Gardening

Creating a Perpetual Garden Journal

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Gardening
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One of our ongoing regrets around the Root Simple compound is not having taken better notes on the garden in the 24 years we’ve been here. What year did we plant that toyon? How long do the avocados take to ripen? What’s the best date to pick the pomegranates? To some extent the blog functions as a diary and I can sometimes go back through entries to figure out, say, what month I picked the olives two years ago. But there are a lot of gaps.

Towards the goal of better note taking and inspired by the work of botanical illustrator Lara Call Gastinger, I started a perpetual garden journal. To make one, you get a blank journal with enough pages to devote one or two pages for each week of the year. When you want to record something you go to that week and do your drawing. You can, of course, add written notes. As the years roll by you keep adding to the same pages thus creating a week by week visual diary of  what’s going on in the plant and fungi world in your garden or in the world around you.

I know that drawing is intimidating to most people (myself included) and looking at talented folks on Instagram only makes this worse. But drawing is not really about the end product, it’s about the act of observation. You could make a perpetual garden journal with digital photos or just written entries and there would be nothing wrong with either approach. However, I’ve noticed that when I draw things I tend to observe details that I think I would have missed had I just taken a quick photo or written notes. For instance, when I drew the prickly pear cactus fruit on the page above I noticed that the spines (technically, glochids) on the fruit form a kind of spiral grid.

You can use any medium–pen, pencil, watercolor etc. For most of my drawings I use a pen, ink wash and watercolor. I use ink so that I don’t overthink things and just commit to the lines. I would recommend finding a journal with enough pages to devote a spread of two pages to each week. I have only one page per week and I think the results will be a little cramped.

Are my drawings great? Nope. But I’ve decided to embrace my slightly wonky draftsmanship and just roll with it. It’s the act of seeing, after all, that’s more important.

Lara Call Gastinger’s Instagram is a great introduction to the perpetual journal idea.

If drawing ain’t your thing here’s a way to use Google calendar to do the same thing.

Olive Harvest 2021

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Fermentation, Food, Fruit Trees, Gardening
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One of the principle reasons to keep blogging long after social media and Google’s search algorithms deemed the end of blogs is that Root Simple functions as a garden diary. Towards that end let me note my second Frantoio olive harvest on Tuesday September 7, 2021. I harvested just shy of 3 pounds of olives from our parkway olive tree. I’m guessing I lost at least 9 pounds to olive fruit fly damage. I moved up the harvest this year to prevent losing all the olives to the damned fly. We’ll see if harvesting this soon changes the quality of the final product but I read that commercial growers harvest at this early stage.

Following UC Davis’ recipe for Sicilian cured olives I mixed up a brine consisting of:

8 cups water
3/4 cup pickling salt
1 cup vinegar

This was more than enough brine to cover my 3 pounds of olives, which filled one 64 oz mason jar and a half filed 32 oz mason jar. As of today, small bubbles have formed. Two years ago when I brined olives I replaced the brine about every month as the brine got dark. It took 7 months in the brine to get edible (and delicious) olives.

To cut down on olive fruit fly damage, I use a McPhail-type trap baited with Torula yeast tablets to reduce the fruit fly population. I use two tablets and replace them once a month. I definitely capture quite a few olive fruit flies and I think the trap gets me more usable olives but, lacking a control, I can’t be sure.

UC Davis recommends the traps combined with a late season application of kaolin clay when the fruit flies begin to lay eggs in the fruit. They also recommend replacing the bait every two weeks from April to November. This all takes careful observation–I only see the flies in the trap and the damage to the fruit is a bunch of very tiny holes that are hard to see at first. As the larvae develop the damage becomes obvious.

Harvesting and processing olives is one of the more labor intensive gardening tasks around our compound but how cool is it to have a chore the people have been doing for at least 6,000 years?

San Pedro Cactus Blooms

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Gardening
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Happy Labor Day from our San Pedro cactus (Echinopsis pachanoi). A friend gave us a large piece that we planted sometime before the pandemic. This morning it decided to put out at least 12 flowers all at once.

When I woke up at 6:30 a.m. a cloud of bees was working the nectar and pollen. Around 9 a.m. some figeater beetles (Cotinis mutabilis) showed up. Figeater beetles like cactus fruit so I’m guessing they were attracted to the smell.

The green parts of the plant contain mescaline which is used in Andean traditional medicine. It also makes an edible and (non-psychedelic) fruit. The plant is easily confused with the more common Peruvian torch cactus (Echinopsis peruviana).

Rain Garden Update

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Garden Design, Gardening, Native Plants
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Root simple reader Julia requested an update on the rain garden our landscaper Laramee Haynes designed and installed in 2019. Laramee’s rain garden idea solved two problems by taking care of a confusing, unused area of the yard and sending valuable rainwater to our landscape.

We consider the rain garden both a success and a work in progress. As Kelly put it, “I’m still trying to figure out what plants work best.”  She adds, “The issue with our rain garden is the soil around the edges is different than the soil at the bottom. And also the light conditions are such that one side is in shade and one in sun.”

The soil at the top is loose and the soil at the bottom is a heavy clay. Kelly planted Douglas Irises (Iris douglasiana) and sedges in the bottom. Around the edges she started with Coyote Mint (Monardella villosa) but it struggled and faced nightly digging from the many skunks that drop by while we’re asleep. Bees Bliss Sage (Salvia x ‘Bee’s Bliss’) was another casualty.

Kelly says, “I also planted Common Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) but I’d didn’t work even though it’s supposed to be hardy. I’m also trying Seaside Fleabane (Erigeron glaucus). I thought it would like the sandy conditions around the edges but it’s been slow to establish and is just holding on.”

Mimulus ‘Jelly Bean Dark Pink’

What has done well? Kelly says, “I’ve placed my hopes in creeping sages such as Salvia sonomensis Mrs. Beard which is doing pretty well. Mimulus ‘Jelly Bean Dark Pink’ looks good sometimes but not all year round and needs to be intermixed with other plants.”

Deergrass (Muhlenbergia rigens)

Kelly says we’ll be heading back to the nursery soon for more Deergrass (Muhlenbergia rigens), “It’s been under attack from the skunks but I’d like to put more in. It tolerates shade so I’d thinking of adding three more.”

To prevent the skunks from ripping up the bottom of the pit Kelly put down some pomegranate branches. Pomegranate trees have wicked thorns and that seems to have inhibited those pesky skunks. You can see extensive skunk damage in the top photo in this blog around the top of the pit. Maybe we need one of those motion sensitive hose gadgets?

A rain garden in a climate that gets year round precipitation would be very different than our dry, Mediterranean region where rain falls only during a short period in the first few months of the year. Kelly has thought about treating the rain garden as a kind of rock garden and planting succulents amongst the river rock but has decided to try to let the plants along the top, such as the sages, cascade over the sides.

Volunteer New Zealand Spinach (Tetragonia tetragonoides)

She says, “Landscaping the pit is like 3D chess–it’s hard enough to plant a flower bed but this is harder because you have in the same space different growing conditions and you have to make use of this unusual space in a clever way. Is it densely or lightly planted? Is it like a rock garden or do you have plants that cascade down the sides? How do you balance all this and not look crazy? I’m worried ours is looking crazy.”

I’ll add that at the very least the avocado tree appreciates the water and we’re not contributing to pollution by sending our rainwater to the gutter where it just washes oil and brake dust out the ocean. And I like the little bridge I built over the pit. The path leads to Kelly’s shed and something about crossing the little bridge adds some interest to a stroll in the backyard.

Here’s our original post on the rain garden.

I haven’t mentioned this in awhile but it’s worth repeating. The reason I include the scientific names of plants is not to show off but because this blog has international readers and the common names for plants can lead to confusion and, worse, cases of poisoning.

Bread and Roses

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Gardening
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On the entrance arbor at the bottom of the steps that lead to our house I thought it would be nice to plant some climbing roses to add to the general fuddy-duddyness that is our 1920s bungalow. Our two climbing roses have survived neglect for many years now and put on a nice show for most of the year.

While I’m sure there are many more worthy and interesting heirloom climbing roses one can hunt down we went with two boring varieties. One is an Iceberg climbing rose that Kelly calls the “gas station rose” for its ubiquity. The other is a lot more interesting, a Don Juan climbing rose.

The Don Juan has a strong scent, a rare quality in a climbing rose. Plus the people like our Don Juan. This week I’ve seen folks Instagraming it and de-masking to smell the blossoms (hope we’re not a horticultural super-spreader event here). While our Don Juan is conventionally attractive in a red rose sorta way, the scent is the winning trait. I’d describe it as what you might imagine a perfect rose to smell like in a pleasant dream.

The Don Juan rose was introduced in 1958 by Italian rose breeder Michele Malandrone. It requires 6 to 8 hours of sunlight and grows to the manageable size of 10 to 12 feet. We’ve been more diligent in pruning in the past year to keep it tidy on the arbor.

The main problem with roses, in my opinion, is that at some times of the year the leaves are just frankly, uninteresting. As I noted I’m no rose expert, so I’d appreciate your opinions about ways to make our roses more healthy and vigorous. The soil they are planted in leaves a lot to be desired and I’m very confused about watering needs. I’m also open to suggestions from readers about interesting rose varieties either climbing or bush.