It's spring!

 All the flowering trees are looking beautiful, even against grey skies.

 Who knows what flowers these are? The leaves remind me of mum leaves, but the flowers do not.

mystery in the strawberry pot

My fennel sprouts have finally grown enough to transfer to their own container. Since I had not expected them to grow, they had been overcrowding each other in the strawberry pot I had thrown them into. I readied a new planter full of soil, and decided to experiment with moving about half, just in case they didn't survive.

I dug my finger underneath the roots of a few sprouts and tried to pull them out as gently as I could, but they would not come. I tried again a few times harder, and then realized it was not soil I was hooking with my finger. IT WAS ALIVE! I had been jabbing the side of some poor toad who was burrowed in there! I never actually saw its face, and not even a leg, but I'm sure that's what it was. I felt terrible. I pulled the fennel off the top, dribbled some water in his burrow and re-soiled it again so he could nap in peace. I went out later this evening and he was gone, probably off to a new home.

fennel harvest

Remember how I talked about going out to a canyon in San Diego and filling bags of weeds, including fennel?

 

 Before I came home to Kansas, I went out to the lake near my house and harvested some of my own. Here, you can see it filling out the sides of the trail, usually about 6 to 10 feet high!

 I collected a lovely amount of seeds, and set them out to dry in the sun once I got back to Kansas.

 But, silly me, after an entire dry summer in California, I forgot it actually rains in Kansas. My seeds were soaked and then turned moldy. Very disappointed, I tossed them in with the soil in one of my pots while re-potting another plant, and took a trip to the store for some instead. Several weeks later, look!

I guess I'll have to think about thinning them out eventually.

You may be able to grow all sorts of things in California that you can't grow elsewhere, but one thing that's impossible here is grass. I'm pretty sure there are only two real grass plots in all of San Diego: in Balboa Park and surrounding the administrative building.

I walk by the administrative building every day since it sits between the trolley and the boat. I think it's beautiful.

Yep, that's it. And my feet just ache from walking on pavement, so I am becoming desperately in need of some thick tall grass. I went to Balboa Park last weekend, just so I could sit in the grass and knit. Also this past weekend, I volunteered at Crest Canyon, an area in Del Mar that was saved by a community in the 1970s from development, so there it sits in an urban setting, a preserve of all that is native to southern California.

Crest Canyon, with a little stream down the center that flows into that river in the lowlands that looks like snow (1980)

Our job was to remove invasive plants, and I was only interested in this because I wanted to know which plants were native and which were not. Clearly I knew nothing because our leader got overly upset when I pulled up some buttercup plants instead of the terrible mustard plants. Oops.

Turns out fennel, which I've seen growing all over here is considered invasive. Here I am trying to keep my now somewhat-tall fennel plant alive, and we were chopping down fennel plants that had grown to 10 feet tall and had 1" thick stems. It sure smelled good at least.

my little fennel plant that I bought at the farmer's market back in Kansas and dragged all the way to California, only to find out it's a "weed"

Another plant that surprised me as invasive is the ice plant (or highway ice plant, because it's grown all over the interstates). It's a succulent that people put it in their yards as ground cover (because remember, there is no grass here) but it absorbs so much water that it crowds out the other plants. It's all over here: yards, interstates, street landscaping, railroads, and beaches.

In fact, it's even growing outside my bedroom window. It's surprising how it can remain alive everywhere considering San Diego only gets 10 inches of rain per year, but that's also why most plant life survives by sprinkler systems here. To keep the stuff surrounding our house growing, I get to listen to the sprinklers spew on at 2:30 every night. It still wakes me up nearly every time, and the first time I heard it, I could not figure out what the terrible hissing noise was! I thought for sure someone had poured water in a hot frying pan right outside the window. Still, the air outside is too nice to keep my window closed. We haven't even turned on the air conditioner. 

I always have trouble keeping myself from buying yet another plant. I'm really going to have to find a house, with a garden, and stay put so that my mother doesn't have to keep plant-sitting my ever-growing collection. The plants are always so small when I get them though...

I found this little thing at the international food market, for only $1.29. How could I resist when it already has an eggplant growing?

Earth laughs in flowers. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

roses, daisies, mums, & snapdragons-- all white!

I was walking through the museum today, on one of my numerous walk breaks throughout the day, and someone asked me if I want these. Well of course! So here they are, on the dining room table, a little worse for wear after the hour long commute (they were in a professional-looking arrangement previously), but they received plenty of admiration on the trolley. I believe they came from one of the ships, which have been going out for sailing cruises the past two days.

Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. --Stephen Fry

Today, for the first time in my life, I ate a fresh fig. I was never able to find them in Kansas, but at Trader Joe's today, I found these, grown somewhere in California:

They're every bit as good as I imagined, and it makes me want to grow fig trees even more! It's really great to see the foods people grow here, even in their backyards. There is a docent who has shared with everyone else at the museum bags and bags of the juiciest oranges from his trees, and just the other day I was given a nice large avocado from his yard as well. He also grows pommelos, like giant grapefruits, that he says are on a tiny little tree, and tangerines, lemons, blood oranges... I was even at a coffeeshop the other day that had a basket of free lemons, just from the owner's own yard.

Another new experience for me was jackfruit. I frequently visit the Asian grocery, as it is the cheapest grocery store near my house, and I see all sorts of new fruit that I have usually only heard about in recipes. The jackfruit itself is a little intimidating, so I opted for a canned version.

Okay, so the jackfruit in the store wasn't quite this large, but these things can reach up to 80 pounds! The taste is difficult to describe, but it's sweet and somewhat fiberous, sort of like a mango.

Needless to say, I've been eating a lot of fruit lately!