It’s almost never too rainy to garden, and of course it’s never too wet to blog. But some outdoor projects have had to be put on hold temporarily.
Yesterday, when it was still dry, we started to construct a shade panel to begin to replace a patio cover we tore down last fall. Many of the plants on the patio are shade plants, and we still have some shade plants hanging in the shade of the greenhouse. As the weather warms and the sun begins to burn hotter in the sky many of the plants are starting to need some cover.
We got this far on the panel project yesterday. It’s a ten-by-four foot frame of aluminum, with an inset of perforated aluminum mesh. The diagonal cross pieces are for both structural support and what I hope will be a level of coolness.
And then it began to rain: Light mist now and then yesterday, and occasional rainsqualls this morning. Not safe weather for operating electric devices outside, but nothing to stop me from pulling some weeds and then stopping by my favorite local nursery, Walter Andersen Nursery. There was a bald spot out front and I needed a plant to fill it. One plant.
But the nursery was oozing green life force that proved irresistible and I came home with three instead: white flowering currant (Ribes indecorum), Route 66 California fuchsia (Zauschneria california ‘Route 66’) a second plant of Ceanothus ‘Tuxedo’ to go with one I purchased last year. I’ve resolved to plant at least fifty per-cent California native plants, and I think I succeeded. The first two qualify, and the last gets partial credit. (I have a post in the works describing why.)
Of course for me rainy days turn into opportunities to collect more rainwater for the prima donna bog plants that detest the water that comes from the tap. At this point I probably have several months’ supply in buckets and barrels. And the ground will hold its moisture and require minimal watering for several weeks. I wouldn’t want to force our county’s golf courses go without water, would I? (Well, yes, actually, I would. Yet another blog post…)
February 20 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: collecting rainwater • rain • shade | 8 Comments »
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 »
As winter approaches many of the plants in the bog garden are starting to retreat into dormancy. Sunday I filled part of a bucket with the trimmings from the bog and two trays of potted carnivorous plants.
I have mostly American pitcher plants, sarracenia, and I’ve been starting to learn the rhythms of the different species and hybrids. Many put out their main flush of growth in the spring and look progressively scrappier and scrappier as spring turns into summer, and summer into fall. Many of these are now tidied up in the bottom of this bucket.
Others sync up with hurricane season, presenting their most spectacular pitchers in late summer and fall when heavy rains can be expected in the American Southeast. The white-topped pitcher, Sarracenia leucophylla, is the most charismatic of these. At least two clones have been tissue-cultured and are commonly available, ‘Tarnok’ (to the left) and ‘Titan’ (to the right). In spring, a mature Tarnok will produce big red double pompoms of sterile flowers that will persist long into the year. The flowers being sterile, this could be considered a cultigen, a plant incapable of reproducing itself except by seducing members of the human species to keep it alive via division or cloning. ‘Titan’ is supposed to have the unusual ability to produce pitchers over three feet tall, though in my too-dry, less than ideal conditions, it’s not as good a grower and clumper as Tarnok.
‘Judith Hindle’ is another tissue-cultured, commonly available plant. I called this Sarracenia Trader Joe’s for a year because that’s where I bought this no-label plant. But I’ve decided it’s Judith Hindle because there was a whole big display of plants that looked just like this one, and I’m fairly certain that it’s the only hybrid that’s been tissue-cultured that looks and behaves like this. Like its leucophylla grandparent, it gives up its best pitchers in the fall.
Another plant that’s still got a few nice pitchers this late in the year is this red-lidded versions of the species S. alata.
And this hybrid, ‘Super Green Giant,’ seems to be doing well late in the season, though I’ve only had it since August and can’t vouch for what it’ll look like the rest of the year. Also, it’s lived a coddled life in a pot standing in water, not one loosed in the outdoor bog with these other plants.
Not everything is pitcher plants. This is the very easy-to-grow (some would say “weedy”) Drosera capensis, red form, a sundew from wet spots in South Africa. If you let it flower it will set seed. And if it sets seed, it can spread throughout your collection. I’m trying to figure out which of the bog plants can get by with less than boggy conditions. So far this is one of them.
In addition to the bog garden, I have two tubs of water with other plants. A very few are still looking presentable this late in the year. Three hybrids in this tub combine to make a lively red-and-green display: ‘Mardi Gras,’ ‘W.C.’ and a primary hybrid, x mitchelliana, made by Jerry Addington of Courting Frogs Nursery and retailed by Karen Oudean of Oudean’s Willow Creek Nursery. All of these hybrids are one half or at least one quarter leucophylla, so they retain some of its abilities to look nice in the fall. They also involve other species that tend to have a stronger year-round presence instead of retreating to a rhizome for the winter.
These trays of plants have moved from the unheated greenhouse, hopefully to trigger the dormancy that most of these plants needs to thrive. Another hope is that they’ll get a taste of rain and not yet another drenching of reverse-osmosis water. After many weeks with nothing, they finally got treated to our first big storm of the season. When I came home last night the trays had almost three inches of water in them. Real water. Free water from the sky. At last!
December 08 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bog garden • bog plants • carnivorous plants • Drosera capensis Red Form • rain • sarracenia • Sarracenia alata • Sarracenia Judith Hindle • Sarracenia leucophylla | 5 Comments »
I find weather and climate to be amazingly fascinating things. The media must not believe that the rest of the public thinks the same way, judging by how they always seem to need to sex up the topic.
“Flooding! Mudslides!” was how Weatherbug packaged the recent early winter storm heading for California.
Thinking that dry little San Diego stood a chance of getting some real rain out of the storm, I put out a couple trays of potted carnivorous plants in hopes of giving them a taste of real water from the sky. And along the eaves of the house I placed some buckets to catch rainwater that I could use later.
Unfortunately I was duped by all the buildup. Imagine my disappointment when I came home last night and found the buckets as empty as a bin of free hundred-dollar bills and as dry as the Baptist potlucks of my early teen years. We are talking dry.
Often by the end of September we have the first of the autumn rains. But not this year.
Still, the days are cooling. The skies are home to more and more clouds that look like they could deliver some precipitation. The rains didn’t come this week, but they’ll come.
October 15 2009 | Categories: my garden | Tags: collecting rainwater • rain • weather | 4 Comments »
We’re located far enough south that the monsoonal influence that brings August rains to the desert southwest can sometimes make itself felt. But we’re far enough north that the effect is mostly somewhat more humid days but very little or nothing at all in the way of actual precipitation.
Yesterday afternoon I was on the computer, playing a game of Tetris, that time-sink that raised itself in my consciousness again now that media outlets were celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary. For a few seconds there was this noise outside. Rain?
By the time I paused the game and made it outside most of it had evaporated, but I did manage to see a few drops left on some steps. It was enough to make it into the weather report as “a trace” of rain, but nothing to add to the 0.0 inches rainfall total since the start of the July rain season or 3.1 inches since the start of the year.
A trace isn’t enough moisture to mean much to the plants, but the weather pattern made for nice clouds for the sun to colorize this morning…
…and a nice moonrise last night. (Sunset a few minutes later was great, but I don’t take my camera everywhere I go.)
We’ve been thinking about getting ready for a few days away to see some family in the Sonoma Valley. A little rain would have helped with the preparations by reducing the areas I’d be hand-watering in preparation for being away. There’ll be someone taking care of the house, but it would be a little much to assemble detailed watering instructions or to ask them to climb a short but steep bank of loose dirt with a watering can to attend to some plants that are still getting established.
At a time like this I realize that this is a gardener’s garden that requires selective attention to different plants. Most of the plants are grouped by water needs, and two sprinkler heads and a small drip system take care of the thirstiest plants. But the occasional new plant mixed in with established plantings requires individualized attention—mostly in the form of extra water, usually delivered by hand. So I’ll be working through a short list of watering chores to finish before leaving:
- soak the potted plants
- soak the new plants scattered around the garden
- give the veggies a good drink
- visit the water store for 5 gallons of water for the bog plants
- water seedlings and cuttings in the greenhouse
And there’s one final important thing to remember: Put cat food out where the cat sitter—but not the ants—can find it…
August 04 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: rain • watering | 5 Comments »
This morning the runners in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon are taking to the streets down the hill from me. It’s overcast and cool enough, for sure. But somehow I’m not feeling motivated to run 26 miles…
The locals have a name for these two months when the morning cloud cover blots out the sun: May gray and June gloom. It makes for a slow easing into summer, good running weather, and prolongs the season when you can hope to put plants in the ground and not have to worry too much about keeping them watered.
Yesterday was extra-cool, and the thick marine layer of clouds made for a heavy drizzle most of the day. For me the sight of raindrops on plants is rare enough that I grabbed the camera.
Are photos of raindrops and dewdrops on plants and flowers cliches? Dunno. Even if they are, I think there’s something so satisfying about them that people need to keep taking them.
Below are all the photos I took in smaller gallery format. Going left to right: images 1-4, flowers of sacred datura, Datura wrightii; 5-6, leaves on tower of jewels, Echium wildpretii; 7, spiderweb on California fuchsia, Epilobium canum ‘Catalina’; 8, flowers of deerweed, Lotus scoparius.
May 31 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Datura wrightii • Echium wildpretii • Epilobium Catalina • native plants • rain | 6 Comments »
Last night was the official opening of the exhibition I’m in at the Cannon Gallery in Carlsbad, but the nice gallery folks had a little breakfast event for the artists earlier in the morning.
It rained lightly both heading north and back. Since rain is such a rare event in these parts, I got out my camera.
I-5 in the rain
These two shots are of the windshield on the way back. Don’t worry—John was driving. The first is with Interstate 5 in the background. The second is while we were being passed by a truck.
Passing Truck, Rain
The Breakfast Spread
Starving Artist’s Plate
They’d set up a nice breakfast spread for us. With the meal being served at ten in the morning, however, we were all starving artists. We dispatched the edibles in almost no time.
My photographs in the exhibition
And then it was finally time to go inside and preview the exhibition. Here’s my wall in the exhibition. Tonight there’ll probably be a few hundred more people at the opening, so it won’t be so easy to document the exhibition view.
Landscaping Around the Gallery and Library Complex
The gallery itself is part of the complex that houses the Carlsbad Public Library. Landscaping there is a mix of native sycamore trees and exotics—spiky sedges, biomorphic hedges and myoporum for groundcover. Like the library and gallery complex, it’s modern without trying to be particularly avant-garde. Nicely done, I thought.
The Overhead Screen
Running around the perimeter of the buildings is a screen wall that is set several feet from the main walls of the complex. Joining the two are these overhead screens cut out of patinated metal. The branches on the screens curve in arabesques that reminded me of Art Nouveau, but the triangular frames give them a geometrical edge that joins them comfortably with the architecture.
Isn’t it a shame most people are so busy looking down they never notice the branches—or artwork—overhead?
Post on the work in the show
The Cannon Gallery
December 14 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • photography • places | Tags: exhibitions • food • Interstate 5 • rain • William D. Cannon Art Gallery | 2 Comments »
