Remembering 2005

In 2005, George W. Bush was inaugurated for his second term in office as the 43rd American president. I was not at all surprised when he won. I'm sure many of you will disagree, but I found it hard to identify the bigger nincompoop in the 2004 presidential race, George Bush or John Kerry. Anyway, it's over now.

The New England Patriots won their second consecutive Super Bowl and the Chicago White Sox beat the Houston Astros to win the World Series for the first time since 1917. That meant nothing to me, but my dad found it all very meaningful.

The Oscar for best film went to Million Dollar Baby, which I never saw. My favorite movie in 2005 took place in sun-drenched southern California...

"If anyone orders Merlot, I'm leaving! I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot!"

My favorite album that year must have been Loretta Lynn's incomparable Van Lear Rose, made with the White Stripes' Jack White. I listened to it incessantly.

In a booth in the corner with the lights down low
I was movin' in fast and she was takin' it slow, uh huh
Well I looked at him and caught him lookin' at me
I knew right then we were playin' free in Oregon...

What other events serve as 2005 milestones? Pope John Paul II died in 2005. So did Rosa Parks. Richard Pryor. James Doohan (Star Trek's Scotty). Anne Bancroft. Peter Jennings. Terry Shiavo...

The Huygens probe landed on Saturn's largest moon (Titan) and I thought that was cool. YouTube went online. French doctors performed the first human face transplant.

And this was my garden, as seen from my deck.



It may seem hard to believe, but back in 2005, noone Embellished the Tropics. Fairegarden fairies remained deep in seclusion.

The Transplantable Rose sat around bare-root waiting for Annie to dig a hole for it in her Austin garden. Pam wasn't Digging yet either.

Gardeners, though somewhat Intoxicated, were not yet Ranting or Going Wild, let alone making careful Studies in Contrasts.

The phrase Miller Time had nothing to do with gardening.

And--I just checked--get this: In all of 2005, Carol only Dreamed of May...twice.

Considering all that, you may be surprised to learn there was a little bit of whoreticulture happening in San Francisco. But it was still very cold and calculating. Nothing to attract the notice of real gardeners, that's for sure. How could it? I knew NOTHING about gardening.

Here you can see what level of thrill moved your erstwhile blogger to take pictures back then:



Yeah, fabulous retaining wall, chuck b. Armeria as a focal point? Why the hell not! Mulching with sphagnum moss? Yep, just another fine example of thinking outside the box. (Lesson learned: Show a little respect for the box.)

***

Let's backtrack...

Guy and I closed escrow on October 31, 2003. There was no garden at that time, just a cheap sod job on heavy clay, with some ratty-looking lavender bushes in rows along the north- and south-facing fences. There was nothing to take a picture of. For a year or two, no pictures were taken.

Within a few months of moving in, we took out the lavender along the south-facing fence and planted bamboo, for privacy. It grew fast but mostly weeped and never formed the screen we had in mind.



We came in to possession of a 20-g ceramic pot, and put a Meyer lemon in it. I'd always wanted a lemon tree. We killed two or three Meyer lemons before getting it right a couple years later.



(Oh yeah, that lush green grass? Miracle Gro.)

At the time when we planted the bambooo, there was no deck or back steps yet, or even a backdoor. We had all that work done in January 2005.







If anything, this is where the garden really began, not with bamboo or a containerized lemon tree. The deck and the stairs re-defined the backyard space and gave us the impetus to come down here and do stuff.

Guy went first. One weekend in June he put in this cobblestone landing and path to connect the stairs to the garage so we wouldn't have to walk through the mud anymore.



He saw a guy in a store parking lot with a truck bed full of cobblestones and inquired if they might be for sale. He said yes.



He was a contractor taking them out of a yard in Noe Valley. His assistant delivered 80 of them to our garage door for $200.

These cobbles came to San Francisco on boats in the 19th century as sailing ballast. San Franciscans have been finding new uses for them ever since. Sewer walls in the old parts of town are made with these rocks. You see them used as edging material in city parks. Road repair crews still dig them up from time to time when they find sections of old cobblestone street under layers of asphalt.

Simply called 'San Francisco cobbles' or 'SF cobbles', you can find them for sale at Bay Area stone yards for $2-3 per stone. We've probably spent another $500-600 on cobbles since this first purchase. Who knows where our cobbles have been, or what new uses they will find when Guy and I ultimately leave this house.

Since the deck construction doomed the lawn underneath it, this was among the first places where I started to plant. I learned a lot about cultivating clay soil here. And ruined many clothes doing so.



I also learned that hosta and lily of the valley must be nice in gardens elsewhere, but not in Bernal Heights. Sadly, I wasted a year reading east coast garden books. Well, I was clueless. And I'm not even going to tell you about the swarms of flies I fed for months with my early composting efforts, or how I tried to snuff them out by shoveling garden dirt on to the compost pile. (No, that never works. Add shredded newspaper instead, and lots of it. Then wet it down and add yard waste. Once the true composting begins, you can add all the food waste you want. No more flies.)

It's hard now to recollect all the ideas and rationales behind the early design choices. Those were heady days, as my mind swirled with new possibilities. On many levels, I was starting to change inside too, into the gardener you know about now.

My southern neighbor's yard was still a neglected, overgrown forest that shaded half my yard. This picture would have been mid-day in summer; you can see where the shadow is. Lavenders on the north-facing fence had to go.



I kept going with the path...



For awhile there, I thought a series of quick, 90 degree turns would be just the thing. That didn't last long.



It was also during this period that I stumbled upon a mystery.



Just below the soil surface, I discovered the tip of an old iron bar set vertically in the ground while I was laying down cobblestone path. I excavated three feet down and still the bar wouldn't budge. At length, I gave up trying, and changed the path. The mysterious iron bar remains in place, buried in the garden for some other person to find at some future date.



As the path evolved, so it carved out some planting beds. I fell in love with flowering maple (Abutilon sp). Why not plant four of them right next to each other? Nice! ("Nice!"--Are you hearing the sarcasm in my voice?)



I still have the peachy-yellow one on the left, and you see it all the time in my Bloom Day posts because it always has flowers. The others are long gone.

This is the early version of my first raised bed, before I thought of using the cobbles to, you know, raise the bed. First, I had to convince myself that a pile dirt would not be sufficient.



From up on the deck, it wasn't so bad, once the plants started to grow.



Do you see the red plant material in the lower left? You'll never guess what that is. It's a hanging basket of red Rhipsalis that I bought online from the Tropical Gardens of Maui. Of all the weird, random things that I did as a young gardener, I have to say a) stumbling on the Tropical Gardens of Maui online, b) reading through the entire Tropical Gardens of Maui website, c) identifying plants for purchase from the Tropical Gardens of Maui, and d) and purchasing tropical plants from the Tropical Gardens of Maui probably reveals more about me than anything else I can tell you. I'll just leave it at that. Draw your own conclusions.

By November, I still had a lot to learn (and the Rhipsalis was long gone, of course--and replaced by a bird feeder that attracted mice and produced more weeds than I can tell you about; it's also long gone), but I was starting to get the hang of things a little bit. And I had my first gnome. See him? That's Butternut.



Meet my other great folly of 2005, the water feature.



For gardeners, the lure of the water feature, esp a pond-based water feature, is so compelling, so alluring, so intoxicating, so all-consuming, you pretty much have to just go there to see how it works for you. Because once the notion of having a pond grabs you, it will never let go, no matter how hard you try to escape it.

This is actually my second pond. The first one came and went in the space of a Labor Day weekend without ever being photographed. I fell under the charms of Ortho's All About Garden Pools and Fountains and became convinced that I could bang out a flexible-liner garden pond all by myself without any kind of experience building anything, ever. I won't go into it... I'll just say leveling the top of the pond on unlevel grade is very, very difficult and certainly not for the ordinary novice. That's all.

Anyway, when I accepted reality without a flexible liner pond in my garden, I still had a big hole in the ground--pretty much the entire planted area you see here + kidney-shaped pond. I decided to try a pre-formed liner version instead. The pre-formed pond was much easier to level, but I was never happy with the edging. It looked fake and obvious and I could never hide that. The raccoon who came by every night to knock rocks and dirt in the pond didn't care about the pond's facile fakeness. It was a just a gas to him, and he partied like it was 1999. A month spent cleaning up raccoon mess and replanting unplanted plants finally put me off the water feature. Even today, I have no interest in one. We have a birdbath. I'm good.


Come back soon and I'll tell you how things turned around for me in 2006. We'll talk about the advent of garden blogs and how they inspired me to a) garden, and b) garden blog. I'll finish discussing the path and we'll do some before/after comparisons.

There's not much going on w/ me.

But I feel that I should post something. I have that sense even when I'm sober, tho' I tend not act on it until it's absolutely necessary. Alas, the Syrah I had before, during, and after dinner* has rendered me sl. gregarious. So, voilà. A post about nothing.

*An omelet. 6-8 fingerlings sliced and sautéed 20 minutes in oil with half a red onion, diced. In a separate bowl combine 5 eggs + 1 egg white (a little idiosyncrasy of mine, when scrambling many eggs, to omit the last yolk, and just use the white) with a commensurate volume of milk and beat well. Pour egg mixture over potatoes. Add ample amounts of sliced roasted red bell pepper, and some rosemary. Cook on med-low heat until set, lifting the sides with a spatula to let the runny parts go under the omelet and get cooked. When it's set, turn down the heat and add grated cheese. Cook until the cheese is melty-good. To make it better, add sausage chunks when you add the pepper. Serve with Syrah.

At this exact moment, in the background is playing the Penelope Hobhouse's DVD, The Art and Practice of Gardening, recommended here by a commenter at Garden Rant, a blog I hardly ever read anymore (What, does Michele Owens have some new batshit complaint about California that my life won't be complete without? Oh!).

The DVD's been playing for only a few minutes, but I love it. This conversation, between Penelope and some stiff Englishwoman strolling a garden, is quoted verbatim:

Penelope: And you have such a good selection of red dahlias [pronounced "DAY-lias"] too.

Stiffy: I love them. Aren't they beautiful?

Penelope: They're beautiful. And I can't see any staking for them, either. Are you not staking..?

Stiffy: I have a marvelous husband who discretely stakes. They're hidden in there.

Penelope: I wish I could borrow him...

Both: [unintelligible mumbling]...

LOL. All my gay readers have watched this DVD several times, haven't you? I'm the last to know.

Speaking of omelets, and the vegetables you might put in them, I'm rather envious of Frances' and Christopher's vegetable gardens, off to blazing starts. Frances even reports harvesting peppers already. Half my tomatoes look good, and a pumpkin* vine is going strong, and the Phaseolus coccineus** are idiot-proof. The rest of the vegetable garden--i.e., the other half of my tomatoes, and all the squash--not so much. I find all the plants that I grew from Territorial Seed are doing well. Plants grown from other sources suck. I'm especially disappointed with the progress of the 'Black from Tula' tomato. The 'Stupice' are more than three times as large. I'm left with a difficult decision: let it go and see what happens, or rip out the underperformers and replace them with...something else.

*Most sources I've seen say pumpkins need heat to do well. Yet all up and down Highway 1 between San Francisco and Santa Cruz, farmers grow pumpkins in cool, coastal fog (much cooler and foggier than Bernal Heights). Half Moon Bay even has an annual Pumpkin Festival in October. So, whatever to pumpkins-need-heat.

**Some species of Phaseolus were recently moved into the genus Vigna. Or maybe I just recently read that. Note to self: Get to the bottom of that.

Speaking of Christopher and Frances, I took some pictures of Dierama pulcherrimum for you/us today at the Botanical Garden.



This is either a young or recently divided plant. The clump of foliage is rather compact, and for some reason I felt like I should show you that.



Foliar clumps on older plants is much bulkier, flatter, and generally less appealing. So know that.



Pink Dierama + dark Eucomis = nice.

The Seven Random Facts meme

I have been tagged three times (one [okay, I can't find the first time], two, three) since the last time [I also can't find where I did this before, but I feel certain that I did], so I will play along...

1) I love cottage cheese. I'm not sure what it is, but if you put a tub of cottage cheese in front of me and hand me a spoon, I will eat the whole thing in one sitting. I can't do that with yogurt or ice cream which I also like, although I probably could with pudding. I love pudding too. Vanilla, chocolate, banana cream, coconut, mocha, whatever--cooked or instant, I don't care. This all turns out to be a good thing because...

2) I have an ulcer or something right now and have to eat bland food. It started a week ago in the middle of the night when I woke up with a little cramp or gas bubble right behind the base of my rib cage. At breakfast in the morning, I began to experience a slight discomfort after swallowing food. When it got worse two days later, I saw my doctor and she put me on a proton pump inhibitor. I think it's starting to work. She also sent me to the radiologist for an upper GI barium study--which happens to be just like this Wikipedia entry, but it all happens very fast, as the doctor has you roll over a bunch of times on the X-ray table as quickly as you can to mix up the contrast agent as it passes through your esophagus and stomach. He's taking X-rays the whole time. I think he took a good dozen. Anyway, I'm still waiting to hear from my doctor about the results. I'm pretty sure it's not cancer. And, frankly, I doubt it's even an ulcer. I think it's just stress and anxiety. I guess most people don't want to hear the doctor tell them "it's all in your head", but I'm very receptive to that diagnosis. I would rather have her suggest a course of Welbutrin than to hear her say that I need to change my diet and take proton pump inhibitors for the rest of my life. I did learn that I don't have Helicobacter pylori, the bacteria that causes many, perhaps most, stomach ulcers. You know, the medical establishment was resistant to the idea of bacteria causing ulcers for several years. That research came from Australia and few people in Europe or America were prepared to accept it. Now it's the first consideration.

3) A pet peeve: People saying "stomach" when they mean "belly". Your stomach is the organ inside your body between your esophagus and small intestine. You don't lay on your stomach, your "big stomach" doesn't hang over your belt, pregnancy does not give a woman a big stomach. Belly is the correct word. (Nothing personal if you're an offender. I don't keep track of those things.)

4) I've sunk low. My favorite television show right now is The Real Housewives of New York City. Link, link. I think one expects people to care much less about the opinions of others when they have enormous amounts of money, but that's not the case for these ladies. They seem to care more. Of course, they have to. If they didn't care, there would be no drama. And, of course, these people aren't old New York money. They're the vulgar nouveau riche. I think Ramona is my favorite housewife right now--although I hated her during the first episode when everyone went to the Hamptons. Her husband runs a third generation family business selling religious jewelry (truefaithjewelry.com). I think it's sweet that Ramona wears what I assume is her husband's company's product, although I don't know for sure, and she does not seem at all religious. Her husband is very good looking and he wants their daughter to enter the family business. I think that's a great idea. I wish my family had a family business. I would be all over it. Alex is the most interesting housewife. She seems really unnatural, like there's something wrong with her, especially her face, the features of which seem to move in all different directions. She's not what you normally see on television and I think that's what makes her interesting. She and her husband are joined at the hip which kinda grosses me out (they shop for clothes together, he shows up with his wife for Girls Night Out, etc.), but if that's what makes her happy, more power to her. Jill annoys me with her gay best friend, and her thick accent. I feel sorry for her daughter and I don't like her husband. I feel sorry for Bethenny, she just seems lost in life. She has a cooking business and she wants to be the next Martha Stewart. It's hard to guess how the structure of the show mediates the truth, but she seems to have much more passion for having a business than the cooking part. So she's doomed to failure because it takes both. That leaves LuAnn, a countess by marriage. She married into the French DeLesseps family who built the Suez Canal. She seems classy and well-balanced and I like her kids. There's a funny combination of uppity and down-to-earth about her, which also makes her interesting. She combed lice out of her kids' hair last week, then she gets snooty when Bethenny introduces her to the chauffeur by her first name. Who gives a crap? Not the chauffeur. LuAnn's daughter is a competitive equestrian. My aunt was Country Riding Queen of San Mateo County back in the 1970s. I also like to ride horses, but it doesn't happen very often.

5) Luckily for my television soul, the new season of Battlestar Galactica premiers tomorrow night. That's really my favorite show. Last season seemed to get a wee bit decadent for me, so I hope it gets back on track this year. I highly recommend beginning with the pilot, presumably available on the first season DVD. Sexy, gritty, smart, mystical, political--an engaging program that satisfies on many levels. No gardens tho'.

6) I'm an idiot in many ways. I have a mole on my right wrist, and that's how I know my right from my left. I have a hard time adding adding 7 + 5 and 8 + 5. Every time, I have to remember that 7 is the same as 5 + 2, and then translate 7 + 5 into 5 + 5 + 2. I go through the same thing with 8 + 5. Of course, at this point in my life I can do it very fast. 6 + 5 and 9 + 5 are no problem for me.

7) Today after this blog post I'm going to re-paint the stairway upstairs. The walls have gotten scuffed beyond any other remedy. So I'm going to re-paint. I did the bedroom several weeks ago, and it turned out very nice if I do say so myself. Last time I listened to Charles Mingus and the Pernice Brothers while painting, and I think I'll do that again today.

Q&A

QUESTION (from the comments here): Can you post more about the origin of your new blog title? I looked it up and found some references that said when someone's "working on their back 40" or whatever, it meant they were up to no good. I'd never heard the term before you used it.

ANSWER: I could, but I like to be ambiguous whenever possible. Not sure if you've noticed that. It's a style choice.

Anyhow, to answer your question, my back 40 is an old expression, maybe from homesteading days ("40 acres and a mule"?), and it refers to the land behind the ranch house--the 40 acres you were supposed to make productive, but maybe you didn't.

Saying "I'm plowing the back 40" is telling someone that you're off doing something that you're supposed to be doing--while maybe you aren't. You're off somewhere out in the back 40, so who's to say what you're doing. (Saying someone is "off plowing the back 40" usually means s/he's having a tryst.)

Forty acres is a lot of land. Once upon a time, that was a reasonable amount of land for homesteading, but in the modern world it's excessive to most people. People wouldn't know what to do with 40 acres today, it would lay fallow, be wild, get overgrown. You can refer to the parts of your yard you don't get to as "your back 40".

I'm being ironic. I live in the city, not the country. I don't have 40 acres. (In reality, I don't even have 40 feet, it's more like 25.) I'm letting you know this is a blog about a small garden, and I'm being cheeky about it. In my garden, even though it's small, I want there to be some wild, some overgrown. Some stuff that I don't get to. I'm echoing that in my blog title.

I also blog about things I'm doing in my neighborhood, or in San Francisco, or in the Bay Area. Everything (almost everything) I blog about is going on quite close to home. So I'm using the expression metaphorically too. I'm saying to everyone, "All this is going on in my back 40."

Am I being productive? Is this what I should be doing with my time? Am I up to no good? That's for you to decide.

You can see why I don't want to have to explain things. I know 50 people come by every day to see the blog, and that's nice. But, really, I do this for me.

The satellite knock-down: a brief, off-topic rant.

(Not that I'm constrained to blogging about specific topics. This is my blog and I can do what I want. When someone pays me to do this, I (might) care about that person's opinions. In the meantime...)

The News Hour with Jim Lehrer is on right now and they're talking about the military satellite they need to shoot down before it crashes. A professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is talking specifically about the lameness of the reason put forth by the government for shooting it down: the need to destroy the the tank of toxic fuel (hydrazine) before it lands on Earth.

I am so glad to hear someone say this because I was thinking the same thing.

Hydrazine is so explosive and volatile unstable, the very idea of an intact tank of it crashing to earth from orbit and creating a hazard on the ground is so beyond any informed person's imagination, that I can't believe they would even put that forward. (Is the tank made out of adamantium?)

This is so obviously a show of power and technical skill, and (the funny thing is) there's really no reason to hide that. China shoots down their satellites. Russia carries out "routine" missile test launches on December 25th. But the United States needs to be...altruistic? It's just not credible.

Not much going on

I've been kind of busy lately, without much to say.

Here's a story (with video) in today's paper about bird sounds.

Clark and Feo concluded that the squeaks and beeps made by the dive-bombing hummingbirds are not vocal - as some research has asserted - but instead are created by their tail feathers.

"I found it really interesting just because these birds were basically doing mechanical sounds," said Feo, 22, who played clarinet in the Cal Band for four years. "It sort of speaks to the musician in me."

But I like this LA Times story about a chess table in a Los Feliz coffeeshop better.

Tom Trellis, owner of the Alcove Cafe, put in a tiny antique chess table in his restaurant when it opened three years ago but forgot to put the pieces in the drawers. His customers have since filled the void with scores of notes, observations and journal entries, some of them labeled "Dear Chess Table."

Maybe later on I'll put up some pictures I took this week during my first-ever visit to Annie's Annuals.

Blog of the Flower and Garden Show

Two west coast Flower and Garden Show's have blogs for the first time this year: San Francisco and Seattle.

Currently, both blogs feature general gardening information. As I understand it, the blogs will become more about the Shows themselves as the Show dates draw nearer.

Maybe we'll get some designer profiles and interviews to whet our appetites... In the meantime, you can read about the San Francisco show's display gardens here.

I know I can't wait to see the Derviss + Chavez garden, Sanitas per aquas!

I did a quick Google search for other F&G Shows to see if they have blogs too, but I didn't find anything. You might want to look up your own local F&G show to see if it has a blog worth following, or just to see what the display gardens have to offer.

A New Year

A new blog.

The old blog is here.