Things that made me happy this weekend

We’re starting our seventh week of sheltering in place, and our lives seem to be made up of tiny moments of joy amongst all the other emotions we’re feeling. There’s lots to stress about, but here are a few things that made me feel good this weekend. Chiefly flowers, and there will be more pictures of flowers at the end. Very warm weather here has made everything go a bit nuts, in a very good way.

For a long time, I’ve been wanting to make salves, tinctures, and syrups from the herbs and flowers I grow in our garden. Now that I finally have time, I ordered this book and began the process. I have quite a lot of plantain, grown from seeds that my mother brought me back from the Chelsea Physic Garden years ago. Plantain salves are quite good for minor scratches and burns and stings, all of which are abundant around here. So I cut a bunch of leaves for a plantain salve and I am drying them on the herb rack.

The drier they are, the better, before I then soak them in olive oil for two weeks, and then blend with some of our melted beeswax. I’m anxiously awaiting our first elderberries to make syrup, and I may make another salve to help with my aching hands. I have lots of ideas I want to try. Being at home all these weeks makes me realize that I have an untapped resource that I should be utilizing. Well, I guess I do use herbs for cooking and drying, which is also great, but there’s so much availability and so many ways to use them. I’m glad to have a new project to tackle.

Speaking of projects, the shallots are just beginning to brown up in their bed (garlic still bright green), so I’m starting to think about how to dry them for longer than I usually do. Our main practice has been to put them up above the chicken coop to dry, but it’s crowded up there, and they need more air. Plus I want to dry them for at least four weeks this year before bringing them in to the house (after last year’s aphid debacle). I started looking up how this used to be done in the old days, and saw lots of interesting pictures of drying tables.

image credit: modernmissouripioneers.com

The table has slats so the onions/garlic can rest above and the greenery down below. Plenty of air circulation here! This got us thinking about some kind of rack to build, or if there is some way to repurpose our A-frame trellises, which are wrapped in chicken wire. Stay tuned for a solution on this. I love having a new building project to figure out! (I’m not sure Tom feels the same….)

I’ve struggled with this narrow border between the fence and the chicken run for a long time. This year, I think I’ve finally hit on a combination that really works. At the very back is a large, white-blooming ceanothus, then we have both orange and red geums, followed by a red salvia and a rangy white salvia. Then there is a new planting of verbascums, plus the California poppies in front looking all cheerful. There’s a new dahlia here which is starting to come up with black foliage and a blood-red flower, and the cinquefoil which is yellow will bloom also in summer. I’m so pleased with this planting scheme.

The verbascum has the most adorable fuzzy stamens in red and yellow. I adore them.

image credit: thefield.asla.org

I watched a documentary on Piet Ouldof filmed by Hauser & Wirth (you can find that here - I hope it is still available to watch). He is the landscape architect who designed the High Line in New York and the Lurie Garden in Chicago. I find his drawings just spectacular, and his gardens absolutely delightful, like modern meadows. It’s worth watching the documentary just to see the seasons change in the gardens.

This is a feature about a man who lives in the redwoods in Northern California. I do not know how to adequately describe him or his farm. He built his home (and several others on the property), beautiful gardens, a gallery for his redwood sculptures, several yurts for camping, and knows as much about redwoods as any park ranger. He’s looking for people to pass all this on to, and teach about the conservation of this kind of property. It’s an amazing video and he’s an amazing guy. And he’s 88!

Finally, I am so excited to have procured an egg basket. Here it is on its perch outside the back door. We’ve never had one - I’ve always carried eggs in my shirt, and sometimes in my pocket (and you know what happens to eggs in pockets). It’s such a little thing. But I love it and I feel like a real farm girl when I go out to gather eggs.

Hope you are finding moments of joy in all the unknowns.

Tomato System 2.0

I think I write those words every year! I’ve tried so many ways of growing tomatoes. Many years ago, I started out (as everyone does) with those flimsy cages you can get at any hardware store. Then I graduated to larger store-bought cages, then homemade cages, then various trellising systems such as Florida weave, then pruned onto stakes, and now finally have settled on something that will last for years.

The idea is to emulate the way tomatoes are grown in greenhouses, on strings. Of course greenhouses are expensive enclosed buildings, which require careful ventilation. They’re built with a sort of grid of rafters so that wires can run across the top, and then strings can be tied into the wires, and the tomatoes trained on to the strings. Technically we have space for such a building (if not the budget), but it wouldn’t look right in our yard or our neighborhood, where the houses are built close together, and would likely require a permit. Our climate is such that we don’t really need such a large enclosed growing space. Plus, there’s the “pretty” factor, which is important to me. I wanted our system to be practical, while open to the elements, and artistic. At the same time, we’ve been trying to add vertical interest to the garden with all kinds of trellising systems and new mid-level plantings at the 6-8 foot level. So I asked Tom to build me some tall structures with cross beams that I could use as ‘rafters’ onto which I could tie the strings which would be the growing support for the tomato plants.

Tom has become quite a builder in recent years; he’s built us a farm table and benches, big wooden planters for things like hops, and of course the chicken coop. I knew he could do this project and that, while difficult, would provide some much-needed respite from his crazy job. It took him two weekends, plus some planning and sketch-up time, to come up with this design, which we tweaked a few times in the course of the project. We needed plenty of structural strength to stand up to winds and weather and random bumps by humans. We needed to be able to access the plants easily. We needed to be able to fit other trellises and hoops underneath them, for different crops and different seasons.

I’m quite pleased with the result. These trellises add a real sense of permanence to the garden, and will be great for our most important yearly crop (tomatoes). It has allowed me to plant 10 seedlings per bed, as each will be trained to its leader and side shoots pruned. I put the cherry tomatoes in the back next to the chicken coop, so I could let them grow a little wide and expand onto the fenced run, if we like. It’s possible (but maybe I’m stretching here) that squirrels will find the strings confounding, or too slight to confidently support their weight, and they’ll leave the fruit to us. We’ll have to see about that.

Each string is tied on to a crosspiece at a height of 6 feet, and then tied on to a wire ‘pin’ that I made from 16-gauge wire, which is firmly anchored in the soil at the plant’s base. Enough slack is left to give plenty of room for twisting as the season goes on. If the tomato wants to grow taller than six feet, I’ll extend the string at the top to the highest crosspieces which are at 8 feet.

I bought 200 of these clips which are made for greenhouse growing; they have a little clip which clips on to the string, and a big clip that holds the stem of the tomato plant. I intend to use about four per plants as they grow. Hopefully, with care, I can use them again next year.

Tom used 2x2 redwood posts to build the structure. Using my dad’s woodshop and tools, he was able to make angled joints to join the pieces together in the frame, for added strength. If you’re interested in knowing more about how he made them, or to see his sketch-up design, contact me here and I’ll get those plans to you. These structures were built so that they could be taken apart and stored each year, but I don’t intend to do that - I’ll leave them up year-round, as I believe they add so much interest to the garden.

All in all, we spent about $300 on this system. We felt this expense was reasonable, since we grow many hundreds of pounds of tomatoes each summer to preserve for the off season. Any method of trellising tomatoes costs money; my other idea for a permanent structure was cattle panels on t-posts, and those panels are $50 a pop and we would have needed eight of them. I much prefer these wooden structures. They will last for many years, and I think the instillation is beautiful.

April Arrangement

Here’s a simple Easter posy, which includes the pink version of California poppy (the Mission Bells mix), shelling pea blossoms, Cerinthe major purpurascens, sweet pea blossoms, Phacelia tanacetafolium, purple salvia, blue-eyed grass, and a sweet little surprise pink penstemon I found growing sideways on the very edge of the pollinator garden near the fence. Did I plant it? Who knows!

It’ll be a strange holiday, won’t it? We usually celebrate by joining our neighbors in a large outdoor potluck brunch (after the little kids have an egg hunt), and it’s always a fun time of fellowship, which we’ll miss. We’ll still have a family dinner with ham and maybe some spring peas from the garden. This little bouquet will help decorate our table.

Two things that heads-of-state have said lately have resonated with me: Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, reminded us that the Bible said that we are all parts of one body; and Queen Elizabeth said firmly, “We will be with friends again, we will be with family again, we will meet again.”

Hope you have a blessed holiday weekend.

Local Tomato Sale (plus other veg)

So many folks are looking to start a garden for the first time, and now is a great time to begin. Even if you don’t have a yard, you can grow most fruit and veg in containers. Start with the best potting soil you can find, water thoroughly every other day (probably daily when it gets hot), mulch the soil surface if you can, and feed once a week with an organic, low-nutrient fertilizer like fish emulsion. Grow bags are a great alternative to pots and have a lot of built in benefits such as allowing the roots to air prune, and they are mostly made out of recycled plastic. You’ll need at least a 10 gallon container for each tomato, but you can fit two peppers in that size pot, and many more lettuces.

Seeds are cheap and many things grow better from seed (cucumbers, squash, peas); however I have heard that many seed companies are running low on stock. You can check on my recommendations page for the seed houses buy from each year. You can start almost anything from seed except tomatoes and peppers - it is too late now to start those from seeds, so you’ll need to buy seedlings.

I’ve just learned that the Master Gardeners are selling the 24,000 plants they raised for their sales this year out of Orchard Nursery in Lafayette. All orders are online, with curbside pickup. There’s many different kinds of tomatoes and lots of peppers to choose from. Orchard is also selling many other veg starts as well as herbs and fruit trees/canes/bushes. I can’t speak for the other veg, but the tomatoes and peppers raised by the Master Gardeners will be far superior to anything you can buy at big box or hardware stores. The proceeds from these sales also benefit their local programs for gardeners, which is terrific. You can get your potting soil from Orchard, too - I like the organic Bumper Crop, but have also had good success with Paydirt.

This is a great project to do with kids, and absolutely fulfills science requirements. While inspecting your plants for bugs is a good idea, resist the ‘urge to purge.’ Do not spray your plants with any kind of insecticide. If you notice bugs like aphids or caterpillars, it is totally appropriate to remove them with your hands. First you might enjoy photographing them and posting your photo to iNaturalist, or removing them and studying them and learning about them. Again, this is science! (I recently completed a multiple-intelligences unit for my Psych class, and one of the ways people learn is through nature, so why not incorporate it into your home schooling curriculum?)

Even if you don’t have kids at home, gardening is something that can take you into a State of Flow and out of the State of the World, which is probably a really good thing right now. You might find that it becomes the thing that shapes your day. And you already know that a fresh tomato out of the garden (in season) is better than anything Safeway is going to deliver you. So why not go for it? And if you run into any problems, please contact me and we will work through those problems together. You can do it!

Our First Snake! *

*That we know of, that is.

This is a Western Sharp-tailed snake. It is endemic to the West from the Central Coast of California up through the Pacific Northwest. I found it under one of the bricks I use as vegetable markers. It’s about the size of a golf ball, all curled up like that, but these snakes only reach about a foot in length, so they are naturally small. It tends to like wetter areas in the garden, and guess what they eat? Slugs and slug eggs! This is so amazing. I could not have asked for a better first snake sighting. Yes, I’d like something to eat rats, and this snake won’t take care of that, but I sure do have plenty of slugs. I hope there are lots of these little snakes all over the garden!

Today was a great day. The sun shone! It was in the 60’s! I spent half the day doing classwork and half the day in the garden, which felt close to normal. Drunk on sunshine, I threw caution to the wind and planted out all my peppers. I have three 4x4 beds full of hot, sweet, and paprika peppers. The soil felt warm, the nights will be warm for the next ten days at least, and I think we are out of danger of frost. Normally our last average frost date is February 15, but we didn’t really have winter until March! And even as late as last night, it was quite chilly with snow down to 3000 ft. But tonight it all changes, and I’m hopeful that spring is well under way, now.

My mood is just so different on days like this, when I have some purpose to shape my activities. We are feeling very hopeful here in California that our curve is somewhat diminished; our governor was very quick to make social distancing recommendations very early in March, and we’re seeing some signs that that was a good decision. The battle is not won, however, and we also watch the news coming out of NY and Louisiana with heavy hearts. It was good to forget about the virus for a few hours. I hope you are able to do the same.