The Drought in California

The Drought in California is very bad - driest year on record for many areas:
http://www.acwa.com/content/local-drought-response

The impact is hard to imagine, even for those who live in California. I was shocked to see the bottom of the San Leandro Reservoir a couple of weeks ago - even after seeing these Before and After photos that were published in January:
http://www.weather.com/news/stunning-photos-californias-lakes-depleted-extreme-drought-20140123?pageno=1

Governor Brown declared a state of emergency in January, and at that time, asked residents to voluntarily cut back water consumption by 20%:
http://www.water.ca.gov/waterconditions/declaration.cfm

The response was spotty; some districts reduced consumption while others increased:
http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25090363/california-drought-water-use-varies-widely-around-state

Overall, usage went down about 1% - not enough. So mid-July, the state approved $500-a-day fines for hosing down sidewalks, watering to the point of runoff, or washing your car without a shutoff nozzle.

The water supply system is a convoluted mess. The result is dramatically different conservation measures depending on where you live, even for neighboring communities. For example, EBMUD (East Bay Municipal Utility District) supplies all the cities in the East Bay:
http://www.watereducation.org/general-information/other-major-water-systems

But each municipality contracts service from one of hundreds of different suppliers:

http://library.ucr.edu/wrca/grants/districts.html

Alameda County Water District notified Fremont, Union City, and Newark businesses and residents of mandatory restrictions - with fines - back in March:
http://www.acwd.org/

While just north of Fremont, the City of Hayward is still on voluntary conservation until August 1st. Our water is purchased from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission:
http://www.hayward-ca.gov/GREEN-HAYWARD/WATER-CONSERVATION/

Many refer to "the drought" in terms of this year, or the cumulative impact over the past 3 years:

http://blogs.kqed.org/lowdown/2014/03/18/into-the-drought-californias-shrinking-reservoirs/

But the data point to this particular downward trend starting in 1998 - right after the last big El Nino event:

http://ca.water.usgs.gov/data/drought/runoff.html

I say "particular", because historically, California has experienced droughts that last hundreds of years (credit to M. Tsui).

Regardless of the debate over climate change and global warming, the dramatic increase in population over the past 100 years means we have to use our resources wisely. Humans can live without food for 46 to 73 days, but we will die in 3 to 5 days without water.

Of course in California, it's all very political:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/15/5309350/california-25-billion-plan-to-save-delta

Some sources estimate that agriculture uses 80% of the water supply:

http://pacinst.org/publication/ca-water-supply-solutions/

So the question is: how much is 20% of 20% really going to help, especially in light of the long-term trend?  

Personally, I don't think the politics warrant letting a water-wise garden die. We need plants and trees to process our emissions and pollutants, and hold the soil against wind and rain - especially after a fire. Native plants use less water than lawn, and hold moisture in the soil to support an entire community.  

Green lawns in California happen in spring. It's called a "meadow".  A green lawn in August is an un-natural occurrence that demands copious amounts of water and chemical fertilizer poisoning our ground water, streams, and ocean while stealing valuable real estate from the native plants that provide much needed food and shelter to birds, butterflies, bees, lizards, frogs, etc.

We started replacing our lawn, bit by bit, 10 years ago, when the last drought kicked our ass.

Ironically, the most generously funded Lawn Be Gone programs seem to be sponsored by the most affluent communities:

http://www.menlopark.org/332/Lawn-Be-Gone-Program

But you really don't have to "landscape" all at once. Wildflowers are a time honored tradition to brown dirt in my neighborhood - and they come back year after year! I like Renee's scatter gardens:
http://www.reneesgarden.com/seeds/scattercans.html

Save the World!  Grow Flowers!

Rest in Peace Little Blackie

We noticed Blackie was having hard time keeping up on 4th of July.  But he's an old dog - we've had him 13 years!






He showed up at the back gate full grown after roaming the park for a week then following a neighbor across the street - all 5 lanes of Mission traffic. 
Another neighbor started feeding him 3 days after he showed up in the neighborhood, but I didn't know that. All I knew was this scraggly street dog was camped under my bedroom window whining day and night, and we had to do something.


He was wild. We used the dogs to lure him in, but he wouldn't let us touch him. We backed him in a corner with a puppy gate, looped a leash around his neck, and dropped him at the vet's for a bath and check up.

I was 4 months pregnant with two dogs.  We made posters.

I contacted the local rescue organization and agreed to foster until we found a good home. Doug couldn't bear to bring him to the pound. We gave him a temporary name because he was a temporary dog.

I took him to an adoption fair, but every time someone looked at him, Blackie wedged further between my legs and shook like a leaf.



He was a good boy and learned fast. Everyone liked him, but he was Booga's dog. Mom said, "he's a once in a lifetime doggie!" So he stayed...

He was scared to hang in the house and thought we were trying to poison him with treats.  It took a couple of years, but slowly he felt safe.



My son was born.

First Katana, then Kenai died.








Bella came 4 years ago. Blackie accepted her like everyone else that's come in and out of our lives over the years. Already turning gray, he became Blackie the White. Finally, we could get a decent picture and stopped stepping on him in the dark, though to the very end, he had this incredible knack for walking exactly where you were going.

Blackie didn't feel good last Sunday. His belly hurt, but he started eating Monday when I called the vet. Come Thursday, it was bad again so we went, and ran all the tests, but there wasn't anything obvious.

We went to the emergency room on Friday.  They found cancer in his liver and spleen, and a mass bearing down on his urethra with imminent kidney failure.

The Doctor sent us home with pain meds for hospice care, but he refused to take the meds and hadn't eaten since Wednesday night. Yesterday she helped end the pain.

Profoundly sad I am, missing the dog who stayed and wouldn't leave - even when it hurt so bad.

Fall flowers

My husband announced to me this weekend, "Do you know how many plants are flowering in the backyard?!" I guessed 15, to which he said,"I counted 18!" This is our little 'ol postage stamp, inner-city garden - in Fall.  And we'll be blooming all winter.

The crazy fuschia is doing great.  This is the one we got at the Botanical Garden Plant Sale 4 or 5 years ago (I'm too lazy to go digging through the tags), and had to cut almost to the ground after the killer frost.  Shoshanna fell in love with it.  Musta heard her, 'cause next I know there's a volunteer baby in the curly willow pot just waiting to be dug up.  Very cooperative!

The Salvia puberula looks amazing now that it's established and not getting beat up by roofers and squirrel chasing dogs.

Yep, it's fuzzy like that to the naked eye from far
away...

The side garden is frankly embarrassing. There is NO path left to the door. Diane would be horrified.  I loved it this summer when I could open the door for air and enjoy complete privacy.

But now I got a real mess!  I got sucked into not pruning in March because I felt bad taking nectar away from the hummingbirds.  Now the pineapple sage (Salvia elegens) is across the sidewalk and in the driveway, pretty well choking out the lavendar.

The scary part is the limelight. This is it's first year.  It's beautiful!  It's growing into the garage!  Again!  Doug hacked a big branch off last month.

Of course Pinkie (and the rest of them) love it, and fight constantly over the Salvias.  It is not safe in my garden.  Any moment you can get buzzed by hummers in battle.  They are especially fond of the Mexican Bush Sage, which is halfway across the front lawn (sorry Bill).

Tillandsia sp?

Kapow!! I was SO excited by the 7 spikes this year! And of course had to share.

But being a lazy gardener, I have no clue what species this guy is. Well, not lazy in this case; I scrounged it from a bin at Home Depot. So I went online to find the species, and found pictures of people holding football sized clumps with 30+ spikes that kind of look like mine, but not quite. At first I thought it was an albertiana, but the purple coming out of the magenta is tubed, not a tri-petal shape.

I've had this plant for almost 12 years, so go figure how old a 30 spiker must be.


Maybe an Aeranthos Bergeri Hybrid? I don't know - the foliage doesn't look right. There are 600 species and umpteen hybrids. Quite a beauty!

I'm pretty certain this one is tillandsia ixioides (another Home Depot find - not that I go there for plants; from back in the days when there was a Home Depot run every weekend to fix something or another).

I totally want to build a real pergola (as opposed to the mutant bench thing that came with the house), line it with a misting system, and get more tillandsias. That's where you'll find me on hot summer days...

This is the flower that Bella ate...

This is the flower that Bella ate.

This is the flower that takes 3 months to ripen,
swelling and pregnant,
all teasing aside.

Opening slowly,
till fullness round midnight.

Calling the neighbors 'cause they can't believe,
the beauty in hand that blooms once a year!

Fading so swiftly, and gone the next day.

This is the flower that Bella ate...before it bloomed this year :-(

Sample Pots

I just down loaded my camera and found some great photos from June of sample pots inspired by the Hort. The Hort does a wonderful job of displaying a mother plant in full glory with smaller For Sales on the shelf below. The sample pots are never for sale, but are amazing beautiful.

I'm a definite sucker for the babies. That's how I ended up with my first orchid, the Green Hornet. I couldn't figure out why it didn't bloom for 7 years until I started reading up and realized orchids need to reach maturity first - typically 7 years! Then there was the CA native that I thought was dead and when I dumped it in the compost discovered it was dormant and the new shoots were just about to reach the soil surface. Quick re-pot!

I've never been much of a "pot" gardener, but after years of drooling over mother plants, I set to making my own.

This is a close up from the campanula sample pot. No, I don't know the exact species. There are many many hybrids and I'm too lazy to dig through the tags. A wonderful plant for the shade garden, providing ground cover and a profusion of blooms in spring, though mine kick some color all year long. I've got entire beds covered in the cute, sturdy little leaves. And it's not overly-aggressive, like mint.

This is from the lobelia pot, one of my favorites at the Hort, and what started the mono-species craze in my garden. I shamelessly copied, throwing 6 different colors in one bowl. Be careful to buy the trailing kind and not the clumpers. I made that mistake once; I thought I was going to cover the ground in front of the rhodie with a mat of lobelia, and instead ended up with 6 mini bushes. Doh! They look real nice hanging too.

Un-hybridized Lobelia is really bizarre; tall spears of big flowers, kind of like a cross between foxglove and delphinium, but in a beautiful claret shade. I bought some. It didn't make it.

And finally my newest addition. This gorgeous little mimulus is a testament to genetic engineering, but oh my it's a breath taker! Because this sort of mimulas is one of the riparian water hogs, as opposed to the drought resistant orange natives that cover our hills, I put a cheap self-watering reservoir in the pot when I planted. It does just fine in 100 degree weather without constant watering.

Yes, for those of you noticed, I haven't posted since last November; kind of shocking really. I had every intent, but first Mom's heart attack and then Kenai's passing kind of took the wind out of me...then there was the attack of the Alaskan Red Gopher.

Bella's technique for native gopher erradication is quite unique, though effective: She digs the tunnel up. The WHOLE tunnel. And everything around it in a 3 foot radius. And she's really, really fast. Made quite a mess of my beds. Doug got very creative with the bamboo fencing.

Other than that, she's absolutely perfect, and the gophers are gone.

The Nest

Last December, one of the female Anna's spent a lot of time in the side garden, particularly in the Dahlia Tree. Oh no! we thought. There's no way she could be interested in building a nest, because a) that plant gets cut to the ground in late January when it dies back, and b) well, it's just too close to the kitchen and all the commotion that goes on in there with the dogs and kid and me at the sink 4 hours a day.

I watched her nestle in the crook of one of those fragile leaves and thought: she's just resting. Then there was this bizarre little platform that looked to be made out of mud, but it was flat and it was almost January, cold and dark. Hummingbirds couldn't possibly start nesting that early! It's not even Spring.

Then in mid-January, 1 week before I was ready to do the deed and cut the dahlia, the platform turned into a cup and we had a problem. Frantically I looked up Anna's hummers and nesting and hatching times online. I figured we had to keep the plant up until May, somehow, fighting the darn snails and bracing it against the Spring winds.

Our Lady of the Dahlia was all alone. The males do not assist.

We hung our heads out the upstairs window whenever she was off eating, looking for eggs. But often busted by a very irritated mama bird who would buzz a foot away from our faces in the 2nd story window. Then one day, creamy yellow eggs the size of jelly beans appeared - but unlike a carton from the grocery store, these exuded life. A few weeks later, the pin-heads emerged.

The babies grew and grew, the nest flexing with as they got larger, mama building up the sides with each feeding. And they developed personalities. The one closest to the window was more aware, hungrier, adventurous. We called him Boy, and though I talked to all 3, he was the one that captured my heart.

Our sleepy little babies were more often awake than not, and spilling out of the nest. Mama had to cling to the edge of the leaf for feedings. Everyday when she went to eat, I crawled through the garden and picked snails off the bottom of the leaf and nest. Doug shamed me for interfering with nature and fretting over what was not mine, but then I'd catch him building supports and agonizing over whether mama would continue to feed the babies after his intrusion.

Their wing feathers came in, and the boy entertained us with flexing and preening. He started to exercise, beating them as fast as he could, holding on to the nest with his little feet, wanting to fly, scared to go. Then one day he let go, and it was a miracle! He hovered up, and I thought I'd lost him forever, thrilled by his independence and might.

He practiced for a week, buzzing around the dahlia, then to the fern, and over to the camellia, gone longer and longer each time. Till there was only one, the little girl.

But the boy came back, urging her on, and 2 days later she too fledged. Again I struggled with joy and loss...until I realized they just moved to the backyard! They followed their mother for over a month.

The females still spend a lot of time sucking sweet nectar from the flowers, but they are shy. It is Pinky, that hungry boy, who follows me in the garden, even perching outside the window when I sit in the turret. He is all grown up. A shocking pink cap covers his head, black stripes run the length of his wings like a hot rod.

The king of my garden.