The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

Greenthumb Sunday

Another picture of dahlias from the Medocino Botanical Gardens.
I didn't have time to take pictures of my garden.
I'm off to Santa Cruz to run in the Mermaid Triathlon.
I will be gone tomorrow so I wont be able to comment on all your wonderful pictures until Monday.
Happy GTS.

In Case of Emergency, Break Glass: The Art of Mosaic.

There are so many multitalented people in this tight knit garden blogging community.

Kate has her fiddle and her painting, Annie has her music, and almost everyone is a good writer and great photographer.

I wanted you to know that I don’t just bumble around in the garden. I actually do other things. I’m also a mosaic artist.

I love doing jigsaw puzzles—as a matter of fact I can’t have them in the house. Jigsaw puzzles are to me what computer games are to my two boys.

If I let them play computer games all the time, they would. Likewise jigsaws for me.

So creating mosaics is sort of like a jigsaw puzzle and it’s sort of like gardening. It is very meditative and even though it seems like mindless work, there is actually a lot of mindfulness and design that goes into it.

I would like to show you some pieces I have done.

Mildew two

After I removed the leaves with the most mold from my gourd plants, I thought maybe that would stop the spread of the mildew.

I was wrong, so I tried the milk and water spray suggested by Annie at the Transplantable Rose. The spray is one part milk to nine parts water. Annie says it doesn't matter if the milk is whole or skim.

I also removed the mildew coated tomatillo plant which was close to my gourd plant.

Here are the last of the tomatillos.

Greenthumb Sunday

Begonias from the Medocino Botanical Gardens.

Splogged

When I first began blogging, I was told by some of my friends that, as in every pursuit, there would be good days and bad days—mostly because there are good people and bad people.

I remember thinking, “How can I have bad days? I’m doing three things I love: writing, gardening, and photography.”

Well, Tuesday was a bad day. I was splogged.

What is that you ask?

Blog theft.

It’s when someone steals your original stories and photos and puts them on their own site, so that Google will pay them for visitors who see Google’s ads while perusing your content.

So if Google pays the thief for visitors to your work, it’s stealing from you.

The Teensiest Tomato Saga Continues

Carol at May Dreams Gardens had an impromptu tiny tomato contest after finding a diminutive fruit in her garden. I entered it and thought that I’d won.

I found myself growing a little nervous lately about my claim to the teeniest tomato. There has been a few more gardeners throwing their hats in the ring, such as Genie of The Inadvertent Gardener, Yolanda Elizabet of Bliss and Curtis of Growing Thumbs.

So I decided to find a smaller tomato.

Here it is.

My last tiny tomato covered up the back of FDR’s head, but this one he could wear as a monocle.

I also included some grains of rice.

Here are some more small tomatoes from my garden.

The tomatoes you see here are, from left to right, Cherry, sweet 100, normal red currant and last but least tiny red currant.

Gardener Blogger's Bloom Day, September 2007

Well, I’m a little late with Bloom Day, sorry Carol.
But you know what they say, “Better late than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”

Most everything is still in bloom. Some flowers are showing signs of fatigue and there were a few surprises.

I have an azalea that’s in bloom.
I have a fava that is in bloom.
And some of my abused orchids are blooming. They bloom every six months or so, so I don’t throw them out.

Here’s the list along with a few photos.

Abutilon
Ajuga
Azalea-1
Bacopa
Calendula
Calla lily ‘Green Goddess’
Campanula
Clematis
Coleus
Columbine-1
Coreopsis
Crosimia
Cuphea
Dahlias
Fuchsia
Geraniums
Gerbera Daisies
Gladiolus
Gourds
Hibiscus
Hydrangeas
Impatients
Johnny Jump ups
Lavender
Morning Glory
Nasturtiums
Orchids
Passionflower
Pelargoniums
Plumbago
Potato vine
Roses
Rudbeckia
Salvias-many
Snapdragon
Sweet Peas
Tomatoes
Verbena
Veronica
Zinnias

Mildew-doo

moldy gourd leaf

I was wandering through my garden searching for ripe fruit, pulling the occasional weed, tucking errant tomato vines in their cages, when I noticed that my birdhouse gourds have some sort of mildew. Oh poopie. On further inspection I noticed that the tomatillo plant next to it has this mildew also. I try to be organic and I don’t use sprays and chemicals. Does anybody have any idea on how to get rid of the mildew?

gourd flower

baby bird house gourds

I was thinking that maybe I should just rip out the tomatillo but it’s producing so much right now.

gourd leaves

I thought that if I took off some of the offending leaves it might help.

What’s a gardener to do?

baby bird house gourds

Walking on Broken Glass

I don’t know what it is about collecting sea glass that turns me into a staring, drooling, incoherent boob.

I would stay on the beach all day if there happened to be beachcombing items, such as sea glass, shells, or even pretty rocks around. I don’t notice the time parading by, the tide coming up or the fact that my children are starving or turning blue and shivering to death as long as I keep picking up treasures that the ocean left for me.

Yes me. Me, me, me. It’s all about me when we go to the Mendocino coast. And after two camping trips in a row I needed girly time. I need to go out to dinner, and shop, and peruse my favorite botanical gardens, and most of all—make my yearly pilgrimage to Glass Beach.

I would like to think that this fascination with broken glass and seashells and other strange objects that are found on the beach is because I’m a mosaic artist and I need these objects to create art.
Yeah, that’s it; it’s for creating art.

In reality though, I think it goes back to childhood and has to do more with treasure hunting and that irresistible childlike fantasy of finding buried treasure than with art.

Glass Beach seems almost too good to be true to sea glass hunters like me. It really does exist way up the Northern California coast in a town called Fort Bragg. Fort Bragg is an old mill town without a mill, since it closed a few years ago.

The lumber company still owns almost all the waterfront property in the town except for a little beach in the North end of town called, you guessed it, “Glass Beach”

The town dump used to sit along the ocean near glass beach and this glass that’s been tumbled by the ocean for over a century now makes up most of the beach.

Instead of sand, there is glass, beautiful smooth glass. Because of this I make the five-hour trip up here with my husband and kids once a year.

Greenthumb Sunday

Dahlias.
I took this photo last week at the Medocino Coast Botanical Gardens
More about the Botanical Gardens coming soon.