The Return of Spring? (February Bloomday)

La Nina has returned, bringing with her warmer days that have tricked my sunflowers into sprouting and encouraged my lettuces into going to seed. The rain has receded, leaving the garden dry enough to need watering once or twice a week to avoid dreaded thirst. We even had a few days of “devil winds,” but these Santa Anas blew cold over the mountains, chilling and drying the landscape.

With these spring-time like conditions, I see growth and the promise of the season to come - 

My garden still surprises me: This sinfully phallic lily has never bloomed before and I have no idea what it is called. I blame it on my devious garden imp/ angel, Sam.

Building a Keyhole Garden Bed

Hubby says that each year I start my spring preparations earlier than the last. True to form, I have started amending beds with compost, leaves, egg shells (an excellent form of calcium for young tomatoes), and low impact fertilizer in February! Despite warmer weather, garden chores after work are still not feasible due to lack of light and cool evenings. So, Saturday or Sunday mornings are my garden time.

I pulled back my weed blocking plastic on my first two vegetable beds and found fewer weeds than I was anticipating. Turns out the cheap black plastic worked better that the more expensive and sturdier fibrous, gauzy, white weed blocker. Go figure. I added mulch from my composter, mixed in dead leaves from my tangerine tree, and added in the fertilizer and mixed, moving about two inches of topsoil with my shovel. I do not plan to double-dig this bed; I will let the good stuff finish composting in place. Using reclaimed bricks, I rebuilt the old pathway. With Hubby’s help pounding the bricks into the earth, I have the beginnings of my first keyhole garden. This first keyhole will be for another round of cool season vegetables. My other bed of cool season veggies is beginning to go to seed and a replant is in order. As we progress later into spring, the bed will then transition to warm season crops: TOMATOES!!

While Hubby and I toiled in the dirt, the neighborhood cat, nick-named Early Bird, lounges in the shade of our pergola. Our garden is a pretty great place to be - even in winter!

Winter in So-Cal (January Bloomday)

While so many are under ice and snow, Southern California basks in the relative warmth of a Mediterranean climate.  Many transplants from the northeast often complain about the lack of seasonality in our weather, but as a native, I know better.  Our winter is very different from the traditional American ideal; it takes more observation to see the subtlety.

Our winters vacillate between being cool and dry or cool and wet, depending on the development of La Nina or El Nino.  La Nina makes the ocean waters off the coast colder and causes Southern Cali to have a dry winter. El Nino is the opposite, causing warmer coastal waters and giving us ample to a deluge of rain. This year has been unique, despite La Nina conditions, we are over the average amount of rainfall for this time of the season thanks to the pulse of arctic storms blasting their way south.  Average rainfall is also a misnomer; for most times we either surpass or have very little rainfall. The “average” is merely the adding the sum of the extremes and dividing by a given number, practically signifying nothing.  For instance, I belong to the generation of California kids who grew up during a seven year drought. When it finally began raining again in earnest, we looked up in to the sky and asked, “What the hell is this?”

With rain, comes greenery, and winter is our green time of year. Our normally dust-colored valleys and hillsides grow lush and the native wildflowers receive the water they need to for their spring rebirth. Rain also provides for opportunists, the weeds. I finally have the upper hand in this battle, using both the spray and pull methods. Here's hoping I can keep them under control.

In the Desert Garden

Many gardens have their dormant periods during the winter, not so the occupants of the Desert Garden. On the east side of Balboa Park, follow the foot bridge from the Natural History Museum across Park Avenue and you will find a garden in winter just beginning to hit its blooming stride.

The morning of our visit was cold with a crisp azure sky. The cacti towered in the distance, indifferent to the temperature, comfortable in their own space and time. Cacti and succulent plants seldom have the soft angles of annual flowers or trees. Their harsh angles demand a sense of awe, their sharpness cutting into the scenery around them in their attempt at survival. But the desert does bloom again, thanks in part to the rain and winter sunshine. The first of the blooms were concentrated in the orange fire of ten feet tall aloe vera blooms and the sharp, blood-red crown of thorns.

Originally built for the 1935 Pan American Exposition, the garden fell into disrepair until 1976. Bulldozers moved 12,000 cubic yards of earth to create the current landscape designed to accommodate bands of variable height succulent plants around curving and gently sloping pathways. Cuttings from local nurseries have grown into the large specimens see today.

All descriptions aside, I feel it is best for me to let the images do the talking. Enjoy -

 

Down Season

Hey everyone, Just a quick hi-and-hello in the off-season for CUA. I wanted to point out a great resource for all of you urban ag minded folks: Salt Spring Seeds.

Not only can you buy your heritage and heirloom organic seeds via this Canadian company, their website also offers plenty of articles and instructions related to gardening. It may still be pretty dismal outside, but I know that I'm not the only one dreaming of warmer days ahead.

Going Green(er) in the Victory Garden

Up to this point, my garden has been a monoculture. A monoculture focuses on one crop or one type of crop; in my case vegetables. (Think ‘Banana Republic’ – and I don’t mean the store!) Consequently, the garden is difficult to care for; it takes hours of toil per week, sometimes upwards of six hours a week when (at times) I’d rather be spending six hours a month. It is a lot to keep up with especially with other goals, responsibilities, and vacations. A monoculture is also notoriously susceptible to plant diseases and blights as well as parasitic bugs and mildews. I have been researching the idea of permaculture, setting up a more sustainable ecosystem in one’s own backyard. With that in mind, I will be working toward augmenting my garden with beneficial perennials that will feed birds and bugs, provide shade where needed, increase the health of the soil, and most importantly help build my garden into a more complete ecosystem that can hopefully survive a couple days longer than normal without my care. I will rely heavily on the beautiful book, Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway. It provides a wealth of advice to help me make my journey from monoculture to permaculture a reality.

Yard waste has also become a problem. Hubby and I are very good at working in the yard for hours at a time, but we must stop when we run out of room to throw out yard waste. A viable composting system will alleviate this and will help return fertility back to the soil. I have begun tossing green kitchen waste in my composter (aka the green machine) and with the help of a leaf shredder/ mulcher I would like to continue the process. Mulching vegetable beds and the fruit tree mini-orchard will also keep a damper on those pernicious weeds. That will surely cut down monotonous work in the garden and save time for the more important work of planting, watering, and tending.

So, to sum up, here is my two-fold goal for going green(er) in the garden:

1. Plant four beds with the idea of permaculture in mind, expanding on multiple purposes of plants while encouraging a healthy mini ecosystem.
2. Reduce yard wasted to almost nil – all plants should be composted minus diseased specimens, over-large branches, or palm fronds.

Call in the Clean-up Crew

So much for having a La Nina year – this season has felt as wet as any El Nino year that I can remember, at least so far. My Midwestern relatives laugh, “how can just a couple inches of rain cause such a ruckus?” Well, this is Southern California, we don’t drain, we flood.  Despite road closures, cliff collapses, and downed trees in many parts of the county, the Victory Garden has weathered the storm mostly unscathed.

In the days between storm fronts, Hubby and I spent a couple of hours a day cleaning up. Hubby spent his time in the eastern side yard where we have our fruit trees. The tangerine tree, while vigorously producing fruit, was being pulled down by the weight of its own branches. One branch had started breaking and was cutting into the heart of the plant with a vicious split. Hubby cut off the heavy branches and mended the painful split in the trunk. We do not have space in the garbage cans for all the branches, but I hope that our neighbors will help us harvest and eat the fruit at least. For the time being, he piled the branches on the concrete pad adjacent to the tree. Hubby also trimmed back the pink heather, jasmine, and pomegranate. After spreading the newly shorn mulch around, he was ready to call it a day.

Meanwhile, I was completing massive amounts of weeding. I pulled buckets of thick stemmed dandelions out of the soil, still wet with the previous day’s rain. I have to admit, the tactics I used in Putting the Garden to Sleep didn’t work for weed abatement.  The cover I used was semi-opaque and allowed enough sunlight for the weeds to successfully germinate. Oh well, you live, you learn. Next year I will change tactics and use sheet composting and nitrogen enriching cover crops (more on that later). By the time I finished with the last bed I was wet, muddy, and my back ached from stooping over to pull weeds. I saw some really good signs of healthy soil – earthworms galore, many of them still young and small. I covered them back up with dirt to protect them from the birds.

I rounded out the day planting some more seeds in my butterfly garden: foxglove, black-eyed susans, butterfly flower, and yarrow. I know it is a bit early, but the seeds will germinate when they are ready, hopefully before the monarch return in their northward migration. I then planted more peas, radishes, lettuces, and nasturtiums. Seed planting is such a joy, like painting with spade rather than brush and with the lovely anticipation of what will pop out of the ground with the warming of the spring earth.