Category: Fall

August Interruption! Had to copy/paste this post due to glitch

Lost all the text from this posting due to a glitch, so won’t repeat. Just wanted to show a couple of critter videos from August. One is of a couple of coyotes in our yard during the day, and another is of a Sharpshinned hawk that got into our house through the doorway (he got out shortly thereafter with a little help). The coyotes are “marking” my Parsnip Flowered Buckwheat, though the second, female coyote actually appears to take a dump on where the male had just marked in front of her…..no respect. Second video is the male coming back to sniff, maybe getting a surprise when he sniffs out the ‘marking’ spot.

Middle o’ the day coyote visitation

Missed him in the yard today by about 20 minutes (his name is actually Wiley but I call him Pretty Boy):

I’ll have to be more stealth when I go out, he could have been there one of the times I was out there this am. Would like to catch them live, like I did the deer pair. He’s more skittish than the raccoons, who don’t give a fuck that you’re there.

November transitions

Had to water the yard a few times this past summer, but not much after the last post….a few good rains helped the green last through to this month at least. The deciduous tree leaves have mostly fallen, but the ground cover greens persist. Even the visitors to the yard agree:

Also, we finally harvested our year’s bounty of cranberries: just over two gallons! They’re all cleaned and frozen now. Can’t wait till they’re honey marinated and dried – yum.

September 2018

Yard still looks great for late sept, maybe due to the regular sprinkling I did when the rains were sparse, hoping the young plants would fill out and mature.

We had the second ever Rattlesnake Plantain flowers, several on each of four plants, one had five flowers! Lots and lots of dust- like seeds released when they matured. Hopefully we’ll have some new little seedlings, instead of just rhizomes.

New Plants from plant sale

Penstemon Newberry (2) for front yard, and a new glaucous Penstemon also for the front….the old one died off in Mole Hill in the back, so I won’t be putting any new plants there for a while.

Moles and Vols: Mole Hill, by the way, is the epicenter of what became of an early backyard project, the “ecolawn”.  Don’t do it, don’t let anyone talk you into that nonsense. It’s a weed trap, and you end up wanting to get rid of it which is then challenging.  Ours spanned the short axis of the backyard, and was a crescent shaped space. We killed it by covering the whole thing with black plastic weighted down with logs and rocks all summer. It killed everything and all the roots, “D-E-D dead”. And then we planted some perennials and ground covers, shrubs and bulbs. The moles were quite happy with the lack of plant roots to restrict them, and they were kind of relentless, constantly upheaving throughout recent plantings. To the point that I moved a bunch of them out from the worst area and just stuck rocks in an arc to define Mole Hill. I even wanted to get a plant sign that said”Mole Hill”. Gradually, seeds and adjacent encroachment covered it without more mole trauma. They’re less of a nuisance now, except that their tunnels provide habitat for voles, which now ravage the plants there.  But the voles do some digging themselves.  Almost all of the Harvest Brodiaea bulb “clumps” have been eaten. I’ve found holes in the ground where a couple of established plants were supposed to be, a big Fawn lily and an anemone plant, and they’ve now eaten DOZENS of Brodiaea plants. So I’m avoiding any new or valuable plants there for a while, too. Thus the front yard garden establishment and rock garden.

Not my photo, but the NW native is newberri, the California native is Sonomensis, which has red flowers instead of pink:

Two Castilleja Miniata, or red Indian paintbrush, for the front yard/ rock garden, those would be our first if they survived…prior seedlings from Shi-Shi beach seeds made it (3) but didn’t survive their outplanting. Also not my photo, since we don’t have one:.

Another try at Purple Coneflower / Rudbeckia Occidentalis, maybe I can find a better spot, it doesn’t seem to do well with moles:

Ones we already have:

Two new Lewisia Tweedii and one new Lewisia Cotyledon for the front rock garden. One new Boykinia for some partial shade area in the front, after our hired landscaping projects are done, we have two in the back.

I planted one new Cornus Canadensis/Trailiing Dogwood, or whatever it’s called now, in the front yard shady area, next to a Maidenhair fan, Pig-a-back plant and trillium Chloropetalum seeds- a little shade plant medley.  There are already some fawn lillies, shooting stars, brodiaea, and some background Penstemon there, so that should help round it out, and of course the Starflower, which is now throughout the front yard, more limited in the sunny back. It seems to avoid direct sun, which keeps it from being just everywhere!

One new 1 1/2 foot Vaccinium Membranosum or Black Huckleberry for the back yard deck/patio area (we want to eventually have healthy huckleberries there of several types), maybe where the Garrya bush was taken out last year. That evergreen bush got so big and bushy that it shaded out most everything around it, and they’re now starting to recover. I just cleaned out all the non native sedum and baby’s tears from that area and along the adjacent lower 4-5 steps as well, mulched it and will replant other stuff soon, when the pending landscaping stuff is done.  New plating opportunities! Will be vigilant for non native plant regrowth, whereas when the whole yard was the project, I really couldn’t keep track of it, and the big Garrya plant distracted.

Garden’s end- October 15

Last of Green Pole beans picked over the last week, and made a sechzuan stir fry with them. Haven’t taken the vines down, but I doubt any of the recent flowers will give us beans with the temps in the lower 50’s and 40’s. We had beans for about 2 1/2 months, from beginning of August to mid October.

Pulled down the tomatoes, about 25 small Casady ones and the four larger Oregon Spring ones inside on platters, we’ll see….I’m sure the Casady ones will be OK to eat, not sure of the others. 

Put the large cloches over he broccoli sprouts. The larger ones are about 8-9″ tall, the other batch are about 5-6 inches. There are a bunch of green onions and a few carrots also inside the cloche perimeter, and a few others outside. I guess we don’t really need the “deer fence” around the garden anymore!

September end news


Vegetable garden: About 12 broccoli plants growing. These were sown around the middle/end of August, after other seed sowing attempt failed, I think due to heat.  Also a bunch of onions, and a handful of carrots. The carrots won’t get very far this time of year anyway, but if I encourage the brocoli to grow (and with cloches) we might get some late fall and even into winter, and onions usually have no trouble overwintering – the native ones do well. I have the kind of brocoli that can over winter or grow early in spring, a common type (walsham 29 I believe).

Green pole beans still doing great. We have enough for a large stir fry of Szechuan style beans every few days. It apparently likes fish fertilizer, and seems to flower a lot when it is fed, which is every 3 weeks or so. It also likes being picked, and makes more beans when you keep any seed-producing beans off the vine. So as soon as they look like ‘peas’ are forming they should be picked. They are supposed to be good through September, but they are still going strong and even putting out new foliage as well as flowers. Maybe climate change has alllowed this, it has been a warm summer. Sudden drop in temps from 80’s to the low 60’s recently, but now it’s back into the 70’s and sunny for a while, maybe we’ll have an “Indian” summer.

Tomatoes at their end. I didn’t like most of the Oregon Spring, won’t get that one again. The tomatoes were mostly mealy in texture, and they split very easily which caused more texture problems. Not particularly great taste, though a few were good. The Sweet Casady was good, but it eventually got attakced by what I think are winged aphids, losing many, actually most small branches. There are only a few bugs on the plant at a time but they sure do kill the leaves, and when they attack the stems of flower or fruit those die, too. There was already a lot of fruit on the vine when this happened, as well as new leaves and flowers – the plant had been doing well. The fruit itself was great, but the loss was from suddenly losing the leaves which are the source of their sugar, or the fruit dropping because it’s stem was killed. Such a violent yard I have. I may have caused the problem though,  in that I overwatered the plants thinking they were still too dry (after I accidentally cut off the water for a couple of days), and ended up creating a wetland habitat for those mite-like bugs in the planter itself. I could see them jumping out of the planter when I watered, and it wasn’t till later that I saw them attacking. Lesson learned, hopefully. I still like the idea of the cherry, plum or other small tomatoes, they are less likely to fail in general. 

Still have a bunch of asparagus starts that have lived under the planter all summer, getting watered and a little sun, not planted out! We have no place to put them, unless we make some compromises somewhere. Asparagus needs a minimum 20″ x 20″ planter, or in the ground. 

Deer in the hood….in the front yard this time. They don’t appear to have eaten anything there, but did leave hoof prints around. They also sometimes trample stuff. I’m a little worried that they will get more tolerant of some of the native plants as the winter sets in. They have already eaten OLD trillium leaves, now they are nibbling on the False Azalea and Geum leaves, all of these normally die back over winter but we’re still quite green. In spring, they eat the flower buds of one of the heurcheras and the Brodiaea, and nibble some of the Bluebell leaves. The key is going to have to be volume – overwhelm them and the fucking voles so there’s sustainable carnage.

BTW, I spotted a vole coming out of a tunnel he’d created near the new bog, the little shit. I’ve only actually seen the bastards a few times, once as an owl pellet.   He came out, stopped and turned tail back in. Later I noticed that a new type of bog lily we bought for our yard last year was dead – the bulb eaten, at the end of one of his tunnels. Luckily it had already sprouted another offspring overwinter, so there’s still one there, unlsss the little shit comes back and gets it.

Deer tracks:

Fall into winter, almost in time.

It’s December 6 and there are Lots of greens still around, due to the combination of evergreen stuff (ferns, salal), green mosses and persistent herbaceous stuff like Vancouvaria. Most deciduous trees lost their leaves but the Rhodies down below still have their reddish green leaves. A few plants like the Red Pussytoes even trying to bloom.

Below, two plots of Rattlesnake Plantain starts from Lopez which are thriving at two different spots ( A third non Lopez one has come up from the dead from a few years back….I’d transplanted it as well as others to get it out of the dry and sun, and they had disappeared until this last year). They have spread from about three leaves/plants to about ten or so each.  I took the two plant starts, a little soil and the in situ moss from Lopez, too, which is like ours but a little brighter and should have the fungus the R.P. needs.

Lower back yard, pathways and places to sit. Though it is excellent screen in warmer months, some of the screen is deficient in the winter. I am still working on evergreen screen for the yard borders, but it’s getting petty good.


Deciduous Rhodies below, with their persistent leaves that turn reddish yellow in the winter.

Below:The pathway up from the meadow to the pond, them looking back down to the lower yard from nearby. The cloche is on a few Desert Yellow Daisy starts from last summer.



The temps have stayed in the 50s-60s during the day and only to the 40s or higher at night. It just got down to 33 last night, with some frost on some of the ground and some ice in the pond, at least in front. I had covered three plants with glass ‘cloches’, but the rest and the seeds are on their own (of course I’ll protect anything that gminates in the winter).

My “special”seeds which rate being put in a pot: Eriogonum sphaerocephalum (Rock Buckwheat), Pink Fawn lily, Bear grass, Iris Chrysophylla, Indian Paintbrush (orange red), Desert Yellow Daisy, Woodland Pemstemon (notochelone nemerosa), Desert Parsley,Allium, Globemallow, Hookers onion, Silkflower, and Gaillardia.

Front yard landscaping project …..

WordPress acting up FOR MANY MONTHS by not saving posts, etc. Multiple false starts with pix and everything, and something would then happen to cause an error. Dave had to change the server back to WordPress, which gives up the plant directory links and stuff, but at least it will keep the posts.

Lots of stuff going on. Continue reading “Front yard landscaping project …..”