As previously mentioned, there are lots of these little native California wild roses around the place, and they produce wonderful little flowers. This particular one grows in the vaccinium patch in pretty heavy shade, and during the summer (which hasn’t yet arrived here) gets regular water. The hips, like those of most (all?) roses, are edible, though I’ve never actually eaten them. Maybe this year.
Poking around the garden just now, I moved a particular rusted cooking pan…
I don’t know much about ant architecture, but apparently this minimalist shelter was the perfect spot for an ant nursery, piled high with the kind of juicy pupae that the ducks (may they rest in peace) would have loved to gorge themselves on!
Needless to say, the ants were not very happy. Not wanting to force them into an emergency move, I quickly replaced to the pan, and while they ran around in a frenzy for a while, they have since settled down. I love having ants in the garden – I believe that diversity (plant and animal) is a good indicator of overall garden health.
I just checked the 10 day forecast – rain, thunderstorms, partly cloudy skies, then more rain. About the only spring/summer annual vegetables that are really enjoying this weather are the potatoes, which around these parts are planted in early early spring. I only plant them every couple of years. One reason is that I typically forget to get seed stock, and the other is this sort of deeply-held (if ill-conceived – I’ve got nothing but space) notion I have about yield per acre, or in my case, yield per foot. That is, potatoes take up a lot of space, but don’t yield all that much food. The same is true for corn, which takes up a lot of space for comparatively little yield, and which is a water and nitrogen hog besides.
Back to the potatoes – they’re looking lovely. I bought the seed potatoes in February or so, and put them in a paper bag at the back of a dark cabinet, promptly forgetting about them. When finally I remembered that they were there, I pulled the bag out to discover that even in the absence of basically any light, they had developed multiple 12″ shoots from every eye, and these were clawing their way out of the bag. The potatoes themselves were withered and spent. I planted them anyway – potatoes are pretty tough – digging a trench and working in the best of the compost. Within a week those shoots had greened up and started developing proper leaves. They’re looking great today.
Bees are busy working the lavender this morning. Some days, there are a dozen varieties of insect nectar-seekers on this bush – European honey bees, native California bees, moths and butterflies – but this morning just the one. I wish I was better at insect identification – I need to pick up a field guide to native bees, and it looks like the Urban Bee Project is working on just such a thing.
Feed the bees!
Walking the property this evening, looking at the forest and planning in my head, I noticed a few new instances of Cutleaf blackberry (Rubus laciniatus), which is non-native, bears delicious fruit, and doesn’t bother me all that much (though I’m not a fan of invasive species as a general rule). At my elevation, this particular blackberry isn’t nearly as aggressive as Himalayan blackberry, which is a big problem in many parts of California, but which fortunately I don’t have.
Another non-native, Scotch broom (Cytisus), is in full flower. Scotch broom is a major source of allergy pollen around here, though the bright yellow flowers are cheerful. Unlike the blackberry, Scotch broom is quite aggressive, seeds profusely, and makes every attempt to take up as much space as possible. On the plus side, it’s a legume, so it’s doing good things for the soil even while it tries to take over the world.
On the native side, the California wild rose (Rosa californica) – is popping up all over the place, and will flower later in the year, while Hartweg’s iris (Iris hartwegii – not sure which ssp exactly) is flowering right now.
Let’s hear it for the home team!
Another cold, cloudy morning, and rain and snow possible for this weekend. Spring seems to be shy this year, but the promise of bright peppers gives me hope that things will someday warm up. This is a picture of peppers that I harvested from the garden a couple of years ago. I like to bring a bunch to the college to share with colleagues, and I usually set up a little display like this and include Scoville scale information for each so that folks know what they’re getting into. Clockwise from the top right: Habanero, Yastufusa (I think), Jalapeño, Serrano, Cayenne, and Fresno, with Thai Bird in the center.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever wandered your garden or even checked on your plants at night, with a flashlight. That’s what I thought. It’s 47 degrees F and clear tonight, and having been at work all day, I missed my garden, so I’ve just returned from a thorough flashlight evaluation of same. There are practical reasons to visit the garden at night – a lot of pest activity occurs under cover of darkness – but mostly I just like to look at the plants. The bear was back in the garden about a week ago, and tore down the fence in the new area – remind me to tell you about the bear – and last night it wrecked all the trashcans on the road and made a huge mess, but I’m happy to report that I didn’t have any contact with it this evening.
Michael Pollan, in the documentary film The Botany of Desire (perhaps also in the book?), calls cannabis growers “the best gardeners of my generation.” Indeed, when I set out to research building a DIY cloning system to populate my food forest, almost all of the plans came from websites, YouTube videos, and bulletin boards devoted to marijuana cultivation. Using some of these examples, over the winter I built this cloner, using plastic storage bins, some pvc pipe, tiny sprinkler heads, a bit of foam, and a fountain pump.
I set the cloner up under some fluorescent lights in a warm room, and as I gathered cuttings, I stuck them in – mostly assorted mulberry and kiwi varieties, which are candidates for the large canopy and vining niches in the food forest. After a time, most of the cuttings developed vigorous leaves, and some showed good root development. Some did nothing at all, and all the while the system hummed along. I eventually put the pump on a timer – 15 minutes off, 15 minutes on – ’round the clock. This seemed to keep the cuttings moist enough.
It remains to be seen whether the plants will survive – they have since been transplanted into pots and are resting in the nursery area of the garden, off the ground and in shade of a giant oak tree. As with all propagation, or at least all of the propagation I’ve ever tried, some of the cuttings rotted, or failed to thrive in other ways. If I had it to do all over again, I might have simply stuck the cuttings in moist peat/perlite in the shade, and let them do their thing with available light and rain – I’ve had lots of success using that dead simple method on other plants, notably blueberries, gooseberries, currants, elderberries, and aronia, some of which are visible below.
Though I’m not convinced that the cloner yielded better results than more traditional methods, its construction scratched a maker itch that I have, and so I’m glad I tried it. I’m going to give it another shot using some local cuttings, and will perhaps set up an A/B scenario to try to better understand whether there’s any benefit in using such a system. Gardening should be experimental!
I’m in the early stages of a long-term food forest garden project on my property, starting with a wooded area adjacent to the garden proper. Forest gardening is a system that involves planting communities of food plants to exploit various canopy levels – basically creating a food rich forest based on natural plant tendencies. This GNU Free Documentation Licensed diagram by Graham Burnett illustrates the idea pretty well:
In the initial phase of my particular project, I’m working on integrating plants into an existing forest infrastructure – tall cedars, mostly – filling in the lower canopy levels with smaller trees, shrubs, and ground covers. There are other parts of the property that were clear cut years ago, and in those areas I will be basically building a forest community from scratch, but based on resources and time, that will be a couple of years down the road. You’ve got to start somewhere, and I’m starting nearest my garden, where I have easy access to water and tools, and where I can initially fence the area to keep the deer out, giving the new plants a chance to get established.
There’s a lot of good information in the two-volume set Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier. Stay tuned.
In addition to the standard spring and summer vegetables, I like to grow things that are a little bit more unusual – Bolivian sunroot, or yacón, for example. It’s a perennial from the Andes, and I ordered my original crown maybe 10 years ago from (I think) Seeds of Change. Yacón is a large, fuzzy-leaved plant that produces sweet, crisp tubers that taste to me something like a combination of carrot, celery, apple and watermelon rind.
Below the ground, but above the tubers, each plant has a crown of sorts, with reddish buds (sort of like potato eyes), and the crown can be divided and saved for planting in the next season – I read once that the plant doesn’t produce viable seeds. As wet as the winters are around here, I can’t leave it in the ground or it will freeze and rot, so in fall after the first real frost, I dig the whole thing up, separate the tubers from the vegetative crowns, and store the crowns in a bucket of sand or peat, to be planted out the following spring. The stalks and leaves go in the compost pile. I like the tubers best skinned and eaten raw, and they taste better after a few weeks in the crisper drawer.
I have shared divisions of the plant with a number of gardeners in the county, and in other counties, and I have this romantic notion of the plant spreading throughout California, radiating out, the map producing a visualization of gardener sharing networks.
