Gardening – Page 2 – The Creative Salad

Modern Landscape Architecture in Venice, California

One morning on our trip to Southern California we needed to kill time before lunch and decided to go for a family walk. We found ourselves in a quirky, well-kept neighborhood in Venice, California. Navigating up and down the streets, I came to appreciate why people love living in LA. Those small quiet neighborhoods are delightful!

Here are some of the architectural highlights from our walk:

I love those modern fences. (Oh, I almost want to pin each shot!) I look forward to the day we own a house and can duplicate that top fence. We’ll bring a little LA to Western Sonoma County.

A Quick Botany Lesson

Did you know that pollen grains come in different colors?!

I think of pollen as shades of yellow, but that isn’t always the case, as we found out with our Valentine’s Day tulips last month.

The white tulips contained yellow pollen grains:

These pink tulips, however, have PURPLE pollen grains:

How cool is that?! Homeschooling 101 around here.

Curious about other pollen colors? This nifty chart on Wikipedia lists a wide variety of pollen colors, as does the beautiful pollen guide by the Bristol Beekeepers.

So much for thinking that pollen was only yellow! My college botany professor would be so disappointed in me.

Goals for Next Year’s Garden

As this year’s garden season comes to a close, I find there are several things I hope we do differently next year. Here are our goals for next summer.

Check for ripe produce more regularly. This year so many strawberries rotted on the vine because we didn’t harvest as frequently as we needed to.

Fertilize early in the season and re-fertilize often. Our tomato plants were especially slow to grow until we buried them in a bag of composted manure and then they flourished. Next year I shall do this in June instead of September.

Install an automated watering system, even if it’s just a sprinkler on a timer. Oh, the time we’ll save!

Be more proactive about checking for (and, dare I say it, disposing of!) critters. Remember our tree collard? We knew something was nibbling on it, but it took us two weeks to figure it out. Yesterday we found three very fat caterpillars munching away. Will the kale recover? Oh, how I hope so. Stay tuned.

And, yes, it’s the end of October and we still have strawberry plants flowering, tomatoes growing, and flowers blooming here in Sonoma County. Love California living!

Garden Failures and the Potential For Yet Another

Not everything has been peachy-keen in our garden this year.

There was the Alium Disaster. Remember last fall (above) when we planted dozens of alium and tulip bulbs? Yeah, well none of them sprouted. (Thank you to our neighborhood gophers who I assume are responsible.)

Then we planted hundreds of poppy seeds days before I sprained my ankle and, well, they never got properly watered and didn’t sprout.

The good news is that we have hundreds (thousands?) of poppy seeds remaining, so we may try again next year.

And now we have one more grand garden adventure that I so hope will pan out: tree collards! Given to us by a friend, these evergreen kale plants typically live ten years and grow ten-twenty feet tall, all while continually producing.

Right now it’s a tiny plant in a giant planter (sitting in a giant mound of compost). I’m excited to see how this goes!

At the moment I am not feeling overly optimistic, but perhaps I’m just trying not to get my hopes up after the previous two garden disasters.

We’ll keep you posted!

Fall Garden and Animal Visitors

We’re had all sorts of animals pop up in our garden over the past three years: turkeys, gophers, frogs, snakes — evidently gopher and garter snakes love our garage, lucky us, and now this snail that we caught helping itself to a drink of water from our hose:

The worst part of what I affectionately call the “snail incident” is that I got sidetracked just after taking this photo so the snail escaped and will continue it’s veggie eating rampage in our garden. Epic Garden Fail.

Speaking of Epic Fails, I’ve spent essentially ZERO time gardening this summer thanks to my sprained ankle. Now that I’m moving around better (hooray!), we’re starting to spend more time outside and more time working in the yard.

I’m floored by how our garden has grown since the Spring: