A tropical storm driven sunset

With the building El Niño pushing very warm water up off our coast, we’re receiving more than our usual share on hot, tropical weather.

We owe this view to tropical storm Polo which crossed the Baja peninsula the other day. When a tropical system churns off the coast of Baja, it pushes thin, high-altitude cirrus clouds hundreds of miles north into Southern California.

As the sun dips beneath the horizon, its light travels through a thicker layer of atmosphere, filtering out blue light and illuminating the underside of these high clouds with vibrant oranges and deep pinks. Combine that high-altitude canvas with crepuscular shadow rays, and you get sky-on-fire evenings like this one over the Pacific here in Northern San Diego County.

Kandy Korn (despite the silly name) looks fantastic in early June

With a goal of getting three harvests of sweet corn this year, I seeded the corn directly into the garden in early April. Despite the turn to cooler weather (the typical “May gray” “June gloom” stuff), the corn is growing splendidly.

This particular round of corn is Kandy Korn, which I wrote about last year. It’s technically a mid-season variety, preferring the heat to the cool of spring, but I had an open packet saved from last year, so it went in the ground first.

Good thing too, because the subsequent planting of Lucious, a bi-color corn, has been a complete disaster.

The Lucious sweet corn has been a low-germination and insect disaster

Despite planting four full rows, poor germination and insects left me with just six scraggly plants. I’ve since done another planting but I’m getting the same spotty germination rate of the last round. Maybe it’s the seed (though they’re new), or maybe it’s the beds I’ve chosen to plant them in. Either way, if I don’t see more spouting in the next week, I’ll swap them out for a different variety.

At least in the meantime we have lots of tasty corn that’ll be ready by the Fourth of July.

Blackberries ripened a full month early this year

Unfortunately, the bees weren’t out in force yet so a lot of flowers went un-pollinated.

I doubt we’ll harvest more than a pound or two, so we probably won’t be making blackberry jam this year. But at least we have fresh berries for the next few weeks.

THey’re early but at least they look nice and taste good

Spiky little wild cucumber growing on the veggie garden fence

Just a wild cucumber (Marah macrocarpa) growing on the fence in the vegetable garden.

Unlike real cucumbers, these are a member of the gourd family and toxic. It’s perennial native to San Diego, growing from a big, woody tuber that can get as big as person (thus the nickname “manroot”).

The spiky fruit will dry out, just like a gourd, then crack open and drop seeds everywhere. One of the interesting things about the seedlings is the first growth goes down rather than up. That turns into the tuber from which the plant then grows upward.

What I really remember about this plant is when we were kids my friends and I would find them and throw them at each other like grenades. If you were lucky and got a good throw, it’d get stuck in their hair and be really hard to remove without pulling some hair out with it.

Shortly after dawn on a misty December morning

It’s been cool and foggy lately, but the November rains have turned what was brown into shades of green, red and gold.

Stepping out the feed the fish in the pond shortly after sunrise, I caught the last of the fog burning off and the sun filtering through the trees, giving the yard a chilly late autumn glow. The last of the agave flower is standing watch over the sages and succulents in the foreground.