We spend a lot of time in and out of the house. The screen door flaps a lot during the day, the windows are always open, the gates rattle back and forth on their hinges.

Since our lot isn’t entirely fenced in, and since we live on a fairly busy road (with the school across the street and with Spring’s arrival and the landscaping trucks convoying in and out of the neighborhood’s enclave) I spend a ton of energy herding children and dog about the commons, keeping everyone away from the street.

Today, however, I was chatting it up in the backyard with Alis when we both tensed to the sound of screetching brakes and heard that most awful sound which sometimes follows: the loud THUD of a broken something. And as that awful sound echoed in my frozen moment, another sound reoriented me, which was the visceral, unmistakable yelping of our beloved dog, Seti.

It didn’t immediately register, the disgust I now feel at the person who accelerated and drove away down our road, leaving his or her immorality on the pavement. Initially, my brain took footnotes: Driver has continued driving down road. Sounds like a truck, possibly a white 4×4. I’ve seen a hundred of those today. Seti looks allright. His hindquarters, something is wrong with his hind legs, etc. But I’m sitting in my bed now, looking over at our lucky dog who escaped death once more (twice this year he has been hit by a car) and who is sleeping soundly through his trauma. I’m wondering how a person can be so selfish. What did they think I’d do? All I would have liked was an apology, an acknowledgement.
People can be so disappointing.

He is okay tonight, asleep in his cardboard box atop a discarded king-sized comforter. If I crouch beside him, his pupils function, taking in my expression and gestures. He sits motionless, licking his lips occasionally, his way of acknowledging my sympathy. And then he’ll lay his head back down. I run my hands along his back, searching for a growl or grimace, but nothing. Just a few cuts on his feet, black tiremarks on his beefy hindquarters, ten intact toes. A short, tucked-under tail. I worry about internal bleeding, embolism. But otherwise, I think he’s okay.

Mean, mean hit and run driver. Have fun with your bad karma.

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.

More fun with the Flickr tools.
The Warholizer tool.

More SPC.

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?

With little difference to the stiff neck I felt yesterday morning, I drove the kids down to the beach. All the elation that nearly winded me on the drive down to Half Moon Bay fizzled once I started lifting Chas out of deep tide pools and stretching to capture fossils embedded in the rocks. I remember the swirling panorama of beached seals and hungry surf, thinking, This is a very bad place to be with a stiff neck and two exploring preschoolers.

So I let both of the kids clamber their way back to the beach on their own (Chas is getting surprisingly nimble) and then rested in the tent while they bouldered and threw rocks at the incoming tide. This overexposed shot is taken from my little infirmary. I like the way it captures the heat, unforgiving light and pain (although I might be the only one to look at this picture and feel it). It also has a nice retro tint. What’s your impression? I’m obliged to use these flickr tools for SPC’s current challenge but I’m not sure I’d use these tools in my own. It lacks authenticity. Not sure I like that, although it has a home somewhere.

My advice to anyone waking up in the morning with a stiff neck is to traction yourself to a board for the rest of the day and hook yourself up to an IV and catheter. Don’t drive a long, winding road to the beach, set up a tent, wrangle children across the rocks at low tide and then press reverse. That was a recipe for disaster. Damon says it wouldn’t matter; that the muscle would spaz no matter what.
I wonder if he’s right.

If you want to learn more about online photoediting tools , check out a gallery exhibiting some at SPC.

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!

Ford, taking a break from gardening to gel in the treehouse.

I think one of my greatests ambitions is to make my kids good stewards of our tiny planet. Partly out of pleasure, partly out of guilt, it’s something I prioritize with as much earnesty as good manners and hygeine. And even though we may be shortcoming in the latter two areas, the kids amaze me in their ability to identify sycamores and scrub jays when they see that pretty bark or hear that raspy sqwawk. After all, we’re leaving quite a legacy for them, both good and bad. Because the natural beauty of this world never stops astonishing me in new ways and because it’s tragic the way humans seem to awkwardly fuddle along, tracking mud all over the place.

My dad, like many children of his generation, spent nearly all of his youth in sunlight and mystery of the outdoors. From raising alligators in his family’s bathtub to bringing sugar gliders to school in his shirt pocket, he built an affinity for wildlife and a responsibility to protect it. Nowadays, at his home in Houston, you can stop by the house and find him digging for worms in the backyard with the neighbors’ children, or building birdhouses, teaching them how to cast in the driveway. I want to be like that always.

And it seems that this generation needs it more than ever, the freedom to roam and appreciate nature and all the therapy it has to offer. Not so much through sheltered nature camps so much as providing them with idle time outside to fiddle fart with blades of grass and fallen honeycomb. But it’s all good. The more the better, right? A book comes to mind, something on the bestseller list last year, by Richard Louv: have you read Last Child in the Woods, saving Our Children from nature-Deficit Disorder?” If you haven’t, go check it out.

In my library at home I have a few favorite that I want to mention, on this subject of sharing nature with children. Here they are, please check these out as well. I wish I had a scanner to help you peek inside the covers. Doesn’t that sound…naughty.

Nature with Children of All Ages is a book I picked up at a thrift store once and fell in love with. It’s divided into broad sections based on habitat or phylum (for example, birds or ponds, streams, swamps and other watery places. In each chapter, there are activities for children designed to awaken their senses, to build contextual knowledge about the world around them, by seeing, hearing, smelling, and touching (and sometimes tasting). Learning bird songs. How to collect animals tracks. Phosphorescence. Drool. Drool. More drool. I love this book so much, this little precursor to didactic biology, where kids sometimes get lost in the tedium of taxonomy.

The second book I dig is A Seasonal Guide to the Natural Year and we currently are using the Northern California edition, although they also have editions for every other major region in North America. This essential reference tells you where to go and when to view natural events in your region or state (and sometimes in areas nearby), divided month-by-month, mentioning when nature is putting on her best shows. It helps when you just don’t know where to focus your explorations (I have that problem); when you would just as soon go tide pooling as you would go traipsing through the woods looking for mushrooms. Oh, the dilemmas I face on a daily basis.

Another book I use, mostly for handwork and “homeschooling” is Earthways, by Carolyn Petrash. This book includes seasonal environmental activites for little ones, like natural egg dying, dish garden-growing, pressed flower cards. More on the Waldorf side, this book also encourages suggestions for bringing nature indoors (through the nature table) and includes lessons that invite children to think about their dependence on the earth through, for example, making butter or taking stalks of wheat and turning it into bread. Great ways to enhance their natural curiosity. Thumbs up.

So, put your finger on nature’s pulse and get that kid outside. And have FUN! I hope these suggestions help. And feel free to mention any of your favorite books in the comments section; I’m always looking for more inspiration.

Ambient temperature outside. The screen door flapping continuously as I chase the kids chase the dogs chase the kids chase me around the house. I’m preoccupied with the tide of afterschool traffic whirring past our driveway, and the kids, puddingfaced and disheveled, monkeying around for the caravan of SUVs, all with their windows down, cheering them back. Where’s the dog? Where’s your bowl of chocolate pudding? Where’s Chas?

This is a shot we took during a ticklefest intermission, all on the sofa in our living room. I uploaded the image to a Hockneyizer Flickrtool website.

For the current challenge atSPC

I am traversing the eastern slope of Fremont Open space, and I’m walking along a terrace once trafficked perhaps by laborers on this former orchard as they roamed from tree to tree during harvest. What kinds of trees? I don’t know. Today their gnarled, leafless, stunted silhouettes stand arabesque upon the hill above me, black and static amid the flowing grasses, beneath the hovering falcon. Birdsong travels like a current over the terrain, bees are busy buzzing in the clover mats, hummingbirds fighting in the treelimbs. I stop along the trail while Seti sniffs the newspaper; it’s Sunday and the weeds hang with dog pee here and there along the worn trail. The entire hillside is tense with new life. You can almost feel the warm ground quake beneath you, a mycelium overtaking winter’s rot, aerating the bedrock, paving the way for shooting rhizomes and weeds. Little yellow wildflowers sway with glossy grass. If I were to try drawing three square inches of this space I might scream; beneath the mat of green urgency lies an even tinier world, a lilliputian army of plants and fungi working together to hold the soil firmly against the hillside. A linear delight, it reminds me of Dutch painting and discovering the architecture of dandelions and drawing for hours on end, without interruption. But today I’m plodding onwards, at times tugging the dog to urge him faster, so I might get back to unpack yet more boxes, and break down more boxes, making space in the mudroom for this naked and young morning light to pour into our house and penetrate the walls with its warm yawn.

It rained a lot last week, sheets and sheets of rain. But this morning, glorious sunshine. On top of Maisie’s Peak, out of breath after a week off and with an arm stretching towards San Francisco, downtown was as tall as a cuticle, my fingernail on the horizon. But I could see it! Amazing early spring air, damp with pungent Bay Laurel and lichen and moss.

Jerry met us at breakfast and decided that a post-rain Saturday was prime for mushroom hunting, so we drove up the hill to an alpine lake along skyline Ridge, ditched the canoe (whim #2) and went off the beaten path with the kidlets.

Chas surprised me with his reaction to a Banana slug. He was pretty offended, wouldn’t touch it at first. This blew me away; I think these things are the coolest molluscs around, like a cold slice of mango looking back at you.

We found a rough-skinned newt, too, that was hard to photograph in the deep shade of a thick, ancient redwook .It crept with fat, orange and humanlike fingers across our hands, drunkenlike yet determined to get back into the detritus. So I returned him to the ground before we exhausted the little guy, and he indeed honed immediately into a random opening in the lattice of wet pine and laurel litter.

We bypassed fallen trees, macerated by rain and time and recently, bear paws. Fresh fiddleleafs, little forest babies, unfurling and mushrooms everywhere. Fruiting above a mycelium beneath an oak tree, wrinkled black Elephant correction: “Elfin” saddles. Little brown mushrooms, maroon unbrellas, fluorescent capes and fans of turkey feathers. Matte black puffs, like ashballs, and salmon candylike clusters on rotting bark. In the split of a tree, neon orange jelly fungus.