More Fall

Fall in Sacramento, when it comes in all earnestness, is a brief and sometimes wonderful few weeks.  In the last few days the autumn season has come on strong.  And today, being an overcast Veteran's Day, was a perfect chance for me to take the camera outside and spend a few quiet moments making some digital memories.

The mulberry tree doesn't produce much in the way of fall color but what it lacks in color it makes up in quantity.

I believe this is a Chinese pistache tree but I haven't been able to positively ID it yet.

More berries.  I once came "this close" to tearing out this frequently ungainly looking bush but the berries make it worth it keeping.

A struggling fuschia on the left and a slow-growing Japanese maple, 'Red Dragon' on the right under planted with some mondo grass.  This vignette will be reworked some day next spring, I think.  But for now it's good enough.

The liquid amber tree . . . it's a true love/hate relationship.  A tall, stately, columnar tree with beautiful fall color and interesting seed pods - that also act as hidden mines when they fall to the earth.  Bare feet beware, these guys mean business.

One of my favorite Japanese maples is this 'Koto No Ito' which means something like golden harp strings.  The inspiration for such a name is fairly obvious this time of year.

More fuschia.  Some blooms still hang on while others have given up the ghost.

More of the ubiquitous mulberry leaves and a succulent planting I'm rather fond of.

Crepe myrtle leaves:

A borrowed view of fall; over the neighbor's fence.

Not every plant and tree is on the same schedule.  Even here, a single branch can't seem to make up its mind.

Japanese maple 'Seiryu' went from total green last week to this:

The plum tree is a bewitching mix of orange, red and green:

And, finally, a word from my family to all the Veteran's out there:

Thank you, and happy Veteran's Day to all who serve and served.

Sandbox Garden

When we moved about a year and a half ago, we did so because we wanted to find our “forever home” before our daughter started elementary school.  It was important to us that we give her the chance to grow up with the friends she would make at school and not have to go through the experience of leaving her best buds if at all possible.   Obviously there were other factors we had to consider as well, but that one certainly drove the timing of our decision to move.   

One of the things I was looking for in a new home was a larger yard where I could stretch my gardening wings a bit more.  I wanted a yard big enough to allow my gardening interests to flourish but still coexist with a child’s inalienable right to play.  I wanted room for a collection of Japanese maples and a Wiffle ball field.  I wanted a yard big enough to grow watermelons in and to lay out a slip-n-slide at the same time.  In short, I wanted a little slice of Americana.    

So when I saw the sandbox beneath the fruitless mulberry tree - the same mulberry tree that had wooden steps nailed into the trunk and ropes hung from a sturdy limb to support a swing, I thought for sure that I had found a yard that would work for both me and my daughter.   

I took this picture on the day of the home inspection.  You can see the swing at left.
I think the yard, in general, looks really different already.

In the months since we moved in, my girl has climbed those wooden planks several times and stood inside the canopy of the mulberry tree.  She’s marveled at the new world from up there and she’s decided that living in a tree house would be “so cool”.  She’s also begged me to find a swing to hang from those ropes too.  A request I have tried and failed to fulfill.  But she never got interested in the sandbox like I thought she would.  Maybe it was the more than occasional cat poop we found.  Or the omnipresent spiders.  Maybe it was the hardened sand, the constant leaf litter, or the fact that she’s already too old for sandboxes . . . if there is such a thing as being too old for sandboxes.  She just didn’t seem to care about it one way or another which was amazing to me because I was a kid that spent days on end in a sandbox.    

On the Saturday before Father’s day, I found myself standing outside, just soaking things in; plotting my next steps.  After my eyes kept stopping on my own misplaced clutter, I determined it was past time to find places for the things I had brought from the old house.  First and foremost was the fountain my wife gave me when I turned 30 a year or two ago . . . give or take the better part of a decade.  Since the move, the fountain had been left out of the way and unfilled under the mulberry tree just because I didn’t have anywhere else to put it.  I would need the fountain to be close to an electrical outlet for the pump.  I would need level ground.  And I wanted it be away from the house because I had learned through experience that it tends to splash and leave hard water stains which are as hard to get rid of as glitter on your skin. 

Tangent: I overheard a guy say to his girlfriend in a craft store a few months ago “Glitter is the herpes of craft supplies.”  I’m pretty sure he adopted that line from a comedian, but I gave him due credit for making me laugh anyway.   

Given that one of the three outside outlets in our backyard is just feet from the sandbox it quickly dawned on me that the sandbox would be an ideal location.  But what would my little girl say to that?  I have seen her, several times, suddenly proclaim her rekindled affection for a toy or stuffed animal only after we decided to donate it to Good Will.  Would she suddenly have a hankering for sand castles or for finally embarking upon her long-planned digging expedition to China through the center of the earth?

The gap in the sidewalk was just wide enough to run the cord AND drip irrigation tubing.  Score!

I drilled a small hole at the base of the sandbox for the wiring and irrigation.

Clearly I was going to have to run it by her and get her buyoff.  So I asked her point blank, “are you gonna play in that thing ever again?” or something similarly eloquent.  And she said, basically, “of course not, Daddy.  I’m a more grown-up big-little-kid and I would prefer to do more productive and creative things with my time.”  So, with her permission, and with her help, we started digging out the sand.  It took a surprising amount of time since I didn’t just want to throw the sand away.  I could use the sand to level the pavers I had haphazardly placed as a walkway around the corner of the house.  So as we dug out the sandbox we also leveled the pavers (in the picture below).  That took us most of the afternoon - a long time to ask a 6-year-old to help you in the yard - but the two of us had a lot of fun working together especially since some of that work was just looking at the bugs that fled their homes when we unearthed them.

The smaller square rocks were leftover from a Tic Tac Toe game (using river rocks) that didn't get much use
after the first year so I repurposed them here.  They could use a cleaning, but I'm otherwise happy with the look.

On Father’s Day, after being spoiled with breakfast and coffee delivered to my lazy butt on the couch, my daughter accompanied me to the “rock store” (basically a quarry with a nursery attached to it) so we could buy a smooth paver to use as a base for the fountain.  Then we went to the nursery to pick out plants for our new sandbox garden. 

I took her to the shade plants section and basically said, “Anything you want we can get”.  She chose a couple good looking coleus plants and I picked a few ferns.   And together we planted them around the fountain.  One of the coleus plants lost a limb on the drive home so I showed her how we could put it into some water and it would grow roots of its own.  This was amazing to her (frankly, it’s amazing to me too).  As we worked side by side I got to listen to her daydream aloud about how we could sell coleus plants to people at a lemonade and flower stand. 

Our first "new" coleus is doing just fine.

We took cuttings from the other two types we bought and put them in a window sill in my man cave.

As far as Father’s Days goes, this last one was pretty great.  I am lucky to be a father and to get to spend time with my family.  And part of my fortune, I realized, is getting to see the world through the eyes of a child and discovering that it’s not always going to look the way I think it’s going to.  Sometimes that world is going to look like lemonade stands and plant sales instead of sandboxes.  And you can find happiness in either one.
  

A few shots of the new "sandbox garden":

Planted with asparagus ferns 'Myers', Japanese Spurge (Pachysandra terminalis), Silver Lady Fern (Blechnum gibbum), Coleus blumei 'Electric Lime', Coleua blumei 'Rustic Orange', and Coleus blumei 'Crimson Gold'.

Suffering from a Lack of Focus

It’s become increasingly common for me to have conversations with friends about our growing inability to maintain focus on one thing at a time.  We blame the internet.  Commercial break?  Check Facebook real quick.  Pause in the conversation while you wife sneezes?  That’s a perfect chance to check your fantasy football scores.  Three minutes before you have to go to a meeting? Refresh your e-mail to see if anyone else has written.  Sad to say, it’s gotten bad enough for me that it’s no longer uncommon to stop what I’m reading mid-sentence and check stock prices or to see if any of my favorite bloggers have published a new post.  And if someone posts an online article with links in it, you can pretty much write-off any chances of me finishing the original article.

    

All this is to say that this sort of internet fueled ADD has bled over into my unplugged life.  It used to be that I could go outside and tackle a project and work on it until completion.  What is more likely to happen now is that I will go out to deadhead the dianthus and I’ll end up working on sprinklers, picking up liquid amber balls of pain and fury, or check my phone to see just how hot it is because it sure feels hot.  Oh look, here comes the ice cream truck.  I wonder what kind of profit they make on days like this.  Do you think that’s a good job or is it just miserable driving around listening to that one song all day long?  What is that song anyway?  I should Google it.  Now what was I going to do with these pruners in my pocket? 

Gardening is supposed to provide us with a break from these kinds of distractions isn’t it? 

Our drought and the heat make these succulents feel like the only responsible plant I can buy right now.

This past weekend being Memorial Day weekend, I decided to make a mini-vacation of it and I took a couple extra days off.  This allowed me ample opportunity to work in the yard in the mornings before the afternoon temps hit close to 100 degrees.  While I worked, I tried really, really hard to focus on one task at a time.  I was mildly successful.  But at after a few hours of weeding, it occurred to me that maybe multi-tasking does have its benefits.  For one, it allows you to use some different muscles and relax others.  The biggest advantage of focusing on one task though has to be the satisfaction that comes when you actually complete something and know that you’ve done it well. 

I installed a brick mow strip to border a new bed I created a few weeks ago. 

I still need to add some sand to the cracks between the bricks and clean up some of the excess dirt from excavating.

I weeded that new bed, a bed I made last year, and the vegetable garden. 

My fenced-in vegetable garden as seen through a young pomegranate tree.

I planted plugs of dwarf mondo grass in a small foundation bed.  I trimmed and pruned the dead wood from several trees.  I hacked off an enormous amount of mulberry branches that were touching the roof of the house.  I extended my drip irrigation system to include a few more plants that were looking worse for wear. 

One of the trees I trimmed was this potted Chaste tree.  When this tree blooms, it's pretty awesome.

I replanted a Strawberry Tree that was competing with the lawn to gain a foothold.  And I thought about, but decided against, cleaning out the potting shed.  But I want credit for just thinking about it because the thought alone made me tired and irritable.

This tree looks so pathetic right now.  Its droopy leaves and sparse
branches make this look like the landscape equivalent of Charlie Brown's
Christmas tree.  Hopefully my decision to replant it now will help
it along and not sped up its death.

I stretched my body and my mind and I came away with a renewed appreciation for what a little focus can do.

Same view as the one above a couple shots but with a different focus.
See, even my pictures can't stay focused on one thing!

Slow and Steady Wins the Race - Or Prolongs the Finish

I like the story of the tortoise and the hare and how the message is that the slow-and-steady approach wins the race.  I admit that I like it because it helps me justify just how long it takes me to get certain things done though.  I'm not a true procrastinator.  I'm too impulsive for that title.  I'm just slow with certain things. 

It’s been a full four months since I had the mulberry tree in my front yard removed.  With the tree gone I had to swap out a bunch of shade plants for things that love the sun.  It took me a couple weeks to figure out which plants I would use and to get them ordered, purchased, and planted, but I did it and I’ve got that dialed in to my satisfaction now.  I also got right on fixing the broken sprinkler lines in the immediate wake of the stump grinding since some things shouldn't wait. 

But in the last four months, the one glaring thing I had not done was figure out how to address the unsightly mess left behind by the stump grinding.  As was promised, the arborists back-filled the hole with the shredded-up stump.  It looks like soil but it’s not.  The surrounding grass has not encroached upon the site at all.  I suspect it has something to do with the decomposing wood tying up all the nitrogen.  The absence of the tree and its surface roots also made it painfully obvious that my yard is not level by anyone's definition. 

The "footprint" of the mulberry tree.

Back in August, I justified not doing anything about this because I figured that re-grading and then re-sodding my lawn when it was a hundred degrees out was not a good idea.  I’d put it off until September.  But then when September came I had plans that involved a week in Boston and my wife had several trips for work planned.  And it was still really hot.  It just seemed like a bad time to tackle a big project.  October, with its cooler weather would be a better month for this.  Of course, I found reasons to delay in October too.  There was a birthday I had to plan for, a 3-day weekend in Lake Tahoe I was looking forward to, playoff baseball, and still pretty oppressive heat.  At one point I did make a couple half-hearted attempts at contacting a few landscape companies to come out and give me an estimate but I had bad luck with that.  One company never called me back and I decided the other one was going to be too expensive so I cancelled their appointment. 

One of the many "sink holes" in my lawn.

Now it’s mid-November and my yard still has this big gaping hole in the center of it and there are so many holes and bumps that it looks like the template for the old Atari game Moon Patrol. 

If it weren’t for my friend and neighbor, Brian, I would probably be stuck in my tortoise shell barely moving on this.  But Brian managed to find a landscaper that would return his calls and over the past two weeks I’ve been watching these guys tear down Brian’s backyard and rebuild it into exactly what Brian wanted.  On the night they wrapped things up I approached the owner of the company and asked him if he could give me an estimate on my yard. 

I would love to do it myself.  I believe I have the capability of doing it myself.  But I also know that for me to remove 1400 square feet of sod (and tree roots), regrade the entire yard, install a functional sprinkler system and then put sod down, it would take me more weekends than I care to give up.  After some conversation with my wife, we agreed that this is one of those times when it is worth it to pay someone else to do it. 

So nothing has happened yet except that I am on the landscaper’s calendar for the week after Thanksgiving.  And I can hardly wait.  I just wish I had gotten to this point sooner but I'm going to trust that old Aesop had it right and that in the end, I'll be happy that I took the slower approach.

Tiiiiimmmmbbbbeeerrrrr

Once upon a time I took a Lit test on a novel (Saint Maybe) of which I had read only the first 16 pages.  But I had gone to the 3-hour night class the week before and paid attention to the discussion so I felt reasonably certain that I would do well on the test.  And I did.  I received the highest grade in the class. 

Later that year I showed up to my 12:30 p.m. Modern Philosophy class after two weeks of having slept through classes and discovered that we were having a test that day.  I was so lost.  I received the lowest grade in the class.   The 35% I received was generous. 

Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with gardening.  But I bring it up because it speaks to the way I do things.  I am equal parts slacker and over-achiever.  I am just as likely to procrastinate as I am to get something done immediately.  It just depends on my mood.  

Naturally, I take that approach to life into the garden. 

I took this photo on the night before the tree was scheduled to walk the un-Green Mile.
It's not a good photo because of the harsh lighting, but it lets you see what a dominate feature the tree was.  

My mood lately has been all about getting things done.  A couple weeks ago it occurred to me that I had a couple problem trees and after writing about it and getting some valued feedback I decided to get them chopped down.  And, as of yesterday, those trees are now mulch destined for someone else’s yard. 

I can't see one of these in action without thinking of the movie "Fargo".

I was pretty proud of myself for taking action and getting things done so quickly. 

And then 5:00 rolled around – generally the hottest part of the day in Sacramento – and as I stood in the middle of my newly “full sun” lawn with a hose in hand, I found myself metaphorically kicking my own butt for acting so quickly.  I really should have waited until October to cut down the shade-giving mulberry tree.  Another couple months wouldn’t have made a big difference in my gardening plans anyway. 

As for the peach tree that was cut down I don’t have that same regret.  No, it’s an entirely different regret.  The arborist I hired told me he thought the reason it stopped producing peaches was because I let the tree get too tall and overgrown.  It had grown beyond its fruit-bearing size and could have benefitted from new wood every year.  Oops.

I wish I had kept this section of the peach tree but they took it before I got to it.

What’s done is done though, right?  It’s easy to look back on life and second guess the choices we made, to cling to regrets, to redden with shame for the things we did or didn’t do.  But once we’ve learned our lessons from those things, there’s really no use in holding onto them.  I have learned the value of reading every word of a book, I have come to see the truth in the saying “90% of life is just showing up”, and now I know the importance of planting the right tree in the right place and that sometimes it is okay to procrastinate when doing so gives you a little more time to enjoy the shade.

Sawdust and hydrangeas or what was and what still is.

I Am My Garden's Biggest Pest, Apparently

Almost ten years ago my wife and I started looking for our first home.  It was a frustrating experience because it occurred right in the beginning of the housing boom in California.  Home prices were increasing on a weekly basis and even though we were offering more than the asking price we were getting outbid.  Our poor agent (who deserves nomination for sainthood) wrote something like 25 offers on houses for us.  At the time she said it was the most she’d ever had to write for a client. 

Depressed by our lack of success, we started grumbling about giving up and finding an apartment to rent.  But before we got carried away with our Plan B we decided to spend one more weekend checking out open houses.  And that is when we discovered our house.  I was immediately enchanted.  Although I was not yet a gardener, I had grown up under the shadows of trees.  And this house had trees. 

Well, it had six trees anyway.  In the front was a giant fruitless mulberry tree which cast a luxurious canopy of shade on the front of the house.

As I walked up to the front door that first time I remember the feeling of comfort that shade provided.  It felt almost like I had wandered into a forest.  In the back yard there were 3 aspen trees (or were they birch trees? I had no idea), some kind of palm tree, and a white peach tree.  I hated the palm immediately and never changed my opinion.  

This is what the corner garden looked like when we moved in.  

I loved the others.  It felt like home so we made an overly generous offer and, miracle of miracles, it was accepted.

A decade later there are now about 30 trees on my property.  The Aspen/Birch trees didn’t make it.  They were planted in the lawn and the grass grew right up to the trunks.  I don’t think the roots ever had a chance to get established so that first winter the trees bent to 45 degree angles after a few rain storms and some wind.  I tried propping them up and staking them but it was clear that they were the wrong trees in the wrong spaces.  The hated palm tree eventually started rotting.  I imagine it knew I didn’t care for it and decided to make it easy on me.  I spent a weekend cutting it down and digging out its roots.  There was never any manual labor I enjoyed more.    

Of the original 6 trees, only the Mulberry and Peach tree remain.  But I’m seriously considering changing that.  I will miss the size of the Mulberry tree but you know what I won’t miss?  I won’t miss the leaves clogging the gutters.  I won’t miss the roots coming to the surface and ruining everything in its wake.  I won’t miss how the roots occasionally crush the PVP sprinkler pipes.  And I won’t miss the annual bill for having the branches trimmed back.  Left to its own devices, the branches quickly grow to the point of touching our roof and extending over the neighbor’s yard.  The other day I watched from the window as the garbage truck lifted our can to dump it in only to have the can whack a bunch of gangly branches on the way up.  It’s only a matter of time before the county sends me a form letter saying they won’t pick up our trash unless we do something about that tree.  I will feel bad about seeing the tree go, but I think a smaller tree will eventually provide the kind of shade I first fell in love with without the unruly roots and annual costs associated with maintenance. 

As bad as I feel about the Mulberry, I feel terrible about the peach tree.  It’s not a tree I would choose to get rid of and the fact that I’m now faced with that possibility is an indictment on my early days as a homeowner.  The peach tree originally was a multi-stemmed specimen.  Someone once told me that trees only have one trunk.  So, I guess the correct way to say this is that there was one trunk but three main stems.

Here is the peach tree from "back in the day."  

Initially the tree gave us buckets and buckets of peaches.  For years I would spend a few minutes each August night picking up the fallen peaches before the ants and rodents could get to them.  It wasn’t uncommon to fill up an entire 5-gallon Homer Bucket.  There was so much fruit and I was so thrilled.  I never once considered that there could be too much fruit. 

Not this kind of Homer Bucket

This kind of Homer bucket!

Until it was too late.  The first stem cracked under the weight of its own bounty about five years ago. The crack was probably seven feet long and several inches deep.  At first I thought it would heal on its own but the leaves quickly browned and it was clear that the stem/trunk would need emergency surgery.  So I cut it off at the base.  Sometime later a similar fate happened to the second stem.  Now the tree looks like a traditional tree with just one trunk.  I have spent a lot of time trimming out dead branches trying to improve air circulation and feeding it compost.  It’s the least I can do, right?  I would also be very careful about removing some of the fruit to keep the weight down if only there were fruits to remove.  I harvested a grand total of zero peaches last year.  I figured it was due to the really bad case of peach leaf curl that all of Northern California succumbed to last year.  But here it is late June of the next year and it doesn’t look like there will be anything to harvest this year either.  

Last night I spent some time inspecting the tree to see if there was any hidden fruit.  I couldn’t find any but I did find some hidden problems.  Most notably, I found a couple holes which appear to have been made by insects.  Termites?  Carpenter ants?  I really don’t have a clue but I can’t imagine that this is a good sign.

And then I found this huge fungus growing at the base of the tree where the other stems had been cut off.  Clearly, there is rotting wood here providing this fungus with a steady diet.

I thought about calling in an arborist but then I thought it might be pointless.  The tree seems beyond hope now and that makes me want to kick rocks sullenly.  Ten years after moving into this house and I’ve gotten to the point where I’m about to either kill or remove all the trees I inherited.  That seems wrong to me.

What feels right to me, however, is the thought of picking new trees to take the place of those trees that will soon provide us with the fuel for S’mores.