A Winged Visitor

One of the benefits in living close to a large wetland is the extraordinary wildlife that visits our front yard. This beautiful egret was a recent early morning visitor.

“Mom, what is that?”

“An egret.”

“Oh, he belongs in water.” (We drove past a group of SEVEN egrets last week standing in shallow water on the way home from the grocery store. The girl remembers EVERYTHING.)

Well, it’s pretty darn wet out there.

In most parts of North America “April showers bring May flowers.” Here in Sonoma County it rains consistently from November through April and then we (typically) have a dry summer. Only a few weeks more of this rain and then our spring will really begin…

Reading Up For the Spring Season

We have two weeks until April when the spring gardening really begins here in Northern California.

Time to say goodbye to the winter garden:

And get ready to plant for spring.

In that vein, we’ve started reading a number of fantastic gardening books. Here’s a glimpse of some of our favorites from this week:





Shown above:
+ Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert (vibrant illustrations and a simple story depicting the process of planning, planting, and picking flowers in a garden that children can easily relate to)
+ My Garden by Kevin Henkes (an imaginative tale about what a little girl would have in her very own garden, such as morning glories that stayed open all night, jellybean trees, flowers that grew back as soon as you picked them (above), and all carrots would be invisible because “I don’t like carrots.”)
+ Gardening with Children by Brooklyn Botanic Garden (a must-read book for family gardeners, full of gardening activities introducing nature’s cycles and earth’s ecology)
+ Eating the Alphabet: Fruits & Vegetables from A to Z (not directly about gardening per se but a beautifully illustrated alphabet book about fruits and vegetables; great inspiration for deciding what to plant in the garden!)

A Garden To-Do List

We haven’t touched our front garden in four months and you can tell.

After our hard work last summer, this mound of weeds is a terrifying sight.

The winter rains have helped the weeds take over the yard. We never pruned back our perennials (plants that will grow back again this spring). We never yanked those bare cosmos plants, annuals dead because of frost and in dire need of being removed. The yard was a mess:

We’ve had a string of gorgeous (gorgeous!) summer-like days, so my daughter and I spent two hours starting to whip that front yard into shape. We’re all about telling that clover who’s boss.

(Especially when it’s 75 degrees out and super sunny; we HAD to be outside.)

After our mama-daughter clean-up party, the yard looks a little bit better:

We still have lots to do. Here’s our list of garden tidying tasks for the month:

1. Take down and dissemble holiday wreaths.

2. Remove rotting pumpkins from porch and place into compost bins.

3. Tiddy up kids toys so we don’t come close to breaking our necks every time we enter the house.

4. Find a pillow and sew a cover for the porch chair. This one has been on my to-do list for two years. We’ll see if we get to it this year.

5. Finish weeding. Cause we have three feet tall giant purple allium bulbs set to arrive in this exact spot soon. Like next week.

6. We also need to lay down a layer of compost and mulch to prepare for the long, dry summer ahead.

We have a little bit of time for the last task because even if it feels like summer with these atypical hot and dry days, it’s really just February, right?! Oh, wait, it’s February in Northern California and our last frost date is a month and a half away!

My to-do list just got longer.

It appears I need to get our veggie beds ready too. Time to start those cool-season crops on our windowsill because spring is just around the corner.

I’m so excited! Stay tuned!

Purple Potato Harvest

This fall we grew potatoes for the first time. We messed up every step along the way: we planted them too late; we didn’t buy starts, instead relying on sprouted potatoes from our pantry; we planted the potatoes whole instead of cutting them up; and we were away for the first frost and didn’t insulate our potato crop with the frost cover.

Coming home from vacation, we found our potato plants completely dead. Could we even still harvest the potatoes? We had no idea what to expect below ground.

To say we were pleasantly surprised would be a gross understatement:

The toddler was gleeful as we found more and more potatoes:

In true Miss Leyba fashion though, she was completely focused on the task at hand and wouldn’t consider smiling for a photo. Removing potatoes from the ground is serious business!

See, a lovely little purple potato crop.

Now my daughter is talking nonstop about dinner and how tasty these potatoes will be!

Too bad we’re having Noddle Salad with Ginger Peanut Dressing tonight instead. (Already prepped and ready to go!)

I suppose we’ll be eating potatoes with dinner tomorrow…

Goodbye to the Summer Garden

Yesterday a frost warning flashed on my phone! Thank goodness for modern conveniences like weather applications; I’ve been so busy reacting to our pseudo Indian Summer that I’ve neglected to notice that it’s almost November. I guess it’s time to say farewell to our summer veggies (oh, how I love the mild weather here in California!) and get ready for the first frost.

So we headed out in our pajamas before bedtime to gather up all the ripe tomatoes and zucchini, and to then wrap up the potatoes in a frost cover. (Keeping our fingers crossed they’ll make it!)

We’re leaving dozens of green tomatoes on the plants, chard, lettuce and carrots in the ground, and several baby zucchini, still too small to pick.


We wonder, “Will it frost tonight? Will the frost cover insulate the potatoes well enough?” We shall see.

What we know for certain is that fall is here and winter is on its way.

I’m already planning out where I’ll plant the kale.