My Attempt at a Permaculture Food Forest

Remember those fruit trees I planted in my front yard? In the last couple of years I've been trying to turn them into a "food forest." At the very least, I don't want them to continue to be fruit trees sticking out of a lawn of Bermuda and St. Augustine grass, and instead be a garden with fruit trees in it. The "food forest" method seemed like a good way to chip away at the lawn and replace it with a different understory for the fruit trees that doesn't have to be mowed, and might be useful in itself.

Permaculture seems to be a kind of trendy thing right now, so I thought I'd give it a go. What is permaculture? It's hard for me to explain, actually. The definition seems to be fuzzy. To simplify it as much as I can, it seems to be an attempt to make agriculture mimic natural ecosystems more closely. For example, using polycultures instead of monocultures, using organic methods of fertilization and pest control, and so on. However, when you start reading about permaculture, it can start getting very philosophical and Utopian. Its most enthusiastic supporters seem to think we can Save the World with this technique. It actually reminds me of the Grow Biointensive method in that way, even though they're kind of opposites. Grow Biointensive is actually very unnatural, with all the double-digging and intensive planting to maximize yields. Permaculture seems to be less concerned with maximizing yields on limited space, and more concerned with minimizing inputs of labor, water, fertilizer, etc. The similarity is in their promises to Save the World by growing food for humanity in a more environmentally sustainable way.

Obviously I'm going into this skeptical that it will be quite as awesome as people say it will be, but I have this area in my front yard with fruit trees, so I thought I might give it a shot. Gardening is my hobby. I'm not trying to completely feed my family with this, so if it doesn't work out, it's not a big deal.

OK, so what I started out with was a suburban front yard in Central Texas in a neighborhood that thankfully doesn't have an HOA, so I can plant whatever I want in the front yard. The fruit trees went in the front yard because the back yard is too shady. In the front yard we have a cluster of live oak trees that shades the house nicely, with non-native St. Augustine grass underneath them, and then a sunny strip between the oak trees and the street with non-native Bermuda grass. The fruit trees were planted in this sunny area.

My house is in the Texas Hill Country (also known as the Edwards Plateau), which means we have a thin layer of black clay soil on top of limestone bedrock. It's Texas, so the summers are scorching hot, the winters are mild (we get freezes, but it seldom stays below freezing for more than one night at a time), and spring and fall are our rainy seasons. The natural ecosystem here would be a Plateau Live Oak and Ashe Juniper woodland. Permaculture enthusiasts claim that you can make a food forest anywhere, in any type of climate, on any type of soil. OK then.


The Fruit Trees

The first fruit trees we planted, soon after we moved into this house in 2012, were a Wonderful Pomegranate, Meyer Lemon, Satsuma Orange, Key Lime, Gold Nugget Loquat, and an unknown fig variety I got as a cutting from my in-laws.

Pretty soon we found out that Key Limes cannot survive in the ground in our area, at least not until global warming takes away what little winter we have. Apparently Key Limes cannot deal with freezes at all. The first freeze we had killed the entire top of the little tree. I was afraid it was dead, but in spring shoots grew back up from the roots, so we dug it up and put it in a large pot, and that's where it's lived ever since. When it freezes, we take it inside, which be dangerous because it has some nasty thorns. I get a nice crop of golfball-sized limes from it every year.

The Meyer Lemon is only slightly hardier. It might be better off in a pot as well, but it's still in the ground at this point. I try covering it with frost blanket when we have a hard freeze, but it still gets damaged often. Last winter despite getting covered, all of its leaves were killed again. It hasn't yielded fruit in a long time because it has to keep recovering from freeze damage again and again. The main reason why I'm reluctant to put it in another big pot is because we have limited space in this house, and already have a key lime, rubber tree plant, and Norfolk Island pine in big pots that we have to find room in the house for each winter. One of these days I guess I'll have to get a greenhouse, but we have so many other household projects going on, I'm not sure when that will happen.

When we removed the Key Lime, I planted a Kumquat in its place. Now that's a good fruit tree to have in the ground in Texas! Even though the tree is still only about 3-4 feet tall, I get a nice crop of fruit off of it every year, and freezes hardly bother it. We do cover it if it gets into the 20's, but I'm not sure if it even needs that.

The Satsuma is also doing fine in the ground. We covered it with frost blanket while it was little, but eventually it got too tall for that. Every now and then it freezes enough to kill a few leaves, but it grows news ones back in the spring. A couple of  years ago we got a bumper crop of about 40 fruits. The fruits are like a large tangerine or navel orange, with thick skin that's very easy to peel. I've heard that in Britain, Satsumas are known as "Christmas oranges," and that is around the time when they ripen. I've also been told that a light frost actually makes them sweeter. While the kumquat consistently bears fruit every year, it seems like the Satsuma is doing that thing some fruit trees do where it has a heavy crop one year that wears out the tree, and then doesn't do much the next year. The year after we had the 40 fruits, it only made two fruits, and then this last year we had a weird late freeze in March that killed a lot of its blossoms, but even after that I harvested 11 fruits in early December.

For the non-citrus trees, the best one is probably the fig. Nobody knows what variety it is, but it gives us a good crop of small figs each year. The figs are light purple and only about 1-2 inches long, so they are smaller than figs from the grocery store, but they are very sweet and tasty. The tree sheds its leaves in the fall and grows them back in the spring, and our freezes don't seem to bother it at all. It's been growing very fast, and it's amazing that it started out as just a little cutting.

The Gold Nugget Loquat has also been growing fast, and has become the largest fruit tree in the food forest. However last spring was the first year we actually got a good crop of fruit off of it. Loquats are a little weird because the tree is cold-hardy, but the flowers are not. They flower in November, grow fruit through the winter, and then the fruit ripens in spring. Every single year we've had freezes that killed the flowers before they could make fruit until last year.

Perhaps the most disappointing tree so far is the Wonderful Pomegranate. The tree itself is beautiful. It's grown really big. It gets large orange flowers on it that the hummingbirds love, and then they fall off and that's it. Last year 3 or 4 of them tried to make fruits, but then when they were about tennis ball sized they split open and rotted. I could tell that happened before they were ripe because the insides were still white. I don't know what it's problem is.

A couple of years ago I added three more fruit trees in a second row behind the first row. They are a Houston peach, an Anna apple, and an Ein Shemer apple. This might be pushing things a bit because they are getting pretty close to the oak trees, and might be in too much shade. We did trim some of the limbs off the oak trees, but I've still noticed that they are starting to lean away from the oak trees to get more sun. But maybe a little shade will help them survive the Texas heat? We'll see I guess.

None of them have produced fruit so far, but last year the peach had some blossoms, got 2 or 3 small green fruits on it, and then they fell off. The Ein Shemer apple has gotten a few blossoms each year that just end up falling off, and the Anna apple hasn't even blossomed. Maybe they just need more time. Apple trees aren't self-fertile, which is why I planted two, so Ein Shemer won't make fruit until Anna blossoms anyway.


The Hügelkultur Beds

A food forest is supposed to have an understory of other plants below the fruit trees. My fruit trees started out stuck in lawn grass. I needed to figure out a way to remove the lawn grass and replace it with something else without disturbing the roots of the established fruit trees. That's when I stumbled upon something called Hügelkultur. This is another thing where I'm not sure if it will work as well as they say it will work, but might as well give it a shot. I decided to start by making a bed between each of my fruit trees and then eventually I'll expand out from there. If nothing else, this will mean I won't have to mow between the fruit trees, which has always been a pain.

Melons in a hugelkultur bed last year.

I modified the technique somewhat from what I read about it. I didn't dig a trench or even removed the grass because that seemed like too much work and also might damage the fruit trees' roots. Instead, I covered the grass with a couple of layers of flattened cardboard boxes. We always have plenty of boxes from Amazon or Costco, so this was a way to recycle them.

On top of that is where I put the wood, which is the main distinguishing feature of this kind of raised bed. In our wooded back yard, we have two big brush piles and some logs. I didn't want to use our oak, mesquite, or juniper logs because I prefer those for firewood, but we did have logs from a big Chinaberry tree that fell down. Chinaberry is such a lightweight wood that it doesn't make very good firewood (it burns up too quickly), so I used those logs to line the outsides of the bed, and then in the middle I put all kinds of stuff from the brush piles that I chopped up with loppers or just broke up by hand if they were really rotten.

Then on top of that you need something nitrogen-rich to balance all the carbon in the wood. I used grass clippings from mowing the lawn.

Then on top of that goes some kind of soil-like substance that you can plant things in. I ended up using store-bought topsoil and cow manure. That is probably not ideal because I had to spend money on that part and buy a bunch of individual 40 pound plastic bags of the stuff and spread them on top. But at the time I didn't have a lot of homemade compost ready for something like that, and since I didn't dig a trench, I didn't have soil that I removed from the trench to put on top.

Then I immediately plant them with vegetables. I've found that I should plant them immediately because the roots of the vegetables are needed to hold everything together. So far the best thing to plant in them seems to be winter squash or melons with long vines. The vines also help hold everything together.

How have they done so far? I started them last summer, so they're over a year old now. For one thing, they DO need to be watered. Some people claim that the rotting wood in the beds soaks up so much water like a sponge that you never have to water them. That is not true in Texas, at least not in the summer. The wood I used ranged from very rotten to very fresh, so the fresh wood may not soak up as much water as the rotten wood, but the important thing is I've still had to water them. So far I can't tell if they need to be watered more or less than a traditional raised bed.

I haven't noticed any problems with the plants having nutrient deficiencies. I've seen some people write online about how the wood draws up too much nitrogen as it decomposes. I do occasionally sprinkle fertilizer on mine, but they don't seem to require any more fertilizer than a traditional raised bed.

One thing that ends up happening is as things decompose, the mound starts to collapse and gets big holes in it. Part of that may be because I used a tangle of sticks in them middle instead of logs, and they were sticks of various species of wood at varying stages of decomposition, so they aren't decomposing evenly. When I plant a new crop of something, I stomp around on it a bit to break up the sticks further and compact it a bit, and sometimes fill in the holes with more compost. I figure they'll eventually settle down into something more solid.

At least some of the vegetable plants seem to enjoy the partial shade they get from the fruit trees during the hottest part of the summer, and the fruit trees have essentially gotten a thick mulch between them that probably helps them in the summer as well.


The Biggest Problem with my Food Forest

I'm trying to grow a fruit and vegetable garden in the front yard with no fence around it in the Texas Hill Country. Nobody else in my neighborhood are bothering to do that, and maybe I'm just in denial about how nuts this is, because maybe I'm just going to all this work to feed the local deer herd. Aaarrrgh! DEER! Yes, I know they are cute. I'm also having to constantly battle them to keep them from eating everything.

I use a combination of various techniques, so I haven't done any kind of controlled experiments to see which techniques are the most effective. I put wire cages around some things (which are ugly, I admit). I spray deer repellent that smells like rotten eggs (gross!). When my husband cuts his hair, I sprinkle that around. I have even hung up socks with Irish Spring soap in them from the fruit trees.

Still the deer sometimes munch my plants. I found out that their favorite fruit tree to browse is the peach tree, but the apple trees are also tasty. Any leaves that aren't protected by a wire cage or aren't too high up are eaten. They eat a few leaves off the pomegranate tree too, but don't like the citrus or the fig leaves. They will also rub their antlers on the trunks of young trees of any kind, so they have to be protected with wire cages.

As for the vegetables in the Hügelkultur beds, I pretty much gave up on legumes of any kind. Despite their value for nitrogen-fixing ability, they're also extremely tasty to deer. They also seem to really like cucumber leaves, but aren't as much into the squash leaves (I guess because they're spiny?). They will eat squash leaves, but it's not the first thing they eat. In the winter, greens like lettuce MUST be under wire cages or they all get eaten.

Maybe one day I'll have to give up on growing anything other than citrus trees, or build a fence around the whole thing, but for now I'm making do.


General Thoughts So Far

I'm not expecting my food forest to be like the Garden of Eden, where I can just pick abundant fruits and vegetables with no labor, no watering, no pests, and no need for added fertilizers. That doesn't sound realistic to me at all. I would think that shouldn't sound realistic to most other people either, but that's how some permaculture websites make it sound. The natural ecosystem in my area is an oak-juniper woodland, not an apple-peach woodland or even a citrus-fig woodland, and there are good reasons for that. You can't get something for nothing, and if you want sweet, juicy peaches here instead of acorns and juniper berries then you have to put work into it. Fruit trees are domesticated trees, so they need human help to grow. Just like I couldn't abandon my house cat in the wood and expect her to survive in the wild like a bobcat, you can't expect to be able to plant a peach tree and then let it fend for itself and expect it to survive like a juniper tree.

A fairer comparison would be between a food forest and other methods of fruit and vegetable gardening, such as my raised bed vegetable garden on the other side of the driveway, where I do more of a Square Foot/Biointensive technique. Is the food forest less work, about the same amount of work, or more work? If it's either of the first two, it might still be worth it.

I expect it might depend on the exact species of plants too. I've already gone over how some of my fruit trees are doing much better than others, the fig and kumquat being the best trees with the biggest yields with the least amount of help from me. For the annual vegetables, I prefer growing vining squash in the food forest because it has more room to roam and spread out. On the other hand, I do potatoes in the raised beds because of all the deep digging required to plant and harvest them. I really don't want to be trying to dig potatoes out of a hügelkultur beds with all the sticks in the way, and I don't want anything that requires digging too deeply because that might hurt the fruit tree roots.

Of course gardens are always a work in progress. There are some plants like tomatoes that seem to do OK in both places, though to be fair I've only grown cherry tomatoes in the food forest so far, and cherry tomatoes are tougher than large-fruited tomatoes. I haven't tried peppers in the hügelkultur beds so far, but peppers are almost perennials in this climate (I've had some live for as long as three years before an especially hard frost killed them), so they might be a great candidate for the permaculture garden, which is supposed to be skewed more towards perennials. And I'm still not giving up on figuring out how to coax my pomegranate, peach, and apple trees to set fruit. I've also started planting I'itois onions, multiplier leeks, and ginger here and there in the hügelkultur beds. At least the deer don't like to eat those.

The important thing is it's been fun so far figuring some of this stuff out.

Meyer Lemon Chess Pie

On finals week, my department at work has a potluck Christmas party, and I usually bring some type of dessert. This year our Meyer lemon tree was doing so well, that I thought about bringing a lemon meringue pie, but after reading about how meringue pies can be a bit tricky to make, I ended up going with a chess pie instead.

Chess pie is basically a custard pie with cornmeal in it, which gives it an interesting texture. Plain chess pie is extremely sweet, but lemon chess pie sounded good because the tartness should balance the sweetness. The problem was that when I searched for recipes, I found a lot of recipes that varied widely. Recipes varied between using only 1 Tbsp. of lemon juice all the way up to a quarter cup, a quarter cup of buttermilk to a full cup, 1 Tbsp. of cornmeal to 3 Tbsp, 4 or 5 eggs, 1 and a half cups of sugar or maybe two whole cups, half a stick of butter or maybe two sticks. I had no idea which one to choose. They even varied on how long you bake it, at what temperature, and whether you pre-bake the crust or not.

I finally printed out four different recipes and decided to combine them into my very own recipe! It was risky, but I think I've made enough other custard-type pies that I had a general idea how they work.

Turns out it worked great! It's a good thing I cut myself a sliver right away at the potluck, because when I came back later to collect my pie plate, it was CLEAN. My coworkers completely devoured it and didn't leave anything leftover for me to take home to my husband.

Glad I wrote everything down so I can make it again!

Meyer Lemon Chess Pie

Ingredients:

• Pastry for a single-crust pie
• Juice of 2 Meyer lemons (about 1/4 cup of juice)
• Zest from 2 Meyer lemons
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 2 Tbsp. cornmeal
• 4 eggs
• 2/3 cup buttermilk
• 1/2 stick of butter, melted
• 1/8 tsp salt

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Beat lemon juice, lemon zest, sugar, cornmeal, eggs, buttermilk, melted butter, and salt together until smooth. Place pastry into regular pie plate (not deep dish) and trim. Pour in filling.

Lay some aluminum foil over the top and bake in preheated oven for 30 minutes. Remove foil and bake for another 30 minutes.

Let cool on a wire rack, and then chill in fridge before serving.

This pie had the gooey texture of a pecan pie, and a nice sweet-tart flavor. I used homemade pie crust with butter and lard, but you can use whatever your favorite pie dough recipe is, or store-bought. Regular milk might work instead of buttermilk, but I had buttermilk in the fridge already, and I think it's more traditional for chess pie. Regular lemon juice would work if you don't have Meyer lemons, but you might want to increase the sugar to 2 cups and/or use regular milk instead of buttermilk, because Meyer lemons are not as sour as regular lemons.

Merry Christmas!

The Bluebonnet Moon (and Easter)

Oops, I was so busy with Easter preparation that I forgot about the full moon last week! My family has gotten into the pattern of my parents-in-law hosting Christmas, my sister-in-law hosting Thanksgiving, and I host Easter, so I was busy last week getting that ready, in addition to it being Midterm time at work.

Of course, out in the garden, it's a busy time as well. March and April is when Texas switches from Not-Summer to Summer, and Not-Summer crops are being harvested while Summer crops are quickly being planted before it gets too hot.

Again this year there are a few bluebonnets growing in the front yard, and not as many as I'd prefer. I forgot to add more seeds last year, so maybe I can do that this year. Some of them are already getting pods on them, so we're being careful not to mow them down until the seeds are mature.

In the back garden, I'm still waiting for a lot of the cool-weather plants to finish up, though as I showed you in the last post, the beets and carrots are pretty much done. The fava beans are looking lush and have a lot of blooms. We got 0.1 in. of rain on Easter, and hopefully will be getting more this coming week.

The celery (on the right in the picture) is still small, and I think it's going to stay that way. I've been harvesting leaves and stems from it anyway, even though they're not much bigger than parsley. They still add celery flavor to dishes that call for finely chopped celery, even though they would not be suitable for anything that needs nice big crisp stalks. On the left you can see the shallots, which seem to be doing well.

The peas are about waist high now. They have about two months before it gets too hot for them. I hope I can get some peas by then. Nothing like homegrown green peas.

The arugula is covered with seed pods. I'm going to have plenty of arugula seeds to trade and give away.

The garlic and kale are still looking just so-so. I've been able to harvest a little bit of Tuscan kale, but I am really doubting I'll get a good garlic harvest. Next time I really need to plant them in a better spot than up under this tree.

The front garden is just about done! I ended up making four 20' x 4' beds, with 3' paths between. I've decided I like that better than the 5' wide beds and 2' wide paths I did in the back. That turned out be a bit crowded, especially when the plants were full grown. Eventually I'm going to redo the back garden and widen the paths.

The front garden has all my tomatoes, tomatillos, and eggplants in it already. Now I'm working on transplanting the peppers that survived the winter from the back to the front. Here are the Lemon Drops. All of them survived the winter. In the back I'm only going to plant the peppers I'm saving seeds from, to make them easier to isolate from the other peppers.

We've also been planting things in other areas of the yard. Over Easter weekend, my husband worked really hard on our hedge of fruit trees along the front by the street. Now we have (in order from lower left to upper right in the picture) Wonderful Pomegranate, Meyer Lemon, Satsuma Orange, Key Lime, Gold Nugget Loquat, and the fig (unknown variety) that my in-law's gave us. The citruses should start bearing fruit by this winter. I'm not sure how long the other trees will take, but I'm sure it will be worth the wait!

I've also been planting more herbs, including this catnip (left) and catmint (right) in the shady area of the herb garden. First we just put wire cages around them, but some cat figured out how to pull it up and wriggle underneath, managing to eat half the catnip plant. So now we have these rocks around the cages to make that harder. I don't mind giving the cats catnip, once the plants are big enough, but I learned my lesson about leaving catnip unprotected. The cats end up eating it up so quickly it can't grow back and eventually dies. The idea behind the cages is to protect the main part of the plant, while letting the cats eat the parts that eventually grow through the cage. The cats just need to be patient!

Pear and Apple Mincemeat

One of the Yuletide goodies I made this year that I had never made before were mincemeat pies. I still had some pears left over, and they were starting to go soft. I also had some apples that had been sitting around too long, and a bunch of half-used bags of dried fruit. I hadn't had mincemeat pie since I was a little kid, and Ball's Complete Book of Home Preserving has a couple of recipes for mincemeat in it.

I decided to go with the recipe for Pear Mincemeat on page 177, since it made less than the Brandied Fruit Mincemeat, and I didn't have enough fruit to make such a big batch. I also had to make some substitutions, though I think it's OK in these kind of recipes as long as I substitute similar things. I didn't have quite enough almonds, so I used some almonds and some pecans. I used some different dried fruit than what they had listed, but kept the total amount of dried fruit the same. I also used about half pears and half Granny Smith apples instead of all pears. That was mainly because I didn't have enough pears, but I also thought the different textures of the pears and apples would be more interesting.

I ended up with four and a half pints. I kept the half-full one in the fridge to use right away.

Next I had to find a recipe for mincemeat pie. The pies I enjoyed as a kid came frozen in a box, baked in the oven by my grandmother on Thanksgiving. I searched for a pie recipe, and found this mincemeat pie recipe from Joyofbaking.com. I liked the idea of making little individual pies instead of one big pie, and the stars on top are really cute.

The recipe worked out great, with one minor problem: the crust-to-filling ratio seemed all wrong. I made the crust exactly like it said, except for using brandy instead of water (a trick I just learned to make foolproof tender pie crusts - alcohol inhibits gluten formation!), but it only made enough to make 9 pies, not 24, and I used one and a half pints of mincemeat (the half-full one I had in the fridge, plus another pint jar I opened up), not only one cup like the recipe says.

Turns out it was because I used a standard muffin tin, not a mini muffin tin like the recipe says! Oh well, mine still turned out delicious, so delicious I forgot to take pictures of the finished product! I think I like it better this way, rather than making such tiny tarts. Making it in a standard muffin tin made each one a nice single-serving size. The star cookie cutter I have was just the right size for the top, and 9 single serving size tarts was more than enough for the number of guests I had.

Now I have three more pints of mincemeat for next year.

Pear Butter

About a month ago my husband's boss gave us a big sack of pears off his trees, about 10 or 12 pounds worth. They sat for quite a while in the garage fridge waiting for me to figure out what to do with them.

I decided to use up some of them to make pear butter.

I used the recipe from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. They have a recipe for peach butter, with a pear butter variation in the footnotes. They also have a variation that uses amaretto liqueur, which sounds delicious, but I decided to go with regular pear butter for my first time.

The recipe called for "7 lbs. of pears, peeled, cored, and chopped." What annoys me about these sorts of recipes is that they don't tell you if it's 7 lbs. before or after you peel and core them! I'd much prefer if they told me how much to have after they are peeled and cored. Much more precise that way. I mean, how do they know how much peel or core you're removing?

So I started peeling and coring and chopping them, weighing them as I went, until I got to about 5 lbs., which started to make my pot look quite full. I decided they probably meant weight before peeling and coring, so I stopped there.

I still have plenty of pears to use for other things.

First the pears are cooked in half a cup of water, and the juice and zest of one lemon. Instead of water I used apple cider. Thought it would make it tastier that way.

Once they are soft, you're supposed to puree them. After trying to puree hot soup in a blender before and getting a nasty surprise, I decided to use the stick blender this time. This actually turned out to be harder than I thought. I think stick blenders work well on more liquidy stuff, but it was a pain getting all the chunks worked out of these pears.

After pureeing, I added the 4 cups of sugar, juice and zest of 1 orange, and 1 tsp. (approximately, since I grate it myself) of nutmeg. Then comes the part where you cook it and cook it and cook it until it thickens. Same as with the pumpkin butter, this took a really really long time. I actually ran out of time, had to stop, put it in the fridge, and finish it off on another day.

Finally, it was done, at least to my satisfaction. You can see here it got much darker in color, I'm guessing due to caramelization. Next I loaded it up into sterilized jars and canned it in my steam canner.

As usual, it seems every time I can things, I end up with extra jars. I managed to fill 10 jelly jars instead of 8 like the recipe said. I always sterilize an extra two jars because of this. I really don't know why it always ends up that way.

Here is the finished product. I sent one jar back with my husband to give to his boss in return for giving us the pears. As with the pumpkin butter, my favorite thing to do with this stuff is mix it into oatmeal. It has a nice flavor with the citrus peels and nutmeg. Next time I get a huge load of pears, I'll try the amaretto variation.

New Fruit Trees and a New Butterfly

A couple of weeks ago we started planting fruit trees in the ground here at our new house. Fall and winter is a good time to plant fruit trees here in Texas, and really any perennials. Since summer is our most stressful season for plants, it gives them the maximum amount of time to establish a good root system before the heat sets in.

I'm still not sure about all the fruit trees I'll end up planting. I have dreams of homegrown oranges, apples, pears, peaches, and plums, but our space is limited. There are few places on our property where fruit trees could grow without the competition from our numerous live oaks, and in a contest against a mighty oak, a puny dwarf fruit tree doesn't have much of a chance.

I already had a Meyer Lemon and Key Lime in a pot, then my father-in-law gave us a fig tree he grew from a cutting from the fig tree in his own yard. Then my husband bought us a small pomegranate tree from a local nursery.

We finally decided to plant them in the front yard, right along the street. The front yard has a mott of live oaks, but they're nearer the house, leaving a sunny strip right up front. And fruit trees are attractive, right? They should make fine front-yard plants!

I think we should cut back the oaks limbs a little bit. A couple of them stretch over very close to the fruit trees, but cutting them off shouldn't hurt the oak trees too much. A little bit of shade might actually be beneficial in this climate, but for the most part they're in the sun. There should be plenty of sun coming in from the street side (which is where I was standing when I took this picture).

Here's the pomegranate with a tomato cage around it to protect it from deer. It's a Wonderful, which is the variety they commonly sell in stores. I considered looking for a more unusual variety, but that was the only kind the nursery had. We paid $7 for it, and considering that pomegranates cost $3 or $4 each at the store, I think it was a good investment.

Here's the fig tree, without a cage, which turned out to be a bad idea, because I just checked on it this morning, and it looks like the deer might have sampled it. I thought fig leaves would have some kind of latex substance (like other members of the genus Ficus) that would deter deer, but it's only got two leaves left now. However, the leaves that got torn off are laying on the ground, so either I'm wrong and it wasn't deer after all, or they spit the leaves out. I'm sure it will grow back, but in the meantime, I should get a cage for it too.

The last tree we planted is the Meyer Lemon tree. We haven't planted the Key Lime yet, but plan to. No cage, because I'm sure deer wouldn't like the strong-smelling citrus leaves. Except, as I was watering the tree here, I noticed someone who does!

On one of the leaves I saw what at first glance looked like a great big bird poop, but upon closer inspection...

It's actually a caterpillar! A caterpillar trying to look like bird poop! Turns out it's a Giant Swallowtail caterpillar, one of the most impressive butterfly species around here. Very appropriate during the Butterfly Moon. Their host species are any members of the Citrus family, including some native trees that are common around here, like Wafer Ash and Tickle-tongue, but obviously they like the domesticated Citrus species as well. I decided to leave the caterpillar be. My lemon tree is very healthy, and can probably spare a few leaves for such a cool butterfly. It's funny how something so beautiful can grow from something that looks like poop!

Key Lime Pie with Homegrown Limes

Key Lime Pie doesn't exactly scream Autumn to me, but since my potted key lime tree has had a bumper crop this year, when facing a decision on what pie to bring to a recent Samhain potluck, I decided it was a good opportunity to use up these limes and make something I haven't made before.

Here are the limes I picked off my tree. The limes most Americans are used to are Persian Limes, the big green ones. Key Limes are also known as Mexican Limes, and are golf-ball sized with more aromatic flavor. They also turn yellow if you let them fully ripen on the tree! I've had my tree in a pot for several years, but I'll probably plant it in the ground soon, so it can get even bigger.

I ended up getting almost enough juice for a whole pie, only needing to top it off with less than a quarter cup of store bought lime juice. Squeezing all those little limes was a bit of a pain, though.

I based my recipe off a recipe for Easy Key Lime Pie I got off Allrecipes.com, but with some tweaks suggested by the comments, using two cans of milk instead of one, four egg yolks instead of five, and a full cup of lime juice. I was pressed for time, so I didn't make my own crust and used a store-bought one.

Key lime pie is an amazingly simple recipe, using only three ingredients in the filling: lime juice, egg yolks, and sweetened condensed milk. It was invented in Florida before refrigeration was common, hence using canned milk, eggs that were presumably freshly laid by the backyard chickens, and freshly picked limes off the local trees, all things that don't need to be refrigerated! Originally it wasn't even baked. The acid from the lime juice made the eggs set up. Today it's baked, but only for a short amount of time.

Here is the finished pie. I only made one mistake, and that was to throw in the zest of my limes along with the juice. That made it have little chunks in it, and I think I would have liked it better if the filling was completely smooth. Next time I'll leave out the lime zest, but other than that it was very good. The filling set up perfectly, and it was nice and tart. It's the kind of dessert for people who like things like Sweet Tarts and Sour Patch Kids.

Key Lime Pie

• 1 deep dish graham cracker crust (either homemade or store-bought)
• 4 egg yolks
• 2 (14 ounce cans) sweetened condensed milk
• 1 cup key lime juice

Whisk the egg yolks, milk, and lime juice together until smooth. Pour into prepared crust. Bake at 375 degrees for 15 minutes. Chill completely before serving. Garnish with whipped cream if desired. Easy as pie!

Autumn Pear and Arugula Salad

It's going to cool off some day. Autumn IS coming! How do I know? Well, for one thing, school is back in, and that means tomorrow I'm back to my job teaching biology at San Antonio College.

But the other indicator that I think is more important is that I just got to eat my favorite seasonal Autumn salad! A salad that is, well, mostly of my invention, though based off other recipes and flavor combinations that are nothing new. Then again, what recipes aren't? This salad was inspired a few years ago by some local ingredients I often got in my CSA in fall: pears and arugula. I just started getting them again recently, so that means fall MUST be coming, even if it is still 100 degrees outside!

Since this is a salad, everything is "to taste". Just throw everything together roughly in the order listed, and enjoy.

Ingredients:

• arugula - a good big bunch
• pears - one or two depending on how big they are
• walnuts
• blue cheese
• honey
• white wine vinegar

Directions:

• Put a bunch of arugula on a plate.
• Cut pear(s) into bite sized slices and lay on top of arugula.
• Sprinkle on walnuts.
• Crumble on blue cheese.
• Drizzle on some honey and vinegar.
• Crunch it up.

I've seen some other versions of this salad that got fancier by poaching the pears first or using candied walnuts, but I really don't think that's necessary. In my version you just pile everything up, which is much easier. I've seen versions that used apples instead of pears, which I guess is ok if you can't find any pears, but I much prefer pears. For one thing, they're grown locally, and apples aren't, but I also think the flavor and texture of nice ripe pears works much better in this. My position on using other nuts besides walnuts is about the same. Pecans or almonds might work ok, but I think walnuts really excel here.

I've also seen some other versions that use milder greens either mixed with or instead of the arugula, such as spinach and lettuce, and milder cheeses instead of the blue cheese, which I guess might be ok if you're a wuss. I've mixed milder greens in when I didn't have enough arugula, but I love the nutty, peppery bite of arugula straight no chaser. And I wouldn't do without creamy, salty, savory blue cheese on this. I think one of the neat things about this salad is that most of the flavor comes from the main ingredients and not the dressing, which is the opposite of the iceburg lettuce salads I grew up with that were defined by the dressing. This salad is moistened with just a bit of honey to add a little more sweetness, and some vinegar to add a bit of of bright tang. I think apple cider vinegar would be fine on this if you can't find white wine vinegar, but I haven't tried it.

This is a hearty enough salad, with protein from the nuts and cheese, to work on it's own as a light lunch, or even a light dinner while the temperature is still in the 90's and you've been out in the heat all day and really don't feel like fixing yourself a hot meal. I invented this salad when I was in grad school and had to teach a late lab on Friday nights after the buses had quit running, and had to walk a couple of miles home since I didn't have a parking pass. It was nice and refreshing after getting all sweaty and tired doing that.