Tag: flowers

Gardening

There is something about the smell of dirt, whether in the form of sodden leaves and dirt in the fall rain, or a pot of soil, or spreading amendment into a garden bed.

For years I had a house with a fenced-off area for gardening.  I grew tomatoes and corn and lettuces and lemons and figs for the most part.  There was a 40-foot tall avocado tree too, but it was old and diseased.  The soil was clay, and if I watered it, I could sink into it up to my ankles unless I put paving stones around the beds.  It wasn’t the best of situations, and had I the wherewithal, I could have rototilled amendment to make a better bed, but it never happened.  Still, going out to play in the soil, plant and weed and pick were some of the best bits of summer.

Since then we have moved.  The guy we bought our current house from put in too many trees, and now we are paying the price of having them removed over time.  About a dozen more to go (that’s down from about 20).  Then, a small back hoe or something is going to need to come in to dig down to get at roots and such – probably 24″ or so – and put in a new watering system and dirt.  In hindsight, I should have done it when we moved in, but that is hindsight!  With foresight, I am planning ahead.  It will take time and money and a bit of thought, and perhaps even a landscaper or professional.

Only one tree is going to be saved – the crepe myrtle (above).

However!  All is not lost as I have a Dog Free Zone (a.k.a the “DFZ” – a side patio where the dogs are forbidden, and is fenced off).  There is also a small flower bed in the front yard, and gardening areas for a fig tree and roses.

We have a couple of tangerine trees in pots on wheels which we roll around on the back patio to collect the sun.  Today I did some transplanting of flowers into larger pots, pruning, and general clean up.  After that, I started some old seeds in starter containers – things like cucumber seeds from 2008, long beans, mesclun, holly hocks, lupines, stock and carnations, pimientos and cayenne peppers.  If they come up, great; if not, at least I tried, right?

Flowers and vegetables and fruit – all are better when home grown!  Besides what I put in today, I also have a couple of tomatoes, odd bulbs, lilies, zinnias, more peppers (about 12 or so), mint, milkweed, lavender, alyssum, sunflowers, marigolds, and few other bits and bobs that attracted my attention these past months.  Front and back are getting spruced up!

Gardening is one of the great joys of retirement, a beautiful spring, and an unfolding summer season . . .

Dappled Light

It’s been nearly 10 days since my last post.  Nothing traumatic to keep me away from painting – I just have had appointments and social activities accompanied by making sure all my retirement paperwork and insurance is in place for my “official” beginning of being a Medicare recipient on June 1st!  It’s been a slog, but it is in place, and hopefully nothing will make me have to do it all over again.

That said and done, the weather here in California has been really strange.  The new normal!  We have had rain into the month of May, and as a result flowers and plants and butterflies are prodigious, with spring flowers lasting well into what might be considered the summer months.  Even the hills are still colorful, but slowly fading to the usual beige and brown.  The rain, though, fills the bright blue sky with big clouds, sometimes ones which sit around and slowly disperse, sometimes with ones that dance their way across the sky, changing with every glance.  When I was a kid in the middle of nowhere, I loved lying in the hammock and making up stories as the clouds shifted and reformed.  It’s as magical now as it was then.

The local botanical garden is one of my favorite places.  It has so many things to see.  A variety of habitats are represented – desert, Mediterranean, and woodland, to name a few.  Today’s painting is a scene along one of the pathways, from the photo I took below.

I am always attracted to dappled light – the strong contrasts of dark and bright.  Photographically, it is hard to capture, but I was relatively pleased with the way the photo caught it.  I am also fairly pleased as to how I was able to interpret the photo and the light.  It was a struggle, and especially difficult after nearly two weeks of inactivity, but it worked out in the end.