Gardening Journal

Plant your own garden and decorate your soul instead waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

It’s taken me thirty six years to realize that I can order the flowers I want on my birthday! I discovered this darling flower shop, Magnolia Flower Shoppe and ordered my very own bouquet of pink flowers for my birthday. I love it and couldn’t resist sharing it here!

I woke up to a warm spring day, and already my daughter Stella and I have fertilized most of the citrus trees. This week we planted ruby slippers, more kangaroo paws, saco palms (which are stunning; I’m so glad I discovered these), flax, white ice land poppies and sweet peas. I’ve also started (finally) putting down ground cover, under the plumeria. The bulbs are spiking up, eager to bloom and I can’t wait to see what they all look like.

My onions aren’t done, and I wonder if anything is wrong with them. I need to go back and check when I planted, calculate when they should be done. Does anyone have a good system for keeping track of plantings? Anything digital? I have dates written on scraps of paper in many places…I need one good system to keep track of plantings, fertilizing, etc. Perhaps a good goal for my new year.

Today I planted about a hundred bulbs….tulips, apricot beauty, mrs. john scheepers, also crocus, muscari, and hopefully some leucajum (but the bag was unmarked!) It took a couple of hours to prepare the soil and get everything into the ground. Here I have a picture of some of my bulbs in the ground. I’ve planted bulbs so many times — but still I hesitate, wondering which direction is the right way! I hope I’m not sending some flowers into the ground!

Lately I’ve been stressed about a few things in my life — gardening unrelated — and I can’t believe how getting my fingers dirty in the soil for a few hours takes me away, gives perspective. It’s like being connected; knowing there’s this larger thing in life, something beyond human drama, beyond our petty grievances. And it’s also a reminder of what is important; things that live, breathe, grow, be. Things that are present, here and now.

Tulips represent luxury. They last for only a few weeks; they take time to plant, energy and space that you might want to allocate to something that reaps more reward, something longer lasting, something green, something that takes less maitenence and space. But when they bloom, when you have rows and rows of color, standing upright on their stems, you just get to enojoy and part of the enjoyment, truely, is that it doesn’t last. So its the ultimate test of “being present” — i.e. being here to actually see the flowers when they blossom, and notice. Enjoy. It makes me feel rich to be able to plant rows of tulips and even fantasize about seeing their color. Lucky lady that I am!

On to the vegetables….I harvested my first winter tomato today!

So much for that nursury owner who told me there’s no chance I’d get tomatoes during winter in southern California. Several look to be ripe in the next couple of weeks. I’ll report back on how they taste!

Today I planted spinach, bibb lettuce, red and white onions, and six splendid basil plants. It’s November in southern California, so it’s dicey whether or not these things will make it. I mixed worm castings with vegetable grower’s soil together and mixed them in my raised beds. For onions, I planted them from bulb and starters — sweet white & red onions. Harvest time is about 110 days, so we’ll see which do better, by bulb or starter

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It feels good to get my fingers in the soil; it’s been too long! I was inspired to do some planting because we’ve been eating our first batch of satsuma manderines: delicious! We planted that tree in early spring, this is our first fruit tree to be ripe, along with the lemons (which are great to have but just aren’t the same to eat!)

What are you planting for winter harvest? I’m curious to hear what other gardeners reap during the winter months.