Category Archives: Gardening

all things kitchen gardening

My Garden Delivers Calm in a Mad, Mad world.

My garden has been a little haven this week. I planted this dianthus a couple of weeks ago and after a hard day at work this week I was brought back to a calm place in my mind by the incredible spicy clove scent of this little blossom. This one right here. These are commonly referred to as “Pinks”. It’s a small mounding plant with little blossoms. If you plant some, be sure to choose one with scent, not all dianthus have it.

I love so many things about the Oregon climate. I miss the rain and the cold and the clouds. This little blossom reminded me that one of the things I missed about California was the ability to grow citrus. This one little blossom so full of rich balmy scent grounded me a few times this week. I park my Vespa right in front of it. I stop and smell anything that’s blooming every time I come home. I’m reminded what is good about the Mediterranean climate I live in. Plus, we did actually get rain last week and that was fantastic.

The rain we got is also the reason for this surprise – a cluster of mushrooms nestled in among the lemon balm in the fig tree barrel. I don’t know what it is but to see a mushroom in our dry climate is pretty exciting. Eventually I want to create an edible mushroom garden in our shady side-yard.

I need to mulch the garlic beds. I’m afraid I didn’t plant the bulbs quite deep enough. They’ll do better with mulch, especially as the warm weather settles in.

This is my other garlic bed. I also have garlic planted around my roses and in between my herbs in the middle tier of my raised beds. These foxgloves were planted last year but remained small in the shadow of the summer squash that was in this bed at the time.

Snow peas! The snails ate the ones I planted a couple of months ago. Snails are proving to be a formidable pest in this garden. I have bought some Sluggo which I always found effective in the past.

My mom’s sorrel. I’m not a huge sorrel fan but isn’t this beautiful? It overwintered and is looking refreshed.

English daisies. I love daisies. All daisies. Such a simple joy. Even if you don’t have a garden you can have a pot of these in a sunny window.

My garden has been reminding me of the cyclical nature of things like time, seasons, feelings, trips, love, housework, jobs, opportunities, dreams. Things come around again and again. Sometimes it’s hard to see the cycle because it’s too small or too large for us to grasp. I don’t think we need to always see it. But it’s useful to be reminded that even things like death aren’t truly an end so much as a return to what we like to think of as the beginning.

The air this morning is mild and pretty. The mourning doves are cooing and it brings into focus other mornings from the distant past that are acutely pleasant to me. Summer mornings when I was 14 years old. My parents left me home alone for a week while the rest of the family traveled somewhere I can’t remember. They gave me grocery money and instructions to take care of the garden and animals. It was one of the best memories I have of being a teen.

I remember waking up early and watering the garden before the heat set in. The mourning doves must have been cooing then too because that sound always brings me right back to this memory. I’d eat yogurt, fruit, and granola for breakfast. I’d drink tea. Then I’d watch soaps on tv while making paper dolls. Sometimes alone and sometimes with my two best friends. In the afternoon I would go down town and hang out with friends. Go to their houses, or to Lithia park. Then I’d be home again, picking vegetables from the garden using my mom’s shallow harvest basket.

Out there in my mom’s garden, in the late afternoon heat, the world was silent except for the occasional squabbling of our hens and the hum of the bees. The air was spicy with clove scent from my mom’s carnations. It was supreme happiness to me, to be all alone, tending a garden in peace and a quiet interrupted only by soft happy sounds. No family fighting, no discord, no unrest in my head, no fears, just blissful solitude standing in the garden my mother designed and grew.

Now I find that in my own garden whether it’s large or small or just a few pots on a ledge. I feel that same happy stillness when surrounded by plants and listening to mourning doves.

Talking to the Roses

This is the first bunch of rosemary I was able to cut from my potted rosemary plant. It struggled all summer and fall and then, suddenly, it was strong, robust, reaching upward, and in need of its first trim. I used a good deal of it for rosemary roasted vegetables and then a little in some cabbage and white bean soup (which was a mistake) and I have just enough left for some more roasted vegetables.

Today I’m thinking about what we can plant as a shared hedge between our driveway and the neighbor’s. The hedge that’s there right now is dying. I want an edible hedge that’s also beautiful. But one I can get the neighbor to agree to. Pomegranates are naturally small trees that can be kept pruned to hedge size easily. I’m dreaming of making pomegranate jelly every year. Or just juicing them and drinking the juice. The spring flowers are gorgeous and they aren’t picky about soil. All I have to do is convince the neighbor to pay to have the dead hedges removed (roots and all) and offer to pay for and care for the new hedge.

I’m still toying with two other possibilities: espaliered apple and pear trees and a blueberry hedge, each posing their own unique challenges.

I get panicky on Friday mornings now that I work four days a week. I feel so much pressure to get shit done. Not only the usual stuff around the house but chores connected to my fledgling apothecary business. Today I drank coffee, chatted with online friends, my mother, made breakfast, yelled at Twitter for constantly clogging my feed with sexual content that I find so tiresome and annoying. This led to two fun non-sex-related chats with different writer friends. One was about pizza and one was about gardening. Within 20 minutes I forgot all about everyone’s irritating obsession with the sex they’re having or wish they were having and realized that what I really need is to prune some of my roses.

I have pruned 5 of them so far. Most of them are spindly little roses that have yet to become deeply rooted. They’re just settling in from being planted late last spring. I hate pruning the little ones because every little cut feels like murder. The roses with the lush thick healthy canes are so much easier to prune. You can hear them sighing with relief as the weak limbs are removed, the dead leaves sough off, and you tell them how wonderful and hearty they are.

I’m writing this as I take a quick break from the warmth outside. It’s too warm for me today but I need to get back out there a little bit more. Next I’m going to the back yard. We have three roses back there that have valiantly held onto life in the darkest oak shade for years before they were transplanted last year. It’s time they got the prune they need to thrive.

School is just getting out. I can hear the messy hum of middle school kids a half a block away. Max is walking home from the high school right now, any moment he’ll walk in the door and dump his backpack at the base of the stairs. I’ll shout greetings at him which he’ll barely acknowledge. Then he’ll disappear upstairs for the rest of the afternoon. Unless things at school were bad, then he’ll lay down on the couch in the living room and make feeble noises at me.

Being in the garden often has the effect of heightening my sense of right now in a pleasant way. It’s calming. Why do I forget this for such long stretches of time, that being in the garden is like a tranquilizer for me? I wonder if it was the years in Oregon where I was fighting with my yard so often? Where being outside somehow made my isolation in my community feel greater. (Probably because of the eerie silence of the neighborhoods I lived in.) Here on Cherry street there are always people walking by, people chatting, dogs saying hello, children playing, the school kids yelling and laughing, and neighbors coming and going. It’s so alive here in a way that when I’m outside I feel more peace rather than less. I belong here. In this community. Being outside in my garden feels calm but also energizing.

There are also sometimes loud drunks that walk by, but that’s just part of the city flavor I love so much.

I used to long for bigger garden spaces, for sizable property. I had big yards in Oregon. The potential of it was exciting but the reality of it wasn’t right for me. I don’t have tons of space in my current garden but it feels like the right amount. Every inch counts. I can tackle it in small -

*LATER*

I never made it back outside. Max came home and wanted to hang out, so we did. I’ll get back outside to the roses tomorrow. This was a good day!

Garden Clean-up

Yesterday evening I spent two hours in the garden. It got just cool enough for me to go out there without shouting “you motherfucker” at the sun every two minutes. In fact, there was a nice breeze.

What’s happening right now is a lot of ripping out and cleaning up of spent or failed plants. I tore out all my chard plants, bug eaten and covered in powdery mildew. I tore out my Black Krim tomato because every last tomato was rotting and they aren’t even remotely close to ripening. I tore out a bunch of leggy dry allysum and have a ton more to rip out. New allysum will replace it in no time.

I cut back half of my rudbeckias and still have the other half to cut back. They are all falling over and the blooms were spent. I’m hopeful that I’ll get more blooms in a few weeks after trimming them.

I ripped out a nasturtium and have more to rip out. I trimmed back my vervain and some thyme plants.

Next up I have to take out my failed bush beans, the leggy buggy tough-as-leather kale plants, the calendula (leggy and covered in powdery mildew), and the borage.

What I want to add to the garden: penstemon, thunbergia, lobelia, lettuce, more million bells, Alpine strawberries, wild violets, beets, and carrots.

I also need to get the kiwi trellised and the mandarin orange planted in a raised box.

I felt incredibly energized after gardening last night. I think this is how some people feel after yoga.

July Garden Update, 2014

The garden this summer has, so far, been amazing. I have been harvesting calendula for over a month now. At first there was just a small amount each time, too little for the dehydrator, so I strung them up to dry. While pretty, they don’t dry as thoroughly this way. I ended up putting these in the dehydrator later for a few hours.

This is the medicinal kind Calendula officinalis and if you plan on using your calendula for salves, I suggest you plant this variety. It has the strongest medicinal qualities of all the calendula varieties. Picking them, smelling them (marigold), drying them, and plucking the petals off to store for use later make me happy. Maybe it’s the colors. Maybe it’s knowing they are so good for skin and so easy to grow. I love everything about calendula.

I’ve been harvesting my comfrey too. I have only one plant but it’s putting off tons of leaves and I keep cutting them and drying them. They are huge. Too huge for my dehydrator unless I cut them first. This one harvest was just too big so I hung it out in the back yard under the oak tree. I don’t like the quality of hung dry as much as the dehydrator. They turn pretty brown. Which is fine. But it’s just better in the dehydrator. I dislike the smell of comfrey. Cutting it, crumbling it, yuck. Not sure why. But it is one of the best medicinals in my opinion so well worth the unpleasant scent.

I finally FINALLY made salve with the oil I already infused months ago. This is a triple strength wound salve and it’s turned out really well and we’ve been using it and it’s GREAT STUFF.

Mom loves kale. I used to think kale was okay-ish but mostly only in soup with white beans and cooked so long it stops being tough or tasting like old man breath. Yeah, I really don’t like kale and never have. But it’s one of mom’s favorite greens so she grew a couple plants of it and I harvested it for her, cleaned it, steamed it, and then froze it. She is still having to be careful of her produce intake after surgery.

Prettiest little insect eggs ever. They look like beads and are hard like bead too. These clusters came off in one piece. I have to admit that kale leaves can be really beautiful.

Our squash plants have been pretty productive. The most productive being the zucchini and the least productive being the yellow crookneck. All of them are so good fresh from the garden – I can’t get enough of them.

Started harvesting and drying my sage.

The tomatoes I planted this year are: Ananas Noire (actually ripens green and yellow), Ethiopian Black (small black tomato), Cherokee Purple (huge and deep red), Japanese Trifele (small reddish pink), Sungolds (orange cherry tomatoes – the only cherry toms I ever grow), and Pinapple (orange with red streaking).

We’re getting lots of tomatoes right now. And yet – we eat them almost as fast as we harvest them. I made a wonderful tomato soup the other night and I didn’t have enough of our own tomatoes that day so I had to add a can of tomato sauce to it. Even so – the fresh tomatoes made it especially good. I made garlic sourdough croutons to go with it. I did make it too salty though.

The neighbors all love our garden. They tell us all the time. Strangers walking by stop and enjoy and we’re outside they tell us how gorgeous it is. It’s gratifying. It’s so wonderful to have our front yard vegetable and flower garden giving so much joy not only to us but to a lot of other people too.

Notable failures: beans. I planted bush beans around the base of the peach tree and they started turning yellow and the beans are tiny. I think it’s the variety and I don’t like it because I can’t tell when they’re mature. The carrots and beets have not thrived. My herbs keep flowering and not growing in size. My summer savory died. Screw summer savory!

It’s time to remove the chard which has become covered in powdery mildew. Time to cut down the spent snap dragons. Time to trim back the rudbeckias. I need to weed out all the spent sprawling allysum and take out the dying nasturtiums. I think we need some new flowers. We definitely need some penstemon and thunbergia. Maybe some lobelia and creeping verbena. Flowers to add some color once I cut down the spent ones.

Next herbal project is to develop a great lip balm. I have just ruined a big quantity of organic sunflower oil by trying to infuse it with fresh rosemary and dried peppermint. FAIL. Infusing oils with fresh herbs has failed twice for me now and I need to stop learning that lesson. I don’t like the resulting smell. It smells like bruised leaves. So this time I’m going to do a batch of sunflower oil with calendula and comfrey and then add essential oils to it. I’ll start that today.

Being out in the garden to pick vegetables and herbs this season has been amazing. Getting back into gardening after such a long time away from it feels healing and good. So, more of that soon!

xoxo

The Monastery Garden Update

BEFORE:

Institutional plantings of agapanthus, spider condos (aka mock orange?), and some wan heather (or whatever those wan plants are that you can’t see in this picture).

AFTER:

Matching tiered raised beds on either side of the front walkway with an Elephant Heart plum in the center on one side and a Frost peach in the center on the other side.

First we had to strip out the agapanthus – a job that will never be completely done because this plant was designed by the devil – and then we removed the creeping amorphous shrubs that all the neighborhood spiders were using as their hatchery.

Then we got one of the neighbors to come dig up the beautiful weeping cherry that produces no cherries. This was a sacrifice on my mom’s part. I swear I didn’t force her to agree to let me put a fruiting tree in its place.

Then I began measuring and cutting the lumber for the beds. Remember that I already designed the beds this winter?

I built the beds. It took me about a week to build all the beds. Philip leveled them in the ground and filled them with soil.

If you want to meet your neighbors in Santa Rosa all you have to do is work on a garden project all week. Absolutely everyone will introduce themselves to you. I love it! You could work on a garden project for a year in McMinnville and no one will EVER talk to you or introduce themselves. Ask me how I know.

Everyone in the neighborhood (so far) LOVES the raised bed design! (They’ve all told me so and have been commenting on the progress excitedly for two weeks now).

I wanted the beds to be matching on either side of the path to give the walkway a sense of symmetry and formality.

This week I will be planting the beds out with most of the herbs they’ll have in them for this year. The vegetables will go in next week. Next year I will add more medicinal herbs to the beds as we’ll be building vegetable beds at the end of the driveway.

I’d be out there planting right now but I woke up too late and it’s already HOT out and I wouldn’t be able to water anything I planted without giving them major sunburn. Next week I should have more to show you in these beds.

A New Monastery Garden

One of the worst things that happened in 2013 was my mom’s sister deciding she had to sell this house which would have meant we’d have to move. One of the best things that happened this year was that our good friend bought her out and now owns half of it with my mom. I can finally plan a garden here. So on New Year’s Eve I pulled out all of my garden books for inspiration and took pictures of the front yard. Then I measured the dimensions and graphed it out.

My garden bias is totally obvious. It’s all about the herbs, the vegetables, and the – oh – I didn’t pull my rose books out but it’s also all about the roses.

This is what our front yard looked like on the last day of the year. Remember when I took out the other spider condo? There has been some major spider trafficking going on in the remaining one. Check it out:

This is just a small sample of the vast collection of spider egg sacks in the undergrowth of this most useless bush. But back to the before pictures. There was still one more agapanthus clump on this side of the front garden. It fell to Philip to destroy it.

Look at it just sitting there mocking us. It knows, and we know, that that appearance of winter weakness is a sham. Just a little rain and this thing will get BIGGER. So yesterday, on the first day of the year, we set to work.

And cleared that damn space! I even swept the sidewalk. Now we have to figure out what to do with all the stuff we pulled out. Yard waste filled up very fast and there’s still such a big pile that Philip can’t get the car out of the driveway. I feel so relieved to see those awful institutional plants eradicated. Once they were gone I made a wonderful realization. Remember the monastery garden I built at my last house? Here, have a look:

And from my office:

It turns out that I can recreate this garden in my new one on a slightly smaller scale. I can only allow 2′ for pathways which means no wheelbarrows. But once these beds are filled up there won’t be any need for that. Some of the beds will have to be smaller but I can totally do it.

That weeping cherry tree will be getting removed once we can find someone to give it to who will dig it up. I am so excited I’ve been spazzing out all day about it. So, it’s time I get off the computer and do some other yard work. Philip is going to go tackle the agapanthus on the other side of the walkway.

Garden Update: one agapanthus down and tomatoes in!

Much progress has been made on the front garden. First of all – those red flowers are ones that Max picked out for me on a trip to Harmony Farms with his Aunt Tara. I put them in the walk so everyone can see them as they walk up the path. Those two containers have bay laurels in them. It’s considered (by pagans and maybe ancient Romans) good luck to plant bay laurel at the entrance to your house. It keeps bad luck and witches from coming in.

I honestly don’t think it’s working that well. But I still like the way it looks and the bay is great in soup.

Let’s revisit the before. Spider condo, aggressively evil agapanthus, lots of pea gravel in the soil.

Spider condo went first, then I started hacking away at the evil. In the end it was hurting my feet (I have very delicate flowers for feet) and after I got 2/3 the way through that clump I had to get Philip to finish it off.

Ahhhh! Look how much room there is for good stuff. I do have plans to get rid of that other sprawling bush. But not right this minute.

First I needed to get some fresh soil. We really could use a couple of yards of soil but we aren’t committing to such purchases until the house situation is resolved. So I just spread a few bags of soil. It will have to do for now.

Next up I planted Max’s flowers, situated the bay laurels for maximum dramatic and witch-deterring effect, and planted my tomatoes. I can’t tell you how tempted I am to stuff a few more in there. I have a tendency to cram things tightly in my garden. I’m resisting the urge pretty fiercely.

Up close shot of the pretty Max flowers.

Some more of them. That little bunch of daisies were also chosen by Max for me.

Cause you know you want to be flogged with pictures of flowers my son chose for me. Next up I have to plant more flowers. I have rudbeckia, red valerian, echinacea, two different penstemon plants, chard, sage, chives, and lettuce.

Hopefully I’ll find the time to get all that in soon. I can’t wait to see this space fill out. Oh – the bare patch near the lion is still in need of much digging – the agapanthus roots are thick in there. My poor feet are finally recovering from their many ridiculous problems so I’m hesitant to get out there and abuse them some more. One thought I had was to cover the area with thick cardboard and then top with dirt but then it will make planting more difficult unless done with seeds only.

What are you doing in your gardens right now?

Agapanthus is the Devil

This is 1/2 of our front yard. The other half is essentially the same. Small, square, dirt full of pea gravel, and filled with vigorous agapanthus and an unknown sprawling shrub that collects spiders. I want vegetables and flowers like calendula, coreopsis, black eyed susans, grandmother’s pin cushion, marigolds, roses, and zinnias.

That bare spot used to have the other half of that clump of agapanthus in it. Philip has not removed the rest of it as I requested him to do because it traumatized him. So I planned to fill in the crappy soil with some fresh better soil and plant a couple of vegetables.

But I’m greedy for space and this spider condo was on my hitlist. I felt sure it wouldn’t be as hard to remove as the agapanthus. At least I could grow more than one tomato if I removed it. I hate shrubs like this. They’re what you plant when you don’t want to actually garden. They’re what you plant if you’re studying arachnids and need to provide the ideal environment to lure them with.I was right. The shrub was just a great sprawling thing that was mostly dead and brittle underneath the top layer. Its removal revealed a startling sight.

About half of the agapanthus clump behind it isn’t even growing into the ground. It’s packed into itself in a crazy-ass impenetrable tangle of root and fiber and I got blood thirsty.

I thought that not having to dig them out of the actual ground would make them easier to remove – I was terribly terribly wrong. By the way, all the time I worked on chopping up the spider condo yesterday it was in the 80′s and I sweated like mad and it was awful and gross. This morning was no different.

That mess is all growing above ground. It’s thick. It will most likely break my shovel handle. I’m using Philip’s burly digging bar which helps but my long held suspicions about agapanthus have been proved true.Agapanthus is the devil.

Would you look at that gnarly mean mass of shovel-breaking root?! It’s living off of itself, people! No wonder they always plant this in parking lots of malls and institutional buildings. This is a corporate strength plant. It will survive balls of fire and lightning bolts of blight.

I had to come inside to hide from the stupid heat. You have to actually hate yourself to dig a cancer like this out of your yard in 85° heat. I may be temporarily defeated but I now have my sights set on removing the entire mass instead of just half of it. And I intend to make Philip remove the rest of his too. Because on the other half of our front yard we have THREE MORE OF THESE ENORMOUS CLUMPS OF AGAPANTHUS.

Garden Wish List for 2013

My mind is turning towards my garden and all that I want to do with it and plant in it and the things I want to change in it. At the moment I am struggling to make myself new clothes because suddenly everything I wear has holes in it or stains on it and I don’t have a lot of choice and I have decided that since I may be obese for life regardless of good healthy changes I make to my life – I am determined to stop being so drab. Making clothes requires pattern work and lots of time. I need to finish this before I get my hands into the yard – but while I’m sewing I keep trying to organize in my head all the things I want to grow.

We mostly have low maintenance shrubs and plants here. A couple of things we do have that are awesome:

a lemon tree (not a Meyer I’m happy to say)

A white peach

a gardenia

a few roses

freely seeding salvia and alyssum

The trees and roses all need big help. The peach has been in a barrel for years without the bottom cut out – so it need the bottom cut out as was done for the lemon so it can spread its roots. It needs a little compost and fertilizer – as does the lemon. Both produce fruit (I just had broccoli yesterday with lemon juice from our tree!) but need care. The roses are in dire shape as they’ve been in the shade for years. They are horribly spindly and thin – they all need to be moved up front to the strip of dirt in front of the porch and they’ll need rose food to help them along. The wee gardenia has a bud but it is being crowded out by a really big hideous shrub-turned-tree that I am going to completely remove.

What I want:

Culinary herbs: rosemary, lots of thyme, Greek oregano, Mexican oregano, winter savory, French tarragon, dill, parsley, sage, and marjoram. (I would add basil and cilantro but I’ve never done well with either)

Fruit: a yellow peach tree (or two, dwarf), an orange or tangerine (though orange might get too big), gooseberries, lingonberries, wild strawberries, currants, blueberries, kiwis, and Red Flame grapes.

Flowers (both annuals and perennials): penstemon, scabiosa, lavendar, rudbeckia, cosmos, nigella, bleeding heart, coreopsis, campion, dahlias, nasturtiums, and columbine. Also hundreds more I can’t think of right now and probably don’t have room to grow.

Medicinals: calendula, comfrey, peppermint, feverfew, catnip, chamomile, and other things I can’t remember right now and need to look up.

Vegetables for this year: cucumbers (fresh eating), lettuce, Swiss chard, tomatoes, green beans, summer squash. Just the basics. Even if I get a couple of raised beds going in the driveway I won’t have much room. Perhaps snow peas too? If so I should get those going soon I think. That would be good for both salads and stir fries.

One last thing I want to grow in this garden if I can are mushrooms. We have all that shaded area and a big oak – some mushrooms like oak trees. I want some half rotted logs innoculated with spores to try and acclimate with plenty of mulch and obviously moisture when the season comes. I must look into this.

So what’s on your garden wish list?

Sharon’s Mushrooms Unidentified

Sharon has some impressive mushrooms growing in her yard. We wish someone could identify them for us. It turns out I have the same mushrooms growing in mine. Are they edible? I don’t have time to research it right now.

Even if I did – I’m not sure I would feel comfortable trying to eat these without a mycologist’s identification. I have read that in some places in France you can bring any mushrooms you find to the local pharmacy and a professional will pick out any inedible ones for you. People love to forage mushrooms in France, this way fewer people die doing it. Genius.

I wish we had that here. There are people who lead educational mushroom foraging walks in Sonoma County. I am going to try to find out who to talk to next year when these come back. Maybe I can get an expert to pronounce on these.

I am posting an exhaustive number of pictures in order to help identify them later from my books. Just as an exercise for my own mycological education.

If those babies were edible you could make several meals out of that cluster! And she has two of them in her yard! No, wait, she has three. Two big ones and one little one.

Even if they don’t turn out to be edible, they are COOL. I’d still like to know what they are.

I like fungi. They’re fascinating.

And beautiful.

I want to get some edible fungi growing in the dark dampish corners of my yard. Make use of all that shade.

I did see chanterelles growing in a really trashy yard down the street from me. I didn’t know you could grow them in your yard. From the looks of the house I’m guessing it was an accident of nature. I’d like to reproduce that happy accident.

Right after Sharon showed me her mushroom riches I found an enormous clump of the same variety of mushroom growing in my own yard!

So this is something for me to work on some time before next year – trying to identify these beauties. If you think you know what they are – please share!