Here, lettuce on the left and carrots on the right are going strong. You can’t see the daikon, cilantro, or kale. That’s a little dog statue from Colima at the corner. We had two rare hailstorms one December day, but all the hail did was poke some holes in all the leafy greens.

This is our largest bed. The tall bushy vegetation is a bunch of cherry tomatoes that are not doing much, but then we are having nights in the mid 30s to mid 40s. Next to the tomatoes are snow peas that have about stopped blooming but gave us a prodigious harvest for weeks. In front, we had green beans which are now done but we still have cucumbers, chard, kohlrabi, and a zucchini-like squash called zucchino — it, like most of our plantings, are heirloom non-hybrid seeds so we can save seeds for next year. There’s an adjacent bed with five artichoke plants coming along nicely.

This squash is turning out to be something of a wonder. It is producing numerous long, curved zucchinos. You can sort of see three of them toppling over the garden wall here, all the way to the ground… that turned out to be a problem, as worms got in the ones resting on the ground. The statue is something we got locally, representing the rabbit in the moon (that’s what they see) with a female figure.

Gardening in a tropical paradise at 5000 feet elevation is not all easy, though. There are a number of bugs to compete with, and we don’t always win. Here, you can see what was done to our nasturtiums. All those stems once had leaves on them — eaten by caterpillars. Kelly has picked hundreds of them off. They also like the arugula (rocket) we have there, but they completely ignore the basil and carrots nearby.

We are happy with our gardening experiments so far. The zucchino wrapped around my neck measured 46 inches… it was delicious, stir-fried with other veggies.

In case you wonder how we clean our veggies here: if we just pick a handful of something, we usually rinse it in bottled water. But when I process as much as you see in the photo or more, it would use a good bit of bottled water, so I rinse things in our tap water which is not safe to drink. Then I fill an enamel basin I keep just for this task with the tap water and add the requisite number of drops of MicroDyn or Albiosan, both available at grocery stores, usually in the produce section. The produce sits for about 20 minutes in this bath and then I have a dish drainer I use for clean produce. This system seems to work fine.

Our Mexican Organic Vegetable Garden: December Report is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Our lemon tree produces at least a few lemons each week, year round, but now in the winter, it is really going to town. We are always giving lemons away, as we get about two a day at this time of year. When I took this photo, the tree had hundreds of lemons on it. Some fall off while green, but many turn yellow before falling off. We never bother with a ladder for the high ones, just wait for them to fall.

You can’t really see the bananas here all that well but I thought that the poinsettias growing over six feet high might be worth showing as well.

And here are those bananas, getting pretty close to ready. It’s feast or famine around here with the bananas — we’ve been buying them at the market for months. Friends are coming from Colorado soon, and I am hoping that the bananas will be ripe for them. Once they begin to ripen, we pick the whole thing and give away a lot.

I didn’t get photos of our loquat trees, our one little mango tree that hasn’t done anything yet, our pistachio tree, our lychee tree, or our pomegranate trees. Nor our young avocado tree — avocados are actually fruit. Another time!

3 Comments from the old blog:

• At December 30, 2007 8:37 PM,  wayne said…

  I am so jealous! I wish we could grow stuff like there here. In fact, I wish we could grow anything here! If you need to get rid of some of those lemons I could send you my mailing address! LOL!

• At December 30, 2007 10:26 PM,  Rosana Hart said…

  Wayne, you’re in Islas Mujeres? Why can’t you grow anything?

• At January 02, 2008 8:23 PM,  wayne said…

  One word, Rosana, SALT. The air here is so salty that it kills any normal plant it touches. Our patio plants are all behind a protective wall. Any part that dares to stick a branch out immediatly dies. Except for cactus. They survive everything.

Our Mexican Garden: Its Fruit Trees is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico