How's Robb?

While Robb was busily ripping apart our front steps this weekend, I had a whack at my garden.  And I must say, it needed a good whack.   The tiny strip of earth between our house and the neighbors' driveway is the site of my fig grove.  It's also the home to about ten million weeds, which I valiantly battled this weekend.   I find it amazingly difficult to photograph this part of the garden.  The figs always look so stunted, when they're actually significantly taller than I am.   I grew all these plants from tiny babies , and I'm hoping that we'll get fruit from at least four of the five plants this summer. My dirt-colored kitty Smog is almost invisible on his garden catwalk. The beans I planted a few weeks ago are doing well.  It's a good thing that I have plenty of extra baby bean plants, because this bed is a magnet for all our animals.  The chickens keep escaping from their part of the garden, and tearing things up.  And t

Our 1925 cottage may not be "great architecture" but it certainly has an adorable front porch.  Here it is a few years ago, at Halloween.  (Details on painting the hellmouth can be found here .) We've known this porch needed love, for some time now. The whole thing is catty-whompus:  crooked in every direction imaginable.   The problem wasn't just that the structure was a bit off-kilter.  It turns out that the porch suffered from both of the enemies of architecture:  water, and stupid choices.  The problems were a multiplication of both those factors.   Luckily, Robb is both fearless and skilled in house-building.  The whole project makes me a bit queazy, but he's undaunted. I'm sure our neighbors are suitably horrified.

This afternoon, while Robb and I were working in our back garden, one of our hives of honeybees swarmed.  Being in the middle of a swarm is an intense experience. The bees, annoyingly, flew into the middle of our next door neighbor's impenetrable bottle brush tree, and stayed there for several hours. One of the crazy things about a swarm is how quickly it happens. Having rested in the neighbors' tree for most of the afternoon, the bees decided to relocate around 4:30, and within twenty minutes they had flown into a different neighbors' low-hanging bougainvillea.  While they were flying, I climbed up on the roof of yet another neighbors' garage, and sat inside of the swarm. It was magical, although I suspect some folks might describe this experience as "horrifying." I called Jamaica who lives a few blocks away, and who is always up for a Bee Adventure.  She and I shook the bees into a specialized cardboard beehive, while the neighbor

Every Mothers Day weekend, a local orchid grower has an open house.  Attending this event is like being let in on a wonderful secret.   Fiori D'Amore Orchids is located in a neighborhood just up the hill from where I live.  From the street, you'd never suspect that the house with the beautiful garden is home to a massive growing operation. The family who run this business have such a passion for their plants, which are simply mind-blowing.  Take a look at those clusters of white-and yellow flowers in the top photo.  Each flower cluster is the size of my thigh. The size of this operation is hard to convey.  There rows and rows and rows and rows of thriving plants. The full sized plants often come with full-sized prices, but for more modest buyers like myself, there are a dazzling array of well-labeled divisions. Somehow I got chatting with the owners.  The discussion meandered from the multi-year drought we have just emerged from, to

Since the imposition of the Muslim Ban, I've been compelled with write to our elected representatives in Washington.  It started small, and just kept going.  So far, I've written over a thousand postcards.  What follows are my photos of this endeavor.