Final Saturday

Lady of Shalott

My husband is getting his Master Gardener certification and today was the last day of class. Hooray! 12 consecutive Saturdays and many arguments later, it is all done! Will it be my turn next year? Do I have to be a Master Gardener? I have been gardening forever. My husband had a great time.  I took the girls to the garden today and we just enjoyed all the roses, berries, bugs, and the sunny weather. I was walking by a nursery and I have David Austin rose radar. I sensed it and turned around to see Lady of Shalott right there. Too much time on my hands!

 I put this arrangement together with lemon balm for a friend.

 Another apricot colored rose. This is Lady Emma Hamilton in full bloom.

 This is kind of a deformed bloom.

 Picking the blueberries.

 Gardening Angel...maybe or maybe not!

 Charles Rennie Mackintosh has adjusted very well.

I have seen rust on this rose.

 

Garden at Dusk

Garden at 8:15pm. It was quiet and so peaceful. I was there yesterday but today, I needed some time to decompress after finishing my resport cards. I had to chance to enjoy the time there.

I planted some dill yesterday. This time, I am going to leave them alone. They hate to be disturbed.

This is Tea Clipper. Apricot colored and very pretty. I will have to wait until the flower is in full bloom.

This is Miss Alice. I think this rose has such a delicate simple bloom. 

 My James Galway is doing so beautifully. The blooms look like ruffles.

This is one of the roses in full bloom.

 The Generous Gardner

 Charles Rennie Mackintosh

 A Shropshire Lad


Strawberry Hill

Sunday Gardening

My family went to the Natural History Museum for the Bug Fair. There we enjoyed all the insects and other creepy crawlies. My husband met Ron Finley. The garden there looked really nice. It was very kept.

The fruit trees, the vegetables, herbs, and all the other plants were nicely labeled. I thought that it looked too orderly. If your garden looks this neat and weed free then you must have a lot of volunteers working. But something was kind of interesting with the garden. It seems like nothing was being harvested. The blueberries were netted and the berries were definitely ripe. Maybe it is just for show and demonstration. The garden is just in a perfect spot. Honeylove.org was there.

This is what I picked up from Muir HS. I went there and helped out a little. I don't think there is much for me to do. There is a lot of work to do there but I have not been there for 3 weeks and it was overwhelming. The newly planted bare root roses were still struggling to get going. The narcissus and the amaranth were taking over and the roses were not getting enough sun and nutrients.  I had to clear some of it by cutting the other stuff out of the way. All I can do is hope for the best. For some reason, I needed to rest but had to go and meet my brother for lunch. In the box, I have some dill, tomato, pineapple sage, zinnia, and lavender seedlings. I am excited to get them into the school garden. The roses in my garden are just blooming in profusion. The Jubilee Celebration was moved and the roots were disturbed a month ago but ever since I put it into the ground for good, it is doing well.

Happy Mother's Day

Oh my what a week it was! First we had some real rain on Monday and Tuesday. Then the heat came once again and it was a scorcher this weekend.  I had a great harvest of blueberries and mulberries. There is a mulberry tree in our community garden near the compost pile. The reason it has such amazing mulberries has to do with the fact that it is getting a lot of nutrients from the compost pile. Who knows? After a few mulberry picking session, you get tired of your fingers and clothes getting stained with the reddish juice. The blueberries are paying for itself. I was visiting San Gabriel Nursery today. They had some good blueberry bushes out there for sale. Still it is hard to shell out twenty or thirty bucks but after a few years, it is quite worth the investment. I got a couple of 15 gallon nursery pots and a few gifts for my mom for Mother's Day. She came with me.

Oh my, this is the most fragrant rose besides Gertrude Jekyll. I had to pick one because I wanted to take one to my mom. The fragrance can make you just swoon over it. It is just too hard to describe. Got to smell it to believe it. It looks like a cabbage. This rose made me a David Austin fan. I never really cared much about roses until I met this one. My first rose bush ever. I watered the garden today, picked some blooms for my mom, planted a few more zucchini seeds, harvested the argula, picked the blueberries and deadheaded the roses. All this morning because I was sick yesterday.

This is one of the mini-bouquets I made for my mom today. It is so nice that I can just walk into my little garden and pick to my delight. It is so important that the roses have a sweet scent. All the roses that I see at the store don't have any scent due to the fact that maybe they are bred that way so they last longer. I also think that Mother's Day is in May when the roses are at their peak especially in Southern California. The heat is so unnatural though at this time. The petals get all crispy and ugly at the edges and sometimes, they just get deformed.

My present to my mom and some.

I think my mom has a Valencia orange tree. Right now it has the most juiciest and sweetest oranges on it. This tree has given us a lot of oranges over a decade and it is going on strong. We even gave our daughter a middle name in Hawaiian-orange blossom since we love it so much.

 This is my Kaffir lime tree that my mom has been babysitting for the past few years. It is relatively small but the leaves and the fruit are just fragrant. It loves the heat and I look forward to taking it with me in the future. Sometime I take a break and garden at my mom's. She has so many amazing plants and trees. Before I got married, I planted two fig trees. Mission and Kadota. One stands for me and the other for my husband. Interesting right? It has been 10 years since and the trees are just beautiful. Thank you mom for making me a gardener just like you! I love you very much!

I did it!

 I finally made the decision to permanently plant a few of my favorite roses in a dedicated space. Yesterday, I got the area ready. I dug up my lemon verbena and limelight sage. I put them both in nursey pots so that I can find them a good home later.



The blueberries are ripening by the minute. I picked a cupful yesterday and today. The mulberries are also ready to be picked. We got a handful! I fed some to my bearded dragon at home. I pulled the devil grass around the bush and spread some fertilizer for acid-loving plants. It already had all the coffee grounds mixed into the soil from my previous visit. I really don't want to buy soil conditioner that makes your soil acidic. It can get really expensive. So I try to use what I have at home.

I put in my three tomato plants yesterday. The girls and I went to a tomato lecture with Steve Goto at Anawalt. It was very informative. I think I will try some of the techniques that were discussed. Every year, I grow Big Rainbow. It is such a beautiful tomato. A yellow tomato with red and pink streaks inside as it ripens. I planted two of those and one Aunt Ruby's German Green. They both produce beautiful tomatoes that are juicy and not mealy. One tomato can easily weigh a pound. Hopefully, I will able to neglect them this summer and the blight does not hit the tomatoes too hard like it did last year.

The leeks are coming along near the blackberry bush that I have in the pot. I trimmed my rosemary so that the other plants don't get shaded. Who knows what the berries will taste like. The leek seedling were so sad looking a few months back but now the stalks are getting thicker. Leeks are always great in a garden. The cress started to flower so I took a portion of it out. We cut down most of the kale plants and mulched heavily around the zucchini seedlings. The cutworms have done their ugly deed. most of the seedling were missing their tops. What are my plans for my next gardening session? I am going to figure out how to make rose growing more manageable. Also, I really want to make my the soil in my plot just right so I don't have to disturb it too much. 

First of May

I needed to escape to my garden today. I knew that I had a lot of roses to look at and kale to pick. Yesterday, someone stole my husband's beloved commuter bike. In 10 years, I have not experienced this kind of theft. We were both very surprised. Oh well, time will tell. Don't know what to say about this incident. I just have to do a lot of digging and weeding to keep my mind off of his loss.

 

 

This is such an upright rose. I think I am going to permanently plant it on the side of the plot to obscure the view of the plot next to me. I call my neighbor...the neglectful gardener. Even though he gets busy, he hardly makes progress. He just grows in chaos. I guess that works for him. Gardening needs a little bit of order and planning. You need to rotate your crops and make sure you don't put plants together that don't like each other. Some people don't care and that's their way.

The roses are at their peak. I didn't want to over pick because the bees love them too...so do the flies. I tried to put the bouquet in the back of the car but changed my mind. I just carried it in one hand all the way home and drove with the other hand. The kale harvest was just another bagful. I gave some away to this lady who always talks about her Dutch origins. Well at least I can make someone happy. At school, I planted the cosmos, trimmed the French lavender, pulled the nasturtium and sweet peas. It was a lot of cleaning up but the garden is once again transforming to the butterfly habitat that it once was. It just takes awhile for the buddleia and the milkweed plants to get going. The students are fascinated with how the sunflower is growing. We planted the Goliath variety. Hopefully, the poppies will flower. They are really still so small. I also gave away a lavender plant to a good home.