I quickly hashed out what I wanted to accomplish with the gardens around the house. Here’s one nook:

Every surface area in the studio is overflowing with seed packets and logs and lists:

Of course, moving into an established garden already has its perks:

especially the lilacs, here in the kitchen and at my bedside table. I love the heady scent that lulls me to sleep.

You can see more photos of the garden on Flickr.
While you’re there, get a taste for some real garden planning in Montanaraven’s “Gardens: From Napkin Sketch to Reality” set. Then look at the hand tool that you can use to make eco-friendly plant pots using newspaper. I found them for sale online here (in the UK) and here (US) and I would love to have one for the kids. About $14.
These wooden pawn-looking tools are great and the children enjoyed planting purple coneflower seeds for our Austin garden using one last year at The Wildflower Center during the Spring kickoff. Fun stuff.

We seize every minute of good mood, sunshine and willingness and harness it all into gardening. There’s an endless array of tasks at hand, some require priority, such as cleaning old terracotta pots and preparing them anew for GASP! tomatoes!!!! I’m thrilled about this, Damon thinks I’m nuts about the tomato, but there’s no tastier nutritional powerhouse during the summer. It holds the torch all season long (to pass it on to the pumpkin in early Fall).

You clean pots because you want to believe the pots contain no more potential pathogens from the previous season(s), fungal and otherwise. Honestly, I’m just following advice and resting assured that they at least look groomed and cared for. We used a bucket of water and a few drops of earth-happy dish suds, but you could clean away lime stains with vinegar, I hear.

You can’t clean out the pocket gophers. You arrive from the nursery with armfuls of tender perennials and, just beyond their leafy silhouettes, you see a tiny brown skullcap slip back into the perforated topsoil. There’s a little mound of dirt, and a golf ball-sized hole beside it. If nothing else, amusement for the dog.

Of course, with little rain and many tender young plants, watering is necessary. Only, the minute I walk back from the faucet with the hose in my hand, Chas feels the most urgent need to water, too. And what a help this would be! If only he would water the plants, and not the gopher holes.

In the meantime, the compost can be tilled. It smells sweet and almost-ripe, like I remember from childhood, climbing atop our tremendous heap. Earthworms, here and there, slipping out of unearthed mines as we plunge the shovel into their dark network. We could always use more. Every day, I bring a bowlful of kitchen scraps: coffee pellets, eggshells, mango peel, bananaskins…

Then, suddenly, it’s time to wash hands and redress, shovel cheekfuls of leftover lunch into hungry, grubby mouths, and rush to karate. “YOI!” when I’d rather be saying”Namaste.”

Namaste.

On the way home from the beach, I stopped by my favorite nursery in Half Moon Bay (who doesn’t have a website to google but I can give you directions, if you are interested) and bought plants. Not just any plants, but anything that could double its duty as both gopher proof and textural. So I chose a leaf in every shape: oval, circular, fusiform, serrated. And I picked up anything chartreuse and violet, wispy and hugging. In essence, I chose plants that not only worked double time but put in extra hours at playing off one another: purple huechera and silver helichyrysum, lenten rose and bronze fennel, waving yarrow and succulent prostrate sedum. They sit in congragation together on cardboard flats atop whiteplastic lawn chairs, in the shade of two towering cypress beside the house, waiting for me to finish digging vitality back into the cold earth.

A family of quail graze the ground beneath them, black and purple plumes gleaming in the afternoon sun, ebony bobbers wiggling like alien antennae atop their noggins. It’s hard not to grin every time they pass. That’s probably one of those beautiful things about Spring here, although for all I know the quail are permanent residents. But the Robin has started chattering at dusk with the scrub jays around the grapefruit tree’s birdbath, the frogs start peeping soon afterwards, and nothing sounds more like an American Spring, to me.

As you start to spend more time outside, maybe gardening, maybe taking a brisk walk, what sounds of Spring are ringing in the air around you?

It’s March now and in the valley this means it’s time to prepare our gardens for Spring planting. But on an established lot, with hungry fruit trees, gophers, a terraced topography out back, lots of little flower beds, habitat niches and no clear sun pattern throughout the yard, it’s hard to know where to focus in the preparations. It helps to make a plan of attack:

1. start compost area and begin layering kitchen scraps with leaves from the yard’s fallen leaves.
2. sketch a very basic layout of the lot, just for elements and their relationships.
3. from this sketch, decide where the different gardens will go: kid’s garden, herbs, moon garden, etc.
4. test soil to check for deficiencies.

And that’s where you see us here. This is a simple $5 soil testing kit from the local hardware store that I thought Ford might like to perform. Ideally, you want to get a soil test professioanlly done, or contact your county extension agent. But I chose the cheap, quick method. It comes with a color table that you compare the tube colors against, and there are 4 tubes to test with (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, pH and Potassium). Our pH tube here (soil mixed with water and the given reagents) eventually turned green, indicating that the soil is alkaline. And what do you do with alkaline soil? You feed it acids. Compost. The grapefuit tree looks chlorotic and appears dormant after fruiting, very likely due to the alkaline soil.

I hauled leaves from the oak tree understory and started double digging to incorporate some nitrigen into the soil. We’ll see how this goes. And so my outline continues:

5. amend soil.
6. sow seeds directly,
7. plant seedlings.

Here I go on my Reading Rainbow soapbox:
Do you have a garden plan? You you want to have a garden plan but lack inspiration? Here’s a great book to share with your kids, one that we love: Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots. It’s a book just bursting with kid-friendly gardening ideas and sweet watercolor illustrations. My favorite tip from the book is to take naturtium seeds and plant them in a dirt-filled old gardening glove and then tack that to the wall. Because nasturtiums thrive under desperate conditions and because I see all sorts of other possiblilities from this idea. Why not use old hats? colorful stockings or socks? Squares of lace, tied into bags and hung in random spots here and there…

Another book I have that I reference often is a book I checked out from the tiniest local library we have ever belonged to (when we were Airstreaming it on an abandoned farm in Texas) and that I eventually bought for a penny plus shipping online. It’s The Organic Gardener by Catharine Osgood Foster. It’s an older book, slightly verbose but brimming with wonderful and proven strategies for gardening with nature. For example, I’m interested in companion planting, which is a permaculture technique that involves planting different crops in close proximity so that a sort of harmonious balance is created, a model for natural biodiversity, with each plant serving another in one beneficial way or another. It also looks cool and cottage-gardeny, full of texture and visually unexpected. This book pays attention to companion planting as a way to reduce pests. It’s very oldschool, written in the 70s I think, and full of old-fashioned wisdom.

So, tomorrow we continue the double-digging.
Do you have any garden plans of your own? I need to go poke around the blogs. Happy Digging!