Category Archives: my garden

What happened in the garden.

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When I returned to California from the Rocky Mountains at the end of the year, I was surprised at the changes in the garden. Shrubs that had barely begun to take on fall colors before Christmas, suddenly were bare and brown. Though we’d had plenty of frosts in the fall, the zinnas under a covered walkway continued to hang on — until the solstice, apparently…. They heard it was officially winter, and they knew in their deepest parts that winter is not for them. They lost their will to live.

The lemons are all bigger and brighter. This tree is so leggy, it needs a good pruning, but I don’t know quite how to proceed at this point… and I especially am puzzled about when to do the job, because it seems always to be bearing. Maybe Alejandro will know what to do.

My spider plant, though it was healthy and green through last winter and this frosty fall, seems to be dead. But cyclamen are popping up, no doubt loving the heavy rains that have thoroughly soaked the ground. Yesterday I found several containers in the yard that had collected a foot of water in the last ten days.

The fountain that I’d turned off before leaving is filled to the brim from that rain, and while I was gone Alejandro pruned the plum and fig trees, and the wisteria. The pomegranates left on those dwarf bushes turned pale from cold and old age. I’ll pluck them soon and put them out of their misery, and prune those bushes, which have grown slightly out of bounds.

With so much of the landscape at its most drab, I was surprised to see bright calendula faces. Dear, hardy little garden friends! God bless you, and all your companions as well, the many who are having a brief rest while you keep watch, and shine brighter than the January sun.

November is here.

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Nothing could be more pleasing than to have rain in the night and morning, followed by sunshine and blue skies. The cold air smells delicious.

I walked in the garden to cut zinnias and pick up pineapple guavas from the ground. I cleaned all the redwood twigs out of the fountain, which has been turned off for a couple of months, and filled it from the hose. It’s now bubbling and the garden sounds normal once more.

There have been years when not one guava got ripe, but this year I’ve had many, and big ones. Usually I just scoop with a spoon out of one at a time, but yesterday I took all the flesh from ten or so into a bowl, and ate the lot with cream.

November is here!

More figs and flowers.

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It is a joy to have sunny days in which to work in the garden that is heading into its quieter winter months. This is the season for harvesting and cleaning up, often at the same time.

I don’t know if there is any good solution to the overcrowding of the Fig Tree Corner of my garden. There are no plants that I am willing to remove, so I guess I’ll have to just try cutting them back a little harder this winter.

Only the pomegranate bush is a little prickly, when I try to push in next to it to reach a fig. The salvia on the left I just push aside, when I stoop down to enter under the tree’s canopy and then stand up again as straight as I can to reach the fruit up high in the center… or not reach it, which is often the case. The hopbushes (dodonaea) between the tree and the fence don’t actually have a lot of width to trim back. There is the olive in a pot, lavenders, yarrow, and lithodora almost completely hidden under the tree for most of the year.

Birds have been eating many of the figs this summer. They take a big hunk out of one the moment it is beginning to be ripe, and then the wasps come along and gorge on the sweet flesh for a few days, before it is left abandoned in shreds, still hanging.

I was introduced by a mutual friend to a fellow gardener who lives on three acres not too far from me. Rosemary had more figs than she could use this year, so I went to her house and we picked side by side for a half hour; I brought home slightly more fruit than she kept to share with friends that very morning. Her figs were a more standard variety than my dwarf Black Jack type, maybe a Mission or Brown Turkey. They were awfully sweet and tasty, with more concentrated figgyness than mine typically have. I dehydrated most of them.

Yesterday I stood on the edges of my planter boxes to harvest the Painted Lady runner beans and cut down the thick vines that have hardened to sticks. It’s tricky to pull the long stems back over the fence from behind my neighbor’s woodpile, where I know he won’t be making use of the attached bean pods.

While I was standing up there, I got a fresh view down under the zinnias, and saw that I had three beets ready to pick. I didn’t even remember that any were growing there, next to the eggplant where the pumpkin vine had been encroaching. But when I harvested the  pumpkins, the beets were exposed. Also an eggplant that had been partly eaten… but when I cut off that part, half of it was intact and lovely.

Four little pumpkins got ripe, and there is one more that might possibly. These are the ones I grew from seed collected from a decorative pumpkin last year, because it turned out to be the sweetest of all I  had roasted. I’ll let you know if these prove anything like that tasty.

I’ve been trying to get calendulas to thrive in my garden again, the way they seemed so effortlessly to do in ages past. I think back then they received more water and sunshine; this year they are finally, happily blooming in the planter boxes, after taller (shading) plants have been removed, and I got the watering schedule corrected: those boxes were getting less than half the amount of drip irrigation they needed.

Most of my garden is pretty dry, with minimal irrigation, so anytime I have a plant that needs more than that I put it in the boxes. Right now most of the space is given to zinnias, the last sturdy stars of summer.

I give Nature a hand.

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Yesterday I wrote about the dwindling supply of milkweed leaves for my hungry caterpillars, and Linda responded in a comment that they have been known to eat butternut squash in a pinch. I was so grateful for her help, and was ready to go shopping for it and to put cubes of vegetable on sticks for them before I would head out of town.

But when I went out to check on the cats they seemed to have stopped eating, and one of them seemed to be working himself into the hanging J position. They hadn’t eaten all the leaves available. I got quite a surprise to see three more, slightly smaller caterpillars on the pathetic Narrow-Leaf Milkweed plant nearby! Should I also try to rescue them?

Later when I checked again, still none of the six were eating — was that because it was cool and cloudy? — but they had moved and were all stretched out vertically. In case they were going to return to chomping through the leaves, I decided to bring a stem of milkweed over from under the fig tree. There was one with a strange horizontal, shallow root, which pulled up easily. I stuck it in the ground so that its leaves touched the other (healthy) plant; I anchored it with rocks and gave it a good watering. I finished packing the car and drove off.

When I get home again next week you can be sure I will let you know the current state of affairs of what is now a group of six Monarch caterpillars. For now, I want to show you something pretty I noticed on the patio — the white begonia is tall and healthy, much bigger than last year. It’s a pristine, comforting bit of newness when the earth is making its yearly descent into death and decay.