Cover of Stem Cell Reports!

Cover As shown by Unternaehrer et al. (pp. 691–698), the transcription factor SNAIL (SNAI1), typically associated with the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition, paradoxically enhances somatic cell reprogramming, which is typically described as a mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition. Original artwork by Anna Lensch.http://www.cell.com/stem-cell-reports/issue?pii=S2213-6711%2814%29X0012-3

The Natives

When I wrote the last post a month ago, and never got around to posting it, I sincerely believed the worst of the southern California summer was over. Fortunately for me, I didn’t know what was coming – life is merciful that way. It’s over now, but our heat wave was really too much. Today, we are sitting outside after having our lunch in the shade, and perfectly comfortable. What a blessing.

As you might imagine after the dismal previous post, I have nothing to write about in my garden. I intend to sow some seeds soon, and hope for a better Fall. But here are some interesting and unusual things I thought you might enjoy.

I loudly called Wolfi (it was not a scream) to come to the bathroom. This handsome fellow was there and did not appreciate our efforts to relocate him to a more welcoming place. Tarantulas are nearly harmless, and Wolfi has nearly convinced me they are cute. We first saw one on the driveway a few weeks ago, and removed it to the entrance to the hills. We hope it was not he we saw a few days later, having been stung by and now being dragged across the path by a “tarantula hawk”, one of the less-appealing insects I have encountered. More recently Wolfi found a scorpion in the office. How do these creatures get in our house?

California buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum) is one of my favorite native plants. Here it is in late summer, when the flowers, pink to white in spring and early summer, have gone to seed and turned tumbleweeds (Salsola tragus) are the most frequent. I will try distributing buckwheat seeds there.

We picked up some paddles that had fallen off a huge cactus fence (Opuntia littoralis) nearby. They appeared dead, but did grow – after a few months little baby paddles sprouted! Most of them became prickly pears, first blooming as a lovely yellow flower that was gone in a day. A few formed new paddles.

One of the most surprising joys of this summer was the discovery of one very productive elderberry tree, way back in the hills. Claire, Lucy and I took a long route one morning on our walk, and discovered it just as its fruits were frosted at the peak of ripeness. We must have collected 10 or 15 pounds over the next couple of weeks. We froze some (and discovered that the fastest way to get them off the bush is to freeze the bunches whole, then knock them off gently onto a cookie sheet while still frozen) and will be able to have them on cereal through the winter. Their antioxidant and virus-

fighting capacity is legendary – evidently they work better than tamiflu! To me, the wonder of a fruitful bush/tree (this one is over 10 feet tall and the radius is probably 15-20 feet) in a canyon that saw its last rainfall 3-4 months previous is mind-boggling. My melancholy at missing our yearly weekend of visiting the Miller farm and hiking Gap Mountain for blueberries with the Weigels was at least partially eased by this discovery.

I'll finish with one last uninvited guest, who left without us being able to make their acquaintance, but left behind the evidence of their visit (toes included for scale). Maybe it was a rat snake?

August and all is not well

Not what I had in mind

The temptation is there to say nothing when things aren’t going so well. But I didn’t commit to a blog about only the positive parts of a garden in a dry place. It’s mid-August, so perhaps we’re done with the worst of our first year, heat and desiccation-wise. That’s what I’m hoping. Here are the garden happenings through the past 3 months.

Our raised beds are languishing. Since early June it’s been hard to keep anything moist enough to survive. Someone warned me of this when we were building them. I thought tomatoes would be abundant and continue into the fall here – but very early on the vines just died. We only got a few Sungolds. Aunt Rose bemoans the fact that her sprinklers water the tomatoes every day and thought mine would do so much better than hers since I water deeply every few days. Part of the problem could also be that their roots can only go about 2’ deep.

Rabbits love pepper leaves! Who knew?

The peppers that Heidi and I sowed in January had a bit of a hard time because I didn’t get them into the beds until late June, I think. It was already very hot and they never really took off, though I have always watered them every day. I’m hoping that as temps cool they might catch on, at least if they can keep some leaves on them!

Because the real blow to the peppers came in the form of uninvited herbivores, well at least one. We had been so pleased that our plentiful rabbits didn’t discover our garden – but that is no longer the case. First he ate all the leaves off several peppers. One day he developed a fondness for cilantro, and ate it all down to nubs, including the seeds that had been drying for my curry. The sweet potatoes appear to win the battle one week, then suddenly they’ll be nearly denuded.

We have had extensive discussions with our pellet gun-wielding friends about our predicament. For now, I have chosen to fend them off with fermented garlic-hot pepper spray a la Mike McGrath. But I don’t always get it sprayed after watering, so I continue to feed the rabbits.

We had our first ripe fig last week! There are 3-5 more baby ones coming. Friends brought us a bag

citrus from above

from their tree last week. We saw what I have since described as fig stealers under a neighborhood tree about 10:30 one night at the bottom of our hill, but I digress. As for our other fruit trees, the citrus have had a growth spurt in the last month. All appears well. The persimmon is apparently fine, but has a shoot from the root stock. Claire thinks I can cut it and root it for a base for another tree. The apricot continues to appear to be fine, though its upper half never seemed to recover. We’ll give it another year. The plum was fine until last week, but that requires another story.

apricot

Two weeks ago Sunday, there was rain in the forecast. I thought only the mountains would see it. There were flash flood warnings in the morning, and by early afternoon we were watching it across the valley, great white clouds completely obscuring the mountains. We heard real flash flood warnings come through on the radio – you know, the ones that almost always end in “this has been a test of the emergency broadcasting network…” We had been in Forest Falls in misty fog on Saturday, and enjoyed the sprinkles. But we had no idea what we were in for! Suddenly the first big drops arrived. We kept watching from the patio. As it started to pour, I took my broom around and cleaned the cement. Rain is such a welcome visitor! Within 10 minutes we had a raging river rushing down our driveway. It snaked around the hairpin turn at the bottom and was off

Did a gopher eat my plum roots?

down the hill. Before we knew it the runoff arrived, and soon our pond was as full as ever. We raced around clearing clogged drains, checking gutters, scooping mud, building a little rock divertor so the east side of the driveway wouldn’t erode. Suddenly there was 6” of water in the backyard – dig a little hole to release it! No, it’s e
roding a canyon into the neighbor’s hill! Quick, fill it with dirt and rocks! Our shrubs got a very good soaking, which they desperately needed!

We dashed back into the hills a few steps, marveling at the channels cut out almost instantly and the mini-landslides we could watch coming down from the steep places. It was really white water coming into the catch basin! All told we got just over 2” in about 1.5 hours. Thankfully, things worked well above the house. Since then, Wolfi has fixed the problems below, so we’ll have to wait for the next test.

Back to the plum tree. It had looked fine all along – but 3 days after the storm, it suddenly wilted!

Now whatever could have happened? I don’t know. Is something rotting? As far as I can tell it is really truly dead.

Perhaps I am going to be a 3-season gardener. Perhaps I could also figure out how to grow stuff even in summer. Lots of people do – you should see our farmer’s market. Of course that’s the main reason I am not more upset that our garden is dehydrated. But I will read up a bit. Another improvement, probably, would be the seeds. We bought a few more seeds, but most of mine were from New England, born & bred for the cold. I suppose there must also be heat-resistant varieties.

Or, I could stick to orchids.
  

It's Spring!

Yes, it’s been Spring for many weeks. I need to keep reminding myself of the fact since temps have often been above 100 this past week. But, better late than never! We are up to 7.4 inches of rain this season – including all of the storms since last November. Our last one, the end of April, yielded a very welcome 0.5”. Our hills have however not regained their green. We will be stuck with gold until next fall.

The winter months were very good to us in terms of greens! We had a constant supply of bok choy, napa, tatsoi, and the tuscan kale and chard are still producing abundantly. We enjoy green smoothies several times per week and never have a short supply. When Heidi visited in January, we got the bamboo into the ground, shopped for pots (and started the collection with the lovely yellow and green one the succulents live in now), ordered our avocado and Fuyu persimmon trees, and planted lots of seeds. She also planted the artichoke, another baby fan palm, and picked out the most wonderful shrub. The hummingbirds love its

petite bright red blooms, reminiscent of snapdragon shape, and its lemony-minty scent lingers on your nose. We have no idea what it is but I love it!




We also went on a couple of plant-finding missions, working toward the goal of native gardening here. Some of what we brought home survived!

It was the middle of February when I suddenly noticed little shoots in the kale/brussel sprout bed – oh yeah, she planted little onion sets too! Totally forgot about that.



In March it became evident that the persimmon, fig, and pomegranate survived – they leafed out beautifully. The apricot was slower, and has almost no leaves on the branches, but from the trunk there are lots of new shoots, which are above the graft, so I am assuming it is OK too. The peach shows no signs of life, sadly.

Our barrel cactus gave us over 20 blooms, even though I feel quite incompetent as to its care. Which is to say I just ignore it. The prickly pear pad I picked up from the side of the road has budded and produced several new sprouts. Two of them have bloomed, lovely bright yellow short-lived splashes.

Our biggest garden development of late is our 5 planters which form the border of our (yet to be developed) outdoor living area. We found a local craftsman who made them, finished them, and delivered them to their final location. In one our Meyer lemon lives, in another the Mexican lime. A ponytail palm with several succulents live in the third, the barrel cactus with more succulents in the next, and the last has a grass which has pink new growth. We love them!

To prepare to plant them, we needed to do a very counterintuitive chore: collect rocks! We went to the catch basin access road and got plenty, but it is funny to me that for years we made huge piles of rocks from our tiny garden in Boston, while here on our entire acre there is hardly a pebble to be found.

Our new shades are not really part of the garden, but somehow I think they belong here anyhow. Rather than blinds we have rolling shades outside that keep the sun from getting to the house in the first place. I’m very happy to have avoided the hard decision about what to get indoors!

An especially dry year

I have the most wonderful gardening companions. More and more, they're ignoring me and coming to visit even when I'm out there.

I have been wanting to go back to a very important event several weeks ago, just after Becki & Heidi left in fact. I got a mysterious package, and was instructed to make sure I was the one to open it.

Within a box and a padded envelope and a plastic bag and a ziplock was what looked like soil. On closer inspection, it was soil - but it was mostly worms!

Lovely, no?

Missourian worms at that, lovingly dug by Becki out of her bountiful (worm-wise) compost. Under cover of darkness, they were unceremoniously buried at strategic points in my heretofore worm-barren raised beds. (I hoped this would decrease the chances that they would become expensive bird food!) At the last moment I remembered to save a few for my own compost. Fortunate indeed that Wolfgang wasn't the one to find that package!

first salad harvest: 12/17/13

There have been frequent harvests of leafy green veggies, and we are enjoying them so much. The Chinese cabbage produces generously, and we have as much salad as we can eat.

Tatsoi is one of my favorite Asian greens; it matured from seed in about the same time it took for radishes to grow. I wondered how ice-bred arugula would do, and until now it seems to like it just fine! Cilantro that we bought as a plant has done well, and lots of babies from seed are following.

Tatsoi and cilantro

 We (meaning Wolfi) have had quite a battle with the gopher (s) and at present are admitting defeat. He seems to take great humor from our feeble efforts to outsmart him. After one particularly grueling day (involving repeated attempted smokeouts) I was sitting in the back yard reading when I heard a scratching noise by the fence. His head popped up not 4 feet from me and I swear there was a smirk on his face. Until now he has not done any obvious damage, but let's say I am glad for our wire baskets.

On a recent hike up Mt. Baldy, I very much enjoyed the yucca growing there. They are numerous and perfectly round and symmetrical, with so many spikes that they make the coolest 3d effect as you walk or drive past. I haven't been a fan in the past, but these guys convinced me I'd like to try to grow a few here. They will be well out of the way - those spikes are SHARP!

I am forcing some paperwhites, which just means having them indoors (though watering is done outdoors, as seen here) so that they bloom

unseasonably early. Well, I have seen paperwhites blooming down the street since late December, so forcing loses much of its value here. In New England, seeing the stalks shooting up, and blooms in February or so, helps convince us that there is hope for winter to one day be over.

I also planted several amaryllis in the ground. I may regret it, as we do get frost, but I decided to try. One appears to be alive.

Our drought is really critical; you may have heard that our governor declared a drought emergency this week. The satellite images below are revealing: snowpack in the Sierras is so much less than a year ago. The more startling thing is that 2013 (the left photo) was the driest year on record until then. Sure would be great to get some rain.

http://paloalto.patch.com/groups/politics-and-elections/p/satellite-photos-show-california-drought