I looked west this morning while I was having breakfast and saw the first rainbow I’ve seen in months, maybe years. Although it was cool outside I had to go up to the deck to check it out. The rainbow was just a short piece of an arc rising from the ocean, but in this land of little rain you take what you get.
The rainbow was just about the last official act of a set of four consecutive storms that delivered over six days almost as much moisture as we received all of last year. And by “storms” I do mean real storms with rain, hail, thunder, lightning and tree-toppling winds. But for most of us in town things went as well as could be expected.
At work eucalyptus trees cracked and fell, buildings leaked, flows of water and mud threatened to invade several buildings. Walking outside entailed wading through puddles or jumping from one high spot to another.
At home power flickered on and off a few times. The back yard laked up briefly, but nothing that looked like it was going to come in the house.
Hail came down a couple times, but nothing was hurt. These pellets were about the size of peas.
Rain was heavy. These little buckets to catch roof runoff were full within the first 24 hours.
A potted Kalanchoe prolifera on the roof deck—seen here on the right—blew over. While the base must weigh 75 pounds when soaking wet, the plant is tall and proved no match for the blasts of wind that came through. This photo was shot after the plant was righted, so you can see it wasn’t bothered by spending some time sideways.
A survey this morning showed the trays of bog plants full of water, flooding the pots. These swamp dwellers are adapted to a little flooding, and in some areas people overwinter the rhizomes underwater so they don’t rot.
In fact, the parrot pitcher plant from the Florida-Georgia area, Sarracenia psittacina, can be found completely submerged over the winter. Its traps are unique in that they’re adapted to catching swimming as well as crawling creatures, so it’ll find something to eat, whether underwater or above.
The culvert in city easement behind the house filled with water. It makes me want to establish a little vernal pool in the muck at the bottom. I wonder if it would work in this location. Some of the most endangered plants in my area can be found around vernal pools and nowhere else.
The cooling weather and moister weather greens up the plants that have been dormant through the dry season. In the back Coreopsis gigantea leaves begin to sprout on what had been little brown trunks. But in the foreground you see all the weeds that accompany the season. These are mostly seedlings of a few mizuna plants, a Japanese mustard green, that I let go to seed a decade ago.
…and when life gives you young, weedy, tender mizuna sprouts, why not pick mizuna greens? These will be in tonight’s salad.
So you can see we came through pretty well. The main casualty was Scooter, the cat, who’s used to occasional times outside to sun herself. 
I think the “Can I go outside, please?” expression is pretty clear on her face here.
She did get to go out this morning, at last, and so did I. While I appreciate the rain, a little respite between storms doesn’t hurt, both for cats and humans alike. It also gives the waterlogged ground to dry out a bit or to let the water seep down farther.
If the weather forecasts are right, we’ll be getting another storm on Tuesday, but it won’t be anything like the almost continuous rain we just had. After 3 years of bad drought, we’ll take whatever rain falls, even if we don’t get any more rainbows with it.
January 23 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: cats • drought • rain • weather | 5 Comments »
It’s a dangerous time out there for California garden bloggers. One of them just had a run-in of a thumb and a chipper-shredder, though fortunately with an outcome way short of what you’d see towards the end of Fargo. 
(If you don’t know Fargo, here’s the snowglobe that came with the deluxe collector’s letterboxed edition VHS tape which mirrors the tone of the film perfectly. It memorializes the infamous chipper-shredder scene where Trooper Marge Gunderson comes upon the criminal trying to dispose of his latest victim. When shaken, the snow in the globe is tainted with little red flakes. Magical…)
Another blogger broke her arm, taking her away from posting for a while.
Not to be left out, a little over a month ago, while working on my house repair project, I ended up stepping into a pile of scrap wood that happened to have a big spikey nail that was pointing straight up out of one of the boards. My work shoes—some battered old Skecher tennies that were hip in the late 1990s—were no match for the nail and…you know the rest. I’m perfectly fine now, but two days of painkillers and the week of crutches were no fun.
I really should have better shoes for working outside, I thought after the little accident. And this weekend I finally got around to replacing my unsafe and ugly tennies.
So here they are: some industrial Timberland workboots with steel toes and puncture-resistant soles. They weigh as much as a small sack of potatoes but are surprisingly comfortable.
So was this overkill for working outside and around the garden? They should be great for forcing a shovel into the patches of the garden where the earth is seriously hardpan clay. But they’re definitely nothing to wear when trying to weave gingerly through a bed of new seedlings. I haven’t had a chance to plant anything over the last couple of days, and I haven’t had a need to finesse my way around tiny little plants. But I think I’ll like them and that I’ll actually wear them gardening.
Whatever the verdict, one member of the household is already happy. Here’s Scooter, who doesn’t give a hoot about my new boots. But every new pair of shoes that enters the house means that there’ll be a shoebox accompanying them. The cat approves.
November 10 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: cats • Fargo (film) • films • injuries • Scooter • workboots | 9 Comments »
Sunny and warm: a perfect morning for cats and gardeners. The cat had her chores, mainly to stare at interesting things in the garden, and I had mine.
Task #1 was to deadhead the arctotis (African daisy) that has been blooming for several months. This is the “before” on one plant…
…and the “after” on another. Arctotis goes on blooming regardless of whether it’s been deadheaded or not. But the plants looked like they were winding down for the year, and I was hoping to extend their season a bit.
The plants are attractive, but I thought the bucket of trimmings was pretty cool, too.
Chore #2 was to weed one of the patches of bromeliads that we’d let loose in the back of a raised bed. 
The plant has rigid spines like teeth on a sharp saw blade, which makes weeding tricky, and forces you to ask yourself, “Do I really want to do this?”
John started on the task and ended up with bloody forearms. Not happy. He went for the pitchfork, thinking we could lift the clumps, weed under them, and then set the clumps back. These are plants with almost no roots, and that would have worked fine.
But I proposed another idea. I have these long cordura motorcycle gauntlets that I use when I ride my scooter when it’s cold out. They protect your hands, but also your forearms. Would those work for the garden, too?
I suited up, first a thick long-sleeved sweatshirt, and then the gauntlets. Okay, it’s not particularly haute couture, and it’s not a look I’d want to inflict on the world. But it worked.
Why all this effort? Well, the flowers are pretty stunning right now in an unrestrained, tropical way. And the plants are surprising drought-tolerant.
Weeding around them seems to be the main challenge. But now we’ve got an easy solution…
April 17 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bromeliads • cats • deadheading • weeding | 6 Comments »
Last night the moon was nearly full and the garden glowed brightly in its light. The images below are all long exposures, from several to thirty seconds, so a tripod was essential.
Moon, contrail, clouds
Moon, contrail, clouds…
Yucca in moonlight
Yucca in moonlight: The flowers are white, but light from the nearby streetlight made them appear orange.
Moonlit Water Lilies
Water lilies reflecting the moon, over black water, with bent papyrus stems in the foreground… This is my favorite picture from last night.
Moonlit papyrus
Papyrus and falling water…
The cat, exploring…
The cat, exploring on the roof…
Neighborhood view
A view towards the water from the deck…
Garden at night
…and finally, a shot of the garden. In long exposures like this one, the garden almost looks as if it’s being lit by the sun. But the odd, theatrical colors from the lights in the houses give it a color cast that makes you look twice. Day or night?
Long digital exposures always have a degree of noise, the grainy prismatic fuzz that pollutes the darker parts of the images. (It’s particularly obnoxious in the cat image above.) Programs like Noise Ninja can do wonders with reducing the noise and making the images look more natural. But I think they’re fine for sharing on the web.
December 12 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • photography | Tags: cats • moon • night photography • Scooter • time exposures | 8 Comments »
It’s getting to be that season. My mornings are now seeing me at work around sunrise and home at a time when it’s almost dark by when I’ve finished preparing and eating dinner. And for the next two months it’s only going to be getting worse as we head towards the darkening maw of winter. At least I only do these long days four times a week. Still, I’m getting a serious case of withdrawal from the garden.
This is the time of year when I really start to feel envious about John’s position, working out of the house. In between doing what he does on the phone and computer he gets a chance to keep up with the happenings on the street. The neighbors across the street just had a new baby, John reported, and he’s really cute. John also reported that the mother of one of our neighbors just died, and the neighbor two houses down is now in a nursing home, completely incoherent, after being ambulanced away from the house not much more than a week ago.
Looking at the implacable facades of the houses on the street, it’s hard to tell that anything is happening. But being home, around the neighbors, John is able to keep up with dramas.
John is also able to keep up with things happening in the garden. A story from the past week was of looking out the window to see the cat dining on the tender new leaves of the millet seedlings that I’d set in the ground not many days before.
“You didn’t stop her?” I protested.
“It was soooo cute,” he said.
Scooter snoozing
Well, this was the cat over last weekend. How can you discipline basic instinctual behavior in such a sweet cat? Okay, okay, I calmed down a bit.
But I was still worried about the millet plants.
Left: Ornamental millet, Pennisetum glaucum ‘Purple Majesty’ [ source ]
Ornamental red millet hit the garden world in a big way with the introduction of the Purple Majesty F1 strain in 2003. This slender four- to five-footer was awarded the All-America Selections Gold Medal, which basically assured that the plant would end up in garden centers and seed catalogs all over. That strain spawned others, including the shorter ‘Jester,’ which I’ve been starting to see a lot of—even at the Home Depot garden center.
Even though purple millet is now so déclassé, now that it’s hit Home Depot, I decided I wanted to try it. A seed order a few weeks back brought me a hefty packet of the original Purple Majesty. Some of the seeds went into pots and they sprouted in less than a week. And then the little fellas were ready for the garden, when they were adjusting and starting to increase in size. And then the lawnmower cat attacked.
Purple Majesty millet seedlings
Well, I’m glad to say, I could hardly see any cat damage to the seedlings—a chewed blade here and there, but nothing major. Here’s a little clump of them as they stand today. The largest is pushing eight inches tall, and the red coloration is starting to develop now that they’re basking in full sun half of the day. It might be too late in the year for them to develop the dramatic seed heads, but I’ll have some nice purple, vertical plants in the garden in no time. Since these are hardy to zone 8, they’ll make it through winter just fine and be blooming away before you know it.
Anyway, now that I’ve have a couple hours in the garden this morning I’m feeling rejuvenated, especially now that I know that the plants I’ve been slaving over lately have come through unscathed. And of course it’s been nice to have some garden time to spend with the cat. To protect the millet, I’ve been pointing out to her the little grass seedlings that are real weeds. So far the feline lawnmower seems content with the other options.
October 17 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles • rambles | Tags: cats • October • Pennisetum glaucum 'Purple Majesty' • purple • purple millet • the neighborhood | 2 Comments »
I have a number of plants in the garden that reseed one year to the next, things like alyssum, violas, California poppies, some ornamental grasses, as well as the lettuces that I’ve written about. Another of these hardy reseeders is catnip.
A member of the mint family, it can get rambunctious in moister climates where it spreads easily by seed. Fortunately, unlike many other plants in the mint family, for me it doesn’t spread by underground runners. Each year I can count on two to a half-dozen new seedlings each year in seemingly random locations throughout the yard. Anything that comes up where it’s not welcome is an easy tug to remove.
This year I’ve identified two catnip plants in the garden so far. Both were starting to gain stature until Scooter got into one of them last weekend. Fortunately they have that mint gene that helps them bounce back after a thorough chewing. Now I’m wondering whether catnip needs to be a federally controlled substance…
July 10 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: catnip • cats | 2 Comments »
I’ve written about our cat Scooter. A while back I’d bought myself a Sputnik camera, and old Russian roll-film camera that takes two pictures simultaneously, each of them of the same thing, but with separate lenses spaced about the same distance as a pair of eyes. With a special stereo viewer or by making what’s called an anaglyph you can reconstruct the scene giving you a 3-d effect. When I took the camera outside on the first day I had it Scooter followed me out.
Above and below are a couple anaglyphs made from images shot during that session. If you have a pair of red/cyan 3-d glasses you can see the image in stereo. (A red/greed pair will work as well, though not as well. Clear glasses that use polarized light won’t work for teasing apart the separate images in the anaglyph.) I constructed the anaglyphs in a way that would still make sense to viewers without the 3-d glasses, in a way that features the star of each picture…
As much fun as I had outside with the cat I hadn’t bought the camera to take more wonderful cat pictures. George Bush’s Iraq War was chugging along full steam and the notorious pictures from Abu Ghraib had recently surfaced. The world was pissed after seeing them and so was I. Politics seeps into my art in various ways, most of them subtle, but I started a small serious of pieces addressing the Iraq war. Below is one of those works, a 3-d photomontage combining staged elements along with one of the most infamous war images of recent times. It’s a complex response, combining what might look like humor with a seething rage I still harbor towards a war launched by a man who’s now been responsible for more American deaths than the number of those who died in the September 11 attacks in New York. And that’s only a fraction of those who’ve been killed.
James SOE NYUN: Le Can-Can Abu Ghraib.
Technical Details: The original Abu Ghraib image was gently dissected and reassembled into two slightly different images that were then composited to give a subtle 3-d image. The foreground and stage were mockups that I staged and photographed twice with conventional cameras, moving the tripod to the side about four inches between exposures. The “dancing” figures were photographed using the stereo Sputnik camera. Two separate composite images were completed using Photoshop, one reflecting what the left eye might see, the other what the right eye would see. The left image was then pasted into the red channels of the final image and the right image pasted into the green and blue channels. The final work is printed fairly large, at a scale approaching narrative history paintings.
Google “photoshop” and “anaglyph” for a pile of resources on how to make your own anaglyphs.
March 29 2008 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: 3-d photography • Abu Ghraib • cats • photomontage • Sputnik camera • stereo photography | 2 Comments »
Here’s a picture of our cat Scooter, squinting:
Lovely, eh? She’s definitely great company in the house or when we’re outside gardening. But being a cat, she’ll be around one minute and off doing something else the next, only to reappear when you least expect it. Something like bulbs in the garden.
You plant the bulbs in the ground, add some water, and practically forget about them. Then when they’re ready, they emerge and bloom for a few days or a few weeks. Then they’re not there anymore, long before you get tired of them.
Most of the paperwhite narcissus in the garden have already bloomed. In San Diego they mark the start of the long bulb season, with its long successions of narcissus, cyclamen, freesia, dichelostemma, blommeria, oxalis, ornithogalum, ixia, ranunculus, homeria, calla, amaryllis, gladiolus, plus whatever else that you’d forgotten that you’d put into the ground. I never get tired of seeing them when they come decide to come around around. Something like the favorite cat…
November 30 2007 | Categories: gardening • my garden • rambles | Tags: bulbs • cats • corms • tubers | 1 Comment »
I think the “Can I go outside, please?” expression is pretty clear on her face here.
