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“Establish the Canopy” — How to Have a Rainforest in your Own Backyard

04 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by ninagarden in Australian shepherd, dog, garden, palm trees, squash, summer, tomatoes, Uncategorized, vegetables

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Care of Garden, Summer, vegetables

First, my headline is misleading. This is not really a blog about how to grow a rainforest. This is a blog about why I don’t garden much in the summer in San Diego.

San Diego summers mean beach, visitors, house guests, theme parks, no rain, watering, restricted watering, the beach, house guests, theme parks, visitors. Should I continue?

I go into maintenance mode. Plus you need a break! We could grow something amazing and significant here every month of the year. When I first started gardening here and realized this, it was a little overwhelming. Then I hit summer–I remember running around trying to garden while my house guests ate breakfast. It was stressful. I had to stop trying to have a perfect yard and let things be (as best I could).

Watering is still a priority and my vegetable garden, which really needs fertilizing.

But once you get things growing, you can take a rest.  Here’s my favorite story about that — One day at my old house, while I was walking through the neighborhood, I found a house that intrigued me. There was a stand of unique lime green palm trees in the front, some orchids growing in the shade and other tropical. I walked by there every day, trying to figure out this interesting house and the palms, which I realized also grew to enormous heights behind the house. I told my husband about it and soon he was walking by there too and we discussed it, trying to figure out what was going on. The person had a license plate on his/her car that said “Palms.” Clearly this was not some minor experiment in horticulture. This was serious.

Well, one day, my hubby being the kind of talk-to-strangers with ease guy that he is, got us an invitation to tour the property. It was in fact owned by an expert in palm trees and his wife was a landscape architect.

The backyard contained a bona fide rainforest. It was tremendous. They had bought the house next door and knocked out the walls so the rainforest could take over two back yards. They had what must have been 60 foot palms with a treehouse half-way up. I think there were hundreds of palm trees of all varieties and paths and orchids and impatients and all kinds of wonderous flora.

Our tour guide explained, “Once the canopy was established, it was easy to grow all the other rainforest plants beneath it.”

That stuck with us. In our wonder, we found a bit of humor. We repeated the phrase because it was so far out and so ridiculous to us–being from Michigan and Arizona–that someone could establish a rainforest with a canopy right in our neighborhood.

We use that phrase a lot in our marriage. It comes up two or three times a year one of us will say to the other– “Once the canopy is established,” and laugh.  It has become one of those inside jokes that only the two of us can understand. And that’s nice. But really, back to gardening, I think once your garden gets to a certain point, it can keep going with only a little bit of care here and there and a few seasonal clean up days. If you think you don’t have time to garden, consider that. Once you get your “canopy” in place, you can just watch it grow.

Anyway, that’s what I am saying about my garden right now!  Good thing, because I have a house full of guests waiting for breakfast!

Here are some pictures from my vegetable garden and one of my naughty puppy. I really need to fence her out of my vegetables–that’s one job that really shouldn’t wait.



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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

≈ 1 Comment

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

≈ 2 Comments

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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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Tucson Botanical Garden: Butterflies and Barrio Gardens

12 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by ninagarden in Botanical Garden, butterfly garden, butterly, drought-tolerant, garden, gardening, Tucson, Uncategorized

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butterfly, butterly garden, Tucson, Tucson botanical garden

I love visiting other gardens and getting ideas. Last week I went to the Tucson Botanical Gardens and the butterfly green house. It was amazing. The greenhouse was full of plants that grow in San Diego such as hibiscus and Pentas lanceolata, which was beautiful. I might try to plant it. I see it grows as a perennial here and as an annual other locales.

I had some little garden helpers with me on the tour. The butterflies were attracted to them.

We really enjoyed the butterfly house, but there was so much more to see. So many of the plants both inside the 80 degree green house and outside the butterfly house, can grow in San Diego. That’s what so amazing about the climate here. We can grow almost anything.

But here is a shady fountain that they have planted and turned into a flowerbed. I think that’s Dusty Miller, which, I am surprised to learn, is a type of Artemisia. I don’t usually like Dusty Miller, but I love my Artemisia Powis Castle. I am not so great at growing it, but I love its smell and its silver gray color. I love all the funny names it has too like Wormwood. I read that is has been grown since “the time of ancient Greece.” (Sunset Western Garden book.) Now that I read this, I see I need to prune it in the fall. Maybe that’s my problem. Anyway, here it is in Tucson:

I also loved the Barrio Garden with its roses, fig trees, purple heart (the deep purple houseplant-type that grew profusely in the flowerbeds in the house I grew up in), pomegranates, and tombstone roses. Just beautiful!

I love the look of this garden path (see below), which is lush and full, despite the heat. This pictures shows a pomegranate, a mesquite and some other flowers in the wildflower garden area. If you are ever in Tucson, be sure to visit this wonderful place!

Of course, March is a wonderful time to visit Tucson.  Everything is blooming–the Palo Verde trees are full of yellow blossoms. They float down the street reminding me of buttered popcorn. My great-grandma tried her whole life to paint one that satisfied her with its perfection. The vibrant yellow flowers against the sage green branches made a very compelling subject. Since I don’t paint, I write, and I can write about her trying to paint, but mainly I prefer to watch them because they are full of pollen and make me sneeze! (If I find a picture, I will post it.)

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Marvelous, Mystical, Motherly Poppy Plants: Ancestor Gardens

09 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by ninagarden in garden, gardening, roses

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I’ve read all the sexy stuff that people have written about poppies–the opium, the seductive red hues, the Laudium making. Decked out with teasing, luscious fringe and lavish sage green foliage, they are bee-seducing, hypnotic, sleep-inducing (think Wizard of Oz), intoxicating. Yep. They are all that, I guess, but for me, the poppy is forever associated with my dear Mama. Yes, my mama. The number one –the only—person, besides myself, I’ve ever known who grew them. They are part of my ancestor garden, and remind me of her as I hope they will remind my children of me. Below is a picture of my mom in her Arizona garden–here she is photographed with African daisies.

In writing this, I realized I didn’t know where my mother acquired them because she has been growing them as long as I can remember. She racked her brain a minute and told me that she couldn’t really remember but thinks they came from a guest speaker at her Garden Club meeting many years ago. She said she got a little packet of them at the meeting and has planted them ever since.

Every year she collects the seeds and one year, she passed some to me. Now I plant them every year and my kids love to help me collect the seeds once the pods are dry. They call them “little salt shakers” and they go around scattering seeds everywhere. We also keep them in a jar, distributing them to friends who can’t believe they are easy to grow.

I always plant them in the empty strip along the front garden. One year I got a phone call from an elderly neighbor. She left me a message saying her gardener told her I was growing opium and I needed to pull them out before they sprouted all over the neighborhood or she would “call the police.”

I told my mother and this sent her into a furious frenzy of research. How dare, that nice neighbor, say that!  She called the experts at the University of Arizona Extension Service on gardening.  She looked in every gardening book and I helped her research on the Internet, intent on proving her favorite flower was not illicit. Of course, even though I felt better when I found that they were for sale, legally http://anniesannuals.com, I was nervous from the threat that my neighbor, who was normally sweet and wonderful, had left on my voice mail. I pulled all the poppies out in my front yard, street-side—my husband laughing at me during the whole process—but I kept the ones in the front courtyard behind my patio wall. The final conclusion was that they weren’t illegal, but perhaps, we should not plant such showy, potentially controversial flowers in front of our house.

My mother still plants them (although I noticed this year that they were growing only in what she calls her “dog yard” even though the dog never goes there, and I quit letting the kids scatter them outside our wall, but they still grow, remnants of my previous enthusiasm. I now mix in toadflax and California poppies so they don’t stand out as much. It still isn’t clear in my mind if my neighbor was upset that I was growing them, or more upset that the seeds might blow across the street and sprout in her yard—scandalous! I have thoughts of scattering the seeds all over our neighborhood canyon, but the source may be so obvious that I don’t have the nerve.

So the poppies grow and mutate each year. There are ruffled ones, purple ones, red ones, red ones with crosses inside. The bees love them and they are filled with humming and buzzing. The thick green stalks grow in cracks and driest soil. They thrive with little water and little care, lending their magic to our yard, making smiles, brining memories, maybe making little gardeners who enchanted by the poppy magic will one day grow them — behind garden walls, of course!

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Daffodils and Stuffed Animal Tree

03 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by ninagarden in garden, gardening

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daffodils, flowers, garden, narcisuss

People are asking me, “What are all those yellow flowers?” They are daffodils (officially Latin name Narcissus). I planted about three dozen of them last fall. My goal was to have a sea of daffodils in the empty dirt near my light post. Well, I do. I have some fancy white daffodils too. I’m not sure how, but I am growing them around the yard. They are quite striking.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud…”

Daffodils remind me of Wordsworth and his sister and I could look up the poem  or you could: http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Poetry/WordsworthDaffodils.htm.  I forgot how much I liked that poem. I went to the Lake District in England to see Wordsworth’s flowers, but it was November. The daffodils were buried under the ground waiting for spring, cold beneath the empty trees.

But if you want scientific details on daffodils, go here:   http://www.daffodilusa.org/index.html.

Or look at my pictures and make things up. I added a fun one of my fairy house and my stuffed animal tree. Reminds me of the bottle trees I saw when I lived in Alabama, but since we are in Southern California, my bottle tree is made from expensive Build A Bear animals that my dog likes to chew. For some reason, he only chews up the Build A Bears, and since they are too expensive to throw out, I started hanging them in my tree. You might say I should wash them, but he always finds them, slobbers them up and kills plants while trying to bury them, and no one but me is allowed to kill plants in my yard!

It is March. Alleluia. I hate January and February. Thank goodness they are over and spring is almost here.

“And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.”

Daffodil patch

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Buds and First Blooms

23 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by ninagarden in garden, gardening, Uncategorized

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flowers, palm springs, slideshow

It has been hot here and the garden is already blooming.  In the slideshow are some of the first flowers of 2012.

We went to this incredible garden at the Parker Hotel in Palm Springs. I loved how lush it was. Very different from my garden but lots of good ideas to take home.

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Compost Thrills

17 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by ninagarden in compost, garden, gardening, Uncategorized

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compost

All the talk of composting made me want to try, too. I didn’t want to buy one of those $100 composting bins and growing worms isn’t for me. I came just imagine my eight year old walking in the house holding a hundred worms in her bare hands. (She loves any creepy crawly thing.) No, I can’t grow my own worm castings. I prefer to buy a bag of them when I can afford it.

So back to composting — I found this video on Sunset Magazine’s web site:http://www.sunset.com/garden/backyard-projects/chicken-wire-compost-bin-video-00400000037005/

This was cheap, fast and easy to make. The problem was that this method took me a year to make compost!

Also, if you do this method, you had better have a lot of space because you should start several of these bins at once or over a series of months. That way you would have continuous compost and when one bin filled up, you could start another. Also, it was very hard to stir and turn the compost the way you were supposed to because the sides were too high. Maybe my husband and I made it too high to begin with, but you might want to consider how tall you are (and how strong you are too.)

Now in the Vegetable Gardner’s Bible by Edward C. Smith, it shows this type of chicken wire hoop as the perfect tool for making “leaf mold” compost, which is supposed to be one of the best composts. But he tells you it takes a year. So start now!

The compost I eventually made ended up enriching my vegetable garden but was nowhere near what I need for my whole yard. I am still trying to figure it out. Send me your ideas!

Now if you have a very short attention span, need instant gratification and cheap thrills (and can’t wait for compost to decompose), try this soil amendment recipe from my favorite San Diego gardening author Pat Welsh.  In her Southern California Gardening book, she writes about harvesting seaweed from the beach. Stuff it in a black plastic bag, take it home and chop it up with a machete and mix it in the soil. All this sounds really funny to me. I don’t think I have a machete. I guess I could use a meat cleaver. I am not sure that would be safe for anyone.  But if you really want to try that go for it. I may do it one day just to amuse my husband or my niece –she says all I blog about is fertilizer, anyway.

Please send me your composting tips. I need help!

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