Hyacinth and Friends

A little white hyacinth is blooming in our backyard, where no hyacinth has bloomed before!!! I've bought them before, of course, at the supermarket, in tiny ceramic pots for forced blooming indoors. After all, who can resist a hyacinth in the springtime?

This one was growing up out of a pile of compost. I imagine the spent bulb came out with the kitchen scraps and landed in a propitious spot. Not realizing what it was -- no blooms were showing -- I unwittingly uprooted it while shoveling compost and adding insult to injury, or rather injury to insult, I sliced off a bit of the bulb with the shovel.

When I saw what it was I immediately planted it in the rich soil along the fence. I was sure it was done for, but plants can surprise you and I am always ready to be surprised. How nice to be rewarded with an un-looked for bloom. Let's hope it prospers in its new home as a symbol of rebirth, regeneration, and second chances, or, actually, third chances: house, compost pile, and now, planting bed. A three-time winner and a fitting tribute to the beautiful youth Hyacinth, beloved by Apollo but accidentally, tragically, slain by him and immortalized in an ever renewing flower.

Flowering at the same time across the yard in the bed along the other fence is a little mystery bulb, a migrant from the front yard. It must have come in with the leaf litter I collect in the front yard to cover paths in the back yard, following the permaculture practice of using onsite materials whenever possible.

There are dozens of these unknowns in the front yard, coming up every spring as long as we have lived here. And now they will be colonizing the backyard too. Another un-looked for spring bloom.

The wild onions are also blooming now in the shade under the plum trees. No mysteries or surprises are involved. These are tenacious weeds I happen to be fond of. They appear with the early spring bloomers and spread opportunistically everywhere there's an opening. I like them as additions to spring salads -- all parts are edible and have a mild oniony tang.

What all three of these pretty volunteer plants with their hopeful white flowers have in common is that they have chosen to grow in our yard. May they prosper (within reason).

A Fine Spring Day

Hello sour grass, my old friend! Welcome back again. Here you are with one, lone, bright-faced bloom lighting up a neglected corner of the yard. Can spring be far behind?

It was such a splendid, dirt-under the fingernails day I ended up spending the whole morning in the garden. The usual inspection tour -- lately just a quick look around our damp, cold, scraggly, uninviting backyard patch -- turned into a flower photo op.

The first oxalis blossom opened nearly a month earlier than last year -- mid-January as opposed to the week of February 10. (One of the great features of a garden blog is the gradual accumulation of exact data from year to year.) Spring does seem to be running early. There are golden fields of wild mustard blooming already out by the coast and our neighborhood is sporting the first gorgeous tulip magnolias.






The volunteer arugula has put forth its trademark four-petaled blossom, delicately veined like the wings of some kind of exotic helicopter insect. I've seen the hummingbirds buzzing these blooms.






Here is borage -- not a very good photo. I'm sure it looks at lot better than this to the bees who gather here.






The pea plants are blooming again, unfurling like the Japanese folded paper flowers that "bloom" when you put them in water.






More flower origami: elegant black-trimmed fava bean blossoms are opening on three-foot tall stalks.






These hot pink rosettes aren't flowers at all, just some garden art that resulted from the thinning out of an overgrown clump of volunteer chard. Lots of the leaves had been so thoroughly mined by leaf miners that they had rotted into slime during the rainy spells. Yuk!

Undaunted, and energized by the unexpected spring day (I know, I know, it won't last), I weeded and trimmed until the plants could breath and soak up the sun. The lipstick chard pictured above is growing back from a venerable gnarled stump, all that's left of a plant that grew six or seven feet tall last season.






There are several varieties of chard in the patch, some growing from over-wintered stumps, some springing up for the first time.






Here's a shot of the north half of the winter garden. The oxalis and the borage are in the back corner where the fences meet; the arugula is to their right, the peas are in the foreground twining up the wooden stakes, the favas and the patch of chard are out of view to the right. In the foreground you can also see spinach, lacinato kale, and a bed of sponsored arugula. In the background are a couple of beds of lettuce. Out of view are broccoli and leeks. The paths are covered mostly with miner's lettuce. And that's about it.

We are harvesting lettuce, miner's lettuce, spinach, arugula, kale, and chard. We are waiting for broccoli, leeks, another round of peas, and favas.

Ready to pick or not, edible or not, everything looks beautiful on this fine spring day.

Volunteer Potatoes

Here's the harvest of All Blue potatoes. It's the second year in a row these plants have come up on their own. It's gotten so I expect to see them come back. Hi fellas!






An unexpected guest was this vigorous volunteer potato plant spilling out of the compost bin.






Here's the whole harvest. I don't usually turn the compost, but it was worth it this time to unearth the treasure. And, as a bonus, the compost will be riper for spreading on fall beds.

These potatoes are clearly fingerlings of some kind. The leaves looked quite different from the Russian Bananas, with extra small lobes that made them appear ruffled. I think I recall some small packages of French fingerlings that sprouted and got tossed. Welcome back!

Yard Chard

Sunday was so warm and delightful a day I got drawn into some unplanned garden tasks, merely as an excuse to be outside. (Hard to believe only two days later as I look out at a cold rainy evening.) There were volunteer chard plants coming up in various spots and raised beds just sitting there under their blankets of straw. Why not put the two together?

The particular patch pictured above is on the path next to last year's chard bed. It consists mostly of seedlings of the coveted Bionda di Lyon variety. All I had to do was dig up the seedlings with a trowel and plant them right back into their ancestral home.




The soil in the bed was perfect: crumbly, dark, and full of earthworms. Several months ago the bed was covered with a layer of fresh horse manure -- earth apples that I get now and then by the bagful from a friend who volunteers with the Morgan horses at Pt. Reyes National Seashore -- and a protective layer of straw. Under the rotting straw there was no trace left of the manure. It was completely assimilated into the rich web of life that we call dirt. I'm expecting big things, literally, from this patch of yard chard.

Gathering Wild -- and Semi-Wild -- Greens

C. and I took a long walk today when the sun broke briefly through the lowering clouds. The gutters were running lavishly with rain water and some of it was pooling into the streets -- we haven't seen that for a while. It made me think of e. e. cummings: everything was "mud-lovely and puddle-wonderful." C. certainly thought so and sniffed his way though this damp world with doggy enthusiasm.

Rain is no deterrent for backyard excursions either. All things green and growing are a delight for the eye -- encrusted with sparkling droplets. Miner's lettuce (above) really shows up well in the gloomy light.

When I first came to California, lo these 45 years ago (!!!), one of the first bits of local lore I was entrusted with by the natives was familiarity with this charming little plant, favored during gold rush days by the miners who valued it for its Vitamin C, a remedy against scurvy. This is the perfect time to gather as much as can be eaten in fresh salads, while the leaves are still heart-shaped and tender. A basic California weed, it is showing up all over the back yard and, like the miners, we are glad to see it.




Another common weed is fennel -- its bright green feathers grace many a roadside in early, early spring and then mature into tall, fragrant poles topped with little round trays of white blossoms, followed eventually by the wonderful seeds. We have one large plant that has dug in next to the fence and comes back year after year. In fall I gather the seeds, and also the hollow poles to use as light plant supports. In spring the mother plant is surrounded by hundreds of tiny seedlings just right for perking up a salad.




Arugula has naturalized in our yard and comes up everywhere on its own. I planted some several years back and let it go to seed. Good move. Salads don't seem complete now without some of its dark leaves with their distinctive spicy, nutty flavor.

In the fall, after letting the tall seed stalks dry out, I merely pile them in a promising corner and wait for nature to take its course. It's only a few months until the new plants come bursting forth.





Parsley too has branched out on its own into a semi-wild state. It comes up wherever I pile the dry seed heads and also wherever seeds happen to fall by chance. I'm always being surprised by an unexpected volunteer. Just as salad doesn't seem complete without arugula, vegetable soup is not a true soup without some fresh parsley, just picked.

And parsley is the loophole ingredient for the 2010 Eat the Yard challenge. So far we haven't had to resort to the token sprig to meet the challenge of eating something from the yard every day:

January 11: vegetable soup (chard, kale, parsley) with garden salad
January 12: tacos with chopped garden lettuce and a squeeze of Meyer lemon in the guacamole (we forgot to add fresh cilantro!!)
January 13: garden salad
January 14: garden salad
January 15: garden salad
January 16: a squeeze of Meyer lemon on the store broccoli, garden salad
January 17: vegetable soup

Tonight, no salad unless I go pick right now, but there is a small bag of kale, chard, and parsley left over from last night's soup making. Maybe a side dish of greens?