Latest Posts

Showing posts with label Hillside Gardeners. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hillside Gardeners. Show all posts
Bomaria Spp. (unknown cultivar)
The garden tour was a great success. The Hillside Gardeners of Montclair sold over 350 tickets, which exceeded all prior tours. My garden looked great and everyone had a terrific time. Most of the flowers got the memo and agreed to bloom right on time. One, Sprekelia formossima clearly misunderstood, as it came into bloom literally just a few hours after the tour was over. The other 6 gardens (of 8  total) that I was able to see were excellent. Anyone that got to see all 8 gardens on the tour had an opportunity to see some really amazing plants and garden designs.

Sprekelia formossima
I am finally getting back to "my regularly scheduled life already in progress." Hopefully my backlog of blog ideas will come spilling forth. Thank you, dear reader, for your patience. I can get back to reading, writing, and cooking. I can also get back to harvesting from my garden. I was leaving things in place so that the visitors could see what was growing. Here is a photo of yesterday's harvest.
I haven't written a damn thing in a couple weeks. My combined email inboxes now contain over 1500 messages. My friends on Facebook wonder what happened to me...

It's spring time here and I have been spending all of my spare time (and then some) in the garden. The urgency is particularly great with the Hillside Gardens tour just one week away (I was interviewed for the local newspaper yesterday - nice.)

While I still have a lot to say, a lot to write, and a lot to cook, spending time outside definitely has advantages over sitting at my desk. Amongst many, many things, I get to see the natural (and naturalesque) world more deeply when I spend my time in the garden. Yesterday I was outside talking to my friend Andy (who is also my landscaper.) I saw a bee sitting on my white lilac but not moving. It was so odd, it was completely immobile, so I went closer to check it out. I realized that it was in the jaws of an almost perfectly camoulflaged spider. Wow! (Note that I cropped the image and increased the contrast in Photoshop to make the spider more visible.)


Creepy but beautiful, and fully part of the natural world. I like the ant peeking out from behind a flower petal just to the upper left of the scene.


Postscript 5/4/11:  Found this on Wikipedia. I think it is Misumena vatia. Apparently this spider can change color at will!


The water feature in my garden.

Busy, busy, busy.

It's spring here in California, and when California springs, it doesn't kid around. I've completely lost count of the number of hours I have spent in the garden over the last two weeks. Weeding, pruning, fertilizing (organic), spraying (Safer Soap, etc.) Then there's "The Farm" - turning the soil, tilling and cultivating, pulling old carrots and planting new ones, planting corn, tomatoes, peppers, cantaloupe, cucumbers, zucchini, patty pan squash, herbs... Then there's the spring harvests - crazy amounts of chard and fava beans. On top of that I have to do something with all that food.

Busy, busy, busy.

Spring in the garden is always a busy time, but this year it is doubly so because my garden will be featured in the Hillside Gardeners of Montclair garden tour, May 1. This is a wonderful tour of gardens in Oakland's Montclair district that raises funds for various horticultural educational projects. I'm very pleased and honored to have my garden on the tour. However, it is an extra challenge because I want to time things so that by May 1 my garden looks perfect, but I also want it to look untouched. Perfect but effortless. No easy feat.

As if that weren't enough, I noticed that the Hillside Gardener's of Montclair didn't have a web site (tsk, tsk.) To my surprise, HillsideGardeners.com was available! So, I registered it and created a web site for them.

Busy, busy, busy!