Removing an Eye Sore: Adios Pool Fence

When we bought the house in 2001, our sons were small and we had a lot of little kids running around the yard. So, we installed a pool fence.

I've hated the pool fence from the day it was installed. I felt it was ruining my fun, cramping my style and giving me eye-bleeds. I was obsessed with hating it, I admit.

This year our sons are respectively 25 and 18 and it occurred to me that they are adults. Adults who can be trusted to walk across the yard without accidentally dropping headfirst into the pool.

You know when you don't have a headache, or you don't have the flu, you take it for granted. Only when you get that headache and you get that flu do you realize how well you had it before: when you felt good, when you were gloriously healthy. An eyesore feels a bit like that. You can't stand it when it's there. You obsess (ok maybe you don't, congratulations for being such a level-headed, mature individual), you think that when it will be gone you'll be deliriously happy.

But you don't. Instead you take brief note of the improvement and go on with your life.

Still, I'm pretty glad that my garden is no longer an annex of Alcatraz.

Before: (not exactly the same angles, so shoot me)



After:



Before:



After:



Before: (note the new bed, ready for planting)



After:



Here is lunch and dinner by the way. It's August and we can't pick vegetables fast enough.

Winter and Fall Planting in Southern California

The end of the growing season means the start of the next one. We keep telling ourselves that we should let the beds 'rest.' We should do a cover crop. Only the moment we see a bit of bare earth we have to plant stuff.  So here it goes.

I am trying to convert the tiny bit of grass we still have near the pool into a wild flower meadow. I planted tons of seeds. I mean TONS. Well, really a few tiny bags, but you know what I mean.

And this is all that grew. I don't know what it is. Yet.


I planted a few purple fingerling potatoes and those adorable little leaves came out.

By the way, Whole Foods was selling 3 bags, one pound each of multi color organic potatoes. I put them into a dark cabinet next to a few onions and they all urgently germinated. I think that buying seed potatoes, a few scrawny sad looking wrinkled things for $6.99 is the con of the century when a single organic potato out of the cuppboard can be sliced and planted ten times over.

But I digress. Here is our first little purple potato leaves. Awww ....


This is them a few weeks later. No longer purple.



November is the perfect time to plant lettuce mixes. If you plant seeds too early then the top soil dries off too fast for the seedlings to survive, but in the cool months they do very well.

I plant it into a small patch not far from the kitchen (in the same bed where I plant my herbs). In a month or less, I'll clip them straight into my plate.  I mulch a lot so they hardly need any washing.



Once upon a time, I planted innocent strawberry plants in a well-defined raised bed. Now the strawberries have taken over and replanted themselves with no regard for the beds. I'll have to do something about it no doubt or they'll creep into MY bed soon.

A Salad Bowl in the Garden

Here is a genius idea: instead of planting heads of lettuce, just scatter lettuce mix and less than three weeks later (depending on the season) you get this:



All you need to do then is clip the lettuce as needed when it's time to make a salad.  The leaves are so young that they have no time to fill with bugs or dirt. Washing them is therefore easier and uses up far less water. Best thing is, as soon as you cut, the lettuce carpet starts growing again.

Like a beard, but edible.

This genius idea I got from my brother in law (So I guess he's the genius, not me). It's likely that you already know this and that what is genius to me is common sense to you. But as I explained earlier, I am new to this gardening thing.

Here, I happen to have the lettuce seedlings right next to my herbs (thyme, parsley) and my onions. So I can clip everything, I head right into the salad bowl, rinse and dry and voilà!