I've been excited to start the garden up again (besides the yuzu and guava plants which I posted about previously), and take some pics of the balcony as it appears in the beginning of the (hopefully warm and long) growing season
We also bought a blue plastic Adirondak-style lounge chair so we can enjoy the garden amongst the plants :) I'm sipping some xiaguan tuocha
This guy is our latest addition - Minty is a mojito mint plant with huge leaves! Apparently it grows really fast so hopefully we won't have to be shy about picking leaves for some refreshing summertime drinks. Pinching off the growing tips will also help to shorten the height of the plant while forcing it to fill in and become bushier which will make the plant sturdier
We got this guy because he reminds me of Ian ... fun, full of personality, and you can't help but smile when you look at it :o). Ian named him "mmmBop", and mmmBop is commonly known as an "Elephant's foot palm" or "Ponytail Palm" (although I believe botanically speaking it's actually not a palm but rather a member of the Lily family). Anyhow, it's really cool because it's super low-maintenance (should I say, "no maintenance"). Native to the deserts of Mexico, it actually stores water in the base of the trunk which is why you see it is swollen. The less you water, the more it forces the plant to store water and creates the bulbous base.
Here is the Yuzu tree at almost 6 feet tall. I've hung the beautiful mouthblown glass sun disk that Ian got for me from Vermont when we first started dating onto the yuzu tree so it will catch some sunlight and look pretty. That disk has been everywhere with us ... downtown Phoenix, Hawaii, Seattle, and now San Francisco :-)
And of course the pineapple guava plant (also known as a Feijoa) which is native to the highlands of southern Brazil, Uruguay, and northern Argentina. If you're more interested, for more information on this cool plant, click here .
Buds starting to appear everywhere - and yes, the leaves are as soft as they look in the picture. Undersides of the leaves are green, and I can't wait to taste the cotton-candy tasting flower petals and then the delicious guava fruit in autumn
Salad greens I had started in some seedling starting medium have sprouted so I transplanted them to a larger container and covered with a plastic bag to make a mini greenhouse. When these guys grow nice and big we'll have some great mixed mesclun salad greens!
I don't have any pictures of the rest, but I also planted a whole array of patio herbs - sage, chives, garlic chives, cilantro, parsley, and even started some mixed kale greens which are supposedly 30 day to harvest (but I'm guessing it'll be more like 60-90 days). All these guys, of course, are in little terra cotta pots under plastic bags so they can warm up as if in a mini greenhouse. I should probably start some flowers growing as well, so I can attract some beneficial insects and pollinators (like bees or maybe even hummingbirds) to the garden. All in time, I guess. Eventually maybe we'll add a cute painted birdhouse.
As far as tea goes, my hearty go-to (in contrast with my light floral formosa oolongs) has been a little tuocha bird's nest of Xiaguan shou pu erh ("bolay" in Cantonese). I don't know what year it is, but it's heavily fermented, oxidized, and earthy tasting and is wonderful in my TINY japanese glass teapot in the morning when I need a little kick. This is "shou" ("cooked") pu-erh which is artificially "aged" to achieve the earthy taste, as opposed to a young, fresh, "sheng" ("raw"/green) pu-erh which must undergo years (if not a decade) of natural exposure to humidity and air while sitting on a shelf in your home in order to turn from green to dark brown and thus changing taste as well.
Tuocha nest wrapped in paper. Only $4 at an old tea shop that Mom used to go to in Chinatown on Grant Ave. My hand is left in the pic for scale - you can see how tiny the japanese glass teapot is :) Perfect for just one serving for me!
So we just break off a little bit of the nest with a knife (since I don't have a pu-erh pick) and place in the pot ...
Mmm ... delicious! There really is something fun about pu erhs since they are compressed. Preparing the tea (unwrapping the paper, breaking off the tea, washing, then steeping) is so fun.
Ian and I were heading over to Emeryville to do a little bit of quick sailing today, but beforehand we walked up the hill to the highest part of Mission Dolores park where I snapped this photo:
Beautiful day, beautiful view
At the marina in Emeryville, we arrived at low tide. Since it's been warm and sunny, the kelp/algae have been growing more vigorously. It was so vibrant green and exposed when we got to the dock
The land around the marina is also a bird sanctuary and I was surprised to see this huuge white bird (sorry I don't know what kind it is?) pecking at the mud since it was low tide.
We sailed in 20 knots of wind today which was quite strong. Even with just the headsail, I was really paying attention and we hit over 5.5 knots of hull speed which was incredible since we were only using one sail. There was quite a bit of big swell, though, which was not fun to deal with and made conditions more challenging. When we exited the marina at low tide around noon, we noticed another boat outside of the navigational bouys just sitting in the water, but with smoking engine. I recalled that these people had passed our boat earlier on foot at the marina while I was un-twisting our mainsheet. I overheard their conversation and it sounded like it was a group of French tourists who had hired a private captain for a cruise around the bay. Anyhow, as we exited the marina and saw them with smoking engine, we called out to them. The captain said they were stuck (grounded on the bottom of the bay) and she asked "why should I be stuck here?!" We replied that it was low tide and the area she was in (outside of the navigational bouys leading in and out of the marina) was quite shallow. Eventually as we passed the second set of bouys, however, they somehow managed to get free and began motoring out into the bay. I bet those French tourists were scared :-( How a captain would not know the area was shallow (i.e. not consulting a chart) is strange to me - especially considering that it was low tide. Shallow areas should be of utmost concern during low tide.
We sailed along for an hour or so but the wind started really kicking up and we decided it would be safer to head home. On the way back in, however, we AGAIN ran into the same boat just sitting outside of the navigational channel. She shouted at us, "Stuck again!" Poor French visitors!
But thats when we had some trouble of our own - JUST as we entered the breakwater wall of the marina, our engine completely died on us for some reason. With strong flow current and strong wind, we were drifting in the marina. I was scared to death and prepared myself for impact against something - I had the boat hook ready to push off of anything we got close to while Ian frantically tried to figure out what was wrong with the engine. Finally we were able to get it started and running again, but it was either 100% throttle or 0% - no in between. Some fellow boaters told us to pull into a big, empty slip so we blasted the engine at 100% and then cut it off completely as we drifted into the slip and the boaters helped us to tie off. I almost cried - I was so scared we were going to cause a catastrophically expensive accident with absolutely no engine power in the marina. After trying to figure out what was wrong (we think perhaps the swell from the ocean may have caused some of the engine to burn out since the propeller would come up out of the water when the swell was at our back on the way back in to the marina), and then finally giving up on the idea of getting the engine started and somehow hoping to make it into our slip, we called Vessel Assist. They were actually on their way into the marina towing that same lady that was stuck twice! I found out later from the Vessel Assist guy that he had towed that same lady 6 months earlier ... and that she was a licensed captain! How would a licensed captain ignore low tide and get grounded in the SAME shallow area not once, but TWICE in one day?
Lucky for us we finally got towed into our slip. Our West Marine membership covered $50 of the tow, and luckily our insurance will cover the rest - although I'll have to file a claim tomorrow. Suffice to say I'm just glad there was no damage to our boat, somebody else's boat, or any people - and that I'm happy to be on dry land again. It's always the case where the sailing is not the problem - it's things that have to do with motoring that are the real challenge (i.e. motoring in the marina, and in today's case, trying to figure out what the hell happened with the engine dying on us right as we entered the marina)
Sailing is an amazing experience and I don't want to give it up in my life completely, however, maybe it's just the wrong time to be doing it? With both Ian and I looking at the prospect of nursing/pharmacy school and paying for an apartment in San Francisco (which is not cheap!), we could use the money. Not paying moorage every month, plus money from selling the boat would be a huge help. I don't know ... for now I'm still just trying to calm down from quite the frightening experience today :-(
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