I just spent the last four fun-filled primarily paleo days with a midwife blogger. This is an incredible story. Prepare to be amazed. The internet does a couple of things really well, inform and connect. You can learn how to do almost anything on the internet (how do you think I learned to garden?) and you […]
Grow Mexican Sunflowers and attract Monarchs to your garden. Monarch Butterflies are so friendly once they know your garden is a welcome waystation for them. This male landed on the flower I was holding while taking a picture. I let it go just before I snapped this. Watch the Late Bloomer episode “Growing Mexican Sunflower” (click through to […]
Some thoughts at the end of the year, and how technology has changed my life. ~ My first conscious thought this morning, after the initial recognition that the wind was blowing and I hate wind (unless I’m in Hawaii), was, Walker is never going to live at home again. I had woken at 5:30AM, and […]
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 […]
Nature Walk – Name that Fungus! If you’ve been following “Late Bloomer” the last couple of weeks, you know I have fungi on the brain! (See my article “Fungi for Thanksgiving!”) I’m drinking mushroom tea, eating mushrooms, I ordered mushroom immune defense supplements, and I even tried to get a grocer at my market to give […]
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 […]
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