In My San Diego Garden and Kitchen

Jun 23

Jun 23 In My San Diego Garden and Kitchen

The ‘Dorsett Golden’ apple crop is coming in. It’s a bit of a race with rodents. I picked some earlier in the week and these today. As I selected them, I saw four that had been gnawed. Traps are set, again. Tomorrow we plan to uncover the espaliered tree and harvest what we can.

We’ve given up on bird netting which is so unmanageable in favor of this barrier netting from Amazon. We use it when various crops are vulnerable.

Apricots continued to delight us and kept us busy in the kitchen. The first week of harvest yielded 17 pounds and last week we added 24 pounds to the count. We eat them fresh to contentment then with the remainder, make stewed apricots to freeze. This is the best crop we’ve had in the last five years, perhaps attributable to the generous winter rains.

You might enjoy my recent post on Apricots which includes a poem about apricots for lovers of the fruit.

My scallions were to become spring onions; then we were traveling and they began to form bulbs with the longer days. I posted last week on Harvesting Onions after reviewing posts by some of my online garden mentors. I’m not sure how long these will store but I’ll use them over the summer.

Rummaging through a pile of clipped recipes I found one that uses two of the fruits I grow—strawberry guavas and limes. Guava-Lime Agua Fresca was refreshing and bright with flavor. I used my frozen guava puree and frozen lime juice. I added water and simple syrup in recipe proportions to make a quart. For an individual serving I mixed the juice with an equal volume of sparkling water. With no limes available, I lacked the requisite slice for the glass. This will be a regular summer beverage as I have plenty of guava puree in the freezer and the limes will be ready in a few weeks.

Gardening has been a bit awkward and much slower with three broken fingers. I tripped on a city sidewalk while admiring a garden instead of watching my feet. A last minute gathering of the berries for dinner added some color to my dressings.