On a lighter note:

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

gardenplan.jpg

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

seeds.jpg

gardenarrnagement.jpg

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

floral.JPG

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

lilacs.JPG

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.

women’s work

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).

pot_cleaning.JPG

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.

gophering.JPG

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.

watering.JPG

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…

kitchen_compost.JPG

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.”

kitchengeraniums.JPG
Namaste.

Full Tilt into Spring

gardenplantsmosaic.jpg

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?