Starting Over with Vegetables

My original plan for the greenhouse was to grow summer vegetables in the winter. Fresh salsa in February. I did that, barely. One year, with lots of effort, I managed a couple of tomatoes and some cilantro. I can't recall if I grew the lime in the greenhouse; I'm pretty sure I cheated on the onions. But it was salsa and it was February and we ate it.
With that mission accomplished, I gave up on tomatoes in the greenhouse. They don't grow that well in the cold, they require extra light, and they're whitefly magnets. For many years, the greenhouse has been dedicated to tropical plants, mainly tropical fruits. But this year we decided to we decided to clear some space and try some vegetables again.  Saturday we cleared that space.

Jasmine 'Belle of India'

Stephanotis floribunda

The greenhouse has a terrific smell in the mornings these days. It could be the Stephanotis floribunda, which has long outgrown it's little trellis but which I can't quite bear to pull down off of the fan conduit.  More likely the fragrance is Jasmine 'Belle of India'. It is nice enough out there that we can tolerate the noise from the obnoxious cows outside. I am close to taking action on the cattle.

There are a number of things in the greenhouse producing small numbers of blooms and fruit. One orchid is complete confused about bloom times.

'Kari' has rebounded very nicely and it looks like we'll continue to get Carambola wine for the foreseeable future.

We have our best crop of Miracle Fruit (Synsepalum dulcificum) yet. What kind of sick person considers making Miracle Fruit wine?

My goal has for years been one new fruit per year. For the second year in a row, we have met that goal. Last year was a feast of new fruit. This year's entry is the Phalsa Berry, Grewia asiatica. The fruit is also known as Sherbet Berry. It is an odd little fruit, about the size of a blueberry, purple in color, but with a stippled, almost hairy skin and a texture that is a little mealy. It grows a little too well in the greenhouse and will need to be pruned back pretty hard this fall.

Triphasia trifolia is a citrus relative which makes a fuit known as a limeberry. I have a few of these in the freezer, and I intent to use them in my "Varieta tropica" wine along with the Phalsa Berry and other odds and ends. This plant, along with Psidium myrtoides, adamantly refuses to become a tree, preferring instead to drape its prickly branches out and down below the pot and onto the ground. Lisa undertook the challenging job of repotting both plants. She also tackled a couple of the Rollinias, the yellow jabotica (Myrciaria glomerata), and others, and they all came out great.

The lemongrass in the south end of the greenhouse has served as the source for many gallons of tasty lemongrass wine, but it was overgrown and unruly. I pulled out two stands of the lemongrass, cut them back severely, and replanted. This should make room for a small stand of veggies. The yield ended up being around 2 pounds of lemongrass, and I have no open carboys. So I offered it to my friend Rebekah and she accepted.  Hopefully Bek's can do something nice with the stuff, otherwise it was compost.

Future home of spinach and cilantro

We went to the store to be sure we bought some seeds before they put everything away for the season, then came home and had some cocktails. The best was the Sky Pilot, made with Arron's homemade Applejack moonshine.  Tasty!