#zone9b

Juice box Mango

A gift from my oldest, isn't she perdy

A few weeks ago, looking at the map for longer & steeper training hikes in my local Shell Ridge Open Space, I noticed a label for a bench memorializing the parents of a high school friend, both of whom passed during a freak flash flood in a desert canyon almost 20 years ago. . Sitting on the bench on a fabulous spring day, I realized how both of them planted some of the seeds of my love for nature: Gordon took & created amazing, enormous gelatin silver photographs of native oaks, Sierra rock formations, & North Coast driftwood, while Kathy spearheaded the creation of a nature area at the elementary school, where she led classes so kids could explore & discover all the magic at the edge of Open Space. . The bench is perched on the top of the steepest hill along the ridge, with views from Mt. Diablo / Tuyshtak to San Francisco, & in sight of their house, where my friend’s younger brother lives there now. . Was a lovely day to finally make it to the bench, & to rediscover so many memories of some of the amazing people who’ve guided my path—even if it’s taken me a few decades to catch up. . #ReGenerations #OpenSpace #ItsNotEasyBeingGreen #NorCal #Zone9b #Grateful (at Shell Ridge Recreation Area) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca8a6K_pICG/?utm_medium=tumblr

https://chokrihomeandgarden.blogspot.com/2016/11/how-to-grow-okra.html

Mini Harvest! 🥔🥕🥔🥕 I've been cleaning up and separating/splitting the lemongrass to make more (and ohhhh it makes me want coconut curry so badly...) I forgot to clean one in the hardshell baby pool because we had mostly green onions and dill in it. While I was moving some things around, I found baby potates!! The biggest one is like the small yellow potatoes you get in the store, and the other three are stunted. The carrot was also hiding under the weight of the flowering green onions! The carrot is actually supposed to be small (I think they're "short and sweet"), so this is a fully-grown, picture-perfect version! Nice! Too bad there weren't any more planted in there. Also, the bottom brown thing is a green onion bulb, I think. It's weird how they grow from both bulbs and seeds? And boy, is that area covered in green onion seeds, we have way more seeds than anyone could plant - same thing happened last year. 🥕🥔🥕🥔 #harvest #gardening #california #pandemicgardening #zone9b #zone9 #zone9garden #garden #potato #carrot #homegrown https://www.instagram.com/p/CQmsMKSs4u4/?utm_medium=tumblr

#Gardening after the rain. #zone9b 🍄 🐸 🦋 https://www.instagram.com/p/CQjYhjaht_F/?utm_medium=tumblr

Cleaned up the side grass that was hanging down into the pond! There were a ton of bricks and stones buried around the edge of the pond, which would find better use elsewhere in the yard, since this area is too overgrown to walk around. (I bet the bricks have been buried since I was a kid, this area has always been so overgrown by grass - there used to be a fence where those bushes are.) Nothing particularly important came from doing this, but I just really wanted to clean up all the dead grass. Got a bunch of worms and fresh wormy dirt out of this half of the pond, too. And I also saw a wild cockroach egg case and a wild cockroach... 😬 I haven't seen one since the exact day I left NYC last and saw a huge one barfing black ooze upside down on my rug... 🤢 Stay outside, buddy. (They're very uncommon to find in a house in this area, and obviously hard to find in the wild because they hide under dead leaves.) #garden #gardening #plants #california #zone9b #zone9 #zone9garden #pandemicgardening #spring #springcleaning https://www.instagram.com/p/CM8jzEjsMrO/?igshid=4txxgmbcbwyc