Category Archives: gardening

Little Green Courgette

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(I think that perhaps Prince ought to write a song with this as the title. Hmmm…)

So to accompany the other types of squash that have begun to appear (see previous post), I’ve some courgettes (or zucchini) coming along nicely. It seems I have two plants of these this year (with a bit of leaf mould infection that I ought to see to), and so in the next few weeks I should have some nice additions to various meals…

Still to be unveiled are some Mystery Squash plants that I put into the soil a bit late. I grew them from some seeds that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Gourdy Goodness

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Ok… So that was a bit unexpected. I was not expecting these when I planted them. Crookneck Summer squash.

I’ve got several of them coming along in three clusters… They look very much like tough, inedible gourds, and I imagine that they can be like that if picked at the wrong time. So I’ve picked a few small ones and the bigger one in the second photograph (below) and will see how they deal with being tossed into a stir-fry.

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‘Tis the Season

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There are a lot of silly, ill-informed things said about Los Angeles, mostly in the form of lazy clichés. Sometimes said by people who are otherwise quite sensible, but the power and groove of a truism is hard to resist, even when it is an untrue one. One of them is that there are “no seasons” here. This is just a silly thing that people say in place of saying that they are used to seasons from a different climate and they have not taken the time to listen and watch for the march of the seasons that is evident here. (I think also that we have it amplified by popular culture that the standard symbols of the Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter cycle involving snow and red and gold leaf colours and bare trees and jack frost nipping at your nose and so forth are “the way things are supposed to be”.) A friend of mine has in her email signature the slogan “I have a life. It is just different from yours”, and so I will retool it here: “We have seasons. They are just different from yours.”

jasmine_in_bloomJust like anywhere else, the seasons wink or call (sometimes even shout) at you through certain combinations of colours, smells, temperatures, and so on. I think people miss a lot of cues in Los Angeles because they don’t get out of their cars and walk the streets very much. Even a few gardens or hedgerows passed along the way can show a lot about the mood of the season the city is in. For me, colours and smells are very big cues in Los Angeles, and there are times when large parts of the city seem to be dominated by a single plant’s smell or colour or sometimes both. For me, it is the Jasmine time of year now. This is when the night-blooming jasmine bushes (cestrum nocturnum, apparently) of the city all seem to work in concert and fill the air with a great scent, and lovely clumps of creamy […] Click to continue reading this post →

Emergence

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p-2048-1536-705e409d-537f-4828-b855-794993185c21.jpegThis is a regular sight that nonetheless always fascinates me. This very compact pair of palm trees (or is it one tree? I’ve never been sure…if you follow the trajectory of the two trunks they look like they might fully join just below the surface of the ground) produces such a delicate flowering and fruiting extension that looks a bit like a drooping hand (with a lot more fingers than normal, yes). An alien hand, perhaps, but of a friendly, curious, tall species that would simply gather small samples from our planet to study out of curiosity… Ok, perhaps I am getting carried away with my imagination. Still only on my first morning cup of tea.

It was Labor day here yesterday, and I deliberately use the American spelling […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Rewards of Countermeasures

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So I had a big payoff.

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The War has dragged on for a long chunk of the Summer, with attacks on three fronts, air (Flitty), ground (Slinky), and, most annoyingly, tree (Fluffy). While I do counterattack, including pointless and potentially embarrassing bouts of fury that see me rush outside early in the morning, sometimes in various states of undress, waving a broom, towel, pan, cup of tea, machete, or whatever I can lay my hands on, most gain is made by thinking through useful purely defensive countermeasures (perhaps in another post I will share with you a rogue’s gallery of the results of other countermeasures – see e.g. here). These were first laid on in July, while the figs were still far from interesting to the enemy, and also while they […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Vial of Calm

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After spending more than half the day writing a report, fiddling with data gathering for the report, and dealing with various annoying issues in background over email, it is nice sometimes to be able to walk outside into the garden, pause to take a deep breath in the warm sunlight, and harvest some lovely tasty things.

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Aaaahh…

I really need this sometimes. It is good.
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Produce

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tomato_crop Well, here’s the first batch of the season (not counting the onesies and twosies I’ve nibbled over the last few weeks as I go by), representing four different varieties… By the way, my compost played a role in all this, so it is quite satisfying.

If the War goes well, I ought to get more of these soon. Several plants are producing tomatoes.

News from the Front? Fluffy has started the above ground […] Click to continue reading this post →