Season change over

I find it hard to evict those tenants in my yard who are still working hard and producing yummy food.
Kale works year round here.

The tomatoes are still throwing out tonnes of fruit though the bushes are looking a little bedraggled. The okra are being left to go to seed since these pods got away on me. Okra needs to be harvested when much smaller.

 

Zucchini is still spewing forth, albeit at a slightly slower rate.

 

My nephews thought these were bananas  when they visited - I wish! Still not a bad assumption. You can see where they were going with it.

The peppers are coloring up nicely.

And speaking of color - one day's harvest brought in this rainbow of color and taste.

The harvest is top heavy with tomatoes, but the romas are great to freeze and paste later. I eat the cherry tomatoes as if they are candy, constantly nibbling on them, and the classic and beef tomatoes are usually eaten in wedges with a sprinkle of salt or in my lunchtime sandwich. My antioxidant levels must be off the scale!

One of the best things about growing your own food is that you can get varieties that you cannot buy in the stores. Such as red skinned (and higher antioxidant content) carrots.

Carrots grow all year round here. I planted these carrots in June after I harvested the garlic. They are now a good size to harvest.

In some plots I am able to seed the winter vegetables where there are some summer ones still on the go. Here I have some beans still growing up bamboo and string teepees producing enough for dinner every night. There is a late developer egg plant in the middle which may  or may not still produce something and a tomato plant and a melon hanging forlornly over the edge of the raised bed (to the left of the picture).

The bed is planted with sugar snap peas and cauliflower. The peas are at the right hand edge where they will be easy to harvest on a regular basis. I'll support them with trellising which I can add later as they sprout.

When planting peas, soaking them in water overnight helps them to germinate.

The cauliflower is a more "static" crop in that they are not harvested daily and so I have them in the middle of the bed where it is harder to reach.

Right now everything is protected with Sluggo to beat off the mollusc pests and bird netting to stop my feathered friends from eating the newly germinated seedlings. When the tomatoes and melon get pulled out, I'll plant that section with low growing lettuce as it is on the south side of the bed and won't be shaded nor shade the cauliflower. Lettuce are also fast growing so the crop that is there has a chance to finish.

I don't usually let the beds rest, preferring to use organic methods to fertilize the soil to keep its nutrient level high and mulching with compost.

In the front, the native garden is supporting all kinds of wildlife. Squirrels have excavated the soil from under this fuchsia and made themselves an attractive little home.

In North America squirrels are no big shakes in your garden, I know, but in this case my squirrels are helping me! It seems that they have been stealing/harvesting bulbs from someones else's yard and bringing them back!

I'm not sure what type of bulb it is but I'm going to put them in a pot to grow for next spring. They sure have gathered up a fine collection.

Out back, the baby lizards are scooting about. This little fella is only an inch or so long. The rusty nail head above and to the right of him gives you some idea of scale. Isn't he just adorable?

I can't wait till he's big enough to eat slugs and snails, though judging by the tiny wee snails I found recently, he may be the perfect boyo for the job!


 Byddi Lee

Reasons why we did come here...

Having spent the last two weeks playing with my nephews who were visiting me from the old country, I always question why we came here at all. Why did we leave behind our friends, whom I still miss keenly? Why put myself through the airport snot and trauma of tearful goodbyes with my family? And most of all, how can I justify missing my superhero nephews grow up?

Perhaps absence does make the heart grow fonder. If I were still living at home, is it possible that we'd take each other for granted? Would we perhaps not bother taking the time out to build forts (that look more like homeless encampments)?

 

One thing's for sure - If I lived at home this fort would be a mush of soggy cardboard right now. My nephews still would not have experienced camping - why camp in the rain in Ireland when you can camp in the sunshine in California on the doorstep to Yosemite National Park?

I probably wouldn't have had such a great crop of beetroot for the beetroot-monster in our family.

Hands up - who loves beetroot?

Though you can grow beetroot very successfully back home, the weather discouraged me from doing as much gardening as I do now. Back in Ireland the rain put me off so many of the activities that I love to do here.

And I almost certainly wouldn't have had the chance to share the great excitement we had in picking out first almond crop, successfully saved from scavenging squirrels.

I was bitterly disappointed when my nephews informed me that they didn't like tomatoes (the start of a long list of dislikes for the four-year-old in particular - Please God, let it just be a stage he's going through, and thank God, he still likes beets!)

Regardless of their likes and dislikes, my tomatoes are coming in beautifully. I had a great crop of Dr Whycees, a variety I am trialing for Santa Clara Master Gardeners. They are orange and very sweet and juicy.

Even though I pleaded with my nephews to try this one, they still claimed that they didn't like it. Hardly surprising, since their definition of tasting something is to briefly touch it with the tip of their tongue. But it meant more of my favorite tomatoes for me, so I didn't argue.

I was delighted to see how impressed they were with the flowers. They even begged me to let them plant stuff. Unfortunately I have no room in the garden right now, and even if I had, I'd be hard pressed to come up with something that would thrive in the hot days of mid-August. They were placated by being permitted to pick these unusual dark sunflowers to present to their Mummy.

This sunflower had been just a bud before we left for our four day camping trip to Groveland, California. The boys were thrilled when they came home and saw that it had grown nearly two feet and blossomed.

Despite its proximity to the zinnia, they weren't tempted to try the kale.

Their curiosity was peaked by the huge Sibley, but these winter squashes won't be ready for at least another month, maybe more.

My sister loved the weather here. Maybe that's why we are here. She joked that this was a cloudy day.

 

Why so funny? Well, on a cloudy day the sky is pewter by Irish standards!

Bottom line - it's the climate that keeps me here. Their visit had the backdrop of golden sunny days. While they where here the garden rang with laughter and and quite often the spectacular a cappella soundtrack of the baddies being beaten by the superheros, complete with sword swishes, explosions and whizzing I-dunno-whats.

As I mourn for my old friends, new ones are cementing themselves into my heart, not replacing the old ones, but wiggling in and making that friendship space bigger and better. I still know where my old friends are, and like my family, they'll never be far from my thoughts. I treasure more the times we do have together for the infrequency of them.

So, as I sit in the once again quiet serenity of the garden, watching the lizards poke theirs heads up as if to ask, "Is it safe to come out again?" I know that I can't have it all and I'm happy with what I do have. Two weeks a year (minimum) of madcap mayhem is merely a huge gi-normous bonus!

 Byddi Lee

Groveland on Dwellable

Swimming from Alcatraz - Special Report

It's hard to say where it all began. To cut a long story short, quite literally cut down to here *** otherwise keep reading... so the beginning...

Was it when my father taught me how to swim in the local swimming pool in Armagh, Ireland? I can't remember how old I was, but judging by the fact that the "wee" (referring to small, as opposed to urine, though it's hard to be sure) pool is only 3 feet deep, and I was out of my depth, I'd say I was about 6 years old. What I can remember, like a video clip in my memory, is propelling myself underwater, about a foot from the floor of the pool and feeling free.

I can't ever remember feeling afraid of water. Sure I respected it, was scared by it rushing past in fast rivers or crashing on rocks on the coast. The forces that drive water should never be underestimated, but the still, deep, calm water of a lake or ocean bay in summer, beckons like a long lost friend.

So, I guess I'm saying I love the water. As I went through life, the sports that I grew passionate about were not necessarily those I excelled at. In my opinion there are 4 classes of people - those who are  are competitive and excel at things, those are not competitive and yet excel anyways(my sister!), those who are not competitive and don't excel, (they of course don't care) and then there are the poor unfortunates like me, who don't excel but who are competitive (and are constantly disappointed)! I was that kid in school who tried out for every team but was never selected, who entered every event on sports day and never won anything. In fact, I even went so far as to break my leg practicing for the high jump in my back yard. Won nothing that year except a day off school on sports day - well, what was the point in going to school on sports day in a cast from my toes my knee?

When I did a lot of kayaking, in my twenties, I seemed to spend nearly as much time swimming as I did in the boat. I provided my buddies with a lot of rescue practice! But I did love kayaking, for the camaraderie, for the adrenaline, for the smell of neoprene - seriously, my heart rate increases when I smell a wetsuit, for I know that adventure beckons.

In my thirties, I realized that I was more comfortable in the water, and I switched to scuba diving. I was fortunate to be traveling around the world during this time and I spoiled myself by diving in exotic, warm water in such diving meccas as the Great Barrier Reef, Fiji Islands and the Red Sea. Still my love of the sport went a long ways to making up for my lack of skill. I once so infuriated an Italian dive instructor by sucking up too much air during dives that that he told me I was like a Ferrari - I looked good on the outside, but I used far too much fuel to be practical. I'm sure there was a compliment in there somewhere but I was deflated - pun intended!

Even my love of skiing involves water - albeit frozen.

Last summer I realized that now that I'm now in my forties,  I needed to do something to keep in shape. My friend Mareese, an extreme athlete who falls easily into the "competitive and excels" category, encouraged me to try running. Under her tutelage I trained for and finished a 5K then a 10K, but like Hans Christian Anderson's little mermaid with her new legs, every step was painful and I never quite got the zen that many true runners experience. After the 10K what loomed next seemed to be a very unattractive-to-me half marathon... until that fateful conversation with my friend Christal.

***

"So, I think we should swim more," Christal said over the phone.
"Great, let's join a gym then," I said. There are no swimming pools here where you pay as you swim. You need to join a gym that has a pool. It would be nice to have a buddy to swim with.
"So I feel like we need a goal to work towards, " Christal said. "I feel like we need..." is how polite Californians say,"We must have..."
"Em, okay. So I've swum a mile in a swimathon before, so we could work up to something like that," I said helpfully.
"Or we could do the Alcatraz swim?"
"Isn't that impossible?"
"Nope they do it all the time - there's a race in July," Christal said. It was the end of February. As she talked I surfed the internet trying to find the race she was refering to.
"What about the currents? Wouldn't we be swept out to sea?" I asked. This was to be a series of questions I'd be answering a lot over the next five months.
"They time it as the tide turns, so the current is at it's least strong."
"What about the cold water?" I'd been gutted when I moved here to discover the Pacific's water temperature here was even lower than the Atlantic and Irish sea.
"We wear wetsuits."
Finally I hit on the website for the swim event. It was titled, "Sharkfest!"
"What about the sharks?" I asked.
"They're just the little ones. The great whites don't like the silty water in the bay." Christal had the answer for every question.
"Well, it says here that unless you can swim a mile comfortably in the pool in 40 minutes that you shouldn't sign up. How about we wait and sign up once we can swim a 40 minute mile?" I said, fairly confident that by the time I could swim a mile that fast (if ever) the race would be sold out.
"Deal," said Christal. "Let's meet up tomorrow and find us a pool to train in."

With a mixture of surprise, pleasure and dread, I discovered that we both were only a few laps short of a mile  in 40 minutes on our first try in the pool. And a deal is a deal. So, we signed up for the Sharkfest Alcatraz swim - 1.5 miles in 60F (15C) open water, with fierce tidal currents - how hard could it be?

If you don't want to read about our approach to training for the event skip on through to **. Otherwise read on...

Cristal introduced me to a surfing buddy of hers, Sumika, who wanted to do the swim, and then we were three!

I took a two pronged approach to training - at least three swims a week in the pool, working on distance and speed combined, and we aimed to do an open water swim together at least once a week.

The pool work was fairly straightforward. I used youtube videos to look at perfecting technique since I'd never had formal lessons. The gym had didn't have swim coaches but they claimed they had a personal trainer who was a swim coach and so I booked him. Turned out they had a perfectly good personal trainer who knew how to swim, but I was never convinced that he really was a coach. Still, he gave me one good tip - swim with my hands relaxed and my fingers spread apart - contrary to popular belief that the fingers must be squeezed tight together to get purchase on the water. It worked better and in one step my lap time decreased.

But the best fun was the open water swims. Each swim seemed to tackle a different area of concern. And there were many concerns - cold water, waves, current, fear of sharks, other swimmers jostling for position, jumping into the water from a height... the list felt endless.

The first swim was borderline traumatic. At the end of March, Christal and I went up to Aquatic Park in San Francisco. This would be where we would finish the Alcatraz swim, provided we weren't swept out to sea or eaten by a shark!

It was a grey morning in San Francisco; the sky was grey, the water was grey, the sand on the beach looked grey and our faces were definitely grey. The water temperature was a frosty 52F. (That's 11C in real money, folks.) We found it nearly impossible to get our faces into the water, and absolutely impossible to keep them there for any length of time. I got an immediate ice-cream headache. We sort of doggy paddled and breast stroked our way from one end, along a line of buoys, marking the swim course and back, a total of a third of a mile a mile, that took us a staggering 40 minutes to complete. We were disgusted with our time - more than twice as long as it took us to do in a pool. And to add insult to injury other bathers were doing it without wetsuits!

The women from the Dolphin Club, where we paid $6.50 to use their changing rooms, showers and sauna, were swimming in just a swimsuit and thermal cap. I was totally inspired by this. (But not to the extent were I would take off my wetsuit! At least not yet.) One of them said that she swam because of the cold, not in spite of it, and that suddenly gave me a whole new perspective on it. Yeah - the cold water was invigorating and not to be feared. I'd also read that it would take quite some time to get hypothermia in that temperature of water whilst wearing a wetsuit. Sitting in the heat of the sauna, it all made sense.

While we were there we met Suzie, an open water coach whom we booked a couple of sessions with in May and June.

Before our session with Suzie we tried our second open water swim, this time in Santa Cruz. We entered at the steps by the cliffs at Cowells beach. Many surfers use this entrance to the water. I was nervous getting in. The waves scared me as they crashed against the rocks. Christal held my hand getting in the water and although it was cold, this time I wore a neoprene hat and ear plugs.

After the initial gasping  for breath we settled down into a semblance of a swim and covered more ground more quickly. 

The pool sessions were paying off. Christal, still ahead of me, was not having to wait as long or as often for me to catch up. The water was clearer and you could see the bottom far below us. And it occurred to me that I was actually enjoying this, enjoying it in a way I'd never experienced when jogging. I loved feeling the stretch in my muscles as I reached forward in the stoke, gliding for a moment in the "Superman" pose before I initiated the "catch' and pulled my arm back. Such a pity I had to interrupt the rhythm to breath. But each breath gave me a beautiful view, cliffs framed by sea and sky on one side, yachts breaking the horizon on the other.

 

This was the life, my inner mermaid sang.

Buoyed by the success of that swim many demons were cast out. Cold water was not our enemy. We swam at Coyote point one windy afternoon to banish our worries about swimming in waves. The other two surfer babes loved it, but I hated being tossed around so much. Still, I knew after that that if I had to do a mile and a half in waves I could.

Our sessions with Suzie were inspirational. She taught us how to squeeze the most efficiency from every stroke and most importantly how to sight. Under her supervision we had a safe harbor-enclosed experience of swimming in a current.

We did a couple of races in local reservoirs in order to get a feel for swimming with lots of other (faster) people. Of course we didn't win, but we didn't come last. Christal beat me in the first one and then shock result, two weeks later I beat her in the second one. My training really was working. I was catching up with Christal and we could both see a difference. Sumika, who lived up near Aquatic Park was swimming up there in the evenings too. We were getting there. It was the Great Escape equivalent to spreading the dirt from the tunnels in the prisoner gardens!

Less than three weeks before the race, a demon rose up from the deep that really tormented me.  Approximately 3 miles from where we swim a great white shark attacked a kayak at Pleasure Point, Santa Cruz. Christal and I decided to swim anyway, knowing that the sharks are always there and that attacks are rare. 

We entered the water from the kayak platform on the wharf and swam east (towards the shark attack area.) As I watched my hands enter the murky green water in front of me and scoop back amid a flurry of white bubbles, I didn't reach my zen place that usually accompanies my stroke count. Instead, I began to imagine two piercing soulless black eyes above a row of jagged teeth lunging towards me. A touch of kelp against my foot made me yelp and and jump up. Christal, swiming nearby asked me if I was okay. I selfishly admitted to being a bit freaked out about the shark. Grim and determined we pushed on.

Christal, always the fearless leader kept us going with, "Let's just go to the next buoy." We where half-ways between the forth and fifth buoy when I caught a glimse of something from the corner of my eye. I could have just been a wave, the yacht in the distance or a large sea animal breaking the surface of the water. At this point I was so wound up that if I'd seen a two-inch goldfish my heart would have stooped dead!

Christal, seeing my panicked expression, said, "What? What did you see?"
"Nothing. I think," I said, scanning around.
"Shall we go back?"
"Yup!"
It took us 18 minutes to swim out that far (0.4 miles) and about 10 to swim back!

The following week another shark was photographed nearby from the air.

However, it was a smaller organism that made us change our last training swim from Santa Cruz to Aquatic Park - E.coli! The water quality report for the beach was dire. We did our final practice 1.5 mile open water swim at Aquatic Park, nearly 5 months after our very first try there. We covered three times the distance in the same time as it had taken us to do that first difficult swim back in March. We had made great progress but was it going to be enough to really swim from Alcatraz?

**

On the morning of the swim I was nervous about even looking out at the water. What if there were white cap waves? How would that affect my time? Mercifully the bay was as flat as a pancake.

 

We got changed and tried to focus on being excited and not frightened. It was easier with Sumika and Christal, and we kept telling each other how glad we were that the other two were doing this with us. Christal described it best as we sat on the ferry out to the Island.

"I feel like I've got that 'I love you, man,' thing going on even though I'm not drunk." 

We totally agreed and had a good laugh about it. And it's those those warm fuzzy feelings I'll remember, more than the cold water, for the rest of my life.

I wasn't sure how the 5 foot jump off the ferry into the water would feel. It was ridiculous to be apprehensive since I'd done it many times scuba diving - the giant step where I usually tripped over my fin tips and landed face first, nearly driving that same Italian instructor insane!

We lined up to jump in. People were shouting, "Go, go, go." The line moved so quickly that I was at the door and at the edge before I knew it. I at least had the presence of mind to hold my nose and hold on to my goggles, took a deep breath and stepped out. 

As soon as I hit the water, the havoc ceased and the world was quiet, then I broke the surface. I focused on catching my breath and swimming breast stroke to carry me away from the ferry. San Francisco looked very far away.

Since the majority of the 1133 participants wore the exact same black swim wetsuit and mandatory yellow hat,  I wasn't sure if I'd be able to see the other two "Charlies Angles" as we three now dubbed ourselves, primarily because there were three of us, and with Sumika being Asian and all, it fit!

I heard Christal call me and she was about 15 feet from me. She'd recognized the sliver of red hat peaking out from under the other two hats I wore. Her wetsuit was sleeveless, so I was able to spot her quite easily. We kept the same pace, and she checked that I was okay and then we set off. Sumika, always the first to get into the water and get her head head down swimming, was away, somewhere in the midst of all those yellow hats!

At the start we were told to head for the old WWWII ship known as the Jerimiah O'Brien. You can see it here on the left. Alcatraz is on the far right.

For some reason I wasn't concentrating on my sighting, and when I looked up I was staring out at the Golden Gate Bridge. Cristal called over to me, asking me where I was going. Fortunately, I hadn't strayed too far, and I straightened up on the Jerimiah and plunged onwards.

The swim was great. We kept a steady pace. I wanted to keep plenty of juice in the tank in case we had to fight the current that we were told runs across the mouth of the opening to Aquatic Park. At no stage did I feel too tired nor wanted it to be over. I was comfortable and in the zone. With every lift of the eyes to sight, the Jeremiah got bigger. We stopped a couple of times to take in the view and discuss our navigation. Yet, all the while I was expecting the current to kick in and start tugging at us, sweeping us past the opening to Aquatic Park and out to sea beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

I couldn't completely relax until we got through that opening, but once we were in, it felt like we were on our home turf. We stopped again and watched the other swimmers around us. It was such a thrill to see the area behind the beach crowded with people, good to see colors other than black, grey and yellow! We'd done it, the hard part at least. We agreed that we should hold hands across the finish line then with a contented sign I said, " Lets wrap it up!" and we launched in to the last half mile, headed for the shore. It's harder to stop the water from getting in your mouth when you are grinning!

The sand beneath my hands surprised me. We'd trained hard for 5 months for this race, and now here it was, over, and we were safely ashore. I stool on wobbly legs and reached for Christal's hand. 

Together we crossed the finish line completing the course in 1 hour and 4 minutes. We found Sumika straight away and reunited for a group hug before splitting up to go hug our friends and relations who had come down to cheer us on.

Thanks for reading - I know it was a long one, but I really wanted to share the experience of a lifetime.

Byddi Lee

Simple mistakes, dire consequences

It is with a sad irony that I link to a blog post entitled "Sweet surprises and possible massacres."

A couple of years ago, I put bird netting against my back fence to provide a light trellis for sweet pea to grow against. I was careful to keep the netting against the fence so that hummingbirds would not accidentally fly through it and get caught. I'd been warned about this. However, hummingbirds were unlikely to  to fly into a solid wooden fence.

The sweet peas blossomed beautifully and reseeded for this year. I left the netting up without incident. Again, I had a hedgerow of blossom this spring. When they died back I removed the dead plants and left the netting up.

A couple of weeks ago, I was working in the raised beds when I noticed that some critter had up-chucked in one of the beds. It was a vile combination of goop and bones. I figured it was an owl regurgitate pellet. And cleaned it up.

As I moved through the garden, doing my daily harvest sweep, I spotted what looked like a lizard tail between one of the beds and the fence. It must have been a pretty big lizard, I thought at the time because the section of tail was about 5 inches long.

As I scanned towards the fence, I stared in horror at what I found there. About a foot off the ground, tangled impossibly in the netting, hung the remains of a gopher snake, very dead and half eaten.The snake looked like it had been shedding its skin, and I figure this is what first caught on the netting.

I was distraught. This poor snake had died because of something I had done, some garden practice I employed. I really did beat myself up over this and fully deserved the beating too. I cut the poor thing down and took down all the netting. In future, it is only going to be used for protecting seedlings, for the shortest possible time and with great care.

Doubly ironic is the fact that my last post was about all the wildlife my native garden was attracting!

It took me a long time to get around to writing this post. I have not included photos on purpose. It's a sad and sorry post, but it has a function... It acts as a warning...

If you do use bird netting in your garden be very careful with it.


Byddi Lee