Eat The Yard

Based on the last week’s blooms, it looks as though at least one of the Anna Apple branches I grafted to my Gala will take.  The buds cracked the protective wax coating and burst through with ease. What an amazing ability: No organ/limb rejection, no immune-suppressing pill regimen — just, “Thanks for the new branch.”  [...]

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I have been dutifully waiting for the apple trees to go dormant so I could do a little grafting.  However, in my waiting for the last leaves to drop I forgot something that I have gloated about on several occasions this winter: the character of my hometown.  In San Diego we don’t really get frost, [...]

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A few days ago we picked and ate our last Gala apple.  I left it hanging on the tree a while longer than I should have, sacrificing the flavor, because I knew that not only would it be the last apple of the season, but it would be the last anything.  We have no harvest-ready [...]

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What does it mean to have harvested and eaten 1,000 calories of food from a yard?  It’s a dubious milestone in the context of my overall objective.  Why?  Because it took most of August to get there, and to be on track we should have consumed somewhere in the neighborhood of 19,065 calories by now [...]

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We had my folks over for dinner a few days ago.  I served up a Caesar salad with Husky cherry tomatoes from the garden, which went well alongside my wife’s excellent meat loaf and baked mac and cheese.  But my mom one-upped us with her homegrown contribution: a pie stuffed full of Anna Apples from [...]

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