Warm February Breezes, Gardening Life Begins--Again

Occasional puffs of warm salty air blowing in from the San Diego Coast for the last five days have provided all the motivation I needed Saturday to peel of my t-shirt, snatch several six-packs of seedlings from my potting shed and head out to my upper garden.

At last, I’m done rebuilding soil in my upper garden and the change in weather screams that it’s time to start planting. Beginning my garden is one of the things I really look forward to throughout winters here in San Diego. And so, trowel in hand, I dropped my 12 broccoli and 12 Brussels sprout seedlings into their respective rows, guarded at each end by a 90-day beefsteak tomato hybrid I’ve grown every year for the last four years down here.

I love gardening, it keeps my hands busy, my mind occupied and it reinforces my commitment to keeping things simple and sweet. And, it forces me to work on fine muscle coordination in my stroke-affected left hand, which is a very good thing indeed.

I’ve been gnawing on Sequoias strawberries that I over–wintered for the last two weeks and the radishes I started from seeds three weeks ago are up and have been thinned.

Later this morning, I’m putting two rows of sweet corn and about 10 Virginia gold leaf tobacco plants down in my lower garden. Then I get to finish weeding both plots and then I’ll try to decide which weird tomato hybrids I’m going to play around with this spring.

What I really love about my little mountaintop is this: I have the space I need to experiment with vegetable hybrids under tightly controlled conditions; room to play on my ATV and toy tractor; and the privacy to work in my garden, pop a nice crop of freckles, get red and then slowly tan as I move from plot to plot shirtless in the southern California sun. At the moment my interests are: in seeing how big I can get Russian black tomatoes to grow; and how big a yield I can get from my favorite Goliath bush tomato strain, And, growing more potatoes this year, but I’m not going to put those into rich composted mounds for another three weeks. Another thing I’m going to experiment with is using trellises to get my cantaloupes and other melons off the ground – something a good friend in Northern California does to minimize insect damage.

Oh, I’ve got the hated gophers under control, and I haven’t seen any evidence of voles for over a month and every shovel-full of earth I take out of my garden in preparation for planting seedlings is laden with active-- and thus healthy-- earthworms.

Like fishing, my love of gardening isn’t about producing bushels of produce, or catching more fish than I can ueat. It’s about being outside, caring more about the screams of gulls and irate scrub jays, and judging time by shadows and currents, not a wrist watch or the progression of items completed on a daily punch list.

It’s me and my mighty Chihuahua passing time in the sun, and enoying the passage of the seasons, from the first puff of a warm trade wind on pre-Spring February mornings, to cold stinging raindrops at the end of the fall yellowtail season, as I troll slowly around the far kelp beds, miles off of the LaJolla shore, trailing a shiny lure, hoping for one more hook-up. –Jim Forbes. 02/18/2007

Comments

[David Churbuck]

You remind me of Diocletian, retired from running the Roman Empire, home in the city of Split on the Adriatic coast, tending his cabbages as the first Roman Emperor to step down from the seat of power without being removed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletian
I wonder if Diocletian had a gopher or vole problem? he probably had one slave attending each new hole. It's really so unfortinaste that the good Emporer didn't have sky rockets and fire crackers. Thery're such fun!Rainy gray wisps staeming off the mountains here this morning. I'm going back to bed--got up for sn sirport run ay 0430. thanks David. You're an inspiration--jim forbes