
A Wednesday Bouquet of Daisies and Lavender

Stories from someone who is learning to grow
It was 113°F in our part of Portland yesterday. Records were shattered! I stayed inside for most of the day. I found it tolerable outside only for about 5-8 minutes at a time. The plants were not happy.
The potted plants on the porch at around 2:30pm yesterday (111°F) were pretty wilted.
By the time this post goes up, I will (hopefully) be back in Portland, OR. As I write this (on Friday) I have just finished my last day of fellowship training. This is the end of nine years of medical training. Holy moly.
It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a decade since I began all of this. It definitely doesn’t feel like it’s been that long.
I took a break outside today in Palo Alto. The weather was a perfect 70 degrees. I will be driving into 114 degree heat! Yikes! Here are the final photos of the Palo Alto garden for posterity’s sake.
The daylily is the next foraged foods bucket list. And they’re growing right in front of my house!
There are actually many in bloom all over Palo Alto at the moment – they’re hard to miss.
Continue reading “Foraged Foods Friday: Daylily”INTRODUCTION: According to various sources on the internet, snipping back the tips of raspberry canes (a.k.a. “tip-pruning) may encourage secondary or lateral branches to grow from the main cane, thereby increasing raspberry yield. Furthermore, some say that the berries on these lateral branches will be bigger bigger than berries grown from the main cane on un-tip-pruned raspberry canes. However, this advice on tipping raspberry branches is not uniformly rendered. Many reputable gardeners make no mention of tip-pruning. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effects of tip-pruning raspberry canes.
The first book on my Summer Book Reading List that I read was Nature’s Best Hope by Doug Tallamy.
I was expecting this book to be somewhat of a downer of a book: we’ve destroyed the planet and we’ll need to make drastic changes to re-direct the train we’re on! Conservation books or documentaries all seem to have the same doomsday message, and it gets disheartening to hear it again and again.
Continue reading “Book Review: Nature’s Best Hope”See Week 7: here
I have a small lettuce plant that grew from one of the starts Dr. Kong gave me. (Most of them were killed by squirrels, but two survived. The other surviving plant bolted a few weeks ago, so I am left with one.) I eat a few leaves from it every few days.
While most of the apricots at the apricot orchard were underripe….
…there was plenty of purslane ready for picking!
Continue reading “Foraging Friday: Purslane”