Category

Gardening

• 01.08.08
  cabbage heads
  Daily, Gardening, Painting, Sketchbook (0)

  

  This old house.

  Alis and I talked in the car on the way home from Half Moon Bay. We had spent the morning, just the two of us, in our now usual way, which is to say that we went first to the plant nursery there and then had lunch and coffee. Gorgeous sunshine. Her car was riding low in back with the weight of two oversized terracotta pots, big enough for either of us to sit in, lying on their sides in the back of her white wagon, and an overgrowth of pink grasses, red-violet oxalis, chartreuse cedar, etc. We talked, the way we do when we are making up for lost time, rushing through important topics in order to make room for the smaller musings that really connect us as friends.

  “My old house is so high maintenance,” she began, about her little white cottage on the mountain. “It tells me precisely what it wants, and this makes shopping both easy and challenging. There is no room for compromise with her.” (Her, meaning, her house.) “Oh, and by the way, did I tell you about Seth and the house ghost?”

  We laughed about the ghost incident, which is not alltogether surprising, given the context of our conversations, but then moved quickly back to plants, because I am convinced that this is the root of our friendship, regardless of the fact that we met in art school, when neither grew nor spoke of plants much, aside from what we ate and what we may or may not have watched others inhale.

  “You know, I would have never planted primroses this fall if I hadn’t seen that one potted red primrose in your garden during the Christmas party. And then I fell in love with the idea of pale yellow petunias sharing the pot with the misacanthus,” I mused.

  “A landscape architect friend of mine and I were talking the other day about how growing older and having kids has affected our gardening style,” Alis replied, “She and I have been friends for a long time, and after she started a family, she gave me a tip. She told me that I would start craving the most unusual, chintzy plant combinations that I never would have expected of anyone, save perhaps Grandma or Aunt Mae.”

  Lo and behold! She was right. Look at those carmine primroses! The array of red flowerpots in the front entry, saccharin pansies and petunias. And ornamental cabbage, something I believed, for the longest time, to be the winter flowerbed choice of green-thumbed Asian seniors, has now become the winter doodles for my garden, as well as hers. It fills in with foliose texture and homeliness to exploding containers otherwise full of purple fountain grasses and chartruse millet. It works overtime trying to please me. And how so! I bought a whole flat of it and completely overused it in the containers, filling far too many corners of brown earth with the laquered porcelain tackiness that walks the fine line between experimentally curious and unabashedly tacky.

  I can’t plant enough violas, and the cyclamen practically dominated the interior of our home this Christmas. I’m wintering the succulents in the mudroom but I am reconsidering placing a citrus tree in there too, in between the overflowing shoe basket and the two easels. I could go on and on. And I blame my chintzy plant obsession on this old house (1930) and the simple fact that I, too, am growing senile and ironically, quite broody.

  Are Alis and I just noticing this ourselves, or are you, too, seeing your taste shift with age? I’m curious.

  
  
• 08.20.07
  A Small Plate of Afternoon
  Daily, Gardening, Thinking (64)

  

  The kids pick their own tomatoes and basil off the vines and bushes that have, in three short months, overtaken their once-huge terracotta pots. I am sloppy; I quickly slice the larger tomatoes and the buffalo mozzarella, throw it onto a plate and shake olive oil and salt atop the pile. We walk barefoot back out into the garden, around the back of the house, and sit in the shade on the upside-down red canoe. There are no forks. Why should we need forks? We eat with our fingers and talk about next Saturday, when we’ll be inside this canoe paddling up the big river from Russian Gulch.
  But the heady tomato-basil-olive oil fruitiness anchors us firmly to the present; and before long, we’re nothing but giggles and dirty, greasy fingers leaving shiny happy prints atop the dusty canoe. Maybe the slick fingerprints will make the boat glide faster, we postulate.

  
  
• 08.05.07
  cosmos
  Gardening, Sketchbook, Uncategorized (1)

  

  My favorite summer project: the packet of cosmos seeds;
  Demeter’s yield from last summer
  Rattles softly in the paper, in my shirtpocket.

  I walk across the dry grass,
  Four curious feet scampering behind me.

  One tears open the packet and shakes the seeds
  They cascade like rain into the other’s hand.

  Quickly, we get to work.

  One seed, every few inches, seems scant. We plant two,
  sprinkle with water,
  and summer flies on by.
  No rain, only sun.
  We water together,
  sometimes alone at dusk,
  as baby owls talk over us
  up in the pine tree bough
  and the crickets start trilling.

  One day in July, they pop atop tall green plumes
  punctuating the feathery foliage: a blitz of purples, pinks and white.
  The nasturtiums cower in awe, shouting loud under-shadow
  But they can’t compete, only enhance the stature
  of the tiny pack of seeds
  that exploded by some miracle into our summer landscape
  and framed our reference within the course of this year.

  
  
• 04.03.07
  On a lighter note:
  Gardening, Home (1)

  I quickly hashed out what I wanted to accomplish with the gardens around the house. Here’s one nook:

  

  Every surface area in the studio is overflowing with seed packets and logs and lists:

  

  

  Of course, moving into an established garden already has its perks:

  

  especially the lilacs, here in the kitchen and at my bedside table. I love the heady scent that lulls me to sleep.

  

  You can see more photos of the garden on Flickr.
  While you’re there, get a taste for some real garden planning in Montanaraven’s “Gardens: From Napkin Sketch to Reality” set. Then look at the hand tool that you can use to make eco-friendly plant pots using newspaper. I found them for sale online here (in the UK) and here (US) and I would love to have one for the kids. About $14.
  These wooden pawn-looking tools are great and the children enjoyed planting purple coneflower seeds for our Austin garden using one last year at The Wildflower Center during the Spring kickoff. Fun stuff.

  
  
• 03.22.07
  women’s work
  Gardening (1)

  We seize every minute of good mood, sunshine and willingness and harness it all into gardening. There’s an endless array of tasks at hand, some require priority, such as cleaning old terracotta pots and preparing them anew for GASP! tomatoes!!!! I’m thrilled about this, Damon thinks I’m nuts about the tomato, but there’s no tastier nutritional powerhouse during the summer. It holds the torch all season long (to pass it on to the pumpkin in early Fall).

  

  You clean pots because you want to believe the pots contain no more potential pathogens from the previous season(s), fungal and otherwise. Honestly, I’m just following advice and resting assured that they at least look groomed and cared for. We used a bucket of water and a few drops of earth-happy dish suds, but you could clean away lime stains with vinegar, I hear.

  

  You can’t clean out the pocket gophers. You arrive from the nursery with armfuls of tender perennials and, just beyond their leafy silhouettes, you see a tiny brown skullcap slip back into the perforated topsoil. There’s a little mound of dirt, and a golf ball-sized hole beside it. If nothing else, amusement for the dog.

  Of course, with little rain and many tender young plants, watering is necessary. Only, the minute I walk back from the faucet with the hose in my hand, Chas feels the most urgent need to water, too. And what a help this would be! If only he would water the plants, and not the gopher holes.

  

  In the meantime, the compost can be tilled. It smells sweet and almost-ripe, like I remember from childhood, climbing atop our tremendous heap. Earthworms, here and there, slipping out of unearthed mines as we plunge the shovel into their dark network. We could always use more. Every day, I bring a bowlful of kitchen scraps: coffee pellets, eggshells, mango peel, bananaskins…

  

  Then, suddenly, it’s time to wash hands and redress, shovel cheekfuls of leftover lunch into hungry, grubby mouths, and rush to karate. “YOI!” when I’d rather be saying”Namaste.”

  
  Namaste.

  
  
• 03.14.07
  Full Tilt into Spring
  Daily, Gardening, Home, Nature (2)

  

  On the way home from the beach, I stopped by my favorite nursery in Half Moon Bay (who doesn’t have a website to google but I can give you directions, if you are interested) and bought plants. Not just any plants, but anything that could double its duty as both gopher proof and textural. So I chose a leaf in every shape: oval, circular, fusiform, serrated. And I picked up anything chartreuse and violet, wispy and hugging. In essence, I chose plants that not only worked double time but put in extra hours at playing off one another: purple huechera and silver helichyrysum, lenten rose and bronze fennel, waving yarrow and succulent prostrate sedum. They sit in congragation together on cardboard flats atop whiteplastic lawn chairs, in the shade of two towering cypress beside the house, waiting for me to finish digging vitality back into the cold earth.

  A family of quail graze the ground beneath them, black and purple plumes gleaming in the afternoon sun, ebony bobbers wiggling like alien antennae atop their noggins. It’s hard not to grin every time they pass. That’s probably one of those beautiful things about Spring here, although for all I know the quail are permanent residents. But the Robin has started chattering at dusk with the scrub jays around the grapefruit tree’s birdbath, the frogs start peeping soon afterwards, and nothing sounds more like an American Spring, to me.

  As you start to spend more time outside, maybe gardening, maybe taking a brisk walk, what sounds of Spring are ringing in the air around you?

  
  
• 03.11.07
  Getting Ready for Spring Gardening
  Gardening, Home (8)

  It’s March now and in the valley this means it’s time to prepare our gardens for Spring planting. But on an established lot, with hungry fruit trees, gophers, a terraced topography out back, lots of little flower beds, habitat niches and no clear sun pattern throughout the yard, it’s hard to know where to focus in the preparations. It helps to make a plan of attack:

  1. start compost area and begin layering kitchen scraps with leaves from the yard’s fallen leaves.
  2. sketch a very basic layout of the lot, just for elements and their relationships.
  3. from this sketch, decide where the different gardens will go: kid’s garden, herbs, moon garden, etc.
  4. test soil to check for deficiencies.

  

  And that’s where you see us here. This is a simple $5 soil testing kit from the local hardware store that I thought Ford might like to perform. Ideally, you want to get a soil test professioanlly done, or contact your county extension agent. But I chose the cheap, quick method. It comes with a color table that you compare the tube colors against, and there are 4 tubes to test with (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, pH and Potassium). Our pH tube here (soil mixed with water and the given reagents) eventually turned green, indicating that the soil is alkaline. And what do you do with alkaline soil? You feed it acids. Compost. The grapefuit tree looks chlorotic and appears dormant after fruiting, very likely due to the alkaline soil.

  I hauled leaves from the oak tree understory and started double digging to incorporate some nitrigen into the soil. We’ll see how this goes. And so my outline continues:

  5. amend soil.
  6. sow seeds directly,
  7. plant seedlings.

  Here I go on my Reading Rainbow soapbox:
  Do you have a garden plan? You you want to have a garden plan but lack inspiration? Here’s a great book to share with your kids, one that we love: Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots. It’s a book just bursting with kid-friendly gardening ideas and sweet watercolor illustrations. My favorite tip from the book is to take naturtium seeds and plant them in a dirt-filled old gardening glove and then tack that to the wall. Because nasturtiums thrive under desperate conditions and because I see all sorts of other possiblilities from this idea. Why not use old hats? colorful stockings or socks? Squares of lace, tied into bags and hung in random spots here and there…

  Another book I have that I reference often is a book I checked out from the tiniest local library we have ever belonged to (when we were Airstreaming it on an abandoned farm in Texas) and that I eventually bought for a penny plus shipping online. It’s The Organic Gardener by Catharine Osgood Foster. It’s an older book, slightly verbose but brimming with wonderful and proven strategies for gardening with nature. For example, I’m interested in companion planting, which is a permaculture technique that involves planting different crops in close proximity so that a sort of harmonious balance is created, a model for natural biodiversity, with each plant serving another in one beneficial way or another. It also looks cool and cottage-gardeny, full of texture and visually unexpected. This book pays attention to companion planting as a way to reduce pests. It’s very oldschool, written in the 70s I think, and full of old-fashioned wisdom.

  So, tomorrow we continue the double-digging.
  Do you have any garden plans of your own? I need to go poke around the blogs. Happy Digging!

  

  
  

recent posts

• ladybugzes
• mapping my runs
• date nite
• It’s not just a marathon.
• indoor track & field
• Reliving fossils