Actually I guess it’s really winter, but hey.

Sometimes you just have to go outside and take pictures of your yard, if only for the proverbial “blog material”.

There are leaves everywhere. The last time the gardeners were here, I had forgotten to unlock my back gate, so they weren’t able to get any of them. Looks like I will need to do some raking before next time, because I can’t expect them to do it all when it’s not even their fault.

Another thing I couldn’t expect them to do was trim back the nopales, which had been majorly getting out of hand. So had some plants from my neighbors’ yard, which had climbed all the way over my fence and entwined themselves with the nopales, as well as with some of my other plants. So, in October, I decided it was time to trim everything.

Gourds that escaped from the neighbors’ garden.

Some cool vines from next door.

I looked up the plant on the right, and I think it’s a bitter gourd, AKA bitter melon, or karela in Punjabi.

Ok so now back to the nopales. These are called tunas in Spanish. They are the fruit of the nopales, and while I have cooked nopales before, I’ve never tasted the tunas. I’ve read up on them some, and they sound like a bit of a pain to prepare. You can read more about this here and decide for yourself.

Fortunately for this project, I had my trusty little red wagon, which we had gotten for our granddaughter in 2004. Time for a trip down Memory Lane.

As with everything else, Papa and Nana Tracy worked as a team!

You always need a pet to supervise/approve your work. See more about Skippy in “Pets from the Past, Part 1”.

It took about four wagonloads of nopales (and several days) to finally get the area cleared out. But I was happy with the results.

Another thing I have in my yard is a persimmon tree. This is the time of year when they are ripe, so I’ve been picking them and giving them away. I’m not a major persimmon person, but a lot of people I know like them.

I like to think of this as the “secret garden”, and I’ve thought of all kinds of ideas for it.

But for now, it’s mostly home to the persimmon tree and the final resting place of our goldfish, Clarabelle, who passed from this life in around 2012 and has since been memorialized in “Pets from the Past, Part 3”.

In other news, this is the “long and winding curb”, covered with leaves.

The “spiky plant” had two huge flowers this year.

I’m not sure, but I think there might be a hummingbird nest back in there somewhere. That’s the star jasmine on the front porch, and hummingbirds fly in and out of that area all the time. You can see the apparent nesting material in the foreground, but I can’t see far enough into know if there’s really a nest or not.

But we’re watching, and if we see any baby hummingbirds, you’ll read it here first!