Bravo on the garden!! I'm starting a balcony garden for my first real apartment at 30. Woo-Hoo!! Good to know that basil can last a while!! I love fresh Thyme too!! Yay Spring and Gardening!!!

OMG! I'm the first comment! Do I get a prize? this NEVER Happens. WOW!! Lucky monday for me!

Hey - I think Ezra Stooge built my house too! Because your story sounds just like mine: every time a plumber/electrician/serviceperson of any variety comes into my house and looks at stuff, he says, "Boy, I've been doing this almost twenty years and I've never seen anything like that!" Without fail. Good old Ezra!

I love the clay-pot edging! It's darling, and very creative.

Bring the small pots, if you have any leftover, inside and put what you like in them as display or objet d'art. My 4 year old currently favors, her socks,spatulas, and puppets.
Knit On!

Okay - I'm just kooky. I wanna trap door in My Kitchen, too! Even if it doesn't go anywhere . . .

If I were to do a pictorial of my weekend there would be a picture of my bed, one pair of pajamas, a lot of popcorn and some mention of Lifetime tv network.

Careful with the cucumber placement. If it's too close to the watermelons, you might get cross pollination and have some really bland, cucumber flavored melons. Unless you're into that sort of experiment...and in that case, proceed! It could be fun to watch!

I think your clay pots are very cute, but I think maybe you should just grow some flowers there or something, cause I just can't see how there is any room for a watermelon patch there! My dad gardens and his watermelon patch is huge! Plus they need sandy soil, I believe. Have you looked at the Earthbox? They are great, you can grow lots of veggies with very little space. Anyway, I am in hot hot Texas, and I plan to spend my summer in the Great Indoors! Do you have any good wine recommendations?

I think being on The Budget enhances one's creativity!

Laurie,
I think you should explore the secret trap door in your cupboard and take us along for the ride..
Whaddaya say?

Next year, when I have a backyard again, I am SO stealing your clay pot border idea. If that's okay with you! I love it!

Word! I planted my food garden this weekend too. I didn't go all crazy at the nursery like I usually do, and was shocked when the bill rang up to $30 instead of my usual $150-$200. More seeds, fewer 4" pots. What joy.

But then my tomatoes and marigolds started getting eaten despite the Sluggo. What could it be? Earwigs. New, Improved Earwig-Abating Organic Sluggo = $24.50. Hate you, earwigs!

You give me hope that your beautiful weather will someday [soon, I hope!] travel out this way. I'm so tired of winter. *sigh*
.

I just love that clay pot border - inventive and just cooky enough to be cute.

Good luck with the garden. I've already warned the next door neighbors that if their pet pygmy goat gets loose and eats my plants/flowers I'll invite them over for goat barbeque...

The secret door in your cupboard will either lead to Munchkin Land or is a leftover from a whole bunch of years ago when people had ice and milk delivered. I have one in my pantry. The deliveryman opened it from outside and put the ice or milk inside. As far as the hedge in your backyard...did Ezra ever have a wife??? Did she suddenly disappear? I love to hear about your gardening adventures! I live in an apartment with no yard, with a kitty who eats anything I try to grow. Keep us up to date on the Watermelon Hill! And, by the way, those old pots look great as a border!

Also loving the clay pot border!

I love love love the border of pots! That's fantastic! When we re-do our bathrooms, I'm going to take all the toilet seats out and cut them in half and use them for my borders! Not really, but that does conjure up a nice picture in the mind, doesn't it?

you should plant some catnip (or kitty ganja as my cats like to call it) for the kids! its cheap and grows inside or out.

Basil is great--we have this straggly basil plant in our kitchen that I hope will perk up when it goes back outside for the summer.

I think Ezra's dad built our house.

Couple tidbits I've picked up over the years: paint/varnish the inside of a clay pot to reduce it sucking the water away. Might not be good for veggies, but ornamentals are okay.

Use these water absorbing crystal in the potting soil - they release water over time and reduce watering (or in your case, keep the plant alive in the day when it's super hot). Some people use regular old baby diapers - soak them and put them in the dirt. Function the same way.

I think there are homemade drip irrigation thingies where you use pantyhose, empty 2 liter bottles, and a bucket! That seems, um, a bit unsightly.

Happy gardening!

You know if nothing else lives the zuccini will! And will produce beyond what you can use or foist off on unsuspecting friends.

There was a house in my old neighborhood that edge it's gardens with old wine bottles turned upside down and pushed into the dirt up to where the neck meets the bottle part. My husband refused to let me do it, mostly because he didn't want people to know how much wine I actually drink.

ok, this has nothing to do with gardening, but still I wanted to thank you for your posts. I truly enjoy your blog and love that you make me laugh and think. I love your perspective on things and it certainly helps put me in a better frame of mind, especially when I have been going through a rough time with le boy as of late. You have helped remind me that my life is bigger than that one problem and that I'll be ok if it doesn't work out the way I want it to. I have been knitting since Jan 2007 (started out as therapy and friend seeking) and then discovered blogs and internet friends in the summer of 2007. I have read your blog archives before and I am re-reading them, because they help so much - making me laugh and helping sorting out the stuff in my head. So thank you again. =)

Girl, I think you have green fingers AND thumbs! You are really doing great managing your little plot of So-Cal hot-hot-hot, and may you be blessed with another bumper year of zucchini and peppers. Hopefully they will inspire all the other seeds, starts and hold-overs from last year to get with the program. I see you have inspired Evan's mom to try zucchini, too!

Garden looks amazing and the pot border is brilliant! Please do,if you can find the time, publish photos of the zuke/cuke/pumpkin/watermelon adventure as the season progresses...I can't wait to see how it all works out!!!

Love your backyard. Too cute! And mobile plants... great idea! Alas, my teeny apartment has no yard and the teeny balcony only gets sun from 7-9am. Woohoo. No plants for me :(

As for your haunting, I've been thinking about it. My parent's house vibrated at odd hours and intervals; turns out it was one of the pumps (air intake? output? septic? hot water? I dunno) that was bad or mis-wired and it could have blown up or something had it not been fixed in time.

SO long story short, maybe you should get ol' Ezra's systems checked out.

HA!!! Ezra Stooge! Silly ol' stooge.

Your house fascinates me. I probably would have loved to live in it as a kid, what with all the mysteries and strangeness of it. Yeah, I was a geek. Probably still am. ;)

I like your take on the Christmas song. Bluejay in a lemon tree. heh

Love the pot lined bed--do you have Ezra Stooge buried under there?

I just had a thought - how about another sweepstakes this summer, and you can send autographed giant mutant zucchini to the winners?

You go get 'em, Ms. Green Thumb!

I have a friend who edged her garden in upside-down wine bottles (similar to your upside-down pots). I thought I'd suggest it as a creative alternative, so that next time you finish a lovely bottle of red wine, you can think about saving it for gardening use! :)

so not fair to taunt those of us whom winter will not leave alone! I want green! I want to plant seeds from another era!
BTW, I love the pot border. Way to use your resources!

Oooo, love gardening inspiration! Love your clay pot border- quirky and fun. The watermelon vines can climb out between them and take over the yard.

Perhaps Ezra was a buddy of Bob (my home's builder)- we have the odd hole in the basement that goes nowhere- but it covered in plexiglass so that you can see the dirt and wonder what else is back there. And the wacky light switches- one of which is upstairs and I kid you not, turns on the ceiling fan in the basement and two that do nothing at all (except make me wonder)

I'm with you with keeping the watering simple. The only other thing I do is try to gather all the water glasses that have water in them and dump them on plants in the garden. We also do this with our dehumidifier. I also know folks that keep buckets in their shower to gather water while they wait for the hot water to turn warm. Great idea that I just can't do.

Don't be so sure on spring having been sprung. I was curious, so I checked the outlook - although yesterday was coma-inducing 95°, today its supposed to be 83°; Tue 69°, Wed 73°, Thu 80°, Fri 76°, Sat 65°, and Sun 66°. I have no idea what to wear.

Your garden is much more fun to look at and read about than the expensive "I flew Charles in from England to design it" type gardens in books and some blogs. Yours is pretty and charming and real. Love the pot edging! Cute! :-)

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is my freaking hero.

I was thinking about you this week-end with the high temps down there! That's a bit of work for a hot week-end. Our basil didn't come back, but we do have a 'rogue' tomato LOL. The border-of-pots is a great idea and I agree, a budget enables me to get creative...what could be better?

Your gardening efforts are much more expansive than mine. I have a packet of seeds taped to the window (where despite being on the inside of the window, they undoubtedly froze the tushies off being in New England and all) to plant in a few weeks by the expedient of running a fork in the soil for a bit and then sprinkling the seeds over the hopefully turned soil. All the gardening done from inside my condo.

Ezra must have been a busy man, cause I'm pretty sure he built my house too!!!! Nothing is where it oughta be, and heaven help if you need to nail something into the wall...studs are just sporadically placed wherever they thought one would look nice!!!!

Next autumn/winter get yourself a catalog from High Country Gardens in Santa Fe, New Mexico (http://www.highcountrygardens.com/) They specialize in xeroscapic plants -- those are the ones that need 3 drops of water/week. P'raps they will some items of interest for the Purl Plaza :-)

I agree with Nancy Knits, you should check where the little door goes, and take us with you!

I was having the same thoughts as Leslie in Mass... what might lie beneath the hedge, might be causing the bumps in the night... ;)

Best of luck with the garden, I tried to have an herb one where I was renting one time, and planted some mint to keep the ants away, and my "ever so not brilliant" landlord pulled them up! The lady next to me tried to grow some tomatoes and he told her she had to get rid of "them weeds!" And then wanted us to water the useless grass...grrrr. At my house now I have lots of yard and LOTS! of mosquitoes!!! Oh, well.

Thanks for being so funny and fun to read!

Love the clay pot border - and lusting after the summer weather. We had snow here today in Southern Illinois!

I like the flowerpot edging too. Very fun. Moss roses are one of my favorite plants as well. They live through anything!

I think Ezra's daddy must have built my last house--it was in 1910, and had foot-thick walls. And very weird everything about it.

I'm very hopeful about your garden this year! Oh, and the old woody trimmings of the basil are lovely tossed onto a charcoal BBQ fire, with beef or lamb being grilled.

Oh to live in a place where the basil never dies! Amazing.

The pots were a brilliant idea. You are a genius.

Your garden looks great! Have you and Faith been taking green thumb classes?

The older and gnarlier that Meyer Lemon tree gets, the better the lemons will taste. Trust me on this.

I love your little pot-border! What a great idea.

When I lived over in Northridge, there was a recycling station on... roscoe? Near Tampa Ave. Anyway, they took-in the stuff from the green bins (grass clippings and stuff) and there always used to be a sign up on their front-fence that said "Free Compost". I think you just had to bring a bag to fill. Anyway... FREE. So if you need more dirt-n-stuff you might go check that sucker out? :)

Good luck with the new seeds!!

I think I am also a member of the People Who Live in Dwellings Built by Ezra (or PWLDBE). After one year of crawling around in the attic, we have given up on trying to figure out what the switch in our living room controls.

Great garden border. Sometimes a budget breads creativity.

Fun gardeN! I like the watermelon edging, it's cute and freeform and practical! Drip irrigation is way too spendy, I agree. I like to water my pots till the water runs out into the tray at the bottom. As long as there's water in there, they seem to do just fine. And hey, you find what works for you, with everything in life, and it always seems to work out just fine, so you go with the madcap gardening and we can't wait to see what grows! :)

Ol' Ezra's long-lost South Carolina cousin, Bubba Stooge, built my house. We have the same comments whenever people come to work at our house... Them Stooges sure did get around!!

My mother uses wine bottles to irritate her favorites. She plunks it in the ground, upside down and it draws the moisture in and drips back out. Or so she says. Maybe its just an excuse for the wine?

I LOVE it when you talk gardening! i am in the same boat as you - in a rental with a tight budget - so i have a couple of tips i've picked up recently. 1: if you line your clay pots with heavy black plastic (jabbing a hole in the bottom for drainage) they are as good as plastic pots. 2: when you buy sprouts for your salads that still have a lot of the seed remaining on them, don't throw them out when they start to lose their freshness - plant them and they'll spring up! i just did this with a pea and lentil sprout mix and they are now flowering and ready to go! value for money!

Laurie,

You lucky girl, you live in a climate where you can grow not only hot peppers, zucchini, and watermelon but the other hot weather vegies that I can never get to grow in my coastal climate.

Corn, oh corn, how I wish I could grow you. Basil, eggplant, every kind of melon, and did I mention corn?

Have fun with your garden. They're great for our health.

Love the clay pots! And seeing all those little holes on the top make me wonder if there are any plants you could start underneath so they vine up the holes and poke out the top! Maybe ivy...

don't forget to mulch.

Portulacas were the only thing that would grow in my front yard in San Antonio. Luckily, I love them!

Maybe I should do a plastic-pot garden this year...

how about some Rocket? it thrives being ignored.

Ooo, you will have to show us what the pumpawatadillathyme looks like! Imagine being able to carve, season and eat all at the same time.

I love the special "features" Ezra Stooge gave your house. Sounds even better than the wood baseboard glued to my kitchen walls as a back splash and the metal porch roofing installed upside down so that it fills with leaves and drops condensation on everything even when it is dry.

I'm happy you're having summer weather. We had upper 60's and lower 70's on the weekend; back to 50 degrees and rain today. All the snow hasn't even melted yet. Love the Portulaca. It's good for those times you forget to water :)

Sounds like CA must be a lot closer to TX than I originally thought! We're having crazy weather too but it's the other way around. We're too cold for this time of year, which is good for those of us who have not done any of our gardening yet. :(

The milk and ice suggestion for that cabinet in a cabinet could be true, but you know that haunting, there could be Halloweeny things in there too! Mr. Stooge didn't work for the mob, did he?

Film at eleven!

The "magic door" in your cupboards is very likely the orginal fridge. If you look outside, you may see a small 'door' frame directly in the place where your cupboard is (if your house hasn't been re-sided). A block of ice would have been deposited by the Iceman who Cometh, from the outside to plop on top of a metal tray in the cupboard. The cupboard doors would be kept shut allowing the ice to create a kind of fridge. Here in the Pacific NW - we have those tiny doors in our old cupboards because just letting the cool air in - kept food decently chilled. Another clue is if the cupboard shelf has holes in it to allow for the cool air to circulate. This was, of course, before people got all hyper about bacteria and other micro-things and before Frigidaire started making major household appliances.

How the heck did I miss this post?

Oh, yeah. Work. Anyway. As I recall, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's absent husband was said to have been a pirate, whether deceased or off on an extended business/buccaneering trip being sketchily explained if at all. I loved her books in all their hyperbolic silliness, and I would like to point out to you that you can both contribute to the welfare of the State of California and add to your array of fresh produce by the simple expedient of not washing until you have sufficient topsoil on your hands to support radishes. Seriously, you can look it up:
http://rabbitboy.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/mrs-piggle-wiggle-by-betty-macdonald/
Just think of the possibilities.

Curious where you purchased the nice, bushy 24.99 dwarf Meyer Lemon?

I used to read celebrity blogs until I found you. You are sooo much more interesting!
Just out of curiosity...Do your neighbors know you are a published author? I was just wondering.
Thanks for the constant source of entertainment!

Love the border of pots! Also the mobile pots. I discovered the large plastic pot/not so much inside it formula for our weekend place (regular watering is harder from a distance) and it is great. Another thing for veggies in pots is 2 liter soda bottles. Fill them up , turn them over and stick them in the soil. They drain slowly and water nicely. You can buy spikey things to put in the end, but you don't have to.

At reading your 97 degrees, I felt the need to yell this number to the rest of the house. I mean, we are in Seattle, and it SNOWED a week and a half ago. Also, A long itme ago, in a land far, far away, I lived in Van Nuys, Victory Blvd to be exact. While I remember the bad -not being able to talk on the phone while the windows are open. And the good - the liquor store that delivers. I am always amazed that I chose Seattle.

I hear there are microbes in the soil that are like a natural antidepressant. Maybe that's why I can't keep out of my garden these days, it just feels so good! Yesterday I planted potatoes and today I'm planting beets.

Shannon (2 posts ago) has a great idea for watering with plastic bottles that are turned over. I've done something similar. Take a plastic bottle (small, large, milk jug, whatever but works better with smaller bottles - you'll see what I mean), poke lots of holes into it and bury it up to the top so that you can only see the neck. When you go around and water you can fill this up and it will slowly drain and gently water your plant. I've done this with tomato plants and it works really well!

Or - you can do a similar thing if you can't bury the whole bottle and don't mind something sticking out of the soil next to your plant. Bury part of it upside down (do the holes in the underground part) and just leave yourself a hole to refill the bottle!

It makes me happy beyond measure that you have plants on wheels. That just made me smile. I think if I start to get down at all, I'm going to think of your plants getting rides around your back yard - wheeeeee! - and that will help me stay happy.

Happy gardening!

I live in NYC so I don't have to fight the heat that much but my epiphany last year to planting in clay pots was this: plant in plastic but put it in a slightly larger clay pot. All the beauty of clay without the quick evaporation.

Just as an add-on, I do what Meredith does. Here in the alpine desert of Colorado, I need all the help retaining moisture that I can get and the plastic pot inside the clay pot really does work.