DryStoneGarden

As a year-end housekeeping task I’ve been going through all the photos I took this year, and I thought I’d post some of the ones that never made it onto the blog. It’s not exactly the year in review, but it does cover some of the things we did this year.

About a dozen photos are below.

We started the year with a month in Baja. Highlight of the year, best bike tour that we’ve done, one of our favorite places to travel, we’d love to go back.

Our veggie garden was rather neglected this year. At one point in the spring when half the veggie garden was dug up by marauding cats and skunks, it seemed like the happiest plant was a mustard volunteer in the sidewalk out front. Chicken wire eventually stopped the animals from digging, and for a while took away my enthusiasm as well, but we had some good harvests later in the year that got me back into it. The rocoto pepper was our biggest success this year. It’s still producing peppers.

I went to the Ruth Bancroft Garden just before they took down the cold frames for the year. The garden looked better without them a couple of weeks later, but it also had a little less funky mad-garden-scientist charm.

I also went to the Gardens at Heather Farms for the first time.

We went to the flower and garden show again this year. Anita and I both liked the New Orleans courtyard garden the best, but I sometimes find myself telling people about the succulent Borg cube so that one seems to have made the most lasting impression.

I continued to frequently stop at Tilden on my way to and from job sites. I took a few pictures at the Brazil Building while the cherry trees were blooming.

Tilden’s giant mass of blooming Western Mock Orange was my most fragrant plant experience of the year.

The wildflower display in the Lowes parking lot in Concord was the most surprising thing I saw all year. More photos are here. It still blows me away.

This small stone project was down on the peninsula, a low wall made of a tumbled sandstone.

This little retaining wall of mostly Three Rivers stone was for a neighbor down the block, just pulling out the choss and restacking the decent stones.

We did a decent amount of climbing and hiking this fall with trips to Lover’s Leap, Smith Rock, Bishop, and Tuolumne. We’re planning a trip to Joshua Tree in another month or two, should be a highlight of the coming year.

Anita took some photos of the High Line while she was in New York City a couple of weeks ago. It looks cold in her photos, makes me think I shouldn’t complain about the winter we’ve been having here in the Bay Area. The High Line blog has photos of the recent blizzard; I’m glad our snow falls conveniently in the mountains where I don’t have to shovel it.

Lots of other things happened, of course, but these are some of the photos that jump out at me. A pretty good year, looking back. I hope everyone else feels the same, and feels the same next year. Cheers.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 2nd, 2011 at 7:22 am and is filed under miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.