Gabe's Birthday Present

I already have a hard time remembering that six months ago, Gabe's Garden was just a patch of neglected lawn. Happy birthday little dood! Soon you will be old enough to *really* play here.

To celebrate, I hung up the Japanese Children's Day banner that used to be mine. Children's Day, formerly Boy's Day, is actually in May, but since few people here in the US know that, I can get away with flying the carp whenever I like.



Gabe absolutely loves the banner. He waves his arms and shouts "da!" whenever he sees it. By "da", he means "gimmie".

I was a little worried that the banner might scare off the catbird who is nesting in one of the nearby shrubs, but I watched her hop right up underneath it.

That same catbird chased off a hummingbird that showed up to drink from these bee balms. The hummingbird was back a day later - hooray! That makes three hummingbird sightings in the yard, total.

But back to the bee balm. . . dang I love these flowers! So crazy, so red, so easy to grow. It's native to the Midwest, which is native enough to suit me. And it's in the mint family, which means it is safe if Gabe ends up eating some.

This is the last of the mustard which I had sown everywhere in this garden in a sort of permaculture experiment. I had planted them to stabilize and shade the soil while the slower-growing natives got established. I had thought that I would harvest it fast enough to keep it small, but I had my hands too full with Gabe to harvest it often. The explosively-growing mustard was crowding out my blueberry bushes, and otherwise looking like an unruly mess, so I weeded it out. This token plant remains so that we can harvest seed for next year; or, perhaps, for pickles. The plant has slumped over beneath the weight of its own seeds. A baby bunny has been spotted using the fallen plant as cover.


This is another plant that has stolen my heart: common cinquefoil, potentilla simplex. It came along for the ride with the creeping thyme that my neighbor gave me. I love its unruly runners hanging over the edge stones, and the lovely texture of its five-fingered leaves.

A few years ago a friend thought she had identified the hangout of local pot-smokers when she spied some hand-shaped leaves growing beside a lake. Now I know that it was some type of cinquefoil that we were looking at, rather than some stray hot-house plant sprouted from a seed dropped from a baggie. The taller varieties of cinquefoil look even more like marijuana leaves than this variety.


Common cinquefoil is in the rose family, and judging by its leaves and runners and flowers, it must be closely related to strawberries. (Here are some strawberries for comparison.)

The black-eyed susans, Rudbeckia hirta, are still blooming, and in front of that, I have added spiderwart, Tradescantia virginiana. Surprise! Despite the arachnid-and-blemished-skin name, spiderwart is rumored to be edible.


This side of the garden is still looking a bit bare. The lavender has bloomed, and the rosemary is thriving. However the native grass called prairie dropseed, Sporobolus heterolepis, has been looking a bit cooked, and the bunnies keep munching on the native violets
.


The bunnies also seem to like the nasturtiums, Tropaeolum majus. Nasturtiums are non-natives that make a cheerful, colorful filler while building a native plant bed, because (around here, at any rate) they seem to be reliably killed off by the cold winters. But seeds can be collected and stored indoors for the following year if the bunnies don't eat them.

Nasturtiums are edible, and have a delicious radishy flavor that would go nicely with milder salad greens.

That's more of the prairie dropseed there by the nasturtium. It's a short clumping grass with very narrow leaves, making a wonderful texture to contrast with wide leaves and big flowers.


Here is a gratuitous shot of the bowling ball, along with cinquefoil, creeping thyme, bee balm, and a clump of native grass. (Alas, I don't remember what type of grass it is!)


Two clumps of that native grass flank Gabe's future fort. Some day, those serviceberry twigs will be a cage of thick trunks, enclosing the perfect shady spot for a little boy to plan his next big adventure.

A Way to Support Small Farmers Worldwide: Kiva

Small businesses worldwide can benefit greatly from small loans. That's great! . . .except that for ordinary folk, there is no way to make a small loan to someone who needs it. Until now!

This California-based company, Kiva, allows ordinary folks to make loans as small as $25 to small-business owners around the world. The loans are interest-free, and in the (likely) event that you get your money back, you can choose to re-invest it. This sounds like a great alternative to making donations.

The even offer gift cirtificates!

The Visit

On the right is Felder Rushing, on the left is Darrell Trout and in the center is my mom.

On Monday I had the wonderful pleasure of opening my garden to these two garden dignitaries. Unfortunately one thing I didn't do was take the time to shoot some decent photographs.

Both Felder and Darrell are garden writers. Darrell's been here before, he wrote a lovely article about my garden back in 2006.

As they arrived and drove down my driveway, I had to stop and stare at the truck Felder was driving. It was the most amazing truck I'd ever seen, a well worn Ford 150 complete with hood ornament and Hula girl affixed to the front dash. The most amazing part though was the garden in the back bed, I had never imagined anything like it.

There were wonderful twisty bottle trees, succulents galore, and all kind of lovely little doo-dads.

This is what a young sprout of a bottle tree looks like, pretty cool huh? I'm going to have to watch my garden carefully and see if any of these are sprouting around here.

Holding the succulents in one area was a little golf cart tire. Bet there's going to be a run on golf cart repair shops now, I want one of these!

Rather than post the whole thing here, I'm going to put the photos of what they saw in the garden on my other blog, Melanie's Perennials.

We're being socked here with high humidity, it makes it hard to want to get out there and do anything in the garden.

Melanie

Viva La Resistance!

I've finished the deed of removing 22 of my blighted tomato plants. I say 22 and not 24 because I had planted two Cosmonaut Volkov Red tomato plants this year and much to my surprise they showed very little damage from the late blight. I noticed while removing the plants that the CVR plants had dead branches from their neighbors draping their healthy branches. There were some branches I had to remove near the base, but there were no stem cankers and overall the plants look good. Their neighbors were showing cankers all the way at the top of their seven foot long vines.

I say resistance and not immune because the plants clearly were showing some signs of minor damage. It looked more light minor early blight rather than late blight. I will keep a close watch on them, but for the moment I have two tomato plants still! Pictures to follow tomorrow as it was too late to take any pictures when I discovered this.

The penalty for finishing my task in the twilight hours is about two dozen mosquito bites on my back. They are straining even my ability to ignore itching;)

Pestilence and Plague

I don't have Chris' eye for spotting plant illness, but even I can see the swaths of yellow-and-brown death galloping up the tomato plants.

I have never had any particular interest in my Irish roots, but here in our yard is the reason for my ancestry. I can't look at this patch of plants without thinking of entire crops wiped out. I'm trying not to imagine what it would be like to starve to death.

There are farmers out there, right now, who are in dire straights because of this. Please visit your local farmers' market and support your local farmers!

This may be the last pretty shot of this year's plants.

Tomatoes Devestated Early by Late Blight - Phytophthora infestans

Tomorrow morning I will have to perform the most difficult act I've ever been required to do: I will have to go out and pull up all twenty four of my tomato plants, place them in plastic bags, and set them on the curb for pickup. Yesterday I showed my friend Jen Gordy the tomatoes, which were looking very good - there was maybe an odd spot on a leaf here or there. Today, they are dead up to three feet from the base of the plant on the most vulnerable plants, and clearly infected on even the most resistant varieties. I don't think I can undersell just how quickly this hit. I reported the event here. I hope it helps them track the problem.


I had read about the problem back on the 4th of July, so I wasn't caught completely off guard. I won't deny that I felt a certain sense of imperiousness since I didn't understand that the spores can travel for miles on the wind. I always thought of it as a "might blow a few doors down the way", not across town.

These leaves literally looked healthy yesterday. To see the change in just twenty-four hours unnerves me. There is a part of my monkey brain that wants to let my plants stay up out of some slim hope that some of the fruits might mature. But I know that this is a lost cause; the plants will be dead within a week, and leaving them up will only give the late blight contagion a stronger chance of taking up permanent residence in my garden.

I just can't believe how sick the plants are.

These tell-tale cankers are present on most of the plant stems.

I'll take further stock tomorrow and may try and save some of the bunches of tomatoes that are close to blushing, but I'm not even sure I want to try at this point. I can only hope some local farmer has avoided this so I can buy some tomatoes at a farmers market.

One of the varieties of potato that I'm growing doesn't seem to be suffering from the late blight yet, but all the others are. I will be pulling them tomorrow as well.

I don't know when I'll get a chance to grow potatoes or tomatoes again. It may take several seasons for the garden to become clear of this blight. The amount of work I've put into these over the past months is great, and to lose them all is a horrible blow.

I'm thankful that my family doesn't depend on the fruits of the garden to survive. I now have a small inkling of the despair the tenant farms of Ireland must have felt as they watched their crops wither overnight.

More Indian Pipe Photos

All Out!

This morning my daughters left with their dad for a three day trip to Maryland where they will be attending a family wedding.

Mom and I (and of course Calie-the-wonderdoodle-dog) are here and going to go ALL OUT during the next few days.

We've got a garbage dumpster in the driveway with lots of space to fill. The basement and attic are in desperate need of a cleaning and thankfully it's not too hot or the attic would not be a good place to be. I'll still only be able to stay up there a short time and will remember to drink lots of water.

Sunday we are planning a huge garage sale to hopefully unload lots of these goodies before throwing them in the garbage (or if in good condition, donate them to a church).

Gail, you asked if our house will be sold. That is still up in the air and certainly a possibility but I sure would like to finish out the next two years of Emily's high school education here.

In between inside cleaning we will also be going ALL OUT in the garden! On Monday I will have the unbelievable pleasure of showing my garden to two very well known garden writers. This might be my last hurrah for a time and I plan on enjoying every moment.

Darrell Trout has been here before and besides his many great books, he has also written quite a nice piece about my garden for Newsday a few years ago. Traveling with Darrell will be Felder Rushing who is a writer I've hoped to meet for many years.

Needless to say we'll be weeding like lunatics here.

While I've got my fingers crossed that the daylilies will still be looking good on Monday, I know that many other perennials here will be strutting their stuff.

Both Darrell and Felder are into "Garden Junque" and I've got lots of that for them to see. Actually, many pieces here were rescues from Darrell's last garden on Shelter Island. I hope he likes what I've done with them.

Now I need to remember to plant those bowling shoes too...

If I don't post in the next few days you'll all know what I'm doing. Going ALL OUT!!!

Lyme-Free for Now

Just a quick note that my Lyme test came back negative, which is good news indeed. It let me start tackling the issues that were causing the stress which is the real source of my current health woes. The year of the slug continues in the garden, though I'm beginning to think it may be the year of the oriental beetle instead. More on that to come.

Landscape scenes

Taking photos of individual blooms is easy. You look through the view finder, check the surroundings and shoot.

If I wanted this photo of the hardy Geranium 'Nimbus' and the Coreopsis 'Zagreb' to be perfect, I would have had to take a little pair of scissors first and clip the dead heads off the Coreopsis. Still, it only took a moment for me to set this photo up and take it.

Stepping back a little further, you can focus on a small planting area. Still, not too difficult although there's more to look at inside your frame. Taking this photo out near the street I had to crouch down slightly so you didn't see the blacktop just at the top of the photo. Of course, there's also photo shop to help you crop out some things.

The more plant material (subject) you mix into the photo, the more difficult it seems to be to get a pleasing shot. Yesterday I tried to shoot a few landscape shots in the garden. This spot looked lovely but the camera wasn't as kind as I had hoped (or was it the photographer?).

I like the way this one came out with the misty air showing. Again, if I wanted this to be better I would have pulled my car out of the driveway (can you see it?). There wasn't any sense though in doing this because there's also a big black garbage dumpster in the driveway but hopefully I hid it well with the plant material.

Of course landscape shots wouldn't be complete without one that includes my little bicycle. Now you can see it with the charming basket that Bonnie found for me.

The back bed around the pool is such a riot of color that I can't make myself leave that area. It should be at peak for another week or two. The main focus of this bed is daylilies, if I had the luxury of redesigning it now I'd add some more mid and late summer blooms so it continued to put on a show for the whole summer. I have very few early spring blooming plants here as I really want it to shine during swimming season.

Here's one of the views from the top of the pool patio looking down. Hmm, I wonder why there's only one single Liatris stalk there, must let that baby increase! The Platycodon (balloon flowers) have been wonderful this season, today I'll try to remember to deadhead these a bit. It only takes a few minutes and keeps them blooming for so much longer.

Hope you liked my landscape shots.
Melanie

Bird Food

Mid July into August is when the cone flowers really start to shine. The Echinacea (Purple cone flowers) are the first, they're going quite strong now. If I find the time to get out there and cut off some of the older blooms, they'll send out new blooms all the way until the end of summer.

If you only have room for one kind of cone flower, this is the one I'd recommend. It brings flocks of bright yellow goldfinch to the garden, an amazing sight and sound!


The Liatris are revving up too now. According to many gardening books their nickname is "Kansas gay feather" but I rarely hear them actually called that around here. I don't know why I didn't take a photo of one in full bloom, guess it's something to do today.

My garden used to be filled with purple Liatris but one day I had a white one seed into the garden and now it's seeded all over.

Isn't it beautiful! The gold finch love the Liatris too, they cling sideways on the stalks and pick out the seeds (you have to let them turn brown and go to seed first). On a warm sunny afternoon you can go out and find Liatris stalks covered with fat happy bumblebees. That's another picture I'd like to get one day this week. Not today though since we are getting some needed rain.


Tall plants are so cool, I have quite a few different varieties in the garden. This is Rudbeckia maxima, it's at least 6' (2 meters) tall. Birds try to land on it for the seed and it's quite comical to see them suddenly bow down under the weight of a tiny bird.

Here's a corner of the bed behind my swimming pool. Right now it's a riot of color, just my kind of garden! You can see the Rudbeckia maxima in the top left corner. The grass that's just coming into bloom is Molina 'Skyracer', another excellent tall plant accent, quite different from any other grasses here.

The other day I was in the pool just on the other side of this bed. As I was swimming laps I realized that there were goldfinch in the bed just feet away from me. I felt like a submarine as I slowly cruised back and forth with just my head sticking out of the water.

At first I thought that I should get my camera and keep it perched on the pool edge but then I thought maybe that might not be a good idea.

Somehow I can just invision Calie the wonder-doodle-dog kicking that camera into the pool. She just goes wild when somebody is swimming, she begs for us to splash her and then tries to catch the water droplets in the air. What a crazy dog!

Looking for Lavender Inspiration

Welcome and thank you for stopping by. I am back from a painting vacation and would love to take you with me on a little tour to share with you the lavender inspirations I found for us to paint together. I am blessed to live in beautiful Southern California just several miles from the Pacific Ocean. We have mountains , lovely farm land , small lavender farms , and vineyards within a three hour drive from the coast. This year we decided to take advantage of our beautiful surroundings and find our inspirations to paint at our local flower and lavender farms.

Pour yourself a cool drink and let's go. First I need to pack my painting gear - my apron and hat are a necessity.

I wear gloves when painting outdoors to protect my hands from the sun and found the fun lavender rubber gloves at Debra's Cottage to add to my painting gear.
Throw in my paint brushes and off we go.
Well, before we get started I happened onto two white wicker chairs that were such a great deal I could not resist them. Bentley, my studio assistant, also went with us to look for inspiration.

On our way out of town our first stop is a slight detour to Balboa Island to show you this delightful and whimsical house with a crooked lavender fence and umbrella. The house even has a lavender clock in the garden surrounded by lavender hydrangeas.

OK, here we go!

Finding inspiration . . . . .

We found lots of beautiful flowers at the flower farm and nursery. Lovely lavender delphiniums.




A beautiful mixed bouquet.

A profusion of lavender flowers growing on a picket fence.




A lovely hanging basket filled with lavender and white flowers.



Lavender flowers with white daisies.


Here . . . . .



There . . . . .




Spanish Lavender


There . . . .




French Lavender



Everywhere . . . .



Lavender Sage




The wonderful road side stands selling fresh cut lavender inspired me to paint. I loved the stand with the yellow market umbrella and could not resist the delightful contrast of the yellow and lavender combination.






Roadside market.

Now, let's paint something together. I picked out lavender bouquets just for you to paint.




French Lavender Bouquet





Lavender Sage Bouquet




The buds on the Lavender Sage are larger and will be easier for you to paint. You are welcome to use either photo for your inspiration. Now let's get started. I am using an 8X10 canvas and base coated it with Naples Yellow and a little White. The Naples Yellow makes a very nice neutral background and looks wonderful with the lavender. My painting is a present for a friend who has a Country French kitchen and I decided to add "Herbs de Provence" to my painting.



First sketch your bouquet.

The colors I used are: dark purple, light violet, light blue violet, magenta, raw sienna, dark green, medium green and a green gray.

Next, paint in your darks - always paint from dark to light.


Now add a little touch of raw sienna and several shades of green for the stems. Lighten up the buds with lavender, blue violet and a touch of magenta and then add a little gray green to the entire bouquet. Note that I put dots of the gray green in between the buds. I always like to compare the painting to the inspiration.



Complete your bouquet and enjoy!

Thank you for visiting. I sincerely appreciate that you have taken the time to leave me a comment and to follow my blog. If you have any questions or would like to see me paint something special, please leave me a comment or send me an e-mail.

Have a lovely week. Blessings, Erin