Henny Penny Farmette

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.

I love the look of an arbor or trellis that makes a classical architectural statement in the garden. My husband Carlos has built a few of these. Most recently, he created a lovely trellis to support a decades-old wisteria that a neighbor had been growing in her garden.

Wisteria is a deciduous vine, meaning it loses its leaves in the winter and goes dormant. These vines are long lived, can be quite thick in diameter, and have lovely bracts of flowers in the spring, even before they sprout leaves.

It’s best to purchase wisteria that has already been grafted onto root stock or that has been grown from a cutting. These vines aren’t particular about soil, but they do need plenty of water and good drainage.

The other requirements are pruning and training. Wisteria can grow as much as 20 to 30 feet during the first year. I had a plant in San Jose that climbed a trellis and spilled over onto the roof in its very first year in that location.

I like tying the vines and the streamers to support them. Wisterias can be trained as shrubs (albeit large ones) or even as small trees. If planted on a bank or berm, they can spread quickly to vigorously cover the area.

I grew Wisteria floribunda in my San Jose garden, but here I’ve chosen Wisteria senesis (Chinese Wisteria) for the Henny Penny Farmette patio arbor (that we have yet to install). Chinese Wisteria blooms all at once in a beautiful violet-blue color before it leafs out in April-May. The blooms, which are more spectacular than the Japanese wisteria, are only marginally fragrant.

There is another variety of wisteria–Wisteria venustra–known as silky wisteria. The flowers are very large, long-stalked, and white. The plant blooms in short, heavy clusters that open all at once. Leaves break open in April. Another cultivar–Wisteria violacea has purple-blue flowers that are quite fragrant.

If you already have an amazing trellis or arbor, why not plant a wisteria next to it to add drama to your garden? It’s a vine sure to please year after year with ever-more spectacular blooms.

Sun-loving wildflowers that we planted last year are putting on a show this February

It’s difficult to find color in the dead of winter. It’s the last week of February and around the farmette it’s beginning to look like spring. Mixed in with the drab brown and gray and green are dazzling splashes of orange and yellow.

On Sunday, my husband and I helped out a neighbor with the pruning of her fruit and citrus trees. My husband will also be removing her aged trellis, cutting back the Japanese wisteria and reducing the size of what looks to be a 20-year-old grape vine.

She had two orange trees both loaded with oranges, so there was harvesting to be done before we could even start pruning back the tree. One was a Valencia orange, known as the juice orange. I cut into several of them this morning and found them streaked with red. What came to mind was that perhaps the busy little honeybees had cross pollinated her Valencia with a Blood Orange. I’m growing several on the farmette.

Valencia oranges are great for eating fresh or juicing

Citrus trees need little pruning. It’s easy to thin the shoots and branches, rather than shortening the tree. You can also revitalize an old tree that is unproductive (my neighbor’s tree was old but still producing a lot of fruit) by pruning a little more severely but such a severe pruning can stop fruiting for one to two years.

Growers say to feed citrus four times a year; I feed mine once a month with a deep watering. Soils that don’t have good organic matter and nitrogen will benefit from compost, blood meal, cottonseed meal, and well rotted manure on the soil surface out to the drip line. If your citrus isn’t performing for you, try scratching around the surface of the soil under the tree. This stresses the surface roots. Citrus need good drainage. Water slowly and deeply.

We’ve been lucky to have a stretch of warm, sunny days here in Northern California at the end of February. The fruit and nut trees have burst into bloom. Around the farmette, there are pink and white buds opening on the apple, apricot, peach, and almond trees.

Daffodils add their dainty shades of yellow to the otherwise drab winter landscape

The field in the back is knee-high with wild mustard and its blooms are bright yellow on green stalks. The yellow and orange daffodils and purple hyacinths create a floral motif on the drab winter cloak of Mother Nature . . . at least here on the Henny Penny Farmette. Just another reason why I love living here.