The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

Frozen Passion

I received a question yesterday on this blog about a passion vine.

I didn’t have a picture of a passion-vine flower, mine are not in bloom, so I took a picture of my dog instead.

Dogs are great. They do whatever you ask but sometimes they can’t hide their boredom.

Michelle asked about her passion vine. She asked if she should have covered it during our cold snap.

She said it wasn’t looking so good.

Well Michelle, you probably should have. But where we live in Califorina it usually isn’t necessary. It will probably be just fine. Passion vines are really hardy.

For now, however, don’t do anything to it. Do not cut it back. The dead foliage can actually protect the plant from the next frost. If you cut your plant back it will probably stimulate new growth and if another hard freeze comes along the new growth will die also.

This rule applies to all your sad-looking frostbitten plants.

You should wait until the next growing season (spring) after the danger of frost is past, and see what happens then. It will probably survive. If another hard freeze comes along, then you will have another chance to redeem yourself and cover your plant.

This is your plants first year. You wouldn’t want to start pruning it yet anyway. You don’t start pruning passion vines until it’s second year. You can prune it annually after that.

An interesting fact about passion vines or Passifloraceae Passiflora--It’s name has religious roots in Christianity. The different parts of the passion flower relate to the passions of Christ. The crown of the flower to the crown of thorns, the five stamens represent the five wounds. The ten petals represent the ten apostles.

And I always thought some unusually lonely plant enthusiast with too much time on their hands named it. Who knew.

Winter Porch Planter Box

This is a photo of one of my planter boxes on my front porch.

I really like the way they turned out this year.

My planter boxes are approximately 10" X 24".

This is what I used:
Cyclamen ‘Laser Scarlet’
Bacopa Sutera ‘Gold ‘n Pearls’
Lamium Maculatum ‘White Nancy’

Right now these plants are in full sun. Normally cyclamen couldn’t take full sun but the sun isn’t so strong in winter.

Sometime during mid-to-late spring I will transfer all the planter box plants in the ground and redo the boxes with plants that can withstand the summer sun.

Nail Tips

Tips for Perfect Nails.

I work in the dirt a lot.

I also work with glass, glue, and cement a lot.

Despite this, and all forces to the contrary, I do my best to keep a decent French manicure.

Meanwhile, I have a busy life. So I don’t have the time to visit my manicurist regularly. As a matter of fact, I show up at the nail-lady’s place only about every 4 to 5 weeks. She always meets me with a sad little concerned look on her face when I walk through her door.

I have a bit of a problem on my hands, so to speak.

My secret: I wear gloves.

Now, any gardener who has spent anytime weeding in mud will tell you that gloves will protect your hands—but they won’t keep them clean.

My other secret: I wear surgical gloves inside my gardening gloves.

And I reuse my surgical gloves until they fall apart. Then I get a new pair.

I also tend to wear out the thumb, index, and middle fingers of both gloves so here is my other secret, I drop balls of cotton into the fingertips of my gardening gloves.

A little prep time goes a long way.

Here’s the sequence again.
First I put on the surgical gloves.
Second I drop cotton balls in the finger tips of my gardening gloves.
Then I slip on my gardening gloves.
Voila—clean hands.

Oh, Your hands will get a little sweaty, so when you take off your gloves, rinse your hands, dry them off and remember to put on moisturizer.

Is this California?

O.K.

It looks like the joke’s on us this time.

Yes.

It’s true my husband and I, in the past, have taken a certain amount of pleasure in poking fun at people who live in places with much harsher winters than ours—and much more humid summers.

My husband’s from outside Boston. He was recruited for a job here in California in 1985, and takes great pride in saying he will never live on the East Coast again. Not after his first winter without snow.

Oh yes, friends and family have come to visit and we’ve taken them to the beach or the wine country or we’ve dined al fresco with them in our own back yard basking in the warm sun.

My husband will say something like “How do you like this California weather?”

Their answer usually goes something like this: “All this sunshine is fabulous, but I think if I lived here I would miss the change of seasons.”

Then my husband will say, “Yeah, I miss sliding sideways into guardrails, too.”

At this point we both double over in fits of laughter, as our bewildered guests stare at us.

My father-in-law called us once at Thanksgiving time to tell us that he had just purchased a new snowblower. Once again my husband doubled over with laughter. Through his fits of giggles he said, “That’s too bad, Dad. Chigiy just bought a surf board.”

But, gone are the good ol’ days.

It’s January.

Normally January brings chilly daytime temps of high fifties and low sixties and frosty nights of low forties and fifties. We bundle up in our sweatshirts and jeans, sometimes even wearing socks with our sandals.

But not this year—nay, nay.

It was 24 degrees last night. 24 degrees! It’s been between 24 and 29 degrees for the last 5 days.

My brugmansia plants are frozen sticks. My cuphea are all crumpled and brown. My Princess plants are sad, gray, and withered. I did manage to get towels over my citrus trees. Then it rained.

Today I have wet towels all over my yard and I’m too cold to go outside and collect them.

I was born on a tropical island.

I moved to California when I was ten months old.

I am not used to this. Stop already with this climate-crisis thing. I was sitting in my house watching the news and shivering the other night. They were doing a piece on the weather in Chicago and how they were having a record-breaking warm December.

They were interviewing some joker who said, “If this is global warming, hey, bring it on.”

At that moment I looked up to the heavens and said, “He’s just kidding, please go back to the way things were. If you do I’ll buy a biodiesel car and never poke fun at people who live where it snows again.”

Especially since I seem to be one of them now.

Saving Newts

I like to run. I live in California’s Santa Cruz mountains. My favorite place to run is straight up the street which goes up the hill I live on. I run there for three reasons: It’s convenient, it’s beautiful, and I can

watch what happens to the plant and animal life as the seasons change.

One of my favorite times of the year to run is just after the first rain of the season, after the long, dry, rainless summer.

I started this tradition about four years ago when I first moved to my mountain home. I love the smell, the sounds and the feel of the clean air. It was four years ago when I found out about the newts.

It had just rained.

It was misty and cool outside, perfect running weather. I slid on my running shoes, called for my cattle dog, Mr. Wizard, and headed out the door. I had only gotten a couple hundred yards up the road when I began to see theese little brown and orange creatures walking slowly—and I mean slowly—across the street.

There were a bunch of them. They looked like lizards, very slow lizards. I realized, however, knowing just enough about animals to get me into trouble, that they were newts or salamaders. They were so cute. Brownish with orange bellies and yellowish eyes.

Then, much to my horror as I ran further up the hill, I began to see squished newts. The salamander carnage was terrible. I realized that even though I could see them while I ran by that the cars going up and down the hill could not.

Bad for the newts.

I kept running knowing what I had to do next. I saw several more little squished carcases and then I saw a live one slowly making its way across the road. I ran to it, scooped it up in my hands and delivered it to the side of the road it was heading towards.

Salamanders don’t like to touch our skin. The oils and salts on our hands are toxic to these little creatures. But I figure better a brief contact with some skin than a two-ton SUV.

I spent the rest of my run saving little amphibious lives. I found out later after doing a little research that the reason they come out in such large numbers during and after it rains is because they’re looking for mates.

To Kill a Gopher

A few months ago I noticed that my four-foot-tall sweet olive tree was all shriveled—like it needed water. I pushed on it and it the whole plant fell over. Its roots had been chewed off at the soil level.

At that moment, I really hated gophers

I’ve tried nearly everything to get rid of gophers. Although there is one thing I won’t do and that is to use poison. I have dogs and kids and poison always seemed to me a bad idea.

Four years ago we bought our home, and it came with a free gopher infestation in the lawn.

My husband and I got right down to business of getting rid of the little varmints. First we tried drowning them. We would stick a hose down a hole thinking when we turned the water on it would run through the gopher’s little underground city and that would be the end of the gophers.

Wrong.

We ran the hose down a gopher hole all right, then turned the water on full blast. For an hour we pumped water into that hole. We live near a lake and I could have sworn the water level was higher on the lake the next day.

I also had an uneasy feeling the entire time we were blasting water down that hole that at any minute our house would disappear into a giant sink hole and the gopher would have the last laugh. We never could figure out where the water was going.

We had four new gopher mounds the next day.

After our first failed attempt with water, my husband Rich and I went down to the local hardware store and purchased some Gopher bombs. Bombs. It sounded so promising. We lit them, stuck them into the gopher hole and watched it smoke.

The next day there was a brand new gopher mound.

Rich became obsessed with this smoke thing. The whole idea is to choke them to death or them or drive them away. After several smoke bombs someone told him road flares worked even better.

Now, flares are fun. They are very dramatic and they burn a long time. The flares seemed to work at first, but within a few days we would notice another new gopher mound. Even though I could tell that the flare thing wasn’t working my husband believed it was. His fixation with flares grew. He scoured the Internet. Until at last he found what he considered a really efficient contraption for getting rid of his little nemeses. It was called the Super Smoker. It was easy to build. It consisted of a flare, a five-gallon bucket, a small computer-type fan you attached to a hole in the bucket bottom, and an extension cord.
You stick a lit flare in the gopher hole; you put the bucket with the fan over it and turn it on. The fan would blow the smoke into the gopher hole. Smoke would come out from every crack and crevice of the gopher’s underground maze.

This method was very cool and it drove my husband into sort of a Caddyshack frenzy. He figured he had finally found the answer. How could that little critter survive in all that smoke? But survive it did. Again the gopher was quiet for a few days and then up would pop one or more new mounds. This drove my husband crazy. Bill Murray would have been proud as Rich spent every spare moment he had moving the Super Smoker around the yard to the location of the newest hole and then turning on. This all came to an abrupt stop when he set my four year old son’s hair of fire with a flare My son still brags about it. “ My daddy set me on fire once.” Then I have to explain to all the other horrified parents that Rich was only trying to save my garden and my son’s inquisitive head accidentally got in the way.
We had to eventually rip out all of the lawn to make way for a new septic system. And when we finally put in a new lawn, we installed it with gopher wire. I highly recommend this.

The gophers did come back, however, everywhere else.

So I started planting everything in wire gopher baskets, which also work but can be costly depending how much garden you have--not to mention the time and energy involved. I even made my own baskets for a while but again I just don’t have that much time. And the gopher is still there…just waiting.

I finally broke down and called the gopher exterminator that my friend had recommended. This worked great and I learned a lot from the guy. He told me that even though it appears that there is more than one gopher that there usually is only one. Gophers have a large territory and they are very industrious. He talked about gophers so fondly that I almost hated to kill them. I said almost. He was an honest guy and he only charged $50 per gopher and there have never been more than one at a time. Great. My gopher exterminator was the least expensive of every other exterminator I called. Great. But the problem was he was flaky and his receptionist was rude.

I could never get him to show up after the first day.

So, I was watching a gardening show recently. On this show I learned about a product that contained castor oil. Gophers evidentially hate the smell of castor oil and it keeps them away for months without killing them. I was so excited I ran out and bought two kinds from different manufacturers. I used them according to the directions. On the bottle it said that after use of the product I would probably see increased activity and then the gophers would leave. Well I did see increased activity. I kept rereading the label thinking maybe this was a product developed by some animal rights activist that was really trying to develop a super gopher. I kept thinking isn’t castor oil good for you? Don’t they give it to babies? Had I been fooled?

The sweet olive was the last straw. I called my gopher exterminator again he never showed. I was wining to my husband for the hundredth time. In the course of the wining session Rich told me that the gopher guy used Macabee gopher traps and he just happen to have one in his workshop. What? You have one? You never told me you had a gopher trap? Had Rich been on the gophers side this whole time hoping to drive me crazy and lock me up in some mental institution and gain control of my trust fund? Remembering I didn’t have a trust fund, another thought popped into my mind. Did I finally have the answer I had been searching for? Could I set my own trap and get this gopher for good and for free? No, I had better than that. I had a husband who would do it for me. I don’t think I ever loved my husband more than at that moment.

I knew just the hole to set the trap in. It was a big new mound that I could stick my whole hand in up to my elbow. You need to find a hole like that to get the trap to work. It has to be a place the gopher is guaranteed to be using. Rich followed the directions that said you should tie a string to the trap, and then shove it into the hole without letting the tunnel collapse. This didn’t work.

Our friend Max came over the next day and showed us that if you attach a wire coat hanger to the trap you not only have a handle to pull the trap out but you also have a handle to push the trap way into the tunnel.


Then you carefully cover the hole up, and come back the next day.

We did.

And the next day we had our gopher.