We absolutely loved the location where we lived in San Diego, and the condo we rented was very nice, but there was no place to grow anything. After a quick stint back in Utah for winter (the worst time to be in Utah), we’re back in beautiful California. I took a job in the bay area and we live just a couple miles from my office. The best part about being here is that we have a yard big enough to grow a garden again, and that’s just what we’re doing.

The weather has been interesting. We’ve had days where it gets over 105 and then cools back down to 55 at night. It warms and cools very rapidly and that seems to be hard on some of the plants, but so far they’re all doing fine. We have only turned on the air conditioner once, because although the heat is pretty extreme in the middle of the day sometimes, it’s almost always cool in the evening again… and the house doesn’t heat up that much. We just open the windows when I get home from work and it’s nice and cool. I think San Diego weather is better, but this hasn’t been bad at all.

I haven’t written about any garden-related activity for so long that it was easy to keep putting it off, but I’m finally making some time for it. Why? Because today I noticed our first tomato on the vine. It happens to be on a tomato plant growing in the front yard, but we don’t discriminate.

We have a bunch of tomato plants this year, a few bell peppers, a poblano pepper, a jalapeño pepper, a Japanese eggplant, a zucchini that’s growing like crazy, a few Armenian cucumbers, and a bunch of herbs. We haven’t really been all that successful growing herbs, but this may be our year. We have chives, cilantro, german thyme, sage, purple basil, rosemary, and tarragon. Oh yeah, we also picked up an artichoke, but I have serious doubts that it will actually do anything.