I'm a suburban girl. I grew up in a sedate suburb of Los Angeles. I encountered some creepy crawlies in our first home because it was a new development being carved out of what was a previously undeveloped cluster of hills. So we had to watch out for rattlesnakes, I saw a tarantula once, and there were lizards and other things around. When we moved from there to the long-since-developed flatlands, I hardly saw any animals that weren't pets or pests. I'm not sure why (perhaps it's that I find animals inscrutable and thus unpredictable) but I'm scared of most animals. I had bad experiences with dogs because of a number of irresponsible dog owners that would let their large aggressive dogs roam around the neighborhood free to chase and nip at little kids coming home from school. I've tried to overcome my fears and have had some limited success. Though I'm not a stereotypical nature girl, I'm environmentalist in my politics. So in gardening it's important to me to provide habitat.
As for my own habitat, I like edibles. So my very first focus is on planting fruits, vegetables and herbs. But where appropriate and possible, I plant native plants. And some non-natives that act as good companion plants. When I moved into my present house, the large backyard consisted of 3/4 lawn. The remaining 1/4 consisted of 4 large raised beds (which were picked clean of vegetation), hybrid tea roses, a couple fruit trees that had not been cared for and two pecan trees. I knew I wanted to significantly change this yard. Although I wasn't truly aware of it at the time, this yard was largely devoid of life. The animals I remember seeing then were Argentine ants (exotic, have no natural predators), aphids, scale, thrips, slugs, snails, what I call "McDonalds birds" because they're so successful in urban environments (the house sparrow), raccoons and possums. These are all animals that have done quite well in urban and suburban environments in California.
I spent a lot of time researching the fruits I wanted to grow as well as herbs with medicinal and potherb value. I also worked with a couple fledgling landscape designers to incorporate native plants. We reduced the lawn size by half and replaced the lawn with Pacific Sod's No-Mow mix, which I'd seen and fallen in love with at Mountain View Cemetery. The diseased and ill-formed plum and lemon tree were cut down. The pecan trees which couldn't bear fruit in such a cool environment were cut down, allowing sun to finally reach the raised beds they'd shaded and also reducing any possible allelopath effect they could have on surrounding vegetation. In went apple, pear, plums, apricots, peaches, citrus, mulberries, feijoa and loquats. Out came the roses and in went strawberries, native flowering currants, wintergreen, native "wild ginger", fruiting currants, blueberries, brambleberries, native buckwheat, native Erigeron, sweet violets, etc. etc. And, mostly importantly, because I'm disabled and unable to hire help often, the yard often gets out of hand. It's not a tidy garden. So despite initial heavy mulching, there are weeds. And welcome volunteers such as love-in-a-mist.
The front yard changed from a couple hybrid tea roses, loads of juniper hedges, a large jade plant and a passionflower to native flowering currents, native and non-native grasses, salvias, cornflowers, honeywort, alyssum, California poppies, ageratum, larkspur, love-in-a-mist, native galias, chrysanthemums, native bushmallow, Lavatera bicolor...and a couple roses because I ended up getting over my disdain for them.
I think the first sign of life was sighting a soldier beetle. Then after about a year of being here, I FINALLY saw a ladybug. A welcome sight! Then hummingbirds started visiting the salvias and perching on my mulberry tree. I'd never seen a hummingbird sit still before. It was wondrous. Such a tiny jewel of a bird. Fiery skippers became regular visitors to the Erigeron glaucus. Honeybees regularly worked the borage, joined by yellowfaced bumblebees. For reasons I haven't yet divined, wasps like hanging around the dilapidated park bench I got off Freecycle. They occasionally light on other plants, as I found out when I leaned against one of my potato plants and got a painful sting in the upper arm!
Now, after about 3.5 years of living here, I'm seeing more new visitors. While clearing overgrown weeds and brush last fall, I spotted what I thought was a snake (yikes!) but turned out to be a California Slender Salamander. I was surprised and happy. Though I'd like a pond, I don't have one. I don't even have a bird bath. Yet I saw something I associate with watery environments. I started seeing new birds that I still haven't been able to identify. I spotted a cute stubby grassshopper. A Northern Checkerspot butterfly. This week kicked it into overdrive with a sighting of two breathtaking visitors on the same day. One was a butterly I've not yet ID'd. It was the size of a fiery skipper and keeps its wings open like that, looking like a triangle as it perched. It was a delicate pale yellow with a pale iridescent blue body. I gaped it it with my mouth so wide open it threatened to drool. Over the drift of volunteer borage in my raised bed, I saw a jewel red dragonfly. Red body, red eyes, red wings. I'd never seen such a thing in my life. It was a sight to inspire Lalique. And again I marveled at seeing such a thing when I'm not particularly close to any of our ailing creeks and a mile away from the San Francisco Bay.
I find myself thinking of investing in guides to local birds and butterflies just so I can keep track of what I'm seeing. Great herpetophobe that I am, I found myself looking into introducing snakes such as garter snakes into my yard. I've longed to find room for a pond and work with an acquaintance who's an amphibian expert to see about introducing native frogs. I want to get someone able-bodied to help me build a barn owl box for a little natural rodent control. Yes, I still leap and scream when I see a snake in the wild. Yes, I'm still afraid the big fearless raccoons that rule the roost in our nocturnal environment. But I'm happy to see the wildlife and to encourage the return of diversity to our urban/suburban landscape.
The key is getting rid of that lawn monoculture and planting a variety of plants from groundcovers up to tall trees. And even more important is not to be too tidy. I think the animal kingdom loves the fact that gimpy ol' me cannot possibly keep this place as weed-free and manicured as I aspire to.
This morning I took a brief tour of Novella Carpenter's urban farm. She and her partner had transformed a vacant lot squat to a garden, mini-orchard and apiary. It was fun to hear the comments of the other visitors because I'm not really plugged-in to that community face-to-face, much as I'd like to be. I have no trouble finding permaculturalists and urban farmers online, but I haven't managed to find like-minded people to hang out with in meatspace. Despite all the plants, the real highlight of the tour for me was seeing Novella's goats. I overcame my usual skittishness around animals because her castrated male goat Bilbo is so nice and friendly. And the two newborn kids are ADORABLE.
I went out to my own garden today. I didn't feel up to planting things out (partly because most of what I have to plant is front yard stuff and my rude neighbors have been out front more than usual lately), so I decided to do as much tidying up as my hands could manage. As usual, I probably did *more* than I could manage but whatever.... Long story short, I've learned that despite my hippie leanings that tell me that nature knows what she's doing, there are times when you really do need to prune, deadhead and/or mow. I have a no-mow lawn (thank goddess), but it still needs some care. The wooly thyme that makes our living path grew way larger than I thought it would and the older bits got woody and defoliated. Which gave the weeds room to grow. So I've learned I would have been better off "mowing" the thyme. Now I'm going to have to do a LOT of work reconditioning the hard soil there and re-planting some form of ground cover.
The final bit today is that I've been shopping for a used chipper/mulcher. I kept hoping I'd find one I could "afford" (as I'm several thousand dollars in credit card debt at the moment, I can't truly afford anything...) I keep having situations where I need to be able to cut branches down and I just don't have the hand strength to do it. I've looked and the Berkeley Tool Library doesn't have a chipper available. So today I saw an electric chipper for $80. That's half what one would cost new. It only handled branches of 1 inch or less, which is smaller than I'd like but I'd have to pay significantly more and go to gas motors to get one that would handle larger branches. And eventually you still get to branches of a size where you need to use a saw or axe. So I wrote the poster and said I was interested. She said tonight was best for her.
So I drove out there and had a nice chat with her and her partner. While we were talking, I mentioned that I was getting it due to my RSI. They demo'd the chipper for me. I said I'd take it and took out 4 twenties. They had a nice orchard in back and we talked about the various fruit they grew. She took a twenty and gave it back to me. I asked her if she was sure and she said yes. I think 10 years ago I would have insisted she keep it but I'm more at ease now with saying "Thank you. That means a lot to me." and it does. We talked a bit more about CRFG and Master Gardeners and I went on my way with my new-to-me chipper.
I've used the iTalk Pro recorder to try my hand at audio blogging or perhaps a podcast but haven't produced anything I like yet. There's a stiffness that comes from talking to a machine. Like talking to an answering machine. I wish I had a co-host to help elicit more humanity out of me.
]]>Why do some gardeners always assume you have to be either/or? Yesterday I made an impulse stop at Orchard Nursery in Lafayette, CA. I was stopping by hoping I'd find some Tuffits at a price I could afford. I figured I probably wouldn't, but since I'd spent the gas money to do an errand out in Pleasant Hill, I was trying to get the most bang out of my gasoline buck as possible.
While there, I saw a couple thing I was interested in that didn't usually appear at Berkeley Hort. Strawberry "Pink Panda", a variegated alpine strawberry, and Fragaria virginiana "Donner Lake Blue". I'm trying to get better about tracking my garden purchases so last night I took out the receipt and was about to write down details in my garden journal on MyFolia.com I discovered I'd been charged tax on the strawberries. Now, in the state of California it is illegal to tax food, including food plants. Many bigger nurseries don't make any differentiation. I was surprised that a nursery as good as Orchard is didn't, but I chalked it up to an inexperienced cashier or an overly-computerized system. In the past, I would have just sucked it up. But I'm trying to be more assertive so I called up to see if I could get the money charged back to my credit card without having to waste gas money driving out there again.
It took a bit of phone-switching until I reached the person with the power to do this. The first person I talked to said "are you going to eat them?" "Of course!" I said. "I'm an edible landscaper and I wouldn't have bought strawberries that don't bear edible fruit." When I reached the fellow in charge of approving the refunding of the mistaken taxing and he heard the varieties I'd bought, he snapped back to me "Those are ornamentals". Well, if they happen to be used by some ONLY as ornamentals, that's their loss. I'm interested in edible landscaping.
I was surprised at the amount of proving I had to do. Look, tons of people buy kumquat trees for ornaments and never eat them. Do the state tax police go around making sure that someone eats every lemon off the lemon tree you just bought? No. I can't help it that some people are narrow-minded enough not to consider alpine strawberries worth eating. They're strawberries, they're food, and I eat them. So there.
Coincidentally, the subject of this month's CRFG meeting (to be held at my house) is: Edible Landscaping.
My hands hurt. As usual. It's a beautiful day. A good day to catch up on the many tasks needed to ease one's garden from summer to fall but I hurt too much to even contemplate it. I did make myself get out and do an "observation walk". While I was taking pictures, I wondered whether I should just record blog entries. After all, typing hurts too. And when I thought of all the things I wanted to say, I balked at the idea of typing it all.
So, if I figure out the technical side, I'll start audio blogging. I hope that folks will still follow my posts and comment. I love interacting with and learning from other folks.
In the meantime, ways I've tried to "garden" even when I can't dig, hoe or cultivate include reading garden blogs, participating in Dave's Garden, reading my gardening books, harvesting/sorting/labeling seeds, and watching vlogs. Netflix doesn't have gardening videos, to my post-surgery recovery disappointment. YouTube doesn't have a ton of good stuff in this category. The Garden Wise Guys looks promising, though. And I just subscribed to the Wiggly Wigglers podcast.
If I had a videocam, I'd be trying to make something myself. I took video production at BCM but haven't been able to do anything yet. I hate the idea of checking out equipment. I'd rather just have my own.
I have a horrible sweet tooth. I'm addicted to sugar. I've gone through periods where I have none and hardly any starchy foods, either, but it's hard not to fall off the wagon. The psychological addiction is strong. Miracle fruit doesn't taste like much, I'm given to understand, but when you eat it and let it coat your tongue, it affects your taste buds in a way that suppresses bitter and sour tastes for somewhere between a half hour and two hours. You can eat a lemon as if it were an orange. Well, for someone like me who is a picky eater and needs to eat more veggies, that's a godsend. I imagine I'll be able to eat bitter greens I normally can't stand.
I had my eye on eventually obtaining this plant, but then the Wall Street Journal did an article on it and other magazines and papers picked up on it and the demand for the plant, seeds, and fruit went through the roof. It began to look as if I'd not be able to afford the luxury of buying one. But I know that sometimes one can get good deals on Ebay so I looked. And found one.
They attempted delivery yesterday but I wasn't around to sign for it (I didn't know it was coming in a way that required my signature). So I had to rush to the post office today because otherwise it would be sitting around the post office yet another day and the thing had already gone through quite a long journey from Thailand. So far the seedlings seem in good shape and I have high hopes for them. They'll be an indoor plant, at least during the winter. They hail from African tropical rainforests so they like high acid soil, warmth, and high humidity. I may not be able to succeed at providing all of those as I do not have a greenhouse and my old Victorian house is subject to extremes of temperature and humidity.
Oh, it's there alright. While I thought that formal rose gardeners might look down their noses at folks with vegetable gardens in their front yards, I was surprised how much division there is in the gardening world. Admittedly, I'm drawing this conclusion based on only a few sources - Garden Rant, the Annie's Annuals catalog copy, SF Chron garden articles, You Grow Girl - but there's a lot of individual opinion that starts to come off ex cathedra. There's one post in particular on Garden Rant that I recall that decried "common" plants that were seen too often for the blogger's taste.
Now, it's not that I don't have plants I can't stand. I do. My mother grew scarlet geraniums and asparagus fern on the front porch of our childhood home. For reasons I can't entirely articulate, I hate those plants. The geraniums stank (to my tender nostrils, anyway) and looked scraggly. The asparagus ferns had so little grace and the scarlet berries seemed incongruous. But my mom liked them. And so did neighborhood ladies who would sneak onto our property to take cuttings. I hated those geraniums so much that it was only recently I discovered that there were geraniums I considered pretty. That they didn't all look like that.
Anyway, I'm of the opinion that gardening should be encouraged. Yes, we can get annoyed and alarmed at folks who dump chemical fertilizers on their lawn and use noxious pesticides, but education can help with that. Still, wouldn't you rather see a yard with drugstore petunias than see more asphalt or concrete? Lots of property owners in my neighborhood have paved over their front yards so they can have more parking space. In poor neighborhoods, bits of green that are cared for (and not just weeds in a vacant lot) are scarce. So let folks have their "common" plants. Let businesses rotate in their annual color of marigolds and pansies. Damned near any gardening is better than none.
p.s. I'm eating a spaghetti squash from my garden tonight (with parmesan and spaghetti sauce). I planted vegetables so I'd eat more veggies, but I still don't do it enough. So yay for me.
I've wanted to make a good garden journal ever since I moved here and started this garden. But I kept putting it off. Then when I got more serious, I bought some existing garden journal blank books, looked at how other folks were doing it, and bought more office supplies to make my own. Then I thought it would be better to do it digitally because of the search capabilities. So I decided to do it in FileMaker. Then I started getting paranoid about having to redesign it over and over again as I learned more about what works and what doesn't in database design. So I contacted an ex-co-worker of mine nearly a year ago to see if she'd help me with the initial design. She said she would and I was very excited. But she's a working mom and it's become clearer to me that this is never going to happen. She doesn't answer my followup emails.
So today I went to look and see what FileMaker solutions for journaling might already be out there (I've already looked into garden stuff and there doesn't seem to be anything). What's out there is very heavily slanted towards corporate office stuff. Then I saw a post about Journlr (not a FileMaker database but a stand-alone application). So I've downloaded it and am messing around in it. It was designed with writers in mind so it's definitely a patchwork solution for me. But I like some of it already. The iLife integration will come in handy. But I can't help but be sad that I don't know enough to design my own FileMaker solution. If I did, not only would it please me, but I'm sure I could market it as a run-time database solution.
So what features would YOU want to see in a garden tracking application?
Yesterday I watched 1940s House for the first time. Today I'm watching (re-watching, since I saw it when it first aired) 1900 House. I'm struck that both shows made a point of hiring garden historians to help out. That isn't quite so surprising with the 1940s House as "Dig for Victory" was the UK's equivalent of our Victory Garden campaigns. But it's a bit surprising that it was given that sort of thought for the 1900 House. It's a middle class South London house and presumably the vegetable garden was more exceptional for city dwellers then. Yet they hired Katie Butler, a horticultural historian, to help landscape the back yard. She used most of the backyard for a Victorian ornamental garden, with a bit put aside for vegetables with cultivar names like "Telephone".
]]>Today was a weird day due to bad sleep patterns last night. The good news is that I think I'm tired enough now to sleep through the night. Anyway, as a consequence, I got little done. My right hand is in loads of pain so that's also an influence.
- collected all the calendula seeds, some arugula seeds, some chard seeds, and some flatleaf Italian parsley seeds before the rain hit. Wish I had been able to get the larkspur seed.
- pruned off the dead bits from the calendula and cut all the "straw" into smaller pieces to start to form a mulch.
- pulled out the dead Cerinthe major purpurea and planted the Cerinthe retorta in the front yard.
If you have more money than time, it's not worth saving seeds. However, if you have a bit more time, it's fun and interesting. Most modern gardening encourages people to prune spent flower, which means we're constantly getting in the way of the plants' attempt to reproduce. Then we spend more money to get more of the plants. It's pretty fascinating to see the different ways plants have of reproducing. Different flower types, different seed types. Some reseeding easily and others needing help from something else to germinate. For instance, I'm told that I'll need to pour boiling water over the parsley seed to get it to germinate.
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