By Andrew Haupt
I woke up this morning to discover it rained a whole quarter inch last night, on top of a tenth of an inch yesterday. The smell of the rain saturated ground (petrichor, if you will) is absolutely glorious. Nothing knocks you over the head with gratitude like a tangible amount of rain on the west coast in July, after what feels like months of barely keeping plants alive through the dry season and a year of drought.
This past week I finished the first wattle garden bed and threw down a bunch of perennial herb seeds to see if anything comes up -- bee balm, wormwood, blue agastache, marigold, etc.
We also spent a lot of time working on the bathroom plumbing, which I can’t say I really enjoy...
Unfortunately two of the ducklings drowned this week while we were gone. Somehow they got into the larger pail of water that we had in there for the full grown duck, and they couldn't get out. It's a hard lesson to learn.
On Thursday we headed up to San Luis Obispo for a wedding, and luckily I found quite a bit of time to wander around parks and trails around Santa Margarita, Atascadero, and SLO, and got to see a lot of plants we don’t really have in SoCal. There were black walnut trees (Julgans hindsii, a different species from the Southern California one) virtually everywhere, full with unripe walnuts, in addition to quite a few California Bay and Blue Oak. I also noticed a bunch of huge mulberry trees -- too late to forage, but it made me curious if they were intentionally planted for landscaping (a la J Russell Smith’s Tree Crops) or somehow popped up on their own.
