Gardens-In-The-Sand

Mid Decenmber

Cold this morning, ice on water barrels...

Had this guy in one of my traps...

Little grey fox... Kinda cute.

Carried it to the front of the property and released it. Foxes are kinda scarce around here... not like those raccoons, possums, and armadillo... Gonna give this guy another chance to stay away.

New axe handle... Carved from one of the osage-orange trees that I grew from hedge apple found laying next to the road in town...

Citron Reprise

I found a recipe

I don't follow recipes... I read them through and then try to figger how to use the ingredients I have...

The important ingredients in that recipe seemed to be the citrons, some citrus fruit and sugar.

even the cooking of ingredients separately seemed unnecessary.

I have all these hardy oranges (Citrus trifoliata) that fall from the thicket each year at this time, and rot enough for the seeds in each fruit to come up and expand the thorny barrier...

So...

after gathering up fallen 'oranges', I sliced them up and removed all the seed I could...

Added to sugar water already on the heat...

And diced up some slices of citron melon (no pics), sorry...

Cooked until citron melon turned translucent...

Ok, it doesn't actually look too good while cooking...

But, after turning down heat on first batch?

I ate half the fruit while still hot!

After refrigerating as advised in the recipe linked to, I felt like the fruit would be nice in pancakes...

Made a very nice breakfast... Poured the liquid into pancake batter and sprinkled fruit on top of cakes while cooking...

Incidentally, placing a bowl of the liquid in the freezer produced sherbet...

Surprisingly versatile fruit... for something not grown anymore...

Labels: citron melon, hardy orange, pancake

October 2025

This Spring, I planted some unlabeled watermelon seed...

After the fruit got ripe... They turned into citron melons... Now what?

They taste like cucumbers... I've tried adding to chicken salad sandwiches, I've tried cubed into ramen noodles... still looking for an ideal use that doesn't involve pounds of sugar...

When searching google... seems the South Africans use the leaves and seeds in stews... too late for that, the leaves all fell off the vines...

Made a new shovel handle that I'm pretty happy with.

I have a hop hornbeam stump sending up sprouts that make acceptable tool handles...

I've been making a few collages...

The zebra longwing and caterpillar...

Pawpaw collage, I originally planted pawpaws for the zebra swallowtail, but after getting ripe fruit... I'm planting more...

Some of the butterfly & moth photos I've taken in this garden...

Labels: butterflies, citron, pawpaw

September

A few weeks ago... I saw a giant swallowtail butterfly laying eggs on a seedling lemon tree... didn't have camera... butterfly flew away before I got back...

But... Here's one of the caterpillars:

Also saw a monarch last week... again, the same deal with camera...

Here's a caterpillar... On a ragged looking milkweed.

Raccoons and possums are back...

Gorgeous pear last month...

Not too bad for a tree that I thought was a callery...

Here's a papaya 'tree'.

They want longer seasons than we have here...

Labels: caterpillars

Spring harvests

Pot of fresh lambsquarter (chenopodium giganteum)

Bowl of cooked greens

With stachys tubers (Stachys floridana)

Pic of stachys flowers

Served with poached eggs, ramen and sausage link.

Flowers on the cutleaf evening primrose... Tried eating a couple leaves fresh from the garden. I think temps have gotten too warm for evening primrose as salad greens, they had a hot finish.

Found some centrosema seeds collected from a previous year... planted in pot.

White rose campion

'

Cherokee roses put on a nice show last month... Here some are on arbor over gate.

Trapped like 3 or 4 of these things over the past couple weeks... Spring brings varmints...

At least the deer problem was finally solved back in March.

I scattered poppy seed over this bed when I saw very few returns... I think I mighta over done it...

As I wasn't seeing whites or purples, I turned entire bed under and set out beans.

Some pretty ones... very few returns from previous year.

Labels: chenopodium, lambsquarter, poppies, stachys

A year and a half trying to fence the deer out of the exclusion zone... The last several months, fence looked absolutely impervious, yet bambi continued leaving fresh tracks everywhere inside the wire... and eating stuff...

Addams family flower garden... Bambi apparently has a taste for columbine flower stalks...

Or maybe Thumper's responsible... Caught 2 rabbits this week...

Here's trouble... Emptied rabbit from trap & caught this huge raccoon next night... They're after the chickens... able to kill yardbirds through the wire...

And then... there's the good stuff... Like this zebra swallowtail...

And this gorgeous leafwing...

Pawpaw flower... Tree doesn't look like much yet, but saw a zebra swallowtail laying eggs... ran for camera, but she was done and gone... so no pics of that...