A Day at Home

My First-Grade client was unexpectedly sick this morning, and did not go to school.  I suddenly saw the day stretch before me, promising and empty: Would I nap? Watch that recording about the making of "American Idiot - the Musical" that I have on the DVR? Start a new book? Play Plants vs. Zombies?

Then I remembered all the chores I had to do. Rats. However I have to say it does feel good to knock some things off my list.

First, I went for a nice long walk with Joe the dog, in Las Trampas. I was the only human on the trail, and it was SO quiet and peaceful. Suddenly a huge bird darted up before me and in to the trees. It was something I'd never seen before. I couldn't get a good picture, but when I came home, I looked it up - and it's some kind of grouse.

It was a beautiful bird, and one I never expected to see.

Later on, I discovered a funky bug on a gorgeous unknown blossom.

Further up and further in, we even found water in the creek. Joe enjoyed it particularly. I didn't much like the mosquitos.

Hard to believe there is any water in nature left anywhere in California by this time of the year.

Then I started in on chores. I won't bore you with most of them, but one I thought you might be interested in: I collected the seeds from the spent Clarkias (Mountain Garland), Poppies, and Tidy Tips. I strip the plant of all its seed pods and then put them in a paper bag. There they stay until next winter. At some point they dry up and pop, and then all the seeds will be down at the bottom of the bag when I want to plant them.

This is a bit tedious (the collecting part) but it's easy, and I'll not need to buy seeds next winter. Also, these big healthy seeds are from plants that did well in my garden, so I'm selecting the hardiest and prettiest plants. I left some seeds on the plants to open and scatter now, and it's possible that some will over-winter and bloom again next year. The Tidy Tip seeds are like dandelion seeds - they scatter like crazy - so I'll probably find them in a bunch of places I don't want them, next year.

Another fun thing I did was begin the trellising for the pole beans. Originally, they were supposed to twine up the corn, but since the corn is struggling this year, the beans need support. So I fashioned something out of bamboo poles and a long branch that came off the catalpa.

Now I just need to drill some screws in the wood of the raised bed, and stretch some taut twine between the branch and the bottoms. Then the beans can grow, and if the corn wants to get its act together and grow too, it can work its way through the trellis. The pumpkins down below and in between have got a great start, and should soon be vining and mulching around the bottom of the bed,  so the corn better get busy if it's gonna.

These hot sunny days, the bee hive smells particularly strongly. I can smell it through the open windows, and even when I'm out working in the street. It's not a bad smell, but it's different enough that I'm sure someone walking by would wonder what it was. It's hard to describe. Feral, gamey. Very rich. Somewhat the same words I use to describe tomato foliage smell, but where tomato foliage has a  tangy green scent, the bee hive smells rounder and plumper, plummy. It's part honey, part wood, part wax, part propolis, part pollen, I guess. I like it.

Ok, now on to more mundane tasks like laundry. And I've got nothing to say about that, except that my idea of heaven? is a place without laundry.

Looking around the garden

This morning, I needed to give the garden some supplemental water, and while doing so, I saw some interesting things.

The peaches are going to be ripe before the end of June. We'll have quite a crop. I pruned this tree heavily several years ago, and it looks like it's finally recovered this year.

I don't like fuzzy peach skins. But I do like sweet juicy peaches! Can't wait for these to ripen. I plan to freeze a lot, for use in smoothies, and maybe pies later on in the summer.

The apple tree is also responding well to having more sunlight; the fruit is growing larger than it usually does. This is a small English variety (I think); the apples do turn to a faint red color when ripe, which won't be till late summer. They are tart and crisp, and put the old apples in the store to shame.

I noticed another dog vomit fungus. I've never seen these before, and this year I've had two. I wish I had caught this one in its bright yellow stage, but at least I got to see it in its pukey white glory. They don't last very long.

The bees are working over the Toyon and collecting its nectar. Toyon is a native plant in California, it is evergreen most of the year, but in late spring gets these delicate white blossoms. An interesting tidbit from Wiki: "Toyon is also known by common name California holly. Accordingly, the abundance of this species in the hill about LA gave rise to the name Hollywood."

The butterfly flowers are particularly beautiful this time of year. They do bloom again if I give them a vigorous pruning, but are prettiest in their first bloom. I rarely get butterflies in my garden, however. This makes me quite sad.

And a dahlia is blooming. I don't have many of these, they tend to attract aphids in my garden, but this one by the mailbox comes back reliably every spring.

And, this is a bad photograph, but I'm so excited about it, I'm going to show it to you anyway. In the raised beds - the nitrogen deprived raised beds - we have a  PEPPER, ladies and gentlemen.

Hooray!

Saturday chores

At last, an almost entirely free day to get a bunch of stuff done in the garden. I had a long list that I'd been adding to all week, and I was anxious to get to it. First I had to go play membership chair at our local neighborhood pool, and then I had to give the house a cursory clean, which is a standing Saturday morning chore. Kate and I had an emergency trip to Target for a sundress to wear to a 'fashion' party. Then at last I could get outside.

First, I took a handheld rake and loosened the crust of chicken manure in the raised beds. Then I fertilized all the vegetables. I do believe the nitrogen boost is helping - the paste tomatoes have put out fruit, and the bush beans have beautiful purple blossoms.

Then I added dirt to the potatoes - they're growing a lot every day.

The yellow in this picture is not a potato bloom, it's a poppy behind the potatoes. I'll post a picture of the potato flowers when they arrive.

Then I added lots of late summer/early fall blooming flower seeds to the garden. The way I do this is fill a bucket with soil, add all the seeds to the bucket, mix it all together, and then broadcast them in the garden. This method always seems to promote germination, since the seeds have a little good dirt to start them out with. I included cosmos, rudibeckias, and zinnias, hoping for late-season bee forage.

Kate has a little garden by the back door, in which she had planted calendula, violas, primroses, lettuces, and a lantana. The lettuces and calendula were spent, and a lot of the violas and primroses didn't make it. So I cleared that bed out today and added seeds of alyssum, spinach, and more romaine.

Then I cleared out the peas and the carrots. There were a lot of carrots to harvest, but the peas were done fruiting. I pulled everything out, Tom cleaned up the bamboo trellis and took it apart for storage, and I did some light tilling of that bed. Then I dug out some compost from the bin. I got a good bucketful from one side.

I added it to the former pea/carrot bed and tilled it in lightly. Then I planted my sweet potato slips, which look great.

It's hot enough for them now, outside. They will get large and their vines will cover the entire 4x4 bed, but I might get some marigolds for the edges, while they fill out.

Then Tom and I tackled the catalpa tree. It's been excellent forage for the bees, you can stand under it and listen to the buzzing, but it was overgrown and shading too much of the raised bed area. So we hacked off some branches.

There's still a lot of blooming flowers on the tree, and they should last for another couple of days or so.

The butterfly bushes are blooming, the sticky monkey flower is going great, sunflowers are reaching for the sun, and I have a few mathilde poppies blooming right now. Another beautiful coffin for a dead bee:

I never used to find dead bees in my garden, but now I see one nearly every day in a flower. For some silly reason, it comforts me to see them so peaceful, being rocked in the breeze in a beautiful blossom.

We opened the hive today; the bees seem to have plenty of room, and there is plenty of brood. Still not a lot of honey. Later, I noticed them acting kind of funny, a lot of them flying around buzzing loudly, not sure what was going on. Many of them still 'beard' outside the hive when it's hot, and a small clump seem to like sleeping outside on the landing board, all grouped up. It's the wrong time of year for a swarm, so I'm not sure what made them so agitated this afternoon, but they seemed to have calmed down now.

I still need to wash the carrots, but once I do that and have an iced coffee, I'm headed for a dip in the pool. First, a snack, from the garden:

Wild Plums

I've never been much of a forager, but this morning whilst walking in the open space, I came across several wild plum trees. The first one had tiny, quarter-sized red plums.

I saw some littering the ground, split open with juice, and wondered if they were ripe? So I picked one and ate it. These little one-bite fruits were seriously delicious. I gathered a handful.

I continued walking and came across a yellow plum tree.

I tasted one of these (had to reach a little higher for them) and it was perfect, firm-skinned on the outside, and run-down-your-chin juicy on the inside. I wanted to gather some of these too, but all I had was an unused poop bag. So in they went.

I brought them home for my breakfast. Delicious!

The Great Nitrogen Experiment

So the time has come to bring out the big guns. I didn't want to use fertilizer, other than compost or manure, but if I'm going to save the new garden beds, I need to resort to larger measures. I've been struggling with the question: Is it more important that I bring a crop to harvest? Or that I used all-natural methods doing so? Yeah, I tussled with it. And then I decided the expense of the beds and the seeds and our labor, is worth a little store-bought help. I went out this morning before work and purchased a high-nitrogen fertilizer, made from seaweed.

This stuff could be the devil, for all I know. I just had to know that I tried everything before I gave up on this year's harvest. And this is what the lady at the expensive boutique garden store recommended. I purposely went to a store where I knew the people had their own gardens, and had a lot of knowledge about growing food. When asked, what would you buy for your own beds?, she waffled between two products, mostly because of expense. I chose the expensive one; it was $10 a pound.

It comes in granular form.

It then dissolves into water and forms a lovely green slurry. A little smelly, but in a pleasant low-tide sort of way.

Then I watered everything thoroughly, using up about half the can of fertilizer.

Here's some corn, with a pole bean behind. The corn grew quickly to this size, and then stopped - it's been like this for a month. I took a picture today, and I'll take another in a week. Together, we will see if the high nitrogen fertilizer makes a difference.

Meanwhile, the hills are drier and crunchier every day, which is why I'm so amazed when I come across things growing in a place where I think no thing could possibly grow. Take, for instance, this wild chamomile:

A pretty little thing, but how in the world does it survive in this dry, hard clay? No one is putting seaweed fertilizer on it. When I see this, I have hope for my vegetables.

Meanwhile, I consulted a bee expert (my dad) on why the bees hang out on the outside of the hive every day. It has been warm, but I've never seen so many bees chilling on the porch on any other hive. Also, a clump of them has been overnighting outside, on the side. A nice view of the stars, but isn't it too cold? I wondered. Dad advised me to add many more bars to the hive and give the bees plenty of room. I'm worried about them expending so much energy in building comb, but the hive WAS pretty crowded. We'll see if the extra room allows it to stay cooler in there, and give the bees more space. Today they are outside the hive as usual, but it is again quite warm.

So, some experimenting here at Poppy Corners. It'll be interesting to see how it all turns out.