The Garden in May

 

Rain's prompt this week is "petals". To me that means flowers - a good opportunity to show you my garden beside all the poppies I blogged about last time.

May is one of the most exciting months in the garden in my corner of the world. In this month, the gardens explode in blooms. Many plants are already past their prime like French lilac and the spring flowers like tulips. They bid farewell a while ago.

Since you already saw the many poppies in my garden, here are just a few examples, including the stunning Lauren's Grape. Mine had a lighter pink-lavender, but usually they are darker. I had quite some of them last year, but only a few came back this year.

Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) is a wildflower with edible root and herbal properties and is feeling very much at home in my garden. It has this huge seedhead and this year, I will try to cut off most of them before they actually get to this stage. In the right picture you can see the tall stalks of salsify - yes, there are a lot.

Another plant that has multilpied through seeds since I first planted it a few years ago is Clary sage (Salvia sclarea), but strangely enough it only sticks to the part of the garden in front of the kitchen. I tried to get it grow in other parts, without any success. It is super drought tolerant and keeps a long time. Spiders like to hang out on the leaves.

Despite the wet and colder than usual winter my peonies underperformed this year. I was a bit disappointed, but am delighted about the few flowers they did get.

Last fall I planted native lupines - it's a dwarf silver bush lupine (Lupinus albifrons). I didn't expect much so soon after putting it in the ground, but was very happy when I saw the first few blooms. It's a stunning flower and I plan to plant more of them. It's living close to my young olive tree that unfortunately the deer love to snack on.

The spider was watching over the ladybugs making new little ladybugs on top of the yarrow "Moonshine" - garden porn!

I love sage (salvia gregii) - they're easy, very aromatic and loved by hummingbirds and bees alike. You can't really go wrong with them as long as they don't get too much water (which never happens in my garden apart from Mother Nature going a bit wild in the winter).

Some more salvia - nemorosa in this case. They have never been as beautiful as this year. 

This I didn't plant - you probably all know this plant well enough. It's Flatweed (Hyochaeris radicata) and has settled uninvited. However, it's one of the first flowers that bees and other pollinators go to in the spring and therefore it's welcome here. I adore the rich golden yellow.

Digitalis is a flower that doesn't really belong to California, however, I did try to plant it last year (they're biennial) in a very weak moment and two of them survived. After they're gone I will dig them up and put in the compost bin since I don't really want them in my garden. What was I thinking?

Apricot mallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua) on the other hand is well suited for this garden. It is very drought tolerant and I first got the idea of trying it out after I had seen it in the desert. It is also called desert mallow for a good reason.

This is one of the newer beds that I created a few years ago with the sheet mulching technique (my entire garden is a sheet mulch garden - all of this used to be a lawn when we bought the house 11 years ago). It has become one of my faovrite spots in the garden. The Jupiter's Beard is taking over a bit, so I will probably get rid of a few of the plants when they're done. I know that they will come back. There's also scabiosa, calendula, coyote mint (a CA native), silver bush, lavender, pitcher sage, potato vine, a native elderberry (Sambucus mexicana), and a small pomegranate tree. A few weeks ago I wrote that I was afraid the pomegranate tree might have died in one of the freezing winter nights we had, but it has come back more beautiful than before and I'm grateful for that. Pomegranates remind me of Turkey and the wonderful time we had there with the Turkish branch of our family.

The native California grape Roger's Red shows first onset of grapes. They're small grapes and don't taste like much, but the birds love them (the raccoons as well...).

The flower in the left photo is a Watsonia, a bulb flower native to the cape area of South Africa and therefore well suited for the Northern Californian climate. I saw it in a neighbor's garden and admired it. Last fall, that neighbor brought six or seven of the plants to my door. I love this kind of neighborly exchanges. I 'm also very fond of container plants and have a few every year. They get watered with the saved water from my shower. We have become quite the "champions" when it comes to saving water. 

And can you believe this??? Well, I almost couldn't, but I can assure you, they're real.

This brings me to the dinner part for Thursday Art and Dinner Date. Recently I cooked something with tomatoes because I was missing them so much, but I forgot to take a picture - I probably was too greedy (I simply love tomatoes). So here is a "winter veggie" dish I made a couple days ago - farfalle with pancetta, carrots and broccoli.

The veggies are from the farmers market where I buy them from a very sweet Mexican lady. That poor woman is my "victim" to practice Spanish (my pronunciation is probably horrible) - did I ever tell you that I started to learn Spanish at the beginning of the year? I felt I needed to learn another language beside the four I already speak (more or less well). It is a lot of fun, but sometimes also very frustrating. I'm glad that I speak German, because some things are similar to the German language, like reflexive verbs, and Spanish has quite some of them. Knowing French also helps a lot, even though I sometimes use "le" instead of "el" - confusion in my head. However, being able to speak and understand some Spanish, even if only a little, is quite helpful in a state like California.

Have a great rest of the week, everyone!

Poppy Time!

 

It's poppy time in my garden again! 11 years ago I spread seeds of papaver - those beautiful big poppies that come in all kinds of color. Since then they have reseeded every year and in some years there were so many that I had to take out some of them right after they were done blooming so that they don't overwhelm the garden in the following year. However, I always left enough poopies go to seed and consequently, never ran out of them.

This year, most of my poppies are of the classic crimson corn poppy kind. They always remind me of the huge poppy fields in Germany.

Poppy field in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany

My poppies happily mingle with all the other flowers in my front garden - allium, California poppy, yarrow "Moonshine", and Spanish lavender to name a few.

Every single flower is an amzing piece of natural beauty.

I also love them when they're not quite open yet.

And of course they spill through the fence and throw shadows on the sidewalk.

As I mentioned in my last post, we have started to enjoy our meals outside. The warmer weather also means the start of Rosé season - my favorite is a chilled dry one. So wonderful when enjoyed outside. And of course it deserves to be shared with the T gang that comes together for Bleubeard and Elizabeth's T Tuesday. Thank you, Elizabeth, for this great opportunity.

I wish all of you a week filled with sunshine and laughter.

13 Minutes to the Moon

 

Rain's prompt this week is "Moon Phases" - I can't really write a lot about that, but I do have a few moon pictures that I have taken over the years. The one above is a moon rise on Christmas Eve over the enchanted land of New Mexico. We were traveling on Interstate 25 from Santa Fe to Pueblo in Colorado when we saw this spectacle in the sky. Fortunately there was an off-ramp close by, so we could safely stop and take pictures of it. I loved the pink shade in the sky as well as on the moon. Only a few minutes later it looked very different.

One evening when the Geek and I walked the neighborhood we watched the full moon and noticed the wires as well. I decided to let it sit on this wire.

Or what about a pole dancing moon?

A few years back, when we returned from an event at the Pepperwood Natural Preserve we were lucky to see the moon rising from behind the trees.

This is another full moon seen over Pepperwood just a few months ago. Here, I didn't have my camera with me and had to make do with my Pixel phone.

I especially love the full moon when the sky is cloudy, it is so atmospheric.

Of course we shouldn't forget about the moon during a lunar eclipse. This is the Super Blue Blood Moon from January 31, 2018.

As a child I was fascinated by the Apollo program, especially the Apollo 11 moon landing. A few years ago I listened to "13 Minutes to the Moon", a BBC podcast about the Apollo 11 mission (later followed by a second season about Apollo 13). It was just as fascinating. 

Back when we traveled to Washington D.C. - a gift we gave to ourselves when Barack Obama was elected the first Black US president - we of course visited the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum where the Apollo 11 command module is on display. It was so tiny! How could three grown men fit in there? It must have been highly uncomfortable.

Now let's get back to Mother Earth and see what's for dinner. The weather has been so nice lately that we started to eat outside whenever possible. We recently got this beautiful picnic table from friends who wanted to get rid of it. It's beneath our big tree now - actually I'm sitting here while I'm writing this post.

That evening we had leftover spaghetti that I sautéed with zucchini, eggplant and red bell pepper. This is also the time to open up the rosé wine bottles - oh, lovely!

This, of course, I am sharing with Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date.

T is for Trip on Mother's Day

 

Every year on Mother's Day we used to go up the coast to Mendocino. However, due to the pandemic we hadn't been there since 2019, so this year my wish was to go back to Mendocino. This was the first time that we did this trip without Kaefer. I have written about Mendocino several times - here, here,  and here. Sorry, this is a photo-heavy post.

Mendocino is a small town located right on the Pacific Ocean in Mendocino County which borders to the North of Sonoma County. It takes about two to three hours to drive there depending on how many slow moving vehicles are in front of you. All the roads to Mendocino are windy backroads with very limited opportunities for passing other cars. We also usually have breakfast somewhere in between, but this time the place where we usually go to was a big disappointment and I doubt that we will return.

We arrived shortly before noon and first walked around the picturesque town a bit.

Mendocino has a lot of old water towers, but depite them as a result of our heavy drought they had to endure a very severe water crisis. Their own water was running out and they had to truck in drinking water from other places. Imagine sitting right on a huge body of water, but having no water to drink.

I have always loved the beautiful gardens in Mendocino, full with colorful flowers. Flowers that are lining the white fences.

But the water crisis changed how people garden, and what I now saw were manly gardens with drought tolerant plants that don't need much supplemental water - and definitely not here on the often foggy coast.

Mendocino is full of little nooks and decorations on buildings. I couldn't resist taking a photo of this sign, taken outside Dick's place.

One of my favorite places in Mendocino is the Gallery Bookshop - it smells of books, the shelves are crammed with books, everywhere are benches and chairs to sit and read. It's a wonderful old fashioned bookstore. Some of my most useful gardening books for the Northern California climate I found here.

Then we headed out to the Mendocino Headlands, passing more beautiful places within the town.

The Headlands are on a peninsula which gives you beautiful views of the ocean and back to Mendocino. From here you can see how it is located on top of the cliffs. It is indeed very romantic - as well as often cold and almost always windy. I was glad I was wearing my thick winter jacket.

The headlands were covered with wildflowers, especially lupines in white, yellow, pale pink, blue and purple. It was a feast for the eyes.

But there were also other wildflowers, like this mallow which I think is an Oregon Checker Mallow (Sidalcea oregana) and wild iris.

And then there was the ocean with a shoreline so different from the one at Salt Point. 

There is a pretty big blowhole out on the bluff - it didn't blow much, but the noise when the ocean splashes in there is quite impressive.

A narrow trail leads around it - and then there were always those views!

Thrift Seapink (Armeria maritima) and California lilacs (ceanothus) rounded out the wildflowers.

As you know, I love trees, and somehow I really liked this one and couldn't stop taking pictures of it.

After having walked the big loop we returned to the town and now it was time to pay a visit to the Chocolate Haus. Oh my! Mother's Day was a great excuse to get some wonderful chocolates.

We opted to drive back along California Highway 1. At this time of year, the road was lined with wildflowers.

Looking out over the ocean,you can see the marine layer (aka fog) hovering over the sea at the horizon. It didn't take long to reach the land.

The view from the highway to the West and to the East.

We stopped in Gualala at the Seafood Shack for some delicious rock fish and chips and a bottle of local Scrimshaw. This beer is brewed in Fort Bragg which is about 10 miles north of Mendocino. The Seafood Shack is a small local business that we try to support whenever we can. Like so many places, the pandemic hit them hard, but since their seafood is one of the best along this part of the coast, we always stop here for a late lunch or early dinner. The staff is hard working and always very friendly. And of course you guessed it - the beer is for Bleubeard and Elizabeth's T Tuesday. Cheers to you, Elizabeth, and all of the T visitors (i.e. YOU who is reading this right now).