Gossip in the Garden

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Eureka lemon trees are notorious for producing freakishly shaped lemons – especially along the cooler coastal climate (like ours in the Bay Area).  Personally, I like the occasional odd-ball that my tree kicks out – and so do kids.  But if more and more of your lemons are turning out like this you may want to take some action.

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What causes this?  It’s a weird little bud mite which sucks the sap from the lemon flower, causing the poor flower to have a misshapen ovary – resulting in, well, freaky looking lemons.

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I came across this description of what the bud mite actually looks like “it’s a small, elongated insect with a tapered posterior and four legs near the mouth”.  Four legs near the mouth? Ewwww….what can you expect from such a deformed little bug?

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What is an Honest Scrap Award?  Well, it’s not really an award, per se, but rather a “Tag – you’re IT” type of post where I tell anyone who’s interested 10 things about me that they normally wouldn’t get from reading my blog.  In turn, I ‘tag’ 7 more lucky recipients with this award, and so on, and so on (kinda like chain mail)….Rachel Mathews with Successful Garden Design has nominated me as a lucky recipient for this ‘award’, so here goes….

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1.  I didn’t start out wanting to be a garden designer.  I started out in the restaurant business and when I was just 23 I was running the cafes at both the DeYoung and Legion of Honor Museums in San Francisco – and loving every minute of it.  Working at the museums gave me unbelievable opportunities to meet many different people and artists (some famous, some not) at the many different art openings.  For example:

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It’s January here in Northern California and today I ate the first (of many) oranges off my ‘Washington Navel’ tree….

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I LOVE that first, sweet-with-a-faint-hint-of-sour-taste the season’s first orange gives me…I look forward to it all year, beginning in late Spring when my garden is literally blanketed with the scent of it’s heavenly blossoms…to the Fall when it’s green ‘tennis-balls’ start to swell…to January, when everything in the garden seems so dreary and all I have to do is look at my orange tree just covered with it’s cheery orange fruits…

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Roses, roses, roses…nothing says ‘Spring is right around the corner’ more than all the bare-root roses in stock right now at the nurseries! Especially when you see their hopeful, little leaves starting to emerge from their stark stems…

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And now’s the time to buy them, as they’re MUCH cheaper when sold bare-root ($15) versus when they’re re-potted into a 5-gallon container ($35.00)

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And while it may seem a little early to start thinking about which roses you’d like to add to your garden this year, you’d better hurry up and decide, as bare-roots seem to only last a few weeks in the nursery – once they begin sprouting leaves, they’re quickly (sometimes too quickly) potted up into 5-gallons.  Plus – the really cool ones sell out fast!

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With most of the country being hit so hard this past month with unusually frigid weather I thought it might be a bit rude to talk about the blooms that are currently in my Northern Californian garden.  Yes, I know that’s the whole purpose of the Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day event, (a wonderful monthly celebration of gardens, created by Carol over at May Dreams Gardens) so instead, I thought I’d show a different type of flower that’s blooming in my garden….

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