Pink Prickly Pear

No rest for the wicked

Our weekend was full, in a productive busy little bee kind of way.  We set aside a block of time in which to revitalize our couch which was showing its cheap construction (sorry Ikea, your big stuff does not last) more than its age.  The slipcovers are freshly cleaned, the collapsed arm reinforced and repaired, the wonky legs removed and replaced with casters.  Maybe Mini-Pear will help me sew new throw pillows this week.

Our garden is looking a lot better.  Unlike our last rental, we are free to do whatever we want with the garden.  For better or for worse, it means the last few tenants have done the same, so the garden is a real hodge podge of mismatched perennials, tumbled beach pebbles, different styles of bricks from various path laying projects, abandoned topiaries and mysterious humps of English ivy obscuring long hidden bushes, or perhaps a wall or length of fencing.  Not wanted to spend a ton of money on someone else's garden, but offended by the bare patches and weeds, we've adopted a strategy of picking up bargain plants and dropping them in wherever there's room.  We have also added tons of mulch.  I find it curious that in an area prone to drought, I see so little mulch in my neighbor's gardens.  Maybe with the water restrictions, people will start thinking more about water retention, although I'm surprised they haven't been all along.  It's not like San Diego just decided it wanted to become a coastal desert last year.

Speaking of gardens, WTF????  Obviously someone needs to squash this hornworm, but I can tell you right now, it ain't going to be me.  Pus is going to fly from here to Montana!  That beast almost decimated my pepper plant overnight.  Mini-pear has collected him into a jar and secreted it off to some hidey hole in her room.  If it escapes...

I'm getting chills just thinking about it.

It's the weekend;)

My throat is a bit sore, so I'm nursing a hot tea with lemon and honey.  That's freshly squeezed lemon from the little tiny lemon tree in our front garden! 

We're mostly moved in.  There's no longer a sense of urgency associated with the unpacking.  We know where all the necessities are; everything else we'll get to sooner or later.  With that in mind, we all headed out for the dog walk this morning.  Nothing quite compares to walking out your front door and seeing the ocean meet brilliant blue skies. 

Mr. Pear took both kids off to karate so I could putter about at home.  After lunch, mini-pear went off to spend the afternoon with her aunt.  The rest of us went on a quick errand before coming back to the house to play in the garden.  Mr. Pear gave our strawberries a little lift and turned the soil in our soon-to-be-vegetable patch.  I weeded our unruly front garden.  Or tried to...d'anjou wanted desperately to join in.  So we traded off, one of us entertaining the boy, while the other got their hands dirty.  A most satisfying afternoon.

Mini-pear came home tired and happy.  Mr. Pear went off to acquire us some fish tacos.  I nipped out for a solo grocery trip after dinner.

It was a delightfully mundane day.  I'm tired.  In a good way.

Here's a photo of that little red headed boy for the grannies. 

I like to listen to podcasts as I drift off to sleep.  Quite often this means I miss the end (or middle and end) of something and I wake up thinking, "Were they really talking about ______?"

Last night I was listening to a BBC program about food - and I was pretty sure I heard one farmer talking about how much money they were losing on their pig farm, until they opened it up to the public for "pig cuddling". 

I love pigs, so the first thing I did this morning (after making a cup of tea and toasting a bagel) was google "pig cuddling farms".  Sure enough, that's exactly what you are encouraged to come and do at Piggy Wigs Farm.

Next time I'm back in the Motherland I know exactly where I'm making a day trip. 

We didn't get to cuddle these little piggies at this urban farm in Leeds.

You can call me nerd.

Never one to slack on my life list of esoteric and largely impractical* knowledge, I recently took a class at our botanical garden on Cycads.  From the course description, it seemed as if I might find myself in over my head a bit, but they gladly processed my registration, so for past three weeks I joined a motley crew of nurserymen (and women), professional gardeners and wealthy collectors of the obscure for a series of lectures and seemingly endless parade of baffling slide presentations of Cycads in habitat (usually accompanied by slightly rumpled botanical fanatics squinting at the camera for scale).

This morning, we spent our last class meeting with one of the foremost authorities in the field, touring the modest collection of Cycads at the botanical garden.  You know, seeing actual plants on a bright Saturday morning, as opposed to slide after slide after slide in a darkened room at the end of a long Thursday shuttling the girl to her various activities and appointments made all the difference.  I think I could identify a Macrozamia from an Encephalartos, certainly from a Bowenia.

Quick!  Where's my cookie?

* Obviously most knowledge is practical.  It's just I seem to have a habit of spending time, effort and, often, money acquiring knowledge that, for various reasons, I will probably never put to good use. 

It was not a particularly relaxed weekend, but hey!  I'm up earlier than usual this morning and I'm not even tired.

On Saturday I spent a few hours at an acquaintance's farm, painting the trunks of their avocado trees.  Their home burned to the ground in the recent fires and the damage to their orchards is yet to be determined.  The bark of the avocado tree is very photo-sensitive.  The lush green foliage that usually protects it was burned off in the fire, hence the need for painting the bark a bright sun-reflecting white.  I'd hoped to assist with laying a new irrigation system - something I haven't done before, but would like to learn more about - but I arrived late and the poor scorched trees were clearly in need of assistance, so I didn't get to make my lewd jokes about laying pipe with my fellow volunteers.  Climbing the steep hillside with a sloshing bucket was difficult work, but the painting itself was quite peaceful.  Even with the sounds of repair crews' chainsaws and earth movers carrying across the valley, I felt a sense of calm in the orchard. 

The drive to and from the farm was depressing.  The route past Lake Hodges is one we make fairly often.  The first time I drove out that way, to meet up with some friends at a park, I was so blown away by the landscape, I think I took Mr. Pear out there to take a look at it the very next day.  Huge steep hillsides with boulders the size of buses, or even houses, on one side of the lake and on the other, even steeper hillsides completely covered with greenery.  I often wondered what kind of greenery as it was so lush, it could either have been the tops of towering evergreens or low growing shrubs.  There simply isn't any human footprint on that side of the lake to get a true sense of scale.  All of the green, acres and acres of it, is completely gone.  These hillsides will recover, but other areas of the county, burned in wildfires 4 years ago and then re-burned this past month, may not.  The term being bandied about here is desertification on a grand scale.

Mow and blow? No.

Just in case you were looking for any more evidence that I'm actually a 72 year old woman, I spent the weekend at gardening symposium.  Two very full days of garden tours, lectures, plant sales and discussions with landscaping professionals and gardening enthusiasts alike.  I'm tired and inspired and overwhelmed (some Latin would have come in handy). 

I'll let some of my favorite photographs from the weekend speak for themselves...