Sage Advice?

When we first moved to Acton 9 1/2 years ago I was all excited about having an herb garden.  In that time I’ve planted 3-4 culinary sage plants and I haven’t seen any of them develop these rosebud-like things!

They’re not flashy.  They’re subtly beautiful, I think.   It was hard to get this photo because there was a nice little breeze blowing and they kept bobbing and blurring.

I took one of the buds inside and cut it open.  Look at that!  It’s a seed pod!

So… does anyone know…  Does that make this a female plant?  Does that mean I’ve always had male plants before?  Or does it mean it was pollinated somewhere along the line and the ones I had before didn’t?  I bought it as a very small plant about a year ago.

How to Become a Redneck in 4 1/2 Hours – Monday 5/25/2009

A) Put your hair up in a ponytail.

B) Go out and do a bunch of yard work on a sunny day and remember to put sunscreen everywhere but the back of your neck.

I don’t know why it always seems to take me till the end of a long weekend to think of starting a physically demanding project, but it often does. I decided to tear out the two rose bushes at the far end of my herb garden. They were here when we moved in and I’ve never liked them.

The blooms aren’t particularly pretty, only last a couple of days on the bush, and can’t be cut and brought inside– all the petals fall off.

The first one came out pretty easily, but look at the trunk on this guy! It was something else digging this out.

There were 1-2 inch think roots running all through that end of the garden and even down to the end closest to the back door. It was a lot more work than I expected. I started at 9:30 in the morning and finished getting the roots out, digging in garden soil and planting until a little after 2pm. Don’t know about you, but when I get started on something like this, I have a hard time stopping till it’s really done.

I did pause, though, once I finished wrestling with the roots, to clip a little fresh sage, rosemary and thyme and put a pork tenderloin in the oven. I was working up an appetite!

I thought I took more photos of the progress. This is after I added in the fresh topsoil.

Man, I had a lot of clean up to do. I’d had most of the tools out of the shed to work on those roots: shovel, trowel, long-handled and short-handled garden forks, small leaf rake, hoe, edger (which didn’t really work), flat blade shovel, long handled clippers, hand clippers.

Every time I went into the house for water I realized just how aerobic my efforts were. I had to catch my breath in order to drink. I kept thinking about my pal Los Angelista who was running the L.A. Marathon today (so exciting!) I think I would have felt about as beat up if I’d tried to run the first three miles with her!

See the rainbow in the sprinkler water?

I didn’t mind getting wet while adjusting the sprinkler heads. Whew!

All the herbs are in! Good sized parsley, sage and thyme (I never knew how good thyme was till I started growing my own and using it.) Small chives, parsley and basil (I think) that I started from seed are in the little planter.

I also planted three cucumbers that I started from seed. I’m not sure any of them will take. They look really tender and vulnerable, and it gets pretty hot out there. K warns that they take a lot of space, so I guess if only one survives, I’ll be okay!

Still didn’t get the new red rose bush or the lavender in. I’m not sure where I want to put them!

And I think I want to get some of those stacking brick colored blocks to put around the edges of the herb bed. Or at least dig the bricks that line it out of the grass.

Sundry to Hydra: You got your grass on my dirt!

Hydra to Sundry: You got your dirt on my grass!

Not exactly a Reeses Cup.

Great day. I feel accomplished.

And tired.

I Don’t Know Scat – Saturday 7/19/2008

There have been mountain lion sightings in Acton this summer. One even took a goat from a place about a mile and a half away, as the crow flies.

We thought maybe this was mountain lion scat, but it’s not. When we got home and looked it up online, we found out that real cougar scat looks like this.

Oh! We saw that all over the ridges around our neighborhood. Seriously!

Still not sure what this is. It’s disturbingly large and full of juniper berries. Like bear scat, kind of. Hmm. There are bears way over on the other side of the valley, but I can’t imagine one wandering all the way over here. It’s very exposed.

I don’t know exactly what this is, either. Maybe it had something to do with surveying the area? It looks like they mounded dirt up an poured the concrete into the bowl to make this base.

We’ve decided that the best place to eat is usually at our house. We went to a restaurant that was well-reviewed online yesterday and it wasn’t as good as these chicken sausages and onions I cooked up for lunch.

Let’s see… What goes with that?

What do I have in the fridge? Persian cucumbers. There’s a ripe tomato on the patio, and basil growing on the front porch and, hmm, the plumbs I picked from the branch of the neighbor’s tree that hangs into our yard.

My instincts are getting better. This was amazing together, dressed with my favorite taragon white wine vinegar and the wonderful olive oil Tomasina gave me for Christmas.

Plumbs and fresh basil. So good. I’m going to try more pairings of fruit and herbs.

Apple Progress – Sunday 6/29/2008

These are the apples we’re throwing away. Sadly, the worms found our little organic corner of the earth. Need to find out what to do about them without poisoning us or the fruit.

These are the small apples Hydra is going to attempt to eat without getting a stomach ache. Pacing is probably very important here.

Yeah, I counted them. We pulled more than 80 off the tree so that they wouldn’t break the branches as the continue their march toward ripeness.

They should arrive around October, I think.

Basil growing tip: I finally figured out last year that in spite of the little directions that come with the basil, it’s really happiest out of the kind of direct sunlight we get here in the high desert. It likes the relative safety of the shaded front porch, but it wants more moisture in the soil that is easy to maintain due to the high temperatures and almost constant breezes.

My mom told me about her trick of putting a strip of rag from a pan of water into a potted plant when she goes away for a few days. I thought I’d try this with my basil plant. Seems to be working!