California Kingsnake

Today, Tom and I were out in the garden looking at some flowers and cutting herbs for drying, when all of a sudden Tom hollered “Holy Cow! A big snake!”

It was a California Kingsnake (pictured above in its full glory; below is the smidgen of it I actually saw), a fabulous creature to have in the garden. It’s non-venomous and eats rodents (YES), lizards, and even rattlesnakes!

Ok, so we never saw its face

Our snake is between 1-2 feet (these snakes never get super large: according to CA Herps, they are most commonly 2.5-3.5 feet) and seems happy in a protected spot underneath a hedge of flowering woody perennials. Hopefully it’ll find a mate and lay some eggs around here. Kingsnake babies! Squee!

As you know, I’ve been trying to attract snakes to the garden for years. It’s quite possible that we have them and never see them. The only other snake we’ve ever seen here is pictured below - a sharp-tailed snake, about the size of my palm, which eats snails and slugs. Also fabulous, but maybe not quite as arresting as a California kingsnake!

A favorite spring recipe

Is your herb garden bursting its confines, like mine? Fresh oregano, marjoram, rosemary, thyme, sage, and chives are at their springtime best right now. It’s a wonderful time to cut giant swathes of the stuff, tie with twine, and hang for drying.

It’s also a fine time for cooking with the soft fresh herbs. You can make pesto out of practically anything, or omit the nuts and garlic and make a simple an herb-oil puree to pour over any vegetable or meat. Make compound butters (we especially like garlic and thyme butter on grilled steak) and freeze for later use. Bake a focaccia topped with fresh herbs, or make mint ice tea/lemon verbena tisane. Now is the time to be profligate with herbs, while they are still soft and green, before they become woody and concentrated later on in the summer (when you’ll be inundated with basil, cilantro, and dill anyway).

One of our favorite things to do with young herbs is chop up a selection (today I used oregano, rosemary, chive, and thyme) in the food processor, with about a cup of cornmeal, a liberal amount of salt, and olive oil. This makes a paste that we often spread on pork tenderloin. After baked (in a 425 oven until cooked through), the herbed cornmeal makes a nice crust which adds so much texture and flavor to the not-so-exciting tenderloins. This would also be delicious on a firm white fish like cod, or even on tofu, if you’re a vegetarian.

I’d love to know how you like to use fresh herbs from your garden. Feel free to share a recipe in the comments!

Practicing 'Bird'-fullness

It’ll likely come as no surprise to you that I’ve been seeing a therapist to process the feelings I’m having about my child’s recent trauma and recovery. One of the assignments my therapist gave me this past week was to take ten minutes every day in the garden to sit and do nothing.

If you know me at all, you know that ‘do nothing’ is not a typical phrase in my vocabulary. I’m a do-er. Always have been. My body is rarely at rest. If I do happen to sit in the garden, my body may look relaxed, but my mind is racing - I notice everything that needs doing, I think about the work emails piling up in my inbox, I wonder about next week’s meal plan - basically anything to keep my mind busy. Of course, keeping the mind occupied with everyday ‘busyness’ means that it doesn’t have to deal with pesky emotions. Brilliant plan. Except that, of course, I do need to deal with those pesky emotions.

I decided that I can create a ten minute period in between letting the chickens out and taking Tom to BART. I have a cushy outdoor chair and a chunky knitted throw to keep me warm on chilly mornings. So I’ve been sitting there, trying to calm my mind and do nothing. If a thought comes in, I tell myself just to think about it later. I take deep breaths and I watch the sun rise and start to shine through the leaves.

Did you ever see a show called “Sunrise Earth?” When the kids were little, we used to put it on every morning while we were eating breakfast, getting dressed, etc. Each episode showed, over the course of 30 minutes, a sunrise somewhere on earth. It was slow, it was silent (except for nature sounds), and it was beautiful.

What I realized this past week is that I have my own personal sunrise earth right outside my back door.

We’ve had a bird feeder hanging on the chicken coop for years, and it’s been a constant source of pleasure for us to see who’s visiting or living in our yard. Because of the feeder, and our water fountain, birds know that they’ll have a regular supply of food and drink here, and so we tend to have a great variety of visitors. Watching the morning activity is basically just pure joy. The trees are full of birds; there’s birds on the feeder and below the feeder; there’s birds on the fountain and birds on the twinkly-light wires. And the conversation! Chattering, calling, singing - the sky is full of music.

Since it’s hard for me to do absolutely nothing, I have been opening the ‘Merlin’ app on my phone and setting it to record the birdsong. Over the course of ten minutes, it ‘hears’ about 15 different birds. Every morning there’s the regular customers: finches, titmice, chickadees, sparrows, crows, jays, doves, and woodpeckers. But some mornings the app will record a cedar waxwing, or a western bluebird, or a warbler, or a vireo. This is very exciting!

In this way, I am able to practice mindfulness (‘bird’-fulness!) without letting other thoughts intrude into my head. It’s a tool to get me to the place my therapist was aiming for - a place where my body and mind are both calm and relaxed, so that I can let go of some of the anxiety, worry, grief and fear that I’ve been experiencing since we’ve returned home from Georgia. It’s yet another way my garden is providing for me; it’s giving me a place to learn a new skill, one that will have positive repercussions for the rest of my life.

Maintenance

It’s about 80 degrees at Poppy Corners, and it’s that exact time when, every April, we say to ourselves, “Is the neighborhood pool open yet?” The season of flip flops and tank tops signals also that it’s time to do some much-needed maintenance at home. Tom and I always keep a running list, inspired by Monty Don and Gardener’s World, called ‘jobs for the weekend.’ We add to it all week and then begin to tackle it as soon as we’ve finished our coffee Saturday morning. Our list this week was literally as long as my forearm - typical for this time of year.

Luckily, I’ve already planted most of our summer veg, which I normally wouldn’t do until the temp is consistently over 50 degrees at night. But I’m scheduled to have knee surgery on May 8, so I thought it would be good to get all that done before then, and luckily everything has survived. Since we removed all the raised beds from the North Garden (to make the orchard), I used that wood to make the raised beds in the South Garden taller. We’re not getting any younger around here and taller beds will be helpful in that regard. I ordered three cubic yards of planting mix from a local nursery, and added that to the beds before planting. It’s good to have all that done.

But today, the first thing on our list was the irrigation system. Now that we’ve had the last of our (prodigious!) winter storms, it’s time to begin a regular irrigation schedule. It’s important to start out with 100% saturation in your soil; if you do that, you’ll just be topping it off every time you water, instead of playing catch-up. But the irrigation system hasn’t been used all winter, so it’s not as simple as just turning it on. Inevitably there will be some problems - breaches in the lines, clogged drips, broken micro-sprayers. Tom and I turn on one ‘zone’ at a time and go around watching what happens and making notes. Often, I’ll see an area that needs coverage, and we’ll add some lines. Sometimes an area is too wet and we’ll adjust that too. Tom always has a lot of repair work to do. It’s really good to get all that done before irrigation becomes crucial.

Can you see the swarm?

After that, Tom opened our top-bar bee hive. Two days ago, I was out running errands when I got texts from two different neighbors: “Your bees are swarming!” So I rushed home in order not to miss it and to see if I could capture it for my dad, who always wants our swarms. Alas, it was too high to reach with our ladder. I’m not even sure if they were our bees (there are many beekeepers in the neighborhood), but it was a good reminder to spend some time looking through the hive and adding bars for new brood and honey. Everything looked as it should, and Tom took a full bar of honey out for us. Opening the hive is now Tom’s job since I’ve become allergic over time; he’s gotten really good at it and never gets stung anymore. I hang back and look on longingly, peppering him with questions which I’m sure he just loves. At least I can handle the messy job of cutting up the comb and extracting the honey, though gravity does most of the work.

I also spent a good deal of time today cleaning out our enormous passionvine. It’s a Passiflora ‘Blue Horizon,’ and has gorgeous flowers and small black sour fruits. It supports a huge number of gulf fritillary butterflies every year, and is a stopping place for every curious neighborhood child in summer. I bought it as a living deer fence, assuming that it would die back every winter with our frosts (and therefore remain manageable). It’s never done that, only gotten more and more enormous each year. It’s extremely promiscuous and shows up in all sorts of places I don’t want it to, so I’m always pruning the thing. However this year, we had so many nights of truly cold weather that the vine died back, leaving a hedge of dead leaves and flowers a foot thick. That was fun to hack through and remove. Now it looks quite bare, with just foundation vines on the trellis, but it won’t be long before that monster puts out new growth and begins the cycle all over again.

Tomorrow, we plan to wash the windows and screens, a once-a-year job that we loathe but that always makes such a difference in the way the light comes in our windows, so is totally worth it.

We also have reserved time for hiking both days. After all this rain, the hills are simply covered in wildflowers. This morning, we walked up to Shell Ridge where a guy named Phil (a volunteer with the Walnut Creek Open Space) has been working for ten years to restore a giant hillside with native flowers. This year it is simply spectacular, with every kind of California native annual you can imagine. Below you can see a very small section of the hillside, covered with poppies and chia. Tomorrow, I’m hoping we will have time to go a little further afield and hike in a place where we can ford some streams, which never gets old in our normally-arid Bay Area, and see nature-planted flowers.