I never thought the weather could have such a profound negative effect on me. Wrong! Never in my 11 years here has it rained past mid May, let alone into June. As soon as I heard the weather forecasters talking about “Junuary” in the Bay Area I knew trouble was on its way. Flooding in June?? Never say never.

I guess you know you’re a real gardener when you have anxiety dreams about your garden! Since this is the first time I have grown my own food from the start I am like a mother hen over those tomatoes. How are they doing? Any new suckers I can pluck off? Any fruit yet? Because I was specifically told by the woman at the farmer’s market that once they fruit, you need to starve them of water to prevent them from being mealy. The lack of water forces the plant to focus its energy on the fruit – makes sense. So I see one teeny weeny green tomato and BANG. In comes June-uary right when i am supposed to start depriving the plants of water. I was a wreck. What would happen? Would I have another batch of gross mealy tomatoes like the plants this house came with provided me last year? Would i have twelve more quarts of stewed mealy tomatoes I am still not quite through?! All of this led to a dream in which it actually snowed and all of my plants were destroyed. There I was scratching through my beds which had filled with white sand looking desperately for a sprouted seed below the surface I could maybe hope to salvage. Clearly, I am a bit crazy when it comes to my garden.

Luckily, the rain stopped and the sun came out and it is back to being gorgeous east bay weather – just in time for the real tomatoes to begin growing. The real drag of the rain was that I had FINALLY finished my yard. It took a solid year (time off for rainy season, of course) and I had finally finished about 1 week before the rain. This was cause for a celebration like no other. Some weeks I spent 30 hours out there! What does the rain matter, you ask? It means that all of the weeds that were tirelessly removed, which should have stayed removed until the fall rains actually came back, have grown back. So now instead of being done, I am un-done. I have a layer of weeds to deal with. again. what. a. drag.

The final shots before June-uary – look ma, weed free!

Backyard from the Arbor

Backyard from Above

Luckily my folks will be down this weekend and are always more than willing to lend a hand when it comes to gardening. The apple – it does not fall far from the tree.

This would be much more effective if it weren’t already most of the way through this weekend. Ah well! At least I remembered to document the transformation of the final garden corner. I have been wanting to get rid of that short bed since I moved in nearly a year ago, and I am proud to say it is gone! It was a ton of work – an entire weekend full, but so worth it. That back corner is where my lavender and orange grasses (sedges) are supposed to go, and I can’t wait to see them finally in the ground.

Here’s the pictorial. In order to remove the bed, i had to remove the rest of the chain link fence. What a *bear*. Note to self: do not be silly enough to plant Wisteria against a chain link fence.

Here’s the corner in all of its messy splendor. Chain link fence? check. Huge dead rose trees? check. Woven wisteria? check. You can see the top of the wisteria line is about 3 feet higher in the last corner because it’s propped up by a massive network of dead rose.

The start of the weekend - Saturday morning. There's the short bed to remove...

I decided to take a break for some lunch right when I had a giant pile to clean-up.

Nothing like starting off the weekend by wrestling down chain link fence.

8 hours later…

End of the first day (Saturday) and you'll note the wood is gone from the bed!

Then comes Sunday with a giant hangover, and much more of a sleep-in than i had planned. Pitch Forking and raking out a bed full of solid clay is no fun with a massive headache. Trust me! Very smartly I decided to irrigate the new plants first which means no pressure to plant them in a hurry since they are irrigated. Phew!

End of a loooong Sunday... but look ma - no bed!

In fact, I finished so late on Sunday I had to take this picture the following day because it was too dark at 8:30pm.

And last but not least a nice comparison photo from a couple of weeks prior since you know I love the before & after!

Taken a couple of weeks prior even before weeding was done.

And a final update of the after, after, after photo:

One thing I never even considered with gardening was the Battle of the Feral Cat. We didn’t really have many in San Francisco – not true here in Oaktown! There’s an entire community of feral cats that roam the streets, sidewalks and back yards just looking for new litter box locations. Turns out the mulch is something they really like to poop in. As are raised beds with nice newly turned soft dirt. Up to now it’s been a losing battle. I have sprinkled every powder and dust I could find on the ground only to find a nice fresh pile of poop one, maybe two days later if I was lucky. Eventually at the end of last summer I gave up.

I am happy to report that with a renewed vigor the Battle of Feral Cat has been renewed! While I can’t (or won’t) cage my entire yard in, I sure can make an enclosure around the raised beds, and it has been an overwhelming success. I am a big sucker for the before and after comparisons, so I’ll take this opportunity to give you the before and after on my two veggie beds – and show you the brilliant designs that have kept the cats pooping outside the veggies.

AND I ate the first radishes yesterday. No, they aren’t really ready, but yes, they were good. French Breakfast and Cherry something or other. Mmmm…

Before (after 1 week):

Veggies! So young and unsuspecting: radishes, arugula, mustard greens and chard.

After: Planted 4/10, taken 5/5

With the fancy chicken wire screen/cap over it.

Before: Also planted 4/10 but from seedling

Young tomatoes - with the pots planted next to them to get water straight to the roots! Clever idea - not mine.

After: 3.5 weeks of Oakland sun later

The faint black mesh you see is bird netting - works like a charm against the cats!

And yes, in case you were going to ask I did look into the possibilities of having said feral cats removed. The process would be that I have to go and borrow a trap, trap the cats myself, *transport* the cats to the place to have them neutered/spade, then pick them up after and bring them back to let them free.

Yeah – I’m pretty sure the last thing I need in my car is a feral cat spraying, peeing and pooping. Thanks anyway.

There’s also the pellet gun option – enticing I must say. I may look into that sooner than later.

They are not kidding when they say working the land is back breaking work – and all I’m doing is weeding. It’s not like I’m out with the horse and plough or anything. I actually finished nearly all of the weeding, enough at least to produce a huge sigh of relief, but as I have no photos of it and have a bunch of old ones to post, we’ll pretend I’m not quite done yet.

I’m at a bit of a loss as to whether I should post most recent to oldest or vice versa. I know I should have the most recent at the top, but my brain can’t tell stories that way, so let’s go oldest to most recent.

I bought the house in June 2010. Much as I loved my apartment in San Francisco, I REALLY wanted summer (the hot kind), my own 4 walls, and a big yard so I could garden. It was time to move to the e-bay, so move I did, into an awesome 1912 Craftsman Bungalow. It came with a sodded yard. Oh, and a dead cat. While I don’t mind sod in general, I do mind wasting water trying to keep something green in a climate that is supposed to be brown during the summer. Here are some photos of the before – gravel paths along the sides of the yard, planted border, stone patio in the back corner (with the dead cat) and sod as far as the eye can see.

Original yard, sod and all. Garage to the right.

original yard, facing house

You can see that by the time I took the second picture, large chunks of the sod weren’t doing so well. Strangely, some small men came and replaced the dry sod even though I owned the house?! I then promptly put an ad on Craigslist: First Come, First Take Sod. Took him 3 days to dig it all up and take it – boy was I grateful for Craigslist.

Then my parents came down to help out, my father is an excellent builder of things, so we went to work implementing the awesome design Steven Young did for my landscaping. Took quite a while to get the beds in and level (all with each other?!) but they really did come out nicely.

Bed construction - Day 1+

That’s my dad!

Beds Complete! Day 4 + Vic

I know! It looks awesome. So I went to work planting the plants we had taken out from the borders and the back corner, and I took a great picture at the end of last summer of the current state of the back yard, and deleted it at Burning Man accidentally. Sigh. You’ll note the clever folks who did the yard for the flipped house put the hot crops (tomato and eggplant) under the Wisteria in the back in the only shaded area. Needless to say I won’t be keeping that bed.

I do feel the need to point out that it took over 20 cubic yards of dirt to fill these beds. That and a wheelbarrow and a 2×10 pressure treated board as a ramp. I did maybe 15% of it (my dad did the rest) and I couldn’t move for days. He was up like a jumping bean early the next morning raring to go.

Here’s the backyard after the winter flood we had:

The weeds, they grew

and then the final devastation after the 40 days of sun followed by the second month of flooding. You can’t tell, but I am standing in the middle of the beds – I could not even see the outline of them anymore, and they’re two feet tall. I was feeling very overwhelmed when I took this picture. Thank goodness for sunny afternoons, friend (Atalanta) for hire and a concentrated session with the parents, or I would never have dug out!

weeds ate my yard. true story.

I’ll save the exciting veggie gardening stories for another day. I know, I know, you can hardly hold the excitement in. Absence makes the heart grow fonder!

I finally took that stupid website down – which was no more than a holder of photos anyway that cost me 9.99$/month for years now. Replacement? Free blog. I’m so modern. In the process I found some old geeky grad school photos tucked in away in a dark corner of that Linux server that made me really happy so these past 4 hours must be worth it! No?

Sorry that the Travel Photos aren’t up yet, but I did get all of the artwork and gallery show photos up, so I am feeling pretty accomplished at this point. Maybe in 6 more months at the height of procrastination I will finish the rest?

I’m also pretty excited because now I can post random goings on along with pictures which next to no one will care about or read – except my parents. They love looking at the progress photos on the garden so here they will be. Cheers!