 |
| Something has been trying to dig up the diascia. Has to be something small, so I'm thinking a squirrel. Maybe it buried a nut there. |
 |
| Yesterday at the nursery I saw these chrysanthemums. I don't particularly care for mums -- don't like the way they smell -- but they were only two dollars each, and I thought that they would be nice to fill that bare spot between the slab and the crawlspace opening. I like the color, too. |
 |
| North by northeast |
 |
| South by southwest |
 |
| Seeing how well the morning glory was doing, I moved the trellis from the Boston ivy over to where it is. |
 |
| I have a long plastic stake that used to support an evergreen in the front of the house (it was removed because it was growing too close to the house) and I stuck it where the trellis for the Boston ivy used to be. I'm hoping the ivy is just dying back as the weather gets colder and will re-emerge in the spring. |
 |
| I had been thinking that it was time to let the garden be, and not keep expecting signs of change. But this morning I found a bloom on the morning glory, and it's starting to twine. |
 |
| There are buds on the pineapple sage, too. |
 |
| And the lantana has some new flowers coming. |
 |
| South by southwest |
 |
| North by northeast |
 |
| Calibrachoa. So I made my weekly (so far) nursery run yesterday. You can't see the flowers on these guys very well here, but the one on the left is "Lemon Slice" and the other is "Cherry Star." |
 |
| Calystegia. I'd been looking for a morning glory, and I found this with the California natives. It doesn't look like the morning glories I know, but I'm hoping it'll take over the corner near the gate. |
 |
| Lantana. The yellow one in the middle. It's called "Simon Yellow," which I liked because one of my cats is named Simon. |
 |
| Pineapple sage. |
 |
| Another pineapple sage, with the jade, the oregano, and the basil. |
 |
| North by northeast. Another foggy morning. |
 |
| South by southwest. |
 |
| Southish. |
 |
| Northish. This is kind of an ugly angle, especially on a gray day like today's, when the fog didn't burn off until after noon. I should think about planting something between the kitchen window and the door to the water heater. Went to the nursery today and got some more plants to set out tomorrow. |
 |
| North by northeast. The fog hadn't yet burned off and it was so calm it felt like the world was standing still. |
 |
| South by southwest. We are being looked at by a cat in the window. |
 |
| I can handle stobs (well, sort of), but pieces of metal sticking up from the ground? Not so much. |
 |
| It turned out to be embedded in a chunk of concrete. I began to be afraid I was undermining the foundation while I was digging it out. |
 |
| North by northeast. When I got up this morning it was foggy. The city fog doesn't usually come this far down the Peninsula. But by the time I got to work in the garden it had mostly burned off. Still hazy, though. |
 |
| South by southwest. |
 |
| Ground view, south by southwest. One of the cats was looking eagerly out the window this morning, so I checked and it was a handsome black squirrel. I don't think I'd ever seen black squirrels before I moved out here, but they're more impressive than the usual brown or gray kind for some reason. So I thought I'd take a couple of squirrel-level pictures. |
 |
| South by southwest, normal view. I swiped the garden hose from the front of the house, because there's a sprinkler system there, and I never used the hose much except when I had potted plants out front. Which I swear I'll do again next spring. Anyway, the one I swiped is newer and doesn't kink and has an adjustable spray nozzle. |
 |
| Ground view, north by northeast |
 |
| North by northeast, normal view |
 |
| I went to the nursery and bought plants. |
 |
| Oregano |
 |
| Cilantro |
 |
| Thyme |
 |
| Diascia hybrid, "Flirtation orange." (I don't think of orange as a particularly flirtatious color.) |
 |
| Rosemary |
 |
| California poppies. Which remind me of a previous attempt at gardening. "Are these weeds? These things that look like carrot tops?" "Mm. I guess so." And so we pulled up the California poppies we had seeded earlier. |
 |
| North by northeast |
 |
| South by southwest |
 |
| The stob garden backs up on the parking lot of a church (Seventh-Day Adventist on Saturdays, something else on Sundays). It has a fence, too, and there's a kind of no-man's-land between their fence and mine. The parking lot is also raised a little higher than the land on which my condo sits, so that if someone ever lost control of their car and crashed through the church fence, they'd be stopped by a curb, thank goodness. Anyway, the no-man's-land is full of saplings that in the summer grow higher than my fence until the church's grounds crew comes and cuts them down. Then they just leave them to wither and rot between the fences. You can see the dead leaves and branches through the gap in my fence above. Some of my stobs are from the saplings whose roots have snuck under the fence and I've had to cut them back. I suppose the no-man's-land provides a kind of compost heap, and when it rains, that washes under my fence. I'm interested to see what sort of effect that'll have when the rains come. |
 |
| North by northeast along the house |
 |
| South by southwest along the fence |
 |
| South by southwest along the house. |
