Everyday I go out and there are just SO MANY LADYBUGS.  Its unbelievable.  If you stand there long enough you can watch them devour the aphids.  What an incredible sight.  I”ll try to get a video of one of the buffets and put it up.  For now, please be satisfied with these few pictures.

Well, though we’ve been a bit quite on the blogging front, we’ve been quite active in the garden.  The new raised bed garden went in about 3 weeks ago, and is looking quite nice.  We also removed some cement from our patio to make room to trees squashes up the patio cover for the summer.    In terms of produce, we’ve been getting a great variety of greens the last few weeks: lettuce, arugula, kale, collards, chard, chicory, the list goes on.  Take a look below to see what the farm is looking like now.

This week, we picked our first Dragonfruit.  If you’ve never heard of dragonfruit before its a fruit native to Central and South America, but now its commonly grown in Southeast Asia.  Recently dragon fruit has been becoming more and more popular in Southern California, where certain varieties grow very well.

We have a few dragon fruit plants, though we haven’t taken the time yet to really take care of them and trellis them like we’re supposed to.  Luckily, our oldest plant decided we still deserved to have a fruit, and gave us our first one.  Its such a beautiful fruit, and the taste is amazing too.  Its very delicate and lightly sweet.  Here’s a few more pictures:

Well we’ve been very busy here at The Growing Home over the last few weeks, and it seems everything is really come together.  We’re very excited and will be starting our CSA in early-December.

This week we made two major add-ons:

First off we added these 5 30-gallon container beds.  We’ll be using them for greens and root veggies like radishes and carrots.  We hooked up two shrubbler irrigation sprinklers to soak the water deep down, and one overhead spraying micro-sprinklers to keep the top few inches moist for our seeds.  We’ll shut those off once the plants get to a decent size to save water.

Secondly, we just bought this awesome wood chipper.  This we’re going to be using to shred up the wood we trim off of our fruit trees and then using that chipped wood as mulch.  It will help us retain moisture in the soil, prevent the sun from killed our soil bacteria, and provide food for the soil bacteria.

We’ve been very busy preparing beds and planting for the Winter Season.   We were a bit behind schedule, but now it looks like we’ve caught up well.  All the beds have been made strong, so they should last for years to come now.  And our spring garden will be a cinch, now that everything is all set up.  Take a look through our photos below.

The time has come.  Summer is waning, and within the next few weeks we’ll see the heat drop off as autumn comes around the corner.  It’s also the time to say good-bye to some of our favorite summer crops (tomatoes, squashes, eggplants), and starting preparing for the winter.  Time to put in all those greens and low-growers we’ve been missing all summer.

Here at The Growing Home, we’re preparing early for our Winter Garden.  We’ve been ripping out some of the the summer crops, mulching the beds, and planting seeds.   Here are a few pics of the seedlings we planted:

We can’t wait to start harvesting, and sharing our vegetables with you!

We’ve been harvesting a few of our pumpkins the last week or so.  They were growing all over the front yard on huge 50ft vines climbing over and under the pomegranate tree.   While I was harvesting some zuchinni, I noticed the behemoth in the picture above.  Its about twice the size of any other pumpkin I see.  Took quite an effort to even pick it up and bring it to the back yard.   Then I decided to weigh it:

45 lbs!!!  Thats a few days worth of food for our small family, plus we have two dozen more of these.  Definitely will be selling some.

Then while we were harvesting some greens, we noticed this strange little bug.  It looks like a little ladybug, but the stripes are very different.  Can anyone identify these things?  Harmful or helpful is our main question.

The last week has been pretty good for produce even though the sun has been hitting all the plants pretty hard.  The painted mountain corn is really pretty, event though we just got two .  I researched the variety just now and realized its for cold mountain areas, hence the name.  Grapes and figs have been keeping us for fruit (way better than any synthetic Metamusil or whatever).   And a big thanks to Trina for the cabbage.  We just used it to make a rice salad and it was excellent!

A few dishes mother made from the zuchinnis.  We’ve been experimenting with what to do with the ballooned ones we find every once in a while.

Yesterday’s Seed Balling class went really well.  We want to thank everyone who came to the class and to the potluck.  We had a great time and the food was excellent too.  Here are a few photos we took during the class:

Today we had about 7 volunteers come to the house to finish creating the beds we started making earlier this week in our side yard.  It was really great to have people working with us and the work got done really quickly.  We just want to thank everyone who showed up and hope more people will come to volunteer in the future.  If you’re interested in volunteering, please sign up on our Volunteer page.

Below are some photos from today, including the end result: