6/6/2025
This year’s relatively dry winter gave way to a mild spring and now a streak of June Gloom. Most of the wildflower seeds I broadcast at the end of 2024 never sprouted, but the cooler temperatures and occasional shower from March onward helped the native plant starters I put in the ground at the beginning of December. Meanwhile, some volunteer plants got well established when I wasn’t around to care for them, and over the past few weeks I’ve rushed to get some herb starters in the ground.
When we look at our garden now, we’re delighted. It no longer looks haphazard — somehow even the volunteer tomatoes and California poppies appear to have been planned. The poppies are now voluptuous bushes reclining outward on delicate orange carpets of their own fallen petals. We dragged an out-of-control potted aeonium left by the previous residents into the middle of the garden after it bloomed for the first time, and the flowery stalk forms a beacon that draws in bees all day long. In past years I would see butterflies, especially monarchs, daily, but sadly, they’re scarce right now, even though we have two thriving narrowleaf milkweeds.
As always, potatoes have sprung up where I didn’t exactly expect them, including in the compost pile. Are compost potatoes safe to eat? Maybe not. But I don’t want to pull them out prematurely. I like the wildness of the compost, where all kinds of life, perceptible and not, healthy and not, can thrive as they synthesize into something entirely different.