Friday Morning ~ Home, Sweet Home

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

You are looking at about one quarter of our native plant garden. This morning's photo is to the east, from the deck, with the beer garden patio and shed in the background.

Enjoy your Friday, and your weekend, this is where we will be spending ours...

~PEACE & LOVE~

The Flowering of Earth Home Garden...

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Saturday, June 19th, finds our native plant garden erupting with the local colors of summer. The above photos picture the flowering of penstemons, Indian Paintbrush, Blue Flax, and California Poppies.

Monarch Butterfly on Narrow-Leaf Milkweed

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

Milkweed is the host plant for the Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus). Here a male Monarch feeds on one of three Narrow-Leaf Milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis) growing in our garden.

Misted Poppy

Eschscholzia californica

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

After watering some recent transplants in the rock garden this morning I accidently turned the hose nozzle to mist and oversprayed a nearby poppy plant which left the poppies decorated with tiny jewels of H2O.

In The Garden...

Yucca glauca

Click on image to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

One of several Yucca glauca (Soapweed Yucca) begins to bloom at Earth Home Garden.

Soapweed Yucca

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

Soapweed Yucca adds a striking visual impact to our garden, especially when the flower stalks emerge. Click here to read more about Yucca glauca and its usefulness to indigenous people.


Palmer's Penstemon
Click on photo to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

A native to our Southwest Deserts Penstemon palmeri closely resembles our Big Bear native, Penstemon grinnellii (Bumble-Bee Penstemon) except that Palmer's grows much taller and has strongly fragrant flowers where Bumble-Bee does not. The two seem to be hybridizing in our garden.

Echinocereus triglochidiatus

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

A Hedgehog Cactus flower photographed in the native plant garden yesterday.

A Nice Drizzly Day At Earth Home Garden...

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

We're enjoying intermittent showers, hail, wind gusts, and thunder here in Big Bear today so I thought I'd come indoors for a spell and share some photos I took between the raindrops.

Dallas is sporting his summer cut in front of the nearly completed workshop/studio/beer garden, and you can see the recently added 'Earthquake Memorial' rock garden in the background, with the pond-pump solar panel now mounted there.

Inside the workshop/studio I have built a sturdy workbench, a toolbox bench, and re-painted & installed steel shelving (salvaged somewhere-in-time from an old auto parts store). This week I'm staining, painting, and getting ready to do an artsy-fartsy collage on the interior back & side walls (pictures to come).

The beer tap equipment isn't completely installed yet so the christening of the beer gardens is a ways off yet, but early this summer for sure!

The rock garden was built of recycled junk and masonry debris from our highly destructive '92 Big Bear quake. There's a dump-site closeby where mountains of old broken chimneys are still piled-up, so a friend, with a truck, and I, dragged a bunch of the stuff home for garden art.

Three sides of the rock garden were built-up with broken concrete from a neighbors old driveway which was then filled with dirt from another neighbors foundation excavation. Remember my Close Encounters/Matterhorn posts? This is where the dirt went, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow. The face of the rock garden was terraced, as I filled it, using chimney pieces, old wood, and even a staircase from the dumpsite. An old twisted wall-heater vent from a demolished house became the garden mascot when I gooped a leering plaster skull to it.

Reclining Skeleton - The Rock Garden Mascot

Click on image to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

A close-up (Photoshopped) of the ruins rock garden featuring our cheery Lost Civilization mascot.

Big Bear native plants now established on the rock garden include Firecracker Penstemon (Penstemon eatonii), Prickly Poppy (Argemone munita), Bumble-Bee Penstemon (Penstemon grinnellii), Narrow-Leaf Milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis), California Fuschia (Zauschneria californica mexicana), Sulfur Buckwheat (Eriogonum umbellatum), Wright's Buckwheat (Eriogonum wrightii), California Poppy (Eschscholzia californica), Showy Penstemon (Penstemon Spectabilis), Hedgehog Cactus (Echinocereus triglochidiatus), Beaver-Tail Cactus (Opuntia basilaris), Prickly-Pear Cactus (Opuntia phaeacantha), California Evening Primrose (Oenothera californica).

California natives include Banana Yucca (Yucca baccata), Soapweed Yucca (Yucca glauca) and Sky-Blue Penstemon (Penstemon azureus).

~The Greenhouse Today~

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

We're growing potted vegetables in the greenhouse this year because of a gopher problem which we're, hopefully, going to solve in the fall by digging out a couple of feet of dirt and lining the bottom of the greenhouse with wire mesh, to keep the critters out, before we replace the soil.

The plants in here now include tomatoes, japanese eggplant, yellow crookneck squash, and basil.

The plants are starters from the nursery except for most of the tomatoes which were started by Peggy from a variety of seeds.

~The Raised-Bed Garden Today~

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

The wintered-over greens we planted last October are almost gone now (you can see spinach in the background which is beginning to bolt). The lettuce mix in the foreground was planted in early spring and is in dire need of thinning. there are young green onion seedlings behind that, and some chives in flower on the left. We have pea and snow pea seedlings which are going in the empty or declining boxes here in the next few days. We also have raised boxes with beets (for greens) and swiss chard.


Salad Hill!

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

We tried an experiment this year which has greatly exceeded our expectations.

While going through our seeds in early spring we discovered that we had partial packets of what we assumed where mostly expired seeds dating back to 1997. Instead of throwing them away, I suggested that maybe we should mix up one of our compost piles with the soil beneath it and cast all the seeds randomly there to see what might germinate.

This salad garden was planted when night-time temperatures were still in the teens and low twenties so we kept the hill covered with clear plastic for a few weeks, removing it only to water about once a week.

To our surprise it appears that most of the seeds were still viable and we now have a very productive salad garden right outside the back door. Growing here are an assortment of lettuces, spinach, chard, kale, radishes, carrots, cilantro, green onions, basil, mustard greens, rocket, and several other salad vegetables & herbs.

So far, the gophers and squirrels are leaving Salad Hill alone! It's already so productive that we're having a hard time keeping up with it so we invited our next door neighbors to consider it their own kitchen garden as well, and help themselves to salad stuff whenever they want.

The large-leafed plants around the perimeter are previously established Hollyhocks.

See, we have been busy!

Sky Blue Penstemon

Penstemon azureus

Click on image to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

Pentemon azureus, a native of California, is found in Yellow Pine forests and foothill woodlands from the Southern Sierra Nevada to the Oregon border at elevations between about 1,000 and 8,000 feet.

It is one of the few plants in our native garden that is not actually native to Big Bear but we couldn't resist those beautiful blue flowers. Ours came from Bert and Penny, at Las Pilitas native plant nursery, the good people who supply our local Hunter's Nursery with native plants.

As you can see, I'm still having fun with my pictures in Photoshop.

American Robin

Click on image to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

I've had such a good case of Spring Fever that I haven't felt like sitting at the computer but I figured I should at least put up a picture so people will know I'm still alive!

This Robin was in the same tree as the Flicker from the previous post. I took the picture about 10 days ago and used the same Photoshop technique on it.

Transitions - Seasonal and Otherwise...

Click on image to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

Ice on the lake cracked, buckled, and melted this year, like always, even as world credit markets remained frozen solid.

The lone Bald Eagle circles intently above the marsh, fishing, unconcerned with the global financial meltdown.

A pair of finches cheerfully weave their nest into the first 'a' of the pharmacy sign, as if Rite-Aid was expected to survive another quarter.

Tilted toward the vernal equinox, the frosted earth warms slightly; wild onions dispatch eager shoots skyward, heedless of greenhouse gases or climate change.

I imagine myself standing in a bread line, during the first Great Depression, finding cheer in tufts of grass growing from broken concrete.

I envision a Final Great Depression, and eventually, masses of lovely wildflowers blooming among the skeletal remains of Wall Street, and the Pentagon.

Spring is on the wind, General Motors is bankrupt, and Peak Oil is upon us.

Take heart, friends of the earth.

Change is in the air…

Botanical Scans From The Garden...

Please Click On The Following 'Botanical

Prints' To Enlarge For Viewing

© 2008 jim otterstrom


I was looking at some old botanical prints this morning and decided it would be fun to try and re-create something similar by scanning native plants into the computer.

So I picked a few fading flowers from the late summer garden and scanned them with our HP Photosmart C7180 All-In-One printer.

Even though we had some pretty substantial thunderstorms here today, I managed to keep the computer up & running long enough, between lightning strikes, to make some rather nice looking botanical art out of them.

Scanning flowers can give very nice results but it's a bit of a messy process.

As careful as you might try to be, it's inevitable that pollen, bugs, and plant detritus will get all over the scanner screen, becoming part of the image, so considerable time is required in cleaning up the pictures in Photoshop, or some similar program.

Scanning gives three dimensional objects an almost painted quality, the subdued lighting and shadowy details creating life-like impressions.

I spent most of the rainy day working on the pictures, time well spent if you ask me. They are rather large images so you'll need to scroll down to view them in their entirety.

Flower Of The Day - Sunday, August 24th

Zauschneria californica

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

Zauschneria californica (Epilobium canum), or California Fuschia as it is commonly known, is a profuse late-blooming Big Bear native which thrives in poor rocky soil and full sun at our 6,750' elevation.

It's a perfect plant for the rock garden and an excellent butterfly & hummingbird attractor. Ours are from locally collected seed.

California Fuschia

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

The above photos are from one of several patches of Zauschneria blooming in the garden today.

For The Contrary Goddess...

Buddha and the Mushroom Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

Fellow blogger, The Contrary Goddess, gave me a "tiny challenge" I couldn't resist.

"Name 100 species which live in your neighborhood", she asked.

Well, here's 117 native (or migratory) species which are residents or visitors to our own yard, and I've barely scratched the surface of the bird and insect visitors.

As I find the time I'll be adding the scientific names to the list below and will include links to various botanical websites for plant profiles.

Earth Home Garden Species

1. Common Yarrow

(Achillea millefolium)

2. Wild Onion

(Allium sp.)

3. Indian Hemp

(Apocynum cannabinum)

4. Rock-Cress

(Arabis pulchra)

5. Prickly Poppy

(Argemone munita)

6. Crimson Columbine

(Aquilegia formosa)

7. Narrow Leaf Milkweed

(Asclepias fascicularis)

8. Green Striped Mariposa Lily

(Calochortus invenustus)

9. Wild Morning-Glory
10. Indian Paintbrush
11. Ash Gray Paintbrush
12. Thistle
13. Miner’s Lettuce
14. Virgin’s Bower (Pipestem)
15. Wild Hyacinth (Blue Dicks)
16. Fireweed
17. California Fuschia
18. Stream Orchid
19. Fleabane
20. Yerba Santa
21. California Buckwheat
22. Pine Buckwheat
23. Sulfur Flower (Sulfur-Color Buckwheat)
24. Wright’s Buckwheat
25. Western Wallflower
26. California Poppy
27. Wild Geranium
28. Gilia
29. Rydberg’s Horkelia
30. Western Blue Iris (Blue Flag)
31. Granite Gilia (Prickly Phlox)
32. Mountain Aster
33. Humboldt Lily
34. Lemon Lily
35. Blue Flax
36. Brewer’s Lupine
37. Grape Soda Lupine
38. Dwarf Lupine
39. Giant Lupine
40. Tarweed
41. Pineapple Weed
42. Coyote Mint
43. Coyote Tobacco
44. California Evening Primrose
45. Anderson’s Penstemon
46. San Bernardino Beardtongue
47. Firecracker Penstemon
48. Bumble-Bee Penstemon
49. Scarlet Penstemon
50. Mountain Bugler
51. Showy Penstemon
52. Desert Blue Bells
53. Mountain Phacelia
54. Sticky Cinquefoil
55. Buttercup
56. Southern Goldenrod
57. Apricot Mallow
58. White Hedge Nettle
59. Stinging Nettle
60. Hedgehog Cactus
61. Beaver-Tail Cactus
62. Cane Cholla (Snake Cholla)
63. Prickly-Pear Cactus
64. Utah Service-Berry
65. Greenleaf Manzanita
66. Silver Wormwood
67. Great Basin Sage
68. Rubber Rabbitbrush
69. California Flannelbush
70. Fremont’s Bushmallow
71. Western Choke-Cherry
72. Antelope Bush
73. Sierra Currant
74. Rose Sage
75. Apricot Mallow
76. Snowberry
77. White Fir
78. Incense Cedar
79. Mountain Mahogany
80. Western Juniper
81. Jeffrey Pine
82. Singleleaf Pinyon Pine
83. Quaking Aspen
84. California Black Oak
85. Pygmy Nuthatch
86. White-Breasted Nuthatch
87. Mountain Chickadee
88. Western Bluebird
89. Steller’s Jay
90. Northern Flicker
91. White-Headed Woodpecker
92. Anna’s Hummingbird
93. Rufous Hummingbird
94. Western Tanager
95. Wilson’s Warbler
96. Yellow-Rumped Warbler
97. Mourning Dove
98. Acorn Woodpecker
99. Hairy Woodpecker
100. Violet-Green Swallow
101. American Robin
102. Black-Headed Grosbeak
103. Rufous-Sided Towhee
104. Band-Tailed Pigeon
105. Lesser Goldfinch
106. Dark-Eyed Junco
107. Cassin’s Finch
108. Mourning Cloak Butterfly
109. Giant Swallowtail Butterfly
110. Painted Lady Butterfly
111. California Sister Butterfly
112. Monarch Butterfly
113. Western Gray Squirrel
114. California Ground Squirrel
115. Merriam Chipmunk
116. Western Toad

117. Western Terrestrial Garter Snake

Yesterday's Garden Pictures...

Calypte anna with Salvia pachyphylla

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

Currently a daily visitor to the garden, this female Anna's Hummingbird (Calypte anna) was feeding at Rose Sage (Salvia pachyphylla) near our porch yesterday afternoon as I took these few pictures of her just after 4 P.M.

In order to capture some detail in the fast moving hummer (on a cloudy day) I used a relatively fast shutter speed of 1/500th of a second which created images that were between 1 and 2 stops underexposed. I then lightened the images in Photoshop to closely approximate their natural appearance.

Canon S5IS with Canon TC-DC58B tele-converter lens, manual mode, f /3.5, ISO 80, 1/500th second.

Our Little "Slice O' Heaven"...

Yesterday In The Garden

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

A Good Part Of The Fun Is In...

~Sharing The Magic Of A Garden~

Click on the above letter to enlarge for reading...

Thank you Fran!

Finding your letter in our mailbox this morning put a smile on my face and reminded me, once again, how important it is to be part of your community by sharing what you love with friends and neighbors. Our garden exists today because of friends inspiring us with their love of native plants and we simply passed that love along to you.

It is a joy and a pleasure to know you have found inspiration in our humble efforts.

We were not part of the 2008 Xeriscape Garden Tour because we have several unfinished projects that need our attention this year but we hope to be back on the tour for 2009.

Much Love, Jim & Peg

Today's

flower of the day

Malacothamnus fremontii

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

Fremont's Bush Mallow blooms today at Earth Home Garden.

Paradise Lives...

...all around us

The closer we look...

...the more we see

Click on photos to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

A vivid Beaver-Tail Cactus-Flower (Opuntia basilaris) caught my fancy today, in the soft-filtered afternoon light, revealing ever more sensual beauty as I moved in closer with my camera to discover that I wasn't the only one intoxicated by the attractive powers of this stunning display.

Beauty Unfolds...

11:21 A.M. Yesterday

Wild Blue Iris (Iris missouriensis)

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

Same Iris - 4 1/2 Hours Later

3:51 P.M. Yesterday

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

I planted several of our native Iris missouriensis in the garden over the past few years and this is the first one to bloom. You'll see these growing wild alongside of streams in the San Bernardino Mountains. Ours are growing around the giant rock bird-bath near the solar waterfall.

Flower Of The Day - June 3rd, 2008

Echinocereus triglochidiatus

Click on photos to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

This Hedgehog Cactus, a native of Big Bear, is flowering in our garden today.

Spring Has Sprung...

Western Tanager with Cassin's Finch

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

A Cassin's Finch greets a male Western Tanager at our little home-made Badwater Springs solar powered waterfall. Tanagers are rare visitors to Earth Home Garden and this one was moving fast, making it difficult to get a decent shot.

Linum lewisii Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

Blooming in the native plant garden this morning are Blue Flax (above), Grape Soda Lupine, Indian Paintbrush and Western Wallflower.

Close Encounters...

...of the Jim kind

Click on image to enlarge - © 2007 jim otterstrom

So, Peggy comes home the other day to find a small mountain just inside her front gate, blocking the walkway to the house.

The first thing that came to her mind was Richard Dreyfuss building a mountain in his living room in the 1977 movie 'Close Encounters Of A Third Kind'.

The next thing that came to mind was her husband, Jim, a close encounter of another kind...

How do I know this?

She told me...

...right before she said, "Now, tell me why there's a mountain in our front yard".

"It's for my new rock garden honey", I said, smiling, "and it's clean native dirt from right across the street, where they're building that new house, and it was free!"

She gave me one of those raised-eyebrow looks, the kind only a husband really understands, while I smiled a bit more sheepishly.

Well, my plan was to begin moving 'The Mountain' to it's permanent location the very next day (by shovel & wheelbarrow), but then I remembered there were native plants which needed to be potted up and moved out of the way, so I spent much of the day doing that.

Then it rained for a whole day, and, of course, no dirt moving could be done during a downpour.

When the rain moved out in the middle of the night, the ground froze, and the next day the shovel responded to the new mountain as if it were solid granite.

And now, today is our food Co-op delivery day so I'll have to receive the order out on the shoulder of the road because the frozen mountain is still blocking the entrance to the yard.

"But I'll get it moved, eventually ("I promise!"), and look at all those lovely rocks in that mountain, just what we need in our rock garden, and they were free!"

Oh, and I didn't tell all you bloggers out there about the theme of the rock garden, did I?

I'm going to call it 'The Garden Of The Lost Civilization', and it's going to be built up around masonry rubble from the 1992 Big Bear Earthquake!

There's a huge repository (a forgotten dump basically) of beautiful broken red-brick and native-stone chimney debris a few miles from here, an historical treasure just lying around for the taking.

As soon as I find someone with a heavy-duty pick-up to help me move that stuff, I'm going to bring a truck-load of those archaeological artifacts home to enhance the new rock garden, after I get this other mountain out of the way, that is.

Anyhow, now you know why I haven't caught up with those other posts I'm behind on (you know, the acorn class & the train trip, and, oh, there's one about my recent birthday too!).

But first, the Co-op delivery, then the moving of the mountain...

...to be continued

~I HOPE~