13 posts tagged “gardening”

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.

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?

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.

Arms, wrists and hands were hurting all damned day so I didn't do much during the day.  Iced my right arm and watched "Mad Men".  Also watched the "Pie-lette" of "Pushing Daisies".  Finally capitulated and took a nap in the early evening.  Paula's sick so we didn't go to sing at Martuni's. (Joe Collins is the pianist on Mondays and I want to do that as much as I can before I go back to work).

I have all these new plants that have been staring at me for up to 2 weeks (some less than that).  Most important was a Passiflora incarnata that I paid bux for mail order.  I'm always bad about planting.  There's not only the dilemma of whether I feel I can afford more potting soil (but I daren't use regular dirt in case it introduces disease), but it's a hand-intensive activity, particularly if I'm planting in the ground.  The maypop hadn't arrived in that great a shape in the first place and staying in its teensy transport pot for a couple days wasn't helping. It stared at me looking mighty peakéd. I forced myself to ignore the pain and get potting.

- potted maypop.

- potted the 3 hanging baskets that have been hanging empty for months with the Alpine strawberries I bought a fortnight ago and which have been the worse for wear for staying on the front porch in small pots being dehydrated by the wind...  Added some misc. flowers I got on special from Westbrae.  They were on the "Death's Door" shelf and of course I left them in their 6-packs even longer.  We'll see whether SuperThrive can bring them back to life. I was too cheap to buy another Alpine strawberry for the 3rd basket so I went out to the yard and dug up one of the MANY Fragaria chiloensis runners that are establishing themselves in my no-mow lawn.

- Added a bit of organic fertilizer in all pots, watered in with SuperThrive.

- took pictures of the potted stuff so I'd remember when I actually got around to planting them.

- mailed seeds to Davesgarden.com trading partner.

- mailed registration for the Fall Master Gardeners seminar.

- had phone interview with MG.

If all goes well with my job limbo situation, I shall be a member of the Alameda County Master Gardener class of 2008

It's bareroot season and the limited availability of some new low-chill Zaiger Genetics cherry cultivars has made me rush to order.  I was too afraid I'd be left out.  If I waited longer, I could maybe get some deals at local drugstores.  But I couldn't wait.  Not counting the time I've spent looking at the internet and catalogues before today, it must have taken me 3 hours of research and shopping before I could decide what I was buying.

The two Zaiger cherries were cinches:  Minnie Royal and Royal Lee.  Bay Laurel Nursery hasn't opened its page for ordering yet which is too bad because I first found out about these new introductions from them. I would gladly have given them my money.  I wasn't thrilled with my experience ordering from Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply last time. But Bay Laurel's site emphasized that there'd be limited quantities available, so I was anxious.  Because the cost for shipping would be the same for 5 bareroot trees as for 1, and because there was a slight price break and bonus plants for ordering 5....I decided to order 5. Because the 7 apricots I got from my Blenheim apricot weren't enough to tide me over, I knew I had to get more apricots in.

My Berkeley coastal climate is one most folks would be envious of.  And it suits me just fine.  But it doesn't suit my favorite fruits. Most of the fruits I like prefer extremes of cold and heat that we don't get here.  The major concern here is a cultivar that doesn't need many winter chill hours.  Last year I winter I got a deal on a cherry tree for 10 bucks.  It was a Lapins cherry grafted on Colt stock and was labeled "Fogline".  So I figured it was meant for growing around here.  but when I looked up how many chill hours Lapins needed (800 hours), I knew it was too big a risk.  I'd be lucky if it bore once every 5 years.  So I donated it to the CRFG raffle and someone inland in Concord, CA (where they get more chill and more heat) gave it a better home.  It sucked, but I figured I'd never be able to grow cherries.  These new varieties only need 400 - 500 chill hours.  That's doable.  I won't get it every year, but I can get it most years, I think. Cherries!

Next came the apricots.  Zaiger has also come up with some low chill apricots that beaer earlier and later than Blenheim so that I can extend the very short apricot season. Since the Zaiger varieties are patented, I'll never be able to get them cheaply.  They're not going to show up (legally, anyway) at a CRFG Scion Exchange.  So those are the ones that make the most sense to buy at an elevated mail order price.   I settled on Gold Kist and Earli Autumn.  One more tree to pick.  When I went to Harbin for my birthday 2 years ago, I tasted my first Pink Lady apple.  I wasn't expecting much. I don't love most apples, or at least that's what I always thought, but I was desperate for fresh fruit to take to Harbin.  The apple was exactly the type I like: crisp, tart yet sweet and delicious.  I made a note to look into it for my garden.  It turns out that it's a patented variety, which also means it won't show up at a scion exchange.  So it was a good choice to buy compared to a variety I could get free as a scion.

Not only did I get a slight discount for picking 5 trees, but I could get 2 grape vines for free.  The varieties were limited, but them's the breaks.  I opted for Muscat of Alexandria, which might not do well here as it needs heat, and California Concord, which I already have one of.  Next I hemmed and hawed over whether to buy professional frost protection cloth or to try to figure out something cheaper to do.  Having lost 4 citrus trees to the record frosts last year, I decided that I had better pay more up front to keep from losing more later.  When you lose the trees, you don't just lose the cost of the tree itself.  You lose any money you paid a landscaper/gardener to take care of it, you lose the money you spent on water and fertilizer, you lose all the hours you yourself put into it, and you lose time because it'll be that much longer until you'll be getting fruit and it's that much longer until the trees grow tall enough to give you privacy from your neighbors.

There's an "early buyer" special on the frost cloth, but it's still expensive.  $167, not counting the cost of shipping a 42 lb. box, to be exact.  But it's a better deal than buying the smaller cloths piece by piece.  With a big roll, I can tailor the frost protection.  I better prepare ahead of time this year because doing it right means more time than I'll be able to come up with at the last minute.  You have to build frames because you don't want the cloth to actually touch the plants.

Now my total was such that I was entitled to 6 packs of seeds.  I bought celery, purple bush beans, Walla Walla onions, pickling cucumbers, and native California lupines.  Oh yeah, I also have a pound of Daikon radish seed in my order which I want to use to aerate the soil.  Oddly enough, the Daikon radish seed is taxable.  Edible plants are not supposed to be taxable in CA.  But I guess because they view it as primarily cover crop seed instead of anything to be eaten, they tax it.  I believe they're wrong.  Not that I'd be able to eat that radishes...

The shipping on this was $25, not counting the trees.  The trees they're going to figure out shipping for and add on later.  This order cost me a bit above 3 Cs.  Oy.

The event I conceived of, pitched to the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden, and have been co-organizing with them for a year has finally come our way.  If you're a gardener in the SF Bay Area or have *thought* about starting to garden, please attend Cross-Pollination: Gardeners Unite!  This event is meant to be to gardeners what a user group fair is to computer users.  I hope it will be a big success and turn into an annual event.  I want to bring in even more participants next year.  Please come!