Say you invite Alice Wilkinson to a fancy dinner party in Beverly Hills and say she admires the flavorful heirloom tomatoes that you serve on the salad. Be forewarned, Alice is the kind of gardener who will walk herself to the kitchen and ask if the tomatoes happen to be organic (which will increase the likelihood that they will come true – or produce much the same fruit – from seed). If you answer in the affirmative, she will squash the seeds of that salad tomato into her paper napkin, wrap it up neatly and tuck it in her handbag. Next summer – Voila – the tomatoes – now known as ‘Tracy’s Heirloom’ - will be thriving in her Happy Valley Garden. Photo: A gorgeous pink cutting-grown rose clothes the side of Alice Wilkinson and Tom O’Mara’s Sonnenhaus.

Similarly, when Tom O’Mara and Alice Wilkinson realized the bats that lived in the eaves and attic of their house were the source of the ever more unpleasant odor in the house, they did not (as some of us might have) exterminate or otherwise evict the colony. No, they knew that the creatures were incredibly beneficial allies in the garden, despite their odor. So after some thought, Tom built an apartment building sized bat house – “You see how it’s two sided?” Alice points out. “That’s because the nursing mothers need their own space,” she explains. While the pest control people suggested they put their bat house on a tree in the garden, Tom and Alice ultimately decided to put it on the house right next to where the bats currently entered the eaves. Tom then sealed the eaves and the bats relocated with relative ease. Photo: Alice Wilkinson and Tom O’Mara.
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Lynette Gooch loves lavender. All kinds of lavender for all kinds of reasons. In the United Kingdom the gardening world has things known as National Collections, wherein when a specific garden has more species or varieties of any one kind of plant than any other garden, they can become designated a National Collection. Private gardens and gardeners are as likely to hold National Collections as larger public botanic gardens. In the United States, we do not have such a scheme, but if we did, Lynette Gooch and her husband Richard might well hold the National Collection of lavender with their 207 different named varieties of lavender at the display gardens in Whitmore: Tuscan Heights Lavender Gardens.

Grown as a culinary and medicinal herb throughout the world, throughout time, lavender (Lavandula) is a genus comprising multiple species and hybrids. Species of the genus originate from the Mediterranean, Africa and Asia, and the genus thrives in the Mediterranean climate of the North State.

The Tuscan Heights’ story started in 1999 when Lynette and Richard, farmer/gardeners at heart, were looking around the North State with possible re-location in mind. Living in Roseville at the time, Lynette is from Calaveras County originally and of strong Italian descent, with fond memories of the large family production garden she grew up helping to tend with her father. “Of five kids, I seem to have been the most gardening inclined, which I think has helped me out here!” she tells me the warm summer day I toured around the gardens. “We were about to leave and head home when Richard by chance picked a local discount classified paper and happened to read about land in Whitmore. ‘Where’s Whitmore?’, he asked me. So we drove up, I got out of the car, looked around, breathed deeply, kicked at the dirt with my foot and said - This is it. Let’s write the check.” Although the sloping land was covered in poison oak, manzanita and blackberry, Lynette knew she was home. The Fern Fire had devastated the area 12 years earlier, and Lynette could see that the soil had begun to recover and was ready for any garden she might want to grow. Neither she, the land nor Richard knew just what that garden would become.
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“Food, food, food - it all comes back to food. Being able to grow your own food, understanding where your food comes from and having access to good, healthy food.” Max Kee tells me this as we walk around a two acre plot of land on which he and his fellow workers are cultivating vegetable and herb crops for a second year. Max, and fellow-CSU Chico classmates and friends Dresden Holden, Francine Stuelpnagel and Lee Callendar founded the Chico-based group known as GRUB in 2007. GRUB stands for Growing Resourcefully Uniting Bellies.

“It started with a bike ride…Well, it started with three of us wanting to attend a sustainability conference in Santa Barbara in the spring of 2007 and realizing that it would be counter-productive to drive a car to a sustainability conference. So we decided to ride - and on the way we talked a lot about what it meant to be sustainable and how best to be engaged in solution-oriented sustainability. And as we talked we kept coming back to food.” Max is walking me through fields where irrigation lines are being set up by two people, while others are seeding llong straight furrows and still another comes along behind the seeders and top-dresses with a layer of rich, dark fine compost. The sun is already warm early on this May morning and the next field over is already producing strawberries, while another field has asparagus plants now gone to fern. “When we got to the conference, Francine and Dresden attended a workshop led by a woman from San Jose, who had started a cooperative vegtable and fruit sharing program by cooperatively gardening in people’s unused back-yard space. Francine and Dresden were so fired-up, that our bike ride home from the conference was all about how to start such a cooperative of our own.” I should note that while Francine and Lee, a married couple, had always intended to start their own vegetable garden, none of GRUB’s founding four had any gardening or agricultural background or education to speak of. I should also note the importance of the bike ride in the inception and evolution of GRUB: it all started with a bike ride and all aspects of GRUB continue through bike rides as the primary sources of transportation, beasts of burden and, of course, fun.
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June in the North State Garden covers just about everything that gardening is: shade trees are shading; shrubs, herbaceous perennials and summer flowering bulbs are blooming their hearts out; vegetables and fruit crops are starting to come in; watering, weeding and dead-heading are once again constant chores; the compost pile gets additions every day, and daily turning reveals a steamy active pile, cooking along. Photo: A cloudy late-May sky in the Happy Valley.

Fruit has set on my blueberries, huckleberries, Santa Rosa Plum, Pink Lady Apple, Hachiya Persimmon, Moro Blood Orange, Meyer lemon and Kafir Lime. My grape vines and my Brown Turkey fig have not set fruit but as they were each planted just last year, I am guessing they are not yet mature enough to produce. I have had a little fruit drop on my Lady Apple and my persimmon and while there could be pests or diseases causing this drop, after careful scrutiny at leaf and bark health, I think it is normal early summer fruit drop which is the trees’ natural thinning of its crop in order to best sustain the fruit it does carry to harvest. My Angel Red Pomegranate is just now blooming and the unwhorling red tubular flowers are lovely. These flowers are almost as remarkable as a persimmon bud, bloom and fruit-set, which remind me of delicate jewelry. Photo: The whorl of the sepals around what will become a persimmon flower bud.

Just like this same time last year, I am suffering from a contact dermatitis, could be poison oak, that reminds me: Gardening is a full contact sport - not for the faint of heart. Bugs, snakes, sun, cold, damp and rash inducing foliage and even pollen might sometimes seem to be obstacles in the way of our passion (obsession). But there is little in the natural world that does not have its job and usefulness - it’s up to me to stay out of its way, which for someone like me who is highly allergic is easier said than done. Here’s what I wrote last year in the June Calendar about learning to identify (and perhaps to appreciate) Poison Oak. Photo: The spring flowers on Poison Oak. (more…)