August 17, 2009
And there was great gesturing and hollering and carrying on, and alas, all for naught.
There is very little dramatic turmoil in my life. I have managed to get my life to a place where it's quite small and usually fine, and sometimes I have my days at my job or in traffic where I am a little emotional, but for the most part I am not an angry crazy person waving around tiny fists of rage.
On Saturday I went to the grocery store and it was so nice outside -- there was a marine layer, so it was cloudy and cool and I had been listening to a good song on the radio and traffic was light. I pulled into my driveway and the gardeners were there. As I was getting out of the Jeep one guy turned on the front sprinklers. He saw me, I mean he was four feet from me, and I just shook my head and said, "Excuse me, hello!" and he said, "Oh, yeah." and then waited until I got my groceries and went inside.
I don't like these gardeners. I miss Francisco. I know that Francisco used to hack away at the shrubbery and he was strange and sculpted all the bushes out front into tiny stunted trees. But he would have a beer with me sometimes and he was funny and he never bothered me. These gardeners are obsessed with the stupid grass and they leave me mean notes about the sprinklers -- which they themselves break quite often -- and they're loud and they ruin Saturdays. But I try not to complain because hey, it's hard to make a living and I figure they're doing the best they can and why complain, right?
So I take my slightly sprinkler-dampened groceries into my house on Saturday and as I am walking toward the kitchen I look out back and I notice something is very, very wrong.
This used to be my garden:
Leafy, gorgeous pumpkin vines trailed up the wall and all along the corn stalks and it was so pretty and happy out there.
This is what was left after the gardeners came:
That's my still-growing pumpkin stash -- the pride of my entire garden -- now attached only to the hacked off-ends of what were green, happy vines.
I'm getting angry all over again. But on Saturday it was like I grew a new head and my new, hungry angry head wanted to EAT THE ARMS OFF THE PUMPKIN MURDERERS.
I flew out the door and I was on them and let me tell you, a hissy was pitched. Yes, in the middle of Saturday morning with all the nighbors out and about and watching, I pitched a hissyfit to end all hissyfits. But the gardener was not apologetic. He didn't plead no hablo ingles (which would have been the smart move) or even try to act dumb. He argued with me. He became defiant.
This only enraged me. I mean, enraged.
"The landlord told me to do it!" he yelled at me.
"Oh REALLY NOW LET US CALL HIM AND FIND OUT."
So I called the landlord, who I had specifically asked back in April what I could do to keep the gardeners from cutting the pumpkin vines this year and he said, "Put a border around it and they will leave it alone." So I got the landlord on the phone and the landlord talked to the gardener and the gardener started to argue with him! Then "the gardener" changed his story. First it was, "They were all dead anyway." So I offered to take pictures on my phone and send them right then and so he changed the story again, "They were damaging the hedges." Finally I just took the phone and told my landlord I would talk to him later when I was less HOLLERING MAD and then I hung up.
I told the guy to leave, get away from me and my murdered pumpkins. There was a whole lot of conversation here I won't repeat but suffice it to say it ended with something like, "And when I move out and the new tenants have four giant dogs and you're picking up dog poop and hoping you don't get attacked by them you will wish you had never killed off the nice lady's pumpkins!" or something equally lame which completely bored the gardener and he left. And I was alone with my poor, dying pumpkins and my empty ugly grey cinderblock wall.
And then I called my dad and I cried. About my garden. People, I know there is real tragedy in this world and I am not here to tell you that the worst thing which has ever happened involved a pumpkin. But I have so few pleasures in my life. My life is this tiny, compressed little sentence and the only things that give me great joy are my cats and talking to my family and my knitting and writing things here and there and sometimes going on a trip. Gardening is something I do because there's such happiness in every aspect of it, picking the site or pot, finding the soil, picking out your seedlings and arranging them just so in the dirt, smiling at your handiwork, watching it grow and bloom and flourish. It's life-affirming.
And they killed it.
So now I have to decide if I'm going to stay in this house and walk around the back yard every Saturday following them to be sure they don't hack away all my tomatoes and herbs or if I'm going to move. I haven't made any decisions yet. Maybe it's time for a change. Maybe I can find a cheaper gardener and my landlord can fire these guys. I don't even care anymore, they can't bring my garden back. I'm just full of give up. Maybe I'll move to the beach and have one nice potted plant and call it a day. The only thing I know for sure is that this year's garden is over.
I'm still mad.
Posted by laurie at 10:02 AM
July 24, 2009
Friday, on which I declare victory in the garden
I am SO HAPPY.
This morning I went out back to water the garden and while I was poking around I moved some of the leaves of the cucumber plant vining its way up the trellis, and I saw beautiful, big, glossy green cucumbers resting happily all along the trellis. And right next door in the tomato plant arena there were several actual RED tomatoes!
This morning I had cucumbers for breakfast (I haven't tried the tomatoes yet.) I love cucumbers. I usually buy them organic at Whole Foods and they're eleventeen dollars each, and the skins are sometimes a little tough or bitter. These beauties from my garden are organic, did not cost much at all, and taste so much better! Even the big ones are sweet and the peel is soft and tasty, not bitter at all.
I brought one smallish cucumber and one of the big-big ones to work and sliced them and walked all around the office at 9 a.m. foisting my farm-fresh cucumbers on everyone. People gave me glowing praise for my farmerly skill, and lo, I was happy.
Tonight I'm going to try the tomatoes, which aren't really very pretty but are RED and mine as well, sliced with a cucumber and some red onion. There is a fantastic article right now on the New York Times website listing 101 simple summer salads, and blissful few contain leaves (I am not a fan of green salad, or as I refer to it, "A big bowl of leaves and grass.") Many of the salads call for cucumber or watermelon, two of my favorite foods. I'm excited to try so many of them, especially now that I have vine-ripened tomatoes and cucumbers! I have officially said the word "cucumber" 700 times this morning. Definitely a good start to the day.
I forget how good fruits and vegetables can taste until I eat something right off the vine, juicy and sweet and perfect. It almost makes summer a good season... aside from the complaining I must do about the heat, of course.
Have a great weekend!
Posted by laurie at 09:28 AM
July 22, 2009
At last! Alert the media! The bounty has begin!
That's part of my weekend harvest. All this time there was a HUGE eggplant growing in the raised bed garden and I didn't even know it was there! Mostly because I didn't bother hunting around in between the leaves. And also because I am not a very good farmer. But anyway, this weekend I watered all the plants and while poking around in the garden I discovered hidden pattypan squash, crookneck squash that were small enough to eat (and some ridiculously overgrown gourds), my gigantor eggplant, several perfect cucumbers and a single red cherry tomato. I looked out this morning before work and now there are multiple red tomatoes on the vines, so I have apparently conquered the tomato!
I also picked one ear of corn this weekend to see if it was ready to eat. I half-shucked it for that picture above, then immediately after the big kitchen photo shoot I removed the shuck and corn silk and dropped it into a pot of boiling water. It was delicious! It was a perfectly formed ear of corn, although on a small scale. It was about 7 inches in total length (miniature!) but so perfectly tasty and sweet. I can't tell you the last time I had an ear of corn that was fresh from the garden. It was decadent! Then I picked all the corn and ate it all before the weekend was over.
It was delicious.
The raised bed garden is so huge and lush and green that I am shocked to see in my yard. It's really big:
The cucumber plant is the big vine on the right side there, it's amazing. I can't believe I have such delicious perfect cucumbers this year. And right behind it, you can see the grey-green leaves poking up behind in the picture, is my giant and overgrown and lovely Bonnie "Heatwave" variety of tomato that I bought earlier in the year as a dare to Mother Nature -- even as I planted it I raised my tiny fist of ire and said, I will show you heatwave! I fully expected this plant to expire soon after the first hot weekend, but it has not only withstood several warm Valley weekends, it is actually kind of thriving. Miracle. There are big green tomatoes all over it and I am just waiting for one to ripen (they looked close this morning -- turning almost red!). I plan to wait another week or two and then just throw in the towel and fry up all the green ones. Because that's the lazy and impatient kind of gardener I am. I am practically hovering around it with the cornmeal and canola oil ready to go.
This year I planted two varieties of pumpkin and both are perplexing me. First, my little small pumpkin plant grew two perfectly formed little gourds and then the plant died. The pumpkins are ripe, you see. In July. Did I get the timing off? I'm wondering if I should go ahead and plant another pumpkin seedling in its spot since there are still months and months to go until October.
My two perfect little ripe pumpkins. In July.
My other pumpkin plant is like something from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The vines have moved upwards now, and there are baby pumpkins sprouting from all my hedges. What do I do with these? I can't make anymore pantyhose hammocks, the one I made for the first hedge-pumpkin led to the whole bottom half of the fruit turning mushy. And even if I could fashion the perfect pumpkin hammock, I don't think the hedge could support it. I think these are meant to be huge pumpkins. This is the size of the still-immature pumpkin growing furtively behind the garbage cans:
Hello, big guy!
You can't really tell from the scale of the picture, but I am guessing that still-unripe pumpkin weighs close to 70 pounds by now. And here is the vine taking over the 8-foot hedge:
And there are baby pumpkins sprouting forth all along it. So my options seem to be: 1) Do nothing, let nature take its course whatever course that may be. or 2) Try to maneuver the vines down off the hedges. But these are 10-foot-long mature vines, and they break easily. GAHHHHH. Why is pumpkin farming so fraught with moral ambiguity?
There are also mystery peppers growing in the garden. They were supposed to be bell pepper plants and they must have been mismarked seedlings, because I am getting what appear to be banana peppers and Anaheim chilis:
The herbs are still alive and my Dad's chilis are almost ready to pick. I love my herbs and I wish I were a better cook, or even someone who cooks at all, so I could use them. My favorite herb right now is the delicate, lacy leaves of my chervil. I'm not sure what to do with chervil, but it's so green and healthy and pretty. As for the plants in my Topsy Turvy planters, they have all withered up and crisped and died in the intense heat. It was fun while it lasted. I think I might try to re-plant them with herbs or something come fall, who knows.
And I will leave you with one last picture, my little neglected cactus in the corner is blooming again:
Summer!
Posted by laurie at 10:14 AM
July 03, 2009
It's still alive, and that is a triumph. Although my pumpkin is in fishnet pantyhose.
When I got back from my trip I was happy to see that the garden was still mostly alive. Last weekend, though, it turned HOT hot hot here in the Valley and I watched in futile pain as my plants withered and crisped under the 100-plus degree heat. Water restrictions, you are evil! (I did sneak out and dump some water on the saddest wiltingest plants but the sprinklers can only be set for Mondays and Thursdays.)
My main casualties have been the topsy-turvy planters. Here is my wilty, yellowed, brown, limp Roma tomato:
To show you all is not lost, however, check out the raised bed garden which has gone BONKERS:
When I got home a few tiny tiny little baby yellow squash I had left on the vines before my trip had morphed into gnarly big gourds:
The best part of my garden is the crazy pumpkin patch and cornfield, a little lost corner of my garden that has turned into the funniest thing I have ever seen. Just looking out my back window and seeing CORN growing in and amongst the Jurassic-sized pumpkin vine is hilarious to me.
Real corn cobs!
The pumpkin plant is doing wild and wacky things. For one thing, it is the hugest plant I have ever seen in my entire life. It has sprouted such long tendrils and vines that it's at least 50 feet long from end to end. There is a big yellow baby pumpkin growing in a random spot behind the garbage cans, some 25 feet from the actual roots of the plant:
And then while I was gone the vine somehow climbed up into my very large, dense back hedge and started sprouting pumpkins midway up the shrubbery:
And it's a really pretty, lovely, perfect little pumpkin, and I didn't want to lose it...
So when there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now. Yes there are two paths you can go by but in the long run, do like us professional gardeners do and wrap it up in your old fishnet stockings:
Oh who am I kidding, I had no idea what to do with it and I just used whatever I had close by for cutting up and wrapping around the pumpkin and securing it to the sturdier branches. And Lord knows with it being the scorching depths of summer no pantyhose -- not even of the fishnet variety -- will be touching my body so they may as well be useful in the garden.
Still, I have yet to get one single ripe tomato from my garden this year! I have plenty of green tomatoes everywhere, but nary a ripe or even ripening tomato in sight. For the long holiday weekend I plan to hang a new bird feeder out back (the last one buckled under the weight of my apparently well-fed local blue jays) and hang up a pretty little hummingbird feeder I found on sale a while back. And then I am going to stay indoors where it is cool and air-conditioned and drink cocktails flavored with my bumper crop of mint:
Happy July 4th weekend!
Posted by laurie at 08:46 AM
June 16, 2009
Midway through the home stretch, the Topsy-Turvy begins to wilt.
First, here's Clarence eating his special squirrel food from a bowl:
He is so cute. I love that I live in the wild outback of the Valley with our animal kingdom and free parking.
So, the Topsy-Turvy science experiment carries ever onward and downward. There are three of these planters on my back patio, one with a Roma tomato, one with a cherry tomato and one with a cucumber. You can kind of see the Roma tomato hanging limp and yellowish in the background here:
The plant in the foreground there is the cherry tomato I have in a pot. Contrast it with the topsy-turvy cherry tomato. It's doing OK, but it's really spindly:
The topsy-turvy cucumber is really looking sad and forlorn:
One of the main problems with this planter is that all the water drains out every time you water it. So even if you water three times a day (which I definitely don't have time for) the water still doesn't stay in the planter. The only one I'm having moderate success with is the cherry tomato, and that is the planter where I used a bag of that special dirt that has little water-holding thingies mixed in. But the poor Roma tomato is limp and wilty, as is the spindly cucumber. Now that you've seen the upside-down cuke, look at the cucumber plant in the raised-bed garden:
The cucumber is on the far right, thick and green and happy. It's from the same little pot of seedlings and I planted it on the same day. It gets the same amount of daylight and I water them on the same days but the difference is dramatic. Everything in the raised bed is so green and lush!
All the tomato plants have baby green tomatoes on them but the ones in the pots are doing the best this year, I'm getting pretty excited. I may get a red tomato yet!
The cornfield and pumpkin patch is luscious, too, even though something large has been sitting on the plants every few days. I don't know what it is and I don't want to know. Raccoon, big opossum, neighborhood cats, hooligans, what have you, it's something that sits on the plants and breaks the leaves and eats the baby pumpkins. But it doesn't even bother me. Every time I look outside I start laughing. I just love the look of this part of my yard, it's so funny me growing corn in my backyard!
My potted herbs and plants are my favorites, though. I love container gardening the best. Last winter I thought my Kentucky mint died, it was bare down to the sticks and it has made quite a revival:
It's a strong mint that's perfect for drinks like mint juleps, mojitos and especially mint water. I love mint water -- you just crush some fresh leaves in the bottom of a pitcher and add water over them. Refrigerate it until it's ice cold and it's more refreshing than plain water or even iced tea!
I also planted some peppermint and a bunch of other herbs in a little patch of dirt near my back gate that used to be covered in nothing. It's the most recent addition to my backyard farm. I know the peppermint will take over eventually, but I don't mind. I love peppermint tea, it's my favorite.
Above: peppermint, oregano, basil (lettuce leaf basil, globe basil and purple ruffles), chervil, chives, summer savory, thyme, Russian tarragon. Chervil! Who knew! It's so lacy and beautiful, it's on the right kind of midway up the picture.
And the patty pan squash I planted in a big pot is doing great:
You'll notice that in all these pictures of my backyard there are pots of gigantic overgrown aloe vera plants. I bought one little tiny 4-inch potted aloe from Target about ten years ago and it has turned into a farm. I can't kill an aloe to save my life and I have some that are almost five feet tall, it's nuts. I need to divide them up into new planters but they just keep growing faster than I can tend to them. Next time I have a party I might make everyone take a giant overgrown aloe home with them.
Finally, the pepper plant is even bigger and more menacing than ever, promising me loads of fire-hot peppers all summer long:
And that is how my garden grows!
Posted by laurie at 10:13 AM
June 04, 2009
My urban farm is full of green. Have I accidentally stepped in someone else's yard?
Every morning I go outside to my backyard -- I think it is my backyard, although it looks so different -- and I marvel at the green stuff growing everywhere. It's not mold, or algae, it's actual real live plants and not many of them are weeds. Some of the growing green things are intentionally planted and most are not only still alive, a feat in itself, but some are actually thriving. In my backyard! Will wonders never cease? Have I turned a corner? Is my life changing? Will I run into George Clooney at the market soon? Will my hair refuse to frizz? Will I one day find myself in the kitchen making something that requires more than two ingredients and the smoke alarm will stay silent? Will my panties stay elasticized for more than three months? Will they simultaneously refuse to ride up uncomfortably?
We can only speculate.
Before I brag dramatically show you my cornfield/pumpkin patch, let me first remind you of its ghetto glory merely ONE MONTH ago:
Now behold the insane wonder that is my cornfield and pumpkin patch today:
Do I mind that I will likely not harvest a single ear of corn nor a solitary pumpkin? No, not at all. There mere existence of these growing things is astonishing and reward enough in its own. Ah, if only dating were so simple.
And my dad's little heirloom chili plants -- remember the ones that he started as tiny seeds after planting each one individually and I tried to keep them alive and for the past two years they've done so-so...? Well this is the kitchen garden a month ago:
And this is it now:
LORD HAVE MERCY ON MY TASTEBUDS! That is one big ol' pepper plant! It is now four feet tall and already has its first blooms, which is record:
Blooming pepper plant!
The biggest surprise, though, is the Great Tomato Situation. So far I have spent about $75 on tomatoes and tomato soil and topsy turvyness and cages and fertilizer and younameit. Every year I do this and by late June I end up with a dried pile of twigs at the bottom of a tomato cage, which is not that great of a ROI. This year I think something in my karma has changed, somehow, somewhere, because I walked outside this morning and discovered these little green pearls:
That's right, folks. My $75 has purchased some baby cherry tomatoes in a lovely shade of spring green! Now we hold our collective breaths and wait and wonder if this will be the the year that I finally grow a single red tomato.
And then George Clooney and I will send ya'll our wedding invitations. And my panties won't ride up or fall dawn. Life is good!
Posted by laurie at 11:12 AM
June 02, 2009
Upside-down and squashy!
Just a quick update on the upside-down gardening... my cherry tomato plant does not look like the plant in the commercial! It's gotten long and leggy and eventually I suspect it will begin to reach ground and try to walk off:
But it is green and healthy and happy and even has some yellow flowers. Who knows, I may see a real, actual red tomato this year after all. It would be a first!
My cucumber is doing REALLY well, considering this is the largest cucumber plant I have ever managed to grow to date and it has two little blossoms on it:
And the yellow summer squash in the raised bed garden are taking over the world! Honestly, I do not understand why a single organic yellow crookneck squash costs $2.00 in the grocery store when they're so prolific and crazy easy to grow. If I can have a squash overload with one single plant, imagine the payload if I were a farmer! Wait... perhaps I have missed my true calling... a squash farmer! [edited to add: Please resist the urge to share your icky squash bug stories and/or squash horror stories, call me crazy but I prefer to live in ignorant squash bliss...]
This morning I counted six little squashii. The largest one might be ready to pick by the end of the week. My zucchini plants got a very late start, I didn't plant them until last weekend and they're still very small so I hope they manage to get settled in before the weather turns hot. We've been so lucky this season so far, it's been overcast and cool almost every day, with sun in the afternoons. Usually by now my plants start to wither and die but this year we have a good dose of June Gloom and I hope it sticks around for the rest of the month. In the mornings I walk outside and just stare at my plants like a crazy person. I can't believe how much happiness my little garden brings me.
Once again I forgot to take pictures of my chili plant that has taken over the kitchen garden and is threatening to start its own country. And you'll never believe the size of my corn and pumpkin patch. It's already exceeded my every expectation. Well, tomorrow is another day!
Posted by laurie at 10:48 AM
May 28, 2009
Little happy thing
Yesterday my friend at work, Cindi, was chitchatting with me and I was bragging mentioning my garden and she politely asked me what I was growing and I told her about my vegetables in effusive, excessive detail. Then I also mentioned I had just about every cooking herb I could ever use or not use, depending on if you think a baked potato is "cooking."
So she perked up a bit at that last mention of herbs and pulled out a recipe she'd written down on a notecard and asked me if I had any tarragon... which I do! Lovely, aromatic French tarragon. And we talked about basil, which she needs one cup of for a recipe (and I don't have that much yet, it being only May) but I told her about my new spicy globe basil plant that's doing well and I'd bring her some of that, too.
So this morning I left her two little ziploc baggies full of spicy basil and French Tarragon. It made me so happy to share some of my little aromatic garden with her, I can't quite explain it.
(And after I snipped some sprigs for Cindi this morning I went over to my yellow crookneck squash plant to look at it in wonder. The little baby is still there and another on the way. Amazing!)
Posted by laurie at 09:10 AM
May 26, 2009
Let the squashification begin!
This year I planted little yellow crookneck squash before I planted the zucchini, and although I have never grown a yellow crookneck squash personally, I had great confidence that they would be happy and prolific like their zuke cousins. Look what I found yesterday:
Little baby yellow squash -- just three weeks after planting! Squash are truly amazing. If you can grow nothing and you feel farming is not in your future, try a summer squash. So little risk, so much reward.
And since squash are such prolific happy growers and they seem to like the scorching baking San Fernando Valley, I decided that this year I should grow my favorite squash. I like the little yellow ones and I'm OK with zucchini, but it's not my favorite by a long shot. My favorites are the perfect, rounded scallop-edged pattypan squash. I love them best rolled in cornmeal and fried like okra -- serve with some sliced cold tomatoes and that is a perfect summer dinner! So I planted two pattypan squash plants in large pots, since my Rodale's Organic Gardening
book says this variety are compact enough for containers. I love my container gardening!
Pattypan squash seedlings. Grow!
My raised bed garden is growing happily along:
And even though I had zero expectation of my little corn/pumpkin patch, seeing as how I basically dumped some dirt on the ground and called it a day, my cornfield and pumpkin patch is growing like gangbusters, if gangbusters were green and leafy:
My pumpkin is even producing babies already!
Grow, little fellow. Grow big and round.
Who would have thunk it? And the little pumpkin seedlings in the corner box are growing, too:
I shall have a pumpkin windfall this year!
My favorite herb right now is this spicy globe basil that has taken off and it smells SO GOOD:
I realized too late that I forgot to take a picture of the kitchen garden over by the garage door. The chili pepper plants have completely exploded into giant chili pepper bushes! They've grown at least two feet in the past three weeks. I guess they enjoyed the fertilizer! I'll have to take pictures later in the week ... no flowers on them yet, though. The nights are still cool here, down into the 50s and 60s, and the pepper plants don't seem to flower until nighttime temperatures are in the high 60s.
Finally, my upside-down planting experiment is science gone right -- so far. I worried at first because the little stems and leaves were curling upward and nothing seemed to be growing. It took a few weeks, but the upside-down topsy turvy cucumber is the BEST looking cucumber plant I've grown to date. The picture didn't come out well, but it's happily vining along.
The topsy-turvy tomatoes are lush! My cherry tomato plant is growing and even has little yellow flowers:
And the Roma tomato is lush and lovely dark green and the stem is so thick and healthy:
I'm beginning to think I may actually get a whole tomato out of this year's garden! I always plant a tomato seedling or two and I have yet to harvest an actual real red tomato. I've harvested zucchini that weigh 22 pounds, but nary a tomato has burst forth from my garden. I came close one year and I got a single green cherry tomato which promptly shriveled and died in a valley heatwave. One year I had tomatoes by proxy, a coworker whose thumbs are greener than mine had big, juicy perfect tomatoes and I begged her to bring me some green tomatoes, which she thought was crazy but obliged me and I made some fried green tomatoes, harbinger of summer. YUM. But I have not actually grown my own red (or green) tomatoes.
This may be the year, folks. This may be my tomato year.
Posted by laurie at 10:07 AM
May 11, 2009
Grow, grow ... faster!
It's Monday, which means Garden Update. I am sure it is scintillating, what with everything being two weeks in the ground and me photographing their every new leaf.
But look... the pumpkin LOVES the miniature raised bed garden! It's now twice the size it was last week!
The brilliant blue jay-like bird which I call a Blue Jay and 37 readers emailed to let me know it is a Western Scrub Jay stopped by to say hey. He loves hanging out with his friends in the yard and harassing the squirrel. I have decided to clear up the naming confusion and call him Gomez. He just looks like a Gomez. Except there are many many Gomez birds in my yard now that they have trained me to fetch them peanuts and birdseed. I have a fleet of Gomez birds.
Now for the Topsy-Turvy update. Ya'll, it is WEIRD. See, in the pictures on the Topsy-Turvy box the plants grow lush and happy in a downward cascade of leaves and fruit. But in my yard, the little tomato seedlings are struggling to grow upward, like they are really not loving being upside down and their genetic memory is reaching for the world of normalcy where tomatoes grow upright and roots are at the bottom. I don't know, it seems wrong somehow!
Cherry tomato:
Roma tomato:
You can see in that picture how some of the leaves that get the most direct sunlight crisped right up last week. It's the valley. It was 100 degrees a few days in a row. Which also means I had my first garden fatality:
It was just too damn hot for the cucumber in the Back 40. I'll replant that spot with a crookneck squash or something that likes heat. What's most fascinating in my garden of eatin' this year is that the only cucumber that seems even remotely happy is the one hanging upside down!
This is the best result I've had with a cucumber plant maybe ever, so I am sticking with it. It's all for science!
The "Heatwave" variety of tomato seeding is still living out in the raised bed garden and it hasn't been even close to hot weather here yet (two measly 100-degree days is just a little foreshadowing) so only time will tell if he can withstand the infernal valley summers.
One plant that has shocked me is the little chili pepper plant in my kitchen garden. This is one of the heirloom chili peppers my dad brought me and planted from a seedling. I've had it for two years or so now and this winter I cut it all the way back to the roots. It started leafing out a month or two ago, but once I added some richer material to the soil and mulched it went CRAZY:
It's taking over the herbs. Funny!
Speaking of herbs ... last night my mom and I were on the phone talking about happy little things. She was telling me about this pretty ceramic planter she and my dad had found a few days ago and how she'd filled it with a gorgeous red geranium and every time she looked at it she felt happy. Just a little happy thing.
So I told her my little happy thing: Yesterday I was making my own salad dressing -- squeeze and zest a few lemons, add olive oil, salt and pepper and stir -- and usually I would add some spices from my cabinet. But I remembered I have this awesome fresh herb garden outside and I went out to the patio with my kitchen scissors and snipped a little French tarragon, a sprig of marjoram and several stems of fragrant thyme. It made me ridiculously happy to chop them up and add them to my vinaigrette.
It's the little things!
Posted by laurie at 01:48 AM
April 28, 2009
Maybe I do it for my sanity.
Yesterday was generically awful. But at the end of the day I walked in the door and took of my shoes and went directly to the magic wine cooler ("the fridge") and then after I fed the cats I slipped on my flip-flops and still dressed in my work clothes I went out back and flopped in the grass and stared at my newly planted garden.
It was the best part of the entire day. And I think the French Tarragon grew overnight, which made me happy in ways I cannot express without sounding like a total whack job.
On the left, Marjoram and French Tarragon. On the right, flowering fragrant English Thyme, a small parsley plant and of course some sage. The rosemary is in a pot nearby, completing my journey to Scarborough Fair.
Posted by laurie at 10:42 AM
April 27, 2009
Let the farmer's tan begin!
This weekend was the perfect gardening weather -- sunny but mild temperatures, not too hot or too cool -- a combination which lures you into believing many things can grow and flourish in your garden, so you buy more than you intended because you are riding high on hope and a dream. A dream of tomatoes and herbs and shiny eggplants all growing peacefully with each other. A dream of a 600-pound pumpkin stretching its vines around tall green cornstalks.
Well, it's early still. Might as well enjoy the hope while we can.
There's nothing better than working in the yard until you're drenched with sweat from exertion and dirty and smelly and surrounded by seedlings. I should work in a garden center, just being around seedlings makes me giddy. And my yard is becoming a testament to my love of science experiments, because what greater science experiment is there?
This is my kitchen garden. On the far left and far right are my dad's heirloom chili peppers, recently pruned and now thick with new leaves. Tucked in a back corner on the far left is marjoram, and in the middle along the back edge I've planted cilantro, dill and basil. In the front I have thyme (both English and lemon varieties) along with oregano. By far my favorite plants to grow are herbs -- I love them. They're pretty and useful and they smell amazing. I've grown herbs and succulents for most of my life, so over time I've mostly figured out what works and what doesn't and still it's always a surprise to see what takes off and what fades away each year in the garden. In this house I've had the best success with marjoram and basil, but I still like growing a wide variety to see what will flourish where. I like having all the herbs crammed in together like that in a small space, one year I grew them in a Rubbermaid tub out on the patio and I had six or seven different herbs planted and they all just took off. It keeps me motivated to clip them regularly which makes me more motivated to try cooking unusual recipes to use my herbs.
But vegetable gardening is still sort of new to me. I spent most of my childhood weeding between rows of my Dad's garden and plucking fat tomato worms off the vines, but I never did any of the garden-making stuff myself like siting the garden and deciding which plants to grow and all that. Prior to moving into this house, most of my personal veggie-growing experience was limited to a tomato plant in a plastic pot on the patio. Since starting my gardening science experiment I have discovered I can grow zucchini like nobody's business and I've had good success with pumpkins but failure with pretty much everything else. Mostly this is my fault, not watering everything enough and being lazy in general. This year I've decided to commit 100% to my garden and see if I can actually grow enough good stuff to justify the amount of money I'm spending on gardening supplies.
The first step was to figure out what I like to eat most (besides potatoes, which I'm not ready for yet.) That's how I decided on corn, tomatoes, bell peppers and especially cucumbers. Add to that some squash and some pumpkins and the random eggplant and that's what I invested in this year.
I'm most excited about trying to grow corn! This is the first patch, small but enough space for three staggered rows of corn and one pumpkin seedling.
Before:
After:
You may be saying, have you gone CRAZY? You can't grow corn there! You may be right, I may be crazy, but it just may be a lunatic you're looking for. My dad's garden was always long and lush with several rows of corn planted in neat aisles. Mine is not. I know corn is wind-pollinated, but I don't see why you have to maintain perfect row formation. This is kind of a staggered splay of corn, but I measured so each is about 12 inches apart, except for two seedlings I couldn't separate. And with the wind we get here, pollination should not be a problem. Notice too that I didn't pull up the ice plant growing randomly on the soil. I just dumped mulch on top. I can't bear to pull up something so pretty, so maybe it will grow in and around the corn stalks and mingle with the pumpkin.
As you can probably guess, this was not the original game plan for my Great Corn Field. I planned to put the corn field out back, alongside my raised garden bed. However, after I bought the corn plants, I started digging up the proposed corn field and discovered there are bricks buried all under the sod. Bricks. In the soil. Were the old residents trying to grow a barbecue pit or something? Weird. But it became rapidly apparent there was no way I could dig up all the bricks in the short window of time known as my weekend. So that's why I had to plant the corn elsewhere. I figure it's serendipity -- the best science experiments have different test groups, right? Next weekend I'll work on digging up the bricks and planting more corn in the back and we'll have a grow-off! Corn vs. Corn! Worst case scenario, nothing grows. Best case scenario I have enough corn for the apocalypse.
The raised bed out back is happy to be filled with plants again.
Before:
After:
In the cages in each corner are cucumbers, with a tomato in the middle. Normally I would never try a tomato out back, it gets full sun all day and it's so hot out here that the only tomato success I've ever had is in patio containers under the covered porch. But at the garden center I noticed this variety of tomato called Heatwave -- allegedly the perfect tomato for hot climates. Well, that is just a dare. I accept your duel.
The best and wackiest thing I did this year was to break my budget limit and splurge on these:
They make me laugh! It seems wrong, growing things upside down, but I'm fascinated to see if it works! I planted a Roma tomato in one, a cherry tomato in another and the last one has a lone cucumber seedling. I am determined to grow a cucumber this year, even if it costs me a billion dollars.
This is Clarence. He lives in my yard and has trained me to feed him peanuts. I think Darwin would be amazed at the evolution of suburban wildlife... they have learned to make human city-dwellers do their bidding and buy them peanuts. I was out planting the corn and I noticed a little movement to my left and there he was, just a few inches away, staring at me. Then he made his little squirrel noise, which I guess is squirrelese for "Get me a peanut!" and so I did, and off we went. All afternoon Clarence would fetch a peanut and then run around the yard looking for the perfect place to hide it. There are peanuts all over my damn yard.
The blue jays like peanuts too:
This one comes over and grabs them out of the bowl. He watches Clarence sometimes to see where the squirrel is hiding a peanut, then the blue jay swoops in after him and digs it up. He's very smart. Sometimes he perches on one of the patio chairs and yells at me until I bring him peanuts or sunflower seeds. The cats love to watch all of this from the big windows that face the garden:
I am happiest out in the yard. No radio, no internet, no TV or phone or email. Just me and some dirt and a cold beer and some peanuts for all.
Posted by laurie at 08:01 AM
April 20, 2009
How green is your garden?
Today is our third day of record-breaking heat in the city of Angels... yesterday the temperature gauge on my back patio reached 102. A few more days of this and everything will be brown and crispy.
I've figured out the spray paths of the sprinklers, and last year I decided to give up on manual watering and just have things potted in and around the sprinklers (thanks in advance to the 200 people about to write me of the joys of drip irrigation but that is a no go, documented here.) My sprinkler-container relocation strategy worked well enough, except the cucumbers burned up in the Valley heat in just a few weeks. The pumpkins did well, considering the gardeners would weed whack the vines every few weeks. I have a testy and contentious relationship with the new gardeners. They scold me, they're ruthless in their desire to have nothing growing but useless lawn and ivy and we clash. Every Saturday it's a contest of wills and since they have the mowers they usually win.
BUT. I am thinking of doing something that would blow their little minds. It will make them crazy. They will shake their fists of fury at me.
I am thinking of renting some kind of machinery doodad to tear up the whole back 40 and remove all the grass -- instructing them NOT TO COME NEAR IT with those weed whackers -- and just plant the whole thing with pumpkins, zucchini (oh, how I love your growingness, crazy zukes!) and herbs. As of now the only things I have growing are my dad's heirloom peppers, carefully pruned back and loved by yours truly for two years now, some mint that survived the harsh 60-degree winter, and two lovely containers of thyme. I LOVE thyme. It's by far my favorite herb, I just love its cheerful tiny leaves, it's happy little white flowers, it's delicate smell. I've decided this year to grow every variety of thyme I can find, just for the sheer happiness of being surrounded by my favorite herb.
According to My Personal Weatherman Dallas Raines, the heatwave is supposed to end soon and by the weekend it will drop 40 degrees in the Valley, back down to a very awesome mid-60-ish, perfect for digging up the entire backyard. I figure this is my last real opportunity to spend a Saturday or Sunday doing serious messing around in the yard before it becomes hotter than the scorching surface of the sun and I find myself locked inside with the air on full blast, refusing to go outside until dark.
-- 5 minutes later --
So I just called my landlord and told him my excellent idea and he reminded me there are pipes and all kinds of stuff in the ground and could I please refrain from using heavy machinery? But other than that he said he doesn't care what I grow in the backyard and I can tell the gardeners to leave the whole back-back yard alone if I want. Victory!
Sort of. I already have a big raised bed in the back (I started it after getting excited reading All New Square Foot Gardening
-- 10 minutes later --
Maybe I have lost my mind.
Should make for an inneresting garden.
Posted by laurie at 10:38 AM
October 10, 2008
Pumpkin Farmer
Well, I am officially a big-time agribusiness pumpkin farmer, if by "big-time" you mean delusional and "agribusiness" you mean: spent $200 in gardening supplies this year to produce two pumpkins of questionable provenance.
One small but lovely perfect pumpkin.
And one large humongous warty multicolored behemoth, THE PUMPKINATOR. He will eat all trick-or-treaters! He scares away mailmen! He smokes cigars and talks like a Robert DeNiro impersonator!
He is my finest work of gardening ever. Well worth the time, effort and watering bill.
Posted by laurie at 09:47 AM | Comments (73)
September 15, 2008
Finally, the orange arrives.
The big ol' lumpkin pumpkin has finally turned orange:
It's big and heavy and ugly. I adore it.
There was a small baby pumpkin that might have turned out to be a giant beautiful pumpkin but the gardeners destroyed the vines so this is as big and pretty as it will get, which is very lovely but not so big:
The only thing left living that I planted myself is the pepper farm, because I pulled out my sternest and most offensive spanish and warned anyone who came near my dad's peppers that a curse would befall them:
It's hard to see from the picture but that plant is loaded with little chilis!
So it's supposed to be 102 degrees today in my beloved little sweltering valley, meaning that summer is still on and long. I don't know if I'll bother planting anything next year. Between the gardeners and the desert climate and the fact that I have no time at all for gardening, it's a miracle I managed to get two pumpkins! Even if one is a little lumpy and misshapen and ugly, it's a pumpkin! My very first. Now that almost makes me feel like fall is coming .... one day.
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comments are closed
Posted by laurie at 08:49 AM | Comments (36)
August 15, 2008
The edible lawn...?
A few weeks ago I found an article online about people turning the front lawns into gardens. The article is here on Time Magazine's website. Then I read an opinion article a few days ago on the New York Times website about urban agriculture. You can read that one here.
I would LOVE to get rid of my front lawn and have a big old garden out there instead! My landlord did not love this idea one bit, though, and informed me about all the hard work and time and effort and money the gardeners have put into getting the lawn in good shape, etc. etc. blah blah blah. I won't let the gardeners put any chemicals in my yard which drives them crazy and of course the landlord gave me an earful about that, too. So I doubt he'd be receptive to zucchini on the front lawn.
And of course even if he were open to the idea (which he is not, at all, the end!) truth is I don't have time to maintain an edible lawn right now anyway. I don't have time to maintain my own (somewhat astonishing) leg-hair weeding and fertilizing and mowing. Commuting is a tough taskmaster!
But one day when I live somewhere with a less lawn-crazed landlord OR when I own a house AND THEN when I have time to breathe (someday, always someday, the sun will come out tomorrow, I will worry about that tomorrow, etc. etc. lorem ipsum dolar...) I think I will plant a big garden out front. Makes so much more sense than some grass of suspect pedigree and all the watering and care you have to do just to have ... plain old grass. I'd much rather have a yard of thyme and basil or a yard full of avocado trees.
Would you replace a lawn with a veggie garden? How about your front lawn? I have a friend who started a garden out back but his wife thought it was a redneck thing to do and she was embarrassed by it. Until he shared that with me it never occurred to me that a garden was anything but a natural work of art, I guess everyone has a different take on things.
And my own garden in the backyard is doing just so-so this year, I don't have any free time right now and it's been a HOT summer and someone at my house is dead lazy about watering on any regular or meaningful schedule. My one lone pumpkin seems to be doing well enough, though. It long ago breached the walls of the raised-bed garden and has taken over most of the entire Back 40 and now its lone fruit rests happily in the weeds of the back-backyard:
But I will not lie to you -- up close it is THE UGLIEST PUMPKIN I HAVE EVER SEEN!! It is lumpy and misshapen and bulgy in all the wrong places and of course this makes me love it even more! I love my ugly lumpy pumkin that is not even orange! I call it my Charlie Brown Yellowbellied Lumpkin. I hope it grows up to be a magnificent huge size and astonishes all who gaze upon its lumpy misshapen pumpkinness. And I do hope it one day turns orange, really now.
My zukes this year are kind of scrawny and sad. It's just the pervasive heat, I guess, either that or the pumpkin sucked all the life out of the dirt which I kind of hope happened, Darwinism in the dirt! On the other side of the yard my peppers have made a comeback, apparently they need water to live (WHO KNEW) and since they are my dad's little heirlooms I treat them to a little drink now and then:
Even the little sprig I stuck in a pot is doing well and has peppers on it:
Ignore the brown sad plant to its left. We're very selective around here what with our midnight watering and all.
Gardening probably takes way more time and care than I have to devote to it, apparently it goes on my "one day..." list. Boy that list gets long sometimes. Dear Someday, please arrive NOW. Thanks! However, I DO take the time to feed and water the cats regularly so they will be big and strong and cute...
Blurry, yes. But cute!
Have a great weekend, lumps and all!
Posted by laurie at 08:28 AM | Comments (134)
June 11, 2008
Gardening is a dirty business
Look, it's my first pumpkin blossom:
Such a pretty sight!
The wall between my backyard and my next-door-neighbor Mrs. Lee's backyard is often just a technicality. Mrs. Lee likes to come over and knock on my garden gate whenever she hears me puttering around out back, so she can visit and we chitchat and then she scolds me for not watering enough. Mrs. Lee reminds me she waters twice a day and that's why her vegetables don't die like mine do. I think it is to my credit that I manage to smile and nod instead of reminding her that I don't stay home all day like she does and in fact I am not home during daylight hours Monday through Friday. I like Mrs. Lee, she just wants my garden to be a happy place instead of a dustbowl. I just smile and nod, she means well.
My desire to attempt some form of gardening each year is so finely ingrained in me I don't bother resisting, even though I tend toward more of a Darwin-esque "I planted ya'll now fend for yourselves" philosophy, also known to some as "sheer laziness" and "I work long hours." But I need to think I have a garden -- it is a Southern thing, I suspect -- and have learned that if I have to water a particular plant twice a day it probably is best left in the garden center or in the capable hands of someone who doesn't commute three hours a day. Hence why I made the bold decision to plant nary a tomato this year and I feel VERY GOOD ABOUT IT. As it stands, we're now in early June and I haven't killed a single tomato seedling all year. The fact that I didn't kill something I never planted is all the greater achievement.
So Mrs. Lee came back to visit with me one Sunday as I was admiring my pumpkin plants and about to remove the very large, healthy not-quite-zucchini plants growing beside them in the raised-bed garden box. The renegade zucchini that just appeared from air and managed to grow hefty little mutants had reached the end of its tenancy in my garden.
"What is that?" asked Mrs. Lee. She pointed at the thing growing in my garden that was allegedly a zucchini. "I thought you grow the zucchini this year? Like last year very happy?"
"Well, it's a recessive gene of the zucchini plant, I guess." I tried to explain it to Mrs. Lee as best I could. "When the seeds from my old squash plants germinated they turned into some mutant version of their non-hybridized forefathers or something sciency like that and now I must remove them for the sake of the pumpkins!"
As we talked, I reached down with my gloved hands and yanked the whole green plant out of the soil. We both looked closely at the weirdly shaped fruit. I wondered silently to myself why I can't grow watermelon but I can grow squash that resemble watermelon.
Nature is cruel.
Mrs. Lee asked me what went wrong again, and again I tried to explain my 10th grade understanding of genetics. I was pretty sure Mrs. Lee, whose English is about as good as my Korean, at least got my general meaning. After all, that thing growing in the garden was not any zucchini I have ever seen. For her benefit, I made the universal sad face as I put the big green plant of mutantcy in my green garden bin along with the grass clippings. Inside I was thinking, "Au revoir, suckers! I win the zucchini game!"
Then she scolded me, "But you did good last year zucchini! Too bad!"
Maybe it's just because she's very brusque that I think she's always scolding me. Except about watering -- she is definitely scolding about that.
So Mrs. Lee and I visited a little longer and then she had to go, needed to be off to the grocery store and the garden center and run all her errands. As far as I can tell, Mrs. Lee spends her weekends buying new plants and gadgets and finding bargains and treasures all over the valley. Their house is a mysterious cavern of unusual plants and appliances with Korean labels and foot massagers. I love their house, it's like being in a game show.
After she left I swept the back patio and added some sphagnum peat moss around my pumpkin plants and watered to try to keep them alive at least until the next big heat wave. I admired my one cucumber, growing happily in its pot:
Moving the plants nearer the sprinklers has worked out really well. My thyme plant is a bush and my basil from last year is huge (and apparently basil is a perennial, who knew) and now I have a cucumber! It's almost like Nature is giving me a break, having already killed the watermelon and now with the mutant zucchini. Maybe Nature and I have finally reached a truce, a kind of understanding. Maybe Nature won't try to kill me anymore.
Later that evening as I was making dinner and getting ready for the workweek ahead, I heard a knock on my front door. It was Mrs. Lee.
"Hi Mrs. Lee, you need some help with anything?" I asked.
"Oh no, I feel bad about your no squash. So you grow good this year!" and with that she handed me a plastic bag from the garden center. Inside rested a big, happy six-pack of zucchini plants that she'd picked up on her travels that day. I believe it is an understatement to say I was shocked.
"Oh, wow, thank you Mrs. Lee!"
"Yeah, Ok, you plant now and water. Water good!" and with that she was off and I was left to plant my new army of zucchini.
Six plants.
Six healthy, vigorous squash plants.
Nature is maybe laughing. Nature said, "You want abundance? You want gardening? I'll give you a garden! Hope you sleep with one eye open!" Nature knows that secretly I do not even really like zucchini.
It's going to be a long and green summer.
There are five more where that came from.
Posted by laurie at 08:24 AM | Comments (116)
May 13, 2008
Nature has a sense of humor.
Is zucchini a weed? In the past I have only had this level of gardening success with weeds -- I have grown weeds that would make you cry with joy (or pain.) But I have never successfully grown many useful things -- case in point: all of my watermelon plants have died. AGAIN.
You may be wondering how they could die AGAIN, but this is just another year in the long sad cycle of me and dead watermelon seedlings. I try every year and still they die. Every year.
Look how dead they are, there is not even a sign that something green used to be planted here:
Obviously... I am growing dirt.
So I had two big empty patches of dirt where the watermelon plants were supposed to be happily growing and waiting for their squareness to begin. But no luck. I decided to go out back to the Back 40 and look at my raised bed garden to see how the one lone zucchini outrider -- that I did not plant -- and my two pumpkin plants were faring. I expected the zuke to be alive and the pumpkins to be dead.
The good news: The pumpkin vines are still hanging on! The bad news: There are five more seedlings just sprouting from the barren ground and they are suspiciously zucchini-like. One can safely assume that nature thinks this is hilariously funny and wants me to be afraid of my backyard.
Just to recap:
1) Sometime last fall the gardeners got tired of looking at the scary huge-ass zucchini plants that were taking over the back backyard and while I was away they cleaned the whole thing out including about two inches of my organic dirt.
2) There was nothing in the raised bed garden all winter.
3) Just dirt and probably bug poop.
4) Then one day I noticed a green thing growing in there. It was a zucchini plant.
5) I did not plant this zucchini. I did not plant any zucchini seeds. I did not water, fertilize or even look at the back backyard.
6) Now there are MORE mystery seedings!! Popping up from the dustbowl of barrenness and despair!!
I am a little afraid, because I have never in my life had wild zucchini sprouting up here and there, it is not normal for plantlike things to flourish in my presence. I have already lost a thyme plant and a whole marjoram that was eaten in one night by a fat neon green worm. Later I thought it was kind of sad that I don't live in a worm-eating culture because he was probably really tasty, having been seasoned from the inside out with pure organic marjoram.
ANYWAY, this coming weekend I will move the two zucchini seedlings (or at least I suspect that is what they are, they could be body-snatching plants WHO KNOWS, time will tell) into the watermelon patch on the sunny side of the yard and another seedling over to the shadier side of the yard. What I am saying here is that I am going to have a houseful of zucchini again, I have just resigned myself to the idea that I will have to learn how to cook. Or better yet, I should learn how to make biodiesel out of squash and then learn how to single-handedly convert my Jeep to run off zukediesel insted of gas and then I could have a neverending zuke-based economy!!! Or, you know, I could learn to cook.
OR, maybe they make good wine!! That would be a self-sustaining economy right there. Zucchini wine!!!
Posted by laurie at 11:14 AM | Comments (98)
April 14, 2008
Valley hoe!
It was exactly one zillion degrees in the valley this weekend. Spring lasted an entire week and then hello, summer! You are HERE.
This year I set a strict budget for my gardening efforts. I set aside a specific amount of money and threatened myself with a stern voice and a wagging finger if I went over it by even a penny. I didn't want a repeat of last year when I spent gajillions all told in gardening supplies (that is an exact amount, gajillions, and not tax deductible!) and yet I had nothing to show for it but some crazyass hot peppers and a field of mutant zucchini.
Most of my budget this year went to new bags of soil and compost and dirt-related stuff. Then there was the chunk of change I spent on my Meyer Lemon tree, still happy and blooming it's little dwarf-variety $24.99 self away:
I bought one small four-inch container of pumpkin seedlings which are hanging out with the renegade zuke in the raised bed out back along with a watermelon seedling that is struggling and in fact could be considered muerto. (The rest of the watermelon seedlings are strewn around the yard, but more on that later.) I found a big ziploc bag in the garage with old seed packets from God Knows When and I decided they just weren't getting any younger Beavis, so I spread them on every dirt patch in the yard and we'll see what comes up. I may have thyme in the watermelon and dill in the peppers or nothing at all, but it's a good experiment. And the price was right.
The pumpkins and zucchini are doing great. The seeds, not so much.
Saturday and Sunday were scorching. I was a little scared that getting a 97-degree day so soon after planting my few seedlings would dry everything up and kill the whole yard, but I think everything is doing pretty good this year so far. It's been a whole week and a day and things appear to still be alive! I believe my weeklong success is because I finally got the memo from the Universe that I live in a scorching hellhole of humanity's armpit and I stopped using all the small clay planters I have lying around -- I'm only planting stuff in my big plastic pots this year. They little clay containers are pretty and cheerful but they dry out in fifteen minutes flat during the summer, and since summer lasts until November that gives me a window of about four days to grow something.
Hey -- you! You there! The one about to write an impassioned comment or plea or admonition for my failure to investigate the MUCH BETTER option of a drip irrigation system, yes, you! You can stop typing, let me save you some advice-giving juice.
A drip irrigation system for my many cheerful clay pots and plastic containers would indeed be a delightful and transformative thing, one which I investigated myself at the hardware store and garden center and after I thought maybe I was reading the information all wrong I even got my gardeners to give me advice on it. But what most folks don't know is that I live in a magical and mysterious house built back in the 1940s by a lesser-known brother of the Three Stooges. His name was probably Ezra ... Ezra Stooge.
Ezra had likely been in possession of his contractor's license for a full four and a half minutes before he opened up a bag of quickcrete and laid the foundation for my magical and mysterious home. I have pipes that lead to nowhere, a giant hedge in the middle of the backyard, tiny doors to secret passages painted shut inside my cabinets and magical utilities that, when they need servicing, usually result in this: A utility services professional telling me, "Gee, lady, I've been with the gas company / DWP / phone company /whateverservice for fifteen years and this is the first time I've ever seen a house wired /set-up / situated this particular way! This is a real first for me!"
It is just a joy and adventure, I tell you what. Also now with the haunting, which is an excellent addition to my magical mystery house.
So anyway, Ezra made the non-standard outside electrical hookup thingamabob and the also non-standard outdoor water thingamajig located in such proximity to each other that they are in different zipcodes. My gardeners are excellent resources for pointing out all the ways the sprinklers or wiring or whathaveyou is out of whack on my house, and after some scrutinizing and measuring and using of tools they determined I would need to have a custom drip irrigation system built just for this hook-up and also have to get an electrician out to do the re-wiring and grounding and someone to cut through the siding and dig a trench for blah blah blah and .... ONE MILLION DOLLARS.
Spending that kind of money would probably make sense for me if I owned this house and wanted to live here the next forty years. But I rent and I'm on a budget with the gardening so I took what I thought was the next best route: I pushed the big plastic planters I already owned closer to the sprinklers. Now they get watered every night with the lawn. Works for me! And didn't cost me a dime!
The cucumbers like being near the sprinklers.
So where was I? OH YES! On a budget. So after I pushed my plastic pots near the sprinklers and worked on the raised bed garden in the back without disturbing the lone zucchini outrider, I decided to use my one big backyard blank space where the old geranium used to be for my new watermelon patch. But I kind of needed some edging material and I was maxed out on my gardening budget.
This was my solution:
Cute! And kind of kooky in the crazy-cat-lady-who-lives-in-a-haunted-house way. Sort of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle without the husband and the magic hat. Notice how I skillfully dumped the dirt in what I surmised a watermelon hill should look like. I am well and truly a scourge on the face of gardening. Then I think I sprinkled some seeds on it from 2002 and called it a day.
In other news, my mint is coming back nice and strong this year. It had practically withered away to nothing last fall since the valley was scorching and the poor thing was left in the sun while I ignored it. In my defense, the pot is a solid ceramic monster I got from an the old neighbors who used to live next door, and they gave me two of those big heavy behemoth pots before they left town. I never did anything with them, like move them, because they weigh seven hundred pounds each. This year I finally got them situated on little platforms with rolling wheels so I can wheel them around to the sun when they need it or back closer to the patio edge where the sprinklers are. I am really all about plant mobility this year, you see. Plants should have the freedom of wheels, too!
The basil which somehow never died last year is doing OK, I pruned it a little and added some basil seeds to the pot. And the peppers have bright green new leaves popping out amongst the old yellowed and tired leaves that are so 1007:
I mixed some portulaca in with everything (I love portulaca flowers, some folks call it "moss rose." All I know is that it's the only blooming pretty thing I can get to live in this heat.) I have my usual three pots of thyme which I grow every year because I LOVE the smell of fresh thyme, but I never seem to keep it alive very long. We'll see.
So that is my garden. A bunch of old seeds who may or may not emerge, some pumpkins, a lone zucchini, a big hill of watermelon seedlings and a bluejay in a lemon tree. And of course the same giant weird hedge in the middle of the backyard, surely planted there by ol' Ezra Stooge himself. What a character that guy must have been. If you ever bump into him will you please ask him where the secret trapdoor inside the kitchen cupboard leads to? Thanks, man.
Posted by laurie at 09:58 AM | Comments (70)
April 07, 2008
Where the wild things grow
After taking some time off to go gallivanting and so on, I found myself back home on Saturday with a cold beer in one hand and a garden hose in the other. That is what heralds the beginning of spring in my life, even if it does occur a few weeks after the arrival of said season. The cold beer is the tip-off.
With the new gardeners the yard is finally green and healthy-ish. They're stealthy, they come and leave and I never see them, but the hedge on the side of the house has come back to life and even the orange tree, which I never knew until this year was an orange tree because of the severe pruning skills of one Francisco, has big juicy oranges all over it and they're not half bad if I do say so myself.
It looks like a shrub from this angle, but it is indeed a tree.
Every year in a fit of hope and optimism I plant a few things and spend a whole weekend getting dirty and hauling bags of soil around and washing out my rather astonishing collection of containers (years of city life and renting has made me an excellent container gardener) (if by "excellent" you mean "has a lot of pots with dead stuff in them") and then I hope it all grows and that's pretty much the sum total of my gardening experience, year after year. Although this year it's different, this year I am far less ambitious than in the past mainly because I know from the outset that my time available for gardening comes down to about twelve minutes per month, and also because I live in the valley where it will soon be 118 degrees in the shade and all things green will shrivel and wither and become kindling. And out of all the money I spent in the past two years of gardening and making raised-beds and buying great soil and soil amending stuff and seedlings and tomato cages and fertilizer and SO ON, the only thing I managed to grow in two years time has been a bumper crop of my dad's chili pequin peppers, which are still alive and thriving and I even have all these seeds for replanting this year:
And, of course, the zucchini.
I planted two lousy seedlings last year in the raised bed out back and they took over the entire yard, producing over a hundred 20-pound zukes and filling the house, the office and darkening the neighbor's doorsteps. I got piles of email from kind readers with zucchini bread recipes and I didn't have the heart to tell them my oven hasn't been used since late 2005. The zucchini kept coming and eventually I stopped going into the back garden altogether for fear one had ensnared a small animal or was plotting a path to the main house. Finally, the gardeners must have gotten tired of the spindly long vines crawling across the back garden and one day last September I came home and the whole lot of zukes had been stripped and cleared and put out in the green can by the curb.
I was free, at last.
So this year I decided to be far more sensible about this whole gardening thing. I bought the one thing I've wanted forever, a small dwarf Meyer Lemon three, perfect for the giant empty pot that used to hold my pencil cactus, pre-2006 freeze:
I've got my pepper plants of course, pruned and trimmed and already sprouting new leaves. And I invested $2.49 in a little group of bush cucumber seedlings, we'll see how they do. One lousy cucumber at Whole Foods was the same cost as the cucumber plant at the nursery, so I took a chance. Bet big or go home! Right?
And then I went out back to survey the back 40, and see what I might grow in the raised bed where the zukes had taken over. I thought I might do a pumpkin this year, or try again with the watermelon project. And out there, in the arid unloved raised bed, I spied something popping up from the dirt.
Yes -- it's lone zucchini seedling, popping up in my raised garden bed.
It's going to be a long summer, I see.
Posted by laurie at 09:23 AM | Comments (76)
August 15, 2007
Only the good die young. Except for the peppers...
One of the things I am trying to work on right now is to stop worrying about events that have not even happened yet. This has nothing at all to do with gardening. But if you could play back the chatter that goes on in my mind on a tape recorder, it would sound like a continual rehashing of events that have not yet transpired. As if worry can stave off future evil.
I maybe am crazy.
In other news, these guys wanted to hop on the Karmic wheel sooner than I expected:
That's Rosemary and Oregano, deader than last year's tomato plants. They developed some weird infestation of flying bugs and the person in charge of watering these plants got grossed out because everytime she would water them the bugs would fly up. She is maybe fired from gardening.
Except she's done an awesome job on the plants that sit near the sprinklers and get regular waterings, such as ... marjoram?
It is dark at 5 a.m. and spooky.
Yes, that is the largest marjoram plant I have ever seen and I am growing it in my backyard. It's lovely and smells amazing. This little plant was a freebie last-minute grab (it was one of those "buy five herbs get the sixth seedling free" things) and it's grown and quadubiliionupled in size and I have no idea what do do with a bushel of marjoram so if you have any ideas ... please share!
My lone bell pepper is rockin' the Christmas colors:
And the other peppers, my Dad's Chili Pequin babies, are doing really great! I planted them in all areas of the yard, both in pots and in the ground. The ones in the shaded pots and the raised beds are doing great, the plants in full sun and even partial-plus-sun either died or shriveled up. California has really intense sun, it's not like other places I've lived. Maybe our protective coating of smog intensifies the sun's something-or-other.
Peppers en masse:
Look, little green pequins!
I haven't spent much time at all in the yard the past couple of weeks, it's been scorching on the weekends or I've been tied up with other things, and it's scary with all the zucchini. And of course I have had to attend to all my imaginary worrying about future events that have not even yet taken place.
But with Francisco gone, the yard is surprisingly lush and low-maintenance. I don't know how one man could make so much go wrong in one yard but Lord he did have a talent for killing things.
Perhaps he snuck in for one last go at those rosemary and the oregano? Perhaps?
Posted by laurie at 06:58 AM | Comments (94)
July 27, 2007
Finally, it's Friday. Time for The Artful Zucchini!
For Ellen Bloom's birthday recently I presented her with the gloriousness which is ... zucchini. (See, when phrased that way it almost seems like a gift of grandeur and not a gift of "Oh my God the squash are taking over my house, help!")
Ellen's husband Larry, an amazing photographer, was inspired by my gargantuan gadzukes and used them as recent subjects de arte.
Lovely, aren't they? They seem almost benign in such an artful pose. In fact, resting in their greenness, you can hardly tell at all that they are conspiring to overthrow a Valley, a city, a nation...
Posted by laurie at 09:19 AM | Comments (83)
July 06, 2007
Houston, we have an infestation.
It started out innocently enough. Everyone but everyone knows I cannot keep any garden plants alive unless they are cactus or cactus relations, or weeds, and anyway once it reaches the fiery temperature of hell in my backyard everything up and withers away, lost dreams for yet another gardening season.
If I am being completely honest here, that is always the best part of summer. I can shrug and blame all the dry crackling leaves on Nature, and just stop pretending I am gardening and instead lay in the inflatable kiddie pool on the weekends with a cold beer and read a book and occasionally look around at what used to be the garden.
This is my plan and has been my plan every year thus far EXCEPT THIS YEAR. This year no matter what I do (or more accurately, do NOT do, such as water, fertilize or even look their way) the zucchini KEEP GROWING. They are in fact growing as I write this, morphing into huge green phallic monsters and they are knocking on the back door and saying, "Let me in, lady!" and frankly ya'll, they scare me.
I think they are staging an insurrection. I think they are plotting with the appliances and the light switches and something untoward will be happening at any moment, demands from an angry and rather enormously fat army of overgrown squash zealots.
They are in the fridge:
They are in the toaster oven:
They are in my knitting bag:
They are in the bathroom sink:
They are in the cat baskets, so Frankie has nowhere to rest her very annoyed furry self:
They are in the chair Roy likes to nap in:
They are also in his crinkle cave, taking over all his soft napping spots:
They are in fact surrounding Roy at all times, since everyone loves Roy, including the creepy gadzukes:
They are in my sock drawer:
They are everywhere except the treadmill, because no one wants to exercise in this heat including even the garden vegetables.
Ya'll. I am only one woman. I cannot handle this amount of vegetation. Send help. Send wine. SEND A FRY DADDY AND SOME HUSH PUPPY MIX.
Your pal,
Infested By Gadzukes
P.S. Thank you for the concern, yes the peppers are still alive! They are small and have provided no peppers thus far but are indeed alive. They are probably getting an inferiority complex from the squash.
Posted by laurie at 10:27 AM | Comments (181)
June 13, 2007
Where The Big Things Grow
I wanted to title this, "Hey little girl come over and look at my big zucchini" but I am sensitive to the amount of perviness in that title and frankly I am actually trying to get rid of the kids in my neighborhood (shhhh, don't tell God) because they are loud and appear to have parents who just feed them sugar and caffeine all day and then set them loose right as I am getting home and trying to do such things as "relax quietly to myself."
Also I don't really want anyone looking at my zucchini without my prior consent.
Hello! Hi ya'll!
So, anyone who knows me at all in real life -- even with just five minutes of knowing me in their resume -- knows that I am completely crack-ass addicted to Self Help. I love to get my crazy on in the self-help aisle! I have always been this way, I swear to you I was the one five-year-old reading all the self-helpy children's books ("The Little Choo Choo That Could," anyone?) and I am particularly fond of the whole Psychology Of Happiness movement, which is basically just a fancypants way of saying that if you focus on the positive stuff, you won't so nearly as much want to sit in a corner eating your hair.
So, let us focus on the positives of this year's Grand Gardening Experimentation. There are many positives, the very biggest one of course being that anything at all has managed to grow since in my life I have about 2.8 minutes per month available to devote to the care and tending of a garden. I feel it is some weird Southern compulsion that makes me plant a garden vegetable or two or twenty each year, and then my more citified and also tired and lazy side thinks, "I planted your asses, now Darwinize! Survival of the fittest, baby!"
Here are the developments thus far in Bad Backyard Gardening 2007:
Somewhat Positive Slant On Bad Thing #1:
Victor the green-headed onion passed on. Yup, he's gone to meet the big Allium in the sky. He got brown and kind of crumbly, then he died. You may be asking yourself, What is positive about that? I did not know either. I in fact asked myself the same question. As you may recall, Victor appeared as a beacon of hope in my life when I was under a deadline that I was still keeping secret while also working full time, visiting the family, trying to stay sane and also find my pants. So I was a little sad when I discovered he had up and died on me just very recently. Then I realized I now had a nice, empty pot for the MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF PEPPER PLANTS springing forth from my patio region. And ya'll know I have to keep these special Texican chili pequin peppers alive because my dad planted them by hand, each seed lovingly put into the soil with TWEEZERS, and then put into a dome-like thingy and they all germinated and now I have peppers literally coming out of my hoohah. Well, not literally. I was maybe stretching the meaning of "literally." I do not for the record have plants in my hoohah. Anyway.
Baby's First Pepper Farm.
Somewhat Positive Slant On Bad Thing #2:
I have also managed to get two pots um... recently vacated by previous tenants, both of whom were of the family name "Thyme" and neither of whom liked my fickle watering strategy. See, I like to keep all the plants guessing as to when they might be drinking again, I find it keeps us all on our toes. Also, I work late and sometimes it is dark and spooky outside, and I'm not watering anything except a wineglass at that hour.
Somewhat Positive Slant On Bad Thing #3:
The cucumbers don't like me and frankly, it's mutual. So we're on the same wavelength, I guess. That's positive! Also, why is it that after two months of growing cucumbers my next door neighbor Mrs. Lee has literally bushels of shiny, green cukes and I have managed to grow one (1) spindly, bitter-tasting cucumber that gave me a splinter? Oh wait. We're being positive ... so, the good news is that before long I will have three new vacant pots for my ever-growing farm of peppers. I hope the peppers bloom soon and start producing something. My dad keeps asking if they've bloomed yet and I feel like the poor first-time mom whose kid isn't potty-trained yet and she feels like they're already falling behind in development and will never catch up with the cool kids.
Somewhat Positive Slant On Bad Thing #4:
I planted six okra seedlings and so far, after two months of growing, the tallest one is still less than a foot tall. On the plus side, I did harvest one perfect okra pod last night, and I think the clouds parted and I heard angels singing, "Aaaaaaah." Also after that the angels may have said, "Hey ya'll, that's real pretty ... but how the heck do you fry up just one okra?"
And finally, Somewhat Positive Slant On Bad Thing #5:
Each year I plant a tomato seedling or two and each year I watch with great hope and wonder as absolutely nothing happens at all, then the small spindly dwarfy things just burn to a crisp in late June. So for the rest of the summer I'll have this big giant pot with a huge tall tomato cage on it and hovering near the bottom half is a sad little hunched-over ten-inch tall plant in the dirt. It's kind of comical really. It's the embodiment of hope and failure all at the same time.
But we are not gardening with sadness and death today, we are gardening with selfhelpishedness! Which means that we look on the positive side, and that side is just around the hedge in the back 40 where I planted my okra in their raised bed with such care and precision, and then because I somehow had these two little zucchini seedlings and nowhere to put them, and they looked about half-dead anyway as soon as I got them, I just stuck one on each corner and called it a day.
Then night came, and more days passed, and while other things in the garden mysteriously mutated and died and passed on through the karmic vegetation loop, my backyard began sprouting forth with GIANT HUGE FORMIDABLE GADZUKES.
Those two little half-dead zucchini plants turned into a forest of squash. And they just keep coming! And nothing will stop them, not even my mysterious watering regimen. I left town for a few days and what had once been a teensy little four-inch zuke grew while I was gone and morphed into a Lock Ness Zucchinister!
So I do hereby declare I am pretty much not going to plant anything next year except zucchini! Seriously. I now know from first-hand experience that there is nothing to make you feel more triumphant and FEROCIOUS in the gardening world than growing an eleventy-ton squash. I swaggered around the patio and told the tomatoes to enjoy the ride this year, buckos, because next year it's nothing but squash all the way! That's right. Sayonara little piddlyass plum tomatoes! Forget all about you, dumb won't-grow-for-nothing cucumbers. And okra, much as I love you, one pod does not a dinner make. Next year I am going to plant nothing but squash and watch the whole yarn turn into a scary funhouse of funky big zucchini.
Plus if I have a surplus I can use them as rockets on the kids across the street. Oh hah hah! You know I am JUST KIDDING. I would never do that ... I wouldn't dare harm an innocent squash!
Posted by laurie at 09:46 AM | Comments (167)
April 17, 2007
The plants are still green -- this must be a gardening world record!
Well, it's a record for me, anyway.
Already, what? Two, three weeks and nothing has died except one lone okra seedling that got sat on by a big blue jay (to all the folks about to email me and remind me: Yes I remember you schooled me that it is a "Western Scrub Jay." I know, I know, but it's blue and I call them Blue Jays because I am rebellious that way.)
So one seedling died shortly after planting when it got sat on by a forty-ton Blue Jay, and everything else is actually alive and growing.
Even the tree out back has sensed the departure of Francisco and has started to grow leaves! After its terrifying near-death prune of 2006, I'm surpised to see it make the effort, but somehow nature has sensed the disappearance of Francisco and made a valiant effort to re-grow.
Dez assures me that Francisco has re-located to the New Orleans area and sent me this photographic proof:
Thanks, Dez. Looks like we have answered the "Where in the world is Franciso And His Mighty Pruning Shears Of Death" question once and for all. I think he's probably making the world tour of his fans... next week he might be in Wisconsin with Dale-Harriet, then he'll be in the southwest to visit Psychomom, and when the nor'easter clears out, I can only assume that Francisco will be standing in Maryse's yard in Boston, pruning shears in hand, waiting to hack something to pieces. (Ya'll give Maryse some love, her kitty Napoleaon passed on last night.)
The neighbor across the street from me uses Abel the able as her gardener but I didn't ask her for the number (I had his card somewhere, anyway, from that time I met him) and I specifically didn't have the landlord call him.
The very first gardener I had at this little house was really goodlooking and dark-haired and hardly ever spoke. It was so rainy that year, I moved in just before Christmas and I was alone with a mountain of boxes and it was A Bad Time for me, I sat on the patio all night long smoking and staring at fat raindrops, watching night slosh into morning.
The dark and silent gardener came once a week, first on weekdays but eventually timing it so he was there on weekends when I was home. He had that way of looking right through me like he could see I was lonely, so that when he was replaced with Francisco a few months later I was actually relieved. There was a time when I could have been had out of lonely and sorrow and that's never a good place for me to be, in the end.
And even now, now that I am all personal growthy and not stunk up with heartbreak and late-night cigarettes and forever-insomnia, I still think it is best not to have a very, very attractive young gardener.
I'm too practical, really.
The hedges and grass would still keep growing even if I grew tired of him, or he tired of me. Awkward wouldn't even begin to describe such a thing. And I'm no good at resisting temptation. I sure know messes, and I don't plan to volunteer for more if I can avoid it.
At least not messes that come to your house every week and have a key to the back gate.
Maybe that was too much information. Maybe all of this is, the whole diary. But I remember too clearly how it felt to be married and lonely and wearing too much makeup to the grocery store, looking for a little attention, maybe not even knowing it at the time.
Flirting with the gardener seems like a bad idea. It feels reminiscent of a time in my life I wish I could un-remember. I feel a little sad and humiliated to have been so married and yet so lonely that I just wanted a check-out clerk at the market to look at me like I was pretty.
Lord I am glad not to be back there anymore.
So the new gardener came by yesterday after work and I showed him the back forty and gave him the key to the gate. He is about 50, and tanned smooth brown from a job he spends outdoors, and he's very businesslike and gave a quick assessment of the trimming work Francisco had done.
"This guy was not knowing anything," he said very seriously. Gravely. He looked at the shrubs in front and sighed so deeply and morosely I knew he could feel those damn hedges hurting, in pain. I just thought they were funny, my little forest of stunted trees shaped by madness and half-dead from neglect.
His name is Juan and he brought his little boy Kenneth along for the walk-through and they admired my peppers but couldn't quite get the okra. I don't know the Spanish word for it, and anyway it's not a staple in Mexican food so I told him he'd just have to wait and see.
Then they watched as one of the fat, surprisingly large blue birds swooped down onto the patio and took a peanut from the bowl I fill each day, or when I remember to fill it. Those birds love peanuts. Sometimes they sit on the chairs and squawk at me until I fill their bowl.
"That is a BIG Blue Jay," said Kenneth.
"It's a Western Scrub Jay," I informed him. Just because.
* * *
P.S. I'm sorry the comments are being weird and slow and sometimes quadruple posting. I suspect the mystical comments machine thinks I am lonely and wants me to think I have a lot of friends. I deleted the messy duplicates where I could then I got tired and stared at my toes.
* * *
Posted by laurie at 09:54 AM | Comments (132)
April 03, 2007
Hot in Los Angeles
There is one smell I can identify immediately and I will forever associate it with Los Angeles, and that is the smell of a California wildfire.
Reporters and the people on TV describe the smoke as "acrid," which I guess it is, but to me a California wildfire smells like desert sage and a hint of dry eucalyptus and brown earth and heat and fear.
Apparently two dumbaii teenage boys from Illinois were playing with matches out near Universal Studios and the whole mountain caught on fire. They should be glad they are not my children or I would have paid the nice policemen to keep them in jail. Of course, I guess if you aren't from here you have no idea how easy it is to set the whole city on fire. Then again, as a teenager, you should have already passed the "play with matches" stage and be developing into the "sneak porno off the innernet" stage. I MEAN REALLY NOW.
You could see the smoke all the way downtown, a thick blanket of it settling down around the skyline. On the bus ride home we approached the 101/134 split and we had to shut all the windows because smoke was filling the bus. I got one not-very-good picture of the backside of the mountain where the fire was mostly out, just smoldering:
And most importantly, I got a sneaky profile shot of the Hot Bus Driver:
Bad picture but you'll have to trust me, HE HOT.
According to weather news, this is the longest dry spell Los Angeles has experienced in 130 years. I'm wary of the fire season, last year and the year before were too close for comfort out in Encino Adjacent. This year I have even more to protect from the scorching heat and fire danger, however.
THIS YEAR I HAVE OKRA.
Now, if you are right this very minute shriveling your petite, well-bred nose in disgust -- Okra! The horror! -- let me inform you that Southern Fried Okra (click for recipe) is the finest dish on earth. Served with a cold beer, some sliced tomatoes from the garden and maybe a whole ham, you will be the fattest and happiest human being around and your blood will flow finely through your veins, lubed up with oil and love.
I do not know if ya'll remember my raised bed garden I built last year, part of the Failed Square Watermelon Project of 2006. Anyway, it just sat there all year sad and empty after my tiny watermelon seedlings burned up in solid week of 118 degree Valley weather. It is now home to TWELVE little okra seedlings, because okra is a warm weather plant and allegedly LOVES the sun. The wildfire, not so much. But sun is supposed to be good for okra. There are also zucchinni in the corners of the garden bed and some marigolds because that is how I roll.
Having been a renter for five thousand years, I have always been a container gardener, and I usually have pretty good success in the containers. Check out the tomatoes and marigolds:
Cucumbers (six plants because yes, I ARE CRAZY):
I've had some of these pots for ten, twelve years now, most of them held giant cactus and succulents. But back in January we had a crazy hard frost and it was 26 degrees for several nights in a row. (That has never happened in the hundred years I've lived here!) Almost everything died. I was sad at first, but then it felt kind of good to make a clean start. I often forget that things and posessions and even plants carry energy and memories. Now I don't look out on the patio and see plants I had in a married house from way back when, I see a whole bunch of happy new little faces and just one or two old friends.
Over the weekend Faith and I wandered the aisles of the Green Thumb nursery in Canoga Park looking at their lovely herb selection and picking up each happily potted plant and smelling them, touching the leaves, and at some point I believe I even hugged a culinary-grade French rosemary. I bought Apple Mint, three varieties of Thyme, the aforementioned Rosemary, Greek Oregano, Cilantro and Basil:
[click for bigger pics]
That last pic is catnip ... in a hanging basket. I learned my lesson last year, you neighborhood alley cats who roll nekkid in planted catnip!!
I also got one red bell pepper, one yellow pepper and one purple (!) pepper, and lined them up like plant-art:
Most of my plants sit on little wheeled plant stands so I can move them into the shade this year when the Big Heat Wave arrives. I did not install a drip irrigation system because it was too expensive and I had already spent my entire budget on plants and potting soil and so on. But I cleaned the patio and arranged everything so that I can just buy one of those special nozzles for the garden hose that simulate rainwater and I'm going to hose the patio down at night when I water the plants, which (I hope) will have the added benefit of keeping Spider City at a more manageable level (the amount of dust and leaves and dirt and cobwebs on the patio was rather startling. Apparently I was very busy last year and did not have time for such pursuits as "sweeping" and "noticing the debris.")
While I would like to end this column with something involving smoke and fire and heat and me and the hot bus driver (as if I would tell ya'll anyway! Because, and Also: Hi Dad! Just sitting over here doing some Bible Study!) instead I'll tell you I spent the weekend gardening my little heart out and it was one of the most relaxing weekends I have had in ages. I used muscles I did not know I had, I got to see Faith, and I got to visit the Korean Market with my neighbor Mrs. Lee (I felt weird taking pictures, it seemed rude)(but it was fun!)
And now I have a little garden, and my hope, and a sturdy hose for the hotspots. I even found a home for Victor:
Posted by laurie at 10:25 AM | Comments (195)
November 24, 2006
I do not speak your language.
After work, I came home and knew immediately that Francisco had been at the house. For one thing, the backyard tree which had fought back all summer from last year's disastrous pruning had once again been pruned to within a shaggy inch of its life.
The weeds, however, carefully cultivated and thriving all throughout the yard were as big and strong as ever.
The general operating philosophy of the gardener is that no weed shall be harmed, no blade of grass or actual planned shrub shall be left standing. It's an interesting take on backyard management. We learn as we go.
However, the most startling discovery was ... well, I have no explanation for it. You see, I have several hanging potted plants around the back patio. They're all reposing in various shades of deadness, because I haven't had a lot of time for garden maintenance these days. But the pots hang there anyway in their little macrame swings and sway sweetly in the breeze, rustling their dead little leaves.
All except... one. Which I discovered sitting out on the middle of the concrete patio floor, surrounded by nothing, not broken, no apparent reason whatsoever for it to be there. It wasn't there before Francisco came. It was hanging and happy when I left it. What was the significance of this? Was it a sign? A secret language, a symbol meant to be decoded? Like a crop circle for urban backyards? What on earth could be the meaning behind this single solitary hanging plant now artfully arranged in code on my patio floor?
Posted by laurie at 12:57 PM | Comments (100)
November 13, 2006
A Tale Of Two Gardeners
I had a dream, I had an awesome dream. That one day I would see square watermelons sitting side-by-side with round ones, that actual vegetables would spring forth from my garden, that visible panty lines could be abolished forever which has nothing to do with gardening but is, alas, still a dream.
And then you know, I kind of woke up and I was like, "Holy crap! It's hot outside and there are ants!" So I had a cocktail and sat indoors and watched Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, which frankly is about as close as I got to gardening all year. Whoops.
Somewhere between the great flood and the great drought and the great pruning, and oh, more pruning, and a tree falling on my yard, well. I guess the square watermelon dream of '06 died. Nice knowing you, seedlings! Sorry about the 118-degree summer! Blame it on all the hole in the ozone, probably from the hairspray I used in my formative teenage years, much-needed to achieve the inpenetrable Wall O' Bangs.
So, the backyard had been looking kind of sad. And so did the front yard, because Francisco had maybe stopped coming so frequently. I saw him in August and he said, "Ah, no really need to cut the back today, it's all dead anyway." That sentiment grew into his over-arching philosophy, I suppose. Prune and hack and remove, ergo making the job of gardener almost totally work-free! Fabuloso!
Francisco thought he had the situation ar Chez Brown Yard pretty well tied up. Nice loco white lady with her organic dirt (Ha! Ha! organic dirt!) and her crazytalk of watermelon with squares. Who knows! Beer! Things were good for Francisco.
But then things changed. An interloper tried to steal the crazylady away, and Franceeeesco get very mad.
It all happened innocently enough. I was coming home from visiting Grandma in Orange County one Sunday afternoon, piling out of my Jeep and generally trying to sherpa my way to the house with all my bags when from out of nowhere, literally, where did he come from? A very cute guy offered to help me carry things up to my porch.
Normal people would say "No!" This is Los Angeles, after all. We have crazy psychoticness roaming the streets at all times. But I handed him three more bags of stuff and he helped me lug it all to the patio. He did not, it turns out, mystically appear out of nowhere. He and his father have a landscaping service and tree-trimming business and would I be looking for the services of a very good gardener?
"Because your yard, it is not so much pretty."
"Thank you," I said. "My gardener has a strategy, I think. He's really into conserving water, maybe?"
"Ah," said the serious young man with the very nice dimple. He was quiet for a minute. He looked at my garden, then looked at me. "Todo esta muerto."
"Si," I said. "Todo esta muerto." Cue the sad music, and pass the tequila.
Somehow, somewhere, the United Gardener Interpersonal Communication system must have been triggered. Just the mere presence of another gardener -- a rival, at that -- standing on my front lawn and chitchatting about crabgrass sparked a psychic flurry of competition, or something, because Francisco WHO I HAD NOT SEEN IN THREE WEEKS instantly showed up in his truck with his leafblower at the ready.
He eyed the interloper.
"Quien es this guy?" said Francisco.
"Oh, I didn't get his name," I said. Then I turned to Mystery Landscape Guy. "So, what is your name?"
"I am Abel." (Confession time. Ok, ya'll, I admit it took me a minute. I was like, "You're able? Able to do what?" because... LISTEN. I am not so fast sometimes. You know?)
So there was a pause. And then it sunk in, his name was Abel, and he was... able!!! HAHAHAHA. This is how I think, and it amused me. So I giggled, which didn't do much to break the tension at Chez Muerto Yard.
Francisco eyed Abel. Abel eyed me.
I eyed my cuticles with great interest. Then I looked at Francisco, and he looked so sad. Like that time in fifth grade when I broke up with Kevin Anderson for not holding my hand on the bus. So I turned to Abel and said, "Well, nice to meet you! This is Francisco, my gardener. I gotta go!" Francisco smiled with what was either relief or indigestion, and ... coward that I am, I fled the scene of the showdown. Locked myself inside with a nice adult beverage and four cats and nothing that even vaguely resembled the great outdoors.
But since then, Francisco has been coming every week and my yard is only a little bit muerto. I guess some healthy competition is good for all men. Even those who really, really prefer to cut and run.
This picture has nothing to do with the story.
Posted by laurie at 10:15 AM | Comments (69)
July 31, 2006
Day 11,877: Dante's Seventh Circle Of Hell is actually kind of brown and twiggy
It's not enough that everything died during the heatwave ... the watermelons, the peppers, the basil, everything died and it wasn't from lack of water (I watered as often as I could without drowning everything) but the plants simply burned. The leaves had actual burn marks from the scorching sun. Nothing could take twenty straight days of 112, 118, 109, 110 degrees except the succulents and desert plants.
It was fine, ya'll. I made my peace with it and said, "Woo hoo, look at how big that cactus has gotten!" My cactus loves the heat, and so I love it. From afar, of course.
With the weather cooling down, however, I was sure the worst was over. Marine layer! Temps in the high eighties! Maybe stuff will grow again where once there was grass. Life regains a glimmer of hope. And with hope returns the will to shop, since I can safely enter the no-A/C hellhole also knows as "my Jeep" to run errands and go to the pet store and Target and get gas and life! is! grand!
Unless you are the hedges. More specifically, my hedges. Which were left unguarded as I threw caution to the wind and ran errands instead of holding fast and firm as the protector of all that remains green and alive in my yard.
Image taken a while back, when my sprinklers flooded the backyard.
The view yesterday afternoon, post-megaprune.
Posted by laurie at 08:58 AM | Comments (106)
May 31, 2006
The Garden of Constant Sorrow; or "Hello, welcome to my backyard lake!"
Hi! Want to go for a swim?
Maybe start a trout farm? Grow some rice in a water-drenched paddy? Begin your very own West Nile Mosquito breeding farm? Do some pre-election muckraking with REAL CALIFORNIA muck? (kind of like real California cheese, only... muckier! Ya'll. I should copyright that.)
Well, if any or all of these activities sound fetching to you, please stop by my house after work. We'll drink some beer and watch the mosquitoes breed. It will be like one of those old Southern novels that ends with someone yelling out for Sounder. Or was it roll of thunder? I do not know. Maybe my neighbor down the street will set something on fire again, but we will be protected by the moat, because my backyard is fully flooded.
Let us flash back to the past, to ... yesterday. At 7 a.m.:
Me, slightly hysterical: Francisco? It's Laurie, please can you come over today because... there is a swimming pool in my backyard.
Francisco: Ah Miss you know I do not swim. I am Francisco.
Me, to myself, also keep in mind I have not had coffee: [You are Francisco ...? Is that like, a declarative sentence in which you state the reason for your actions in life is 'I Am Francisco'? I HAVE GOT TO TRY THIS. Would you like sour cream on that? No! Because I am Laurie! Would you help me with this power point presentation? No! I am Laurie!]
Me, out loud: Francisco. It's ... a lake. The sprinklers are... broken? Or maybe really really overactive? Because there is water all over the backyard.
Francisco: I see.
Me: ...!!!!!!!
Francisco: Yes. I will come and save save the sprinklers.
Me: Because you are Francisco.
Francisco: huh?
Indeed, I had discovered really exciting lake-front property in Encino, which was in fact very new and rather alarming as it is Summer (and Summer in the valley means Never Rains Everything Dries Up Dies Is Dessicated Catches On Fire) and I myself had quite the tropical paradise happening out back. There was a chair floating near the pumpkin plant. I believe I saw a squirrel jet-skiing in the back forty. Rather than join the assorted bugs and wildlife partaking in the watery goodness, however, I had to haul ass to downtown because apparently I don't have the cajones to tell my boss, No, I cannot come to work today! I am Laurie! Also, I pay the water bill for this lake!
Work was very happy as you can imagine, with me trying to decide if the house would flood, or maybe begin sinking, or that otters would swim up and start building a dam with what used to be the patio chairs and before long the opening sequence of CSI: Miami would be filmed right in my own backyard, complete with airboats and alligators and one David Caruso, who takes off his sunglasses and surveys Waterworld Encino, and then as he slides his dark glasses back on, he punctuates it with a quippy line such as, "It's murder ... Miami-Encino style. I Am David Caruso!"
Anyway. All's well that ends well and also ends with no otters on my doorstep, and I left work and Francisco came over and stopped the River Encino from growing into a canal and he did manage to SAVE THE SPRINKLERS. The yard is another story all together. Mucky is the new chic, yes? The drought-tolerant ice plant is now floating like so many waterlilies out on the bayou. If I find any crawfish swimming back there, I'll invite ya'll for dinner. You will need to utter the secret phrase for entry into the pond, though:
I Am Francisco!
I couldn't get any further than the sidewalk to take muckier, more bayou-like pictures, because I was not wearing my waders, and Lord knows what could be swimming back there, revived from the primordial ooze. Hey, want to come over? Primordial ooze! Fun!
Posted by laurie at 09:30 AM | Comments (75)
May 15, 2006
Gardening probably burns calories, right?
I am maybe slightly hobbled over and also, limping. You may be asking, "What exciting sport/date-gone-wild/hijinks and toomfoolery did you tangle with to be hunched over on a Monday morning?"
And your excitement would be wasted on me, me who is the apex of boringness, me who has apparently suffered a gardening-related injury. Or not-injury, really, more like "I am so pitiful out of shape that hauling a few bags of dirt around has crippled me."
I should maybe use my treadmill more often? Do some sport besides knitting?
And ya'll, I am embarrassed to tell you, I did not even haul around that much garden-related stuff. In fact, I maybe carried one or two bags of Gromulch, and the rest of the lifting and "put it here... no... over there... let's move this, too!" was carried out by two very nice men who had the dire misfortune to be working on a house directly next to me, one Scarlett Wishful O'Hara.
The house next door to me, previously rented by Mark and Sherri, a very nice couple, is now being put up for sale and for the past couple of weeks all sort of hammering and drilling and painting has been going on over there. I have just been ignoring it, since I know that with my luck the folks who buy that house will be either: A) Loud talkers/yellers/all-night partiers B) Super quiet people who despise my breathing noise c) Satan-worshippers who make live pigeon sacrfices in the backyard D) Drug dealers. So, I have just ignored the whole house-is-for-sale-to-possible-Satanists aspect. However, on Saturday morning I was introduced to Octavio and Julio, both of whom were very sorry to bother me but could I please come outside please?
Not a good sign, usually.
They had apparently been sawing down the tree that sits between my yard and the neighbor's yard when a large chunk of said tree crashed into my back patio. One would think that I would have heard this madness and carrying on just a mere fifteen feet from me, but I was locked in a bathroom with a cat who was determined not to be poisoned (medicated) and had grown ten biting heads and forty-eleven claws and frankly ya'll I was just not monitoring the logging operations going on in the back yard.
So I went outside with Octavio and Julio and we looked at my backyard and the large tree which was covering much of my patio.
"Shady!" I said.
"Accidental!" they said.
"Is it too early for a beer?" asked guess-who.
"Never too early!" said Octavio.
And after much chitchatting and scrutinizing of the downed soldier, everyone decided perhaps the best thing to do would be to push it back over the fence to the other side. Mind you, I had nothing to do with this flash of brilliance, as I was doing the thing that all good Southerners do when faced with a tree spontaneously committing suicide over their back porch: I was opening up cold beers and hostessing. Because this is what I do, people. I can't chainsaw a tree or haul it off to the... tree place, or whatever people do with giant pieces of greenery. No, I make jokes and kick back a cold one.
Of course, after 20 minutes of trying to push a giant tree back into the yard from whence it came, everyone was ready for another round and Octavio and Julio decided perhaps, with my OK, they would just saw it here and carry it off piece by piece?
And as day turned into evening turned into six-pack, the tree left little by little, I realized that the Almighty himself had send me these two new best buddies, and they felt so bad about a tree landing on my porch that they would agree to do anything, and also they were maybe a little intoxicated. And I had eleventeen hundred pounds of potting soil in giant bags that I had purchased way back in... April? that had been delivered... to my garage. And I had procrastinated for about as long as one can procrastinate when they are on a square watermeloning craze, and the dirt needed to make it to the back 40 for the transplanting, and I had found two poor schmoes to help me haul eleventeen hundred pounds of potting soil on Sunday. If a tree falls in Encino, will Scarlett O'Hara think about her garden the next day? Indeed!
On Sunday, both Octavio and Julio came 'round in the afternoon, and helped me with the Great Dirt Distribution Project of 2006. As previously mentioned and worth stating once again, I carried at least two whole bags of Gromulch (ha!) and I transplanted most of my seedlings and I took pictures of none of this, because it was 500 degrees in the valley all weekend and I was sweaty and dirty and also, 500 degrees. This story has no excellent conclusion, unless you find it excellent that I lied to everyone at work just now and said I was hunched over and crippled from a weekend of extreme hanky-panky, which I am sure they really believed, especially after one person suggested I downgrade to a "battery-operated model." Heh.
C'est Monday. Hobble hobble.
Pictures that also have nothing to do with this story.
Posted by laurie at 10:04 AM | Comments (80)
April 25, 2006
Day 17: An Intervention, or perhaps Prozac , is necessary
One wonders what the gardener's own yard must look like. A barren wasteland of stubby shrubs and hacked-up trees? One tries not to envision it. One drinks a glass of wine the size of one's own head and mourns the loss of the pretty flowers.
Finally, I call Landlord Bob. "I love Francisco, but he needs medication."
The landlord said, "I'll see what I can do. He seems to be on a mission doesn't he?" and I agreed. Then I said, "Perhaps he's missed his calling as a lumberjack. Or butcher. Axe-weilding maniac?"
My landlord tells me, voice lowered, "My wife almost fainted when she saw the bouganvilla at the back of our house. It has about four leaves left on it."
Pause. Take a sip. It has become quite clear: Between myself and Ladlord Bob, neither of us has any balls. "Why are you and I such pushovers, Landlord Bob? Why do we let Francisco run our lives?"
"He's the one with the electric shears, that's my guess." Then we grumble, toast to nature in its bounty, with its amazing ability to grow back.
We hope.
Posted by laurie at 12:26 PM | Comments (105)
April 17, 2006
Day 9: The Gardener wants a divorce
Francisco and I are standing in the back yard, neither of us has said a word to the other for a full five minutes. He is leaning on his shovel, staring at me, and he is angry, or frustrated, or both. I had planned to tell him all about my exciting Square Watermelon patch, but now we aren't speaking. We need therapy, or couples counseling. I suspect he wants to divorce me on the grounds of insanity.
Aside from the fact that we do not live under the same roof, and I don't do his dirty laundry, Francisco and I are in a marriage. We don't talk much, we both share the responsibility for the upkeep of the yard, sometimes we don't listen to each other, or understand each other. Sometimes we laugh, or have a beer, but we never have s-e-x.
Sounds like marriage to me.
Francisco wants to trim the big hedges, and I am trying to convince him otherwise. He has a vision for the shrubs which I do not share, every time he stops by it seems something has been removed, or cut to within an inch of its life. I used to have big box shrubs in front of the house. One day I came home to find them carved into trees. Now I make jokes to my friends, "Ya'll come over! Look at the shrubs! You can't see the forest because of the tiny, stubby trees!"
On this particular day, however, I have mortally offended Francisco. Our relationship is on the rocks. I have made the egregious error of implying that he killed the big back yard oak tree when he completely chopped it to pieces, or "pruned" it a few months ago.
"Francisco, I'm sorry, I'm sure you didn't kill the tree, it just died coincidentally around the same time, maybe?"
"It's not dead."
"But it has no branches and no leaves."
"Look! Right here, es verde, ok?"
"Ok. But this one green leaf bud will not shade me for the whole summer. If you cut down the hedges, I'll bake over here."
"Bake?"
It occurs to me that maybe the only way to appeal to Francisco on this issue is to make him understand that while his idea is REALLY GREAT, and I was WRONG to imply he killed the tree, I have special needs, and they are girly and silly but I would be so happy if he would oblige me. (Being married taught me a thing or two about the fragile male ego.)
I change my tone.
"Francisco, I know you're right about the bushes. I do! But this is a little embarrassing, you know? Me da verguenza. But ... I'm ... you know. Muy guera. Very very pale colored. And without any shade, I'll get sunburned and I'll be bright red and super fea. And you know. I just don't want to be red and ugly. I need some shade, that's all, even though you are completely right about the hedges..."
He hesitates.
He looks at the hedge. Looks back at me. As if for the first time discovering that I really do glow in the dark, probably, and while he doesn't find the shade of a giant hedge very pleasant, perhaps this crazy white lady has challenges he had not considered.
"Well," he says slowly. Taking his time.
"OK. No hedges today."
"Thank you Francisco!" I hug the gardener. We're both relieved. Neither of us really want to divorce each other. Yet.
Francisco finishes with the grass, and I sweep the patio, and then we have a beer and I decide that today is maybe not the best day to tell him about the square watermelons after all. It would just lead to more misunderstanding, more distance between us. And Lord knows I cannot afford couples counseling for me and the gardener.
Posted by laurie at 11:16 AM | Comments (58)
April 10, 2006
The Garden Of Eatin' ... Day 1: How Green Is Your Valley?
My little house in the Valley has two backyards. There is the normal back yard that stretches off the patio about seven feet deep, with some grass and a couple of trees and an overgrown geranium bush in the corner. At the back of this backyard is a giant hedge that reaches over nine feet tall and spreads out about twelve feet wide, and behind this hedge lies what I fondly call The Back 40. It is the back-backyard.
I have no idea what kind of loopy person back in 1942 decided it would be a great idea to grow a hedge in the middle of the yard, separating it into two. Ellen and her husband Larry suggested it may have been a way for the original homowners to disguise "untidy" yard things, or maybe laundry, or both. But apparently 1940s-era loopy found its 2000-era perfect match, because I love the hedge divider. It gives me a secret garden in the Back 40, plus provides a much cozier atmosphere in the front-backyard.
Before I decided to embark upon my new path of Growing Square Fruit, my back-backyard was a vast empty wasteland of nothingness. The soil is hard and mostly clay and I shut off the Back 40 sprinklers some time back in December, so the few weeds shriveled up or wandered off to someone else's better-maintained Real Yard. The goal here was to kill off the weeds and remaining straggly grass so it would be easier to dig up come planting time. I planned to create two raised beds (shallow, but still raised), fill them with dirt and let the magic begin.
On Saturday, I began my Great Gardening Adventure by heading to the Back 40 to size up potential placement for the raised beds.
It was not the same back backyard. It was suddenly a lush den of weed iniquity, full of wildlife and mayhem, if by "wildlife and mayhem" you mean one blue jay and all the ants in the known universe.
Clearly I needed a hoe for this job, so of course I went to Wal-Mart in Panorama City. (heh) (Oh, I love you, Ghetto Mart de Wal!) While I was there pimpin' for hoes, I also picked up a packet of okra seeds and some extra starter medium. I'm starting most of my plants from seed because I am a glutton for punishment, and also because seeds. Fun to grow!
Next stop, Home Depot on a Saturday for raised bed materials. Home Depot. On a Saturday afternoon. Not even a hoe can help me. Luckily, as I wandered around the lumber area looking like a lost puppy in platform flip-flops, I met Lumber Man, possibly the most patient guy on the planet, who took pity on me and listened patiently as I described my great gardening ideas.
I should interject here that I had no actual building plans, sketches, measurements or details for my raised garden beds. My dream of a square watermelon patch was self-sustaining; dreamers like me can't be bothered with little details like "how long is this thing" and also "what is it made of."
Me: You know, I just want a box thing. To hold dirt, which I have been told to call "soil" and in this dirtsoil I'm going to plant a garden.
Lumber Man: Do you know about how big you want it to be?
Me: Oh, you know. Big-ish?
Lumber Man: Like ten feet? Twelve feet?
Me: You're cute. I'm going to make a square watermelon.
Lumber Man: ...? Why?
Me: Because I feel it might be my true calling.
Lumber Man: Well, maybe five feet by five feet then.
Wise Lumber Man suggested I buy supplies to build one box, just in case I needed to "adjust measurements" or perhaps "discovered I do not know shit about building anything." (He did not say it so much as, perhaps, it was implied when he asked "Do you have any tools for building this?" and I replied, "Tools schmoolz!")
I purchased my supplies and went home, determined to have a nice glass of cabernet and build The Beginning Of The Greatest Ant Hill Ever Made. In just a few quick ... hours, I created the masterpiece:
So, in conclusion, the Great Watermelon Patch has the following:
• One garden box sitting on the patio, bereft of dirtsoil.
• One package of okra seeds germinating away in a Jiffy greenhouse.
• One hoe, still unpimped.
• One Back 40, full of weeds.
• One OCD blue jay.
• One bazillion ants.
Excellent beginning! Gardening is fun. Especially when it involves wine and power tools!
Posted by laurie at 09:56 AM | Comments (100)
