Tag Archives: Plants

The Great Olive Harvest of 2026

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The Original Angel Boy and I purchased olive trees at about the same time from our individual Trader Joe’s stores, just as a sort of experiment to see what would happen.

While his tree is about five feet tall now with many little olives, mine is stuck at two feet and, after a couple of years, here’s my bountiful harvest! I’m so excited!

Photo by Enchanted Seashells

Yes, I know you can’t eat olives directly from the tree because it’s extremely bitter and unpalatable due to a compound called oleuropein. Olives must be cured using salt packing, water soaking, or a brine process to make them edible.

I wonder who was the first person to figure out that it wasn’t a good idea to eat them raw?

And who first came up with these methods?

Dry Salt Method: Layer ripe black olives with coarse rock salt (about a 3:1 ratio of olives to salt) in a breathable container or a perforated bag to draw out the bitter juices over three to six weeks.

Water or Brine Curing: Soak the fresh olives in clean water, changing the water daily for two to three weeks until the bitterness fades, then transfer them to a salt brine solution for storage.

Rinse the cured olives thoroughly, then pack in olive oil, vinegar, or fresh herbs for final flavor enhancement.

There’s another method using lye, but that seems dangerous, so I didn’t include it.

I’ll let you know how delcious it is when it’s ready to eat and I arrange it on a miniature charcuterie platter.

A Perfect Rose

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I’m not referring to myself, haha, not this time, anyway… but I’m so proud that I propagated this rose and cared for it so lovingly until it produced a first bloom!

I feel like I just gave birth to a beautiful rose baby.

Photo by Enchanted Seashells

A Big Fig

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Lack of rain and fruit rats are the reason I have had a very sad harvest this year. First of all, they (or squirrels) ate all the baby apples before I could cover the tree in netting, then they ate tomatoes and peas and plums.

I have a little fig tree that produced a few figs and I did use the little mesh bags to encase the fruit to try and save them, but rats ate through the mesh!

THIS was the lone survivor…and it’s a BIG one.

I need to savor every bite because that’s IT until next season. I just don’t understand. Everyone around here suffers from the same rodent issues in their gardens, but I seem to bear the brunt of the destruction, maybe because I adamantly refuse to use poison to get rid of them, mainly because of the secondary damage to other creatures.

At least we’re forecasted to have an El Nino winter which means lots of rain, so I’ll probably plant more veggies (especially lettuce that won’t cause explosive diarrhea) and try, try again, but it’s becoming so frustrating, I’m almost ready to give up.

PlantLust | Polka Dot Angel Wing Begonia

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Think about it: a plant with polka dots, how could you NOT love it?

Here’s my prettypretty Polka Dot Begonia in her prettypretty seashell pot! Simple pleasures bring joy for this simple girl, I confess.

Photo by Enchanted Seashells

I’ve been lusting for this Polka Dot Angel Wing Begonia (Maculata ‘Wightii’) for a long time and finally found one in the clearance section at the nursery.

The check out employee told me there was literally nothing wrong with the plant but it was stressed out and should be repotted which was pretty awesome. (I can relate as I’m a little stressed out and wish all it took was to be repotted in new soil to fix me, too…)

When young, the Polka Dot Begonia is a beautiful tabletop houseplant. As it gets older, with good care, it becomes a beautiful floor plant, reaching four feet tall or more. 

Photo by Enchanted Seashells

While its variegated leaves are the main reason to grow it, polka dot begonia can also show off clusters of small white flowers on and off throughout the year if it gets enough light. 

Propagating Polka Dot Begonias (Begonia maculata) is best achieved via stem cuttings placed in water. Cut a healthy stem just below a node (leaf joint), remove lower leaves, and place it in water for four to six weeks until roots reach about 2 inches, then pot in airy, fast-draining soil.

Photo by Enchanted Seashells

Fingers crossed that I won’t love this one to death like I’ve done to other specimen plants.

The Impossible Flower

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With news of ships blown up during an illegal faux war to manipulate financial markets, a deranged fraud of a prez, skyrocketing prices, future uncertainty, there’s sanity in the simplicity of a flower that persists against all odds.

When I first noticed it, I tried to gently pry up this volunteer zinnia from between the crack in my driveway to plant in a better location, but I would have destroyed it, so there was nothing else to do but leave it where it grew. The roots are strong, much more so than I thought.

Photo by Enchanted Seashells

I’ve watered it, watching and waiting, and it just bloomed, one single, brave flower.

My plan is to wait until the flower dies and forms seeds so I’ll continue to plant resilience, grit, tenacity, and determination.

I think there’s a lesson here, somewhere…

Orchid Rescue

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A while back a neighbor was tossing out a few orchid plants that she thought were dead or dying. I rescued them, gave them love, and patiently waited.

I’ve been rewarded with not one, but two of them throwing spikes and blooming at the same time!

Photo by Enchanted Seashells

Best of all, they’re one of the few flowers that don’t trigger my allergies!

Photo by Enchanted Seashells

Slightly different shades of fuchsia bring joy.

Photo by Enchanted Seashells

I don’t know why anyone would discard an orchid; they’re not that difficult to maintain and there’s immense satisfaction when they rebloom.

I found an obscure poem about orchids by José Santos Chocano, written in the 1920s:

The Orchids

Freaks of bright crystal, airy beauties fair,
Whose enigmatic forms amaze the eye—
Crowns fit to deck Apollo’s brows on high,
Adornments meet for halls of splendor rare!
They spring from knots in tree-trunks, rising there
In sweet gradation; winding wondrously,
They twist their serpent stems, and far and nigh
Hang overhead like wingless birds in air.

Lonely, like pensive heads, all fetterless.
Lofty and free they bloom; by no dull chain
Their flowers to any tyrant root are bound;
Because they too, at war with pettiness,
Desire to live, like souls that know no stain,
Without one touch of contact with the ground.

Friday Tirade: Fevers and Gnats and Hammers

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Have you ever experienced the feeling that you had a fever but you actually did NOT?

Somehow, as careful as I am, I got sick. It started with heavy congestion and a headache along with a low grade fever, then it spiked to 101.5 as all the other aches and pains descended upon my body.

After a couple of days of not getting any worse, I decided that I didn’t need to see a doc because my lungs were OK and that probably meant that it was a virus and not a secondary bacterial infection that would necessitate antibiotics as I’m prone to pneumonia.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, except for a cough and this annoying feeling that I have a fever but the thermometer says otherwise. I think I would be feeling a lot worse if I hadn’t been vaccinated for Covid and the flu, so I’m grateful for that. Ginger tea and Tylenol seem to help.

At the same time, my indoor plants are inundated with fungus gnats. They’re joyfully procreating and multiplying and are SO annoying. I sprayed the soil with a hydrogen peroxide solution that’s supposed to help–fingers crossed that it actually does. I’ve never had an infestation this severe and I’m not really happy about it.

If that wasn’t enough to put me in a foul mood, neighbors decided to build an absolute monstrosity of a remodel that looks more like an apartment building as it looms over my house. The construction noise has been ongoing for MONTHS and right now I’m listening to incessant sawing and hammering and nail guns along with an air compressor that goes off and on, off and on, off and on.

Closing the windows doesn’t do anything to muffle the noise and that’s almost impossible to do as temps are consistently in the 70s, so I suffer either way. When people drive or walk by, they look up at the giant structure and shake their heads, so I know it’s not just me.

Because of the way the wind blows (literally), all the sawdust and other building detritus comes my way so the side of my house was covered in sawdust, along with nails and paper from the insulation. I asked the neighbors to let their construction people know about it so they could clean it up and that didn’t happen so I sent them some pics and again asked to have something done about it, which they finally did about a month later.

Is there a real pervasive lack of basic courtesy and consideration nowadays, or am I the only one who thinks that?

Does everyone live in their own little bubble and not comprehend–or care — how their actions might affect others? Was I unreasonable to expect them to (promptly) clear away their construction mess? It’s definitely NOT my job to clean up after them and you can’t tell me that they didn’t look down from the scaffolding and see what was going on below them. Yes, SCAFFOLDING, because, like I said, it’s a huge, multi-story monstrosity.

Anyway…

I can’t take it much longer…I think I might have to scream into a pillow. SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP!

June Blooms

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Here’s a little sprinkle of alchemy from Mother Earth.

I grew these flowers: Forget-Me-Not, Zinnia, Calendula…with seeds collected from last season’s blooms. It’s a satisfying project to participate in the circle of life, almost like I gave birth to them, which in a way, I did.

It’s not just me: A query about saving one’s seeds reveals this:
Harvesting garden seeds offers a deep connection to the natural world, to become more self-sufficient, and to witness the unique adaptations plants make over time to their specific environment. It also provides a sense of continuity and independence from commercial seed companies. 

Yes! I do so love FREE things!

I try to save as many seeds as I can in the veggie garden, too. Cilantro and tomatoes perform well, as do certain types of lettuce. Cucumbers and members of the squash family won’t produce true to type if they’re hybrids, but it’s fun to experiment.

June is full of color around here. Soon enough, it’ll be too dry and everything will turn drab and brown, but the joy continues because I’ll salvage the seeds for next spring. It’s the circle of life all over again!

My Spicy Girl: Peppermint Party Climbing Rose

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This is an update to a previous post about transplanting this awesome Peppermint Party Climbing Rose. It’s been a couple years and she’s really blossoming and super spicy!

I don’t give her too much attention except for a hard prune every January, and cross my fingers that she’ll grow back healthy and happy.

I took this photo when it was sunny. I woke up to rain which was totally, unexpectedly, but absolutely welcome, especially since we haven’t had any sky water is quite a while. Any little bit helps.

This was one of my most successful transplanting of a mature plant. I moved this Peppermint Party Climbing Rose from one arbor to another and it’s been thriving ever since.

Late afternoon sun on these stripey petals caught my eye:

And a closer view…

Happy Sunday!

All photos by Enchanted Seashells

Blooming Bee-filled Fragrant California Lilac: Ceanothus

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(I think if you click on the little pics, they become big.)

This gigantic California Lilac (Ceanothus) has survived and thrived against all odds. About seven years ago, I thought it had completely died; there was no hint of the plant at all — it had disappeared. Since dying plants are something I’ve gotten used to here in the southwest, I figured it had gone the way of many others…

However., one day as I randomly inspected the area, I saw something that strangely resembled a minuscule Ceanothus leaf, shiny and green. I kept my eye on it for a while and was amazed that it WAS that same Ceanothus plant — it had resurrected itself.

Look at it today! It’s taken over the entire area next to the driveway. Periodically, I cut it back because it grows so prolifically, I wouldn’t be able to get in the garage. Trimming doesn’t seem to bother it at all, as you can see.

What you can’t hear are the hundreds of bees it attracts and what you can’t smell is the fragrance of a blooming Ceanothus, powerful yet delicate.

Did you know? The flowers of certain Ceanothus species contain saponin, a natural compound that creates a soapy lather when mixed with water. 

Historically, Native Americans used Ceanothus flowers as a natural soap for washing hands and clothes.

To use Ceanothus as soap, simply gather the flowers, get your hands wet, and rub the flowers between your hands. The saponin will create a soapy lather. It really works!