The garden is a mess this full harvest moon. This summer has just been too hot to spend any time outside caring for it, and way too dry for any but the hardiest plants. Then too I went off roadtripping to the west coast at a crucial time when the garden really needed me to provide nurture in the form of water. The monsoons pretty much failed to materialize. Again.
That said I do have a trickle of meager harvests coming in now.
Pomegranates, though small, (young trees? drought? heat?) are ready to eat at the moment. I enjoy one or two of these beautiful jewels of the desert daily.
One of the bushes, the first to be planted way back when first the world of this enchanted garden was dreamed up, seems to be putting on autumn color a tad early.
The fruit is also splitting badly on this bush. Since I’m definitely not overwatering (one reason suggested for splitting fruit) I think that I might, sadly, have a fungal problem in my absolute favorite of desert fruit trees. More research is needed. I’m somewhat troubled by signs of sickness in the shrubbery.
I do have a reasonably healthy stand of the drought tolerant Honey Drip sorghum (sorghum bicolor) ripening. Wind tends to set the stalks a bit awry
After a few seasons of increasingly serious corn earworm, I decided to give corn a break for a few years, and try instead this ancient grain, one of the first to be domesticated over 5000 years ago. Germination was excellent. I would have had more plants had I not inadvertently weeded out a few. I thought they were grass coming up amongst the cowpeas who, incidentally, were meant to climb the sorghum stalks but mostly preferred to sprawl and wander.
I have begun bringing the seed heads inside to protect against the voracious appetites of my seed eating avian roommates. Hopefully I can thus dry enough sorghum grain for four or five small bowls of the delicious porridge which I grew up eating regularly as an evening meal. One of my mother’s favorite cereals, sorghum porridge was known at my childhood dining table as mud. More commonly, though, it is known in my birth country by the Zulu word mabela or the brand name: Maltabela.
The 2024 cowpeas hoard, generally called black eyed peas in the US, is coming on slowly. There will certainly be enough to ring in the new year though you won’t find any ham hocks in my pot of lucky peas on New Year’s Day.
Having come back from the brink of death by dehydration during my absence in July, the Japanese eggplant has a promising crop of at least four meme worthy fruit currently swelling. In a week or two there will be brinjal (eggplant) dishes on the menu in my kitchen.
Spicy heat for these will be provided by the harvest from the Birds Eye chili pepper plant which has also rallied from it’s sorry state in late July to put forth an abundance of flowering and fruiting. Small but mighty thy name is Birds Eye Pepper.
Opuntia tuna are at peak harvest readiness. Though like almost every growing thing, the opuntia are impacted by drought and heat stress, I have enjoyed a tall glass or two of the refreshing ruby coloured juice this year. It’s a late summer treat I look forward to each year. Nothing like the color!
The garlic chives (allium tuberosum) are mostly done with offering their late summer pollinator feast and are turning into seed heads
Here and there some small umbels of late flowers can still be found.
Leucophyllum frutescens (Texas Sage) is often called the Rain Plant or Barometer Plant because at the slightest hint of monsoon moisture it becomes covered in beautiful purple flowers.
In spite of the plethora common names, Leucophyllum is not actually a true sage.
It’s a botanical classification thing. Arcane at times.
I have introduced several varieties of these drought tolerant grey leafed shrubs around the garden, the most successful being the one in the thrive-or-die xeric hellstrip out front.
Somehow in a season of garden neglect, I have managed to especially neglect the Tulbaghia (Society garlic) yet still there are some few sparse and delicate blooms to be found in the rampant grass gone wild undergrowth outback.
Berlandieria lyrata (Chocolate flower) continues to deliciously perfume the wash line area in the mornings in a flowering which has spanned the entire season from early spring to autumn dawning. This tough regional native plant is proving to be a sterling member of the outback garden floral community.
So, while not my best year ever in the garden, it’s not actually nothing neither this harvest moon and autumn equinox.
I’m ready for slightly cooler temperatures so I can tackle the choking invasive grass, and work some more on outdoor projects put on hold during summer heat and because ugh! the monsoon season mosquitoes and gnats.
Meantime I’m printing up a storm (hopefully literally now that the roof is 90% fixed) with Southwest Print Fiesta just over two weeks away.
This piece of purple background fabric, enough for two square tablecloths, was discovered in my sizable fabric hoard. It is a pure cotton cloth known as Fasco, produced by the Da Gama Textile Mills in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. I have been carrying it around for twenty five years, the remnants of yards of cloth (mostly shweshwe) which I had in my two bags of worldly goods when I immigrated, a form of canoe plant to sustain me in my new life. What better designs to use to decorate this special cloth than the Kalo (taro - Colocasia esculenta, a Hawaiian canoe plant) and Ohio lehua (one of the first shrubs to grow on lava flows) .
Now can I find it in me offer such story dense pieces for sale?
But then don’t all my designs tell stories?
In the repetitive inking and printing with these designs to build stock for the print fiesta, I tell the beads on my rosary of being and becoming.
In the end it could be that all life is just breathing into story. Repeatedly. Until there’s no breath left.
When the story runs out of oxygen, we die.
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