POMEGRANATES AND GARLIC

I decided I needed to help out the pomegranate tree today. It was bowed down with fruit and in danger of injury. I looked at my blog to see when I picked last year. September 8th. The fruits looked good and ripe although not quite as rosy as last year; they never look like the ones in the grocery store. However, when I cut into them the seeds were white and the fruit quite pithy. I juiced them all the same but the amount was disappointing and the color pale. I will leave the rest to see whether they improve in color. I may have been just too hasty. It is ironic that this year we had no late frosts to kill the new growth on the tree so there was a bumper crop, only to be ruined by our dry hot summer.

I tried garlic for the first time this year. It was the wrong year. When I was gone the drip system must have put out too much water around the plant and they rotted. Mine is the one on the left. The one on the right came from a friend's garden in Boise, Idaho. They had picked their garlic and it was hanging up in their potting shed; bunches and bunches of these large firm bulbs. At the end of the month they have a garlic party where everything they serve has garlic in it. Even garlic ice cream! 

I took myself off to the Natural Gardener and bought a new pair of gardening gloves- what a splurge. Two days ago I was stung again, on the hand, by a wasp hiding in the lamb's ears which I was pulling out. The gloves are very lightweight, which doesn't spell a long life for them as I am very hard on gloves, when I wear them, which is not often. I also bought another culinary sage plant( yet another one died this summer), and a small sharkskin agave. That cheered me up. Oh! and today the temperature was only 99 degrees!