Henny Penny Farmette

The Abbaye de Cluny rose has dinner plate-size roses

Roses are among the most romantic flowers in a garden. I grow dozens of cultivars of rose bushes–climbers, hybrid teas, floribundas,  and polyanthas. When I have an extra few dollars, I might spend it on a rose bush, but when money is tight, I simply start a new bush from one of my favorites that I’m currently growing.

Climbing Sally Holmes has scampered up a ten-foot fence

My husband and I love the climbers. We have tall fences (over six feet) around our property on all sides. Covering an entire fence is easy when you use a vigorous, virtually pest-free climber. Two roses that quickly adapt and grow to fantastic heights are Sally Holmes and Cecile Brunner.

Climbing roses need strong support, since some canes can reach forty feet or more as they scramble over a roof or stone wall, trellis, fence, or arbor.

Last year, my husband created a rose arbor on wires strung from the fence along the north side of our house to the roof line. He planted the Cecile Brunner rose as his climber of choice. Its sage green leaves make a lovely foil for the tiny pink roses that permeate the air with a spicy-sweet scent throughout the spring. Cutting and feeding will render another bloom in summer.

My garden has plenty of places where I could tuck in a new rose bush, and I’ve bought many over the years. I have some favorites that I’d like to start in other areas. They include A Shropshire Lad, Handel, Lady Banks (a thornless yellow rose), and Iceberg.

Climbing Handel flourishes in full sun on a sturdy support

This is the perfect time to propagate roses from cuttings in the Bay Area since the rose bushes in many yards are beginning to awaken. Roses require water, something no longer plentiful in California. Thanks to a severe four-year drought, we now have mandatory water restrictions. That means we gardeners must consider how we can recycle water, use gray water, collect water, and otherwise find ways to reduce water usage.

A Shropshire Lad is a David Austin climbing rose that looks splendid alone or with other roses

To propagate a rose from your favorite bush, take a six-inch cutting from a healthy cane. Make the bottom cut a sharp angle cut, not straight across. Do not crush the stem. Remove the leaves.

Dip the angle cut into a jar of root hormone powder. This powder enables the cane to root more easily in the ground or pot.

Insert the prepared cutting in the soil. Water as needed when the soil is dry. The cutting will need one to two months to root and then, it will begin to leaf out.

Some people like to put a quart jar over their cutting to create a mini-green house climate. In mild climates like the Bay Area, this isn’t necessary. The best time to propagate cuttings from your favorite roses is in the spring and never in extremes of cold or heat.

Creating romance in the garden could start with a table and chairs, floral-motif linens, and a service of tea. But even before those accoutrements to romance are added, why not fill the space with roses? It’s so easy.

A “Pineapple Express” rainstorm with gale-force winds blew out the power and made for slick roads as well as ponds in our clay soil

The weekend storm is still a vivid memory, what with the fence along one side of my property beaten down by high winds and pounding rain that also brought a power outage on Friday night.

But today with outside temperatures in the 70s Fahrenheit, I cleaned my strawberry beds. Somehow, mint had crept in and I don’t want mint with my berries although I like it served that way for dessert.

My neighbor’s relative, who’s visiting from Lebanon where they grow apples in his mountain village, share a suggestion for digging dried chicken manure around the bases of my trees. The high nitrogen will get them off to a great start and my trees have already broken bud (which is attracting the honeybees).

The wild bird population seems to have exploded and I see signs of nest building starting. The five suet cakes I hung in trees for the songbirds, blue jays, and woodpeckers last month are down to a fraction of their original size.

I extended the chicken run with poultry wire high enough to keep the my heritage girls from flying out. Now, they’ll have plenty of space on both sides of the chicken house to forage and out the beds I’m working.

Dark clouds usher in a rainstorm

The rains have arrived in the Bay Area . . . finally. Although my hubby and I are thankful for the wet stuff, we weren’t quite ready.

Our sheds have leaky roofs. I also need to install a different kind of gate on my chicken run; one that won’t swell with moisture and get stuck so that I can’t open it. I close the gate at night against predators, but the chickens free range in the yard during the day.

Our supply of building materials is dwindling as we are completing some projects. Much of the stone and retaining wall materials, torn out from estates that are being re-landscaped, were donated to us. Carlos and I were only too glad to integrate them into our own landscape. We work on it little by little.

Rain helps along the roses; the flagstone walkway reduces the amount of mud tracked into the house

With mud everywhere, I probably appreciate more than anyone having the flagstone  leading to the front door, however, we still need to fill the spaces between the flagstone with gravel.

We’ve built fences and put up the frame for an entrance trellis where the gate will go in. We also have constructed a porch trellis that I will grow wisteria over, but we have to install the porch floor first. We’re using plywood in the meantime.

The long half-circle driveway is packed dirt, although we have shoveled in gravel where my husband parks his truck. Now that the rains have arrived, the driveway is pretty muddy. We need to figure out whether we’ll put in gravel for entire length of the driveway (there’s some there now) or lay asphalt or stone.

So while it rains, I think about our master plan for the farmette. We’ve come a long way . . . but there’s still a huge distance to go and some projects can’t wait for spring like those leaky shed roofs.

The backside of the fence shows the framing

We have been working like crazy the last few days, busily applying the finishing touches to the redwood fence we are building for our neighbors. We are pushing because they have scheduled a party on Saturday to celebrate the birthday of the youngest member of their family. He turns one year old.

Around noon, above the cacophony of hammers pounding and saws buzzing, we hear our neighbor’s voice call out, “Has anybody seen the turtle?” He was referring to the family pet, an African Spur Thigh Tortoise, who’d taken off from his designated area of the yard and was no where to be found.

We dropped our saws, laid down our hammers, and started searching the three yards that conjoined at a certain point along the fence lines. We looked under the recently raised shed and searched the perimeter of two neighbor’s yards until finally a voice called out, “Found him.”

The pet tortoise had moseyed over to the kids’ play area and had found a shady spot to its liking. There it seemed to be enjoying itself, hanging out, without the concern that its absence was causing its owner.

After a few minutes, Carlos and I and our worker, Alejandro, resumed our tasks. After all, the fence had to be finished. The party was less than 24 hours away.

I had to wonder why the tortoise felt the need to find shade. Its species is at home in the hottest, driest, desert type places on earth, for example, in Northern Africa: Senegal, Niger, Chad, Ethiopia, and The Sudan. But maybe it wasn’t the sunshine it was seeking to escape but rather the noise. I guess we were making quite a racket with our hammers, saws, and shovels.

Carlos Carvajal, my architect-designer husband,  near the fence we have been building for our neighbors

My husband is good at what he does. His highly developed aesthetic sense for design and sense of proportion and drive for perfection has proven  invaluable in the projects he designs and builds. For the last two weeks, he’s been working one farmette over, replacing an old fence and crafting a trellis to support a gorgeous Japanese wisteria about to bloom.

I’ve been helping on the days he doesn’t have extra workers. Although I’ve helped him build fences on our property, the fence for our neighbors was a bit different. It would include supports for a lattice and would extend about 100 feet in length between the two properties.

Our neighbors are lovely and the building brought everyone together. We shared bottles of water and cups of juice, noonday meals, and lots of conversation. We worked through the weekend and since yesterday was Sunday, we even met extended family members who came to visit and to observe the fence building that was going on.

The completed trellis for the wisteria awaits a fountain and hanging plants

We shared a lovely Saturday lunch, thanks to the neighbors on one side of the fence and a beautiful Sunday lunch, gratis the neighbors on the other side of the fence. When the sun grew low on Sunday afternoon, yet another neighbor invited us over for a sumptuous meal of salad and grilled salmon. While the salmon cooked, we plucked two huge bunches of leaf lettuce from my garden and rolled lettuce leaves around slices of sheep’s milk cheese and sardines. The food went down perfectly with a central coast zinfandel from the Sterling vineyards.

I almost hate to have the fence building end. It’s been a wonderful experience to learn about the families living nearby and to share our love of our construction and gardening with them. In fact, it’s been the discussions about gardening that have proved for me most gratifying. I’ve enjoyed seeing their fruit trees in bloom and learning gardening tips they have shared.

Some people might believe that putting up fences hinders the fostering of neighborly relationships, but I’d have to say that it was the fence construction that helped us get to know our neighbors better.