Focusing on the Lower Garden

Just over a month ago, I was so proud of myself when I was able to post that I had cleared the grass from the island in the middle of our lower garden.



A months worth of evening gardening since and a few hours of rototilling donated by my husband, we've completely transformed the lower area. First we cleared the area next to the house and garage.


Then, we cleared the area past what will be the dry creekbed and spent hours flattening, weeding, rototilling and compacting the middle round patch for Patrick's lawn. It works well in my design, so I like it but it is definitely Patrick's lawn (he has to mow it).


This picture was May 30th and carefully examining the seeded patch every night after work, we found sprouts on June 6th.


This is Eco-Lawn grass seed that we bought from Annie's Annuals which is supposed to be less thirsty than a regular lawn. Also, from pictures around the web it does look like it will be a pretty grass left long. That besides how soft and thin the blades seem to be.


By June 8th we had grass that we could actually see a bit from a distance. And as of tonight, it looks like the picture below. The only bit we're disappointed with is that the one bag of seed we bought wasn't enough for this small bit of grass. Maybe it should have been but we still have a bunch of bare spots so we bought another bag over the weekend and seeded those spots again.


Now to the details. The foothill penstemon has been in bloom for some time now. I'm just in love with its beautiful blue. The one I have planted is a bit scraggly this year but I'm sure next year it will be much fuller.


My wildflower patch with wrinkled apricot poppies, five spots, and tidy tips were at their height a few weeks ago.


But are now acting floppy and not shining so much. On the plus side, I'm starting to collect seeds for next year. Below you can see what tidy tips seeds look like. Apparently, the tidy tips seeds I separated out from the mixed bag last winter were the ones I thought were yarrow. Oh well, I prefer tidy tips and next year I'll have thousands it seems.


While the wildflowers fade away, the two Agastache I planted next to them are in a wonderful full bloom that should only get better in the coming months.


Agastache Rupestris


Agastache aurantiaca 'Coronado'


Then we have the gorgeous ladybird poppies. God, I've wanted these for two years, ever since I first saw them at Annies, they are so beautiful. And finally I have two of my own. Sadly, they are supposed to be annuals so I'll do my best to try and collect seeds from them.


Behind the first picture, you can see some blue flax, now in bloom as well. Almost all of these planted only a month ago.


There's one other big change to the lower garden. In just a couple of hours and after one swipe of rototilling by my husband, I cleared the area next to the garage and created a small planting bed framed with some redwood 4x4s.



Hostas and lady ferns (a bit sun bleached but this is the shadiest part of the garden just now)


Some Astilbe, finally sending up flower stalks after two years.


And for our two trellises, we're trying Nasturtium (Tropaeolum peregrinum) "Canary Creeper" which started out too short to attach to the trellises.


But with just a month, they're halfway up the wall. There are also quite a few other plants along the garage but I'll go into that later when I have nice pictures of them.


And finally after sitting on our back steps for two or three weeks, I went on a planting spree this Sunday and put 10 of the suffering little guys in the ground. There are some Gaura that had reseeded in my parents Antioch yard that I rescued, two blue gentian sages, two more foothill penstemons, a milkweed to hopefully bring in the Monarchs, Galvezia speciosa "Island Bush Snapdragon", a Monardella villosa "Coyote Mint" and lastly my second Ceanothus 'Dark Star'. I feel bad for leaving that one so long; a lot of the leaves had gone yellow, but I'm sure that I got it in the ground within enough time for it to recover.

New Creatures and Rototilling

The weekend before last, we had what I guess was the last storm of the rainy season and the clouds were amazing. Also, as you can see, over the prior week, I'd gotten a bit more ground cleared of grass and planted 3 basket fulls of Annie's Annuals.


Here are two Ladybird poppies, some native carex grass and the rest of my five spots.


A native Penstemon heterophyllus "Foothill Penstemon"


The first edible I've ever planted, Fragaria vesca "Alpine Strawberry".


And a bunch of others mixed with some of my much neglected earlier purchases, such as this bronze grass.

But once the plants were planted (the ones I could figure out where to plant, there are still a couple without homes), I worked on removing grass around what will be the dry creekbed. It was a slow slow chore but not too difficult using my handheld garden spike to lever the clumps out by their roots. But as that's not very interesting I haven't documented much of the process. However, this Sunday my husband finally came out into the yard and we went to work rototilling the area close to the house.


This is our before picture. Everything was very weedy and bumpy. We had a pile of dirt infused with lumps of concrete that the contractor's men left behind last year. You can see it next to the green bin in the picture. So there was quite a hill away from the house, growing flatter as you got closer. What we wanted though was the opposite. We want a nice flat area to eventually put outdoor furniture. That would involve a quick steep hill near the house (to maintain proper grading at the foundation), then a flat expanse, and another slope to what was the original level of the area. Like this, kind of:



It certainly an amazing improvement, its still not quite level, quite close though and a huge change from what it was. It's hard to see in the first picture but we created a nice hill near the house and now we need to compact the built up area and do a little more rototilling in the area we've been removing the dirt from to really make it level.

But isn't just beautiful, flat... ish and clear. I can really imagine that patio area being their eventually.

Another bit of fun this weekend - I sat down next to the batch of native wildflowers just above the "patio" area and watched the creatures moving about. And I actually took some good pictures! These are all my pictures, not stolen from around the web like before.


A native sweat bee, Agapostemon (angelicus?)


His back legs are covered, rather disgustingly... or at least weirdly... in pollen, both yellow and blue from the tricolor gillia that he's diving in here.


Here's one of the many pasted down metamorphosing ladybug pupas. This one has attached itself to a leaf on my Salvia leucantha.


Continuing with the same Salvia, here is a big black bee... maybe a carpenter bee, but the other pictures I see don't look like carpenter bees are fuzzy and this is fuzzy, right? Maybe it's just my picture.

Now, I'm not crazy about bugs or creepy crawlies but when it comes to my backyard and the creatures living directly around me, I'm extremely interested. I'm amazed by all the new different creatures I've found living on our property. I grew up just twenty miles from here and in my entire life I had never seen a sweat bee, to my knowledge, until two weeks ago. But now I've seen dozens of them! It's shocking that there have been all these creatures around me and I've never known it.


Here's a pretty common butterfly, a Fiery Skipper (Hylephila phyleus), on my five spots.


Wings closed.


Lastly, an awesome action picture, an Anna's hummingbird. After a few clicks of the camera, the hummingbird got interested in the clicking of my camera and freaked me out a bit by suddenly flying a very quick three feet closer to me, right at the camera and seeing it through the camera lens, she was like crazy divebomber. But no picture because I flinched at the teeny little bird.

Planting Out

As of yesterday I have a bigger better bed next to what will be a patio area in our backyard. I already had some bulbs, poppies, and wildflowers.


The red near the middle are the flowers for some freesia I planted around the same time as the daffodils, in late winter.


This last week the poppies I planted out about a month ago really started blooming, a beautiful mix of oranges.


Then there's the fluffy bunch of various wildflowers behind the freesias, three of the plants in the mix have just started blooming.


Gilia Tricolor and unidentified yellow flowers


And two short baby blue eyes, hidden below the other taller two.


Everything to the right of those plants are new to the ground.


I finally planted out what was a baby Dietes. I separated it from its mother when it had only three blades and I found it quite rootbound when I popped it out of its pot yesterday. To plant it I tried to stick a shovel into the ground but even with all my weight I could only get about two inches down because I haven't watered that spot all year. So I took a hose and filled it with water and let it drain sloooowly for the next twenty minutes. Meanwhile, I took my hand-pick and worked on a trough in front for my Five Spots, 7 little pots all from seed. Still have three more to go.



These little plants have popped right back since my taking them out of their pots.

Lined up behind them, are a bunch of Tidy Tips plants just about ready to bloom and taking a close look at my little transplantees tonight, I noticed that despite their short time in the ground, my tidy tips already have a little defender: this ugly ugly lady bug larva. I've been seeing ladybugs every which way since it's started to warm up and before moving out to Oakland, I had never noticed a lady bug larva before but now they're everywhere.


Last weekend, I worked with my garden spike inch by inch trying to clear away the grasses and weeds around what will be the dry river bed to plant out all these little plants I'd started earlier this year. I cleared quite a bit as you can see but you can also see I have plenty more to do.


In this picture, what you can't see in the grass is the other trench we dug in order to form a cute little island, I want to have that entire area and two feet all around the other side cleared of grass eventually.

Also, on another subject, two weeks ago, I found this little maple tree up in the field of my backyard and decided to keep it since it had the cutest soft fuzzy leaves. I'm a sucker for soft fuzzy leaves. It lost all its old leaves but has since grown all these and is now a good 6 inches tall.


And for fun, here is a Stig in a box. (I didn't put her in there, but I admit to leaving the empty basket because I love seeing here jump in and out)