The December Garden is full of surprises

I hope you and your family had a wonderful Christmas! We’re still celebrating with various family members and will be until January 1st but I wanted to pop in and share our December garden with you. We’ve had a really warm fall and winter – in fact, we’ve not run the heater at all and have actually had to run the a/c because it’s so humid and warm. 

We had our first real cold front blow in today and it’s cold and rainy so many of the photos are kind of dark. But we’re all about keeping it real here so dark winter garden photos it is. 

The lemons are ready and while it looks like we haven’t picked any we’ve actually picked quite a bit. We juice it and freeze the juice to have fresh lemonade all year long. The Cara Cara orange tree is dead. We have no idea what happened. It was fine, then dropped all it’s leaves and died. The sweet orange tree isn’t looking so good either. But the grapefruit, key lime, satsuma and pumello are looking great. 

We mowed the garden! I’m so happy to have that done. We’re collecting cardboard to lay down in the pathways and over time will cover them with wood chips. We had so much rain in 2015 that these walkways have been the major irritation of my gardening. We’re hoping to not have waist high grass in the future. 

This is the new perennial herb garden. We planted a row of comfrey and some ginger that I grew from a ginger root from the store. I also have sage, thyme and lavender in this area. Carl is building a bench to put in this area as a resting spot. 

Our lone tomato plant. This guy popped up in our front yard as a volunteer and we re-located it to the garden in the early fall. It’s doing well. 

On the right is our asparagus patch – year one is over, just one more before we can harvest. Since we’ve had such a warm winter so far we’ll probably have to cut it back next month. One the left is one of our strawberry patches. This is the first year and they survived the summer and are thriving right now. 

We even have some berries and quite a lot of flowers. 

We only have a few cabbage plants that made it so we planted storage onions all around them. 

I just love it when cabbage starts to ball up. 

This…this is our crazy luffa plant! It’s still blooming and luffa really likes the heat. 

It has three large luffas on it and we harvested 10 from three luffa plants this summer. 

This is my favorite garden bed right now. We planted a fall crop of green beans for the first time. We didn’t plant many but we get enough for dinner twice a week. It is such a treat, normally we just have greens this time of year. We have some swiss chard and lettuce growing around it. The chard is great but the lettuce is bitter. It could just be the variety, I planted black seeded simpson and and a red head lettuce. The black seeded simpson is bolting so we’re leaving that for the bees. I just planted some bib lettuce which has a mild flavor and hopefully won’t be bitter. 

We planted more storage onions and some cilantro. Here’s the thing about living in a place that has long hot summers, some herbs like cilantro that like cooler weather really need to be planted in the fall instead of in the spring. I know this but this year is the first time I’ve really acted on it. 

Our carrots are coming up and looking pretty good. 

Our Chinese cabbage has bolted. There are a few plants that we’re still eating off of that haven’t bolted but mostly the bees are enjoying the flowers. We also have quite a few spots of basil (one is in this bed). We’ve collected most of the seeds but still need to pick the last of the leaves for pesto. 

Our three moringa trees are looking great. I noticed that our local grocery store sells moringa capsules for $26 a bottle. That’s just crazy when it grows so well here. 

Our fig tree is confused. It has two small figs but is now dropping its leaves for winter. 

Is anything going on in your garden? Feel free to share what you are doing in the comments. 

This bundle is no longer available. If you are interested in being notified of future bundles you can fill out this form. 

If you are looking for some healthy living inspiration you’ll want to check out the Ultimate Healthy Living Bundle flash sale. I bought this bundle during the regular sale this fall and have loved it. You can read about my most favorite items in this post. It’s only available for Dec 28th and Dec 29th.

Also, as an additional bonus, I’m offering a pre-release copy of our new printable ebook, The Wellness Notebook, to anyone who purchases through one of the links on our site. The Wellness Notebook will really help you organize all the things you are learning about wellness but it won’t be available to the public until the fall of 2016. Just email me and let me know that you ordered through one of our links and we’ll send  you The Wellness Notebook. Don’t worry, when the final product is ready, we’ll send that to you too so you won’t miss out on anything we add to it. 

Thanks for sharing with your friends!