The first week of October and we’re having a day of heavy rain… almost unbelievable. Normally October in San Diego is high fire season. The brush is crisp from months of drought and high temperatures, and then the Santa Ana winds begin: wild dry winds that blow east to west from the deserts, full of static and mad gusts that turn brush fires into firestorms.
My property is a watershed, funneling rainwater from the street through to the streambed in the barranca below, taking all my topsoil and some of the embankment with it. This year I had the beginnings of a permaculture garden installed to remedy this pattern. By deepening the loam and placing berms around plant guilds water is encouraged to pool up and soak in rather than run off. Overflow is channeled through a series of dry ponds which allow water to soak into the ground. From there it is channeled safely down to an overflow into the stream. Today was an early test of what has been worked on since Feb. 1.
The tilling, mulching and berming done by the crew of landscape architect Roger Boddaert proved successful.
Berms hold water back so that it may soak into the loam
The soil has a high clay content, which was good news when digging the large pond because it held water without a liner. It is bad news for other areas of the garden where water is pooling up instead of sinking in. I was able to take note of these areas this afternoon so that they could be drained and mulched for more absorption.
Aquascape, the company that installed the series of ponds, is still planting and maintaining the waterways. Jacob came out in the rain and watched it flow, shaping and fortifying as the force of the rain and thus the volume increased.
Jacob helping water flow
Water flowed under the fence from the street, but instead of flooding a cement culvert as it used to do, it is channeled down to the ponds.
Street run-off enters under the fence
Blocked by debris, water floods past the bridge
Silt and debris blocked water flow under the bridge, and was eroding the area by the structure called the Nest. I cleared the debris and raked rocks and silt to the weak side, and that fixed the problem temporarily.
Rainwater flowing into the first 'dry' pond
Water quickly filled the first dry pond; with the high clay content, water percolates but does it slowly.
'Dry' ponds filling and slowing run-off
Logs and rocks are ornamental and slow water flow
Normally dry, the stone crossing is now almost underwater
The little pond is rapidly filled.
As water reached the small pond, which wasn’t intended to permanently hold water but the clay had a different idea, the sides had to be shored up and the overflow diverted.
Water is diverted from the little pond around the big one
Extra floodwaters aren’t being diverted into the large pond because we don’t want it filled with silt, and we don’t want it overflowing rapidly and eroding the sides. Instead the water flows through a channel around the large pond, then down to a prescribed place to flow out and over the embankment to the stream below.
Overflow is channelled past the ponds and out to the natural stream below
Some areas of heavy erosion had been filled and supported, and as of six this evening they looked wet but not iffy. What a night of heavy rain will do, I’ll have to see in the morning. I am very lucky to have this type of
rain early in the season. It has been heavy enough to cause significant water flow to help shape the watercourse and show weak spots, and the rain will be reduced to showers tomorrow then clear up, so repairs and improvements can be made before true flooding happens later in the year or early in the next.
Although much more water is being held on the property, and topsoil is not being lost, it still pains me to see so much rain channeled out to the stream. Rainwater is a neutral Ph, and carries nitrogen (especially when
there is lightning). It is the best possible water for plants, as well as for human consumption and bathing. In side-by-side comparisons with tap water, plants watered with rainwater flourish far beyond the growth of the others. I’m greedy to hold that water onto my property, letting it soak as deeply as possible for tree roots to use far into the year. As the newly planted trees grow, their roots will help hold water and soil. As their leaves drop the mulch levels will raise, aided by compost and mulch that I will be constantly adding, and the soil will become more absorbent farther down. Each rain should have less runoff and more absorption. This rain has shown a great success with the garden, but I know it is only the beginning.
To veer off from the vacation photos, I thought I’d talk about bugs! I’ve been working in the garden a lot and watching the myriad types of insects drawn to the various flowers blooming all over, and it reminded me of something amazing that I learned last year. The way flowers look to us is not what most insects and birds see. The flowers are bright and showy, but they offer up visual clues to pollinators through colors and patterns that can only be seen with eyes that see UV light. Humans can’t. We can’t assign colors to UV light in the way that we understand them, so when photographing with UV light we substitute our colors to show the change in patterns. The markings on the flowers are guides to where the pollen is, like lights and painted lines on airport runways. Just as baby chicks’ mouths are large and brightly colored to show mom and dad where to put the worm, especially on the inside as they gape and wait to be fed, so have flowers made sure that the pollinators get to the right place for pollen! The differences between what we see and what insects see can be startling; there is a whole hidden world right before our eyes, just as there are supersonic and subsonic sounds that we cannot hear. Elephants make subsonic noises that other elephants can hear miles away, but we aren’t aware of it.
Below are photos taken with and without UV light by the brilliant Norwegian scientist-cameraman Bjorn Roslett. Remember that the UV colorization is man-made to show the difference in patterns. More technical information can be found at his site here: http://www.naturfotograf.com/UV_flowers_list.html , with lists of types of flowers and what approximate color changes there are under UV light.
If you ever go to England, go to Cornwall and spend at least a day at the Lost Gardens of Heligan (http://www.heligan.com/ ). Due to a flat tire we only spent four hours there and we didn’t see even half of the 400 acres of incredible restored gardens. The story is this: a thousand acres on the southern coast of Cornwall has belonged to the Tremayne family for about 400 years. At the end of the 1800’s, one of the Tremaynes had built extensive theme gardens. There were walled gardens, enormous hedges, glass houses, cold frames, a pineapple pit where the only pineapple grown in Cornwall grew warmed by horse manure. Melon houses, leisure gardens, formal flower gardens, woods, kitchen gardens and unbelievably, tropical gardens, filled the estate. Due to Cornwall’s position by the English Channel the climate is such that with care tropicals can be grown there. The estate was fantastic; then came WW I, and almost half the family and staff were killed. The gardens were abandoned. Subsequent wars and taxes took their toll, and the gardens became overgrown. Vines, brambles, trees and weeds ran rampant, breaking through the glass roofs, pulling apart brick walls, upsetting carefully laid pathways and covering every trace of the gardens under a head-high blanket of tangled, thorny brush.
Twenty-one years ago, the Tremayne who inheirited the gardens, asked one of the founders of the neighboring Eden Project ( http://www.edenproject.com/ ) to try and restore the gardens. The task was phenomenal and reads like a mystery. Hacking through the overgrowth they found the walls, the foundations and the clues as to what had been. Since then the gardens have been restored. They are everyone’s dream of a garden combined. There is a mound that was a beacon mound during Nepolianic times, but then discovered dates back to the Armada, and then back to Medieval times! There is a jungle with massive gunnera plants and palm trees, about half an acre of vegetables all grown from seed that dates from the late Victorian time, walled flower gardens, ‘antique’ poultry and cattle, unique sculptures recently added, and a wildlife garden to encourage the existence of so many insects, birds and animals that are disappearing. Even with weeding through photos I came up with so many that I want to share, that I’ll just post them below. Visit the website and read up on the Lost Gardens, voted Britain’s Finest Gardens. They are magical.
Entrance to a magical world.
The Tremayne who built the gardens holding a single Gunnera leaf in front of his famous pineapple pit.
Flavors of ice cream… we didn’t get to have any!
A mysterious mound was uncovered and thought to have been a beacon site in Nepolianic times, and for centuries beyond that.
Stone steps into the ravine
The Italian garden
Ivy coming through the roof, trying to reclaim the building once again.
Hot houses and cold frames
Cold frames for veg.
Espaliered pears of many varieties.
Writing on the wall of the ‘thunder room’, or original composting toilet
All plants and veg grown are from the late Victorian period
Espaliered fruit trees make use of warm wall space
About a quarter acre of mixed greens.
Bee skeps (baskets, pre-movable hives) were kept in boles for winter protection.
A bee skep in a bee bole
History of the Bee Boles
A banana grows in Cornwall!
Melon houses
Potting shed with greenhouses in a walled area. Sigh.
Cold frames in the potting shed
A robin watches, just like in The Secret Garden
The overgrown remains of mud brick walls
A very steep pathway lined with chicken wire to prevent slipping
The Jungle
A wire sculpture of a woman with her arms out… can you see her?
People either love or hate figs. Figs were grown long before wheat became a crop. They are members of the Ficus family, which includes such spectacular specimens as the famous Banyan tree that grows enormous roots and support trunks from air roots. The fig tree, and members of the ficus family such as the Bodhi tree, are mentioned in all three major religious texts.
However, figs are not fruit. Nope.
Figs are swollen, fleshy stems called syconiums.
Figs are swollen stems.
A fig is actually a swollen, hollow stem that has internal flowers!
The insides of figs show the flowers
When the flowers are ready for pollination, the end of the stem opens slightly to allow in the fig wasp, its only pollinator.
The end opens.
The syconium will then set seed inside, which is the time when they are usually harvested. Happily for fig eaters, many fig types are self-pollinating. Now you can amaze your friends and family with this interesting trivia over the dinner table!
The migration of the monarch butterfly covers an astounding 2500 miles. Instead of dying off in the cold of winter, these flimsy, light-as-air insects fly from parts of the US to groves of Oyamel fir trees in Mexico. They are the only insect to cover such territory. They are particular little beasties, for they rest only in the Oyamel firs and look for milkweed plants on which to lay their eggs. Milkweed exudes a sap toxic to animals which the Monarch caterpillars eat, obviously immune, making them toxic in turn. The caterpiller’s bright coloration is a warning.
Snazzy stripes mean 'eat at your own risk' (photo: M. Kennedy
In fact, the Viceroy butterfly, which is very tasty to predators, mimics the Monarch’s coloration to keep from being dinner.
Deforestation, insects, climate change and pollution have cut a huge swath through the Oyamel fir tree population, and the Monarchs are struggling to survive. They also combat the decrease in milkweed as human populations spread and plant lawns instead of weeds and wildflowers.
At the beginning of this year, in my efforts to change my property into habitat, I was determined to help the Monarchs. Every year I see maybe one or two of the majestic butterfly pass through my yard, and I’ve been sorry that I can’t offer he or she anything except nectar.
What I had been calling milkweed actually is sow thistle Sonchus oleraceus, which is an edible kitchen herb brought over from Europe with the settlers as food. It also has a milky sap in it’s hollow stem, thus the erroneous name of milkweed. There are over 100 varieties of real milkweed. So, I purchased two Balloon Plants, or Asclepias physocarpa (Asclepias is the botanical name for the milkweed family). They grew quite well, developing the balloon-shaped seed pods which, when ripe, burst open spreading small seeds with feathery wings attached that carry them everywhere.
Seeds burst and fly
To my great excitement my daughter spotted very tiny Monarch caterpillars on the leaves!
Tiny Monarch caterpillers (photo: M. Kennedy)
The caterpillars have been eating voraciously and growing big and fat.
Monarch caterpiller and milkweed (Photo: M. Kennedy)
We’ve seen Monarchs in the yard many more times than in the past. We are monitoring the caterpillars closely, waiting for them to metamorphosize. I’ll help the plants distribute seeds throughout my yard, and I’ll plant the native narrow-leafed milkweed as well. I’m so excited that within months this goal was achieved and that these wonderful creatures have one more place to find refuge.
This year I grew watermelons. I planted organic seed in my raised vegetable bed, protected from gophers by aviary wire, grown in excellent soil and fertilized with organic fertilizer, watered often, and the vines produced three melons the size of grapefruit. The chickens enjoyed them very much. However, a non-organic watermelon from a six-pack stuck in the ground under a bamboo, decided to take over the world. Not only did it’s foliage cover a good portion of the upper soil, but it grew and has grown enormous beasts of watermelons. One we call King Watermelon.
King Watermelon is in the foreground, laying in wait.
My daughter and I watched a YouTube video on how to tell if a melon is ripe. One way is to watch the tendril opposite the stem of the watermelon, and when it turns brown the melon should be ripe. The area where the stem connects to the fruit should also turn a little brown. Also, under the melon should be a pale spot where it rests on the ground, and when that area turns from white to yellowish, that is another sign. King Watermelon had no spot. We checked every few days for weeks as the beast grew larger and larger, it’d tendril tenaciously green. Then suddenly, it was brown. Much celebration. My petite collegiate daughter crept up on King Watermelon and swiftly cut it’s stem. Then staggering with it, brought it into the house where we weighed it. It was an incredible 28 pounds. It is a wonder that any other plant in the area got any irrigation! Normally we’d slice the melon on the countertop, but King Watermelon was so large that he had to go into the kitchen sink, and he barely fit! It was there that he was butchered, in consideration of all the juice that might come out.
So large it had to be 'butchered' in the kitchen sink!
The insides were perfectly sweet, juicy and crunchy. I couldn’t believe how perfect it was.
Beautiful inside; sweet and crisp.
My daughter cut and cut, saving some for our dinner (all that extra water before bedtime wasn’t a great idea, though), and wrapping the rest. The chunks had to be stored on cookie sheets to distribute the weight on the shelves and protect from leaking juice. We had watermelon the next day too, and fed some to our very grateful and thirsty tortoise during the heat wave. There is a lot of King Watermelon left. It is scary to look into the refrigerator and see it all. Even cut up and wrapped, that melon still has an attitude. And I think he won the battle after all.
Wrapped sections for infinite eating.
And there are more melons ripening with each passing minute. Gulp.
Are your sunflowers being stripped? Are the leaves acquiring non-snail-like holes and then disappearing altogether? You may be feeding the birds, but not with the seeds!
Lesser goldfinches apparently are nuts over sunflower leaves. They will tear little bits of the leaves off and injest them, and within a day or so there will be nothing but a stem and a flower.
If your goal is to feed the birds, then this is okay. If you have bird problems on your vegetables such as peppers, then you may want to plant sunflowers off to the side to distract them.
Why do they eat sunflower leaves? They must like a little salad with their seeds, and sunflowers are particularly yummy for them. In searching the Internet for suggestions as to why they like sunflower leaves so much, there were many postings about the incidents, and yet most respondents insisted that the birds were after bugs on the leaves, or that snails came in the night and ate the leaves!
This occurrence seems to happen mostly in California, and other than bird nets (which one person said that the lesser goldfinches chewed through!) or planting sunflowers thickly (one for them, one for you), you may as well just enjoy the show. Ours come up from dropped or buried birdseed, and when the plants are growing their flowers, suddenly they are beset by birds who skeletonize the plant. We’re okay with that; it saves a little cost on the very expensive Niger thistle seed! (Oh, and by the way, Niger thistle isn’t thistle seed at all).
Plants have been enjoying the beautiful weather and the constant irrigation from the well, and the garden is flourishing. So, unfortunately, is the Bermuda grass, but that is another tale. Since I see it everyday I don’t notice the change so much, but when I show someone around I am thrilled all over again with the incredible change that has happened on this property. There are so many birds, insects, reptiles and other animals either already here or scouting it out that I know the project is a success. It is a habitat, not just for me and my family, but for native flora and fauna as well. It wasn’t so long ago that I had a cracked, weedy asphalt driveway, a termite-ridden rickety porch that needed pest control, a house with a stinky deteriorating carpet and old splotchy paint, a tile kitchen counter with the grout gone in between and a cleaning nightmare, and a yard full of snails, weeds and Washingtonia palm trees, with the embankment eroding each rainfall. Over the last four years we’ve survived some pretty intense construction projects (none of which were done on time, no matter what they promised!). My house still has some repairs that need to be done but I no longer am embarrassed to have anyone over. The garden is wonderful to walk in and explore. I’ve taken some photos this evening to show you how things are growing:
Bees enjoying purple coneflowers
The luffa squash has mighty asperations.
A luffa squash and bloom. They are edible small and green, but I’ll leave them to dry.
Five eggs today! Each laying hen participated for the first time! The little girls have grown up.
The small lower pond and the palm pathway.
The veggie bed.
Rushes, fleabane, waterlilies and other plants are growing in nicely around the big pond. The boat is still on loan from Aquascape.
A pumpkin tree? This apricot isn’t healthy, but the pumpkins sure are.
These bare areas I’ll fill with plants that will make up guilds, each plant filling a niche to help the others grow.
The entrance to the bee garden.
Native vinegar weed loves a place we left untouched, and so do the bees.
Sugar pumpkins ready a little early for Halloween.
A feral zucchini, still producing at least one a day.
Melons, passionfruit, pitcher plant and many others under the back porch we call the Poop Deck.
Very eager bamboo, sugarcane and hops.
Olive trees tied to painted PVC pipe to make a hut.
The ‘Nest’ beyond the dry stream bed.
A thud and a swish… with no warning the neighbor’s tree fell across the fence.
A green roof for the entranceway, just beginning to show.
The watermelons in the vegetable beds were tiny… these monsters are wild. That one grew on the rock on its own.
Entranceway flower tunnel… with dogs waiting to go inside!
In the August of one of my most successful years of vegetable growing, as the squash vines wither to reveal the graceful shapes of winter stews, and the cabbage moth caterpillers chew collards into lace, I am able to review and make notes on triumphs and things not-as-good-as-one-would-hope. Gardening is as much a practice as medicine, but healthier. What works one year may not work the next; for instance, there are melon years and no-melon years. A gardener can worry about the soil, the water, the sunlight and the bugs, but come to discuss the problem with enough other gardeners and there is sure to be at least one who didn’t have a good melon year either. Whether there is astrological truth in it or not, it matters not except to bring relief from the strain of worrying if there were no melons because of a fault in the gardener.
Here is my list of things that didn’t go as planned, and resolutions to improve next year:
1. Trim back foliage to make sure there isn’t something drinking all the water.
Ginormous Swiss chard root
2. Check for volunteers, especially those hitchhikers from the compost who decide to sprout.
One of three avocado volunteers in the collards
3. Don’t think you’re going to pinch the tomatoes back so that they grow onto a large trellis, especially since you don’t make the trellis. Tomatoes need some light to produce and ripen.
waArkansas Traveler just ripening
4. Warn visitors early about the rubber snakes.
Soybean and rubber snake
5. Count backwards from Halloween the estimated ripen days on the seed packet, and don’t plant too early. That way your pumpkins won’t be ripe in August. Also, plant herbs such as dill and cilantro early and thick long before cucumbers, so that you have the seed heads ready when it is time to make pickles.
Ripe pumpkins in August
6. There only needs to be one zucchini plant.
Monster zucchini
7. Prepare to stake everything. With wire-lined raised beds you can’t plunge a stick down into the soil next to a wobbly plant. You have to attach the stakes to the sides of the bed, or drive them down outside of the bed and make T’s. Whatever the choice, it is best done before the plants are mature.
Quinoa: pretty but floppy
8. Plant lots of kale. It is extremely tasty sauteed, and drying the oiled leaves to make kale chips (see recipe section) makes a nutritious and addicting snack.
Kale is yummy
9. Again, keep volunteers under control. This kabocha squash took over three vegetable beds and two pathways. However, it is producing some mighty fine squash.
Kabocha squash volunteer coming from the bed behind this one, around and into the end bed.
10. Rubber snakes are remarkably effective in preventing crows from eating seeds. However, besides warning visitors, don’t forget where you’ve tossed your rubber snakes if you are reaching into a leafy dark space at twilight!
I found a weed I loathe even more than Bermuda grass. I know that’s hard to believe. Bermuda grass has chased me out of my vegetable garden, and was part of the reason I laboriously built raised beds. It is even now working its way through some of my new planter beds and needs annihilation. I’ve seen Bermuda grass emerge from the top of a five foot hollow metal pole and cascade over the top. It survives under mulch, under rocks, under pavement. Think that is impressive? That’s nothing. Johnson grass has it beat.
I thought that the tall grass growing under the bird feeders was from the bird seed. I let it grow to see what seeds would come from it. The plant looked like corn stalks, and had a little tassel at the top. Pretty innocuous, huh? Then I started looking up on Google images what all the bird seed ingredients looked like in plant form. This stuff didn’t match any of it. Uh-oh. Then I started looking up invasive grasses. Bingo.
Looks like corn, or other weeds. Evil!
I read blogs where ranchers complain of having it on their land, and the general response is to burn, salt and run away from the land. Trying to be organic, I sprayed the tops of my Johnson grass with pure white vinegar, then covered them with black plastic during one of our hottest weeks. When I pulled it off the stalks were slightly pale, but boy they were angry. So I took a day and started digging them up and found tremendously thick roots that spread everywhere with such force that one had burrowed up into a log and I had to use a screwdriver to dig it out.
Johnson grass is the ultimate monster, it spreads by seed, by rhizome, and by any microscopic piece of the root left anywhere near the soil.
Roots worming through and around the wire
Last winter my daughter and I had built a new heirloom bulb bed, lined with black landscape fabric to deflect weeds, and on top of that aviary wire to deflect the gophers, mice and moles. Guess what emerged? The other day I spent a morning carefully digging out all the Johnson grass in and around the bed, following the roots and unwinding them from the wire which they embraced, while trying not to kill my bulbs. I thought I had won, but only two mornings later, there stood a four-inch tall sprout of Johnson grass! Aaaarrgghhh! So I dug it out, and dug more out, and more and more. Today I decided that I had to start from scratch, so I dug out all the bulbs and scratched out the soil (which I’m afraid to reuse because I know there will some miniscule rhizome just waiting. I think I’ll have to spread the soil out and cook it in the summer sun for a few years or so, just to make sure), and was glad I did. This was a task I was so eager to do in the hot sun while other chores stacked up, too! Not only was the JG entwined with the aviary wire, but it had solid, rooted rhizomes as fat as my thumb wriggling around under the black landscape fabric, consequently under five inches of soil, too.
Thick rhizomes under the landscape fabric
I’d use dynamite, but the weed would take advantage and all those bits would come up everywhere. An evil Sourcerer’s Apprentice.
Yes, that is a root sticking through the turned-over aviary wire
My fight against Johnson grass will apparently go on for some time. It is coming up in my pot filled with Christmas cactus, and in the midst of a thorny rose bush, and many other places, disguising itself as other weeds. I’ll not only have to keep digging it out, but cutting the stalks of the plants I can’t dig out without destroying a valued garden member. The question comes to mind: if I set Johnson grass against Bermuda grass, which would win? Whichever does win, it deserves burning and salting!
