Purge the Spurge! - and a Nifty Newt. A Good Day!

(OK I give up trying to make photos appear side by side! This is too frustrating!)

I spent most of today on the steep chaparral hillside pulling petty spurge, Euphorbia peplus, an annual weed that has totally exploded on parts of the hillside where we cleared. Here are some before and after pictures:



























I was going to try snipping it as the roots were dislodging so much soil, but then I found a way to hold the ground around the plant as I pulled it, and that worked.

I noticed lots of very fine bee plant, Californica scrophularia, as I worked, covered with caterpillars of the Chalcedon Checkerspot butterfly, Euphydryas chalcedona.

Don't you just love those big juicy green leaves? In California we don't see so many of those, not like the Florida gardeners do, for example.

It's really quite a handsome plant, though the flowers are very small.

I also found quite a lot of poison oak sprouting, and I sprayed it with roundup. As I was working on the hillside, I don't think any critters got rounded up. I hope not anyway. I had a wheelbarrow full of spurge when I was done.
Most satisfactory! So after dumping it in the compost pile, I thought I'd see how Rat was doing. He was trying to bust open the concrete where the pipe runs under the pool patio. He sawed a box shape with a masonry blade and was giving it some good whacks with a sledge hammer.

Rat Wielding Sledgehammer... on YouTube

But to little effect! I glanced into the (somewhat dirty) pool - what was that little guy?

Oh, he is a newt! A Coast Range Newt, Taricha torosa torosa to be precise, and he didn't seem too bothered by his situation.

They have skin secretions that can kill you if you eat enough of them. He looked too cute to eat though. You can tell the difference between this one and the Rough-skinned Newt, Taricha granulosa, by the way the eyes stick out on either side of the head. Rough-skinned Newts' eyes don't do that.
He went off happily into the damp miner's lettuce.

A good day in the garden.

Winter Chores

I've been wanting to write about the many things waiting to be done, but I've just been too busy out in the garden. That's right, we have no snow, it's wet and pleasant for the weeds, so we'd better roll up our sleeves.

One of the fun -- if a little scary -- tasks is pruning the fruit trees. I have a triple plum, two peach trees, a nectarine, and two baby apple trees. I'm trying to keep them at a manageable size, so I prune in winter for shape and in summer to reduce vigor. It's an interesting challenge, especially with the plum. The multigraft trees never look like the tree in the pruning book.

A fun but smelly task is the lime-sulfur spraying of the fruit trees. This needs to happen on a day without rain, and without rain forecast, and I must have a stretch of time for it. The challenging job is to hook up the contraption to the garden hose, spraying doesn't take that long because the trees are small. I use these nasty chemicals because it's really the only way to avoid peach leaf curl. And as long as I'm spraying before the tree buds out, the fruit is still considered organic. How does it smell? Like rotten eggs.

I also spent some time anchoring to the fence what's supposed to be anchored. That includes the espalier of the Toyon, and tying vines to their trellises. The Aristolochia out front badly needed to be pruned, and I caught it just before it started setting buds. And that's one danger here in our mild climate. Sometimes the leaves haven't fallen yet and the plant already buds out again.

And finally, there are the weeds. Above, the spurge, looking pretty and very harmless amongst the poppies. But if you miss just one plant, and it flowers, you'll have thousands of little spurges to look forward to in the next rainy season. I still don't know where I missed one last year, but there surely are a lot of seeds in the back. Interestingly, this is actually a pleasant weed to pull, it comes out easily and with all its roots. Much better than the dreaded Oxalis pes-caprae poor Country Mouse is battling. The only problem is that the days are short and the winter garden tasks are many.

Fire - Burning the Brushpiles

Earlier this month, we burned the brush piles we had accumulated from last fall's clearing of the chaparral area on the slope below the house.

The brush piles had become homes for critters, and I felt bad to evict them, but unfortunately it had to be done. This pile was huge to start with, but when I got it down to about this size:

I could see there was clearly a woodrat in residence, based on the nest and the munched up passion fruits I found.

I also surprised an alligator lizard! I have never seen one of these before!

Looks like he had regrown his tail! I ended up leaving a smallish pile hoping they would stay in their home, but I fear I disturbed them too much. Look at this guy's eyes!


It's endlessly fascinating to burn stuff. I remember as a child, how the pleasure was compounded by the knowledge that it was naughty to light matches or candles or put to a piece of paper in the fireplace to watch it bloom into flame. I also remember the house being full of smoke and the fire brigade arriving and a firefighter gently asking me if I'd been playing with fire in the attic.

So I enjoyed being in charge of the burn pile, and keeping the flames going but not so high they would scorch the nearby shrubs. Rat is less patient. He is not allowed to be in charge.

I also uncovered a beautiful millipede (difference between millipede and centipede: centipedes have one leg per body segment and millipedes have 2 or 4). I think he's a common millipede.


He quickly curled up when I disturbed him.


Well I hope they are all alive and well today, somewhere down there.

I was thinking about the local native Californians as I burned. I've been reading about how they systematically burned the land to promote growth of more food plants. Some academics believe that the burning was so extensive and was sustained for so long - people lived here for 10,000 years at least - that some of the California habitats we think of as natural are in fact man made! But more of that in another post.

Seedling Status

While we're on the topic of propagation, I'll let you know how things are going with my seedlings. In this post, I had sent out a cry for help to Country Mouse because I'd sowed some annual wildflower seeds, and some of them had grown just a tad too enthusiastically. Country Mouse came to the rescue with potting soil and more 4 inch pots, and on Christmas Day, we spend some time taking some of the overstuffed pots apart. Quite a few seedlings survived.

In fact, even the thinned out pots were looking a bit crowded. What to do?

I decided the day had come to experiment with putting some in the ground. Wanting to hedge my bets, I left about half of the seedlings in their pots, crowded or not. The other half I tried to separate just a bit and stuck them in the ground. For a few, I managed to get all the potting soil in. The others will just have to deal with the clay.

Three days later, about 20% have been eaten by someone. Slugs maybe? The rest are hanging in there, but I'm a little worried that it's getting wetter and wetter. Will the seedlings make it? Will they flower and bring stunning spring color (and tasty nectar and pollen) to the garden? Or will the experiment fail, and Town Mouse regret she ever posted about those seedlings.

Stay tuned. I'll try for an update once a month.

Propagation Party Time

I've been having too much fun with propagation lately.

At the October 18 of 2009 CNPS propagation session, we prepared some Dicentra formosa stolon cuttings. (Stolons are underground stems - something I keep having to look up.) There were a lot left over, and I took them home and prepared about 8 gallon pots.

To prepare stolon cuttings, you make sure to include at least two leaf nodes, and you clip close to the nodes at either end so the meristematic tissues in the nodes can set their adaptable cells to building roots below and stems and leaves above.

We laid two cuttings per gallon pot horizontally and covered with about an inch of the growing medium, which was a bit richer than usual as I recall. We weren't sure how deep to put the cuttings and I still have not found that info so if someone knows please comment!

One of my cuttings sprouted within a month, and I was happy to get any success at all. I just left the rest hanging around, and nothing was happening at all. I don't know what made the difference - but another four in the cold frame have sprouted just this week - three months later! Never give up hope :-)

I had been ignoring the cold frame pretty much but decided to close it up to keep the torrential rains out. Maybe it kept them at the right temperature, and in moist conditions, or maybe they have a biological clock? I don't know.

Last week the propagation group met again, and a member had brought in a bunch of Western azalea, Rhododendron occidentale, for cuttings. They were growing natively at his Boulder Creek home. With the leftovers I made a tray of cuttings for myself. I would love to have some of this azalea - it is deer proof, and locally native. Also my daughter lives in Boulder Creek and it would be great to give her some plants.

Inspired by all the propagation work, I also I made a tray of cuttings of the ceanothus that grows on our property, Ceanothus papillus, Wartleaf Ceanothus. They are in Rat's office, along with the Holodiscus discolor cuttings that I potted on, of which about eight are now doing OK. Down quite a few, but I'm happy.

Yesterday I visited a neighbor to ask if the Ceanothus thyrsiflorus growing along the road on her property was native or planted. Native, she assured me, and showed me another one behind her house. "They used to grow all over here, they were everywhere thirty years ago," she said. "I don't know what happened to them all." She invited me to take cuttings and we mused about the fate of the ceanothus, and I took some pictures of her beside two huge trees that came down on her property in last week's storm. Fortunately the only damage was to her wood shed.

So I gathered and planted cuttings of Ceanothus thyrsiflorus, but when I was preparing the cuttings I noticed a lot had brown blotches on them. I cut most of it off, but am not happy. I might get more cuttings today from the roadside tree which looks a lot more healthy. I also made cuttings of Quercus agrifolia (from the little coast live oak that was downed in the storm - whose rings told me it was about 15 years old), and both "varieties" of manzanita, which I haven't yet identified - I'm calling them Arctostaphylos tomentosa crustacea "chubby bud"and Arctostaphylos tomentosa crustacea "droopy bud."















The droopybud ones have that extra long leaf thingy over the top of each flower (or is it a floret). I labeled each set of cuttings separately and will be overwhelmingly happy if I get results from both so I can compare the young plants. Jeffrey Caldwell told me that our manzanitas are at least several decades old. Some are looking really more dead than alive. If I can propagate them I'll be very relieved to have a way to perpetuate them, and share them with neighbors.

I also set some cuttings from a native rose that grows on our property. I'm not sure which kind it is - I am guessing it is Rosa californica but maybe it's Rosa gymnocarpa. I don't know how to tell as yet. I made an irrigation tubing framework for the cuttings and covered it with plastic, which is the method that seems to work.

I read that the mixture for arctostaphylos should be about 8:2 perlite:vermiculite. But I added a handful of peat moss too just because I couldn't help myself. Even though I read this on a CNPS forum (accessed 1/23/10):

Another thing about native shrub cuttings is that people often over-water or over mist them. If possible, wate[r] the cutting flat so that just the cutting medium gets wet. Continual water on the leaves of the cuttings can rot them. This is especially true of manzanitas, which are highly susceptible to fu[n]gal pathogens.

OK, I'll do my best! I don't know why I added the peat. It just seems so - sterile. But then I realize that the cuttings don't need any nutrition while they are first putting out roots. That comes at the 4 inch pot stage once the roots are established.

The cuttings have overspilled from Rat's office, now full up, to the master bathroom. And in case you are wondering about the greenhouse - work goes on apace, though rain put a stop to work for a week there. Here's a sneak peek at the current state of affairs.

Book Review: Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of our Own Back Yards

A few years ago, I took a garden design class with Fran Adams, and the text book she assigned was Noah's Garden.

In her book, Sara Stein tells the story of her back yard. She inherited a wild and unkempt back yard, and slowly made it conform to what she thought a garden was supposed to look like. Then, with everything orderly and in place, she realized that the birds and other critters she had come to love had disappeared, and asked herself (and some experts) what she could do to return her back yard to the wildlife paradise she used to have.

Each chapter of the book is about one of the ways in which she works on bringing the garden back to harmony. "Fruits in Their Season" is about the the berries and crabapples she now has, but she sees the big picture. "Did we plant the woodland garden of early spring ephemerals before or after I realized hat the honeybees are close to starving at that tie of the year, and that feeding early-hatching flies is critical to feeding early-arriving bluebirds?" I'm always amazed by how much she sees, how much she considers, and how her labors are abundantly rewarded. "Who Gets to Stay Aboard the Ark" is about the critters we don't always appreciate. And again, she considers the web of life:" We are all connected. A hawk may eat a snake that ate a mouse that ate a nut for breakfast, but the beech nub may have come from your tree, the mouse from my field, the snake from our shared wall, the hawk from a hundred miles north, and all of them must be supported on a varied and extensive smorgaboard."

It's an amazing and inspiring book. Then again, as I read it, I wondered why I couldn't find the predator for the Argentine ant that haunts my garden. The answer is simple: This ant isn't supposed to be here, as are other pest brought here from far away. So in some ways, the idea of nature in balance, of things working out, while pleasant, is possibly not always realistic.

But regardless, it's important for each of us to do what we can. And really, there are days when I can use all the inspiration I can get. Where I need to believe that miracles are possible. Where I need to remind myself that yes, I stopped using pesticides and planting natives, and now I have lizards and birds. And who knows, if more of us read this book, if more of us became inspired, we could all have more birds. The Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly might still come back to the SF Peninsula if enough gardeners plant Aristolochia Californica. Who wants a cutting? 

Rain Stops Play

The Country Mouse home is currently experiencing technical difficulties due to the storm that has been lashing the Bay Area and Central Coast. (I'm at work and doing this quick post during lunch.)

No power. No power means no running water either. No phone. No Internet!! This is day 2.
Also no tree where there used to be one, on our property next to the road. So sad. We had to chop up this lovely little coast live oak tree, so parents could try to get their children to school. Turns out there was another, larger tree down closer to the school. Bet the kids were glad!

My dad is at home snug in his cottage with a propane heater and camping stove (and windows cracked open to ensure healthy air!). We are going to install proper propane heating so we can have heat during power outages.

No mud slides, though, where we cleared. The old chaparral shrub roots are holding the soil. So - that's good!

More when we are back on line....

There was no farm here after all!

In a post last november, Where are YOU Planted, Country Mouse, I noted that there used to be a farm here. Well, at a recent neighborhood gathering, I asked one of the original inhabitants of the ridge (disregarding of course the original original inhabitants, the Ohlone Indians) about the farm that had been here before the houses were built - its name is painted an old gate at the beginning of our road.

"Oh, there was no farm," quoth he, "That was some scheme of [another of the other people who originally moved up here], something to do with the planning department, I don't remember now, some requirement so we could keep the status of the road as a private road or something. It had to have a gate, so he put a gate there, and he just put that sign on it so it looked real."

So there go all my theories that this is a farm gone back to the wild - I'm very happy of course, to know that this is land that has not been farmed - only clearcut by redwood tree loggers, which is bad enough - but I believe that much of the existing chaparral was originally chaparral and not converted redwood forest area.

It turned out that my informant at the party was also the person who brought all the Monterey Pines to the ridge. (I blogged about that here.) He explained that the forestry service was promoting their use, and giving them out to home owners, in an attempt to reforest areas that had been clearcut back in the late 19th century. He did agree that they hadn't done so well, as it turned out. I guess the forestry service was not so concerned about restoration of native habitats in those days. I wonder what their approach is now?

BTW, I edited yesterday's Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day post to add notes about each of the plants. You might enjoy a look at that. There is a photo of native plant that has just started growing here, all by itself, Ericameria arborescens.

GBBD January 2010 - Country Mouse

Things are lush and green here, especially on the north facing slope, and more blooms are popping out. This lot is rather like last month's set, but just more of them. The ceanothus in particular has really burst into bloom. And the miner's lettuce is starting to flower also. As I'm short of time, I'll just show a bunch of pictures this month. [Note: on 1/16, I went in and edited this post to add details] Mostly natives, some planted, some indigenous, and a few non-natives.

Pop over to May Dreams Gardens for other bloggers' bloom days!

Above: Ceanothus "Dark Star"

Above: Indigenous coyote brush, Baccharis pilularis. A female one. The males don't get the fluff.

Above, indigenous Salvia mellifera, black sage. Looking lovely.

Above and two below: indigenous Arctostaphylos tomentosa, probably crustacea.


(I know above isn't a flower but the new manzanita leaves are like tender young flowers!)

Above: Indigenous Blue witch, Solanum umbelliferum (see A Tale of Two Solanums for more adventures with this plant).

Above: Indigenous Gnaphalium ramosissimum - aka pink everlasting, or pink cudweed. A biennial. Found in chaparral, mixed evergreen forest, coastal strand. I've found that it is lovely in a wildlife kind of way, though sticky - then when it dries up it seems like a fire hazard and is frankly ugly. So you have to whack em back and take them to the compost pile. Found in California only.

Above: Indigenous Scrophularia californica aka bee plant or California figwort. Great for hosting caterpillars of chalcedon checkerspot butterfly which estivate there (estivate - like hibernate only in summer.) Pretty much limited to California.

Above: Ericameria arborescens, indigenous native that just appeared in 2009. Known as "goldenfleece" - a chaparral and open woodlands plant, common after fire (or in this case, clearing). Found in California and Oregon.

Above: planted salvia "Bees Bliss" and Duncan who seemed to be snacking on it. Beautiful carpeting salvia. Spreads really big.

Above: Ceanothus Dark Star from another angle.

Ceanothus "Joyce Coulter" - A spreading Ceanothus that is massively happy here. This one is about 4 years old.

Non-native Mexican sage, Salvia leucantha. Last year's growth, almost ready to cut back to make way for the next. Survives with no care whatsoever. Was here when we moved in 10 years back. Hummingbirds love it of course.

Above: Creeping Rosemary and Jumping Duncan.

Above: spires of hummingbird sage, Salvia spathacea, and Erigeron glaucus, seaside daisy.

Above: Monkeyflower, Mimulus "Trish."

Above: rosemary that needs to be whacked back or removed for fire safety reasons, and in the distance the Ribes indecorum that is so stunning.

Above: the Ribes indecorum which is so stunning and in the foreground, Ribes sanguineum. Also you can see a bit of juncus and above, a spreading juniper I put in to spill over the parking area retaining wall, as I couldn't think of a native to do the same job. It doesn't really spill, but it's OK.

Ribes sanguineum, pink flowering currant, which is not so happy here. Maybe to warm overall? And miner's lettuce, which is all over the place.

Salvia "hotlips" I think. I got these from Town Mouse who didn't need them. They are not native but they thrive with absolutely no care, and I just whack em back every year so they don't get too tall. They make a nice backdrop to the parking area. Right behind them is a drop-off and a beautiful big madrone tree.

Above, sugar bush, Rhus ovata, Southern California native, said to grow to 8 feet but this one is about 3 feet and about 5 years old. There is one beside it that is not thriving at all - it is so small you can't see it among the miner's lettuce. I think this shrub would be happier on the sunnier chaparral side. Supposed to be fairly fire resistant, too.

Above: Ah, the gorgeous Ribes speciosum, fuschia-flowering gooseberry. It's so happy where it is, in partial shade, with some afternoon sun. It has furious thorns so you won't want it where you have to prune much or walk close by.

I do not make very inspired containers. That's probably an overstatement. Above, non natives: Some sea lavender (aka statice) and some pelargonium (aka geraniums but that's apparently wrong). Again from Town mouse. I am a sucker for plant waifs and strays. Don't let anybody know!

My attempt to make a container arrangement: Sphaeralcea Munroana (Monroe's Globe Mallow) dangling down, very pretty, with locally indigenous Nassella pulchra, foothill needlegrass. There is also some Margarita BOP penstemon and local indigenous California fuschia in there but they are not doing so well.

Another waif, an abutilon that lights up a dark corner, along with some kind of fuschia, not doing so well. The container on the table had a lovely fern but it died back. All from Town Mouse garden overspill.

Above: Cape honeysuckle, Tecomaria capensis. It should have been trained along the utility fence to hide it but wasn't so it just went into a huge bushy shape about 15 feet tall. One of my initial efforts to design and implement a garden, before the native plant bug took hold.

In front Encelia californica, Coast Sunflower - a "mother plant" that I'm fostering from the CNPS propagation group. A Southern California native. She'll be giving us cuttings at some point.
In the background, Polygala dalmaisiana, sweet pea shrub, non native. Trouble free, just sits there and has little lavendar pea-like flowers. Again part of the initial pool garden plan from '05, that was all non-natives.

Above: Also from many years ago, a snapdragon escapee (Antirrhinum majus). Doesn't spread, just hangs out there at the edge of the pool concrete, and reminds me of my mother's little gardens in Glasgow and Liverpool. Behind it the scourge - calla lily. Never plant these unless you want them for ever and ever. I wish they weren't like that as they are so beautiful. They do also seem to foster snails and slugs.

Last but not least, miner's lettuce, Claytonia perfoliata, nestling among some naturalized California poppy foliage. (Eschscholzia californica is not indigenous to our immediate area AFAIK). Miner's lettuce is covering the north facing slopes where we removed the big-old bay tree last spring. Unfortunately many weedy plants are growing among it, and it's next to impossible to weed in there without disturbing the extremely fragile Claytonia. I like how their little flowers seem like a tiny bouquet. It does taste OK but I haven't actually prepared them in a salad. I really should. Maybe this weekend...