The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

Seed Gathering Detour

I’m a freak. We had our annual Forth of July party on Saturday. We have a lot of friends and neighbors over. Around 100 of them.

This means days—sometime weeks—of preparation. Our party is held outside, of course. It’s hard to light sparklers and piccolo peets in the house, and the water slide just doesn’t blend with my carpets.

The problem with having the party outdoors is: It happens to be in the middle of my garden.

Why is this a problem?

Well, it’s not so much a problem with the location as it is with me. You see, while trying to get my party chores done, I get sidetracked. That’s right.

My neighbor popped in to see if there was anything he could do to help and there I was bent over a paper plate squeezing seeds out of the dried head of a columbine flower. I had absconded with the plate from the party stack I was supposed to be arranging on the table with all the other paper products.

Table? Oops I forgot to set it up.

Where were those darned paper products and plastic utensils anyway? Who cares?

My Purple Planter Boxes

This year I wanted to try shades of purple and lavender. Which is a change from my normal winter porch planter box.

I wanted some trailing plants and some that weren’t. I wanted different plants with different sized and shaped flowers.

Here are the flowers I used in my boxes:

Petunia Dreams Blue
Million Bells (Calibrachoa) in dark and light purple
Bacopa white
Lantana Luscious Grape
Trailing Ivy Geranium in Amethyst

I think they work really well—and will only look better as they grow.

Live and Learn: How my dog survived a rattlesnake bite

Last Saturday, a rattler bit my dog, Moondoggie.

I didn’t see it happen, but I was there.

I was taking her for a walk and I looked back and saw that she was holding her paw up and licking it. I initially thought that she just had a sticker in her paw.

Then I noticed that she wasn’t moving and couldn’t put her paw down—so I walked to her and checked the pads of her foot. While I was checking her foot she just fell over.

It was then I noticed the puncture wound in her right foreleg. My heart started to race as the realization set in that she had just been bitten, probably by a rattlesnake—maybe a coral snake—but most likely a rattler.

We just happened to be at the end of the trail, of course, at the furthest point from the trailhead.

Luckily we weren’t down at the lake or I would’ve had to run uphill.

I did what anybody who loves their dog would do.

I threw my coffee down, picked up that 44-pound dog like a baby, and ran.

I tore the quarter- to half-mile distance down the path and back to my car.

My sunglasses flew off, and I kept running.

She just lay in my arms and looked up at me as I jostled her skinny little dog body to and fro.

Normally, she wouldn’t have let me carry her like a baby—let alone run along a dirt trail with her.

I would remember later that she looked up at me with total and unconditional trust.

Escargot Away

The pests in my garden have been out of hand this year.

It’s kind of depressing. I am growing some strawberry pots filled with succulents but something has been eating large holes in my hens and chicks (Sempervivum tectorum).

I had a sneaking suspicion who was eating my little hens, so my sons and I borrowed a high powered flashlight from my husband and we waited for the sun to go down (which took a while since the summer solstice just occured) and then we crept outside to the scene of the worst damage—and look what we found.

My hunch was correct.

While my sons and I were collecting a container full of these fat pig-like mollusks our neighbor, who also happens to be a chef, stopped by and laid claim to the snails.

You see, he wants to take them and purge them and make escargot from their little soft bodies.

Umm—tasty.

My kids couldn’t have been any more grossed out.

A Bird in the Hand...

… is far better than a bird flying around your bedroom, scaring the hell out of you and landing on you husband’s sleeping head while you are trying to catch it in a terribly inadequate butterfly net while keeping your cattle dog from having it for an early-morning snack while being watched by two snickering children.

My family and I went to Yosemite for a 36-hour whirlwind mini-vacation while my neighbor watched my dog. Unfortunately, she left the side door open so our dog could come and go.

It seems that the birds at my feeders were able to come and go freely also.

An adolescent female oriole wandered in, flew upstairs, and  hid on top of the ceiling fan in my bedroom all night. Unbeknownst to me, she silently watched The Bachelorette along with me.

Then, at first light, she tried to make a break for it.

I slowly opened my eyes and there she was diving down at me unannounced which was slightly disconcerting since the cabin we stayed at Yosemite had bats in the attic.

I got out of bed and went downstairs to borrow my son’s butterfly net.

My two boys peered at me through a crack in the door as I ran around my bedroom like an escaped mental patient—in my bathrobe—swinging a butterfly net and yelling obscenities at a defenseless little bird.

It was over fairly quickly, which was good for all involved. My sleepy husband took this picture of the feathered vagrant and then I set it free—out the same door I suspect it had entered.

All was right with the world once again.

Green Thumb Sunday–Pinks and Purples

Gardeners, as well as plant and nature lovers, can join Green Thumb Sunday every Sunday. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information

Love Apple Farm

I went to Love Apple Farm today.
My trip was very short because it was last minute and unannounced.
I hope to return for a more in depth interview and tour sometime soon.
While there, I did notice that Cynthia Sandberg the owner and I have quite a few things in common.
Cynthia lives in an old farmhouse, I live in an old farmhouse.

Cynthia likes herding dogs, I like herding dogs.

She raises chickens, I had a chicken once.
Cynthia uses organic compost and worms castings. Me too.

She seems to like mosaics, and so do I.

Cynthia reuses and recycles broken concrete, I reuse broken concrete.

She has a vegetable garden, so do I,

Cynthia has an RV, I have an RV.

Cynthia supplies Manresa, a famous Michelin-rated restaurant, with fresh produce from her garden every day

and…I have an RV.

Northern Pacific Rattlesnake

It’s always a good feeling to do spring cleaning in the old garden. I think I mentioned before that my husband and I removed an old, icky, woodpile and a heap of broken concrete. We were concentrating on a part of the yard that had been neglected for a long time. This is great for us but not so good for the creatures that made their homes in the piles of wood and concrete.

The before picture

Going

Going

Almost gone

Ta-da

About five days after we removed the junk, someone else came home. That certain someone was none other that a Northern Pacific Rattlesnake, (crotalus oreganos oreganos), which, while watering some daisies, I almost stepped on. Oopsie.

I pivoted on one foot and put the other one down about 12- or 16-inches from this foot-long snake.

I froze immediately and I noticed something interesting—rattlesnakes don’t just coil and rattle their rattles when they’re scared, they try to get as flat as they can. This poor little snake was so flat I thought for a moment maybe I had already stepped on it.

I called to my husband and he brought me the trusty rattlesnake cooler. I picked up a long stick and herded it into it’s home for the night.

The next morning, after showing it to my son’s Cub Scout den, once again we took the displaced snake up our hill to a safe location—both for the snake and for people.

We sang our favorite verse of “Born Free,” dumped it out, and then ran like hell in the other direction

Released and look, she blends!

My Husband’s Been Abducted By Aliens

My husband six months ago                       

Today was the last straw.

My husband actually told me that he was going on a bike ride. Now, you must understand that he hasn’t been on his bike since before we were married.

I believe that an alien pod arrived approximately ten weeks ago. I think it landed somewhere near my husband while he slept. At which time, a weird alien metamorphosis took place. My husband was sucked out of his human shell and replace by an alien that looks just like him.

I started to take notice of strange events. First he told me was going to go on a diet to lose forty-six pounds. I said, “why do you want to look like, Gandhi?” This guy didn’t have forty-six pounds to lose but lose but he did. He has already lost a total of thirty pounds. Thirty pounds.

His diet isn’t like the ones I’ve been on—no, this is different. He didn’t drink himself into a stupor and then vomit for two days straight, swearing off drinking and food and anything else that comes close to touching his lips.

He didn’t choose my other favorite either: kissing my kids a lot and making them breathe on me when they have the flu, so I can catch it and vomit for two days swearing off anything that comes near my mouth for another three days.

He also didn’t try the one I used last year—an abscessed tooth followed closely by a thyroidectomy. I lost ten pounds on that one.

My alien husband’s diet had to do with blood sugar stabilization and eating healthy. He doesn’t eat carbs or refined sugar. My husband?

No carbs?

Come on, Alienman, don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes. I may not know how to do space travel but I know there is no way my husband is going to give up carbs.

My alien husband says he doesn’t even get hungry or crave sugar.

Right.

Another weird thing that happened after the suspicious weight loss is gardening. That’s right; Alienman was leaving his laptop computer for more than thirty minutes at a time and was working in my garden.

The weeding was great, but then all of a sudden he was planting, planting in my garden. Planting things he had grown from seed–himself. This really made me suspicious. Some of the seedlings have really big leaves. He claims they’re pumpkins, but I suspect they are more pods.

I’m watching him secretly from my bedroom window. He is in my garden right now planting pods using his new skinny human body. He looks pretty good.

For an alien.

My husband after the unfortunate pod incident  

Columbine Orgy

Before the season passes, I thought I would share some photos of my columbine. They went rather crazy this year.