Wow, compared to your adobe, am I happy with my soil. It's barely more than sand. But, it's not too tough to dig, and with lots of amending plants grow well in it. And it drains like the dickens, which I've learned plants like.
For winter reading, and rose dreaming, I ordered the David Austin catalog (click on the "free catalog" link). Easily the most gorgeous rose catalog I've received. Highly recommended, and the right price. Only danger is — it may lead you down the wicked path of temptation.
Oh, and they do have a positively evil lovely suggestion — plant roses in threes in a sort of triangle about 18" – 20" apart. This way the roses grow together to form one large-ish mass, with lots of blooms all the time. Must help sales.
Last weekend I closed up the garden. I gathered the stray rakes and hand tools and stowed them. I cleaned and "organized" the garage, stacked up empty pots, sorted through the pile of plant markers so I could make a list of plants I had bought but now can't remember the names of, and swept. I hauled the table and chairs in from the deck, and folded up the Adirondack chair for winter storage. I took down the rope hammock and put it away in its box.
The next day it rained.
Like Rich, I too have seen the confused look on people's faces when I have complained about lack of rain, or rain too late in the season, or waxed poetic about rain.
The first lesson a gardener learns is about control. You don't have it. Nature does. And so you begin to learn more about the Big N. About dirt. About wild creatures. About weather. Which requires a certain level of attention to things you might never have paid attention to before.
Like dirt. I knew one thing about dirt when I began gardening and that was the kind of dirt inhabiting my region. We call it "adobe" because that's what the Spanish "Californios" called it when they formed it into bricks to make houses. It's clay. Black, dense, sticky. In the dry season it's hard as cement. Mid-monsoon season it's soupy and greyish and slippery.
You don't want to work in adobe when it's wet. It merely compacts it and you have a gooey mess of gum balls. The first winter I ordered bare-root roses they arrived in January and I had to dig 2-foot holes in the adobe. I stuck my shovel in and pulled up a chunk of grey dirt. It stuck to the shovel like a leech to skin. I tried to heave it off and found myself flying along with the shovel and clod. I tried kicking it off. It stuck to my shoe. Finally, I got a trowel and scraped it off laboriously. Now I plant anything that arrives in January in temporary pots for placement in the garden proper when the adobe is back to its pliable state.
I have over time discovered the importance of my compost bin to the dirt in my garden. As kitchen scraps and dead plant matter miraculously metamorphose into sweet-smelling, fluffy, loamy dirt I pile it around my garden beds and dig it into the adobe. As the years go by there is a marriage of sorts. The adobe chunks grow smaller and disperse among the compost dirt, finally becoming small grey specks in the loam. The adobe still resides not far below the surface of this worked dirt. But it's enough to get the plants started, to give their roots some easy going before they must drill into the solid deeps.
So winter has become the time of replenishment in my garden. I cease prodding and pleading for growth. Instead I give back to it, piling up the compost accumulated during the summer onto the beds, spreading it out, letting the rain percolate through it. Only the worms will work this soil for the next few months. The human gardener is done for the season.
I've become a farmer.
Every day this fall I've been eagerly reading the weather reports. Scanning the weather sites for news of rain. Finally, there's been a break in the relentless sunny days of late fall here in San Francisco.
Rain.
With all the new gardens I've planted this fall, all I needed was a bit of sun and steady water. Of course, there is the hose, but I am not the most reliable water source (yes, yes, I know, a drip system would be lovely, too).
Where I live, winter means rain, if winter ever comes. When it does, everyone else has long faces, to have their overly active lives constrained so. But I've been looking forward to it. When a co-worker told me that wet weather was coming my response was "Yes! Finally!" That got me some strange looks!
But the sweet little bright green leaves of the geraniums, clematis, japanese anemone, and the bubbly euphorbia all agree with me. And thank goodness -- my garden isn't dead.
So I eagerly await the rain.
My mother loves tuberous Begonias--a tropical genus named for the french patron of science Michel Begon (1638-1710). She has for decades grown them in handmade hanging baskets of redwood slats--a once common receptacle in California garden centers that I think now are somewhat rare. (I seem to recall seasonal "peddlers" hawking them door to door.) She'd haul the baskets out of the tool shed when the sprouts appeared, pale green points emerging from the dry mulch. Then she'd hang them around the yard in shady spots--under the house eaves or from a tree branch--and they'd rapidly grow to bouquet size, dangling large, impossibly colored blooms from the baskets. Both the colors and the shape of Begonias seemed bizarre to me. Somewhat rose-like in form they appear to be made of tissue paper. Very frilly, in girlish shades of peach and pink.
Sydney B. Mitchell*, in "Your California Garden and Mine," tells us that most commercial tuberous begonias are grown in this state, and that it is cheaper to buy young seedling plants between May 14 and June 15 than to purchase the tubers. They flower in summer and autumn and so are valuable color in the waning days when other flowers are spent. But they are very particular about food and water. Mitchell writes, "The preference of the tuberous begonias is for light sandy soils, composed largely of humus, leaf mold, or peat. " And they require additional nutrients such as fish or cottonseed meal as well as fertilizer later in the season which must be kept "...away from leaves or tuber by making a shallow furrow around the edge of the pot...Watering is very important, just a gentle spray until the plants get going, then regular supplies but never from hard packing streams....In autumn as the foliage turns yellow, water is diminished until the plants die down, then all soil is gently washed off and the tubers stored in a cool dry place over winter. "
That is a lot of trouble to go to for what to me is a strangely unsatisfying plant. But there's no accounting for taste in garden plants. If I confess to not liking begonias I have to also admit my weakness for clematis--in any color or form.
*A Canadian-born former librarian at Stanford University and the original editor of the California Horticultural Society journal (now Pacific Horticulture).