A Weekend in the Country

Last weekend, I went to my friend's farm. I was officially there to help build a fence. But my total lack of fence building ability was blatantly obvious, and I can't drive a tractor, so instead I made coleslaw, helped watch children and dogs, and dug sweet potatoes.

The completed fence

 Sometimes, it's nice to have physical labor to do. It takes your mind off other things.

late-season blackberries

It was a beautiful day. The weather was perfect, and the fall colors, (what colors we get) were starting to show. And there was the added bonus of seeing Michelle's fall garden, which is doing quite well.  She sent me home with a head of lettuce and some radishes. I love having friends who garden.

mushrooms on the lawn - they formed hemi-spherical pods

broccoli



eggplant blossom

romaine

Our sweet potato haul - unfortunately, I hate sweet potatoes

tomatillos - not ripe yet

late bloomers



Happy Wednesday.

An abundance of basil

I have a large pot on my patio filled with basil. I've cut it back, but that only means it will grow back even more thickly. I don't know what to do with it all. There's only so much pesto a person can eat.

I'm can dry some of it, but then what?

I am appealing to your wisdom. What do you do with an abundance of basil?

Creative Destruction: Gardening

It's Spring and I've been out in the garden.  More specifically, I've been tearing large chunks of it out. The trash collectors have not been happy with me.



Someday, it will be nothing but flowers

That fence you see? There used to be a five foot hedge of ligustrum next to it. Gone. I've replaced it with two yellow jasmine plants, which are only about a foot high now, but they will eventually cover the fence with sweet-scented blossom.

In the front yard, I pulled out two scrubby azaleas (they went to a neighbor) and replaced them with rosemary because I love rosemary. It smells so good, and  rosemary planted by the front gate is supposed to keep harmful people away.  I don't know if it works, but it can't hurt.

Sweet broom - I've been assured it gets a lot bigger

I've planted sweet broom in an attempt to hide the air conditioner. When I was growing up, we had a holly hedge around the a/c unit, and it was literally a pain to get to and trim back. So I'm going with non-thorny plants around the a/c.

I've purchased citrus spikes for my orange tree, though "tree" is rather a grand term for a stick with leaves on it. No flowers this year, but I am getting new leaves.

My mother divided her agapanthus and gave me a bucketful so I planted a row of them across the front flower bed. They look like leeks with the tops chopped off, but given time, they should become big green plants with ball-shaped purple (or white, we're not sure which) flowers.

I've trimmed back the jasmine I planted when I first moved in, because it's huge and expanding towards the neighbor's yard. It's loaded with buds that are just beginning to open. The bees have already discovered it. By the end of the week, it should be glorious.

It doesn't look like 1600 pounds, does it?

In less glamorous news, I dumped 1600 pounds of dirt in the back corner of my yard (that's forty, 40-pound bags) because it was a gigantic mud puddle. (I've had some drainage issues.) This weekend I laid sod on top of it. At this point, all I ask of that section of the yard is that the grass grow.

I'm planning a tree to get some shade on my little patio, so my mother and I went to a tree nursery last weekend and wandered around for about an hour.  I'm currently torn between a fig and a crepe myrtle. I love the flowers and the shape of  crepe myrtles, but the fig tree would give me fruit, and would be a lot more interesting as a plant.

Any suggestions?

Look what I grew!

Okay, the tree did the heavy lifting, but I watered it.

Just in time for Christmas, my orange tree has given of it's bounty. Six (six!) oranges.

My last harvest yielded oranges the size of golf balls. This time around there is a greater size range. The largest is about the size of a baseball.

 

And the smallest. . . well, as you see.

 

Living in a construction zone

My neighborhood has been overtaken by builders. When I moved in, there were a fair amount of empty lots, and of course I expected people to build on them. I just wasn't expecting it all to happen at once. There are 6 houses going up on my street, 3 of them directly across from my house.  It seems to be contagious, because the people who live behind me have decided to build an addition onto their house, too. 

There's nothing like opening your curtains and suddenly finding yourself face to face with the workmen you had no idea were there. It makes you a lot more diligent about wearing clothes. It's been noisy, dusty, and I've developed a new found appreciation of Norteño.

Perhaps it's better this way. Instead of the neighborhood being disrupted by individual building projects over several years, it's one big building spree and then it will be over. At the rate the houses are going up, I expect them all to be done by July 4th, if not sooner.  Then I will have a bunch of new neighbors! 

In the meantime, I'm concentrating on my backyard, which is looking it's best right now, because the jasmine I planted two years ago is starting to to fill in. 

Pretty, isn't it? The cats remain unimpressed.

There are three of these, giving me the sweetest smelling backyard in the neighborhood. I'm hoping that over time, it will grow thicker, so that you can't even see the fence. Obviously, that's going to take a few more years.

Add a background track of circular saws, earth movers, and pounding hammers, and this is what my neighborhood sounds like.

Proof that I am not a gardener

There has been an unassuming green bush by my garage. I thought it was an azalea. It didn't bloom when the other azaleas bloomed, but since it seemed healthy otherwise, I didn't really think about it.

Yesterday I found out why it didn't bloom with the other azaleas.



It's a gardenia.

Weekend fun video



Developing a Green Thumb

I've never been known for my way with plants. I've long been a practitioner of lazy girl gardening. Lazy girl gardening is very simple:

1. Have a selection of nice planters/pots on the balcony, in the living room, wherever you want a plant.
2. Go to the garden center and buy full grown plants.
3. Transfer plants to the planters.
4. When the plants die, replace them.

So when I bought my little house last year, I wasn't looking for a garden. A little outdoor patio or terrace, somewhere to relax on summer evenings with friends and a bottle of wine, but not a garden.

 

But now that I have actual ground to put things in, I find I'm interested. And I enjoy it, even if trying to dig a hole in the clay that passes for soil around here is hard and thankless work.  Last summer I planted three jasmine plants. I killed two of them immediately in a freak weedwhacker accident, but I replaced them and now look.

I have the most fragrant backyard in the neighborhood.  This weekend, I threw caution to the winds and planted mint. If this keeps up, I may have an herb garden before the summer's over.

If you have a garden and a library,

you have everything you need.
                                                       - Cicero

Happy Spring!

It was a weekend devoted to gardening. I mowed, edged, sprayed, clipped, planted and fought a particularly persistent spider. (I knocked down the web at least 5 times.) I also found a baby turtle, who I photographed and let go.

Isn't it sweet?

In other exciting news, my orange tree is blooming!

Maybe next year I will have more than one orange.

Spring and other difficulties

outside The Guild Shop on Dunlavy

It's Spring! Well, not officially, but all the trees are in bloom and the garden centers are full of new and exciting plants to try. I'm trying my own little experiment: I purchased three pots of horsetail reeds (Equisetum hyemale) and planted them in the wet corner of the backyard. They are supposed to like water. My hope is that they'll flourish and create some visual interest in a really boring part of the yard. We'll see.

 

In other news, my father had eye surgery last week. It was a total surprise, but somehow he tore something in his eye. He's fine, and there should be no lasting damage, but for the next week (maybe two) he's not allowed to read and he has to sleep sitting up. I don't know which would be worse. I can't imagine not reading for two weeks. My job would be impossible for a start, but then what would I do with the spare time? No newspapers, no blogs, no letters, no books!

 

He's tired from trying to sleep upright, but the no reading condition is really wearing on him. When I saw him yesterday, he was going to get some books on tape, and he's called me twice today for recipes. Since he can't read, he'll cook.  This should be interesting.