Here are some photos taken yesterday on Easter Sunday…

Baby Cactus Named Wilbur… Recently Flowering!

My Niece With Her Easter Eggs and Candy

A Cala Lily Flower

White Daisies…

Yellow and White Ranunculas

Yellow Snapdragons

Lately, I’ve been having some reasonable success with my garden. And my success has been a matter of trial and error. But I can narrow it down to one main ingredient… the fact that I’ve become a serious “composter”.

Here in sunny San Diego the soil is mainly clay, filled with lots of rocks too. So, one has to dig down about 12 to 18 inches minimum, remove all the rocks, then add soil amendments to break up the clay, which tends to hold the water too long, contributing to such gardening problems as root rot.

The secret to my success so far lies in composting, taking various decaying plant matter and adding it to a large heap or pile. After so many weeks or months, this pile of decaying plant life turns into compost, a dark, rich organic matter that is good to amend to your existing soil, or added to the top layer of the soil as a mulch.

Now there are many online guides to composting, so I won’t go into an entire essay on the art of composting. I will just say that in my experience, composting seems to be an important factor in a successful garden. People can always water their plants, and plants will always find a way to get sunlight for photosynthesis. But, as gardeners we can greatly improve our gardens and the plants within it by improving the quality of the soil.

And a great and natural way to improve the soil is to compost.

Elements To Composting

So, what does one add to a compost heap?

Two main ingredients make up a successful compost heap:

Green Plant Matter

Mainly, this includes all vegetable and plant refuse from the kitchen: Banana peels, orange peels, tea bags, melon rinds, dead flowers, any waste that came from plants. Grass clippings from the lawn also falls into this category.

Brown Plant Matter

These include dead twigs and leaves, small wood chips, shredded newspapers, any brown plant wastes from the garden can be added, providing they are small in size so that they can decay more rapidly.

What I Add To The Compost Pile

Usually, I keep a small black pail in the kitchen to throw all the kitchen refuse into. Much of the stuff that ends up in the pail are coffee grounds, tea bags, banana peels, nut shells, spent flowers from cut arrangements, various leftover vegetable cuttings from broccoli, orange, lemon, apple peels, and any old veggies in the fridge that have spoiled.

Every time I mow the lawn I take all the grass clippings and throw those into the compost heap.

Sometimes, I go to my local Starbucks Coffee shop where they always have bags of coffee grounds that are free for the taking. I think coffee grounds are excellent for adding to the compost heap, as they were still very moist and a good brown material that’s already ground small in size.

A Simple Procedure

When The Compost Is Ready

And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing so far. I haven’t had to buy any mulch or compost from stores, because it’s cheaper and better to make your own organic compost at home.

Creating A Meditation Garden

Today I took lots of photos of the backyard/garden, since the rains have stopped and it was reasonably sunny outside.

A while back I made a commitment to myself to create a beautiful meditation garden in my backyard. I’d been inspired by the meditation garden at the SRF Temple in Encinitas, a beautiful retreat and hermitage overlooking the Pacific Ocean where anyone can go to admire the garden or meditate on any of the meditation benches available there.

A Place To Sit and Meditate

I don’t have a plan as to how the design of this garden would look. Years ago we hired a landscape architect to design our whole backyard, and so we already have a design plan drawn, and half of the construction was done with the project before we sort of ran out of money. But the basic look of the backyard had already been achieved. It was just a matter of creating a beautiful garden.

Here are a few of my goals for this garden:

1. Have lots of flowering shrubs and perrenials, and maybe a few annuals in pots and in certain key areas.

2. I also want to be able to have lots of flowers available for flower arrangements indoors.

3. We have a large hill in the backyard between the patio area and the street. And this is where I want to create natural paths to walk around and start planting new shrubs and put some nice outdoor lighting to light the paths.

4. I’m also investigating the best placement for new trees that will allow more shade during the harsh summer months. So, I’m closely studying the path of the sunlight throughout the garden.

It’s been raining quite a bit here in San Diego and today was a pretty sunny day, the soil is still to wet and muddy to do any kind of serious gardening. So I thought I would take photos of the backyard to document the start of this whole project.

A Meditation Bench

The garden looks clean and fresh in the cool winter sunshine right now. Recently I received some money for my 50th birthday and I thought I would use most of that toward a concrete meditation bench. We dropped by a garden shop in Carlsbad and we found the perfect one that curves, to go into a corner spot. So that’s a very good start to getting this meditation garden underway.

Here are photos from today. A good starting point before Spring, so I can slowly document the progress that is going to happen in the coming months.

. . . .

I just saw a rabbit just now, eating the grass in my backyard!

Well, we have an open yard to the canyon, which is nice because it makes our property seem to extend far beyond its boundaries. And, naturally little furry creatures can be found roaming in my yard, once-in-a-while.

Anyway, I turned on the sprinklers and that scared the little guy away… for now.