This is one of our hens this time last year.

Barred Rock hens are beautifully barred with black and white stripes as adults. But they are all black as chicks. This is one of our girls this time last year. So cute. I thought since I hand raised them that they would be tame, but they both peck me. The other three hens that I got as adults do not peck me. Go figure.

Apricot-Plum Upside-down Cake

I am still in catch-up mode, so this will be an assortment of harvest and cooking photos. Above is a plum-apricot upside-down cake that I made with apricots and plums from our garden. This was the first year that we got more than a handful of apricots, and man were they ever good. Most of the apricots (see below) were eaten fresh, either whole, or in fruit salad, or as fruit topping with real maple syrup added on top of pancakes.

Apricots

We are still working on the plum harvest. I think I have one more plum cake and some plum bread in my future.

Santa Rosa Plums

This was the first year that we got more than a couple of plums. This is only a portion of the harvest.

Florida Prince peaches

Our Florida Prince peach tree produced a bumper crop of small peaches that were free of worms. Being an early season crop, they ripen before the moths come out I guess. Our August Pride peach produced only four peaches (it is a tiny tree), but they were incredibly delicious. We consumed them fresh for breakfast two mornings in a row.

The Babcock Peach tree produced a few peaches, but the birds got most of them before they were really ripe. Our Panamint nectarine tree has a LOT of nectarines on it, but they are quite small this year.

lemon

We have only five Eureka lemons this year on the dwarf tree, but the Meyer lemon has a lot of fruit on it. Our lime harvest is over, with about two quarts of lime juice frozen away for summer limeade, pork pibil, and some future margueritas.

artichokes

We had a nice harvest of artichokes.

Navel oranges, limes and an avocado

We had a really good harvest of oranges and avocados this year also. There are only about a dozen avocados set on the tree this year, but they look like they will be big ones. Not sure about the orange crop, maybe 40-50 set fruit. Both of those will be ready to pick  January through April. A Southern California garden is great!

bok choy

It seemed that the bok choy harvest would never end. I froze a lot of it. I just love having a chest freezer, something I have wanted for decades. They aren’t that expensive. I got ours used, so it was really inexpensive.

This spring harvest of Kyoto Red carrots and parsley went into a soup.

onions

The onion harvest was pretty pathetic, mute testament to the fact that I hadn’t been watering my garden enough this winter. Hey, notice anything different about the background? That is our new Corian countertop. I will post the kitchen remodel pics another day.

garlic

More testimony to my lack of watering this spring. Some of these garlic bulbs were about the size of the cloves that I planted. I harvested Early California, Early Italian, and Ajo Rojo (beautiful red skins on them). This is about half the harvest. I used some of the Ajo Rojo in pesto this week and it was incredible!

That pretty much catches me up on harvests, except for adding up the ounces and undating the harvest totals in the box on the right. Later.

The Garden of Infinite Neglect in front

I was so discouraged by the tiny size of my garlics and paltry production of onions, etc. that I bought soaker hoses for four of my garden beds. Boy, are my plants happy now! This is the bed in front that never got watered because it was too much trouble to stand there watering by hand. Now I can turn on the soaker hose, and turn it off 15 minutes later. The plants are loving it, as you can see. Komatsuna is in the foreground, then wax beans, kale, watermelon, cantaloupe, butternut squash, chard, beets, parsley, sage, chives, basil and maybe some dill if it ever sprouts.

I think this will suffice to catch you up on what has been going on in the garden for the past two months while I have been busy with things other than blogging. My hat is off to those of you who blog like clockwork (Daphne, Dave, Norma, Seed to Table, Leduesorelle, etc.) I am going to try to do better.

I still want to post about our late June trip to the eastern Sierras, our kitchen remodel, and our trip last November to San Salvador to visit a high school classmate of my husband’s. That was a life-changing experience. After seeing his super luxurious digs, we have been embroiled in home improvement  projects ever since.