The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

Drought-Tolerant Update

I was having lunch with a friend the other day and she said that she hadn’t seen the finished product of my drought-tolerant garden. I told her that I had indeed finished it and had written a blog article about it. She said she had seen the beginning and middle but not the end. I insisted that I had written and posted it along with pictures. She said she had done a search for drought tolerant and only two posts came up. “Oh,” said I. My friend said “Maybe you don’t have the proper tags on your post to link it to similar posts.”

Dang, there’s that technical stuff again.

I can hear my kids now,
“Mom, don’t you know anything about computers?”
“Well son, child O’ mine, the answer to that question is very complicated. You see when I was your age we had these things called typewriters and well, I wasn’t even very good at those, let me put it this way¬–have you ever heard of white out? O.K., no, I don’t know anything about computers, that’s why I had you, so, shut up and fix my blog and make all my articles link to each other already.”

Enough of talking to my children in my mind.

Here are the latest pictures of my drought-tolerant landscape.

Notice the tags.

Stumble It!

This Makes It All Worthwhile.

I’m telling you: Gardening is easier than you think.

But even though the actual action of taking care of a garden is easy, the work can be tedious and time consuming. Most of the time I consider it Zen-like, meditative and relaxing. Every once in a while me head explodes with the amount of work I have to do in the garden along with the amount of work I have to do in my life in general.

Two acres is a lot of garden.

Then you wake up one morning with a mommy, wifey hangover.

You slog towards the coffee pot like a zombie looking for fresh human and there it is…

Cattleya 2 lc casitas springs

Just looking up at you with it’s beautiful face. And suddenly it’s all worthwhile.  

Stumble It!

Caddyshack Convention

I came home from grocery shopping the other day to find a couple of good ol’ boys, real Bill Murray types, a sittin’ at our new garage sale table and chairs in the front yard.

These boys were discussing the best way to eliminate our little tunneling intruders. They each had their favorite weapon of extermination but they were really trying to come up with a new one, something that they themselves devised. Because while each invention had it’s own strengths and weaknesses none of them really did the job consistently well.

How the little varmints met their demise was really not the issue, just that they indeed parish.

The trigger was perhaps the most important part, followed closely by the method of getting it into the ground, then came the actual method of execution. Whether the method was humane wasn’t really considered just that it would be better if they were completely dead when the trap was removed.

In the end they each decided that it was back to the drawing board. The boys would give it another try later. So, with visions a dead hairy creatures in the heads and a song in their hearts they parted ways.

I’m alright

Nobody worry ‘bout me

Why you got to gimme me a fight?

Why don’t you just let me be?

–Kenny Loggins

Stumble It!

Jeepers Creeper

Why is this plant always trying to find it’s way into our house?

Does it want to be a house plant?

First it was my husband’s office.

Isn’t it enough that it’s taken over a plum tree and is attempting to take over a very old oak?

This greedy thing now wants into my son’s room. I found it outside his window trying to wedge it’s way in.

As I walked by it today, I thought I heard someone say, "Feed me Seymour."

Should I be worried?

Stumble It!

Green Thumb Sunday—Red Dahlias

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

Stumble It!

Red Wigglers vs. Dead Wigglers or How to Get Free Worms for Your Worm Composter.

My friend Tony just bought a worm composter. He asked me if he could have some of my worms to start out with. I said “sure” and then promptly forgot that he asked me for them.

What Tony didn’t know was I forget everything.

One time I forgot my son. Yep, I got in my car and drove home not noticing that my eight-year-old son had gotten out of his car seat.

I was talking to a friend. He knew I might take a while so he got out and played in her yard. So when I was ready to go, I got in my car and just drove away.

When I got home I drove into the garage and left my phone in the car. Before I went into the house I watered some flowerbeds and did some weeding. I was expecting my son to get out of his car seat and run into the house to watch TV or play with Legos. I heard my cell phone ringing but I ignored it. I finished watering and heard my cell again. This time I decided to answer it. It was my friend on the line. “Did you forget something at my house?” She said. “What?” I said “You son maybe?”

So ya see Tony, I forget things, and children, all the time.

Tony, not wanting to bother me a second time, ordered some worms by mail order, but they showed up dead.

Which brings me to another query. Do you put dead worms in the worm composter? Are they cannibals? I would guess, Yes.

Upon the arrival of his dead red wigglers Tony called me again. This time he came to my house with his two boys, and hand picked their own worms from my composter. It was very cute to see them sticking their hands in the worm mud and picking them up one by one.

So how do you get free worms for your composter¬?

Easy.

Just ask a friend and maybe, just maybe, she’ll remember.

Tony's kids dressed perfectly for worm picking

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day–September 2009

I’ve been down for the count with a cold.

Funny, this cold came along Sunday night, just 48 hours after I was “picture mom” at my youngest son’s school.

I wonder if primping 500 children for their school pictures had anything to do with getting sick?

Hmmmm.

So I took GBBD inside and photographed some of my blooming orchids, three of which have never bloomed for me before.

 

 

Visit Carol from May Dreams Gardens for more information about Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day.

My Sago’s Bigger Than Your Sago

 
 My Sago in it's old spot a couple month after my birthday

Hey, my sago palm (cycas revoluta) is doing really well.

I always surprise the doodie out of myself when I actually do well with a new plant. I usually have to kill a couple before I get the hang of it. But my sago palm was one of the lucky ones, especially since when I got it I didn’t even know the proper name for it.
My friend Jenny gave it to me for my birthday, which means I have had it for almost a year. I experimented with trying to find a good location for it.
This is where things went terribly wrong for awhile. I first placed it on my side porch where it got a lot of sun. And with my superior intelligence I deduced that palm trees would thrive in full sun. Oops, oh yeah, it’s not a real palm tree, it’s a cycad, one of the oldest plants on the planet.
While sago palms are super hardy, it’s probably best not to stick them in intense sun—especially in a place that you run by everyday on the way to drive the kids to school and you look down at your wilty little plants and you say I’ll water you tomorrow—I promise.

My little cycad sat there day after day. It tried to get my attention by developing a cute new set of leaves.

 

One thing I learned was that during the time sago palms produce leaves, the leaves are very vulnerable and it they are disturbed or say–under-watered, the leaves with die and possibly the whole plant.

It was very distressing when the entire new set of leaves turned brown and died. This is when I had my “Oprah Aha” moment and decided to move the plant.

Three Days of Heaven

 
Nicki's House

I stayed at my friend Nicki’s house over Labor day weekend,

Think five-star hotel--with no other guests but you and your family.

Her house sits in the hills above Napa. She designed it to look and feel like Auberge du Soleil.

The house sits on sixty acres, four of which are cabernet vineyards with glorious valley views

Nicki is also a gourmet cook with a gourmet kitchen.

To say that my family and I had a good time at Nicki’s would be the understatement of the year. To try and explain what a wonderful weekend we had would be silly.

So here are some pictures worth a thousand words each.

 
Cabernet grapes

View

Boy and garter snake

Nicki's vineyard

 
Happy boy happy dog

Nicki's pond

 
Running through the grapevines with the boys

 
Grazing in Nicki's garden

Tomatoes from Nicki's garden

Fear of Lemon Cucumber

 
Fear of large Zucchini.

Stuffing our faces at dinner in heaven.

Sipping wine by the Bocce court

View from our bedroom

Early morning

Sunrise  

Garden Fortunes Told Here

Every once in a while I give free gardening advice to my friends.

Sometimes they even believe me.

But in order to give advice, I need a certain amount of information. And sometimes my friends surprise me by knowing more than I thought they did.

Sometimes they even know the Latin names of the plants, at which point I run home and look it up on the Internet and then pretend that I knew it all along.  Even though that last scenario doesn’t happen a lot, it has happened.

Then I have the friends with not quite as much knowledge, like my friend Gina.

Gina said that she was having a problem keeping a plant alive. I asked her what kind of plant it was. She said, and I will try to quote her as accurately as I can.

She said (waving her arms), “Well, It’s got all these leaves and they fall over when I don’t water it.”

I was thinking of having a contest here on my blog, giving the person who correctly identified the plant some sort of prize—maybe a Ouija board or a crystal ball.

Now even though I don’t know what kind of plant it is, I think I might be able to give her a little advice: I’m pretty sure that if you water the plant more often, the leaves are more likely not to fall over, and the plant won't be so apt to die.

Just a suggestion.