Our Garden

(April 2019) Starting Spring 2019 we spotted several pretty birds in our yard. Click here to see more.

(September 2016) I've been having a bit of trouble explaining to people exactly what we are doing in our yard, as it defies usual gardening concepts: there are no lined paths, no planter boxes, trees are not aligned in regimental order, the lawn is not manicured, very few bushes are trained to shape, etc. Instead of retaining walls we have berms, instead of planter boxes, we have swales. We allow pests to propagate because we assume natural predators will eventually take them out -- and toward that end we allow the birds, opossums, raccoons, squirrels -- and lately, even the gophers -- free reign; I think our assumption is working out: a few months back in our last wet spell I found dozens of predatory cone snails in the yard; every spring Coopers hawks nest in the huge Walnut over one yard. We have lost several dozen seedling trees and we will lose yet more: our patience has not come without cost! But we are seeing the yard come to a life of its own without the need for pesticides or other modern protections. We are nowhere near our goal to have a yard that lives on only the 10 to 30 inches of rain we get each year--but every year the yard needs less added water. On to describing our yard, after doing some searching about, starting with the words "wild garden forest," I discovered that our general aim for the yard is not unusual! There seems to be a trend these days toward permaculture, forest gardens, agroforestry, and several other related technical terms. These describe precisely our intentions! So where are we at? Are we "agroforesters" yet? No. But: we have seasonal wild produce -- seeds from various lettuces, Vietnamese spinach, various squashes, edible chrysanthemum, sunflowers, . . . all sprout at odd times in odd places -- ready to pick and eat! Our fruit list includes plums, peaches, apricots, pears, citrus, pomegranates, and olives; we have almonds and walnuts; we have grape vines and dragon fruit -- we haven't introduced chickens yet, and we have nowhere near enough produce to feed ourselves or to sell; but in 10 years a mostly dead yard has come back to life! Who knows what the next 10 to 20 years have in store?

Our videos of flowers from the garden here.

Last year (Summer 2008) my wife and I started landscaping our yard. We're doing all the work ourselves and trying our best to spend no money on the project -- impossible, of course -- but my grandmother left us w/a lot of bricks, rocks, falling walls, sticks, etc., and also two HUGE Mullberry trees to serve as the gateway to our hillside paradise; and thanks to the LADWP Million Trees program, we were given ten trees to start things off. I'll be posting pictures of our progress. This should take us about 20 years to accomplish; but when we're finished we hope to have a hillside garden that is foresty but won't cost us an arm and a leg in water bills. Here is our 20 year plan.

The yard is a 300 feet long slope, 50 feet wide, East facing. Behind the Mulberry trees the yard rises about 30 feet, with the backmost 20 foot section of the yard having half of the total rise (picture to right). Behind our lot is an undeveloped hillside that extends another 300 feet -- this hillside is a landslide area: it can't be built on and trees don't seem to easily take root; an unfortunate circumstance because small California walnut trees grow on other parts of the hill but behind our house is just seasonal mustard and grass -- very pretty, but a severe fire hazard! Lupins also grow, but most years they are hidden under the mustard. Hopefully, over the next ten years, our oak trees will grow wide and high enough to start shading the hill and allow the seeds the squirrels plant to take root [09 September 2016 :: The two oaks have less than 3/4 inch diameter trunks, (9) is about 5ft tall and (10) is about 3.5 feet tall. (10) died down to a few inches above ground level a few years back, but came back to life. New plan: Start w/smaller trees that start easier, then let oaks grow in their shade. This plan is also not working; one Jacaranda is still holding onto life behind the fence, but barely. I may have to resort to Loquats, Manzanita, and Mountain Lilac to get things started up there--I like these plants; but I was really hoping to see the beginnings of an oak forest in my lifetime.]. I'd really love it if one day there is a forest behind our house for our grandkids to explore (Still have faith this can happen!). One good thing about the hill being a landslide zone is that we can be certain no one else will build behind our house -- so after our private little forest paradise takes root maybe our grandkids can look forward to the day that their grandkids have a whole hillside of oak and walnut forest to wander in! [22 September 2016 :: I did some reading on the USFS website, it is unlikely that we will be able to start an Oak forest within our lifetime. The site is OK (although the water table is a tad deep; over 100 feet). A better bet will be to start a walnut forest; then, in 40-50 years, hope that an oak forest will begin to take over, so that in about 100 to 150 more years, a primarily oak forest will come to fruition. So: my dream for us and my grandkids has now become a dream for my great-great grandkids! I'm patient, but this project is turning into something much more than I can handle. We'll start this Spring (the gophers plant plenty of walnuts for us -- so I'll start transplanting the seedlings up the hill; and we can find some acorns and plant them with purple sage (a suggestion from a California State website, to protect the seedlings from rabbits). The oaks will grow about 2 inches per year. In 30 years we can expect to have a hillside of mature Walnut trees and scrub oak (my wife and I should live to see that). The acorns that drop from those bushes can start a second growth of oak that will compete with the walnuts and maybe be "treelike" 40 to 60 years later, so my boys should see a foresty hillside with codominant walnut and oak; then some 50+ years after that, the oak trees should start to dominate the walnuts, and maybe 50 to 100 years after that there will be a real oak forest for my great-great -great grandkids to play in! Now we have to figure out how to get the Los Angeles City Manager and Forester to get on board with our plan! Now that I think about it, this is in principle the plan I said above, the only difference is I need to start w/walnuts trees and my wife and I won't see the result. Also, it would be terrible if we manage to make a beautiful forest, only to have someone buy up the property and rip it out! So our gardening endeavor has been raised to an effort of faith. I wonder how to start a conservancy? Anyone know? Send me an email! The land right now is a "paper street" + residential R1 zoned hillside that is unsuitable for modern housing.]

http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/queagr/all.html#18

http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/jugcal/all.html

http://phytosphere.com/restoringoakwoodlands/oakrestoration.htm

10 June 2009 We planted a Mimosa tree about 10 feet behind the banana. Hopefully it takes! I'm not sure how well Mimosa is able to hold up steep hillsides -- but we figured that they'll give shade to the hill quicker than the oaks. [13 October 09 :: A gopher buried and seems to have eaten the mimosa. I'm not pleased w/the gopher! The banana made it through 2 winters.]

12 June 2009 I saw the first sign that a forest is in the making! Two walnut (Juglans Californica) growing in the yard. I verified that they weren't Ailanthus (stinking sumac) by gently pulling away the dirt around the budding trunk until the walnut shell was revealed. Unfortunately, one of them was growing in front of the house -- so I pulled that one up and planted it in a pot; hopefully it takes and I can plant it in the yard in a few years. The other one is growing next to a compost hole that I dug near the Bay Laurel tree. See the two pictures below [27 Oct 09 :: I added another picture of the tree.]. We're hoping that within ten years California live oak seedlings will also be found. [13 Oct 09 :: I have given up on seeing a natural forest in my life time -- but we gathered seeds from around the community and planted them in old milk containers. We now have about two dozen seedlings of Purple Orchid Tree (Bauhinia purpurea, in Vietnam it is called the Queen Flower), Jacaranda of unknown variety, jack fruit, and several other 'random' trees that I can't classify. We'll plant these up on the hill so that a fledgling forest will develop in our lifetime, and then tell our great-grandkids to slowly remove those trees and let the oak trees we hope are growing by then to replace them. 09 Sep 2016 :: I forgot I wrote this! One jacaranda is still alive up there: barely. The ash, queen flower, and mimosa, we planted behind the fence all died. Two very small mimosa we planted in the ice plant are doing well (but growing terribly slow! We saved some of the seedlings in pots, where they pretty much did nothing more than stay alive. We planted the biggest one of these (about 3 feet tall and skinny) in the front yard early this year, and in only a few months it is well on it's way to looking like a young tree; greater than 5 feet tall, w/a spreading habit, and trunk diameter of almost an inch. My conclusion is that the hillside lacks enough water to carry the plants through the Summer--somehow I have to get tiers up there--hopefully that will allow for enough water retention to start the forest.]

13 July 2009 The potted J.Californica is doing well -- it lost the leaves it originally had, but started to grow some new ones. 03 Sp 2015 Turns out the J.Californica is easy to grow from seed, in pot or soil! We haven't had much luck putting them into the ground. The one above is still alive, but looks even smaller than in the picture, it's hard to believe it is now a 6 year old tree! One winter the top died back completely, a sapper [got that wrong -- new growth from the root crown] came up and has now replaced the trunk, it's had it's primary roots eaten by gophers (yes -- gophers DO eat walnut roots, and cut by shovels--it's had a rough 6 years ... still, it's not doing as well as it ought! Our yard is just turning out to be more challenging than we thought it would be! [22 September 2016 :: Last week was too radiant for the walnut -- the sun burned off all the leaves! We have had a dozen or so days over the past year when the afternoon sun is like a microwave -- it doesn't happen all day, just when the sun is at a particular angle, you can tell by the pattern of burn on the susceptible plants. Some of the burned plants are supposedly very resistant to sun damage, for example the Japanese loquat. I am thinking we need to invest in a high canopy for the yard, but I don't know how to do that without also expecting to block so much sun that we won't be able to agrofarm. Here, in SoCal the state uses various pines and eucalyptus for a canopy -- we want neither.]

13 July 2009 This project is coming along quite a bit faster than I had originally hoped. I thought that the ground prepping time would be about 5 years -- but was amazed earlier this year to see that the heaps of leaves and dirt I had prepared (three years ago) had a complete normal compost ecosystem -- not just huge worms, but also those big shiny green bugs. We've been doing some small farming projects (on several plots about 2x5 feet), and those have been going well, so I ought not be too surprised -- but this year we're finding `wild' squash, and just this morning I saw a family of rabbits! I have mixed feelings about those rabbits -- on one hand, it means that the backyard ecosystem is improving by "leaps and bounds" -- on the other hand: they've eaten all our cabbage (no, I'm not joking!), they also ate most of the wildflowers my wife planted. Between the gophers (taking out whole tomato plants, rose bushes, and even fig saplings), birds (that snap small twigs and eat our sunflowers), rabbits, and lizards -- we have LOTS of lizards -- almost our entire crop of fruit and vegetables this year was stolen. Admittedly, this crop amounted to about a dozen fruit, total. Two apricots and some peaches and nectarines. Our asian pears are still green and the persimmon tree hasn't yet shown us what it'll do. The only things the critters didn't steal was our cucumbers, string beans, and okra. I'm not really surprised about the okra -- but I was hoping.

28 October 2009 We finally decided to 'trap' the gophers. Two down -- at least one more to go! [4 Nov 09 :: Got three ... but the fourth one seems to be much smarter than the others. So far it has eaten the string on the trap, pulled the trap into the tunnel several feet, buried the trap (w/out setting it off), disappeared for several days at a time, only to reappear about 20 feet away in what seems to be an entirely different tunnel system. 1 Dec 09 Got five total ... but there's still at least one more to go. This one's tunnel system is at least a foot underground, making it hard to place the traps. I'm now getting into the habit of trying to collapse as much of a tunnel system as I can, and filling what I can of the collapsed parts with water; hopefully making it harder for other gophers to go back to the same place. 2 Jan 2010 :: Total caught is now 9. I should probably make a separate page dedicated to gophers, but so far, almost everything I've read on the internet has been verified by my experience. One BIG exception: gopher sense of smell is not as good as some people report; assuming you know how to safely set the trap, you can handle the trap w/your bare hands. The trick is to place the trap as per the instructions on the package. However, most of my kills were messy; it's probably best to use gloves unless you have a place to immediately wash your hands.]

28 October 2009 My wife figured out an even faster way to get a 'forest' ... plant papayas! They seem to take well on our soil and they look kind of cool, too. See the picture. We also found out that if you take about 100 new twigs from the mulberry, put them into dirt and water them, three or four will take root. Here's a picture of one of our new mulberry trees, too. 03 Sep 2015 The papayas didn't make it past 2 winters--I should have posted that. I don't know if they succumbed to frost, cold nights, or both. The baby mulberry is now about six feet tall (but quite skinny!).

1 December 2009 The banana didn't die! well, the main shoot did, but a side shoot came up. Hopefully it can survive the winter and yield fruit in a few months! Today, for the first time, I saw a field mouse in the garden. It jumped out of one of my piles of wood branches, leaves, and dirt, that I've been building to help control erosion. This was one of the first piles I made, it's not very compact, there are lots of big holes for little critters to hide in. I'm not sure if the mice are good or bad -- on one hand I'm happy that they are finding food; but on the other hand, the food they are finding happens to be wildflower seeds and other stuff that I would like to see grow in the Spring -- I do hope the mice don't eat up all the seeds. I haven't seen the gopher snakes in a long time -- I hope they are still on patrol!

4 January 2010 I found out that mangoes DO grow in California -- in fact, one of the names cultivars comes from my zip code! yeah! In a couple years expect to see a picture. 03 Sep 2015 I planted a Keitt mango in the first berm, toward the fence--it's not a great spot, the berm isn't "settled" yet, lots of air and decomposing branches with barely enough dirt to glue it all together. Also I fear the dreaded wood borers will get it. But it seemed to be the best I could do--I read that mangos in California need to be understory, and well-protected from potential cold and frost. This area of the yard is not touched by the super cooled wind that comes around and the hill winding down a 10-20foot wide path through the middle of the yard. Since I'm on the topic: This year was exceptionally bad for wood borer damage. About half our small trees (hmmm ... except for "our" Santa Rosa plum, Joshua's Royal Apricot, and the Florida Prince Peach, ALL our trees are less than a 1 inch diameter trunk!) are at risk of not making it back next year (they are at the susceptible age and size: 2-5 yro, w/trunk diameter less than an inch). That sentence suggests how hard this project is turning out to be, I estimate (I've lost count) that any given fruit tree seedling we plant has less than a 20% chance of maturing into an adult tree. Even then, the soil conditions are so bad, and weather so unreasonable that the trees are small--our Florida Prince has been in the dirt for almost 8 years and it's only got a trunk a little bit more than an inch in diameter 1 foot above ground! It's NOT a dwarf!

31 May 2014 Four years and 5 months: the yard has changed quite a bit! Our composting efforts have been paying off. My wife has been buying bags of wildflower seeds and throwing them out every February and after they bloom we let them go to seed--the birds eat most of them but enough are left over that we can now look forward to flowers whether we plant them or not. Chrysanthemums now grow wild every Spring, too. We also grow non-wild flowers, like orchids!

... actually, we have to plant the sunflowers every year--a huge head of food is too tempting for the birds and squirrels to pass up! The next set of pictures show some of our water retention efforts. My sister calls the berms I've been making "bird's nests." Three of them are visible in the pictures. We start with a woven wall of tree branches. I dig out the hill behind the wall and then we compost in the depression. The end result is a terrace of sorts that is about 3 feet deep and filled with decomposed matter that soaks up a huge amount of water. We plant a low hedge at the base of each of the walls and the hedge becomes a living wall. The berm in front is the newest, you can still see the woven branches as the jasmine, boxwood, and hibiscus hasn't grown in yet. Pomegranate (grown from seed) is holding up the second berm. The third berm is failing--the pomegranate is growing slow and the woven wall is decomposing--I'll rebuild the woven wall at some point.

The picnic table hasn't moved in over four years! Actually, if you look carefully, it is now on a bricked base; used to be sitting in dirt.

I decided to finally get moving on my Japanese garden. You can see a baby black pine and maple in the picture; the maple is the same one in the previous picture. 03 Sep 2015 A month ago I decided the Japanese maple wasn't coming back -- after digging it out I noticed that the roots did not grow past the original ball, not sure why. The azalea in front of the stump also died (it was weak, I transplanted it to a more sunny place--not a good idea!) I topped the black pine to get it to branch more and hopefully give it a bit of character.

The third berm--this one is not doing so well. Even worse: there's a gopher family under it that I can't seem to scare away or trap. I've lost 3 traps under that berm so far. The row of daisies are doing an excellent job of erosion control right to the edge of the berm.

This drought has convinced us that water retention is THE necessary first step to getting our forest growing. So now I don't feel too bad about the berms attracting various varmints. If we want a forest back there, we have to start w/basics ... I guess that also means good dirt (our dirt has a layer of sandstone about 1 foot below it, on average, that is from the late meiocene period, 11 may it has no nutrients in it--but the city gives away free compost and mulch as long as I'm willing to shovel it into my car once a week! So, all's I need is a pickaxe to poke enough holes in the stone, fill them w/compost, and let the rain and nature do the rest!

Next Update Coming Soon (I hope).