My Bloom Day

I know that garden bloggers have a specific day of the week they call bloom day... but I can't remember which day that is so today is mine! I really want to share the pictures I've taken recently in my garden but I don't feel much like writing... So today is bloom day!


My first California Poppy (Eschscholzia something) from seed, sadly it had closed by the time I took the picture.


Right in the middle, the first little bud on... my baby blue eyes? Maybe... (Nemophila something. A bud counts for bloom day right?


Buds and aphids on my seedling Red Horned Poppy (Glaucium corniculatum), grown from seeds I took from the one I bought from Annie's Annuals last year.


Buds on my red princess lily (Alstroemeria).


Beautiful pink carnations (even if the plant itself looks quite ragged)


Heuchera Sanguinea


Lavender Sancho Paza (Lavandula)


Blue Marguerite Daisies (Felicia amelloides)


Nemesia, in bloom year round.


Soon to be red Freesias from bulbs that I planted this winter.

Now my roses, all of them came with the property so I don't know their names but I love them now. I used to hate roses for their thorns but these are so simply beautiful. These are the three currently blooming, three more colors are still just buds.




Then in front of this last rose, is the far to tall for where it is, my Geum.

It's about 3 feet tall now from less than 1 foot when I planted it. After I've fixed up other areas of the yard I'll move this baby over to the left where it won't block my rose anymore.


Lastly, my long awaited iris. There are more than a dozen buds on them now and still not a single opened flower. But I finally know what color it will be.

New Flora

As a counterpart to my last post and as a way to make my posts not unbearably long, I will now talk about the plants that have been coming back to life in my garden.

Last week I decided I was fed up with the way my tiny bit of cultivated front yard was looking and added another barberry and a new daylily and salvia, taking out my ailing Dietes. It has a clear hole in the middle showing me that it needs dividing (even though it's tiny!). I was also greatly motivated by the wilting of my Daylily. My husband bought it for me as a Christmas present (actually, he let me go to a huge out of town nursery to buy $100 in plants, great Christmas present). I've been keeping my potted plants watered during the dryspells over the past few months best I can, but last week even my daylily finally wilted once. A quick watering solved that but now it's in the ground so it will never happen again.


The only other part of my front yard that I've had the time and patience to work on is the tiny square for the street tree. Last year, when I first put the plants (all started from seed) around the little tree it looked like this:


Now the plot is well filled in.


I've said before I don't like the Gazanias (the ones with the flower buds) so soon I'll be taking those out but it won't take long at all for the lambs ears to fill the open spot. I might also stick another plant in their place, something that will flower.

But the care I gave to the soil in this little plot and the water I started giving it late last summer once we'd bought the house has really paid off. The street tree, a small crape myrtle, has leafed out beautifully and very early. The other crape myrtle across the street is probably a year older than mine and still has no leaves even a month after mine started.



And taking these pictures, I thought it's been such a long time since I've taken a picture of the house and I've never really captured the correct color of the new paint job so here is a new one, very true to life:


Clearly we're not very into taking care of the lawn, if one can call it that. Our intent has always been to take it out, so we don't waste time on it except to pull out some of the suddenly appearing 3 foot high grass seed stalks, like the ones I found two weeks ago. And though it is a small victory, see my nicely grass free sidewalk, I spent ages out there with my small pick scraping it all out (don't look at the grass in the driveway!)

Now onto the backyard, where I've put in a bit more time. The irises that I divided and moved to the back of the garden last year finally have buds! I was worried that I didn't divide them properly and wouldn't get any flowers until next year but I must have done it right after all. I can't wait to find out what color they are.


When I did that dividing, there were a couple small tubers that had no leaves or didn't look so healthy, so I threw them into one of the big paper bags we were using in removing all the extra debris that wouldn't fit in our green bin. Well, a couple of those bags never got thrown away and sat decomposing in the back corner of the yard. And last weekend, I noticed this:


This really shows how much you don't need to baby this type of iris. There should actually be one more, taller iris in this picture, but feeling bad for the tough little baby, I had already tucked it into the earth behind my other irises when I took the picture.

Flowers are also opening up now for my Geum. This Geum started out as a tiny little Annie's Annuals purchase just over a year ago. But it not only survived being planted at my dad's for a short while but lived through the flooding that the lavenders next to it did not (I rescued them and put them into pots but I'm starting to think I was too late). Now it has over a dozen flower stalks and multiple buds on each.


The rose behind my Geum is also starting to flower. It looks so much better than when I first saw it, with dark green leaves and tons of buds. I do wish that I had cut it back a bit more though because I can't see my baby Ceanothus on the mound behind it.


Then there are the potted Hostas that died away last fall and I kept, hoping against hope that they would sleep through the winter and come back. I've never had Hostas before so while I knew that they die away during the winter, I didn't know if I did anything bad to them at the same time. But their pretty little leaves have come back and are still growing. I bought these last year before I had the house and split the one plant into these two. Once I get a nice shady spot cleared to put them, I'll get them in the ground...

New Fauna

Not much work has been done in the past month but I've found I'm still able to enjoy the garden, despite my busy-ness, sickness, and plain bone idleness. Now that Spring has gotten started, I've gotten into the habit of having a walk through the yard every night and on the weekend... trying to put in a couple hours of weeding.

At the top of the garden, ever since Abel and his people emptied the contents of the old garage, there have been two cabinets sitting in the very middle behind the lemon tree, back to back. While it gave me a relatively snail and slug free platform for a couple of neglected pots of seedlings, they never made me very happy so we finally finally moved them two weekends ago.


With the cabinets gone, I finally weeded the oxalis and onions that had been coming up between the doors and cabinet frames and all around them. In the process, I discovered a slender salamander. So interesting to find a new creature in your garden, especially when it's a beneficial one and not an evil looking bug... It's hard to see in my picture, but he's running away from me right in the middle of the frame, on his tiny little legs.


He clearly was enjoying the moist ground under the oxalis and gorging on the hundreds of slugs I had been finding all through my weeding. But he apparently wasn't the only one. Minutes later, I found an arboreal salamander too! You can just barely see the tiny yellow spots on his sides.


I'd read about them on another blog and knew not to pick this guy up in my hands because of his sharp sharp teeth. Reading about him before, I never thought I'd find one in my yard, either of these salamanders. They sound like creatures that couldn't survive the long dry summers away from creeks and rivers but that must not be true. I grew up in Contra Costa County and apparently they live there too, though probably not in any of my backyards which were mostly packed clay and grass.

The last in my new animal discoveries, I was not so happy to discover; not that this creature was deserving of my disgust.



Sadly, I found this Jerusalem Cricket and another one minutes later before I tried to find out what they were and I sent them to cricket heaven. I found them when I started to attack the dirt pile near the house, about a foot high and there, like the cabinets, ever since Abel's men took out our patio. I was trying to break it up and spread it out evenly on the ground when I broke into these guys' homes. Jerusalem Crickets are apparently everywhere in the west and far down past Mexico, though this is the first I've ever seen one, probably because they are nocturnal and prefer to stay underground. This one is trying to scramble out of a 3-inch pot so it's a good inch long. They look disgustingly evil but are apparently a good creature all around: They aerate the soil, eat dead animal matter and provide a good food source for many larger animals. I found this page about them quite interesting.

Nearly two months ago (only two posts ago, sorry), I wrote that I had bought a bird feeder and hung it on my magnolia tree. It's been so interesting watching the little birdies ever since flying to and from it, fluffing their wings and hopping around. I've never properly watched birds before and I'm not yet interested in doing so much farther than my own backyard but I've been searching around the internet to identify each and every bird I've seen so far. There aren't any rare birds yet, but I'll admit that I didn't even know half of the names of these birds. And here they are:

(Not my pictures, but I fully intend to capture my own birdie pictures once I have enough money to justify buying a new camera lens)

Male Anna's Hummingbird


Female Anna's Hummingbird
One female dive-bombed the Salvia next to my brick step. I was standing there, about to go back inside and I hear a loud crescendoing buzz and boom, it was there three feet from me. Goes from my Salvia to the Nemesia and the lavender before zooming off again.


The next three are my most common offenders, often jumping about and twittering in groups of 5 to 10.
Golden Crowned Sparrow


White Crowned Sparrow


House Finch


Mourning Dove - There's a pair that always come to the yard together and peck at the seeds spilled by the smaller birds and those mischievous little squirrels.


Scrub Jay
I've seen these before, even as a child and they don't come any more often since I put up my bird feeder. Interesting thing, these are actually a type of crow (which explains the loud screech it makes) and they sometimes eat the eggs of others birds and even small hatchlings. Still, they are beautiful.


Crow
I've only seen one land in my yard once, about two weeks ago, but who hasn't seen them everywhere else.