scarabic

These poppies have just been propagating naturally in my yard. I don’t do anything except leave them alone. We got so many this year that we spotted several people stopping to take selfies with them :)

This is the first year I actively gathered these seeds and spread them around my yard to places that poppies don’t just spring up on their own. If we have any kind of rain this winter then spring will be insane.

It’s pretty fun trying to gather these seeds because by the time the seed pods are mature, they’re also bent and flexed, which makes them split and POP and spread their seeds everywhere as soon as you touch them. So you have to grasp the whole pop in your hand quickly to get hold of any seeds. My kids had a blast with that.

The wet winter and spring really made for a wild year here. It’s dry usually so only hardy, opportunist plants tend to survive. But this was such a year of plenty that everything green just WENT FOR IT. Man I hope we get more like that.

I guess I thought they were more like distinct biomes but it really is just uniform chunks of temperature range. I also didn’t know that they were defined by the US Department of Agriculture, who created the first such system to help gardeners. There are similar maps for Australia, Canada, and parts of Europe, but no single global system. What’s your zone?

I’ve bought spinach starts in the past and had a great time harvesting spinach all season - just a few leaves off the bunch each time and more would always grow.

But this year I sprouted seeds myself and I was disappointed when they didn’t grow into the nice bunches I had seen before. Just these leggy little plants. They have nice leaves but not many of them.

Should I be sprouting several seeds together? Or just plant a lot of these closer together? Is it an issue of variety? If anyone has thoughts I’d love to hear them. Thanks

I had a great year for Romaine lettuce. After learning how nutritious it is, I started a bunch of seeds and they did really well. We had more than we could eat, and after a camping trip I came home to find they’d bolted (see picture). I recommend trying this plant if you have any interest. They are reportedly water intensive but I didn’t find them excessively so. I was also told they will bolt at the first sign of heat but that didn’t happen for me either. They were mature and harvestable for weeks, even with some hot days.

I wanted some color in this part of the yard and I’ve always loved lanatanas. I remember being fascinated by their many geometric shapes even as a kid. But I lost a whole row of them the first time I planted. What little frost we get here, maybe 2 or 3 nights a year, was enough to kill them. I tried again the following year and started earlier. And I blanketed them one or two nights when there was a frost warning. They still lost some foliage but the roots remained healthy and with some pruning they have thrived this spring and summer! I hope they are now on their way to being even stronger. They grow big around here, into full hedges even.

I built this trellis and planted two varieties of honeysuckle in front of it, maybe 7 years ago, thinking they would mingle and mix. One of them, a Japanese variety, took off, and the other barely grew: after 3 years it had scarcely grown from the potted size I bought it at. Then I began pruning it. This seemed counter intuitive: it had much less foliage than I wanted so why cut what little was there? But it stimulated more growth than it subtracted. And a few years later, the two varieties are now of a comparable size in my hedge! I have a calendar reminder of what time of year to go prune and I do it diligently. Lessons learned!

The previous owner of this house planted mint in the ground around this site over 12 years ago and it keeps coming back. It’s not taking over or anything but it persistently pops up here and there. Just amazing how hardy and well adapted to this site it is. Wish everything was this easy to grow :)

For years I’ve been taking a pee jug along when I go camping. I buy a 2-gallon jug of kitty litter and keep the nice wide-mouth jug it comes in. They’re firm plastic and have a nice handle. I keep one right outside my tent for midnight pees. Way easier than hoofing all the way to the bathrooms or whatever.

This time we actually brought the pee back and added it to the compost pile! It’s like two of my hobbies finally came together after years. Huzzah!