Archive for the ‘Gardening’ Category
A real post later, maybe…
Or maybe not; I’m swamped. But some quick notes.
Read to Huck & Rilla: Henry Hikes to Fitchburg; Chloe, Instead; Big Hungry Bear; Madeline; Anna Banana (book of jump rope rhymes). Notes on those to follow (Chloe in particular, since it’s new, and both kids loved it; had to read it three times in a row).
Carrots are up!
Roxaboxen rock-decorating continues intermittently.
Handed out poetry books today (volumes in the Poetry for Young People series, which we’ve collected over the years) and asked the girls to scatter, read, come back to tell something about the poet (time and place) and share a poem. We sat outside in the sunshine and they read or recited their choices. Great fun, we’ll have to make a habit of this. Jane chose Dickinson’s “I Dwell in Possibility,” Rose picked Theseus’s imagination speech from Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Beanie selected Robert Frost’s “A Patch of Old Snow.”
Everyone learned C, F, and G on the ukulele (those who didn’t already know them).
Wonderboy got a haircut the other day and looks quite spiffy.
Rose invented a board game.
The freesia is incredible this year, and between it and the jasmine, the whole yard is fragrant. And I have irises about to bloom.
I don’t remember planting them!
Aphids all over the rosebush, and rumor has it all 1500 ladybugs have decamped to the tall grasses on the other side of our back fence.
March 2, 2012 @ 5:21 pm | Filed under:
Gardening We planned to read today (The Mitchells, continued) but instead found ourselves sitting in a patch of dirt building a construction site for Huck. Four of us, ages 5, 11, 13, and 43, digging holes and heaping pebbles and smoothing roads. The site foreman was napping during this endeavor. His reaction upon discovering it, post-nap, still glassy-eyed, was akin to what I imagine Miss Rumphius felt when she happened upon that first breathtaking patch of wind-sown lupines after her winter in bed.
A few yards from Huck’s Struction Site lies Rilla’s Roxaboxen. A while back I gave up on a rickety old end table we’ve had forever. It has the loveliest blue-tiled top and was a hand-me-down from a beloved friend, so I kept it around long after it could be relied upon to stand upright. Finally, I unscrewed the legs and gave them to the kids to play with. The tiled tabletop is a tray for houseplants now.
By “gave them to the kids” I mean I tossed the wooden legs into the backyard and waited to see what became of them.
Here’s what.
You are now entering the Roxaboxen.
Elsewhere in the garden, a surprise: I forgot I’d planted freesia!
They smell as heavenly as they look.
Another gray day, but a nice gray. Grey, if you’ll allow me to go all Vicky Austin on you. You could see the blue glimmering just behind the clouds. We’re expecting gardening weather this weekend. Mostly that will mean roaming the yard staring broodingly at the dirt for signs of seeds that can’t possibly be ready to come up yet. Hasn’t even been a week, for Pete’s sake.
But there’s comfort in that brooding, impatient, soil-prodding stage. I do my best writing while I’m gardening. I never realize I’m doing it until later when it’s time to work and that knotty scene that’s been giving me fits is suddenly there, formed, waiting for me to get out of the way. And then the next scene crowds in and pitches a fit, and gets stubborn and silent, and refuses to speak to me, and I have to go back out and poke at the dirt for a while and dislodge all the seeds that are never going to sprout if I don’t leave them alone.
In other news, I really miss Downton Abbey.
I also miss reading fiction, which I’ve been unable to do these past few weeks: it’s the writing, again. Instead I keep drifting toward long New Yorker pieces about politics or Grey Gardens, or reading Didion essays (for the first time; I somehow never got around to her before) and gardening books and Helene Hanff, or going five, six, seven years back in the archives of a blog and reading the whole thing from start to finish like a novel, even the comments. I have strange reading habits, at a certain stage of writing.
I’m in the mood to reread (for the umpteenth time) Katherine White’s Onward and Upward in the Garden, which made me, at twenty-three, long to be a gardening writer and also to grow peonies. I have yet to do either, but the day is young.
All weekend I couldn’t drag myself out of the garden, but today is cold and rainy. That’s all right; this is much better writing weather. This blog is going to be low-key for a while. I’m in the cave.
Outside my door, I hear the pleasant clatter of dice against a table, over and over, and murmuring girl-voices. Rose and Beanie are playing D&D. Rose is the game master, the story-crafter. Beanie was delighted, this morning, when she rolled a charisma check and came up high enough to converse with the black dragon she’d encountered. Apparently Rose does an excellent extemporaneous dragon.
Rilla has all the Draw Write Now books spread out across the bedroom floor. There are horses and dolphins to be drawn. I will emerge to a menagerie in crayon, later this evening. The boys are playing Wii Party. Jane is getting ready for her web design class. Scott’s got music playing, something with lots of inquisitive trumpet, while he tackles the lunch dishes. Crows are calling through the rain. Yesterday we planted seeds: radish, butterhead lettuce, carrots, field peas. And in the flowerbeds: cosmos, sweet alyssum, California poppy. I found a few stray sunflower seeds that had spilled out of last year’s packet into my gardening basket; we tucked those at the corners of the veggie patch. I’ll have to remember to plant those blue morning glories again at the base of the stalks when the sunflowers come up.
Perfect timing, this rain.
I spent most of the day in the garden, most of yesterday too. I found some old bricks and used them to lay out one end of a small raised bed for our veggie patch this year. We’ve planted banana peppers, onions, and cilantro from starts, and there are seeds to go in tomorrow: carrot, butterhead lettuce, and radish. I’m not sure anyone in the family cares much for radishes, but they grow so quickly and are fun to harvest. Oh, and we’ll plant a few beans. We buried a couple of seed potatoes this afternoon. Will I ever cease to marvel at this climate? February was always the longest, hardest month back east. My children love snow (those who remember it), but not I.
Saw our first monarch of the season today! Alas, it made two passes around our yard and fluttered on by. My milkweed has buds but isn’t open yet, and may not bloom at all—it’s horribly infested with little yellow bugs I thought were a particularly squicky kind of aphid, but now I’m doubting. We recruited an army of ladybugs, who munched dutifully for a while but have now flown home to check for fires or something.
Bees: a respectable number, but not the legions we hope to see when the salvia blooms.
I took a million pictures today but none of them came out. Ever since I dropped it on the street during Comic-Con, my camera is reluctant to focus.
Bloom notes, mostly for my own reference. I like to poke through my archives and compare…
geranium (three kinds)
tree mallow
Cape honeysuckle
lavender (two kinds)
jasmine (the one with the pink buds, not the white)
the yellow marguerites
African daisies
snapdragon
nasturtiums
sweet broom
viola
alstromeria
sweet alyssum (white and purple)
ice plant, in magenta profusion
bougainvillea (trying—I think I need to move it to a better spot)
red salvia (barely)
petunia
stock
Probably more things I can’t remember right now.
This list staggers me. I say that every year but staggered I am again.
FEBRUARY.
We do penance for this in October, when the very air crisps your skin and the only color in the garden is brown.
My plan for today was to read and to sew, so naturally I did neither of those things and spent most of the day in the garden. The weather demanded it. Perfect sun, perfect breeze. Rose and I moved a number of nasturtium seedlings from the back yard to the front; I keep trying to fill in a rather stark flowerbed right in front of the house, and nothing works. This is entirely because I am an inconsistent waterer. But also an optimist. This time, as all the times before, I firmly and deeply believe I will follow through and nurture those bitty seedlings to lush abundance.
At least this time, my unmerited faith in myself didn’t cost a penny. I planted a $1.49 packet of seeds in the back garden four years ago and they have multiplied enthusiastically. I’ve tried them in the front before, but it’s a sunbaked flowerbed that really wants to house succulents and cacti. So: I’m both inconsistent and foolish. But hopeful! These nasturtiums are going to be spectacular, I am certain of it!
In the back yard, I pruned a butterfly bush and the big cape honeysuckle to make a sort of archway leading to a nook by the back fence. Rilla and I read Roxaboxen yesterday, and you know what that means. (Hannah’s post reminded me that, like Miss Rumphius a while back, here was another beloved book Rilla hadn’t met yet.) She spent the afternoon painting rocks for edging a little house under the arching branches. I yanked out a mess of bermuda grass. Lots left to do—I completely neglected the garden last summer—but we made good headway today. She’s collecting dishes and stones.
I have only cut out half the squares for our Valentine’s blanket, but I did find the cord for the sewing machine today. Progress!
I’ve been enjoying (and shuddering at) all your snake stories in the comments. I have another one of my own to tell, but it’s long, and I have to scan some pictures. It’s a place story, really, but it’s full of snakes—the story and the place.
Oh, and Rilla finished my game of Oregon Trail for me. I hear my wife died—of snakebite!
October 25, 2011 @ 4:59 pm | Filed under:
Gardening 
We’ve just passed the five-year anniversary of our arrival in San Diego. We were going to commemorate it last week with a trip to a favorite park, but the three youngest kids have taken turns with a lovely little virus, so we’ve postponed.
After five years, you’d think I’d be used to the strange seasons here, but a Southern California October still feels novel to me. My garden dries up in August, goes dormant almost, unless I’m willing to douse it with gallons of water daily. (I’m not.) Now, after a week of wonderfully cool(ish) weather—why, the mornings have been almost brisk!—and sheltering clouds, things are perking back up a bit. Suddenly the roses are blooming. Up and down the block, my neighbors’ rosebushes look like the end of The Blue Castle. The cape honeysuckle is magnificent, swarming with bees. Geranium, lantana, plumbago, and morning glory: everywhere I look is color. Red, pink, orange, sky blue, violet.
We planted lettuce starts and peas this weekend. There’s one melon ripening on the cantaloupe vine, and the watermelon I planted over the summer is finally thinking about blossoming. Will it produce? We shall see.
(My garden attracts all sorts of critters.)
August 26, 2011 @ 4:27 pm | Filed under:
Gardening When my sunflowers were about a foot high, I planted morning glory seeds near the base of each stalk. Now that the sunflowers are spent, I’ve been stripping off their lacy, bug-chewed leaves and watching the morning glories climb. The drooping sunflower heads are heavy with their own seeds; the goldfinches are in heaven. Empty shells litter the earth beneath the green hearts of the morning-glory leaves. When all the sunflower seeds are gone, I’ll remove the dry brown flowerheads and the stalks will disappear behind a curtain of blue trumpets.
This is a tremendous amount of fun to be had for the price of two seed packets.
Dwarf grapefruit tree. We’ve been waiting four years for this thing to bear fruit. Maybe this time?
