Green thoughts

For the last five years I haven't been gardening.  This is because of my health, the drought, and the fear that if I went into the garden I would see nothing but dead plants.   Last year I gardened in containers on the back porch, and that worked well enough that this year I walked down into the actual garden.

After a wet winter it is in glorious shape.   Old roses I'd thought dead are putting forth blooms (this is one of the big reasons to grow old roses), all the citrus are blooming, my two bench-graft apple trees are blooming, a couple of native plants have self-seeded down the hill.  In short, I see possibility rather than despair.  I've also been able to take advantage of having a gardener; I can say "Weed that bed and mulch it" or "Make that bed bigger", and it is done.   I can also, just as important, say "Plant those pots where I left them."    

I am bringing back my herb garden this year; I'm adding edibles and flowers to the expanded front bed; and I'm going to start cutting roses for the house.   First I need to make a sprayer of dilute bleach so I don't carry disease from rose to rose.

Today we went to a new nursery in San Mateo, and it is better than my loved and lost Roger Reynolds.   A wider variety of plants, an emphasis on local growers where possible, and more plants overall.  They had loquats, and two varieties of elderberries, and three varieties of currant, and a lot of things I'd expected to be able to buy only by mail order.

I am saving the big shop for my birthday.  This was just a medium shop.  Passiflora edulis, the passionflower that produces passion fruit.  It is an undeniable triffid, but I have persuaded my husband it's the only way we'll ever be able to afford to make passionfruit mousse again.  A grafted tomato, Early Girl.  I chatted with a passing gardener, and he said that grafted plants were more vigorous and more heavy-bearing.  The important trick is that you do not, as with most tomatoes, bury them with the stem belowground, because you don't want the grafted plant rooting on its own.

I will put more plants in a somewhat later next rock, because I am tired.  After we got home, I put on my hat and my rose gloves and pruned the deadwood out of the flowering cherry, the orange (badly damaged by the drought), and the apples.   Now I am in a chair with the hot cat stretched along my legs, and I do not think I shall move for some time. 

New kinds of citizen engagement

 Thanks to nextdoor.com, a startup (of course) that lets "neighbors", loosely defined, talk to one another, our collective irritation at the people tearing down ranches and putting up 3-story McMansions has actually amounted to something.   One of the complainers has organized a Google spreadsheet about the zoning codes of the 5 nearest towns to us; I've filled in 3 out of those towns' requirements for lot size, setbacks, notification of neighbors, privacy, and so on.   Now we have a stack of data that the organizer can take with him to a meeting Monday with a sympathetic council member.  He's lined up an architect and a builder to review the presentation and suggest changes.

In short, there's a very real chance we can show up at the planning commission with actual data.  Not "I don't like that the house downhill blocked my view", but "In Town A and Town B that wouldn't have been permitted".   With this set of data we can demonstrate that our town's zoning code for single-family dwellings  is considerably less restrictive than its neighbors.  Add that to a group of people who will actually show up at the planning committee, and it might amount to something.

And I could help from home, on my own schedule, as my health permitted.   It's League of Women Voters for the 21st century.