Last summer, my little granddaughter came out to visit. I taught her about the edible flowers in my garden. One afternoon was spent gathering and chopping up edible flowers to be eaten in a fairy salad. Fairies don't eat lettuce, so we could only eat mainly flowers. Calendula and Borage with a rose petal or two. Maybe a few mint leaves thrown in. I tell you, they weren't bad. And we all lived happily ever after.

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It was a beautiful day today - and not raining - so I emptied my compost bin from the back yard into the garden beds in the side yard and did a little cleanup. These are my keyhole gardens where I put my compostable scraps into the "baskets" in the middle. I just have to build up the soil around them and then they are ready for planting spring crops. Despite the beds not being very built up yet, and the baskets only about a year old, I can see that they are composting down and that there are more worms in the beds. My sad little cabbage didn't do well though. Not enough nutrients, probably. I'll be better about it next time.

I just have a bottomless 5 gallon bucket for a compost bin in the garlic bed. I'll build a composting basket after the garlic is harvested. The bucket works pretty good. I keep it covered to keep the possums and rodents out. I suppose they can get into the baskets, but so far no problems. I think the feral cats keep the vermin at bay.

 This is what happens when you run out of Sluggo. The snails and slugs go crazy on your plants. So grateful for the rain, but the little slimesters went nuts! Some of the plants were on the small side, but I got quite a bit of harvest from them!

This is the Rosemary plant that almost died after I transplanted it. It loves living next to that compost basket!

Recap from an annoying gardening summer:
Last summer's vegetable garden was not a huge success - again - but it was much better than the summer before. Partly this was due to unforseen circumstance. I had made plans to build up the beds and co-garden with a neighbor, but then she had to bail. I had planted some things that she preferred - things like golden beets and tomatillos. Im not crazy about either of those, but of course those were the vegetables that did best. (of course). I have a freezer full of tomatillos and I guess I had better make some verde sauce with them or something.  I also planted fewer of the things I love - like pole beans and eggplants. Oh well. Lesson learned.

I outwitted the cucumber beetles with moderate success by making a raised bed behind my house and growing my winter squashes in there. I got some good Spaghetti and Hubbard squash by training them to grow up my fence. I tried some Cherokee Trail Of Tears Beans which did ok, but there were not really enough of them to do anything but munch on. Not bad though! I saved seeds and will grow more this year. My Kentucky Wonder pole beans did great and I got some good seed from those as well!.

There was more water available this last summer, so my  tomatoes were better and no two legged pests stole anything out of the garden proper, although Bambi found it and ate my Valerian flowers. I did get a decent harvest of Valerian though, and it has been keeping me suitably sedated though the beginning of this new political regime. Not sure what to do about Bambi though as  the two legged pests stole the chain link fence that used to keep the deer out. I am afraid of so many things this year. Did the humans really need to steal my fence as well as my country? I digress............

A few of the heirlooms got buggy and I was always fighting those off with neem oil and soap. I even found a tomato caterpillar for the first time and made a mad dash to drown him. Never saw another one after that. I never gor those beds raised much, but I did continue with the keyhole garden idea and I love, love, love it!

Plans for the new year - and hoping to actualize them this time............

Raise my beds to cover up the compost bins in the middle. (right now, they are exposed)

Plant some things from starts and not from seed. Things like onions. I dont have great luck with onions from seed. They start fine and then they fail. Maybe I will have a chance with bigger starts.

Make more raised beds in the back yard now that I know where the sun hits best back there (there used to be a huge shade tree).

Maybe only plant one tomatillo plant. I think that will do me just fine. Two at best.

I took all those flower petals and orange peels that Ive been drying and hoarding and made myself a big batch of fabulous potpourri! I'm feeling crafty these days, so now I'm ready to fill all those little sachet bags that Ive been cranking out! Just about everything came out of my garden or was something that Ive had on hand. If I don't put those orange peels in the compost bin, I dry them for this very thing!

A Summary Of Last Summer's Garden

My summer garden was so disapointing that I just gave up for a bit. Despite all my attempts to garden effectively with specific water allocations, the garden just didnt prosper.

Im going to get snarky here: while the city of Napa still got away with green lawns and water running freely in the gutters from overwatering, I got my rent raised with the excuse that the property owner was getting fined from all our water consumption. Seeing as I was using grey water for the most part combined with limiting my showers, using greywater for most of the toilet flushing, and using the DIY ollas that I posted about earlier, this didnt make sense. I dont know if anyone in my building was using more water, but I really dont think so.

But whatever.

The ollas worked, but I didnt plant my seeds and seedlings close enough. I had used a diagram found online, and the roots did indeed find thier way to the containers, but everything should have been planted closer to the ollas and it was just too hot.  Very little thrived. The beans were sick. The tomatoes were sick. I got blossom end rot and all the plants were stunted. My garlic was small. The bugs were out in full force. Very little had a chance out there. Oh, a few things did alright once the weather cooled down. I found out that Snapdragons are a wonderful drought flower! And my Kale and Cauliflower did alright eventually. But I was a very sad little gardener for the most part.

So "Fuck That", I said when I stopped grieving. I spent all winter researching new ways to go about having a thriving vegetable garden in a desert. What I came up with were keyhole gardens. Raised beds with a compost basket in the middle and based on permaculture. So I have been working on raising my beds with found objects and cinder blocks. Ive been collecting rocks and bricks bit by bit. This bed is ready to fill as soon as I grab a few more cinder blocks and fill in some edges..

They wont be very high to start with, but I never know how long I'll be able to garden out here. I'll raise them higher next time if I can.

 Im also making new little beds in my back yard that will have little compost buckets scattered here and there. As soon as I get my truckload of soil, my neighbor Homirah and I will be planting a whole new garden that hopefully with the use of keyhole technology, compost buckets, and better use of the ollas from last summer,  will give us way more bounty.  And she can help me rig shelter from the sun for our tomatoes. It has been raining a lot and the reservoirs are filling. So that is promising. The aquifers are not filling, though, and this will be bad.

I am a determined woman in a desert land.

The Loring Street Olla Project

My garden went from lush, green, and rioting with color, to dried up and dead. And this will happen in the summer here without a steady supply of water,

The severe drought in California is forcing stricter measures to be put into place for the average citizen while Fracking and big water bottling companies like Nestle are pumping water out of our aquifers at a terrifying rate. We're being told that we can only use 35 indoor gallons per person a day, which isn't bad, yet you can still wash your car as long as you have a nozzle on the hose that you can shut off while you soap up. Its not making sense. Total bullshit. We're watching greed and entitlement in its true colors right now. We gardeners and people really working hard to actually conserve our resources are suffering while lawns are still green, water is being bottled for a profit, our dwindling ground water is being sucked up and polluted forever, and you can still wash your car.

 But aside from all of  that, I'm managing to have a small garden this year because I did some research, thought ahead, and took some action. I discovered Ollas. (Pronounced oh-yah) The pretty, large, round ones are just too expensive for my meager budget, but I discovered how to make them myself using plain  terracotta flower pots and matching saucers. People have been using ollas for thousands of years in arid countries. So why not. I bought some pots at that big box home improvement store, but if you are good at scrounging and have cheaper places to shop at, all the better. I made the first batch by just sealing them together with a silicone sealer that comes in a tube for use with a caulking gun, I should have considered whether it was a food grade composition, but I didnt. I read that aquarium caulk is best. I dont think this is a huge deal, but I will be more careful next time.  I made another batch by gluing them together first with hot glue and then using the silicone sealer. Some swear by using Guerrilla Glue, but we'll see how these work out.They don't last forever, some will inevitably break, but it seems like such a reasonable way to conserve water and not spend a fortune.

 Unfortunately, I had  put my tomatoes and cucumbers in the ground beforehand and the plants really could have benefited from the ollas being planted closer at the same time. . I planted some as close to the tomatoes as I dared  get. You have to dig fairly deep - and of course, it depends on the size of the pot.  I had already set plastic grow pots near their roots, but it didn't seem like they were getting enough water. I hoped that this would help.

The idea behind the olla watering system is that by filling them with water and letting the ground dry out, the roots of the plants will be drawn to the water and collect moisture by pulling the water from the submerged container. It has to be a porous container so that moisture will be able to escape to the thirsty roots. Some people get all fancy by installing an irrigation system that fill the pots, but I just do it by hand with a headless water wand. You just unscrew the head. I went out and bought a funnel to make the system less wasteful as I still end up spilling some.

By trial and error, I am learning how to use this wonderful watering system! Next year, I will plant my tomatoes around  larger Ollas and use the smaller ones for the other veggies. . Ive been covering the holes with rocks and little chunks of found concrete, but next time I'll paint all the tops white and cover them with saucers to alleviate some of the inevitable evaporation. And everything will get planted around the ollas at the same time.

While I was doing my research, I saw a lot of pictures of things newly planted around the Ollas, but not so  many photos of plants as they grow with this system - or the end results. So I'll try to remedy this by showing how my garden progresses over the summer.
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Lets start with the tomatoes. Mine are all mostly Cherokee tomatoes. Ive also got a  Black Prince and an Egyptian somethingorother that appears to be a paste tomato, I started most of them from seed indoors and they just seem a lot smaller than what they should be. They are all producing fruit, but they are tiny as compared to last year. The soil should be fine and I used the same techniques that I used last year. They might need more sun - maybe they don't get enough hours of it. I think putting in a couple of Ollas and mulching with some rotting hay has helped. We have had some hot days, so all in all, the plants seem a lot happier now. Ive got more flowers, so I am ever hopeful.

The cucs, which I never have any luck with, seem to be pulling out of whatever bad mood they were growing up in. Ive been upping the fertilizer - mostly worm castings - seems like they should be bigger, but they look like they might live. I actually got two medium sized cucumbers out of this one. Maybe its just too much to hope for a healthy cucumber plant in my world of mega cucumber beetles (they spread a virus). I have one growing in a more enclosed space out back, and it looks much healthier - no cucumber beetles. I am convinced that they like the Olla watering system.

 So far, the pole beans that were planted around the Ollas are the healthiest I have ever had. (this is a photo after a long hot day - they always look a bit wiltie after the heat) They look like they are supposed to and I didn't lose a single one. Not a single one. I had saved up a lot of toilet paper rolls and gave them little collars as they poked their little heads up out of the soil. It works like a charm. There are a few that were planted a bit far out of reach of the water, but I save the watering can or the hose for the ones that wouldn't otherwise make it. More Ollas next time!

Eggplants, Zucchini, Kale, and Cilantro are all doing well. Now that they are established, I water about every two - three days and use so  little water as compared to last year. I have not planted any root crops because I just didn't have all that many pots. But Ive got more space since digging up my garlic. It would be fun to see how carrots and radishes grow around these.

The bottom line is: if you have the time and some DIY skills, you can do this as well. They do take up some room and have to be stored somewhere if you dig them out of the ground, but if you plan it out, it looks like you can actually get quite a bit  out of a small amount of space. Stay tuned.

The Flowers Are Rioting

 Literally.
 A riot of Nasturtiums. I took some seeds from a neighbor's outcrop of Nasturtiums a while back. He didnt mind as he hates them and they grow like weeds. But a pretty weed and vine creation is just what I needed. I threw these seeds out into the field and with a couple good rains - voila! They pop up everywhere!

Unless you absolutely cant stand weeding, don't plant them near your garden. But I find these flowers easy to identify by their leaves and to pull out when they stray. The bees adore them and while I cant prove it, they probably keep some bad bugs away.

Unless I can keep them watered, they will die back soon, but the aroma is absolutely intoxicating during the day and evening. I planted some in pots in the back yard for color.