Sometimes you eat membrillos...

 So we've been trying to decide what trees to plant in our yard. It's not "easy" haha. We don't just want to plant whatever without being sure it will do well in this particular climate. And we're also kinda lazy and don't want to be fighting pests and disease with very delicate tree varieties. So we've been delaying getting and planting trees because of this. One of the trees we were considering was Quince, or membrillos in Spanish. I remembered eating them with limon, sal, y chile when I was a kid, and liking them a lot. But almost every description of the quince trees that do well in this climate mentioned they are not for fresh eating, that you have to cook or process them. I was skeptical, and felt it was really just that people here are more picky and less creative with their produce haha. So a neighbor was giving away quince because they had too many and we got some, which was perfect because we could confirm if the membrillos here were the same or similar enough to the ones we grew up eating. And here they are: 

For some reason, I don't remember them being quite so yellow, but apparently they are. 

So we tried them fresh, with some limon and tajin, and they were delicious! I thoroughly enjoyed it and it definitely brought me back to my childhood haha. 

We also made jam with them, and left some chunky and did the other one smooth. 

And we also made dulce de membrillo (Quince paste). 

cracker, pecan, dulce de membrillo, and "cream cheese". 

And this also, has a very specific taste that I remember eating and enjoying many many years ago. Pretty cool how a flavor can transport you to a long ago time and place. Also the fruits themselves were super aromatic and smelled amazing. Kinda like pineapple. It was unexpected and welcome. All this to say that we will definitely be planting a Quince tree, and I can't wait to get some fruit off of it, many years from now haha. 

Sometimes you pick plums...

Still on the garden theme, there was a plum tree in the front yard when we moved in to this house. We pretty much ignored it for the first 7 years or so and it turns out, you're not supposed to do that to fruit trees. Some years it would give a little bit of plums, some years a lot, and some no plums at all. We had no idea why, and that was fine, until the pandemic got us gardening haha. It is one of the few trees we have and it is very pretty in spring, they bloom and look like white cherry blossom trees: 

A tiny Bushtit pollinating the plums!

A Lesser Goldfinch hanging out on the plum tree

A Black Capped Chickadee pollinating the plums!

The Lesser Goldfinch having some nectar too...

A crow on our power line, with the flowering plum tree in the background. 

So the birds and bees love it, and it looks really pretty, and is signals the start of spring, so all around a win for everyone haha. This happens in spring, around mid March, and then the blossoms fall off, and the pollinated flowers turn into plums over the coming months. Eventually, in mid to late August, this is where it's at: 

The plums we have are very different from store plums. They're smaller, green, and more sour, but also sweet. I really like them. And I'm not huge on plums, but these are really tasty.  We suspect it must be a wild variety perhaps. Around August 2020, while we were harvesting the plums of that season, the neighbor saw me struggling to pick the plums up high. We had let the tree get like 20+ feet tall, and that was not smart. Most of the fruit was unreachable, even with a ladder. So he offered to help me trim down the tree, a lot. We easily chopped more than half of the tree off. It was hard because we needed to make sure the main trunk fell in a specific place and not crush his roof or ours. Usually I'm very reluctant to trim plants, I always think I'm going to hurt them or make them less productive. It's not intuitive to me that you chop things off, and the plant would respond positively. But that's how it works. We chopped it down to like 6 or 7 feet tall, and it looks funky, but this year it gave the most plums it ever had, even at this reduced height. We got over 40 pounds of plums! 39 pounds from the older tree, and like 5 from the younger one, it was crazy! For reference, in 2020 we got 13 pounds of plums from both trees and that was a good year, so this year was a lot! 

From just the big tree!

We're supposed to thin the fruit before it goes crazy like this, like the branches were almost touching the floor because of how heavy with fruit they were. This is not good because a branch could break and lose all the fruit but also damage the tree. Thankfully, it didn't happen, but we'll be thinning the fruit next time....maybe haha. It's hard to remove fruit for this reason haha We shared some with the neighbors, we made jam, we ate LOTS of plums and didn't buy any fruit for like 3 weeks. 

Plum jam, lots of it!

Removing pits from the plums was definitely the most tedious part.

Sophia helping us pick plums -_- Notice the funky tree shape due to the heavy pruning. 

Froze a gallon of plums, maybe for a future plum pie. We may not get many or any plums next year, because we got so much this year, but hopefully we still do. 

Sometimes you don't eat ground cherries for 10 years...

 The pandemic definitely got us to finally pay attention to what little land we have and start gardening. The extent of our gardening before this was to allow the neighbors raspberries to expand into our yard by clearing weeds around there so they could "walk" into our side and picking said raspberries when they were ripe. Luckily, our neighbors to both sides have raspberries that have expanded into our yard. And the neighbor behind us gave me a raspberry cane years ago that I also planted and has since created it's own patch of raspberries also. So basically, we have a lot of raspberries and a plum tree that before these couple of years, would sometimes give plums, and sometimes not. 

Well in 2020 we ordered seeds, made a plan of sorts and decided to start a permaculture food forest in the very little land we have. This meant getting rid of the grass (thought it was mostly weeds at this point haha) by sheet mulching (covering in cardboard and then a thick layer of mulch or wood chips to smother the grass) and then trying to plant a garden. 

Before I write too much, I'll expand on that later in other posts. I'll just say for now that we love trying new produce. Any fruits or vegetables we either haven't tried or new varieties of familiar produce that we've never tried. So back in Milwaukee, we tried for the first time a fruit called "Ground Cherries" at a farmer's market. They are like tiny (size of a dime) sweet and tart yellow tomatillos. 

They were so good! 3 year old Sophia loved them back in Milwaukee, and so did I. And we had not tried them again since then until last summer when they started fruiting! And so we grew them again this year, and it's one of the highlights of the garden for me. I absolutely love these little fruits. But they're not available in supermarkets or stores. So we hadn't seen them in 10 years. 

Cute little yellow flowers with purple streaks in the center

Little "easter eggs" to collect every day!

You harvest them when they drop. And they start dropping in july, and don't stop until like October. Every day, cute little gifts to collect under the plants. 

And they're so easy to grow. Our soil isn't super fertile (yet). And these little plants keep on doing well and giving fruit for months on end. It's great! 

Ah, and lastly, this is what Paw Paws look like inside:

(The fruit that we're going to plant that Geli wrote about in her blog)

Sometimes you're late to the party...

 So we hadn't bought a game console since the Wii in 2008. In large part, it's because we tend to do most things together and we've yet to find a video game we both enjoy or all three of us enjoy. Geli likes single player open ended games (Zelda, Metroid, that kind of thing), Sophia likes games where she can be social in, and the game itself doesn't really matter much to her (Minecraft, Little Big Planet, Among Us). And I like many kinds of games, but haven't really played much recently. Some of my favorite games have been Mortal Kombat (II and III/Ultimate mostly and on the SNES or arcade), Golden Eye(N64), Perfect Dark (N64), Smash Brothers (N64), Super Street Fighter II (SNES), Donkey Kong Country (SNES), Super Mario World (SNES), and on PC I was obsessed with Warcraft II and III. You get the point, I think. Old ass fuckin' games haha. Never had a NES (sadly, and badly wanted one). Never had a GameCube. And we bought the Wii once we were working and living in Milwaukee. And it was a bit of a let down, but mostly because we never found a game we could all enjoy (outside of World of Goo, but it didn't have a lot of replayability) and we didn't use it very much. I ended up buying a bunch of old NES, SNES, and N64 games from the WiiShop or whatever and played those, though not much either. Fast Forward to a couple months ago, and Baudy upgraded her Nintendo Switch to an Animal Crossings version, and offered to sell me her old Switch. I bought it off her, and she sold it to me with Smash Ultimate. And let me say, I've been quite into it. I hadn't really played newer Smash games more than a few matches here and there when at a friend or relative's house. And they were different enough from the N64 version I was used that I always felt like a noob haha (we had never bought Brawl for the Wii either). All this to say, that I hadn't played a console game in over a decade and probably 2 decades since I played for any significant amount of time. But since I got the switch, I've really gotten into it. The graphics are so good (give me a break, this is where I left off in graphics)! 

Not gonna lie, I still think this one is the best! 

These graphics were amazing haha

And Smash has soooo many play modes! haha I've completed Adventure mode. I've unlocked all characters, and currently, I am trying to collect all spirits. 

100% w00t! 47 hours play time?! Yikes! 

Not even sure if that's possible (since there's DLC spirits and what not), but I'll wait to get every single one I can and then see how many are left. Currently at 1417 out of 1486 spirits. Definitely hits the "collector" in me haha. 

1417/1486...almost there!

So anyway, I have yet to play online, I will eventually. I just didn't expect to get this much playtime out of the Switch or Smash Brothers Ultimate. Pleasant surprise, definitely been enjoying it :) I know the Switch is old news, but it's new to me.