Wet
I think this is the longest period of frequent rainfall in my life.
The view from my back door
Soggy, slick trails, mud in the garden. Weeds, weeds, weeds. And yet.
I looked out my back door this morning, ready to complain. No one would hear it, but I thought it my due. And then I looked more [...]
One day of sunshine
I was doing some gardening this morning and walked around checking the fruit trees. The citrus are in their glory. The apricot trees were bare, and the fig had small leaf buds. I just returned from a neighbor’s home and the apricot trees have put out the tiniest leaves. One day of sunshine.
Spring is not [...]
What a fine day
Garden work! Moderately dry soil. My friend Jackie gave me some yellow onion sets and I needed to get them in the ground. So I went to bed four, dug down and aerated the soil, leveled it, added two inches of a beautiful compost/chicken manure mix, worked that in and leveled again. I can almost [...]
Poor old Noah
Think about being on a sailing vessel with a menagerie of animal pairs, relatives, and rain. For forty days and forty nights. Rain. Wooden ship. Rain seeps through the decks. The stench. The mold. The noise. The complaining.
We are having a lot of rain this month. And it looks as if it is going [...]
Low hanging fruit
Usually that’s all gone by late January. By now we typically have to use the picker tool to get an orange from the tree.
Many oranges are still on the tree
I am officially declaring today the first day of late winter on Coolidge Avenue. No rain. And I could weed. And did weed. I did not [...]
Hardening up
Happy new year!
The lettuce seedlings are growing quickly under the grow light and in the warm house temperatures. But. I’m about to put them into the ground. Where there are bugs, and snails, and slugs, and wind, and cold. If I were to take them straight from the house and plant them, they would be [...]
A winter harvest
Gloomy. The happiest man I know of right now is in the desert and on the way to Joshua Tree and just fell in love. None of those things are true for me. I’m looking at a gloomy sky. But. I just harvested vegetables for dinner.
I felt like a thief, having done little gardening for [...]
Something special
Satisfied with less. Though I miss the ebullient growth and abundance of the summer garden, I am grateful to be growing cabbage, broccoli, carrots, and peas. And lettuces. I enjoy seeing the surprise on friends’ faces when I serve up a bowl of mixed lettuces. Every shade of green. And some reds. A special palette [...]
Tomatoes and the march of time
At this time of year when I was a boy, my brother Bill and I would spend hours on the floor looking at the Sears Christmas catalog. Hours. We would prioritize our lists. No Internet. And we had just recently gotten a television. The only way we knew what to yearn for was what the [...]
Rains coming
Few things motivate me to get gardening tasks done more than approaching rain. For a few reasons. If there is planting to be done, it either has to be completed before the rains or several days after. Mud is not an option. Cleaning up and soil work need to be finished for the same reason.
Weeds [...]