Wandering Chopsticks: Vietnamese Food, Recipes, and More: Gardens

Showing posts with label Gardens. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Mimosa LA Nursery - Los Angeles

The day before Thanksgiving, my mom said she wanted to buy a Meyer lemon tree for the house. We have plenty of fruit trees given by my uncles, but none of them were lemons. My youngest uncle's Meyer lemon tree isn't producing as much as it had in the past and my parents wanted to plant one in the front yard. Less likelihood of anyone stealing our fruit since so many people in SoCal have lemon trees in their yards you see.

So I took my mom to Mimosa LA Nursery, where lil' sis had purchased the persimmon tree for my parents' garden the year we drove up in 2008. It's also where my uncles bought their fruit trees until they started grafting or planting seedlings from existing stock.

Mimosa Nursery is owned by a Vietnamese-American so there is a pretty large selection of tropical fruit and flower trees spread across three acres.

Planting Pennywort and Harvesting the Last Figs

Not much going on in the garden in September. I brought down some pennywort and flat-leafed chives from my mom's garden in Oregon that needed to be planted so I finally started working on the narrow space outside my kitchen door. The row of amaryllises are along the wall on the opposite side of the steps. I'm leaving the amaryllises there, but the space is really too narrow to plant other flowers.

There's another dirt strip opposite that, and then these two long narrow dirt strips, which seemed ideal for me to plant herbs. Right outside the kitchen door so I could cut a few herbs when cooking and the contained space would keep the them from spreading too much.

But first, I needed to pull all those weeds.

Amaryllises, Blueberries, and Night-Blooming Cereus

May is quite a lovely month in the garden. The amaryllises in the side yard were in peak bloom. The amaryllises were there when I moved in so I can't take any credit for them.

A few weeks later, most of the blooms had faded.

Cielo Verde - Playa Restaurant Rooftop Garden - Los Angeles

While dining at Playa Restaurant for the media preview for AltaMed's 7th Annual East LA Meets Napa food and wine event, when Chef John Rivera Sedlar mentioned that all the greens and flowers used in his dishes were grown on his restaurant's rooftop garden, I was amazed.

Rooftop Garden - Playa Restaurant - Los Angeles 2

Even better was when I found out he was allowing small groups of visitors on the roof to check it out. After climbing the ladder, which you saw in the previous post, I saw this. The view is from the next level up, looking down. The ladder I climbed is just to the right of the green rooftop.

It's not the fancy terrace-like rooftop garden depicted in many a home magazine. What it is, is a functional garden with towers and towers of plants grown in a soil substitute shoved into what space was available on an industrial rooftop in the center of Los Angeles. This was just the herb and starter plant area, the next level up was simply incredible!

One Pomegranate. Singular.

Two years ago, I had about half a dozen pomegranates on my tree. Last year, they were only about an inch or two in size. :( So I was really excited this year to see about three that were almost 3 inches in diameter.

Only, when I cut it open, that's what I saw above. The seeds never even formed! Have you ever seen the like before?

Still, I was hopeful since there was one decent-sized pomegranate left on the tree.

Dragon Fruit Buds

After snapping photos of my desert rose and fledgling porch garden, I wandered onto the side and saw that my dragon fruit were finally budding.

It doesn't appear to be quite as bumper a crop as last year's, but perhaps I'll get a good harvest.

Desert Rose and Blueberries

After noticing that the desert rose that I brought back as a cutting from Vietnam was wilting in the sunny spot on my porch, I moved it to a shadier area. Months and months later, the leaves are glossy again and the flowers are all abloom.

Longans

My favorite part of November in the garden is when the longan tree ripens in the backyard.

At the beginning of October, they were still mostly green and not quite ready for eating yet.

$41.40, JetBlue RT LGB to PDX for 35 Hours

I had to skip out early on cousin A's bridal shower because I was going up to Portland again.

For $41.40 round-trip!

After taxes!

JetBlueCheeps LGB to PDX, $10 each way, plus taxes.

Sure I was only going to be home for 35 hours. But did you not see that my round-trip plane ticket was only $41.40?!

Even though my parents were coming down a few days later for cousin A's wedding, it was too good of a deal to pass up. The minute I saw the price, I started furiously typing so I could book it before the deal disappeared, while simultaneously text messaging oldest nephew and dad's friend's daughter to tell them about it. They were too late though.

Surely you'd pay that for two of your momma's homecooked meals?

How to Eat Dragon Fruit

With all the dragon fruit pictures I've been posting, I realized that I've never shown you how to eat one. Not that you couldn't have figured it out on your own. OK, it was just an excuse to post more pictures. :P

Whoa! Dragon Fruit!

After photographing my dragon fruit flower abundance in August, I forgot all about them.

On October 2, I noticed that the fruit were almost ripe.

Begonias

I've shown you my begonias before.

After a bit of neglect, and moving them to the same shadier spot as my desert rose, they're growing and blooming again.

Desert Rose

This desert rose grew from a cutting I got from my cousin's plant and brought back from Vietnam.

It had been woefully neglected -- no flowers, few leaves. I moved it to a shadier side of my patio and within two months, it grew glossy green leaves and flowered.

Yay!