A single flower is blooming on the rockrose, in the rain.
Category Archives: my garden
Our Kind of Fall
Reading as many blogs as I do has the subtle effect o
f making me want to bring my neighborhood in line with the music that autumn plays in most other places. For example, I found a November poem that is all about the violent wind, when we usually have to wait a month or two later for that sort of thing. It didn’t fit with my reality.
It’s definitely Fall here, but our notes sing a quieter background harmony, linking us more obviously to summer. Even the window art at the grocery store is mostly sunflowers to go with the pumpkins and turkeys.
All of the pictures from my garden were taken on this sixth day of November. A strawberry is ripe, as “ripe” as ornamentals get, but is decorated by a few of the telltale fallish pine needles that are slowly covering everything in that part of the yard.
The sign for the orange cherry tomato is hiding deep under the exploding foliage, and I can’t remember if it is a Sungold or a Sunsugar, but the fruit is still ripening, and nearly as sweetly as a month ago.
Mr. Glad stopped us on the way to Vespers last week to take this picture of clouds in a blue sky. Not rain clouds, sad to say. The grass has that November look, from having dried up and then been rained on a little, not enough to create any new green color. Our autumn is drier than usual, which is a hard kind of gentleness.
The furnace has been turned on, which means that we keep the windows closed, though with the days mild, and the air so fresh and soothing, I wish we could have them open. I just have to go fully out of doors if I want to get into the natural atmosphere.
It’s still not really cold enough to have a wood fire, and we haven’t had a frost yet, as you can tell from the tomatoes.
These are the hens and chicks near the new planting bed out front. I set out all the new ground-cover starts this week, and some of the thyme is blooming still.
October is the month to plant peas of any sort, and this year I bought sweet pea (those are the flowers) and snow pea seeds, but I never got around to actually putting them in the ground, which means that the failed flowering fennel and the nasturtiums are free to paint an impressionistic scene. The background music is called “Flowery Fall.”
We like rain on our parade.
Two special blessings today, neither having to do with Halloween. Our baseball team the San Francisco Giants were back in town (We consider them our team though we don’t live in San Francisco) after winning the World Series in Kansas City earlier in the week; they have won the series three times in five years. Today was the parade and ceremony to celebrate and honor the team and it was also a rainy day.
Considering
the drought, no one of the thousands of people in attendance seemed to mind the rain one bit. Several speakers at the ceremony mentioned it as an extra blessing and even thanked the rain as well as every human participant. Mr. Glad and I were here in our town watching some of the festivities on the computer and we left the door open to the back yard so we could hear the rain. Everything smells fresh and fallish.
It was a good day to go to Peet’s and buy some coffee beans. A flock of roosters calls that parking lot their home, and they 
didn’t mind the rain, either.
Earlier in the week when we were watching a World Series game that our team lost, we had son Pathfinder here to eat dinner with us, and I made an old family favorite that I thought he might like, Fiesta Corn. I’ve read recipes for this that call it Mexican Spoonbread. It’s cheesy and corny with some green chiles, and I forgot to take a picture of it cut into a slice.
The zinnias are putting on their final show pre-frost. This one pink bush has been the biggest producer of blooms, and has converted me from my former stance against this color of zinnias. The flowers look even nicer and last longer now that they don’t have the sun beating down directly overhead. (The picture also shows a few of the gazillion redwood needles that fall in our yard from the tree over the fence day after day and demand our attention.)
My favorite orange variety seem to really like the cooler weather; I even had enough to make an all-orange-zinnia bouquet with some sage and fennel flowers.
As of yesterday morning I still had not prepared the soil for my new planting out front, and I knew the rain was coming and would gum up our adobe soil again for who knows how long. So I put aside all the indoor tasks and began to hack at the brick-like dirt with my shovel, hoping just to get some bags of compost mixed into the clay before the showers began last night.
I managed to do that and also to collect some odd steppingstones from here and there to heave into tentative places. I didn’t die, but before I was halfway done I was lying on my back on the crunchy former lawn berating myself for ever committing to that project in the first place. I am too old for this kind of fun!
The same market that had the Giants cheer on the window has this lovely display inside, with all things pumpkin including hard pumpkin cider, which if I had had the foresight to pick up a bottle, would be the perfect way to celebrate all of this week’s special blessings. Most of all, rain!
Feelin’ good in the fall.
It feels good to have our favorite baseball team playing in the World Series, and as I type the San Francisco Giants are playing the third game against the Kansas City Royals. I come over to the computer during the commercials and sometimes also when I am too nervous watching the Royals at bat.
We went to one of our favorite nurseries today, driving through vineyards and brown fields and clumps of oak trees, under a blue sky. As soon as I heard that we were headed out into the country, I was so excited, anticipating strolling around in the pleasant air. It felt good to wash all the dishes that had piled up – then we were off.
At the big nursery we were the only customers for a while as we browsed the perennials for a few drought-tolerant plants to use as ground cover in the front yard. One of the plants that was suggested to us was this verbena that we knew was already blooming all over the sidewalk at home, where I later took this shot.
At the garden center I had to keep reminding myself that we don’t have space for this or that beautiful or interesting plant, but I did remember to buy a little bay tree, inspired by some of you who mentioned that you grow them in pots. It’s a Grecian bay, bearing the type of leaf one buys in the spice section of the market, and not the California Bay Laurel that is native around here, which would outgrow a pot too fast, I think.
On the way home we stopped at our favorite fruit stand where they had a contest going to guess the weight of this pumpkin. We tried to recall the size of that ton+ pumpkin in my recent post, and put in our guesses for this one at about 1300 and 1400 pounds.
Last week I found some of my all-time favorite Pippin apples in a store and made some killer apple crisp to share with friends, and my love for apples was rekindled. Cooking and eating apples when they are in season, coming off the trees in our local orchards, is the way to go. Too many times in the last year or two I have tried to make something appley with apples from across the world, or fruit that had been languishing in cold storage. I hope I have learned my lesson now. Today I bought some more Pippins at the fruit stand and once again have a stockpile of substantial, useful, and of course tasty emblems of the harvest season.
Here are the plants we came home with. Left to right: Australian Astroturf, Scleranthus biflorus; Lawn (flowerless) Chamomile, Chamaemelum nobile; Pink Chintz Thyme; the bay tree. 
Our project is to put some steppingstones and ground cover into an area of our dead lawn not far from the front door, in the lower right-hand corner of this picture that is mostly taken up by just half of the sweet olive (osmanthus) bush. It’s a pleasure to work close to the osmanthus, because it’s so often bearing its tiny perfumed blossoms that I have gushed about in this space more than once. They are doing that right now. 
A couple of weeks ago I dug big clumps of orchard grass out of this lawn area, and this afternoon I got a little more done removing the grass thatch that is embedded in adobe clay. Eventually I will add some compost and the new plants.
Meanwhile the trailing zinnias are thriving in the slightly cooler weather. They are my autumn decorations and I don’t at all mind not having a pumpkin or a gourd out front. Anyway, I already have a box of plants taking up space on the front step and who knows how long they will have to hang out there.
And look at this darling portulaca blossom. It is so little that I didn’t notice the much tinier insect inside until I had enlarged its picture. Since I planted it the cistus nearby has grown by leaps and bounds and overshadowed the portulaca, so I have to poke my camera underneath to catch a flower.
I’m sorry to say that between the time I started writing and now when I am finishing this post, Kansas City won the game. But tomorrow is another chance, and Sunday, too. We will watch one of those games with some friends, and maybe eat apple crisp together. I’m feeling good about it already.
Gladsome Lights 