Happy Holidays from Late Bloomer! To all those who have subscribed this year and to regular followers, I want to thank each and every one for your support. I hope I have inspired you just a little this year to get your hands dirty and try growing your own food. And don’t forget the flowers! […]
Growing Heirloom Tomatoes Part 4 covers the bounty of August, both in many pounds of colorful tomatoes and lots of issues from catfacing to sunscald and brown widow spiders. Did you know they are taking over Southern California? Don’t miss the very cool original music of Late Bloomer composer Jon Pileggi! Growing Heirloom Tomatoes Part […]
December Blooms in Southern California! While many gardens are buried in snow or frost, and gardeners are dreaming of their spring gardens, a few plants are blooming in the Late Bloomer garden and I thought I would share. Hopefully, they will offer a little sunshine into your day! As I didn’t plant a full-scale winter […]
I’ve been learning about raccoons this week. I had hired wildlife capture professionals Animal Capture Wildlife Control to humanely trap and relocate raccoons that have been digging in my garden since September. Three traps were set on December 9th. The first raccoon was caught and relocated two days later. Read about that in “The Connection Between June Bugs […]
The connection between June bugs & raccoons is grubs. Something has been digging up my garden since September. I was pretty sure it was a raccoon. Raccoons are omnivores (they eat food of plant or animal origin), very smart, and take every opportunity to look for food. They dig for grubs, then they wash their muddy hands […]
Make the most of the rain event, plant! I’d been rather ashamed that I hadn’t planted anything for a fall/winter garden. The wonderful garlic I harvested in June still sat in my kitchen, and, many packets of seeds waited, neatly filed in a box. I had made all manner of excuses, but the long and short of […]
Fungi for Thanksgiving! Beyond attempting to identify various fungi that pop up in the Late Bloomer garden, I haven’t bothered to learn much of anything about fungi in my three years of gardening (I am a late bloomer). But this Thanksgiving week, fungi are all I’m thinking about! I’ve been introduced to the scientific work of […]
“We need all the bees we can get,” a commercial beekeeper told me at the California State Beekeepers Association annual convention this week in Valencia, California. I had been invited by CSBA Ladies Auxiliary president Melinda Nelson, a beekeeper I’d met when I spoke at the Orange County Organic Gardening Club in May, to be the […]
“Maybe the best chicken salad ever,” I said to myself while polishing off two bowls for lunch. I’m am only a “20 minute cook” (if it takes more than 20 minutes to make, I leave those recipes to the experts!) so this salad fit my parameters. I rarely measure anything, so it’s hard to write […]
Loveliness After the Rain & More on our Water Woes. Last night’s light shower was nothing more than a blip on the radar of California’s vastly reduced water supply due to four straight years of drought. Still, the sight of dripping flowers in the morning light cheered me. I attended a Sierra Club Angeles Chapter water forum last night […]
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How to make Basil Pesto, Substitute THIS for pine nuts!
Planting Garlic in Ground | What I'm doing different this year!
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