(soft music, birds chirping)
Thursday workdays in October were always jam-packed with getting ready for fall,
planting, late summer harvests, and there was always some encounter with bugs,
critters. Check it out. So these are my first pink Mexican guavas. you get those
by they fall on the ground? I enjoyed the smell. You ate one. I ate one.
It's very sweet. I have to try it, but it's hard. You bite
into it. I cut it from the tree. But do you eat the skin?
All the skin. Oh I see, clean it like that. Ok, ok, that one? you
can eat that green like that? Yes, it's ready. Oh, ok so you take them off the tree. I see, ok. Oh, wow.
This is the perfect time to eat. It's very soft, it's medium. You can go to the ground.
Ok, it's too sweet when it's on the ground? Too sweet. They're ready. Ok.
You just bite into that. Yes. The Mexican pink
guava joined the 3 pineapple guavas in my parkway food forest in 2015. It bore
only a handful of small fruit in 2016. I hope it grows taller than the pineapple
guavas, which tend to grow more like bushes, so it can reach the sun. Meanwhile,
Oh. I have to learn to like the taste.
Are those seeds in there?
Like the little seeds?
Yeah, everything. It's good.
Hmm. Okay.
Across the sidewalk, my Arizona pequin pepper was struggling to survive
against the bacterial spot, as was the orange Thai chili tree.
(soft music begins)
(bang, bang, bang)
Erick was sorting out the fresh pineapple guavas.
So, how many pounds am I gonna wind up with,
like, twenty, thirty?
Maybe 25.
I wish I could sell those. Ha, ha.
Yeah, I just can't make that much chutney. That's not gonna happen.
I harvested the stunning Listada de Gandia eggplants.
I'd love to know what causes
the leaf edges to turn yellow on eggplant.
(dramatic piano music)
Okay, it's always great to get a box from Sharon's Natural Gardens. What do we have
here? Oh, these are the seeds. Some of these are a gift. Each one of her seeds
comes hand-wrapped in these art packages, and a lot of instructions. What is this?
Oh, this is horse tail. I ordered one of her handmade baskets and she filled it
to the brim with goodies, live plants. First of all, check out this wonderful
basket, and then second of all, all these, oh my goodness, all these live plants that
she literally dug up and sent to me. Okay I'm gonna have to read and see what she
has sent me. This is, oh, ha, nettle, nettle plants, and these are oh the tuber rose
bulbs. I have no idea what to do with those, and the canna bulbs. Oh, this is
wonderful. Okay. Alright, and this is oh, valerian,
wonderful! Okay, let's check out this basket. Oh, I love it!
This is gonna be a beautiful harvest basket.
Look at that, handmade from her wild, ah, let's see: (reads) Making the baskets
preserves this ancient heritage of handwork. Each basket is one-of-a-kind.
It's a strong basket, because of the framework. And this is basket willow, made
from basket willow, which she grows so that she can make baskets.
(soft, acoustic guitar)
Oh, those roses look terrible. We need to trim it. Yeah.
We can move this. Yeah, Oh! This looks terrible.
This is my sweetgrass, and I let it get a little too dry in this heat spell,
so there's a lot of dead underneath. And this will regrow, so we're cutting it all
the way back. And he is cutting it twice, and we're putting it in the compost for
green compost, because I don't have any grass, and this is one way to get green
into my compost. While Eric finished up clipping the sweetgrass, which smells
wonderful by the way, I ran over to the hardware store for some vinyl sheeting
to cover my redwood fence rail. It was getting pretty beaten up with the
planters, one of which was leaking.
Well, it looks a lot better than the black plastic garbage bag. I planted the
annual herb Sweet Annie beside the cranberry hibiscus sent to me last
November by Pat Smith in Mobile Alabama. She makes tea from the flowers. It
suddenly shot up in height to over 10 feet in summer, while the sweet Annie
went up to 6 feet. Yeah about right there. Because the branches were yellowing, I
cut the Sweet Annie - yeah - for drying. it has a wonderful fruity smell. I infuse
the dried flowers for my homemade skin balm. So, that's a beetle, and we think
it's bad, right?
I wish I knew what that was. Oh, ha, ha!
It's October 19th and this is the harvest for this Thursday workday. This is Listada
de Gandia eggplant. This is from a separate plant. It didn't look so good, so
I took it off. This is a Thai eggplant. The seeds were sent to me by a young man
in Northern California and it split so I went ahead and took it off, even though
it's hard. These are my last, and only, watermelons
I'm not sure what these are. This is a Bradford watermelon, which normally would
be this big. I took it off because it's getting soft on one side and the vines
are totally dead. So I'm hoping there's something that I can eat in there. I only
have one Meyer lemon on my tree today. These are strawberries, blueberries,
One little okra. Okra has been a disaster here. These are goji berries,
almost the last of my fresh goji berries, and these are peppers from a Vietnamese
chili, and these are sweet apple peppers, this is Aleppo. And I think these are Thai
chilies, otherwise, I switched the seeds and there Joe's long red cayenne. And
these are my, the first of my Mexican pink guavas, and these chilies are from
the island of Pantelleria. And in addition to that I have... uhhh!
probably, maybe 15 or 20 pounds of pineapple guavas.
Sharon has been asking me for a block of the sweetgrass for a while, so we've
literally just chopped a square and I'm going to wrap this right back up in the
same thing she sent to me and mail this to her
like that.
Thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate your support. Please give me
that like, and share this channel with your friends, and I'll see you in the
next video.
(soft piano ends)