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Garden of Delights Blog

Monthly Archives: May 2012

Garden Party

28 Monday May 2012

Posted by ninagarden in bohemian, champagne cocktail, chickens, cupckaes, garden, garden party, gardening, honey, insects, recipe

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chickens, cupcakes, garden party

We recently remodeled our backyard (or almost) and it looked so nice I decided it would be fun to have a garden party.  Often my ideas are bigger and more complicated than I can execute, especially when we weren’t done with the sprinklers or clean up. I scheduled the party early May, and had to reschedule it, making it very confusing for all my friends. The actual day of the party the weather was beautiful–perfect, sunny yet cool weather that San Diego often lacks in May (typically, we have what’s called “May gray,” when the marine layer sits over the beach for most of the month) so we were lucky. And it was wonderful fun!

The theme was “bohemian garden”, something I made up and wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but I got to use a lot of my odds and ends from inside the house and cook a lot of eggplant dishes. I made lemon squares and honey cupcakes with honey buttercream frosting from the recipe on the Romancing the Bee blog–really yummy!

Oh yes, we had a drink called Le Romantique, which is a champagne cocktail served at one of our local restaurants. My husband bartended (thank you for being the lone man! Apparently, we were really loud and scared the dog into hiding inside or maybe he didn’t think eggplant caviar was worth begging for).  Anyway, we made our own version of Le Romantique with rose water, raspberry vodka, pomegranate juice, simple syrup, champagne and real edible rose petals my sister brought me from England. The rose petals looked so good in the drink that had a friendly visitor drop in for a drink (see slideshow below).

Everyone visited the chickens and the new chicken coop and took photos in my hanging photo frame. You can see it hanging here in the tree next to the paper decorations I made.

Here are more pictures. I hope everyone had as much fun as I did! Thank you all for coming!

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Cute Coop

25 Friday May 2012

Posted by ninagarden in chickens, compost, garden, gardening, Uncategorized

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Two months and two weeks after our chicks arrived, they spent the their first night in their deluxe new purple chicken coop.  It also happened to be the night of my birthday, and there is no birthday present like getting chickens out of your house! Thank you to my hunky husband for building me a beautifully constructed, painstakingly perfect chicken coop. I love it!

Now here’s the construction dude. He looks happy because he is almost done building this. He spent a lot of late nights in the garage working on it. Really, he wasn’t that happy about it, but he looks happy in this picture.

 

Now the dog is a different story. He doesn’t like the chickens in a coop. He thinks they should be free-range. Look at him here staring them down as only a herding breed can do. Is he going to eat them or is he trying to protect them?

He may be in a down position because of his arthritis, or he may really be wanting to be near them. He loves them in his own special, bossy, I’m the king-of-you kind of way.

Actually, the chickens have given him a new lease on life. He’s almost died in January, and I think they are giving him a reason to get up in the morning. He wants to be right in the middle of everything we do with them, which is typical Aussie behavior. But if he thinks the chickens are mis-behaving, he tries to heel them by biting their tail feathers, and my vet told me that could be potentially life-threatening for a chicken so I always have to be careful.

It’s always exciting around here on our little Point Loma farm!  Happy Memorial Day!

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Gardeners: Take a Photo!

21 Monday May 2012

Posted by ninagarden in garden, gardening, roses, Tucson

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I had a great idea to write a blog about all the women who had influenced my gardening. I was going to put pictures of them in their gardens next to a description of what they liked to plant and how it influenced me. I started asking family members for photos of my Grandma Vi, who loved to garden, and Grandma Betty who had a tidy rose garden in her patio. Also my mother, who loves her poppies. I am planning to call it Ancestor Gardening, and I’ve already written the first one about my mother and her poppies—but guess what? No one had a photo.

Why? I guess the gardeners were too busy gardening!

My mother’s neighbor helped me out and  took a photo of my mother with her African Daisies. (She had taken lots of photos of her flowers over the years, but never one of herself in the place she worked so hard to make beautiful.)

I sat down with my mother on a recent trip and culled through family photos, searching. I thought we’d find one of Grandma Vi in her garden, or at least her garden—a little farm she created in her backyard—she had planted so many citrus trees, berries, pine trees, roses, you name it.  Nothing. Nada. Nope. Not one photo. The closest thing I could find was a photo of me at 18 months, my grandma and her sister holding me in front of a prickly Pyracantha bush not the beautiful lush plants I remember so well.

Then I found one of my mother, my grandma and me in front of one of her favorite roses. President Lincoln. I knew it because she talked so much about it as I was growing up—”Abe Lincoln” she called it; she loved that rose. At least a few of its rich red blooms peeked out from behind us. But the rest of her garden is only in my memory.

“We were too poor for a camera,” my mother explained, as to why she has no photos of her childhood. But by the time grandma had bought her house, paid off her 1950s fin-tailed Cadillac and planted her back ½ acre with about 90 roses – all earned by waitressing and managing the soda fountain at Walgreens—you’d think she would have taken a picture. Probably she was too busy watering all those roses with a hose—irrigations systems were not easy to come by, and in the desert of Tucson, she spent a lot of time watering.

My Grandma Betty was the same when it came to delinquent photography. I can’t find a single picture of her in the beloved rose garden she had tended and later had a gardener care for. She loved cut roses and had many bouquets throughout her home. When she died I inherited several vases and frogs—those funny spiky flower holders. I imagine them full of her roses. And I wonder if there were pictures we threw away that would have shown me the flowers she loved.

I finally found one of her standing in the patio, next to the rose garden—I think there is a vase of her roses on the table, but that’s all. Well, I did find this other one of her next to a painting of her flowers. I’m sure those are her flowers in the vase because I recognize the parrot statue. It was a white marble bird bookend that sat on a table in her livingroom. She must have gathered the props for her still life from around the house. Love the 70s decor and outfit!

  My mother also found some photos from Ohio that are much older. These are ones from her ancestor garden—from her Grandma Hahn, a farm wife in Darke county, Ohio where Annie Oakley was from. She influenced my Grandma Vi and my mother. Grandma Hahn, I learned, loved her garden. She had it fenced to keep the chickens out. There are some lilacs and some irises.

Sigh. Please, people, if you garden, take some pictures of yourself in it. Someday so relative of yours may want to see it. Or if you have some photos of a favorite spot in your garden, pass them to someone in your family who values gardening—even if they don’t garden now but you suspect they will one day.

Now, what photos of me do I have in my garden?

One:  from the day before I gave birth to my second daughter. It was Easter. I am enormous and wearing a giant pink pregnancy top that is out of fashion. I can’t find it and that is making me upset.

Two: a creepy one of me in a bathrobe, hiding behind the flowers at my old house. I look sort of elfin. I think I’m making that weird face because I don’t want my photo taken.

Okay. To do list: Have photo taken of me in front of Austin roses.

Thank you.

Stay tuned: now that I have a few photos, the Ancestor Garden story will be coming shortly.

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Mother’s Day in the Garden

10 Thursday May 2012

Posted by ninagarden in garden, gardening

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Mothers Day

In honor of Mother’s Day, here are some pretty photos. These were taken at Summer’s Past Farms, one of my favorite places in the San Diego vicinity.

Entrance to the farm.

A photo from my garden:

An iceberg rose with a friendly visitor!

Happy Mother’s Day!

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Garden Club Lecture from the 60s: “Strange Bedfellows” (& Good Friends)

08 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by ninagarden in companion planting, roses, squash, tomatoes, Uncategorized, vegetables

≈ 1 Comment

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borage, companion planting, gardening, garlic, roses, squash, vegetables

Friends for life

My mother sent me notes she’d photocopied from a Garden Club lecture she went to about fifty years ago. The title “Strange Bedfellows,” sounded oddly like a Dickens novel or an episode of Mad Men. Typed, single spaced and on legal paper, it was written by a woman named Jean Hersey, whom she does not know or remember.

I skimmed the first paragraph quickly, knowing my mother would ask me right away if I’d read it.

“Symbiosis is the harmonious living together of two species of organisms for the mutual benefit of both.”

Skimming again, impatient, I read: “Plant garlic in your roses.”

My mother, who was note-taking during the lecture, wrote in the margins: “My grandmother knew this.”

Apparently, the garlic may stop mildew on roses. Enough said, I folded it up and put it somewhere to read it later. I am always fighting mildew and since I don’t like to use pesticides, I thought this might be useful. I would read it one day, when I had time, better eye-sight and a longer attention span. However, I did have time to plant garlic. I ran to the garage and found a package that I’d been meaning to grow. I opened it, thinking how funny it was to plant a whole bulb.

“Do I plant the whole bulb?” I asked my husband who grunted, “No idea.”

It seemed so much like the garlic in my kitchen. I wasn’t sure if it was worth it to plant a bulb, but it was for the roses, I reminded myself. So I did.

Later that day, my best friend called from Huntington Beach. She was parked outside Home Depot. “I can’t find garlic sprouts, and I’m buying them for my roses.”

Get out! The very same thing? Cosmic coincidence? Mind meld? Did my mother send her the same long article?

“It’s a bulb,” I said. “I just planted some. You can’t buy the sprouts. You didn’t get an article from my mother did you?”

Turns out she didn’t. She was fighting the mildew on her roses, too. I told her I tried to ignore the mildew on my roses, because it didn’t seem to hurt them. (My mother’s solution was to take a Q-tip with alcohol out there and wipe them all down. Now that’s a lot of work. I wonder if wine, counts, because there is a possibility I could do that while enjoying a glass.)

Anyway, my girlfriend called me a day later, and she was really getting into “companion planting.” She was planting squash with her corn and basil with her tomatoes. She had called her husband’s cousin who was a Master Gardener and she’d told her to read this web site: http://sally-odum.suite101.com/organic-pest-control-and-pesticide-a4337 and http://www.ghorganics.com/page2.html. (I really like this one!)

And when I started thinking about planting things for mutual benefit. I thought, hmmm, this reminds me of my friend. Yes, funny that I can find a metaphor in just about anything. Funny that she was planting garlic in roses when I was. There is something significant about that coincidence. Let me tell you…we have been friends since before I was born. Yep. That’s right. She is nine months older than I am. Our mothers lived across the street. That means when she was one, I was three months old inside my mother. That’s how we knew each other before birth. Maybe I heard her babbling while I was growing in there, my mother sharing coffee with hers, or maybe trading plant cuttings or recipes—all things they still do today. Then I was born, and we were often put in the same crib.

Forty years later, we’re still friends sharing things and helping each other. If I am oregano, she is tomato. If she is borage, then I am a strawberry. She’s beans, I’m corn. You see, we are like companion plants—her often openness complements my reluctance; her emotions contrast to my stoicism; often she calms the rant; then she rants and I calm. We alternate moods and emotions depending on the problem or the need. We’ve both been irrational and reasonable; sympathetic and outraged, talkative and silent — forty years of companionship through school, college, jobs, marriages, illness, divorce, death, childbirth and child rearing, parents growing in years, moving, house buying, house remodeling and gardening; two growing things have never been as mutually beneficial.

So thank you, friend. I am so lucky to have you as a companion.

Now that my tribute to this friendship is over, and I will get to a summary of Jean Hersey’s points—I finally read the entire article and summarized it for you.

• Lavender and scotch broom: Here’s a picture of scotch broom.

 

• Dandelions. “You may scorn them in the lawn, but please appreciate them for one marvelous characteristic–at sunset they exude an ethylene gas which causes flowers and fruits in the near vicinity to ripen ahead of time.”

• Grapes benefit from nearby plantings of hyssop and wild mustard.

• Strawberries like to grow near spruce trees.

• Bush beans lettuce and spinach are good companions; borage is also good and good with strawberries.

• Never grow cabbage next to strawberries.

• Tomatoes–parsley and asparagus are great; stinging nettle (!) keeps them mold free and sweetens the tomato pulp.

• Never plant tomato with fennel.

• Radishes are good near cucumbers and ward off cucumber beetles. Cucumbers also help corn.

• Most pumpkins or squash and corn and legumes (such as beans) are all good companions.

• Carrots, peas and lettuce are all good for each other are all good together.

• Potatoes and sunflower stunt each other.

• Nasturtiums are good with apple trees and are said to influence the sap and make it taste bad to aphids

• Hang pennyroyal on fig trees to keep flying bugs away.

• Mint repels ants. And since ants carry aphids and that horrible soot and therefore attracting that white scale, I am going to plant a lot of mint this summer. And my favorite one:

• Plant a white geranium among your roses to keep the beetles away: “They [the white geraniums] attract Japanese beetles which eat the geraniums and die. You can also collect Japanese Beatles and pill bugs in traps, burn them and scatter their ashes over nearby vegetation.”

Now that is one kick ass garden club lady! Go Jean!

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