April Flowers Bring May Fruit

Our citronella and white sage are both blooming for the first time.

Elderberry is blooming (with pomegranate and sweet potato in the background), and Barbados cherry is setting fruit.

Volunteer tomatoes are ripening.

The early crop of figs is starting to ripen, and it looks like even the new panache fig wants to join in.

Olives and apples are fruiting.

We may have our first homegrown prickly pear fruit this year, and the wolfberries are ridiculously prolific.

Grapevines on the clothesline and on the moringas are starting to bear fruit.

We're learning how to cook with moringa pods.  You can see why from the picture above.

Bugs, Biodiversity, and Bad Guys

We're seeing more insects this year.  Better still, we're seeing a greater variety of insects at Sage Garden than we saw last year.  One of the things I liked about Arizona when I first decided to move here was that there weren't as many insects here as I was used to.  So why would I be happy to see more insects?

In a word, biodiversity.

Biodiversity leads to resilience, and resilience leads to stability and efficiency (more yield for less input).  Every natural "problem" has a natural solution.  Sometimes the problem is its own solution.  Here's an example.  Problem: mockingbirds eat figs from our trees, leaving fewer figs for us to eat.  Solution: for a modest fee of a few figs, these same birds defend our fig trees from beetles and other birds (mockingbirds are territorial).  Every year the trees grow more productive, and now there are so many figs that the mockingbirds only take a tiny fraction of them.  Besides tending our figs, they also sing for us.  Here's a similar example.  Problem: grackles and doves eat tomatoes, leaving fewer for us to eat.  Solution: these same birds drop tomato seeds throughout the yard which grow into more plants, providing more tomatoes for us to eat.  All of the tomato plants growing here were planted by birds.  Thanks, birds.  Have some more tomatoes, please.  Plus they provide fertilizer, and they keep the insects in check.  All this goodness comes free of charge, with zero human effort.

Wait a minute.  Didn't I start by saying I was happy to see more insects?  Then why would I be happy that the birds are eating them?  Who are the good guys here, and who are the bad guys?  Maybe the good guy is a natural, effortless balance.  And maybe the bad guy is the good/evil dichotomy, which leads to a monoculture approach where we pamper a single protagonist species and eradicate all competition.

I have to admit there are a few species we have eliminated completely from this place.  We chose to uproot all the foxtails, goat heads, and fiddlenecks in order to avoid injuries to people and pets.

Getting back to the insects, some old favorites have returned this year, including honeybees, ants, grasshoppers, and butterflies.  We also have some newcomers.

I didn't know what a hoverfly was before this year, when we noticed two of their hangout spots: one by a mesquite tree, and another by a dill plant (left).  This year we're seeing these predators and pollinators in large numbers.  In retrospect, I'm not surprised.  If I were a hoverfly, this dill plant and its neighborhood look like a place I'd want to be.

In smaller numbers (so far) we're seeing lacewings and damselflies here for the first time.  Despite their delicate appearance, these are both effective predators, keeping other insects in balance.

We installed a bee block for mason bees this spring, and it's getting used.  (When I took the picture below, I didn't see the photobombing bee in the red circle.) And we're seeing many mason bees at work - especially on our basil, wolfberry, sage, and brittlebush.  Maybe the mason bees are newcomers this year, or maybe we're just starting to see them because we're looking for them.  In any case, I'm glad they're here to pollinate our plants.

What? More Flowers?

Yes.  More new flowers continue to bloom.  We're seeing our first pineapple guava flowers since this tree was planted in the fall of 2016.  And judging by the number of buds still waiting to open (see the round, gray-green buds in the picture on the right), we're going to have quite a show this year.  Besides putting on a show, these flowers are edible - as are the fruit that follow - and of course they play their part in extending the foraging season for pollinators.

Speaking of pollinators, we're starting to see more mason bees, especially on the native flowers like the brittlebush and wolfberry above.

Seeing the mason bees made me wonder whether any had found our bee block on the northeast corner of the house.  I checked, and sure enough, one of the holes is occupied with eggs.

The paper sleeves in the bee block are there to protect larvae from splinters and to make the holes easier to clean between seasons.  The purpose of the wire mesh is to keep hungry birds from eating the eggs or larvae.

Below are flowers on the Barbados cherry (left) and Fuji apple (right).

Below are flowers on our newest moringa (left) which we planted this February and some flowers and peppers on the thai pepper plant (center) which we planted ... never.  This pepper is a volunteer that popped up in our labyrinth.

And I've saved the best for last.  The little white flowers on the curry tree on the right may not look like much, but the fragrance is amazing.  When I first sniffed these little flowers, I was expecting something more spicy and aromatic, to match the leaves, but no.  The strong but pleasant sweetness immediately took me back to my great grandma's garden and the lily of the valley that grew there in the black Iowa soil.

If you know someone who's growing curry leaf, go smell their flowers.  Go now.

Still More Spring Flowers

Every passing week brings new flowers to Sage Garden Ecovillas.

The plum tree is blooming.

In the picture below you can see the emerging flowers of the Thai lime (foreground).  In the background is a lavender bush, and on the far left edge of the frame, you might see a few of the baby fruits setting on the Washington navel orange.

Under the peach tree is a desert senna (right) and several self-seeded basil bushes that we have let flower.  The mason bees don't mind that at all.  I'm hoping some of them find our bee block nearby, so we can watch their lifecycle.

This year we sowed lupine (the native species) and vetch in several of our planted areas, and it's starting to flower.  It's a shame to see these go, but it's time to chop them and let their bodies and root nodules do their job and enrich the soil.  The vetch in this picture will feed its neighbor - a Fuji apple.  We'll leave a few flowers to go to seed.

And the olives are putting on more flowers every day.  I'm looking forward to this year's olive harvest.

Next up will be the moringas and the curry leaf (flower buds pictured on the right).

Check out the two preceding posts for more spring flower pics.

More Spring Flowers

Jasmine is blooming under one of the pomegranates.

We had to move two of the pomegranates last November.  I wasn't sure they would survive the trip, but they are both clearly doing fine.

Globemallow, hibiscus, and hollyhock.

Mulberry and onion.

Spring Flowers

It's the time of year when the trees come out of dormancy, and we start to see a variety of flowers.

Some are accompanied by strong fragrances, like the orange blossoms and the chaparral sage.

Some are barely visible, like the olive and jojoba.  Two of our jojoba bushes turned out to be female.  You can see the unassuming bell-shaped female jojoba flowers in the picture on the right below.


Others are more showy, like the blackberry and banana.


But I think my favorites this year are the avocado flowers.  They're small and somewhat camouflaged, but the fascinating thing about these flowers is the way they ensure cross-pollination.  All of the flowers  are perfect (having both male and female parts), but the anthers and stigmata open at different times over a two-day cycle.  All the flowers on a single tree enter the male phase - when they release pollen - at the same time.

The yellow parts are nectaries, which provide the payoff for pollinators.  I'm guessing that's what the ant is after.

Below is a flower from the same tree, but at a later time.  Now all the flowers are in the female phase, when they are receptive to pollen.

While this cycle might seem to make it more difficult for a single organism to reproduce, it benefits the population by encouraging genetic diversity, which gave the species more resilience in the wild.  This is a fuerte avocado tree.  Nearby is a Hass.  The Hass avocado tree has a complementary two-day cycle, so it will hopefully cross-pollinate well with the fuerte.

Eventful 2017

Quite a lot has happened in 2017.

We hosted our first Olive Festival in January, where we tasted pairings of our homegrown olives with cheeses and wines.

We have a new caretaker!  Cina and family moved in this spring, and she has helped tremendously to maintain and expand the edible landscape.  This year, we added 16 new trees (14 of which produce food) and many other edible plants.  We planted these moringas (on the right) in late May.  By October, they had grown over 10 ft!

We had new windows installed.  This was a big deal, because the old windows were, well, old.  And drafty.  We replaced all the windows with high performance dual-pane windows.

We held two olive harvesting and curing workshops.  The olive crop wasn't as large this year as in past years, but we had more new faces than ever, and really the whole point of these events is to share ideas.

Our food forest is gradually taking shape, starting in the east yard.

And finally, our first banana flower appeared this December.  This is a "Dwarf Namwah" - one of four varieties of bananas in our chunky monkey patch.

This year has been filled with learning by doing (I won't say learning the hard way, but I suppose that's the more common expression), and I hope to sit down soon to write more details about what went well, and what I'll do different next time.

And there will be a next time.