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California Quail Goes Gardening
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Tag Archives: landscaping
Last Winter’s Bird Seed
All the snow and the quail and the chickadees are gone now.
They’ll be back. We’re ready!
Shelter From the Rain
You may not be planting your garden for yourself. Good on ya.
Dragonfly and Pine
Gardens Old and New
Old Style Rock Garden.
New owners, New Style Rock Garden:
You can’t cheat at art.
Plastic, Gardens and Drought
The replacement of lawn with gravel to save a rain shadow valley from drought is based on the principle of laying plastic down over the living earth and smothering it so that its natural creative energy is killed.
Or so it seems. After only two or three years, the earth reasserts herself and begins to bury the stones.
Any decorative appeal, which was gained at great expense, is soon lost.
Things begin to look like hell.
What a lot of work it is to kill the earth. Sometimes it’s just easier to give up and grow a garden.
Dang, but a few years will nix that, too. Whew.
Best to give that up to and relax by the lake. A cool brewsky. Kids playing in the sand. Corn on the cob. Nature, you know? Nice. Here’s the corn, coming along.
Oh, crap. Of course, you don’t have to kill the earth. You can use plastic to bring her to life, too. Water, you know.
A society gardens in its own image. That’s the thing. If you want to know your country, look to its gardens.
Ouch.
The Ripeness of Colour
The emotional colourings of trees and the balance between these colourings can be very beautiful.
This form of art is as much a garden harvest as any other. In this case, the art is in an old, private graveyard in Zurich. It is a place of great spirit. This form of ripeness — this agricultural harvest — cannot be created by landscaping or by work. It has to be allowed to find its balance. By it, we can find our measure. Beautiful!
Gardening in the Okanagan in 2017
Some things are sobering. Here’s a cold frame (a glassed-in seedbed, for early growing) from 1978, updated for the new Okanagan in the age of vineyardization. Before 1978, this was an orchard, that supported a family and grew apples, peaches, cherries and plums. After 1978, it became a place where people could raise that food for their families themselves. As people turn away from the land today, hire Mexicans on special temporary permits to do “their” agricultural labour (actually, the produce is for export, a series of capital-intensive cash crops; the produce locally eaten comes from California and Mexico), and pressure the water system with overpopulation (yet blame the water deficit on global warming) while continuing to extol the fruitfulness of the land (heavily-taxed wine, affordable only to tourists and the wealthy), gardens transform into a new image of society. 
A couple things to notice: the black cloth is intended to allow water through but to prevent weeds (or life of any kind). It has been augmented by some rocks, likely formerly a decorative garden wall, to keep it down, and has been growing some cheatgrass (like the green stuff in the foreground) in the fir needles (the tree is an important local hawk perch) that the stones have gathered. The yard is decorated with a pre-fabricated aluminum garden shed. The yard next door, which has replaced its garden with a small, decorative patch of lawn amidst a vast swath of rocks and gravel (because of that global warming, but also because yards are now large barbecue entertainment areas, not spaces for gardens, i.e. they are now interior spaces), has collected un-needed garden equipment behind its new (large) garden shed, which mustn’t be for garden tools. It’s likely for general storage. Welcome to Canada in 2017. It took us some work to create this, but we managed in the end.
The Earth Makes Perfect Sense
If you crush up black bedrock and strew it around, you get predatory spiders, and nothing else. This is a fire landscape. They clean up.
Anyone who knew this land would know this.
Landscaping for Water Capture
Welcome to the second of a series of posts on creating a sustainable Okanagan. They are archived on the menu bar above. Today: smart water. Read on…
Wherever there is a crack, stuff grows in the Okanagan. 
That crack above has yellow clover and feral grasses, but there are cracks, right on the sidewalk beside the main highway through town, which are growing wireweed, purslane, amaranth, wild lettuce and plantain, which is to say four food crops and one medicinal plant great against mosquito bites. As for downtown Kelowna, the Okanagan’s urban knot, have a look at this wild lettuce, growing behind a downtown restaurant.
Now, it’s not going to fly to grow our food in these cracks beside the highway, or in alleys, due to pollutants from traffic, but let’s consider a few principles here:
- The roads and sidewalks are collecting water and …
- the cracks are delivering it and …
- in what appears a total desert, life is flourishing.
In other words, the Okanagan is neither a desert nor dry. Look at how a simple roadway can be a seasonal river. That water could have been easily diverted at that joint, and used to grow the thistles I mentioned yesterday, or sunflowers, for a bird seed industry, or anything you like.
The land is simply not dry. Only the air is, and not always. Here’s that alley again. Note the tree on the right, and the water pouring out of a roof drain, uselessly onto asphalt.
Water is limited in the Okanagan, and so is agricultural land, but consider: every sidewalk and every road has cracks, and every road has ditches, and they all work on the same principle, collecting water, moving it and generating life with it. It’s not necessary for water to flow freely to create crops in this climate. With that in mind, here’s a crack:
Rocks like that are everywhere in this region, split by winter frost and spring thaw. They collect water. Not only that, they collect bird droppings, which contain saskatoon seeds, which bloom and give fruit. The image below shows a very common local sight.
The rock shelters the young plant from deer, better and more elegantly than snow fencing around inappropriate, irrigation hungry Japanese maples …
…and collects water and manure (from birds and marmots) and nutrients (from crumbling rock) to nurture the plant, despite the ongoing lack of free-flowing water. The trick in this climate is not to get water to flow but to get it to stop as soon as possible. This principle can be applied throughout the valley, for landscaping projects and even for creating farming land where no water is otherwise available. And we’re close. Look at the decorative rocks in the landscaping above. They are visually appealing (perhaps) and collect heat. They could have been arranged to collect water as well. We’re close on this one. Let’s take that one extra step.
A Picnic in the Saskatoons
The saskatoons are getting ripe, and what a year for them it is.
Some people don’t seem to get it. I mean, the earth gives gifts, and (*&^!!@#!!
A week ago, that young bush was full of berries. Well, there’s no accounting for the human need to surround the cave with skulls. Still, some people hire landscapers who plant domestic saskatoons for aesthetic reasons, to tie together the golf course, Arizona and Tuscan themes of the low-maintenance yard. They are nice and sweet! Yay!
Of course, when the low hanging fruit is gone, it’s gone. Pshaw. That’s so, like, as yesterday as fake stone facing for particle board fascia for pressurized copper-stained wood supports set on concrete poured into a concrete tube backfilled by a bobcat loader.
The does are off having their fawns now, so this event is purely stag, you understand.
The world is rich.
Mmmmmm.
