Tag Archives: garden

February Planting with No Coffee

25 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by in chickens, compost, dog, garden, rats, Uncategorized, vegetables

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Other than the travesty of our coffee maker breaking, the week has been off to a pretty good start.

Warning—this blog was written entirely without coffee.

Even though it was not a perfectly sunny weekend, it was warm enough to garden, and I got a lot done. I planted almost all the plants I bought last fall and I only have one rose left from last spring’s order that I still need to plant. I’m scoping out a new spot–that means I’ll have to get another rose to plant where I thought I would plant this one.  You can never enough roses!

It’s good not to have planting last spring’s plant purchases hanging over my head.

For some reason, I finally worked up the nerve to start using the Rose Pro method of fertilizing, what appears to be a complicated series of odd things you have to hunt down at nurseries and drug stores to pour on your roses each month—urea, potash and Milogranite—just a few of the things in my future.  This week, I put Epson Salts and Super Phosphate on half of them today (the half that didn’t get the Ada Perry’s Magic Formula—I just love that name and won’t stop using it!).

Now I have an experiment going. We will see what works better. I can’t put the Ada Perry’s with Bone Meal on my roses where the dogs will eat it so it goes on the plants outside the wall. The puppy took a lick of the Epson Salts but I stopped her right away and most of my roses are fenced off (for this reason and the because of the chickens) with that low green wire fence.

I put my first chicken poop compost on a few of my plants too. Hoping that doesn’t burn, but it sat for six months and looked like real compost you’d buy in a store (Ha ha) and the dogs don’t want to eat it because it doesn’t smell like chicken poop anymore—just a guess…

I planted rosemary and horsetail reeds in my chicken garden. I need to buy more to fill out the space because they look nice and the chickens aren’t eating them. Rosemary chicken is a new joke around here.

I planted two azaleas because I have acid soil and they are supposed to like that. We planted artichokes, tomatoes, delphiniums, blue berries, onions and Iceland poppies, which I had to fight over with little sister who wanted them all for her fairy garden. She is envious of big sister’s fabulous fairy garden but hers is just as good…

Boy, I’m so random. That’s a problem with liking plants and not having enough coffee.

My husband bought a Raticator. You should hear Henrietta squawk when she sees a rat. It sounds she is being strangled. I heard chickens can stop laying eggs when the rats come so it should make Henrietta happy to have a new rat trap to save her.raticator

Anyway, here’s stuff I don’t want to forget to buy:

More Bill Wallis geraniums—they are looking great.

More Peruvian lily

Rosa Rugosa alba

Ferns for fern grotto—new idea for under elm tree

Coral bells

Remember to consider weeping willows because Tacoma Stands look terrible and may need replacing

One new Zuni Crape Myrtle tree

Cat mint to plant under roses

New lemon (dwarf)

Plant eggplant this year

Okay that’s enough! It will probably take me a year to plant all that.

If I had a decent cup of coffee, I would probably make more sense. The French press is our salvation and our curse–it’s a slow process for a small cup of coffee. Today I heard my husband talking to my father about how to make cowboy coffee or boiled coffee, his lifetime specialty.  We have to do something while we wait for our new coffee maker to come in the mail. Here is his try at cowboy coffee.

coffee

New Blog Look

14 Friday Sep 2012

Posted by in bohemian, butterfly garden, chickens, drought-tolerant, garden, gardening

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Hey! I have been wanting to re-style my blog for several reasons. My old blog has grass and I’m not about lawn-care! I wanted something with roses and the chickens, of course!  Fortunately, my daughter is a great artist and she made this drawing, which I love. Here is the whole drawing so you can see it all. I had to crop it to fit the banner.

I have lots of stories and photos to share, and it’s fall planting time (I already pulled a muscle in my back digging holes in the hill.) I am waiting for cool weather so I can really start working. I am grateful to my neighbor Gail who is letting me dig up grasses to plant on the ugly empty spots. As you know, I hate holes in my garden.

I have tons of seeds to plant, too. Just waiting for this heat wave to end!

Dark Morning

02 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in dog, moon, morning, ranch, summer, Uncategorized

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I wake up and I’m outside a lot earlier these days because of the puppy. While I wish I could sleep in, the morning sunrise and the stillness is something I love. I remember the mornings on the ranch when my mother would wake me in the dark, and my father would already be awake drinking his second cup of coffee and listening to the weather radio. The weather was what set his mood—rain was a happy morning and a brisk walk to the barn. When it was bad news, we’d drive the truck, late from listening more to make sure the radio hadn’t changed the forecast in those last few minutes.

The barn was dark and still with only one light on in the tack room, and in the dark corrals, the horses stamped and shuffled, waiting for us to saddle them.

The sunrise would build behind the western hills and the sky would turn from dusky lavender to yellow then orange. The sun was seemed like it didn’t come up for hours (even though it was probably only one hour) as we rode out to find the cattle. When the sun did come, it was blinding and its rays seemed to ignite the sharp yucca leaves and grasses.

The sound of dark morning was always peaceful and silent even with birds chirping and the jingle of spurs, the slushing of horse legs and saddles. Maybe a whistle or low whisper of Spanish about the weather of the work to come.

Unfortunately I get about ten minutes of silence nowadays—from the time I sat down to write this until here on the page.

Now dogs are barking in my house. The senior grandma dog just woke up and she is wheezing and puffing. Chairs are rattling. The kids are humming and buzzing and building fairy houses and singing a song about the puppy to Ode to Joy (boy, that is a big theme in my house). The chickens are cackling to be let out of the pen. Feet are scuffling across our hardwood floors. And my husband is calling my name with a question mark at the end trying to find me to cook breakfast or bring him a dustpan.

Fortunately, I was already outside at 6:30 a.m. and caught this picture of silence (below). See the pretty morning moon. And here are some pictures (2nd and 3rd down) of the ranch so you can get an idea of what it was like. You can look at them and imagine the silence.

Daffodils and Stuffed Animal Tree

03 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by in garden, gardening

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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

Sexy Pumpkins

21 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by in garden, gardening, pumpkins, Uncategorized

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Well, here is an update on the pumpkin situation. The one Cinderella pumpkin sits on my front porch, making me happy when I see what I have grown.

But my neighbor deserves credit for figuring out what was wrong with my pumpkins. She told me I had to mate them. Yes. Mate. Male pollen sprinkled into female flower.

I told my dad, who is an old farmer–really, he raised lots of cantaloupes and lettuce on a big farm when I was little. He had a huge vegetable garden on our plot in town. (To give credit, my mother is an excellent gardener too.) He scoffed, guffawed (you know what I mean). Dad resistance.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said. “That’s baloney.”

“It’s true,” I said. “I read it on the Internet.”

More scoffing.

But I think so. All the bees are dying. If the bees die, they can’t fertilize your pumpkins. I told him this. I guess he admitted my point of view–but only slightly.

So once I studied those Internet pictures on male and female flowers on pumpkins (that’s it, I swear), I marched up my hill to the small planter I have on our “vista,” which sees nothing but treetops. I peered into one of the yellow blooms.

Buzzzzzzzzzz. Yikes. I jumped. Out flew a bee right at my nose. Okay, Dad, maybe you were right. This is hogwash.

But then I started looking for females. There were plenty of male flowers . In fact, too many. Not one female anywhere! The only female must have been fertilized by some miracle of survivor bee power. But now, it’s a locker room of manliness.

That’s why I have no baby pumpkins. I have only men flowers to mate. Who knows where the females, with their tiny pumpkin babies sitting at the stalk of their flowers, went or why they aren’t growing.

It makes me kinda sad.

Well, there’s always next year. That is the good thing about a garden. In a garden, you can always start over.