The High Line

My mom just sent me these photos of her visit to the High Line in New York City, a brand-new park created out of an abandoned elevated train line that will be 1-1/2 miles long when fully complete. A gardener, she especially noticed the plants, which were carefully selected to look like weeds and planted in natural groupings as if they had just sprung up. With its views of the city and artful landscaping, the park was wildly successful from the moment it opened. It is so popular they have to limit how many people can go up on it. There are many stunning photos on the website.
I really love this plant selection (and the whole concept of making a destination park out of an abandoned track) and I had a sudden revelation that this is what I want to do in our front yard: plants that look like weeds, but aren't! And some old railroad tracks! I wonder if my husband will go along.

Admiring the Beans

My favorite plants in my raised bed right now are my bean plants. It's partly because they are all healthy right now, no mysterious holes or pests, and growing fast. But bean plants are more interesting than, say, lettuce, which just gets bigger and bigger and then bolts. Bean twist and twine, they flower briefly and then suddenly where there used to be a flower, there's a bean. The bean grows longer and fatter and then it's ready to eat.
I have Romano beans, my favorite kind of green bean to eat, which I planted from starts in late April. They have taken their time to get established and have only grown about 18" high, but they made yellow flowers a few weeks ago and now beans are forming, some already 3" long. On hot days the Romano bean plants rotate their leaves so the top surface is perpendicular to the ground and only the thin edge of the leaf is facing the sky. I knew sunflowers turned their heads to watch the sun, but I never knew beans could rotate their leaves like that.
The photo above is the Emerite beans, a variety of French haricots verts, those thin green beans they sell for an outrageous amount at Tower Market. These are pole beans, and you can see them twining in the photo. I had to keep tying them onto the tomato cage that I'm using for their support, and it took a week or so for them to finally start twining. There are a few lovely lavender blossoms on them now. They are supposed to grow up to 8' high. I have an arch of PVC pipe for them to twine onto once they reach the top of the tomato cage.
The last start I planted just ten days ago are Tongues of Fire beans. These are shelling beans kind of like cranberry beans, with red speckled pods and a reddish bean (I think). You use them in soups or salads, cooked fresh. I can't tell if they are going to twine or not.

First Flight Lesson

It is very satisfying to be able to give someone something you know they will love. My husband and I had the chance to give our son an introductory flight lesson for his 14th birthday. At least, that's what I called it. My son called it "my first flight lesson." Note what that implies.
Anyway, it was as thrilling as he thought it would be. He had a wonderful flight instructor from Oakland Flyers who was chatty and warm. He and my son did the whole pre-flight check together, while I took photos, then they walked me back to the terminal and they flew over the Bay in a tiny 152 Cessna 2-seater for an hour. My son got to handle the controls (the pilot did, too) and take photos from 2,000 feet up. After many his hours on the Flight Simulator game, my son knew pretty much what all the controls on the dashboard were. In fact, during the pre-flight check, the pilot said, "I'm not so sure you need me." But a revelation to my son was the actual physical feel of the yoke, the wind pulling on the plane, and how much force it took to hold the plane steady. He said his arms were tired after the flight (and I don't think he's ever heard of Henny Youngman). All evening he was reliving the experience, like what the fog looked like from above, what the control towers said to them, and how it was a little choppy coming in for the landing, and what a good job the pilot did bringing it down with a little plunk. My husband and I got several extra hugs that evening, and the statement, "That was the best present I have ever had and I will remember it for the rest of my life."

Galette-O-Rama!

It's galette season at our house right now. These were (top to bottom) nectarine, strawberry-rhubarb, and peach. I tried to make my son a birthday cake but he requested a galette instead. I stil like pies...but actually these are easier and the crust never gets soggy. I follow the recipe exactly in Alice Waters' Chez Panisse Fruit. Whenever I have deviated from the recipe, something has not been quite right, so this is one of the few recipes I follow exactly.

Father's Day Hike

We took a spectacular hike today on Tomales Point, all the way to the very end. There were lots of people on the trail: young fathers, old fathers, fathers with daughters, fathers with sons, fathers with fathers, and also people who were not with their fathers. In the air there were pelicans, cormorants, an osprey, swifts, and lots of white crowned sparrows. On land there were elk and ladybugs and a small garter snake and this caterpillar, who was going somewhere in a hurry.
I've been trying to work out what it is using the Internet, since my wonderful butterfly book doesn't cover moths. It looks most like a Ranchman's Tiger Moth (Platyprepia virginalis) caterpillar, also known as a "woolly bear" caterpillar, a name that is applied to a lot of different species.
The sites that have the most photos don't have a lot of specific information about where the species is found, what they eat, etc. So I did more searches and found an article about the interaction of Platyprepia virginalis and another species that are very common on Lupinus arboreus. Well, guess what? Our entire hike was through a sea of Lupinus arboreus (yellow bush lupine).
That was a clue that maybe I was on the right track. Then I found a photo of an adult Platyprepia virginalis taken at Point Reyes. That pretty much clinched it.
It gave all of us an ecstatic feeling to walk all the way to the very tip of Tomales Point, down to where the rocks would toss us into the ocean if we walked any further. There were seals lounging on the rock shelves and pelicans flying around the tip at our eye level. My son kept saying he couldn't believe there was a place like this so close to San Francisco. To me it felt very far away, like another world.

Inadvertent Worm Farmer

(Come to think of it, worm farmer isn't really right. It implies some kind of commercial enterprise. Like the politically correct dog owners these days, I will call myself a worm guardian.)
I never really wanted a worm bin--too much responsibility, like having hundreds of pets. But our compost bin has over the past few months turned into a worm bin, and now I go and check on the little creatures every day. My invitations to my sons ("Wanna come and see some worms?") have so far met with polite declines. But my husband is my partner in worm husbandry. In fact, it is he who is responsible for our compost becoming the home of several hundred (or more?) red worms, since he confessed to occasionally tossing worms in there from the garden. I guess at least two of them* were the right kind, because there has been a population explosion and our bin is writhing with them.
They don't exactly need a lot of "care." They need fresh compost to eat, which we were doing already by feeding the compost bin our vegetable scraps and trimmings from our garden. They need moisture, which we added when the compost seemed a bit dry. We have taken to adding ripped up strips of newspaper since the worms like it--in fact, this morning I caught my husband outside with our office shredder, shredding paper for the worms. And that's about it.
I became curious the other day because I noticed that sometimes they seem to collect on the sides of the bin and even the underside of the lid, so when I pulled it off there was a mass of them. I searched through a few sites about worms, but all I could find was a description of something called "worm crawl" when all the worms decide to leave their bin together in a mass exodus. This was not happening--thank god! Sounds scary. The only thing to do was to email my farmer friend Karen, who lives on a real farm and who several years ago originally urged me to get a worm bin and showed me hers. At that time I was not hip to worms and politely declined.
Karen responded that her worms sometimes climb up to the top of the pile or the sides if it's too warm for them, or too moist. I was reassured to read this: "My worms regularly come up in a huge, roiling mass --and they often climb on the lid to my container." So, nothing to worry about.
The hardest part is separating the worms from the compost when I'm ready to use it. Specially-designed worm bins have separate sections for adding new compost so you can let all the worms migrate to the new compost before harvesting the castings. But everything gets pretty much mixed up in our bin. When we harvest our compost, we have to sift and separate out all the undecomposed stuff anyway, so I have been trying to pick out the worms and put them back in the bin. But quite a few go along with the compost back into the garden. Sounds like I'm doing pretty much what Karen does: "To remove more worms from the castings, I have tried piling up the castings in the sun to encourage the worms to move to the bottom, away from the light. It was more effort than necessary, so now I don't worry if some worms get placed into the garden."
My nieces are coming over for dinner tonight. I think I'll take them out back and show 'em my worms.

*Yes, there must be two of them, because even though worms are hermaphroditic, there must be two of them so they can rub their clitellums against segments 9-11 of their mating partner, depositing sperm in each other's bodies. For a more in-depth discussion, see the excellent description on the Backyard Nature site.

Sewing Projects

Last summer I created my own one woman sewing camp and made an apron from a retro pattern. Over the past year, I've kept sewing. The smock apron above is made from an old tablecloth and other scraps of material from SCRAP. I love going to SCRAP. They have a lot of fabric and you can't beat the prices. Using odd shapes of fabric tests my creativity, since I sometimes have to piece things together instead of using one whole piece of fabric. Or I make little things, like these purses (the lining fabrics were remnants):
Last summer I also got a great stash of fabric at the Alameda Flea Market. Someone was selling interior design samples; these were extremely expensive fabrics for $1 a piece! Here are some seat cushions and sofa cushions I made from two of these samples, which happened to go beautifully together:
I have two great fabrics from SCRAP for my next projects:
I think the yellow one will be placemats and the blue and white toile a fabric cover for a photo scrapbook. I'm also going to make at least one apron this summer. One-woman sewing camp, here I come!