In My San Diego Garden and Kitchen

Jun 16

Jun 16 In My San Diego Garden and Kitchen

This past week in the garden has been all about fruit. The apricots began in earnest; strawberries, marionberries, apples and rhubarb delighted us at meals and we added to the freezer store.

Here’s a sampling of yesterday’s booty. We’ve harvested 17 pounds of apricots, mostly ‘Gold Kist’ over the last week. The other two trees, ‘Blenheim’ and ‘Royal Rosa’ come in sequence later. We’ve been savoring each apricot and attributing their juiciness to our abundant winter rains. I also began stewing the ripest apricots to freeze. There are cobblers ahead and maybe some apricot jam.

These are the yet-to-ripen ‘Blenheim’ (Royal) apricots that are a long-time California favorite. My parents grew this variety in their coastal, Southern California garden. It was a popular, lower-chill variety in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

We have three apricot trees planted in one 4 foot by 4 foot raised bed and pruned as one tree. For more details see another post, Fruitful Promises on growing apricots and other backyard fruit in this way.

Apricots and David Austin roses—things from the garden that go together. Read a poem about apricots in my recent post Apricots.

We get enough strawberries for cereal or a bowl at dinner every other day. The marionberries are ripening and we anticipate more next week.

Lucy dutifully brings the drops to the house with a characteristic Brittany ‘soft mouth.’ I picked more and made some applesauce.

I harvested all of the lettuce growing around and under the tomato plants. Much of it went to neighborhood tortises. My little neighbor friends took the remainder of the romaine and their mom will sort what goes to the family and what will be for their rabbits.