Category Archives: other gardens

Wandering into Urban Homesteads

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God willing, today was the last day I will have to live out of my car. The floors took two weeks instead of one. In the meantime I have forgotten how to keep house–having a thick layer of fine wood dust on everything each night has beaten me down–and haven’t learned how to be a gypsy. I’ve been leaving the house at 9:00 and wandering around the county doing little errands or some shopping. I can take all the time I want to try on clothes or look for that special title at the library’s used book store…

But today, Memorial Day, the library was closed, and there was no place to be. My bed, my computer, and some vegetables were what I longed for. I have lost all my sociability and courage and just want to be a housewife hermit for a few months.

But before today’s last straw, some outings I enjoyed were gardening at church, and having a long-overdue chat with my priest; sitting in Starbucks on a day of pouring rain and drinking the largest Café Mocha I’ve ever indulged in; and visits with crafty gardening friends.

K. and S. got more chickens, and a hive of bees! They are growing everything from parsley and onions to raspberries and blueberries. K. has been knitting sweaters and socks. It was lovely to catch up on their homesteading developments.

One night we visited with our longtime friends who I will call Art and Di. Di is one my best-ever book friends; we never have enough time to sit by a fire in winter, or on the patio in summer, to talk about our reading and how it is all connected. She and my husband never tire of sharing music from their old and new favorite musicians.

Art creates beauty, whether it’s in his sketchbook or the garden. Among the santolina, lavender, germander and California poppies he had this yellow-flowered giant I wasn’t familiar with. He said it was sage, and wanting to know just what sort, I went home and researched it online.It didn’t seem to be in the salvia group, so I set several of my botanical sleuths on the chase and found out that it is Jerusalem Sage, not a salvia but Phlomis fruticosa. I also learned that Salvia and Phlomis are both members of the Lamiacea family, also known as the mint family.

In addition to propagating unthirsty plants such as the ones that populate the textured garden in their front yard, he has created a clever drip/wicking irrigation system that gets the needed amount of water right to the roots of his back yard vegetables. In the photos here, if you look closely you can see that the wick goes into a piece of hose carrying the moisture deep to the root zone. The paper bag that normally hides the water pot from the sun has been lifted briefly for me to see it.


Writing about these inspiring gardens and people I love is helping bring my most stressful day and fortnight to a better close than I thought possible when I sat down here an hour ago. Just remembering gardens and books and good friends is soothing and healing.

Week Full of Big Events

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The kitchen was gutted on my Big Birthday, leaving us to camp in a corner of the living room with an electric skillet and microwave that more than once have overloaded the power strip, so I have learned to take turns, at least until Sergio and Jorge and Edgar finish the electrical work and turn all the circuits back on.

Paper plates are the most uncivilized and literally distasteful thing about this week; I never use them even when we camp in the wilderness, so why should I have to in my own house? Must retrieve some real plates from a box for tonight, so the food will taste right again.

As we were dealing with rain and illness, the weeds were taking over the yard. Still, ranunculus do grow tall, and these showed above the robust sea of green. One Big Event this week was the pulling of all the weeds in this bed, accomplish by moi.

Today is a wonderful commemoration of a resurrectional event, when Christ raised Lazarus, so we have Lazarus Saturday, with celebrations. After the Liturgy, there is a clean-up effort to get the property and buildings all beautified for Holy Week and Pascha, but I didn’t go, because I did my such prep work at church yesterday.

After shopping for plants and dirt, I planted all new plants in nine containers, ranging in size from half-wine barrels to smaller clay pots. That might not have taken five hours if I didn’t have to start by emptying three of them, heavy with old dirt, into my wheelbarrow, which I labored to drive what seemed a quarter mile to the dump pile. Then I loaded up some compost from the other side of the pile to put in the bottom of the containers. I went the long way around buildings if it helped me to avoid steps–I didn’t like trying to do wheelies.

The huge bags of Supersoil I’d bought to top-off the containers were almost too weighty for an old woman. But I had heaved and dragged all four of them into my car earlier, and I managed again, to get them into the wheelbarrow, then out of the barrow on to the ground so I could grab double-handfuls of the rich stuff and nestle it around all the little flowers. The picture shows the three old medium-sized wooden containers that I’d moved from one area to another. Though the weather was perfect for gardening, it was too bright for good photography.

After weeding some, and cleaning up all the mess, I was surprised at how sore and tired I was. I went home in time to clean up and recover a bit, and return for Matins of Lazarus Saturday. The church had been decorated, while I was decorating the gardens, and was full of calla lilies, with palm fronds on the chandelier.

Today Mr. Glad and I worked at home, and I tackled the back yard. The mass of weeds is ten times that of the front yard, but I rested at one point by this table, looked at the “trees” instead of the looming “forest,” and thanked God for the strength to work, and for the spring flowers. This pot of nemesia that one friend gave me, I’d like to put in a pot so it can spill over the sides.

The children and husband and friends were so good to me for my birthday. One interesting gift I received was an olive tree, hand delivered from Oregon by my son and decorated with drawings by the grandchildren.

I’m going to buy a big pot to put it in, and remember that “I am like a green olive tree in the house of God: I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever.”
(Psalm 52:8)

 

 

Flowers of Matins

church, Lent, other gardens, trees,

One lovely thing about attending more Matins services during Lent is being able to see the flowers in the early morning light. When I walk out the church door to my car, I reach for my camera, and –more often than not, it’s missing!

This morning I found it in the pocket, and walked around a while snapping pictures.

This first one of a camellia has a stray redwood twig hanging on. We have a lot of those cluttering up the garden beds, as there is at least one tall Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) on the property. Check out the link if you are unclear about the different types of redwood trees.

Long ago when I was in labor of childbirth with my Valentine baby, a friend brought me a bouquet of daphne for my bedside; that was my introduction to the heady scent of this plant. I never realized until this month that I’ve been looking at it growing at church for several years.

  

This afternoon I had another photo opportunity and my camera was home on the computer table where I’d been uploading these pics. So now, I’ve put it back in my purse, and I’m considering an outing tomorrow for the sole purpose of photo-shooting, to catch more glimpses of early spring in my neighborhood.

Watering the Garden and the Soul

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I’m sharing some pictures from my church’s garden, where I am privileged to work a few hours a week. All these I took just this afternoon.

Garden soil tends to dry out when we get this far into summer. Maybe it’s because we gardeners get lax, after the super-scorching days have passed, and don’t water deeply enough. But when the earth gets to a certain degree of dryness, it sheds water, rather than absorbing what it needs. You can stand there with a hose for ten minutes, and then put your finger down into the dirt and discover that one inch down it’s bone-dry.

This water-repelling phenomenon happened to me at church today. Last week I planted lots of violas and stocks. The weather is still borderline too warm for them, but we are getting the property ready for our big food festival coming up, and I thought they would do o.k. if they were kept moist.

(Two plants–the large green leaves are the Burning Bush, from the Holy Land. And the red berries are hips on a Nootka Rose.)

There are several of us who irrigate the plants that aren’t on automatic watering, and sometime in the last week someone of us let the ground dry out. Today some stocks were languishing so much that I knew they wouldn’t look good in a week, so I drove down the road to the nursery and bought some more stocks, and some more violas. Came back and soaked the ground, and mashed the water into the baked soil with my trowel, and re-planted.

I often think, at such times, how much extra time it takes to re-do and fix things, that if I had just done them right, wouldn’t need fixing. And immediately I thought of the spiritual counterpart. Lately I had let things dry out, just when the cares of this world were making me more thirsty than usual.

Most likely the soil of my soul was not able to take up the moisture needed from the showers of blessing I was getting. If only I had been more constant in feeding and watering my soul…but I hadn’t. And it got to the point where extra attention was needed—more time and labor, to overcome the effects of the stress of drought. I don’t want to look like some of those Johnny Jump-Ups that I saw splayed on the ground! But even they, after their soil was moistened up so that they could drink, quickly revived and stood up straight.

Repentance is not self-flagellation; it is an opening flower.
-Fr. Kallistos Ware