Summer's End / Winter Planting / Heat

90F + today, hot hot hot dry wind. Forecast? Flash floods and rain! We'll see.

Summer Debris, Winter Sowing

Meanwhile, the last of the summer garden came down today. Dried cornstalks uprooted and added to the compost pile, dried sunflower stalks likewise. Crunchy sugar pea vines threaded out of the chain link fence-cum-trellis, a last grope for rogue potatoes that might have been missed. Also weeded out first of the winter garden last weekend and put in garlic and shallots.

Garlic is amusing as "seeds" come from the produce department. In this case, organic garlic from Organic Express. And Von's. Took the largest cloves from several bulbs and sowed them. Learned with last crop that size of the starting clove is a big factor in finished clove. Shallots also came from produce department. Not organic, so not as excited about those.

Mid-week our Marauder -- probably a skunk, but could be a possum or even raccoon -- got into the water garden. He loves to shred water lilies while fishing. The mosquito fish, fortunately, breed prodigiously, and in the four years our water garden has been up, we've never had a 100% die off. Or any mosquitoes.

Marauder also had a dig in the garlic bed, disturbed a few, but was probably looking for grubs or earth worms in the turned dirt. (Once I left the lid on the worm bin too loose, and someone had a feast. The worms are back, but I keep a brick on the lid now.)

Salad Days of Winter

Sometime this week will get the rest of my winter "Salad Garden" in the ground: Chives, Broccoli, endive, escarole, radicchio, corn salad (aka mache or valerianella locusta), green and red romaine lettuces, Italian arugula. And French carrots.

It's a lot, I know, but if half the crop does half what it should in the temperate fall here, we will do okay. 'Course, these should have gone in the ground three or four weeks ago, but that just wasn't possible due to various maladies.

I went kind of crazy at the Renee's Garden display at the hardware. Some great seeds that are hard to find, and it made me happy to put back all the "Miracle Gro" seeds I had reluctantly been gathering, and go with Renee's.



Summer Finale

For the past several weeks, the Night Blooming Jasmine we planted two years ago has been in crazy-bloom! Intense, lovely perfume drifts for blocks when the plants are blooming, and of course they only bloom at night.

The scent is a little heavy, almost cloying, but I love it -- probably the only thing of that kind that I do. It reminds me of later summers and early fall as a boy at the Great Grandmother's house on Balboa Island. After a long walk around the island, we'd get within a 100 feet of the house and there would be that smell; and my mother would say, sniffing the air vigorously "Mmmm. Night blooming jasmine!" And we would breathe deep as we passed through the creaky old wooden gate, and in a few seconds we'd be indoors, getting ready for bed in a house that smelled of ancient mildew and salt spray as only a beach house can.

Night blooming jasmine is my own little time machine.