Just Live With It

I’ve been overwhelmed with tasks.  We have moved in to our new place and unpacked most of our boxes.  We’re still in the process of remodeling the 69-year-old kitchen so there is still a sense of disarray in our household.  But we’re getting “there” even though we don’t quite know where exactly “there” is or what it will feel like when we settle there.

With some of the more pressing issues taken care of I am slowly turning my attention to the yard.  But the yard is larger than I’m used to and I don’t know where to start.  I haven’t been here long enough to discover all the things that make this yard unique so I'm reluctant to commit to anything.  For instance, our recent rains revealed that there are a few places close to our patio where the water does not drain.  At all.  I had already considered putting in some kind of rock pathway beginning right where the water puddles so that idea might have “gone down the drain” . . . unlike the water.    

The best advice I’ve ever received about garden design was in Julie Moir Messervy’s “The Inward Garden.”  I’m loosely paraphrasing here, but she said that a gardener should just live with their garden for a while.  That advice has been on my mind lately as I’ve been eager to tackle new projects.  I keep telling myself to be patient and let the ideas come to me as I spend time working in the yard, as I get familiar with the sunlight, as I live through the seasons and experience the patterns of nature here. 

But I don’t think Messervy was trying to say “do nothing” either.  So I am keeping up on tasks like mowing the lawn (which I really don’t enjoy doing), and picking from the abundance of weeds.  I have also set up my compost bins and planted three dwarf Japanese maples that I brought over from our old house. 

Last night, however, I had a spare hour-and-a-half after work so I decided to tackle a small project.  At some point, along this trellised fence that marks the divide between my property and the elderly lady’s next door, there was a flower bed.  I imagine it must have looked beautiful in the spring several years ago.  But now the only word that comes to mind is “dilapidated”.  The lattice work needs to be repaired.  The weedy grass needs to be pulled.  Irrigation needs to be addressed. 

From the look of it, I thought the house next door was empty when we bought this house.  It is not.

I started by pulling out handfuls of grass and discovered that buried within the grass were various types of edging materials – bricks and red cement edgers.  I have no formal training in archaeology, but I’m pretty sure that these buried materials were placed right against the base of the fence to prevent the overgrown grass and weeds from coming in from the other side of the fence.  

I dislike this type of edging.  I dislike it a lot.  

I assume that the elderly lady (whom I have yet to even see) no longer cares about gardening or keeping her exterior in tip-top shape.  I may help her with this in small ways if I can but I don’t want to assume that my help would be welcomed until I’ve met her.  I’m not a fan of using weed blocking fabrics, but this might actually be a perfect place for using it. 

After the grass was mostly pulled out I was able to get a better look at the irrigation pipe that so prominently stands out in this small bed.  I could definitely take this down to ground level and still have access to water here but for now I think I will just add a Y valve and attach a drip irrigation timer to it and leave the other valve open for attaching a hose. 

Irrigation is always a first concern when planting here since we very rarely get rain between May and October.

This weekend I’ll try to repair or replace the lattice work and install the weed fabric.  I will pull out the grass roots that I missed.  I will use the weed whacker to trim the edges.  I might even plant a few Moon Flower seeds that I harvested unless I simply can’t escape the siren’s call of my favorite nursery and need to take the plunge and buy something that is already green.  And then I’ll live with it for a while.  

Rant Diffused

About a year ago I read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.  It's probably the most important non-fiction book I've read.  And although I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a zealot and I'm definitely not a puritan when it comes to what I put in my body, I do get passionate about what I perceive to be problems with how our food reaches us and the gradual progression of our "food" becoming little more than industrial products packaged for our convenience.  Whatever knowledge and passion I have on this subject I owe to Omnivore.  If you haven't read it, you should.  (Okay, non-paid product plug out of the way.) 

My wife, on the other hand, has other things on her mind and really can't devote the sort of energy it takes to be mad at the world like I can.  I have to be okay with that because its her mind.  But every once in a while, I'll try to educate her about something without overwhelming her in the kinds of drama she doesn't want.

So when she brought home these pre-sliced apples I was prepared to turn it into a teachable moment.

You see, these apples don't turn brown.  Normally when I slice an apple it will turn brown before I can shove it into a tub of caramel and jam it into my gaping maw.  I've accepted this as a defining natural characteristic for an apple so when these apples didn't turn brown it really made me question what unnatural preservatives could be pumped into these to alter them so dramatically. 

As I've stated on this blog numerous times, I'm not scientifically-minded by nature but I am curious about science.  With that in mind, I decided it was time to conduct a non-controlled experiment.  I took this picture with the intent to see just how long it will take for these apples to turn brown.

Here we go.  Do scientists say anything at the start of
a project?  Play ball, we have lift off, or get 'er done? 
Anything? 

While waiting for them to turn brown I got online to do a little extra research.

Brief aside: I am of a generation that has straddled both sides of the information age.  When I was in school research was conducted by reading encyclopedias, source material, and microfiche.  My 8th grade paper was on the history of the atomic bomb.  So I went to our family encyclopedia to start reading up on the subject but I couldn't find anything on it at all.  Turned out, our encyclopedias were older than the atomic bomb was.  Kids have it so easy these days. 

Back to apples.  According to the package there are only two ingredients in these apples.  The apples themselves and calcium ascorbate.  "Haha, Crunch Pak people, I've got you in my sights now!" I thought.  If calcium ascorbate doesn't sound like scientific jargon meant to conceal ghastly side effects I don't know what does.  Acorbate just sounds like something that will harden your arteries, shut down your kidneys and cause priapism.

They don't look great, but they aren't getting browner.

Or maybe it's just good use of science.

According to a company called UniChem it's pretty harmless.  In fact, it sounds like it might even be good for us.

Ascorbic acid is the pure form of vitamin C; however, with the combination of calcium, the supplement calcium ascorbate is produced. Because calcium ascorbate is less acidic and thus, easier on the digestive tract, it can be consumed in high doses without the possible side effects like diarrhea, rashes and stomach aches that may occur in individuals who are sensitive to taking pure vitamin C.

This picture is blurry because I was too drunk on
apple cider to hold my phone still. 

It goes on to say that:

Calcium ascorbate offers an efficient way to supplement vitamin C and the essential mineral, calcium, at the same time. Amongst other mineral ascorbates, calcium ascorbate is a non-acidic form that can provide the same great benefits of vitamin C without upsetting the stomach and digestive system.

So, if the only thing that's been added to these apples to keep them from turning brown is this magical combination of vitamin C and calcium you could make the argument that these apples are even better for you than regular apples are!

Sober again.  No noticeable change in 4 hours!

Still, isn't it more than just a little unsettling that these don't turn brown?  I left the apples out overnight and still didn't notice any browning.  They had gotten very dry and the peels were starting to bubble a little bit but the flesh still looked like a fresh-cut apple.

So I've concluded that my thesis was all wrong and that these apples are probably fine.  They are probably better than fine, in fact.

For an in-depth article on how these apples were brought to market, check out this piece from the New York Times Magazine:  Twelve Easy Pieces.  Within the article are some interesting facts such as:

• In studies, students in Florida ate twice as many apples when they were sliced as compared to whole apples.  Students in Nevada ate three times as much when the apples were sliced.
• Americans eat half as many pounds of apples as Europeans do per capita.
• They figured out that cutting an apple in 12 slices optimizes freshness.  Apparently, when you cut an apple in normal situations the apple increases production of the hormone ethylene.  The cutting also ruptures cells that had compartmentalized substances that suddenly spill out and intermingle.  
• In 2005, McDonald's stocked 54 million pounds of pre-sliced apples.
• Before the 1960s, boxcars full of unmarketable apples were dumped into Washington's Columbia river.  Then they learned to make frozen juice concentrate out of those apples instead.
• Apple growers in Washington harvest apples in late summer and early fall and store them in oxygen-depleted containers so they can slowly distribute them throughout the year. 

So my teachable moment that I was getting all ramped up for?  Looks like the teacher became the student.  Story of my life. 

Gifts for Gardeners - And How We Can Get Them!

During my extensive web wanderings, I see a lot of internet ads targeted at people who know a gardener that would love something related to their obsession for Christmas.  But the non-gardener is almost always at a complete loss when it comes to buying a gift that the receiver would actually need or want.  And, I fear, all too often the purchaser overpays for something that will be gratefully accepted but ultimately underused or under-appreciated.   For example Red Envelope's garden tote and set of tools for $69.95.  It's a nice thought, but any serious gardener already has these tools. And besides, has anyone in the history of the world ever made a practice of hauling their pruners, hand forks and trowels around their yard in a tote bag?    

At this point in my life I find myself in the fortunate position where I can buy for myself some of the things I need and many of the things I just flat out want.  So when Christmas rolls around and people ask me what I want for a gift this year, there just isn't that much left to ask for.  I wish I could say that my lack of a wish list this time of year had more to do with recognizing the true meaning of the season than it does with my year-long tendency to gratify myself instantly.  That sounds "dirty."  What I mean is that as long as I buy myself whatever I want all year there's really nothing special I need in December. 

Obviously, that doesn't help those people in my life who, for whatever reason, think they would like to get me a gift.  So I have been learning to do a few things to make it easier on them and I thought I'd share those things with you just in case you find yourself in a similar predicament.

Stop Buying Stuff!

The first change I implemented was that I stopped buying myself things starting around mid-October.  For most gardeners, that's not the hardest thing to do because so many of us have already finished our gardening seasons by then.  But in Zone 9A, where I garden, mid-October through mid-November is prime tree and perennial planting season.  So, on some level, this is an actual sacrifice for me (a sacrifice for which I don't get enough credit, I think).  Of course, I found a way to get around my self-imposed spending hiatus and still get trees in the ground at the best time.  I simply buy my trees earlier in the season like I did with this Strawberry Tree.  I bought back in July and kept it in the pot until it was time to plant.  Disclosure time: I've read that this is unnecessary for trees that have been in nursery pots as they will almost always be better off being planted out even in the heat of summer than they are while stuck in a black plastic cauldron.

Books

Another change I implemented was that I started paying attention to the kinds of information I was going to Google for.  Although it seems that the world's secrets have all been recorded in HTML somewhere, inevitably, my online searches would lead me to blog postings or reviews about gardening books that promised even more information.  I find that although the gardening community is pretty subdued in its criticisms about all gardening efforts whether they be books, videos, or garden designs, the cream still rises to the top and the books with truly good information or inspiring prose would surface time and again.  If you've been paying attention to the books in the blogosphere, chances are that you've read about Dirr's Encyclopedia of Trees and Shrubs or one of the many books written by the Garden Rant contributors like Garden Up! and Wicked Bugs.  I could easily list another 7 or 8 books just off the top of my head that have struck me as particularly interesting but I think you get the point.  But instead of buying these books for myself like I would the rest of the year, I added them to my Amazon wish list.  The great thing about the Amazon wish list is that people know about it and they can get exactly the book you want without worrying about buying the wrong addition or getting the wrong book entirely.  ("Was it Joy of Gardening or was it The Joy of Gardening?")  Even if you aren't much of a reader, gardening books can provide you with helpful data and inspiring photos.  I tend to read mine more in the winter as I stare out the window and wait for spring so they make wonderful and timely Christmas presents.   

Not gardening related, but I appreciate literal literature.

Gift Cards

Another option is gift cards.  I know, I know.  "How impersonal."  "How unthoughtful."  Well, say what you will about the worthiness of gift cards as presents; I adore them when I receive them even if I wouldn't dare to buy one for someone else without knowing that they also appreciated their plasticy promise of just what you need when you need it.  Gifts cards make good gifts for the gardener because they are easy for people to buy and they can be shipped without having to wait in line at the post office.  And, if they really want to, gift-givers can put them in a Hallmark card that says all the thoughtful things they think that the gift card doesn't communicate on its own.  But here is why a gift card is great for gardeners at Christmas time: very few things can be purchased from a nursery this time of year and put in the ground.  Heck, in many parts of the country, the plant sections of nurseries aren't even open this time of year.  So a gift card to a favorite garden center or online retailer is one way someone can give you a gardening present and still be sure that you'll eventually get exactly what you want.  Lest they think that it's still not a good gift, reassure them that the prospect of getting to use that gift card in spring will excite you throughout the winter months.  And, come spring, it will be like receiving a second gift when you actually get to use it.

Closed for the winter?

Expand Your Horizons

"Gardening" is a pretty encompassing term.  Underneath the umbrella of this one word is a plethora of genres.  You can be a vegetable gardener, a water plant gardener, a bonsai enthusiast, a daylily hybridizer, a plant propagator, a backyard orchardist, an urban farmer, a guerrilla gardener, a cottage gardener, a greenhouse grower, a fairy garden creator, a strawbale gardener and now, at least for the time being, you can even be a marijuana grower.  If you've been doing nothing but growing daylilies for the last decade, consider trying something different.  By doing so, you'll expand both your knowledge base and your shopping list.  Take bonsai, as an example.  As a new hobby you would need to get all new materials: how-to books, shallow pots, copper wiring, a concave cutter, pruning shears, planting soil, and a fresh supply of patience.  By taking up a new interest, you give someone else the opportunity to get you started off on the right foot.  You'd practically be doing them a favor by starting something new because it would be so easy for them to buy you something. 

I love pots.  I have several unused bonsai pots in my pot ghetto and in my garage. 

Consider Becoming a Collector

This is dangerous for a number of reasons, but it will make purchasing a gift for you easier for years to come.  My sister-in-law is a sweet lady.  She's so quiet, so polite, and so afraid to say anything that could possibly be construed as contrarian.  I'm not sure how she ended up in my family.  When she was a newlywed, she made the catastrophic mistake of telling my mother that she collected ceramic cow figurines.  At the time, it was just a new trend in her life and I'm sure it wasn't something she intended to make a permanent part of her life.  Two decades have passed and people are still buying her cow magnents for her refrigerator, cow-shaped cookie jars, cow-print hand towels, and yummy steaks.  Okay, not steaks; I was just kidding about that.  But now that I've mentioned it, I might have to consider that as a possibility this year.  So, if you want to collect something garden related, be sure it's something you can tolerate getting a lot of.  You should probably avoid a collection of gazing balls unless you want your flower bed to look like the ball crawl at Chuck E Cheese's. 



Which is which?  Is this the ball crawl?



Or is this the ball crawl?


Wish Lists

Finally, I'd like to revisit Amazon for a moment.  Although most people know that Amazon sells a bazillion different products, one of the coolest features of Amazon is how it puts you in touch with other retailers.  Many of the items being sold on Amazon are not actually products that will be shipped to you from Amazon but from retail partners.  But wait, there's more!  Recently Amazon featured a new tool that will help you keep track of all the wonderful things you could ever want in one simple list regardless of who has the item.  It's called the Amazon Wishlist Browser Button.  It's basically an add-on for your internet browser that you install and then, while visiting any web site if you find something you'd like, you simply click the "Add to Wish List" button and that item will be added to your list on Amazon so people don't have to hunt all over the World Wide Web to find the exact items you want.  I'm using this myself this year and hoping that my wife will get me this Hori-Hori from Annie's Annuals!

Growing Excuses Not Food



A must-read book about
our relationship with food.

In theory, I’m big on the whole “grow your own food” trend.  I passionately believe that doing so makes sense on so many levels.  It’s economical, it’s environmentally healthy, it’s a source of exercise, it provides the grower with a better sense and appreciation for what it takes to get food on the plate, and (for the Mad Max scenarios of my imagination) it will be what keeps us alive when the whole world goes to hell.  I follow Michael Pollan on Twitter, I have King Corn on my Netflix queue, and I refuse to support Monsanto so, you know, I totally get it. 

In practice, however, I’m basically a hypocrite.  It’s not that I don’t grow any of my own food; I do.  But it’s more of a novelty than a bona fide food source.  For example, I have a mature peach tree that produces more fruit all at once than we could ever hope to eat.  So for about 10 glorious digestively-regular days we have peach milkshakes, peach cobbler, and grilled peaches but that’s where it all ends.  We don’t can our extra peaches to extend our bounty and we don’t have any other trees that produce fruits or nuts for us to eat until December when the oranges are ripe so we'd probably develop scurvy should the world as we know it come to a screeching halt.  You can basically repeat this scenario for all the other things I grow.  A lot of my tomatoes end up in the compost bin.  Much of the lettuce I grow in the spring winds up there too.  I chewed on one single piece of broccoli (and spit it out) before I pulled up this year’s plants in favor of the warm season bell peppers I planted a couple months ago (and have yet to harvest).  I have every intention of increasing my homegrown food yield, but when it comes right down to it, I haven’t devoted the time and, more importantly, the garden space to doing it right. 

Part of the problem is that we just don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables in my household to make it worthwhile.  My three-and-a-half year old recently interrupted a conversation we were having about what we needed from the grocery store to note that "we eat a lot of potato chips".  The other part of the problem is that I’m still hung up on growing ornamentals and perennials in my yard.  I don’t want to apologize for that.  It’s just where I’m at in my evolution as a gardener.  But at the same time, I am apologizing for that because I disagree with myself philosophically and it’s about time I confessed before it ate me up inside.

You see, for years I’ve found excuses not to become a more self-sufficient link in the food chain and my excuses are growing (unlike my neglected butternut squash). 

My friend, Brian, took me along on a fact-finding trip to a bee shop a while ago.  He was interested in starting his own hive and I was curious about the whole thing too.  Who doesn’t love honey?  And more bees in the yard would be great for my plants.  Besides, bees need a little help with that colony collapse disorder, right? 


I could stretch my dollar by also using one of these suits to play paint ball in.  If I played paint ball.


Well, in spite of being gung ho about it all initially, I found ample reasons not to pursue bee keeping myself.  First, my wife is allergic to bee stings; a fact that, by itself, should have precluded me from even thinking about keeping bees.  Plus, I’d be signing up for regular trips to Walgreens to restock EpiPens and after the first ER visit I have a feeling that my Queen Bee would make me look for a hive/apartment of my own.  Second, it’s not exactly cheap getting set up as a beekeeper.  It could easily run a couple hundred bucks after you get the robotic looking netted-hat contraption, a smoker, the wood boxes for the hive, the bees, and the equipment to extract the honey from the honey combs.  And really, it seems like a whole lot of effort for just a little bit of honey.  And that's the real reason.  I don't have the time or the energy to do it right.  So I chose instead to spend $10-$15 a year to buy local honey and support those dedicated farmers who’ve already got the set up and depend upon customers like you and me to keep them in business. 

Not sure exactly what the message was,
but this was part of "Chalk It Up"
in downtown Sacramento last week.

"Besides," I told myself, "I’d rather have chickens."  Which was a convenient thing to tell myself, because I already knew that Sacramento County prohibited keeping chickens unless you had a lot that was at least 10,000 square feet (which most homeowners in this area don't even begin to get close to).  Oh, and one minor financial consideration: in case you did have a 10,000 square foot lot, you still had to submit an application along with a non-refundable $4,500 application fee.  Yes, that’s four-thousand-five-hundred United States dollars.  And just because you applied did not mean you would be given approval.  So you could either fund your Roth IRA for a year or apply for the privilege of keeping a couple chickens.  Clearly, Sacramento’s City Council was just egging us on to follow the old adage “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.” 

Undaunted but uncommitted, I researched the quietest chicken breeds (Black Australorps, apparently) and some covert coops designed to look like garbage cans and herb gardens so nosy neighbors wouldn’t have enough audio visual evidence to turn me into the chicken coppers.  I was really into the idea and thought it would be great.  Free, nutritious eggs and an ongoing source of manure for the garden?  Plus they would make fun pets for my daughter.  How awesome would that be?   

But I never followed through with it.  I told myself it was because I didn’t want to break the law.  And now, in my revisionist historian ways, I’m telling myself it was also because of my wife’s debilitating ornithophobia, but we all know my sympathy for that has its limitations.  The truth is probably closer to the fact that I don’t want to add taking care of chickens to my list of things to do right now.  Not without a good place to keep them.  Not with an aggressive shepherd-mix dog that would harass them non-stop.  Not with dreams of going on vacation and not wanting to ask my neighbors to water the plants, take in the mail, turn on the porch light, get the dog water, AND feed the darn chickens. 

So last week when the City Council finally came to their senses and lifted the backyard ban on chickens I knew that it wasn’t going to change anything for me.  I’m really, really thankful that people in my county can now pay just 1% of the former application fee to keep up to three chickens.  They have to pay $15 upfront and then $10 for each hen – no roosters allowed!  Still, in spite of the drastic reduction, $45 in up front costs for a few chickens, not to mention the cost of the coop and the feed, reduces the economic benefit when a dozen eggs is only $1.89 right now.  Even if you consume a dozen eggs a week, half the annual money you'd save by having chickens of your own would be lost due to the fees.

Of course, once those Mad Max scenarios come to pass, those chickens are going to be worth their weight in gold.

*For a really great chicken related blog, check out Scratch and Peck.  And do yourself a favor.  Start reading from the very first blog entry.  

OMD! (Oh My Dog!)

Even after he was caught red-pawed, he rests with a clear conscience.

It's not unusual for me to wake up in the morning to find that the sliding glass door that leads from the bedroom to the patio is wide open. 

My family dog and garden companion/nemisis figured out long ago that he could unlock the door with his nose and then push open the door if he really needed to get outside to hunt a squirrel playing on the fence or to bark at the mail man (who, by the way, is a man so I'm not being sexist in this case). 

This "talent" my dog has means that we have awoken to many surprise discoveries.  One morning many years ago we awoke to the sound of our dog gnawing quite loudly on the (mostly) decomposed skull of a deer.  On the gross-out meter, that ranked pretty high.  Much higher than today's treasure which was simply a rolled up pair of my socks that had been buried in the yard somewhere.

Annoying yes, but it could have been worse.  It could have been Chip or Dale or even Alvin, Simon or Theodore.

I have been reading "Plant-Driven Design: Creating Gardens that Honor Plants, Place, and Spirit" by Scott and Lauren Ogden.  While some of the book's blunt opinions may rankle those of us that tend to collect certain types of plants, there was at least one section of the book that resonated with me.  That would be the part where they note how difficult it is to grow a garden with multiple dogs.  While I only have one dog, I think he does the damage of two so I quote this section knowing that the spirit of the quote applies to my experiences precisely: 

". . . [Dogs] often develop pack behavior, establishing regularly patrolled routes that become promptly evident in paths worn through beds and lawns, and torn and broken limbs marking trails through shrubbery.  Plant-rich gardens can't easily develop alongside such rambunctious animals; excluding them from areas with intensive, vulnerable plantings is usually the best course."  

I agree.  My garden would be much better off if I could exclude my dog from specific areas, but my yard is small already and given that I can't even keep him inside our own house, I don't even bother trying to restrict his boundaries within the backyard fence.  I have waived the white flag and surrendered to the fact that as long as I have a dog living here I will also have an imperfect garden. 

The good news is that today's damage wasn't permanent.  The picture below shows where the X on my dog's treasure map was.  It's annoying and it delays the inevitable filling in of this newly renovated patch of earth, but I will survive and my garden will live to see a better day.  My socks, on the other hand . . .