Succulents and More™

For a month this 7 ft. scarecrow has been standing guard at our front door. It’s a fisherman, complete with a creel and bamboo fishing pole, and it even has Gore-Tex boots and a Ralph Lauren shirt (wonder what guy was duped into getting rid of those ). While its face is quite cheery, it sheer size is enough to give you the chills, especially if have a vivid imagination and are a horror movie addict like I am. Anyway, Halloween is over and the time has come to say goodbye to Creepy Joe. It is just a scarecrow filled with straw after all! Pants with nobody inside them Ashes to ashes, and straw into compost tumbler That’s the end of Joe the Fisherman. May he make good compost! Good thing our younger daughter’s elementary school will have another scarecrow auction next year. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

Tonight the thermometer is forecast to drop to below freezing for the first time this season. If the weather people are right, this will be followed by two more nights of freezing temperatures before night-time lows climb back above 32°. Most of our succulents are quite hardy so the 28° to 30° forecast for the next three nights shouldn’t be a big deal. However, last winter a few of them were damaged at 26° so I’m going to take precautions, especially since I don’t trust forecasts 100%. Agave desmettiana ‘Variegata’. Lost 50% of its leaves last winter at 26° but came back with a vengeance this year and is now looking better than ever. To protect this tropical soft-leaf agave, we draped a strand of holiday lights over it and then covered it and a few neighboring plants with a frost blanket. Agave desmettiana ‘Variegata’, protected with holiday lights and frost blanket Our flapjack plant ( Kalanchoe thyrsiflora ) was damaged badly last winter as well. The little plant in th...

"The mistletoe is still hung up in farm-houses and kitchens at Christmas, and the young men have the privilege of kissing the girls under it, plucking each time a berry from the bush. When the berries are all plucked the privilege ceases." --Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. , 1820 What a charming custom that is, and yet in our house mistletoe doesn’t engender friendly feelings of that sort. Maybe it’s because we have too much of it, year round, to the point where it’s about to bring another of our trees to its knees. Mistletoe is a parasitic plant that grows on a wide range of trees, its roots invading the bark to extract water and nutrients from the tree. Usually the host doesn’t die because the mistletoe would die with it. However, some trees, like our Bradford pear ( Pyrus calleryana 'Bradford') get weakened to the point where limbs start to break off. Since this poses considerable danger to anything or anybody near the tree, the only...

The Arboretum is a 100-acre public garden along the banks of Putah Creek on the south side of the University of California Davis campus. It contains more than 22,000 plants and trees adapted to our Mediterranean climate of cool, wet winter and hot, dry summers. At the southwestern end of the Arboretum you’ll find the Valley-Wise demonstration garden, which I briefly mentioned in my post about the succulent beds in our front yard. With its bike and pedestrian paths along the creek bed, crossed here and there by quaint wooden bridges, and a small lake in the middle, the Arboretum is a treasured resource in our small college town, much used by students and the public alike. It is also an inspiration for home owners who want to use more climate-appropriate plants in their landscaping. While the larger trees, like the valley oaks, are too massive for today’s smaller residential lots, many other shrubs, grasses and flowering plants are eminently suitable for just about any landscaping de...

The first of a series of winter storms is going to hit us tomorrow, which in our case means rain and high winds. The rain is welcome, the winds are not. In the morning Heather got our raised vegetable beds ready for winter planting. She ripped out all what was left of our summer vegetables and herbs—still quite a bit of basil, loads of jalapeños and a sad-looking squash or two—and topped off the beds with the soil we had brought in a few days ago for our bamboo stock tanks . Amazing how much soil seems to disappear from the veggie beds every year; I guess it just gets compacted. A 2-inch layer of composted chicken manure on top, and the beds were ready to go. Heather, with the help of our younger daughter Elena, was finally able to plant the winter vegetables we bought a while ago at Morningsun Herb Farm in Vacaville. For the peas Heather resurrected a teepee she built years ago for bush beans. Sure beats trying to tie up the peas to the fence! Copper-tubing teepee for peas T...

In our back yard we have four bay trees ( Laurus nobilis ) that were planted when the house was built in 1990. Now the trees are 30-40 ft. tall and shade a large part of our back yard—not to mention provide us with a never-ending supply of bay leaves. If anybody in our area needs bay leaves for cooking or crafts, drop by. You can have as many as you like! Unfortunately, the root system of bay trees is shallow and extensive, so planting under them has been an exercise in futility and frustration. Digging is hard enough since the roots form a dense mat, but almost anything we planted over the years ended up dying since the trees suck up all the moisture and nutrients. The few plants that have survived the longest include a cast-iron plant ( Aspidistra elatior ), which I believe is truly indestructible, a Japanese holly fern ( Cyrtomium falcatum ) and a clivia ( Clivia miniata ). Since this is a such a shady area, it would be ideal for ferns, astilbes, hostas and the like, but these plan...