Did my garden miss me as much as I missed it?

Judging by the growth spurt - no! Okay, so maybe it's an illusion. I go out every day and peer closely at my plants to see if they have grown any in the last few hours - seriously mad, I know, but I can't help myself. So you can imagine what joy it is to see my garden after three weeks. Things have really got growing out there.

I was greeted first by a profusion of flowers in the native garden. I arrived back after dark and they seemed white in the moonlight, but the next morning the Hookeri Evening Primrose (Oenothera Hookeri) flaunted her full glory.

Considering this was six inches tall when I bought it last October, it's simply stunning. And close up you can see how beautiful the blossoms really are.

The coyote mint ( Monardella villosa) has also blossomed. As well as having perfumed foliage, the purple blossoms are attracting the bees.

The old plum tree in the front yard, one of three non-natives spared in the conversion, is rewarding us for our mercy with bough breaking loads of fruit. Delicious! I see plum jam in my immediate future!

 

The pomegranate has blossomed. Hopefully, it will produce more fruit than it did last year -a grand total of three pomegranates! Perhaps that extreme pruning the year before last has paid off.

In the succulent garden, most of the plants are happy and some have even sent up blossoms. What a big turn around from the days when I seemed to kill every succulent I looked at!

 

Some funky things are going on with my vegetables. I have several squash volunteers. They sprung up in the mulch under the fruit trees. Before the mulch went down, I used everything in my compost bins to provide a layer of compost whether it had composted yet or not.  My guess is that these are from a butternut squash we'd eaten a while ago.

Why is it that volunteers seem to grow better than the ones I carefully tend to?

While I was in Ireland it rained here. This patch of unseasonably (though I've yet to figure out just what seasonable means in California!) cool weather brought a few surprises. The late peas, that I had given up on and hadn't gotten around to pulling, took off. Back to having mange-tout and sugar snap peas for dinner again - yipee!

After reseeding my parsnips several times I eventually got them to germinate. And now look at them.

I'd tried and tried to get kolrabi, the space ship-like brassica, to grow. Again I'd given up, had noticed unidentified brassica leaves growing amonst the peppers and decided to leave it until I came home. I was astonished to see a beautiful apple-sized kolrabi - ready to harvest.

I sliced it and stir-fried it with the peas and carrots I've been harvesting.

I've also been harvesting French round carrots. These are excellent for stony ground or containers. I was growing them for fun and because I got a free packet of seeds. Now, I'd grow them for taste. They have a lovely aniseed aftertaste. I steamed these ones.

The pole beans are living up to their name and growing nicely up the poles.

In the foreground you can see potatoes that are ready to harvest, and which I actually have harvested since the picture was taken. I love the maths of gardening - I planted 3 potatoes here and dug up 16 of at least the same size, if not bigger. On the topic of potatoes - my bags of spuds have really taken off.

 

It won't be long before I'm harvesting them.

My last garden observation involves alcohol. I have sunflowers planted in two beds. One of the beds is orderly and quite regimented. I can watch as these little sun soldiers stand up tall and turn their faces to the sun, all facing the same way.

The other bed is the one where I carried out my beer experiment on the slugs. I did spill some, but oh boy, those sunflowers have really been partying! Can you tell which bed is which?

Byddi Lee

A word on weeds and a little something for those of you with snow covered gardens...

I'm linking in with Garden Bloggers Bloom Day this week at May Dreams Gardens. Many of the blogs posted have gardens under snow.  Even the usually milder, wet Irish climate has been delivered a wallop of white so that my mother's garden (and the whole island, from what I hear) is knee-deep in the stuff. So this post is for all you snow bunnies...

First, I'll show you some of the lovely flowers that are defying the frosty nights and still blossoming, in the hopes that that will cheer you up.

Above is a snap dragon, and below are some dianthus, followed by close-ups of them as I felt this first picture did not do the individual flowers justice, and those of you who are bloom-starved might like to feast your eyes on them.

Do you notice a color theme going on? I can't help myself with pink!  Even my Primulas are pink...

I've always loved fuschias.  The blossom reminds me of a ballerina in a tu-tu - the stamens and style are her legs...

My petunias are bravely soldiering on too - I planted these as annuals in June.  They are starting to behave like perennials!

Allysum reminds me of my Grandmother - she used to have lots of it growing in her rockery.  I like how this one catches the winter sun...

Another plant bought during the summer, and expected to be a shorter lived annual - I think its a verbenna but I've lost the plant label for it...can anyone confirm that for me?

And then there is the Bird of Paradise - I can't claim credit for these - they were here when we moved in, and they just do their thing.  This year, I might even fertilize them!

If all this only serves to make you jealous, I'll demonstrate the downside of all that growth - Weeds!

My word on weeds is "Therapy"!  For some gardeners that may mean they need therapy when they see a garden full of weeds.  For me, strangely enough, the process is therapeutic.  Am I crazy?  Don't answer that.  But many gardeners I've met say the same thing.  It gives us great satisfaction to pull out weeds.  Mind you, most of the people I've discussed this with were weeding voluntarily with the Edgewood Weed Warriors at the time of the conversation, so perhaps my surveying methods were flawed!

I've been very vigilant about keeping the veggie garden weed free, since last year when I tried to convince myself that it was really a "green" mulch and that I'd dig them back through as "green" fertilizer!  That did not work out so good - especially for the poor over-run beets that never quite took off.  In the end, I had to weed and then cover them with compost mulch during the summer, and that has kept me on top of things here. Now, the raised beds look much smarter...

The wood chip mulch is doing a pretty good job at weed control in the front garden, and now that I've planted the as-yet-baby-plant natives, the front garden looks clean and weed free.

 

In the foreground, the Deer Grass is looking happy. In the background, I have the aromatics planted close to the path - Cleveland Sage, Coyote Mint and Desert Lavender (from bottom of picture up).  But look closely at the bright green patch just beyond the railings.  A totally different story!   That is the long forgotten side yard, and the weeds have been having a jamboree.  They've invited all their friend round too!

So - getting back to my word on weeds. I do love to look back on a patch of ground that I've cleared of weeds, and the denser they grow, the greater my gratification with the job.

The trick with weeds is to not let yourself get overwhelmed by the task at hand. Set yourself a target and work a little bit a day - ten minutes, thirty minutes, an hour - whatever works for your concentration span and what your back can manage.  Don't worry if you don't get it all done in one sitting. Those blighters aren't going anywhere - more's the pity!

It's best to get them out by the roots. I think that there is an optimum weed pulling size.  Too small and it's way too fiddly ( and not quite as satisfying)  Too big and the roots are too hard to get - I like my weeds about two inches long.

Each day, I roll back the weed frontier by a couple of feet.  I like to keep it geometric and work in foot wide strips each time.

There is a big rain storm on us now, so the weeds will think that they are winning.  But in the end they won't, because we may not have come here for the grass, but we certainly did not come here for the weeds either!


Byddi Lee