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.

Last Sunday of April

Oh my how this month has flown! No real April showers at all.  It was overcast in the morning for a few hours today. The cress is just taking off. It looks like cress carpet in the garden. As a ground cover it is great. Edible! It tasted peppery and very sharp. It is great with a good vinaigrette. I only planted a few seedling but they are very invasive. You need to really like it a lot to grow it because it is like mint. It will just spread across your garden especially when you keep your soil moist and if the weather is cool. Once you pull the plant out, it does not grow back because it does not create a extensive root system like the the different varieties of mint. I am really hating all the mint in the garden now. The 4 different types have like all just created a monster root system. Pull out and dig! Throw out the roots....don't compost. They just don't die!

I moved this rose bush last week and disturbed the roots. It had a lot of flower buds on it. Luckily, I did not cause too much shock because it bloomed and the crimson petals looked beautiful .

 This is the where the first tomato plant went in today. I dug a really deep hole and added organic fertilizer. Then my daughter had the honor of putting in the plant and filling it up. We took off all the extra leaves and buried the plant at least 18 inches deep. It was ready to go in the ground. The Sungold plant become extremely leggy and unstable. Then we watered it deeply and put a couple of old tomato cages over it. The lemon verbena is taking over as well. The leaves are lush and so pretty.

The David Austin roses are all blooming. I didn't want to make too many cuttings but I had to take some to a fellow gardener's house today. It is such joy to see and smell all the roses. My plot is small and yes I have limited space but the roses bring such delight to the girls when they get a whiff of the heavenly fragrance. I like giving them away as well. I wish I had them earlier in my gardening career. I just need to find a permanent place for them because certain roses can grow in containers and some just won't.

 

Worms and more worms. My fellow gardener above my plot has a worm bin and he gave me a handful for my worm bin last year. I do have a lot of worms. I am so afraid to put in shovel into the soil. I might just slice some worms in many pieces accidentally. You know when you have a lot of worms it means that your soil is in top shape. Worms make your soil airy and they just leave all their casting to fertilize the plants. You should read more about worms because I could just go on and on about them. I used to keep a worm bin in my apartment for many years.

 

My favorite garden tool is the Korean ho-mi. I am the proud owner of four. 3 are not made in Korea but this one is. I found it yesterday at this nursery in Tarzana. They always have some old interesting garden tools stashed away in their garden center. One of the guys actually asked me if the ho-mi was made in North Korea. It would have not gotten sold to them if that was the case. Weird question. Anyway, a practical tool for any gardener. The handle is a little aged but I had to get it. My cousins bought a couple for me from Korea but they were not made in Korea. Not that special. This one is!

Missing my peas!

Last Sunday when I pulled out the pea plant, I didn't know the weather was going to cool down dramatically. My garden neighbor asked me if I wanted some her peas and I said "No". My pea plant was still vigorous when I composted it. Feeling a little guilty for being a little hasty. This was my last crop of peas. Sweet and crunchy just eating it plain and simple.

The blueberry bush is in full production. This past Thursday, I was at the garden watering late, I noticed a lot of ripe berries but did not pick any to take home. Instead I just ate it right there. When I used to live in Brooklyn, we used to head out Long Island in the summer. In the woods, I must have tasted my first wild blueberries and raspberries. I loved going berry picking. There were a lot of raspberries than blueberries but as a child nothing is more fun than foraging for wild treats.

I have 5 lacinato kale plants. Last night I made kale chips for dinner. Oh my! They make the best kale chips because the leaves are flat and not curly. When you tear them into pieces, they just toast better in the oven. My friend told me she massages her kale before eating it and I said "What the heck is that?" I found out that if you massage them with dressing/olive oil and salt instead of just tossing it, the kale is relaxed and the oil gets evenly coated on the front and back. My kale salads look better too. You need to get you hands in the salad bowl and just work it. Who knew? I don't watch cooking shows.

The weather is back to its crazy old self! It is suppose to be in the 80's in certain places or even higher. No marine layer. I am waiting for the zucchini seeds to sprout. I still have a few red carrots in the ground. Even though the garden is near the coast, I still have to think about planting my garden with seasonal crops. Just because it is cooler out here you can still get away with planting lettuces and other greens until all the cilantro starts to bolt.

Does it feel like summer?

It was an amazing day to garden. The sun was in full force and I hoped the on-shore flow would move in. From the distance, I saw the faint marine layer. I spent most of the morning planting new roses in my independent project. It was hard to figure out the color scheme and what roses to let go. In the end, I planted 4 old David Austin rose bushes. Well, they have living in the nursery pots for many years. As I was about the thin out the leaves of the other rose bushes, I almost took the life of this ladybug as I was stepping on the lemon balm.The lemon balm smells great and it is looking lush. It is on the border so I sometimes can't help not stepping on it. The humidity level was so low yesterday, I made sure I watered the garden deeply today.

 
 My garlic chives are in full bloom. The lacinato kale is tall enough so the bottom munchers don't get to the leaves on top. My leeks are taking off. I can't wait until they are thick enough to harvest. I cut the borage plant back, pulled all the lettuce out, planted zucchini seeds, and pruned the side of the rosemary bush. The last pea plant came out. Hot dry weather and snap peas just don't like each other.

There was so much kale that I had to put my harvest in a cloth shopping bag. I usually pick my kale early in the morning or late in the day. The taste is different. You should not pick certain vegetables in the heat of the day. I guess I will be making kale chips for dinner. My work at the garden was finished finally around 3:30am. I started at 9:45am. Feels great to weed and take care of things I usually can't during the work week.