A Better Place

 On my recent road trip up north, I took a side trip to check out A Better Place Forest's location at Point Arena, located about 130 miles north of San Francisco.  Cindy and I had had numerous end-of-life discussions over the years, but those discussions had never gone farther than deciding that we both wanted to be cremated.  When Cindy died in December 2020, I had to face the question of what to do with the box of ashes, and I didn't have an answer for that question.  

I had put a small amount of the ashes in the soil under a small "Blue Skies" lilac bush in our backyard last year, and a couple of family members had helped me surreptitiously deposit several "smidgeons" of ash around the grounds at one of her favorite restaurants, but that still left a LOT of ash in the box.  One of her favorite places to visit was the Muir Woods National Monument; every time we went to the Bay Area, we'd have to be sure to stop in for a visit among the towering, peaceful Redwood trees at Muir Woods and soak in the sense of tranquility generated by these magnificent trees.  I thought that her spirit would feel at peace among those trees, but I also felt that the National Park authorities would most likely frown on my efforts to deposit several pounds of ashes in the park.* 

So I needed to find an alternative site, and the Better Place Forest organization presented itself as a good alternative, with five forests in California, two in the midwest, three in Eastern states, and one in Flagstaff, Arizona.  The location at Point Arena seemed especially appropriate; we had spent many vacation days along the Northern California coast, at the old Greenwood Pier Inn at Elk and staying at our friends Eric and Elaine Hillesland's inn Alegria in Mendocino.  Also, the Point Arena location was the only location at the time that had  Coast Redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, which have always been special to me from the days when my family went camping among them at Jedediah Smith State Park.           

I picked out a tree on-line last summer, but felt that I needed to see it and see the location.  Just to be clear, the trees in this forest are not old growth Redwoods; the area was heavily logged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so these Redwoods are mostly about 100 to 150 years old, but they are still magnificent, stately trees. 

Redwood Forest

View Toward The Ocean

Tree and Snag

Tallest Trees On The Planet

Sunlight Through The Trees

Peaceful Path

 

And it is a peaceful, beautiful place.  I think it's the right place for Cindy, and later, for me, too.  

*  Note:  although ash scattering is permitted in some areas under the National Park Service's jurisdiction, Muir Woods is specifically excluded.  

Watsonia

 I am declaring victory, at least for now, over the Watsonia.  I don't know who planted these plants out behind the garage--they've been there for many years.  I don't think Cindy planted them; she wasn't much into bulbs. They bloom in the Spring with tall spikes of bugle shaped, salmon-ish colored flowers.  They're pretty for about a week, and then the weight of the flower stalks makes the whole thing tip over and drape itself all over the pathway.  https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/watsonia/

Hummingbirds apparently like them, but I've never been fond of them, mainly because of their path-draping habits, and it turns out I've never bothered to take any pictures of them in bloom.  The flowers die, the stalks and leaves dry up, and we've usually just left them alone.

The Watsonia climbed to the top of the "Garden-- Deal With It Now" list recently when the ancient garden hose that feeds the faucet on the wash table I gave Cindy several years ago sprung a leak.  I don't know if the leak happened because the hose was old and deteriorated through exposure to the sun, or whether some varmint decided to chew on it, but the sad fact is that it does leak and needs to be replaced.  

Pretty Clear Why It's Leaking

Replacing it meant that the dried Watsonia leaves and stalks finally had to be dealt with because they were in, around, and over the the irrigation pipes and wires behind the garage, including the hook up for that hose.  

Project Half Done:  Irrigation System Pipes And Remains of the Watsonia

That meant I had to be careful about digging them out without damaging any of the irrigation pipes, wires, or hoses.  So I started digging, carefully but with determination, cringing a bit whenever I hit something solid, which was pretty often.  Fortunately, the solid objects I was hitting turned out to be the Watsonia corms, which looked a bit like flying saucers.

Watsonia Corms

And it turned out that, after years of neglect, there were multiple layers of corms; corms on top of other corms and underneath them all usually a huge monster mother corm, all of which had to be pried reluctantly out of the soil.  

It was hot, tiring work, largely because I had procrastinated so long that the sun was on that side of the garage by the time I started.  I only got about half of it done the first day, so I decided to leave a couple of the corms on the wall to see if any of the local critters would nosh on them overnight.  Nope, they were still there with not a toothmark to be seen on them the next morning.  Taking a break overnight turned out to be a good thing, because I realized that what I needed was a tool that would give me leverage to pry the corms up, and of course, Cindy had such a tool in the garage.  

Corm Killer Tool!

The tool, part chopper and part fangy-toothed rake, worked great and I had much more fun hacking and prying up corms today.  

All Cleaned Out.  Wonder Where All These Pipes Go?

So I got it cleaned out.  Next--fix the hose.  

Now I need chocolate.

Blueberry Bonanza

 The blueberry bushes Cindy planted several years ago in grow bags out behind the garage have been busily producing a bumper crop of big, fat, juicy berries this year.  When Cindy's sister Mary was here a couple of weeks ago, we had fresh berries for breakfast many times, raiding the bushes many times over during her visit.  

Right Off The Vine

The neighbors who are farming the raised beds also filled their buckets several times.  Then they made a blueberry cobbler and brought it down for us to enjoy.  Yum!

Yummmm!

What a great way to get antioxidants!

When The Lilacs Bloom

 Cindy and I both grew up in climates where lilacs thrive, she in northeast Indiana and I in Kansas and southern Oregon.  We both loved the scent of the flowers.  To both of us, nothing says "it's Spring now" like the intoxicating scent of a lilac bush in full bloom.  However, living in Southern California has its drawbacks, one of which is that lilacs generally do not do well in San Diego's micro climate; there simply are not enough chill hours for most varieties of lilacs to bloom.  

Whenever we traveled back to visit her family in Fort Wayne in the Springtime, we would seek out blooming lilac bushes to get a hit of that heady scent of lilac.  Sometimes, if we couldn't find anything we could get close enough to without climbing over somebody's fence, we would drive by with the windows rolled down to get a "drive by" sniffing of the lilac's scent.  See A Drive-by Smelling

Early last Spring, before everything shut down because of the pandemic, she found a variety of lilac called "Blue Skies", Syringa vulgaris 'Monore', at one of the local nurseries that promised to be able to flower in warmer climates.  She put it in a biggish pot out by the mini-greenhouse I had made for her and hand watered it.  When she began to get sick last summer, she was able to spend less and less time in the garden.  The lilac began to suffer, and by the time I noticed what was happening and began to hand water it again, many of the leaves had turned brown around the edges and had begun to fall off.  I was afraid it might not survive, but over the winter the plant began to show signs of budding again.  

After Cindy died, I asked a friend to help me get the lilac planted in the ground near the bird feeder, where there was an existing drip irrigation connection, after I had watered the ground thoroughly so that we could dig a deep enough hole in the hard, compacted and very rocky soil.  

And it did leaf out, although the leaves are still a bit scant.  This variety is supposed to grow quickly to be about 10 feet tall and six feet wide, so it has a bit of growing to do yet.  

And It Bloomed!

The lilac scent was not very strong this time, and there weren't many flowers this year, but the scent was definitely there.  

And, yes, I did put some of Cindy's ashes in with the plant, so I'm hoping she'll always have Lilacs in the Spring.

The Gardener Is Gone, But The Garden Lives On

 Cindy's breast cancer came back late last summer in a very aggressive form called Inflammatory Breast Cancer.  As the disease progressed, it became more difficult for her to get out into the garden to attend to things.  By late August she had harvested and frozen the tomatoes and the beets.   The pole beans ran rampant; she harvested as many of those as she could, but many of the bean pods remained on the vines. 

 Our friend Janet came over one day in September to help me pull out the bean stalks.  We pulled off as many of the pods as we could and Cindy sat at the table on the patio shelling them, but we knew some of the seeds had escaped into the soil.

Cindy died in early December, during what passes for a rainy season here.  Without her time and attention, the garden began to go wild.  There were three foot tall dandelions growing in her raised vegetable beds; whitefly had attacked the dwarf tangerine and lemon trees in the pots in the driveway, and I was too busy and too overwhelmed to do anything about it.  

One day a gardening neighbor called and asked if we had a wheelbarrow she could borrow.  She came down to look at our garden cart; while she was here, she pulled some of the huge dandelions for her chickens, who apparently think they're a special treat.  

A few weeks later I pulled some more of the dandelions and took them down for the chickens.  While I was there, she showed me the raised bed her son had started for growing veggies.  Last summer Cindy had shown him her anti-varmint system of plexiglass and hardware cloth panels.  He had tried to duplicate that system in his beds, but because plexiglass is in such great demand due to the Covid-19 pandemic, he wasn't able to get enough plexiglass to enclose his beds and the critters were feasting on his veggies.  

I suggested they use our set up to plant their veggies, since the panels and irrigation were all in place, so they came over, pulled all the weeds and planted eggplant, kale and other things.  I showed them the small cages Cindy had made from hardware cloth and electrical ties, so they used some of those to protect the plants from airborne veggie munchers.  Some of the rogue pole bean seeds had sprouted in the bed, and they carefully put tomato cages around for the vines to climb even though I warned them that the beans will take over the space.  

Beware the Beans!

Veggie Cages

Birds Like Kale

It's good to see the beds cleaned up and in use again for more than growing dandelions.  I think Cindy would be pleased.  

The Downside

We've been very impressed with the prolific production rate of the tomatoes and eggplants Cindy planted in the three GrowBox containers this summer.  The plants have been large and the tomatoes have been numerous and delicious.  The Purple Bumblebee tomato planted in the GrowBox was double or even triple the size of the same variety planted in soil in the raised bed:   http://plantagarden-itllgrowonyou.blogspot.com/2020/05/a-tale-of-two-tomatoes.html

However, we've also been experiencing a lot more mosquitoes this summer than we've ever had in the past.  And two invasive, non-native mosquito species have recently been detected in San Diego County: the Egyptian Mosquito, Aedes aegypti, and the Asian Tiger Mosquito, Aedes albopictus.  These mosquitoes can transmit the viruses that cause Zika, Dengue, Chikungunya and Yellow fever.  Fortunately, these viruses are rare in San Diego, but this is definitely NOT an insect you want to encourage in your yard.  https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/sdc/deh/pests/aedes.html

So we've been scratching our heads trying to figure out why we're experiencing so many more of these lovely creatures this year and where there could be any standing water nearby, and this morning the light bulb went on:  they're probably breeding in the water reservoir in the base of the Grow Boxes.  The two boxes in front of the garage have been done and cleaned out for over a month now, but the one behind the water tank, the one with the gigantic Purple Bumblebee tomato plant in it, is still going and Cindy has been faithfully adding water to it every day.  

That plant is about done now, too, so that box will be cleaned and dried out soon.  But that leaves us with the dilemma of what to do about next year:  we love tomatoes, but definitely don't want to encourage the breeding of mosquitoes.  Any chemical added to the water to kill mosquitoes would probably be transmitted up through the root system into the plants and probably into the fruits as well, so that doesn't sound like an acceptable solution.  

San Diego County does encourage people to use Mosquito Fish, Gambusia affinis to control mosquito larvae, so that may be a solution for next year.  

As Nan Sterman says, "every garden is a science experiment", and our will probably be even more of one next year.  

Return of the Mystery Pruner?

We've had a volunteer rose bush that grows in the planter beside the garage.  Cindy periodically cuts it back and tries to dig out the roots, but it persists and eventually reappears, as it did this year.  It wasn't high on the gardening priority list, but this morning I noticed that most of the canes had been raggedly chopped back, most of them about 5 or 6 inches off the ground.  

Just A Couple of Sticks

And One Long One

One cane was still about a foot long, and one small one had been left completely alone.  None of the other plants showed any sign of damage at all.  I thought it might have been a skunk because I had noticed a kind of skunky smell in the area, but Cindy pointed out that the plant about two feet away is called Skunk Plant for a very good reason--that's what it smells like.  When the leaves are disturbed, it smells very much like a skunk has passed by recently.  

So what kind of critter eats rose canes?  And apparently nothing else.  The last time we had a critter "prune" some of our citrus plants, we eventually concluded it must have been a deer.  See http://plantagarden-itllgrowonyou.blogspot.com/2012/01/new-garden-mystery.html  Even though we live in a city of 1.3 million people, surrounded by freeways, deer do sometimes come down the San Diego River, sometime with startling results.   https://plantagarden-itllgrowonyou.blogspot.com/2013/01/yes-deer.html

I'm finding it hard to believe that deer would be such selective eaters that they would prefer a few rose canes to whole garden beds full of tomatoes, green beans, eggplant and other veggie delights.  And although Cindy's anti-varmint panels have been very good protection against the ravages of the California Ground Squirrel population, I don't think they would stand up to a determined deer.

It's still a mystery.