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We have six Blue Beaked Yucca trees (Yucca rostrata). There are six panicles between two trees this year. The last time these trees bloomed was in 2023.

If you’ve ever been on the Cars ride at California Disney, you can see several of these trees along the exit path.

This year we are growing tomatoes, strawberries (‘Everbearing’ and ‘Surecrop’), Walla Walla onions, pumpkins, beans (climbing and bush), Marionberry, rhubarb, peppers (Anaheim and Poblano) and herbs. I will add carrots, ‘Bright Lights’ chard and beets to our garden, shortly.

I kind of gave up on vegetable gardening for the past few years because we have so many rodents (rabbits, ground squirrels, rats and mice) that decimate some of our vegetable starts. (The pumpkin, cilantro and zucchini plants are already destroyed.) But, anyhow, this year I got the vegetable gardening itch.

This tomato plant (below) is ‘Little Napoli’ – a compact Roma tomato. This plant is our most productive tomato so far. We are also growing ‘Better Boy,’ a cherry tomato and ‘Early Girl.’

Bush beans (below). These are beautiful. Each plant has a few flowers. Interestingly/fortunately, the wildlife have not touched the pole bean plants that we planted in the ground.

My favorite variety of tomato is ‘Early Girl’ (below). These tomato plants are on steroids. They grow fast and get very tall and full in size; they also produce a lot of fruit. I almost always plant two of these tomato plants together in a barrel.

I picked up five quarts of these California native plants in July of last year from Mad River Gardens Nursery in Eureka, CA. They made it through the winter AOK and are filling in nicely. There are lots of different colors of penstemon – I’m planning on picking up a variety of colors from another nursery in April.

Tag information: Penstemon heterophyllus – ‘Electric Blue’ – California native with brilliant gentian blue flowers May – September. Attracts butterflies. Drought tolerant. Zone 6-9. Full sun. Height 24″.

I made a trip to Green Thumb in Ventura and picked up three more gallons of Electric Blue. I also picked up this pink variety (below), grown by Native Sons.

We adopted Chance from Hoofs and Woofs Animal Rescue in Valley Center, California. (You can also like this rescue on Facebook.) Chance is a gorgeous, 12-year-old, 15.2 hh, foundation stock Quarter Horse and very sweet. He loves grandma the most.

One of our plans for 2020 was to add chickens to the garden. (The COVID pandemic turned out to be a nice coincidence because we could focus on these projects.) We knew we wanted a very large chicken run connected to a coop made from a shed kit. We started with 27 chicks; three of each breed.

I decided to enclose the orange trees so the chickens would have some shade. They can’t (shouldn’t) eat the oranges, but they will probably enjoy eating the blossoms. These trees weren’t in great shape when I started building the run. But each time I mix concrete, I water the trees and now they are looking pretty healthy.

This is basically the finished product. Our chicken run is 25′ x 15′. We used redwood posts and rails and then coated them with food-grade mineral oil.

We’ll be back…

Some other nice ones: