Rained really well so no trip to the garden

It rained a bit harder in spurts yesterday so again didn't bother to go out and check on things. Tomato is not really going to do anything fast, don't expect the beans to grow for a while and the cilantro is likely pummeled. Really understand now why people don't garden much in the winter around here and don't understand the people that do.

Vegetables are very seasonal for a reason. If you want to have a 'salsa garden' in winter, good luck. About the only thing that's going to grow is the cilantro. You need to plan your garden for when it's going to harvest not when to plant it. So having salsa in the summer you have to have really fast growing plants if you want it from your own plants. I could have done the tomatoes and peppers for sure but neither ended up ripening at the same time and not very well. Also need onion and the cilantro which I didn't have unless I bought it. So veggie gardening for me is more of a novelty, I would love to have the space to do a flower garden and this is another year I can't buy bulbs despite me wishing to. Gardening in general is seasonal. Some people don't understand about that or have a different idea of what's seasonal due to them being used to living in another area or state entirely.

We plant 'spring bulbs' in fall and 'summer bulbs' in spring. Because guess what? That's how long it takes for them to grow and bloom in the normal cycle of things. Another thing I would get asked is 'what's your favorite flower?' Now that's a toughie for anyone because there are different categories of flowers. Bulbs are wonderful because they typically come back year after year if you're in the right area. For So. Cal unfortunately tulips, crocus and hyacinth need more cold to repeat every year so they are one shot wonders if you don't chill them.

          

For bulbs believe it or not I love Freesias for sentimental reasons and for fragrance you just can't beat Hyacinths. Hyacinths come in four colors. Yellow is a newer color variant but previously it was 'blue', white, pink and dark pink. Each color smells slightly different and they are all wonderful no matter what so that would be one of my first picks. 

Tulips are gorgeous of course but very short lived at least where I am. All the different shapes and types are incredible! There are daffodil varieties that I have always wanted to grow because of how unusual they are. Where are the paperwhites you ask? Well they have their place of course but again very short lived and overrated in my mind. Due to their odd growing needs they don't do as well in the ground as they do in a pot and replanted. Cross fingers they decide to come up the following year and flower, haven't had much luck with that in the past.

Summer bulbs... I absolutely adore Gladiolas. Tall, stately and a wealth of colors from purple, green, white, red, bicolor, orange even. Full rainbow of colors and I would love to grow them some day. Iris..bearded iris are another flower that I'd love to have. They keep growing and multiplying through the year and you can divide them all over the place. Just about all bulbs will divide, that's one of the reasons why they're such a great addition to the garden. Put them in the ground, be sure to mark where they are! You can sink them in a pot so it's easier which with most plants would be silly. Overplant with annuals that will be there before and at the same time as the bulbs.

I could go into the details on how bu lbs, especially tulips, got to be so popular but that's something for another day.

There is water falling from the sky finally!

 After I watered the tomato and cilantro yesterday of course. The rain is not enough to really penetrate the dirt and barely washes the dirt of my car but at least it is rain we need though still not enough to thoroughly soak the ground

I didn't take any pictures when I watered for some reason or other. Not much progress there so same ol' same ol'. I did water the other empty bed just because it helps with microbes and such, as well as the compost pile. 

So no pictures this time around, nothing even from previous days because I already used some of those that are pertinent to gardening. Since it's drizzling don't need to water and it's cold so plants aren't growing very much. Oh! I did throw some more pepper seeds where the other pepper was after I watered. Wrong time of year for that but who knows what will happen by spring. We aren't due any really warm weather for months from  now on, not that we're like back east or up north with weather but we usually have day temps in the 70's most days. The soil cools down as well which is another factor people don't consider with some plants.

It's not just air temperature but soil as well that determines how fast a plant grows. When you see some seed packets that say 'after the last frost' that means the weather warms sufficiently that the ground will start warming.

Another point: when does it frost? Why does it frost?

Frost is air condensation that has frozen. It is a combination of air moisture (condensation), no wind and low temperatures. What you need to look for on the weather is 'dew point', that is the temperature at which condensation will form in the air and create 'dew' on the plants and ground. 

 So you can see from this screenshot, today the wind is non-existent, humidity is relatively high (if this were summer we would be melting), Dew Point is the temperature at which moisture will form in the air. It may well get down that far but it depends on where we are and how long it stays below that temperature. The combination of no wind, possible low temperatures and the skies have to be clear is the other part of the formula. We could get some frost in low lying areas, we have a lot of hills and valleys and some areas will be in a frost area and others will not. According to the weather and from what my old 'weather sense' says, it won't get down to 50 in the next 24 hours, 53 is predicted for most areas. We are currently cloudy which means it is holding the ambient warmth from the city a bit high so for the most part, no frost conditions yet.

And there you have your garden weather lesson for the day. Science!

 

 

Again with the delays in posting

 When there's nothing to do, you do nothing right?

I need to get out and water today hopefully so there's not much in the way of pictures from the actual garden. Instead going to talk worms, plant size and other stuff.

Walking Rocky the last few days I've noticed 'wormsign' as I call it. Worm poop, worm castings..whatever you want to call it, on dirt areas in the lawns.

This is a good sign of work activity in the ground. In the last decade or so there has been an increase in people asking for worm castings. It's a good source of minerals for soil and is best used in really organic and fluffy soil. Why not in soil like I have? Because I already have clay soil and that's what this is. Worms eat organic material and what comes out the back end is essentially dirt that is extremely fine and slightly gritty. No organics left in it so if you put this in a garden that is already heavy soil it really is not good for improving the texture. But if you have a pot or garden that is mostly compost, this is a good addition as well as just a touch of regular 'dirt'. 

You want the composition of your soil ideally to be about 1/2 organic, 1/4 clay and 1/4 sand. You can also do 1/3 of each which is more ideal for potting soils. Worm castings are not bad, not saying you can't use it but like anything else you need to be aware of where you're putting it. The gardeners have not used any fertilizer at all on the lawns and as you can see, it's typical bermuda patchy lawn but other than the tree roots it's fairly healthy.

Remember that Norfolk pine that they moved? Well it's got issues now and I suspect it may be from a lawnmower running into it.

The bottom band on the barrel is gone so the roots and soil are just expanding. I tried shifting it but there's no help for it at this point, it needs to be repotted. The color is not good either, it's lost a lot of green and some of the branches are browning. Poor thing.

I talked about roses and how to tell when you have to dig them up and how to recognize the root stock. Well here's your sign,

Hard to get a good shot of this due to shade and position but all the branches are coming from the ground, it essentially looks like a climber, which it wasn't, and the former bush trunk is evident in the middle. So much I want to do to fix the landscaping around here and can't do a thing about it since it's not my job nor place to tell people how to do things.

Anyway...bright spots in the garden on the other hand are the signature winter flower for Southern California, pointsetties? No, calendulas.... no:

 All the bushes are just busting out with flowers. Since it is a South Africa native, it's spring going into summer for that hemisphere and therefore, they are blooming here. Several other plants from Australia and other places usually bloom in the winter here because that's their timing. 

On the right of that photo you can see a tall stem with a tuft of foliage at the top. The left side...is a nandina that is about 5 feet tall, (the bush in the background is a viburnum). 

Cat for size comparison accidental

This is a better shot but still a bit wonky. When people see that the mature size of something is say 5-6 feet they gasp, 'I don't want anything that big!'. You know how long it took for this to get that tall and look at it? Spindly, not cared for should have been dug up and replaced by now. My usual reply is, 'don't let it get that tall' or 'then you don't want this bush'. I have seen some nandina that were full and beautiful and full height but it's not common.

So a bit of this and that, don't let your pets chew on your plants, pointsettias or azaleas or trees or garland.. you know the drill.

 

Finally got back out to the garden

 Still dry, warm and very little wind. Went to ComiCon yesterday so no gardening. Amongst peopole and sity surroundings, couldn't pay attention to much else than where Iw as. Geekiness is my other side and sometimes have to feed that too.

As for what's going on in the garden...nothing much. Tomato is still growing, so is the cilantro surprisingly.  Neither showed signs of stress but watered this morning because they needed it.

Interesting how the shade marks the boundary of my growing area. The cages are keeping the cats out because there's signs of scraping in the south bed.

So just watered and checked to see what the little tomato flowers were doing and... they were all yellowing at the base which means no pollination.

That's all right, not expecting much from a summer tomato going into winter. Plants are so amazing taking what we think of as a killing situation and they survive. Much like other animals and people except plants are doing it out of survival and higher organisms sometimes do it out of revenge or a sense of hope and perseverence.

A little too philosophical there but there isn't much else to talk about. Looking out the window and there's barely a breeze, the sky is absolutely clear with very little haze so it's that wonderful light to medium blue. There's a sense of waiting and an almost tense air while we transition into the holiday season. Normally I would be busy at work likely patrolling either plant tables or the seasonal section depending on how busy it is. I do not miss that. Plants don't care. They exist and have very few needs which we are responsible for if they are in our care. I would give up my weekends again to be able to help water, arrange plants, educate people... but then I wouldn't be writing this blog.

Shifting seasons without much else to mark it can be almost surreal. The trees are losing their leaves and it is definitely colder at night and during the day. There still hasn't been any rain and by all indicators it's going to be another dry winter where I am. It's going to be dryer for many years to come due to the shifts in weather patterns and 'global warming'. The world has gone through this before, people have contributed to it this time around but previously it went unnoticed except for changes in animal and plant growth, migrations and evolutions. 

Oh something that comes to mind that has nothing to do with gardening but more of representing plants in media.

I play in Second Life which is a virtual world way before the current term of 'metaverse' was in the news. What I have discovered is there are creators of content in SL that use various bits and parts of plants when trying to create 'alien' worlds. I am helping to relandscape a Pandora world and another totally made up one. Being a plant geek I can look at a multi colored plant and see what the original plant was that they based it from. A pitcher plant in bright orange but it has a hibiscus stamen in the middle of it. A blanket of pansies but they are brilliant crimson and purple, bamboo that you can color purple, light green, pink or yellow. It's amazing that you can take a regular earth plant and change the colors, suddenly it's not on Earth anymore.

It's just fun to see people use familiar names but then the image is nothing like we would think. I even came up with an idea for an alien plant that would drip sap below  the flowers and if anything walked through it would get stuck and then die and get absorbed by the plant much like a carnivorous plant. Another would drop seed pods if the ground below vibrated and it would occasionally kill whatever was under it. Yeah kind of nasty but just about anything on Pandora will kill you.

I think I'll just wrap it up for this session before I go completely off track.

Santa Anas again and will continue through the week

 I seem to recall only once did it rain on a holiday and that was I believe Easter about ten years ago. Or longer. We rarely ever have 'typical' Fall weather on Thanksgiving. So here we are having weather that is dry, hot and no wind. Not the best weather for being in the garden.

I went and checked on it anyway due to the dry air and hadn't watered in two or three days. Tomato is still plugging along and oddly enough, so are the cilantro. Nobody wilted!

The white-ish color behind the cilantro I at first thought was stressed or dried out leaves, nope. A small rock behind it so it's doing fine and so is the smaller seedling. So hard to get good pictures of them when they're so small. I don't think they've grown much and might have to get some liquid food that will give them a boost. There's some old MG in the storage closet next to the garden but then I would need a watering can and... don't have that.

Something else I noticed, that is another tidbit of info about soil. It shrinks and expands. 

It was dry enough that it shrank away from the retaining board. The grey haze on the soil is from the foam that formed when I flooded it last time. But this is something to keep in mind with pots as well. Soil will shrink and when you water it will just run over the top of the soil and down the side barely touching the actual root ball. Only succulents should get this dry and use the same soaking to thoroughly hydrate it after. Unless... it is a California native and only then lightly water and step away. Some plants don't want a flooding after being dry especially in the middle of summer. Keeping soil 'evenly moist' is tricky because in my situation I would have to be down there every day to water. Instead.... going back to mulching, that will keep it evenly moist and saves water and work.

My previous post about pruning roses? We were out shopping and stopped at a light near a large mall and what do I see next to us? Pruned roses and what I think is Dianella, judging from the thatch and size of the roses, they've been there for at least a decade.

The pruning of the roses was wrong in a few categories... wrong time of year for our area and it seems they only cut them down and stripped the leaves. Someone must have learned pruning in the midwest or some other colder region. Or their boss/whoever told them to do it that way. Sigh. Not my circus not my monkeys, they've obviously done it this way since the planting went in and they're still okay.

You can have a very educated opinion on how to do something 'the right way' and then you have that situation and just have to keep your mouth shut. Like trying to tell someone how to raise your pets, everyone is different and usually they all turn out okay.

There are few hard and fast rules for anything in the world the ones that matter are for a good reason but gardening.. whatever works for you.

Change of theme and rose pruning or not

Since it's fall I decided to change the theme and look of my blog. Didn't realize I could change the font as well as the theme so there ya go. Hope you like it and it will change with the seasons of course, this one may only stay until December.

On with the show!  Since there's not much to do with my garden there are plenty of things people can do in theirs that I don't have. One of the big topics around this time of year is what to do with roses.

I have grown roses several times, worked at a nursery where we sold them as well as pruned and planted them so I think I  have a good corner of knowledge on their care and feeding. In my complex though, there are some sad examples of roses that are just existing because no one has really cared about them for decades.

 

  When a rose gets to this stage in your garden start looking for a new one to replace it. The first one on top may be salvageable if it gets some care and feeding, the other three... not so much. A lot of people get very attached to their roses, I know, I dug up four of them from the yard at my house when I had to move. But I picked those out dangit and one was an antique rose. I'm glad I saved them and hope they are all still surviving wherever they ended up. Doubtful but I like to hope.

The one on the top right and lower left are truly not worth keeping. One or two spindly branches and I don't believe they actually bloomed this year. My hand was twitching to get my pruners and deal with them but honestly, more work than is worth and not my job. 

You can look up how to prune but it's a lot like taking online classes for cutting hair, nothing beats getting something in front of you to practice on. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a 'game' type simulation for gardeners to show how to prune and you get to try it on a virtual bush and get graded on it? Anyway, if you have a good two to three year old bush you have likely been taking care of it all along but what about moving into a new place that has existing bushes? I had to deal with that when I moved into a house and had a very small knowledge of how to prune roses, mostly gleaned from the pages of Sunset Western Garden Book that was my mom's. I did okay but there was one beast of a bush in the corner I don't remember pruning at all. I was raising kids and a dog or two and actually dealing with the garden was hit and miss.

Pruning at an angle is not really critical but pruning on the correct side of a branch is. "Outward facing bud" is the rule and about a quarter inch above and at an angle. That's been the rule for decades of rosarian advice. 

 

No matter where you live, that is a universal rule but how far back and when is the difference.

Hard snow areas roses have to be cut back now, in warmer areas like mine we do 'hard pruning' in December/January. But why? Remember the pictures and weather reports I've been doing? That's why.  As far as they're concerned it is still growing season as we won't be getting any serious cold and wet until late December and they start shutting down for good. That will last maybe a month or two and then they wake up again. Seriously.

This time of year there will be some roses that have formed rose hips, seed pods that is and keep those on as that tells the bush to shut down and stop blooming. This is a good thing in our area as you have seen. There are some roses that have continued to bloom all the way through winters when we haven't gotten enough cold and wet. Climate change is real folks, believe it.

Anyway, take a look out in the garden if you have roses and decide what needs to come out, where you want to cut and whether to save it at all. Now is the time to pick out new roses for sure. I miss seeing all the new varieties and old favorites coming through the nursery. Seeing how different each variety grew and who was thornier than another. There is no true thornless rose, no such thing, they get thornier as they age so when they're younger they may seem like they're thornless but they aren't. 

Thornless blackberries on the other hand, do exist, I know, I bought and grew one for a year. They are unfortunately very prone to spider mites and you have to be very on top of them if that happens. Mine didn't get enough sun and succumbed after two years to mite and insufficient room. They only get about four or five feet tall and wide so not the huge rambling wild types and therefore can grow in a container just fine. I just might get one actually as I have the room to plant one now. Hmmmm. If I had the money to spend on one.

More on that later. Now is the time for oohing and aaahing and oh that is wonderful! Looking in catalogues and going to the local nursery.

Should have watered, but took a walk.

 Decided to walk around the corner and see what sort of units they are building on the next street over. Been hearing hammers and yelling for a good couple of weeks. Won't be able to afford them but it was a walk then on the way back I decided to stop in the garden and see what's going on.

Need to water but didn't have the nozzle with me so just took pictures and discovered another cilantro sprout coming up. 

Okay so I've been having issues lately with dropbox not updating almost instantly like it has in the past. This is rather vexing and frustrating. I took four pictures, only one is showing up and the video I took of Rocky checking out a katydid on the screen. WTH?

Finally! So there's some flowers on the rather weak looking plant. New growth is supposed to be a lighter green but this is not a good look. It needs fertilizer and so do the new cilantro sprouts

Itty bitty tiny babies, good thing the weather is cool, which is likely why they are sprouting now. They are definitely not a summer plant. Most leafy veggies aren't so you'll see spinach, lettuces and all the cruciferous types in fall and winter. (I covered this before)

It is definitely cooler right now for the past few days, fog in early morning turning into patchy cloud cover doesn't dissipate during the day. It's warm enough for say a windbreaker or sweater depending on what you're doing. So this is prime weather for doing stuff in the garden...and I'm broke.

Such is my life: I will have money but no time, then have time but no money. The garden, as I said is a non-essential and is no more than a hobby. Oh the things I said I would be doing..... and now not sure if we're going to be here another year.

Meanwhile back at the garden, you can see by the pictures how sandy and rocky the soil is. Any organic matter is just floating on top so it's hard to get it incorporated. A better garden would have 90% organic and 10% inorganic. 

One of the first things I covered in this blog was soils and given the nature of my soil, that's about the ratio I would need for ideal growing. I would also have to make walls in order to contain the resulting increase in volume. I would be adding about two to three inches of soil level and that requires more engineering and building that I have neither time nor energy to do at this time.

So garden is on hiatus at this point and will see what happens in the next month or so.