It Has Begun

Our cucumber plants are so prolific right now that we can't keep up, so we gave our neighbor a few on Saturday. Yesterday, Chris’ coworker brought him two tomatoes, and Chris took a cucumber donation to work today. This afternoon, another neighbor gave us some tomatoes and a cucumber from his garden. And just like that, the season of exchanging the overabundance of homegrown vegetables has begun. In the end, I’m not sure any of us will have fewer vegetables than we started out with, but we will have more friends. And isn’t that really the whole purpose of planting vegetables?

Thugs

Tonight from my dining room window, I watched a band of thug crows in action. After a few minutes of a Three Stooges-style quarrel over a stolen pecan, Larry jogged over to my vegetable garden containers. Without hesitation, he hopped up on my pepper planter, pecked at and rub on my cherry pepper plant, plucked out the plastic ID marker, paraded around the pot a few times (as if to show his buddies), and then flew away with it. Curley, Moe, and the rest of his band of thugs flew after him, like he had just robbed a convenience store and the first ones back to the tree got the cigarettes.

This is going to be a long summer...

The Herb Garden

The Herb Garden: Week 6

The Herb Garden: Week 4

The Herb Garden: Week 2

Holly is supervising the first harvest

The Herb Garden: Week 1

Seems that whenever my mom and stepfather visit, I end up with a new garden. Sometimes I have to do the planting, but they always buy...which makes planting seem like peanuts!

A couple years ago, they bought the plants for a sage garden we'd been wanting. We ended up with about 10 different sages! The garden was our pride and joy...and then we moved across the country and had to leave it behind.

In our new home, we were in sore need of an herb garden (ours went the way of the sage garden)...so they bought us an herb garden. And the pots we needed to house the little garden.

It’s freezing out here! Literally.

Last night, for the second night in a row, temperatures dipped into the upper 20s. Snow flurries were reported in El Cajon and other parts of the we’ve-never-seen-snow-before sections of San Diego County three days ago.

My garden sprinklers went off at 4 am today, and by 6:15 when I left for work, the sidewalk was coated in a bubbly sheet of ice. My plants? Well, they looked like I employed the same tactics as the citrus growers.

Tonight, my garden is full of little ghosts. Sheets and towels cover everything that proved itself not hardy enough for sub-freezing nights. These ghosts are almost symbolic of the loss of life I fear in my beloved gardens.

It feels silly to say I’m attached to a plant, but I am a sentimental person and many of my plants have sentimental meaning. Like the pot-bound, waterlogged Jade we rescued from the back yard. It was finally making a comeback.

And the Aeonium clipping from our last home that had grown (exponentially) into a mounded knee-high pile of green. Today, they look like a pile of cooked collards. Or the Costa Rican sage my mother and I planted just last summer to cover the ugly shed in the back yard. It had reached a proud 4 feet and was a nice distraction from the rusting, faded, metal building. Today it is just a stalk of withered leaves.

And, the Giant Bird of Paradise Chris lovingly bought me to soothe my disappointment after someone stole mine right out of the garden of our last home. Now, the black-brown leaves drooping from the stalk look more like a vulture warming itself in the desert. The list goes on, and so does the cold.

I covered everything I thought couldn’t take it another night, and I apologized to the rest. I hope my little symbolic ghosts turn out to be just that…symbolic. In the mean time, Holly and I have snuggled in for a long winter’s night. San Diego-style.


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