime, lemon, and a new grapefruit tree. We've been in this house for 18 years, but due to hurricanes, we've lost quite a few trees. Let's scroll down an inventory:

-- 1992, Hurricane Andrew: the hurricane brought in with it a Cuban fly, which attacked our grapefruit tree. We babied it back to health, had some output over the years, then it petered out.
-- around 1994: Heavy rains and a low spot in the yard that frequently flooded finally made us rip out all the banana trees.
-- 2004, Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne: We lost a huge oak, coconut palm, and Queen palm. All were heart-breaking. Why didn't it take any of the trees we didn't like?
-- 2005, Hurricane Wilma: It did a number on our tangerine tree.

Maybe we're tempting fate, dooming ourselves to get a big storm this year, but we have been adding a lot of trees. The papayas are doing well.


We have four pineapples that will be ready to eat in a month or so.


Which brings me back to Halloween. A few months back my daughter was eating a grapefruit. She noticed one of the seeds was starting to sprout, and asked if we could plant it. Being the indulgent parents that we are, we said sure, we'll put it in a pot, not thinking for a moment that it would grow into anything. Fast-forward a few months, and we had a grapefruit tree big enough to transplant into the ground. We added a few shovels-full of compost we've been working on all year, and found a good spot for our new grapefruit tree. And now here's the weird part. Another plant is growing from the dirt around the grapefruit. And it looks distinctively like a pumpkin plant. I guess the pumpkin guts we threw in the compost pile last Halloween stewed and simmered, and grew. Here's hoping we have a nice pumpkin we can carve for Halloween.

Gardenia Envy . . . and Inspiration

Growing up, my mom had a gardenia bush in our yard, and I absolutely loved the scent of them when I walked out the back door of the house. When we bought our house 18 years ago, the first plant I added to our yard was my very own gardenia bush.

Around my neighborhood, gardenia bushes bloom in the middle of May, and last about a month. I don't know why, but our bush doesn't bloom until 3-4 weeks after all the others. All month, I go around town suffering from gardenia envy. Everyone's bushes are filled with flowers, and their heady scents, and mine doesn't have a one. I go through this every year. I don't know why my bush is such a late-bloomer. Finally, our bush has bloomed. And now, since all my neighbors' bushes are spent, they are suffering gardenia envy when they see my beautiful blooms.


All these bright gardenias got me thinking about the color white, and the inspiration you can draw from it. One of my best inspirations is the blank white page of a new journal. I love that!


Here are some white ribbons I've collected for my art projects.


I made this necklace recently from some pieces I found at a bead show


And finally, I leave you with another flower from my garden. I don't know the name, but it surprisingly comes back, every April.
.

Color My World -- Orange

When you live in South Florida, you realize that we have a completely different growing season and so many different types of tropical plants and trees that you don't see anywhere else. For example, we grow backyard vegetable gardens from October through May. It's just too hot to grow many vegetables in the summer. We do have summer fruit, like mangoes, which is very exciting. I make a mean mango sorbet. I'll show you some mangoes when they come out in July.

But for the spring, we have these amazing blooming trees. A spectacular tree that is found all over South Florida is the Royal Poinciana. It blooms around Memorial Day every year, and gets absolutely covered with bright orange flowers. They can get 30 feet around, so you can see them dotting neighborhoods from a great distance. My neighbor planted one just 3 years ago, and it's already 20 feet high. It bloomed very little this year, but give it another year or so and it will be covered. I took a drive around my neighborhood and caught a couple in bloom.

This tree is in full bloom.


This tree is even bigger, and some of it is done blooming. The orange flowers drop off after a week or so and are replaced with lush, green leaves.


Here's a closeup of the flowers.


The bursts of orange all over town inspired me to see what I have that's orange around my house. I admit, I'm a blue girl, so I don't decorate with orange a lot. I did come up with a few things.

A nice variegated candle.


A beautiful sari/tablecloth that came from Hawaii.


A painting I bought from an artist who was displaying his work at the Juno Beach art show, Art By the Sea. He's originally from Hawaii, and we had a nice conversation about mutual artists we know.


Here's a necklace I made specifically to match this dress. I was wearing black shoes and wanted to pull some black into the necklace.


I searched through my beads and found a few more orange beads in my stash.


And finally, here's a blouse I like to wear. It encompasses so many bright colors, and is a good example of how I like to dress. Unfortunately, I have to iron it, which means I only wear it about once every 4 months. I hate to iron.

The View from My Window

Blue sky -- nothing is marring the perfectness of the blue. No clouds, no planes. The birds are dancing in the trees. They take turns flitting down to the feeders, perching a bit, then back up into the tree. The tree has a vertical chunk that has scarred over. A hurricane split the tree in two, and yet the tree never died. There's a slight breeze -- enough to sway the long fronds of the Queen Palm, but not enought for the Red Maple. The maple is losing its leaves on this winter day, a normal occurrence in Florida. The sun is bright, the shadows are long. The brightness on the grass belies the fact that it's a rather cold day today. This quiet scene will end when the children come bursting through the front door, only to run through the house, to the back.


And so goes another day in South Florida.