Just a little update on my garden and this little site of mine.
Posts I’ve had lots of fun writing ideas while walking my Great Pyrnees Zeus and my foster shepard-of-some-sort Cookie (who is part of this family and foster only until I go update the animal shelter). These include: pruning: how intimidating it is to new gardeners, how your skill develops, and how it relates to life; mindset shift, how gardening started to feel like a chore, and falling back in love with it, how gardening shifted my previous anti-homebody habits, and hummingbirds: how to attract them, how to enjoy viewing, and finding the joy in it not turning out how you expected. All working titles, of course.
My garden My garden is doing beautifully. We are in the couple months of this hot sunny LA summer where my North-facing patios (and the plants on them) actually get hit with direct sunlight for many, many hours of the day. The initial period of this seasion is always wary time, checking in on plants, rearranging the more delicate ones, and repotting to terracotta pots, which are not always as pretty as others, but have their own charm, and more importantly, help keep plants cool and soil moist on scorching days.
But this summer, the usual wariness was overtaken by excitement and curiosity. I’ve had a really steady gardening rythmn, integrating watering and check-ins and repotting and pruning and all those notes that turn into a beautiful song of growth and greenery. I inherited dozens (maybe even shy of a hundred) new plants from my Mother’s move last fall, which left her with a menagerie of plants, and not enough space to take them with her. Her move also brought her just a couple of blocks away from me, and we’ve found more time than ever to bond over weeding, pruning, and repotting. I do find myself a bit shamed as she outpaces me, but it’s still a relaxing time as we chat on about everything and nothing. She’s shared so much of her experience about gardening, and also about life.
I’ve seen the fruits of my chaos-propagating in action, as the all-in-the-pot succulents seem to outpace the growth of any sucuclents I can recall. I’ve thrown together new Franken-pots of green and red and waxy and furry succulents, and (almost) all of have thrived.
While I’ve seen notiriously vigorous morning glories grow inches in days, I’ve never seen such rapid growth and vibrancy across my entire garden, and there’s still months left of this sunny season.
It’s shaping up to be a great summer for the Sunshade Estate.