Random green things make a post

[mme_hardy]

• I got my Botox-for-migraine treatment yesterday.   Oog.
• I also signed up for a study of migraines.  This one is "what can we find about migraine sufferers that distinguishes them from controls", not to test a treatment.   I'll be filling out a questionnaire, giving blood samples, spending an hour in an fMRI machine, and having a spinal tap.  I'm pretty oogy about the last one, but this research is important to me.  As I told my doctor (the head of the study), this is my gift to the future.
• It's garden season.   My daughter is scheming with me and we're planning to keep our efforts small.   This house came with a gorgeous planter on the back deck which was slowly abandoned.   I'm replanting it with a mixture of herbs and beautiful things.  I also have two geraniums (the official kind, the blue ones; the red ones you're thinking of are actually pelargoniums), a pretty succulent, alyssum, and, er, two marionberries that seem to have jumped into the cart when I wasn't looking.  I also ordered a chinotto to replace the one that died 3 years ago when the sprinkler system failed.
• Another of my favorite nurseries has bitten the dust. :(  I found a new one, Wegman's, with an excellent selection, but it doesn't have a beautiful soothing tree-lined lot like the two that went out of business.   
• We're heading into a horrific drought.  I'll be dialing back the sprinklers to two days a week; the back terrace is already on drip, and only the two tiny patches of grass in front and back are pop-up sprinklers.  I'm also having a drip sprinkler line run to the dwarf navel orange in the patio that has been slowly dying without winter rains.
• Long-term, I'm starting to think about alternate ground covers for the two patches of lawn.   I would love to do the front in thyme, because I already have the plaque saying "You can do anything you like when you've all the thyme in the world."   I note that most of the groundcovers recommended in xeriscaping articles are actually horrifically invasive and thus inappropriate for California.  This is true even of the California xeriscaping articles.
• We're paying to have the fscking fan palms that seeded themselves in our back yard removed.   This frees up an entire corner of the yard for something.   Bet on fruit trees.   I'm leaning toward a succession planting of small trees; probably apriums, which I love, a long-harvest pluot, and a nectarine.  That, I promise, is for next year (at least).
• The downside of asking for a climbing rose to be replanted under your bedroom window is having gardeners dig under your bedroom window.   This is a rose that I bought at my favorite nursery, Roger Reynolds,  closeout sale :( :( :( that was labeled as Climbing Don Juan.  Since Don Juan is a red rose and this one is a pleasantly-scented white, I suspect label swapping.  Anyway, it's a nice rose.
• Most of the roses in the back yard have survived years of neglect.  Go team old roses.   The Old Blush, an 18th-century rose,  on the garden wall has had a few blooms year-round.   One of the roses has several seedlings around it; I'm going to watch for them to bloom and see what turns up.  (Roses don't come true from seed; if you want to propagate a rose, you have to do it from cuttings.)

Comments

[movingfinger]

Your sloping lot should make putting in a gray-water system fairly easy (gravity does the work!), so in your shoes I'd hold off putting in more water-intensive fruit trees until you can get that in place. Even just laundry water redirected will likely be enough.

Ceanothus might also be good in the freed-up corner.

[mme_hardy]

Oh, no major plantings this year, rest assured. (You would not believe the volume of removed fan palm material. I'm really glad I did this now rather than later.) The chinotto goes in a pot fed by drip irrigation on the patio.

The Chron had an article on lawns today. A tidbit I knew you'd enjoy:

Brown’s order is long overdue, Will Casey, 56, a part-time gardener from Pacifica, said as he walked past advertising for water-efficient, low-maintenance plants, succulents and cacti outside Home Depot. He said he is encouraging his customers to stop irrigating lawns and instead put in drought-tolerant plants.
“I'll be doing conversions to desert landscaping,” he said. “When the drought is over, I'll go back and put in lawns.”

Yeah. Good luck with that.

[movingfinger]

Monkeys will fly out of his butt as he reinstalls all those lawns, yeah.

We'll probably see a lot of artificial-grass lawns in suburbs.

[mme_hardy]

One of the people interviewed in the article is a landscaper who bought an artificial-lawn firm a few years back and is really glad he did.