the gluttonus gardener

That's me today. I just ordered a million seeds and it's all I can do not to run to the nursery to watch them unpack all of the bareroot trees. I only have room for an avocado and 2 kiwis REALLY. But, oh my goodness, do I ever have the wantsies. I'm thinking that I can plant two dwarf somethings on either side of the front walk. Hmmm, what do I need???? I have the following:
lime
meyer lemon
kumquat
grav apple
golden delish apple
asian pear
bartlet
stella cherry
bing cherry
turkey fig
nectarine
santa rosa plum and blenhiem apricot grafted tree
1 tiny dwarf peach

I ordered a mexicola avocado from Growquest in Ventura in August. After many phone calls and emails and promises, it has still not arrived. I have requested a refund and a week ago they have about another week before I take them to small claims court. I am so irritated. I have never taken anyone to court before and would rather not do it now. But I sent them almost $150 for a tree for Jonathan's birthday and they have strung me along for months. I found another supplier in the South Bay and am hoping to get a tree from them soon. I want to resolve the money with Growquest first.

So, once that's resolved, I'll add an avocado, oh and I have that banana tree waiting for me in Forestville too. I'll buy a male and a female kiwi but I still want more. I'd love some suggestions for small food bearing trees.....Must find more room. Will find more room.....

Warm in the Sun

I moved some trees today. It's warm out, so warm. We're talking pants and a tank top warm! It felt incredible and I wish I had all day to devote to the garden. I even just sat on my favorite rock and had a snack. It was perfect.
I potted a dwarf peach which is in the way of a new path I want to build. I dug up a blackberry which has never been happy. I hope to find a new berry spot and plant some raspberries this year. I planted a lime which has been rootbound in a pot for a few years. I pruned the espaliered apples, the kumquat, the lemon, the lime. I planted a bartlet and moved the bing cherry and the asian pear closer to the porch. These three are in the narrow West garden near the bees and I decided to move them a little closer to the porch and prune them a bit more like fence trees so that they can be harvested from the porch with less risk of bee sting. The boy got the first one of the year last week!
Regarding the bees: It looks like we have one really happy and thriving hive and one not so happy. Jonathan suspected this would happen based on the way the hives looked in the Fall. The good news is that he can split the thriving colony to rebuild the sad one. I think we'll have to order a queen though. How weird is that? Ordering a queen bee? Wow, farming sure is strange.

trees come and go

I planted a tree today. We've had a fig tree in a terra cotta pot for a few years now. I've seen so many fig trees in the ground trying to take over the world so I was quite hesitant to give ours that kind of power. It was ready for a bigger space though and I didn't really want to spend the money on a super huge pot just to get 20 figs a year. I killed a dianthus in front of the shed this Summer when I refused to water flowers for a while. It is the perfect space for a small, manicured tree. I decided that the fig could live there but that it would be subjected to vigorous pruning if it got cocky.
I also bought a new Bartlet pear. This is the third and final pear I'll buy. Our little pocket gopher seems to really enjoy pear roots. I'll buy a heavy duty gopher basket and plant this one in the West garden among the cutting flowers and bee hives.

The parcel behind us was purchased recently. It was on the market for $375. I don't know what it sold for but I do know that the new owner demolished the house last week. this week, he removed all but 2 trees, a little oak and a gorgeous magnolia. He removed 2 big (80 feet or more) conifers which provided my only shade. Sadly, the chicken yard I just built was based on our chickens love of that shady corner of the garden. The neighbor has offered to buy us a new tree. We can't decide what kind of tree.

At first, I ruled out anything food producing. This new tree will hang over Jonathans last patch of pretty grass and I don't want to be out there picking up gooey peaches or finger ruining walnuts all of the time. We decided that the chickens might do better with a deciduous tree so that their yard gets some light during the rainy season and is a little less soggy in the Winter. Off we went to the Urban Tree Farm....This place is great. They have tree experts who take you out on a little electric cart. They ask all of the important questions: location, soil, size, etc. And then they drive you around pointing out trees that would be suitable. We did this but didn't fall in love with anything. One of our biggest concerns is that the tree not be so big as to infringe upon the food growing portions of the garden. On the other hand, We want it to grow quickly so that our grass doesn't die this Summer and the chickens don't swelter.

Not being able to agree on nonfruiting, I've decided to look into nut trees. Jonathan has promised that he'll pick them out of the grass, we'll see. Since no one in the house enjoys walnuts, I'm reading about almonds. Hopefully, we'll both find a variety that suits us and be able to find a nursery carrying that variety.

Grass without a special card

Back to the garden. I made a little trade with an excavator friend and had the old shale driveway removed and carried away in just under an hour. Amazing what a tractor can do! I would have spent 2 Summers soaking and pitchforking and shoveling that out only to have no way to dispose of it. Stevie-T carried it all away in his dumptruck and then we had lunch. Sadly, we lost the big triangular planter boxes as they were in the way and starting to fall apart anyway.

With not much space to plant this year I started to seriously eye the East side yard. Technically, it’s part of the front yard because we live on a corner. It’s full of grass. Seriously ugly grass I refuse to water with any regularity and we never use. Last year I planted a Stella Cherry tree out there. More than one neighbor questioned my placement thinking that it would not get enough sun. Well, ha ha I did actually watch the sun before I chose the location and it’s thriving and makes some yummy sweet cherries. To me this means I should plant some more stuff out there. I need to plant somewhere other than the backyard because the chickens are killing everything I plant back there. I’ve been talking about removing the grass for many years and Jonathan really loves it. After a long conversation, which nearly escalated into an argument, I finally got him to delve deep and tell me why he’s so attached to the stupid grass. Grass makes him feel at home. That particular grass makes me feel frustrated. I love the grass in the backyard. It’s lush and green and soft. It’s soothing and cooling. It begs for the hammock and a good book. The grass in the front and side yard is dry and brown and useless. Poor Jonathan came home to patches of that grass being removed. I doubt he was truly surprised. I promptly planted 40 corn plants and dug out some more grass. I planted a Winter squash and then dug out some more grass. I planted some Pumpkins and then dug out some more grass. There’s still more grass to come out and now I have to go back for the crabgrass which seems to be thriving without all that taller grass to smother it. Where the heck does all that crabgrass come from anyway? Some flippin’ bird carries the seeds in his belly from the Central Valley? No one in Northern California plants crabgrass! It has had to travel from afar and I will have to spend the next 3 years pulling it out of my soil.

On the West side of the house I removed, shovel by shovel, about 120 square feet of grass and planted flower seeds and three fruit trees. The gophers got the apricot despite the gopher cage but so far the bing cherry and asian pear seem happy. I have room for one more dwarf tree over there. Haven’t decided what yet. Tons of crabgrass over there too.

On the East side of the house I am removing maybe 500 square feet of grass. In neighboring communities they pay you to remove grass. I’ve heard they pay $.50 per square foot in another local town. But not here….. Noooooo. We’re all hippy dippy and progressive and conscious but we’re not giving out money for grass removal. We’ll leave that to the larger more development-ridden cities. I could buy a lot of fencing and mulch and seeds with $.50 a foot.

There’s still grass in the front and there’s still that lovely patch in the back. Jonathan still feels at home.

Speaking of Jonathan, he has a new farming project of his own. We were watching a beehive at the fair this year and I said it would be nice if we could have bees. Well, guess what, this instant gratification family now has 2 beehives. They live on the West side of our porch and give that side of the garden a purpose. The bees love the cutting garden the boy and I planted and when the Bing and Pear trees bloom next Spring we should have bumper crops! We’ve had the hives for nearly 2 months and have only had 2 stings so far. Someone knocking on wood for me? The neighbors have noticed more bees on their fruiting and flowering plants and we really feel like we’re doing something important for this amazing little species.

And so, happy readers, I think that brings us up to date.

The birth of Son and Sun

In the Winter of 2001, we added a baby boy to our family. We began to spend more time at home enjoying parenthood. We were dressing warmly because we had three ridiculous Eisenhower era wall heaters but we were happy. Then there was the big storm…..that darn tree let go of three limbs, each at least 30 feet long, one of which hit the side of our roof. Luck for us it didn’t do too much damage but we had had enough! We called a tree guy. We didn’t know how we were going to pay for the tree guy but we’d have to figure it out. We were terrified that tree would crush our house or injure our precious child. The tree guy explained that the tree had been improperly pollarded many years ago and would never be a good shape. We would have to have it trimmed annually at a cost of $1000 to stop it from losing branches. It was suggested that we spend closer to $2000 and remove the tree. Well, we couldn’t imagine our yard without the tree, but we couldn’t have it threatening our safety. We had to petition the city to have the tree removed. We had neighbors crying and trying to talk us out of it. We had to attend a tree board meeting and beg to be given permission to remove a tree from our own property. I’m not usually irritated by “the man”. I like laws, I think they’re important. However, the process of removing a tree from out very own land was a bit much. Finally, we were given a permit. We shelled out a bunch of cash and the tree was removed before lunch. It was astounding how quickly the tree disappeared.

Then, the beauty…..we had sun! Lots of sun. So much sun! Jonathan built a shed in the back corner of the yard. We had somewhere to store dog kennels, weed whackers, car parts. After so many years with leaves falling all year, the backyard slanted toward the house. Our little concrete path from the backdoor to the back gate was constantly covered in mud. I spent the entire Summer of 2002 trying to level the backyard. Our growing boy would play in an exersaucer or hang out in a backpack while I dug and dug and dug. I made a huge pile of dirt on the patio. I say dirt because that’s what I thought it was. I later realized that it was some serious topsoil. Enriched, deep black and so fertile. Duh, we live at the bottom of a hill, next to a laguna with soil being enriched by millions of falling leaves each year! Oh, how far we’ve come. Anyway, I had to stop halfway because there had been a driveway there and it was a 3 foot layer of compressed shale. That remained it’s own little hill until the Summer of 2008.

So, there we were with sun, a big pile of dirt, and some scrap wood from the shed building. Jonathan built me 5 huge planter boxes. We put these 3 foot high boxes, one rectangular, four triangular on top of the compacted shale in the bright bright sun. I filled them with “dirt” and planted stuff. All of the usual suspects were there, squash, toms, cukes, strawberries, peppers. Whatever was handy at the nursery and sounded yummy. In addition to the herb garden next to the kitchen, we now had more food than we were prepared to deal with. We were still spending lots of time away from the house and would arrive home full from eating out only to see the veggies shriveling in the crisper. We left a basket by our back gate and filled it with excess for our neighbors to enjoy. The zucchini plant looked prehistoric. It was huge! Oh, right, great soil! I think even the neighbors ran out of uses for the zucs. We went on this way for a few years. I don’t know how long because I live in some sort of weird timewarp. We learned where to get more interesting varietals and where to get organic stuff. We began frequenting the Occidental Ecology center for plant sales and brought home some great stuff.
We realized that we really love to grow food. The truth is that I am not a happy gardener. I do not enjoy pruning and weed pulling. I now understand that fresh food makes those things doable for me. I am slowly becoming obsessed with eating my meals from the garden. Also, there is something so wonderful about watching your child come home from school and forage in the garden for a snack.

Nearly 10 years ago

Nearly ten years ago, my new husband and I fell in love with a house. We had been quite happy in our little rental cottage. Then we met this tall, empty house and neither of us could stop thinking about it. We weren’t looking for a house. We just sort of stumbled upon it. We didn’t have any real money. We were in our twenties, just beginning our “grown-up” jobs. I guess real grown-ups call them careers. Still, this house had taken us hostage. So, we scraped together as much cash as we could, liquidated our small portfolio (mostly the Apple stock Jonathan loved so dearly), and took a first loan at just over 9% and a seller carried second loan as well. Perhaps we’re a little impulsive. Perhaps we’re a lot impulsive. We purchased a 100 year old two story brick house with no garage, no driveway, no crawlspace, and plenty of termites. We were in love and thought we were handy. Ha!

After the eradicate-every-bug-in-the-house tent was removed, we, Jonathan, Trish, and our two cats, moved in. I promptly bought my self a sledgehammer and began removing the random and strange fences and posts throughout the back yard. I removed the termite infested raised beds. I dug disconnected pipes out of the ground. I removed an awkwardly placed patio. We found treasures of old and tons of obsidian. Poor Jonathan started to call me “Destructo Girl”. I think some days he was afraid to come home. We painted, and removed paint, changed doorknobs and light fixtures. We made very few repairs of any consequence and even now still have a broken window in our upstairs closet. We did take care of the wiring and some minor plumbing issues. Jonathan met a bat in the attic and named him “Guido”. Hundred year old houses need lots of work and I don’t think we were even 2% ready for it. Surprise! we are still learning how to be handy.

We continued forward, going about our busy business away from home.

In the Summer, we got a gorgeous puppy. She was a steal at $50 and is 3/4 German Shepard and 1/4 Rottweiller. All grown-up now, she is our beautiful, sweet, gentle, long coated, super-fluffymous Zoe. With Zoe, came more time in the backyard. All the strange fences were gone but the yard was filled with weeds and drowning under a huge Elm tree. I started pulling the weeds and planting random things. We had no idea how to be homeowners! I didn’t know how to keep anything alive. My neighbor suggested I try watering the plants. I couldn’t figure out why the foxtails just kept coming back. Afterall, I pulled them, didn’t I? What I didn’t realize is that one must pull them before they turn brown and release all of their seeds. We even laid down some sod we had gotten for free from Shakespeare in the Park. We didn’t water that either. We were getting our asses kicked by this house and still spending most of our time being busy outside the home. Our focus had not yet come into focus.

The elm tree was a huge pain in the behind. It rained leaves constantly. We bought rakes, blowers, sucker-uppers, nothing worked. Then it started to lose limbs. With windy days came great anxiety. Poor Zoe dog, with her big velvety shepard ears was miserable. She would try to hide behind us from the wind. We would go outside after the windstorms and just cringe at the mess. And then, we’d go out.