We got a white Christmas after all ...

... if a few days late!

Here's what I woke up to this morning:

Hope all of you are having a wonderful holiday. :)

Harvesting my prickly pear ... (you can grow that!)

This week, I harvested the fruit from my prickly pear (with the help of some salad tongs!), following the instructions on this page (which has a nice recipe).

I found it very easy to take the fruits (called tunas) off of the plant -- they simply twist off -- but much harder to clean them properly. They tend to spin in the tongs, and I ended up having to hold them with one hand and scrub them with the other. Of course, now I'm picking tiny needles out of my fingertips, but ... ;)

If I were to do this again, I would get some different tongs (mine are like the ones in the article I linked to above) and/or wear some thick household gloves set aside for the purpose.

The fruits really are lovely once picked, and to me they taste just a bit like strawberries. I'm looking forward to making some sorbet or ice cream with them this evening.

Planting this was as easy as putting it in the ground (it was much smaller then!). I've put some landscape cloth around it so I don't have to weed it later, and eventually I'll fill it in with gravel, once I find the kind I want.

It doesn't require any maintenance, watering, or anything else. When it gets a bit bigger, I might try harvesting some of the pads and report back on them. :)

Prickly pear and dewberries, among other things ...

This past week has been fairly stormy, but I was able to get out into my garden some ... here are a few of the things that went on last week:

My nectarine tree arrived! This is a dwarf Mericrest Nectarine from Stark Bros.  My husband and I planted it in the back yard, between the pomegranate and the mulberry trees.

I absolutely love nectarines, so I'm pretty excited!

The flat to the left of the tree has a bunch of roselle hibiscus (Hibiscus sabdariffa) seedlings in them, which I started from seeds I got through Baker Creek. This is the kind of hibiscus you use in herbal tea.

I didn't get as good a germination as I would have hoped, but I do have a half dozen or so seedlings from the packet.  The roselle doesn't do well in zone 7, so these will be potted plants ... I'm going to put them in various places and see where they do best, once I get them put into more permanent containers. But so far they seem to be happy on my back porch. :)

My prickly pear has bloomed! I was surprised to see that this one was yellow - I had always thought that prickly pears had pink blooms, but apparently they come in a wide variety of flower colors.

This plant is quite funny - it sort of "shrinks" in the winter ... all the leaves droop, turn a dull gray-green, and curl up a bit ... then the whole plants pops back up and starts putting out new leaves once it gets warm again!

Home Depot didn't have any more of the nice colored gravel that I started this with, so I'm looking for something similar to finish filling around my plant.

My dewberries are ripening, and I spent part of an afternoon last week picking them on the front yard side of the fence. I got almost two quarts of berries, and I haven't even started on the back side of the fence yet!

And just the other day, I picked our first bit of salad from the front yard ... which was a first for us! Go, edible landscaping! :D

 

So ... how was your garden doing last week? Anything interesting to show us?

Dallas Open Day (part 4) - the Nichols garden

The fourth garden I visited last Saturday on the Garden Conservancy's Open Day tour in Dallas was at the home of Matthew Nichols (who was kind enough to show me all around).

This is another garden that I hope will be entered in my front yard photo contest next month, because it was really good.

(here's the link to the first one, if you want to start from the beginning)


The first photo I have here is of his driveway, which had a row of citrus trees going along it to screen the side of the home. I imagine that this cools off the house considerably.

 

 Around to the left was the front door, which had a bay tree beside the steps up to it:

This was about when I ran across Matthew, and he showed me this over on the side of his other house (he owns the one next door, too), which to my surprise was a variegated tangerine! This would make a great edible hedge:

Then he showed me his backyard, which was in two parts. This is the back of his other house:

The one on the left is of course a yucca and the right photo is of a sago variety that is endangered ... he had several there. 

This was the back of his main home (click the photos to make them larger):

  

Another yucca

Tapioca plant

Really nice deck with all sorts of edibles around it

Several fruit trees

If you go down some steps, you come to another little courtyard, with this off to your left: 

This is a loquat tree (Eriobotrya japonica), also known as the Asian plum. Matthew told everyone to try one, so I did ... it's a bit like an apricot in taste, but fuzzy on the outside like a peach is. The stone is almost perfectly round, not at all like a plum stone.

I went out front to look at his impressive collection of agaves before I left to see the last garden. Here are a few of them:

Weird weather aftermath

Well, it finally seems to have cooled down. Which is good, because we've all been sick the past two weeks, so I haven't gotten much done, and it's nice to have decent weather to get back to work in.

The bad news: both blueberry plants are gone, as far as I can tell.

The good news: my daylilies have recovered, and everything else seems to be doing okay.

Today I planted a prickly pear in the back yard to start off my desert garden. I chose an area that in general is always drier than the rest of the yard, and that not much grows in anyway. I'm a big cactus fan, and I'm so happy to finally get this garden plot started.

Once I get the rest of my cacti in (I have a potted agave and a dragon flower plant that I've been lugging indoors to overwinter for a couple of years but that will grow here just fine, and I think I'd also like to get at least one yucca), I'll put down gravel mulch all around it so I won't have to do any weeding.

There's a lot of trial and error to this, which is why I think that landscaping companies tend to stick with the same few plants in any one area. They choose the ones that they know work and ignore the rest unless someone specifically requests something different.