Gardening Week

It's Easter week and it's Spring Break for Minks, so lots to do. My gardener thinks I've turned (you know, like milk) because suddenly every detail interests me (and his stunning inattentiveness to such details, my fault for previously not watching closely enough). I have a whole flat of tomato plants to plant and the gentleman who is building my raised beds on the hillside (this is Laurel Canyon, dear reader, not much flat ground to be found) will come on Thursday morning. Meanwhile an elegant chap called Will tells me that the soil for tomatoes should be a secret mix of planting dirt, manure and sand, and that tomato plants thrive in trash cans. The manure I shall pick up at the barn today. The horses are always so obliging. Home Depot on the way home for sand and trash cans.

My father sometimes used the extra large white buckets that the chlorine powder came in. Sturdy bottoms and wire handles. He put them inside the greenhouse, next to his mushroom box beds, and tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers did very well there. But then again my father spent, as far as I could tell, every waking summer moment either in the greenhouse or in the garden. Let me put it this way; we never bought vegetables of any kind.

Very inspired by the gardens at the Parker at Palm Springs designed by Judy Kameon (interiors designed by Jonathan Adler). Interesting piece from Apartment Therapy on Judy's favorite plants, etc. here. Much use of flax, olive, bougainvillea, kangaroo paw, native California grasses, ice plant, gazanea, several types of salvia, lavender, ie the plants we have in our garden, but used to brilliant, breathtaking effect with the mountains as a backdrop. Wonderful list of yellow (sunshine) plants here from Sunset magazine. (In the picture: spiky purple salvia, olives, palm trees @Parker, Palm Springs.)