Opa’s Garden super bloom! Golden poppies (Eschscholtzia californica), the state flower of California, are blooming intensely across the state this spring after all the winter rains we had. Such a beautiful sight to see them take over the space where Opa’s Garden was too! For those who are curious, we will not be including the garden as part of our rebuilding yet. Our main focus at this time is to rebuild the house. There are still other obstacles to growing a garden again which we will tackle down the line (i.e. no water lines, garden bed frames need to be rebuilt, and we don’t have fences built so the garden would be very vulnerable to wildlife in the area). In the meantime, we are enjoying the volunteer plants and flowers that are bringing beauty to this space again.
A pumpkin plant on the property that already has vines several feet long and a pretty good sized pumpkin growing on it. (It amazes me that these are all growing without any water, other than what they are getting naturally through the ground or dew in the mornings.)
We have a few small raised beds at my parents’ house in another area of Santa Rosa (which was thankfully not affected by the October wildfires) where we will be growing raspberries, rhubarb, and 6 tomato plants this summer. A smaller garden than we’ve had in past years at Opa’s, but I’m still grateful to have a summer harvest to look forward to.
We won’t be growing our regular summer garden at the property this year since we don’t have running water or fences to protect from wildlife. The garden will have a life of it’s own this year, as many volunteer plants have sprouted on their own in the beds and randomly throughout the property - lots of tomato seedlings, sunflowers, and wild California poppies.
Found one last four leaf clover in a patch of unburned grass in the backyard where we always used to find them. In the midst of a lot of shit, there is still some good. Keep looking for the good.
That said, the home that we all loved is merely a heap of debris now - ashes, roof tiles, warped metal, almost unrecognizable appliances and cars, and fragments of the beautiful life my grandparents built together.
The garden near the back of the property was mostly untouched somehow. Just a few of the vegetable bed frames burned. A few of the fruit trees even made it. But, as we figure out how the property will be cleared, we aren’t sure yet if it will make sense to keep what is left or if it makes more sense to clear everything to give us a clean slate for rebuilding.
Here’s the crazy cool thing about gardens though - plants have this incredible habit of growing in the most unlikely of places. They have a natural resiliency that is hard to explain. So I know that when the time is right, someday there will be another garden to carry Opa’s memory through.
Thanks for all of your support the last couple of years. It was wonderful to share the garden with all of you each summer.