I have been in San Diego for the past 45 days (working 16 hour days) and I can’t tell you how good it is to finally be home!! Since I was gone for such a long stretch, I can really see the changes in the landscaping and I can tell that the daily yard work that Stefan and I do REALLY helps to keep things under control. My garden is totally overgrown with weeds, but some things are salvageable (we’ll get the last few heirloom tomatoes, we still have some spicy lettuce and red oak leaf lettuce, as well as the herbs). As soon as I left Stefan told me that something ate the lemon cucumber plants, but I pulled the weeds off of it yesterday and it looks like we might actually get some cucumbers. I have no clue what happened to the edamame, but the 12 healthy plants that I left behind are nowhere to be found…

Any how, no biggie. Stuff grows so quick here that I should be able to regrow everything pretty quickly.

On a more positive note, most of the trees are thriving and I can see HUGE amounts of growth on them since I’ve been gone. I am blown away at how quickly flamboyant trees grow! In the 45 days I’ve been gone some of the flamboyants have gone from being 3′ tall to being 5′ tall (no joke)! And to my surprise, we are already getting FRUIT on some of the tiny trees we’ve planted (less then a year ago).

Check out our peanut butter fruit tree:

I planted the peanut butter fruit tree about 6 – 8 months ago and it has nearly doubled in size. The peanut butter fruit tree is one of the exotic fruit trees we got from Montoso Gardens and the fruit tastes just like peanut butter. And if you pick the fruit early (when it is orange) it tastes like carrots. Kinda Willy Wonka, eh? Any how, the peanut butter fruit tree is already fruiting (and it is not even grafted)!!

Cool!!

We also have a lime growing off of our tiny lime tree:

The lime tree is “inhertado” (I may have spelled it wrong…that is Spanish for grafted), but it is still funny to see a big ol’ lime hanging off of a little stick of a tree.

We have also found that the avocado tree down by the quebrada is indeed producing HUGE avocados (Kuta is STOKED with all the delicious treats he is finding down there now) and we have found a papaya tree and guava tree on our property too.