Snake Season

Neighbors on NextDoor are reporting finding snakes in their yards, including a rattlesnake and a San Diego Ring-necked Snake, Diadophis punctatis similis.   The Ring-necked snake is not poisonous, but rattlesnakes are definitely a danger to humans and pets.  When a neighbor found one in her front yard a few years ago, I wrote a post on how to tell a Rattlesnake from a harmless Gopher Snake.

 Recently I've been seeing a California Striped Racer, Coluber lateralis lateralis, also known as a Whipsnake, in my yard and the neighbors' veggie bed. These snakes move very fast and apparently can climb trees. I found this one sunning itself in my front yard the other day and again on my garden steps this morning. I thought at first it was part of the irrigation system, but then it quickly scooted into one of the succulents to avoid a dog passing by.

California Striped Racer

And then I also found a Western Skink, Plestiodon skiltonianus,  in the back yard this morning. This lizard with a very long tail lives up to its racing stripes and moves very fast but hung around just long enough for me to get a photo of it.  

Skink

The large gopher snake may still be around in the canyon somewhere, too, to the peril of the California Ground Squirrels that hang out under the bird feeder.   It pays to watch where you're walking these days.  

Some Kind Of Bug

 As the neighbors have tended their plants in the veggie garden, they've found various forms of insect life crawling on the plants or in the soil.  

The kids are fascinated by earwigs that they call pinch bugs.  Earwigs are scary looking but harmless to humans; they may actually be beneficial to gardens by eating decaying vegetation.  

Earwig

Other forms of insect life are various caterpillars or grubs.  They found this grub in the soil last week; bugguide.net has let me down and not identified it, but I think it might be the larva of some type of beetle, possibly Figeater Beetle larva.  These grubs also eat decaying vegetation, and apparently crawl on their backs, which explains the lack of visible legs.  I've always liked seeing the adult Figeater Beetles; I love their iridescent green color, although they're not the most graceful of fliers as they bumble around the garden seemly at random.  Various critters, including the neighbors chickens, consider the grubs to be a succulent treat.  

Grub

They also found this, possibly a chrysalis.  Still no idea what it is, but it, too, got fed to the chickens.  

Chrysalis?

Today they found this green caterpillar.  I thought at first it was a Cabbage Looper, but it doesn't have the yellow strip on the side and doesn't loop as it crawls.  Instead, it looks like it might be the larva of the Cabbage White Butterfly.  That caterpillar has a fuzzier body than the Cabbage Looper, but they look pretty similar.  

Cabbage White Butterfly Larva.  Maybe.

The garden is literally crawling with life all the time.  

 

"The Love Of Gardening Is A Seed Once Sown That Never Dies"--Gertrude Jekyll

 About a year ago I let a neighbor grow some kale and eggplant in Cindy's raised beds.  See The Gardener Is Gone....  He got busy with other things and didn't have much time to attend to the veggies he had planted, but they continued to grow.  

That left several of the raised veggie beds vacant, so when the family next door found that their own vegetable bed was being raided by voracious raccoons, I invited them to plant their veggies in Cindy's beds.  The drip irrigation was all in place, the soil she had filled them with was waiting, and her security system of anti-varmint panels was ready for action.  

So they came over with their kids, Maggie and Jude, and planted veggies, sowing seeds of carrots, beets and corn, and waited for them to germinate.  Then they added some broccoli and cauliflower plants that were a little further along, and those have been thriving ever since.  

And now another neighborhood family has joined us and has planted their veggies, too, so on Saturday we all had a Ladybug Release Party, turning hundreds of Ladybugs free to feast on the aphids and other pests that were eating the plants. 

Neighbors Tending The Garden

Kids Are Learning Gardening

Release More Ladybugs

Ladybug Ready for Release

It's been fun for me to look out into the garden and see it being productive and full of life, both vegetable and human, again.  And I know Cindy would approve that her garden space is helping educate and encourage a new generation of gardeners.  

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.