Weekend update

We're feeling pretty good about the yard for mid-July.  A number of fruit and flowers suitable for winemaking are coming along or even starting to ripen: elderberries, hibiscus, passion fruit, lemongrass, blackberries, citrus.  We should have a bumper crop of kumquat this year.

Purple Possum

Passion fruit 'McCain'.  I never much cared for the name.

Saturday's blackberries

Lisa has tamed the woodland bed.  We ordered a couple of hundred chinese ginger and epimediums to fill space and we really need a couple of hundred more...next year.  I spent a fair share of both days working on the greenhouse bed, weeding and mulching.
Saturday night we grilled chicken and with that had a tomato mozzarella salad with cherry toms from our one and only tomato plant.  We got brave and opened a bottle of my 2013 satsuma wine and for the second time in a week, we were pleasantly surprised.  This wine is colored like a sauv blanc, very pale and almost slightly green.  The tangerine is subtle but unmistakable and thankfully I didn't oversweeten it.  I'm happy to know that I have a couple of bottles left.

I can't remember where I got my black sapote (Diospyros nigra) tree.  I either grew it from seed brought back from PR, or my friend Ethan in California sent it to me...I think it came from Ethan.  This tree has been quietly minding its own business in the greenhouse for about 4 years.  This year it flowered!  It has these odd little flowers which open up to a size no larger than a pinhole.  Manual pollination is impossible.  So I brought it outside, hoping to get a little help from the insect world.  It just might have worked.

We have a lot of mint.  I'm thinking of remaking the lemongrass-mint wine we opened earlier this week but so far I just haven't quite found the motivation.  Additionally, I only have 2 free 3 gal carboys, and I'm hoping to use them for blackberry and elderberry.
Lisa made me promise I wouldn't freeze today's blackberries.  I didn't get as many today, but just enough for two ramekins of blackberry crumble.  Nice way to end the weekend.