Four years ago today, my garden was in full bloom. I know this because Facebook showed me my garden photos from 2019. The plants are way behind this year from all the rain and wind storms.
The roses aren’t blooming yet. The wisteria has just started to bloom. The potted plants either drowned in open weather or need to be tended to if under the cover of eaves or porches. I have two porches on my house, soon to have a third one.
Houses built in the 70s didn’t go for porches. Many houses in my subdivision have their front doors on the side of the house, facing the neighbor’s front yard. Many have since remodeled and moved the front doors so that they actually face the front. When I added on to my house eight years ago, I had the contractor bump out the dining area kitchen wall two feet and add a covered porch. It has been my favorite part of the addition, along with the extra bathroom and the huge laundry room.
Now I’m redoing the hall bath and having a tiny door installed with another porch. It won’t be covered, but it faces south and the park and will give me a shortcut to the side yard when people ring my doorbell asking for their frisbees, balls, drones, and other stuff back.
Like last night. A college-aged guy wanted his blue frisbee. I went out the kitchen slider and around the entire back of the house to get to the side yard. I walked the side yard twice and couldn’t find it. Finally, I found it in the blue wading pool filled with rainwater.
Back to the garden. The trees I planted a few years back are getting big. Two were seedlings from Girl Scout camp in 2011. The rest of them died, but two are happy campers. I have no grass anywhere on my property, lots of native and drought tolerant plants, sages, yarrows, mallows, lavender, native grasses, and the rose bushes that were here when I moved in.
For trees, I have one flannel bush with brilliant yellow and sticky flowers, three birches that survived the drought, two pine trees, several live oaks that came up on their own, a valley oak in the front yard and another in the hedge that got planted by a bird, two camphor trees and one ginkgo tree. Each has its own growth rate. Oops, I have six redwoods, two planted last summer when the city of Pacific Grove wouldn’t let me cut down my high-risk Monterey Pine tree. I’d already bought the four replacement redwoods but didn’t have room to plant them all down there so brought the two back here.
My apple tree on the side yard was half dead after the gardeners put in a foundation drain and cut through the tap root. It is back to producing apples, even though it’s an ugly tree now. The plum tree is on its way out, but two babies have sprung up under it and are now five feet tall. I cut down the orange tree that produced pithy dry oranges, a rat magnet.
It’s nice to take stock of the garden every now and then. I love the purple coprophagia flowers. Wait! That’s the name of the dog chewies so Pepper won’t eat her own poop.
I mean calibrachoa; I was close.
Not really.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 