The heat is upon us. Not the full-blast, oppressive, scorch of the Inland Summer, but still very warm and very dry weather. We have been averaging the high 80’s and low 90’s this last week. I have to force myself not to water. My instincts tell me to water the plants. But my experience says that will stress the plants and turn their leaves yellow.

And it attracts gophers. I hate gophers.

I am sure that gophers play some important role in the food chain and environment. But they have no place in my yard. Let’s review what kind of damage gophers do in my yard:

• Eat plants I am trying to keep alive
• Eat the roots of plants I’m trying to keep alive
• Shear off baby trees and shrubs at their bases
• Dig holes throughout the yard
• Throw dirt up on plants I’m trying to keep alive
• Undermine my retaining wall
• Kill plants I paid for and spent time trying to grow

Here is a list of the benefits of gophers in my yard:

• I haven’t seen any benefit

I will walk past a black widow and let it live in my yard. I’m sure I don’t have to explain why a black widow can be a potential problem. But at least they eat other bugs. I’ve moved centipedes, the big yellow scary-looking kind, so I didn’t hurt them. I’ve gone out of my way to attract birds to my yard. Those poop on my chairs and patio. Their seeds drop and grow in my yard where I don’t want them. But they eat bad bugs and they are pretty.

But I will drop everything to put a trap in a gopher hole and kill it.

I know it sounds bloodthirsty and barbaric. I get it. But I’ve seen a healthy, blooming, growing manzanita turn brown and die within days because a gopher ate its roots and burrowed so much in its root system that it dries out. I’ve seen my baby pine tree pulled into a hole and its trunk gnawed by gopher teeth. That’s the kind of stuff that brings me to a lethal frame of mind toward small furry creatures.

But let’s not dwell on the negative. There is a whole yard of plants and flowers to look at and enjoy.

The sun and heat are still bringing out the poppy blooms. I’m very pleased with my decision to sow poppy seeds around the garden. I think next October I will but several more packets and scatter them, too. It’s fun to see the little yellow and red flowers amid the rest of the plants.

My Gambel oak (a non-native species from the Colorado/Utah areas) is finally putting on some height. Already this season it has sprouted a full foot higher. But my other two oaks remain short. The Wislenzenii seems to be growing slowly. But my Cryselopsis (Canyon Live Oak) looks like it’s the same size as when I planted it in 2015. The Buckwheat next to it is already higher! I know it takes a while to develop the roots for the tree to grow. But this seems extreme.

My vegetable garden is running rampant and growing wildly.

I hope to have some good pumpkins for Jack O’lanterns by October. Judging by these vines, I will have that. The square foot gardening experiment is going well. I’ve got tomatoes for days and we’ve eaten broccoli, zucchini,and kale from the garden.

Just a quick post with some pictures of the yard. Some of the spots are filling in well, and others are making me wait longer. When I started this in 2015, I understood intellectually that plants take time to grow. But, I underestimated exactly what that felt like in real time. There are eleven trees and probably four more large shrubs in my yard that, in time, will all be over 15 feet tall. I have two oaks that, after ten years ought to top 30 feet. And, those trees are all in my mind when I look at the garden. All of the manzanitas and ceanothuses are supposed to be at least 6 feet tall, some of them over ten! And I can see them, too, in those spaces, in my mind.

That makes it hard to look at the garden sometimes. I see what’s not there. Yet. I imagine the plants filling in  and covering the areas now dominated by the red mulch. Here’s a shot of my stream and bench area. But, look at the Bee’s Bliss sage in the center, in front of the bench. That’s three plants! But, they filled in that whole long area, about 15 feet long. Honestly, I am surprised at how well they actually did that. I expected plants to be about 4 feet wide. But, they are probably pushing six or eight feet! Most of my yard will, eventually, look similar to that, I hope. Maybe I will regret that, I don’t know.

I actually have “banned” my gardener from my backyard. He pruned a couple of my California Buckwheats that I was enjoying spreading out. It was probably the right thing to do. But, I want to have a full, “wild” garden. Maybe in time I wlll need to remove some of these plants. But, I can deal with that later. The only things that I really can’t move, easily at least, are my trees. So I was much more deliberate in placing them. I think I made good choices. But I won’t be shocked if it turns out I underestimated their sizes, too.

I’ve had to water more now. I’m really only watering the really young plants. Not the ceanothuses, though. Nope. Those plants seriously hate water unless it’s cold and the soil is cold. And even then they seem to prefer little water. With our Toddler-in-Chief rolling back environmental protections so he can pretend he’s helping the working man, I suggest everyone buy ceanothuses. They love heat and dry soil which will likely the prevailing conditions in our future.

Waiting is hard to do. Every plant was bought from a nursery and were tiny when I planted them. Obviously, they are growing, some of them are thriving! But, still. I wish I could skip a few years and have bigger plants already.

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.

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…

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.

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.

I’m loving how the plant, many of them, are finally filling in and looking good. Spring is fun!