Native Garden: Catching Up Is Hard To Do

It’s March, nearly April. Spring is well-sprung and the temperatures have been between 95 degrees on one extreme on March 13, to 34 degrees back on February 25. Average temperature is probably right around 50 degrees or so. There has even been some rainfall, about 1/2 an inch in the last 30 days. We are well over the average rainfall for the year here. And, flowers are blooming in the garden.

Some garlic and onions and carrots in my square foot garden.

The vegetable garden is coming along. The only plants that I didn’t get to sprout was my eggplant. Yesterday I put out new Eggplant seeds, along with some Jalapeño, Serrano, and Bullnose sweet peppers. They said to surface sow. Let’s see how that goes.

I’m going to have to go in and remove some of the plants where they grew better than I thought they would. I have a large amount of seeds still left over. Baker Creek, at this point, has lived up to the reputation and produced some great seeds to work with, but the true proof will be in how the vegetables taste.

On the other side of the garden, the California natives…

Penstemon flowers getting sprinkled in a last Southern California rain?

Fiesta sticky monkey flower and grinnelli penstemon contrasting flowers.

Bee’s bliss here hosting both bees and an awful lot of aphids.

A multitude of blooms brings all the bees to the yard. Milkshakes are for boys. I have milkweed, but not, yeah.

In the foreground, California Poppy baby plants, and in the background a Ray Hartman ceanothus.

Apparently it’s well-known gardening adage that “the first year they sleep, the second they creep, the third year they leap” in reference to perennials. This kind of seems to be what’s going on here, too. Some of my shrubs and trees are supposed to be 15 to 20 feet tall, others 6 to 10 feet. And, yet, the tallest I have right now is one of my desert willows is around 5 feet. But, my oaks seem to finally be making a lot of new leaves after spending the last year (or two in the case of my Chrysolepis) just kind of sitting there. Many of my plants do really seem to be taking off this spring. It also wouldn’t surprise me that having so many plants in the ground, that their roots are helping the microorganisms in the soil to develop the kind of system that California natives want.

Two large Ray Hartman ceanothus are swarming with lilac blue flowers.

I have managed to kill a few of these ceanothus. I didn’t mean to kill them. It was my inexperience with watering them. I’ve planted whirly blue curls next to these Ray Hartman ceanothuses since I’m under the impression that they hate water during the summer, too. These mountain lilacs are said to get huge and I believe it. In one year they’ve tripled in size at least. They are about four feet wide and three feet tall, well below the 20 foot full-grown size. But, they have beautiful glossy green leaves all year and the blue flowers are striking.