Tag Archives: Naked Buckwheat

Monday rain and flowers.

homemaking, my garden, , , , , , , , , ,

So many little tasks need doing before setting off on a journey. Of course there is the packing of supplies to use while I’m away, but there is also the making ready of Home. It needs quite a bit of tidying up, just to show the homemaker that she does love this place. Being extra nice to the garden by deadheading and cleaning up also does a lot to ease my sore heart, because it dreads saying good-bye once again.

And I’m in the middle of my biggest garden project ever, that is, the biggest I’ve ever taken on by myself. Ten areas of the garden will have been changed in different ways, when I’m finished. That sounds like it is almost everything, but it’s not. I won’t be finished for a few more weeks, mostly because October and November are better months for planting perennials around here, but also because I plain ran out of time this month.

Last fall I planted three clary sage plants, which are biennials and will bloom next June. I hope I can remember to start a few every fall so that I can keep them coming. Below you can see one of the older ones in the foreground, next to the pincushion flower I planted last week, and in the background two of the younger clary sages I was able to get from a local nursery recently.

As three big conifers to the south of me, including my own Canary Island Pine, keep growing taller, the amount of “full sun” in the back garden has been shrinking. It was a case of bit by bit, and then all at once. All at once I realized why the purple coneflower barely blooms, and even the recently planted Mexican Evening Primrose is not happy.

apple mint

Also there is the problem of the unpleasing design, or lack of design, from the last landscaper, of the area near my front door. I’m unwilling to live with it, so it’s taken hours and hours of thinking and thinking and reading on the Pacific Horticulture site, researching and shopping for plants, imagining how they will look if I put them here or there. I’m moving several plants installed last year to better places.

When I get new gallons or 4″ pots on site, I arrange them still in the pots where I think they work, and then I think better of it, and carry them elsewhere. To the front yard — No, the back yard — how will it look alongside this other plant that can take part shade? Weird? Probably… Oh well, they will have to get along. It can be exhausting being so unsystematic.

Naked Buckwheat

I’m excited to have my very own Naked Buckwheats — this is a California native that I often see in the mountains. My daughter Pippin has them growing wild around her place. And now me!

I decided to grow annual vegetables in the front garden near the perennial asparagus, because they will be sure to get enough sun there; but I need to add more soil first. I should have waited to buy the kalettes and Chinese Broccoli until that bed was ready, but I didn’t, and they were in little six packs, so I spent an hour transferring them to larger pots so they won’t get rootbound while they’re waiting.

I have cut down the asparagus a few times, first because of the aphids, and then so that I could rake away all the mulch and add more soil, and new mulch. But spears keep coming up, and looking ferny lovely:

When I cut them, I throw away the fronds or chop them up for the worms, but there are always several that haven’t become fronds yet, and that are the right size for eating. I accumulated enough to roast a panful this afternoon.

And I made a batch of Jammy Eggs to have for snacks on the journey.

It’s to Wisconsin I am going, because my granddaughter Miss Maggie is getting married! It was barely over a year ago that her brother’s wedding took me to that state, and now back I go. It will be a very happy time, and I will be over my leavinghomesickness before you know it.

One of the asparagus beds.

It started raining this afternoon. Early autumn rains are just the best. I can leave the windows and doors open and breathe the rain, and hear it pitter patter. The drops began to fall when I was still in the middle of planting my Bouteloua gracilis, or blue grama grass (“Blonde Ambition”), and after I cleaned up my tools I still had to put out all the trash cans, plus an extra green bin a neighbor is letting me use. Four neighbors, two on either side of me, are always letting me use extra space in their green waste bins for my overflow.

Blue Grama Grass

Do you find that when you are getting ready for a trip, not only do you have the packing for the actual trip, and the everyday housework and cooking that has nothing to do with the trip, but also extra, surprise things that come up that take some of your precious time? I realized last week that I needed to lay in some firewood, and that took a whole day to deal with. I got a half cord and stacked it almost entirely by myself. In the course of that my neighbor Eric lent me his wheelbarrow and offered to repair my wheelbarrow. He noticed in going through my gate that it didn’t latch behind him, so I spent an hour figuring out how to adjust that latch. I don’t want the gate to fail to close when I’m away, if he should come for the wheelbarrow.

And what do you know, I also got inconvenient visitors this week — ants! They have been mostly crawling around on my computer table and keyboard — and my hands — so I am going to cut this shorter than it might have been, stopping at long instead of longer, and I’ll hope to check in from Wisconsin soon. But I still don’t have a tablet or anything larger than my little phone to work on, so I don’t know…

Happy Autumn Days to you all.

The very thing.

birds, mountains, poetry, wildflowers, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Web photo

The hawk dropped down to the shoulder of the road just ahead of where I was driving down the mountain. It was at the elevation where you start to see the elderberries that don’t grow much higher, about 6,000 feet. He carried something in his talons that touched the ground just before he did.

I didn’t see any cars in my rear view mirror, so I slowed to a stop in the middle of the road and looked out the window at him, a few feet away on the other side of the road. He looked calmly at me. I should say, he looked in my direction, because I don’t know… what if I were the first human he had ever seen? Does a bird focus on another creature’s face and eyes, the way a human baby does? I stared and he looked a little bored, for ten long seconds, and then he flew into a tree nearby.

salsify

That meeting was one of the exciting events of my drive down from the mountains this week. I’d stayed at the cabin two more nights after my family departed, and had anticipated that when I finally left I would do my typical stop-and-go meandering for at least the first few thousand feet of descent, say, from 8,000 to 5,000 feet elevation. Because in July there are many more wildflowers than in September, the month in which I most often have visited this part of the High Sierra.

When the rain began to fall, and fell harder the morning I was to leave, it seemed my plans would have to change, and I might only be collecting rocks for my garden, instead of wildflower pictures. I always love rain at the cabin, so I did not complain at all. And it surely wouldn’t be a bad thing if I got home sooner rather than later. But — about the time I’d finished closing up the place and packing my car, the clouds began to break up, so that this was my last view of the lake:

The first wildflower I found, one I hadn’t seen for years, was Mountain Pride, bordering the road. It and Wavyleaf Paintbrush had few flowers remaining, but they provided a bright contrast to the sky, water and granite. This is a picture of them taken four years ago nearly to the day, in the same place. The snow melted earlier this year, as there was not much of it, so the bloom peaked before I got here.

I noticed or met for the first time no fewer than 18 different species of wildflowers that day, most of which I wrote down in a little notebook each time I got back into my car to drive further along the road, going slow and keeping my eyes open for spots of color, or whatever else might appear. Some of the flowers that I won’t show you were:

Spreading Dogbane
Arrowleaf Senecio
Goldenrod
Deer Vetch
Ranger’s Buttons
Spanish Clover
California Aster
Delta Sunflowers
Groundsmoke

My favorite flower of the day by far was Bigelow’s Sneezeweed, a darling thing which I first saw in this area many years ago. I pulled over for it several times, and the last time was the best display, with bees and two kinds of butterflies drinking at the blooms.

One of them was the Field Crescent, of whom I didn’t get a good shot, but here is one I found online of this little insect:

Field Crescent Butterfly [Phyciodes campetris]
Mormon Fritillary

Should Nature at times, on our awakening, propose to us
The very thing to which we were disposed,
Then praise at once swells in our throats.
We feel we are in paradise.

-Francis Ponge

The corn lilies were blooming, and a beetle was on site for that glorious event, seeming to have lost its head over pollen:

Fireweed waved its purple flowers in the breeze. “It earned its name because this plant is the first colonizer in the soil after forest fires.”


This next picture shows an area ripe and ready for some fireweed to sprout and grow; it is a landscape resulting from the Creek Fire last fall.

That was the huge fire that necessitated closing the highway that we use to get to our cabin, the same week that Soldier’s family and I had planned to be up there. We went to the beach and took smoky pictures instead.

Already I saw wild roses blooming among the stumps, and this healthy milkweed:

I often have run across wildflowers with buckwheat as part of their common name. This page shows you how vast is that family, called Polygonaceae, that includes mountain sorrel, curly dock — and rhubarb, of all things. But the strange species I saw a lot of on my drive was Naked Buckwheat.

It has strong, wire-like stems that are tall and bare for most of their length, with white puff-balls at the tip.

Bridges’ Penstemon

I wanted to get a nice picture of the elder bushes in flower, and when I squeezed in close this bright and rather large beetle got my attention:

I began to think of all the fascinating and complex creatures that live their (often short) lives in “obscurity.” I bet no one else had ever seen that bug. God lavishes the earth with life and beauty as an expression of His generosity and love.

As I went down the mountain, it was like an hours-long birthday party with Him saying, “Stop here. See that flower? It’s one of the special gifts I’m giving you today.” Then, “Look there! A red and black bug I chose just for you.”

He gave me sneezeweed because they are my old friends. He introduced me to a hawk for something new. Butterflies fluttered, proposing the very thing to which I was disposed. This place was not paradise, we can tell that by the fire damage, and many other aspects. But there was a little taste of Paradise in my soul, and praise swelling in my heart.