Category: Garden Journal

End of summer, hot fall

Like most Southern Californians, I’ve spend the last week dealing with oppressive heat. We somehow always forget that as the light begins to tilt slightly and the days shorten, suddenly it becomes unbearably hot around here. And it can stay hot into October or November. A few years ago, I planted pretty pink hyacinth in the backyard hoping for a spring bloom. They now regularly begin to emerge in November, long before the spring and sit there awkwardly as the colder months approach. A few of the plants I started way back in June are in a sort of delayed adulthood. My sunflowers live in containers and are just now starting to bloom while also being endlessly thirsty.

A few of my potted sunflowers struggling to open in this heat.

A few watering hacks for fellow gardeners with thirsty plants:

Keep a bucket of water in the sink for when you rinse produce or your hands. The excess water is perfectly fine for watering plants outside. Plus, you pay for that water so you might as well get the most out of it.

I’ve used a product called SoilMoist for a few years now. It’s a polymer that expands when watered to provide an extra supply of water when needed. Although, in this heat I’m sure it’s much needed. It says it’s safe for vegetables, but I only used it for non-edibles.

Another hack I used are terracotta watering spikes. Terracotta is porous clay and once these spikes are inserted in the soil, you can invert a glass bottle filled with water (gently, please) and the water will slowly seep through the terracotta into the thirsty soil.

I’ve written on this before, but the book I recommend for all California green thumbs is 52 Weeks in the California Garden. This book changed how I approached all of my outdoor projects with the main planting season starting in September. Fall is our spring here and the most advantageous for good results year round. I should post more updates on my gardening projects in the future.

I get a little wistful writing about the end of summer, even with the extended blazing heat. For Labor Day, I drove once again to the desert house out on the Colorado River to spend time with my aunts, uncles, and baby cousins. Talk about heat. It was about 111 degrees on regular days, most of which we spent splashing around in the water and always with a cooler full of beer and soda water nearby.

I hardly had time to take pictures or anything like that because I was mostly on guncle duty to seven-year-old twins. Besides the aforementioned time playing in the water, activities included: word searches, activity book mazes, putting together a 500 -piece jigsaw puzzle (didn’t finish), and I got to introduce them to Mad Libs. Alas, that was the last family occasion of the summer, though I may be able to squeeze a few more trips in during the warm months. That’s the good thing about the desert house being so close…

…and by close, I mean about a four-hour drive from where I live. Tell that to any Angeleno and they’d probably fly into a tizzy. Palm Springs is about as far away as most LA people can stand. While the four-hour drive doesn’t really bother me, I do fill the time with either podcasts or audiobooks. My selections this time around:

”I’m Glad My Mom Died” by Janette McCurdy – listened to on the Libby app (free library books, y’all). The title is outrageous, but earned in this memoir on the author’s life as a child actor and Nickelodeon star, her fraught relationship with her mother, and dealing with eating disorders and alcohol abuse. I was already aged out Nickelodeon during the iCarly era, but like many I so wanted to be a teen TV star like her. Many years later, so many millennials are starting to come to terms with what this meant for the child stars themselves.

The podcast Weird Medieval Guys did a four-parter on the Hundred Years War. I’m not sure how I got started listening to this podcast, but I appreciated the deep dive into this. Like anything historical, it just makes you want to dive in even deeper, especially into the enigmatic life of Joan of Arc.

Onward to a very hot fall, and what is shaping to be a busy work season for me.

Helianthus, summer suns, fire colors

Early July, my birthday month. In Southern California this means the ever earlier beginning of what we call fire season, historically reserved for dry fall months. I’m not an ecologist, but someone who is outside a lot. Someone who pays attention to the land, photographs it, and notices the ongoing changes over the years. Needless to say, growing up here we didn’t have months on end of skies amber with smoke. But that’s a post for another day.

Closeup of a yellow sunflower.
A small, but large sunflower blooming.

Independence Day fireworks came and went. I’ve passed on them yet again to mind the sanity of my dogs for the evening, plus I can’t stand the poor air quality the next day. I choose instead to admire the small sunflower bursting open in my container garden. These Helianthus have been surprisingly more work than I’m used to, needing extra care and water in an already hot summer. But the blooms I do love.

A closeup of a red sunflower.

These little summer suns. Among the fire colors I have spilling out of pots and small patches in my garden. The only fire colors I’m hoping to see in yet another year of climate records shattering. I’ll be keeping an eye on the landscape as we carry on through it.

A Garden in the Rain

A closeup photo of seed pods in the rain

” ‘Twas just a garden in the rain

Close to a little leafy lane

A touch of color ‘neath skies of grey…”

A Garden In The Rain (Carroll Gibbons / James Dyrenforth)

A very rainy week or so here in Southern California. One of my favorite times to take my Leica outside. Carefully, of course, as droplets are still dripping off of things.

I haven’t posted anything since last year, but feeling a sense of re-focus on creative pursuits. Pandemic life and political crises have occupied my mind almost non-stop since who knows when.

I know we aren’t in a clear space yet, but it’s nice to feel a storm has come to wash away and refresh.

An image of the book 52 Weeks in the California Garden

Garden Journal: The Year Starts in September

Being from Southern California, I grew up with earthquakes. Yes, I’m one of those people who will stand there calmly as the earth under my feet literally shakes. The occasional fire might have made the news when I was a kid, but back then climate change was real but mentioned rarely and usually in passing. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that fire season became something so all-consuming. Several fires have threatened my home in the hills over the years, and I’ve been evacuated once in the middle of the night. I’m currently sandwiched between two large fires–the Bobcat Fire and the El Dorado Fire–each burning tens of thousands of acres.

Late September. The wildfires continue to wreak devastation up and down the West Coast, and the sky is filled with a toxic atmosphere of smoke. I’m tending to my garden. A piece of land that was a simple, plain lawn when we first moved here. Now it is a constant work in progress, thanks in many ways to an excellent professional gardener, Miguel.

As of yet, I have to limit my time outside, but do I have my own projects in the garden as well. I keep an eye on the big plants and I’ve spent much of the last few months weeding more than I ever have in my life. The garden has become my sanctuary and the thing that tears my eyes away from computer and phone screens.

I’ve started stacking a growing collection of gardening books along with a few seed catalogs. Finding a copy of Martha Stewart’s Gardening Month by Month at a thrift store was, like many things Martha, the start of a great love. Her yearlong paean to her masterpiece garden at her old Turkey Hill home, paired with incredible photography, is something to behold.

From there, I found myself diving into the wonderful A Way to Garden by Margaret Roach, former head gardening editor at Martha Stewart Living. Her anthropomorphic approach the gardening year as six seasons, starting in birth all the way to death and afterlife. Her “how-to and woo-woo” approach illuminates the elemental joys of gardening.

Still, for some reason most gardening books are centered around an East Coast, New England style of gardening, where there are more conventional seasons–pleasant springs, humid summers, crisp falls, and snowy winters. As opposed to here in California where much of that just simply does not apply. Luckily, I happened upon 52 Weeks in the California Garden by Robert Smaus, former gardening editor at the LA Times. His recommendation is to start the gardening year in September as he states in the Introduction:

“My gardening year begins in lat summer, when I fish out some weathered redwood flats and sow seeds of broccoli, calendula, delphiniums and other things I plan to plant in the fall. In the warm weather of August, seeds don’t sit, but sprout like a rocket lifting off, and six weeks later they’re large enough to go out into the garden…In our climate, fall is spring, at least as far as planting is concerned, and autumn, not spring, should be our busiest time in the garden.”

Having published this in 1997, I don’t think Smaus had to account for the apocalyptic wildfires we have happening now. Still his thoroughness in describing just how to truly maintain a thriving garden amidst the dryness, the Santa Ana winds, the heavy raining season, the ever more common droughts, and our notoriously hard clay soils have become fundamental to me. A guide for each week of the year here in SoCal.

So, here it is. The new gardening year begins, fall as spring, as the West Coast burns to an ashen crisp. I don’t know how to fix these terrible fires beyond acknowledging the impending doom of climate change–but I can make this a small sanctuary for the birds, the bugs, and the humans that pass through.

Speaking of fires, my childhood summer camp is currently being threatened by the El Dorado Fire, the one that started as a botched “gender reveal”. If you have a few extra bucks, please consider helping fund them through this emergency: https://www.uucamp.org/contribute/covid-19-emergency-fund-2/