Photo by Rick Gush
My succulent are doing well this year despite Robert Lee Frost hurt to the rest of the garden . My aloe plants are even in bloom !
This has been a stale wintertime with a bit of snow . Some of the stamp stuff in the garden , like the clivia , is frost - damaged , but most of the works have come through fine . Some , like the succulents and cacti , have actually seemed to flourish . I originally planted a bunch of succulents in the hot topographic point in the garden where the grunge is really shallow , but it ’s prissy to see they ’re also tough in cold conditions .
The flowers of the cacti and succulents are prissy . In the middle of winter , the gravid plot of aloe salad days like crazy . Then , as soon as spring starts , all the ice plants get alert in a riot of blooms .
A few days ago , when we start up taking our annual vacations on Mediterranean islands in late October , one of the merriment discoveries on Corsica and Elba was that October is a stark time to harvest Opuntia cactus yield . I ’d eaten a few of the fruits in the beginning in my lifetime , but I was n’t very good about removing the spines , which ended up being jolly bothersome . The first class I harvested Opuntia fruit on Elba , I somehow figured out the deception , and we became warm consumer of the fruit .
The trick is simply to wear leather gloves and to use a really sharp knife to slice up off the skins , make trusted to throw out anything that was a part of the outside . The inner pulp is really sweet , with a squeamish savor . My wife usually dissects the remains further and removes the little seeds , but being the goat I am , I eat the flesh , seeds and all .
compulsory boxing for vacations now includes a dainty distich of leather baseball glove and a fruit - harvest home basket . Once we get in at our destination , I go hunt up a few long river bamboo canes , and I set up my harvest home equipment . Harvesting cactus fruit is fun , because almost nobody else harvests it . I manage to find a peck of undisturbed cactus patches from which I can take as many fruit as I wish . A typical breakfast on vacation includes a bowl of grain with unused cactus fruits . Yummy ! I also always care to determine someone else nearby who also likes cactus fruits , so I get to give bags of yield away ( one of my preferent pursuit ) , even while I ’m on vacation .
We brought back cuttings of a couple of dissimilar Opuntia cacti and implant them in the garden . We now get a lot of the smaller red fruit that are as sweet as berry . The big Opuntia cactus are just now commence big enough to produce pregnant fruit crop . It ’s fun memory when and where we collected the various plants when we ’re eating the fruit . Pretty overnice souvenirs !
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