The Little Surprises of Remodeling

Warning: Some of the images featured below may give you the creeps.
I've just been reading "The Coddling of the American Mind" in the Atlantic (recommended read) and don't want to get in trouble for grossing you out.

Princess

It's construction season in my neighborhood and the rodents have been shaken loose from their usual hidey-holes. They've been freed to boldly go explore the strange new worlds of the nearby neighbors.

Or not. Princess has been busy doing her part to reduce the rodent population, one small death at a time. She stays very local (probably less than one-half acre), but she is both persistent and fast. Actually, she's mostly just persistent.

It's not because we were out of town and she wanted to welcome us back that she's been after the rodents. Nah, it's what she does and who she is. The good news is that, while she is focusing on ridding the 'hood of rodents, she can't spend a lot of time hunting birds (more about that later).

Princess' Most Recent Rat

Alameda County Vector Control Services has ideas to help prevent rats (big mice) and mice (cute little rats) from infesting your home. Some of the ideas are obvious; other, such as screening off your crawl space with galvanized mesh, I wouldn't have dreamt up on my own, but can really make a difference. 

Freebies from Annie's

Freckles (?) Pineapple Lily

Annie's Annuals allows those with a small bit of oomph and entrepreneurship to collect free, high-quality potting mix. Yes, free, except that you have to shovel it yourself (and unlike horse manure, this stuff is heavy) and you can only get to it on Wednesday mornings.

First come-first serve. And plan ahead - like late winter or so - if you don't want to be disappointed. 'Cause once the gardening season heats up, so does the competition. On a nice clear day in January, however, it's just you and the pile.

And a few plant labels, an occasional plastic pot, old root balls, and once in a while, a surprise (think Cracker Jack®, which apparently still exists after 120 years).

The last time I went shoveling, the mix included a mystery bulb. I threw it in the green bin and then felt badly. So I fished it out, tucked it in a pot and ignored it.

Pineapple lily. Definitely a pineapple lily, although, based on the photos, not one of those that Annie's grows. A wandering pineapple lily? If so, it now has a home in Oakland.

When Friends Give You (#2)...

Finial for the top of the trellis

Copper tubing, make a trellis for those unruly vegetables.

Leftovers from an ancient plumbing project can be surprisingly useful. It took some fiddling around to make the pieces fit together, but I had enough extra joiners and fittings to waste.

No soldering, necessary. Waterproof epoxy (the kind intended for plumbing) should hold it all together. Trust me, I've done this before and it lasts for years.









Yeah, the trellis appears a bit wonky, but with the long side sitting a little deeper in the dirt, it will all level out. The third leg, offset at a 90 degree angle, helps with stability.








Thank you, Dick Holmes!

My New Favorite Flower

Actually, there are two of them:  Papaver rupifragum (Spanish poppy) and Papaver atlanticum (Moroccan Poppy), Truth to tell, I can't really tell one apart from the other. One's supposed to be shorter, but when they're wearing heels, it's really hard to tell...

They have been blooming all summer on very little water. The blooms only last for the day, but then another flower or six unfurls for the next day's show. They will overwinter here, as well as in places as cold as central Montana (USDA zone 4). That's way better than I can do.

They seem to thrive in part-sun or more (I may test their shade tolerance next year). Also, bees, especially carpenter bees, love these babies. I grew these from seeds (pretty easy) and have been saving this year's seed crop. I plan to spread them around in early spring.

And who knows? They may have cross-bred after a romantic night out on the town (I tell ya, those heels can get a girl into trouble) so I'll never really know who's who.

Salt Potatoes

Early June Harvest
Purple Viking Potatoes

Last month I dug up the Purple Viking potatoes which I had planted in February. I hadn't planted many, so I didn't expect many. Only I got many - many little one, that is. Very unusual for Purple Vikings, which are known to produce "lunkers" (large, over-sized potatoes).

What to do? Reaching back into my upstate New York heritage, I came up with salt potatoes. It wasn't something that we were served regularly growing up, but it is one of those rare regional dishes from upstate New York.*

When asked about salt potatoes, my mom wrote:

"The first time I had salt potatoes was when we went camping at Grass Point along the St. Lawrence and Dad and I left you kids with Grandma for the day while we went to a pre-NY State Fair clambake for communication folks, reporters, etc. in 1962. There was clam chowder (delicious), clams on the half shell and bowls of tiny salty potatoes with melted butter poured over.

Elsie (Grandma) Deegan
1900 - 1998

At the time you couldn’t even buy raw salt potatoes in the store so no one could make their own…..unless you had a crop like mine!! And they were really good tasting.

[One of the few crops that my mom can't seem to grow is potatoes.]

Grandma told me that when she was young in Tarrytown, little potatoes were called pig potatoes and mostly fed to pigs. At her corner store, pig potatoes were 2 CENTS a pound and all the poor folks bought them and served them with the skins on. She said her family ate a lot of them for years."

*In my experience, should you say that you are from "upstate New York" people imagine Yonkers, or perhaps the Catskill Mountains (100+ miles from NYC). Alternatively, they lock onto Buffalo, at the very western tippy-tip of the state.  Well folks, it's about 350 miles from the eastern edge of the state - the Hudson River - to the western border at Lake Erie. At one point, that was the western frontier of this nation.

Mosaic Project #2

The garage is unrecognizable, what with a new roof, new overhead door and new lights that actually turn on when you flip the switch.

And it got a total clean-out. The bulky pick-up guys came and took what the dog walkers and pedestrian commuters left behind. And all those old paint cans, dead batteries and dried out caulk tubes were delivered to the proper authorities. Now the garage is so clean, we're thinking that a real, life-size car might just fit inside. Unbelievable.

All this work has meant that a lot of partially completed projects were rediscovered, including this ceramic planter which I tiled a number - think of a very large number - of months ago. It has simply been waiting for someone to go get a new bag of grout.

However, one question remains: which lucky plant will get to call the blue pot "home"?

Get 'Em While You Can

Mountain View Cemetery, 2015

Gardeners in colder climates indulge in imaginary gardening in January when the seed catalogues show up in the mailbox. Me? I m a complete sucker for the glossy bulb offerings which appear in early summer. I'm not allowed to read them in bed because I drool all over the sheets.

For many years I planted a great big pot of tulips each fall for next spring's entertainment. And since "winter" here has very little meaning, once the blooms are over, pretty much the only thing to do is throw the tulips away and buy new next year.  Other bulbs - narcissus, daffodils, hyacinth, crocus, etc. all do a very good job of naturalizing. (The narcissus are great, but get a little confused and start blooming in October in my yard.)

This year I'm ordering my bulbs early from Fedco Bulbs. It won't stop me from continuing to look at the catalogues, but it may prevent me from changing my order each day. And although I'll be putting a small dent in the budget this month, by next year, I won't remember a thing. Just happy springtime.

Bulbs in a Pot, February, 2010

Do It Yourself? Maybe...

Lesson Learned (again, maybe):

If you don't really like sprouts, growing them at home won't make them taste any better. Yeah, yeah, they might be healthier, because you are have better quality seeds, etc., but isn't that the problem? For me, they already taste too "healthy".

These were kale sprouts, and they only took four days of changing the water just twice a day, so really not a lot of work. But, well, at a certain point on day three, I though something had gone "off" in the kitchen garbage can. Only to lean in closer and realize that it was the sprouts. I guess it's true that growing up is a messy and stinky business.

I may try growing some arugula micro-greens since I really love arugula and have a small mountain of seeds. Also, the little buggers always seem to bolt before I get to enjoy them as salad.

Discover & Go Wins Again

It was a dark and stormy night. Actually, it was a sullen and overcast day, so to inject a little cheer, we went to the Academy of Sciences. And because we planned ahead (by one day only), we went for free. There we were graced with the company of two young friends - Aly and Avery - who also got in for free. Thank you Discover & Go - Oakland.

We sweated through the rain forest, lurked in the aquarium (I had never seen the boa constrictor before and have no plans to see this or any other one again), caught the tail end of the penguin feeding, and then moved on to the planetarium for the show, Habitat Earth (don't bother, it was kinda slow and preachy).

Great entertainment for a gray day.

The Flower Floozies Strike Back

The wonderful gardeners at Annie's Annuals are getting armed with reason, and for a reason.

Recently their blog featured, "Home Gardeners are NOT the Problem", an article debunking some of the big, scary ideas going around about water and its lack.

Their conclusions: basically, if you don't have a large lawn in a hot summer area, then you are probably not the problem. That doesn't mean that we all still don't have to be careful about water usage. Yes, wasting is bad, especially now that EBMUD proposes to raise rates by at least 7 percent. And that's not counting the drought surcharge they are contemplating. (You see, if we use less water, they make less money... Someone is supposedly looking into this conflict of interest at the state level, but I'm not holding my breath.)

However, that didn't stop some passerby asking me yesterday if the water I was using to hand water my peas came from the bathtub (none of your business, buster. And by the way, how come you're driving around, alone, in a big-ass SUV?).

But the big water numbers are elsewhere. The true culprits are large agricultural interests that insist on growing water-intensive crops - almonds being the poster child for bad water management - in the very thirsty areas of the state. Obviously, almonds and desert are not a good match, especially when most of the almond crop leaves the state.

Pretty much everyone is in agreement that 75 - 80 percent of the state's water is used by agriculture. What is less well known is that agriculture and mining together constitute about 2 (yes, two-point-zero) percent of the economy, and employs 3 - 4 percent of the labor force. Now that's a lotta water going to a very small piece of the action.

For their part, agricultural interests argue that they cannot accept water rationing because how else would the rest of us get fed? Food - yes. Non-essential crops  - say for example, the alfalfa grown here, which is exported to China for beef, which is then shipped back here (I just don't want to pick on almonds again) - let me think about it.

However, our Governor is not letting us think about it. He is singling out urban and suburban water users for mandatory rationing. He may feel our pain, but he sure ain't sharing it around. So shower with a friend, get rid of your lawn (plant some tomatoes or beans instead), and let Jerry know that there is a "big picture" and a "little picture" and he's got 'em backwards.