My first planted palm is a Mediterranean Fan Palm on the hillside and one volunteer palm springing up. One of the Scrub Jays may have planted the latter, or strong winter storm winds may have blown a seed across the street from our neighbour's 90 year old Palms (see photos below). In July 2001, I planted three Butia Capitata "Jelly-Pindo" Palms in the flower border along the street. They can withstand sub-freezing temps to about 15-20º, growing to 20' tall with branch spread to 15'. Now my Garden of Love has seven varieties of palms, some seen in Yahoo photos: Mediterranean Fan-1, Mexican Fan-4, California Fan-2, Canary Island Date Palm-3, Butia Capitata-4 (Jelly/Pindo Palm), the Queens-2, and one Windmill Palm-1 (Not all pictured in album). Most were planted end of 2004 thru 2005.
Howdy! I'm 'Joe Roy' (my grandfather's nickname. I was named after him) near the Central Pacific Coast. There's just a very narrow band of green in California where we are located, as to the east lies the very arid parched California Valley, and the Great San Andreas Earthquake faultline! The irrigated farming San Joaquim Valley is further East. However, the pollution of the groundwater is increasing due to the heavy use of crop pesticides.
If you saw 10.5, the NBC Miniseries on Sunday-Monday May 2-3, 2004, it came very close to showing how CA will look after this giant cataclysm*. It coincides with my dreams above. This 35 degree N latitude, 120 degree W longitude is a breaking point that will go under water up to 1000 feet above sea level totally drowning the Salinas River Valley and the Los Angeles basin. At the end of 10.5 showed a map of CA with a large island left where Santa Barbara-Ventura counties are now. It looked like the north of San Luis Obispo County was water, a part of the sea.
Our local rainfall varies quite a lot from the higher coastal Santa Lucia Mountains on the southwest side of town over to the northeastern side of our inland valley, with more hills, valleys, canyons and mountains across the Salinas River.
On our sandy/rocky hill of decomposed granite we use drip system watering, mostly on an electric timer, keeping our dwarf fruit trees, vegetable gardens, and lawn green. But we do turn off the timer during wet weather of course.
California native plants do well with just the rainfall.
On the north-northeast side of our hill we get the direct blast of cold winter winds; while on the Southwest side we have a kind of Palm Springs desert heat with the summer sun! Just open the hilltop gate at the lawn's edge, step out and boom: up roars a furnace like heat! Even in the winter it's more mildly pleasant on the protected SW downhill. Sometimes you gotta carry a coat or sweater even in summer, especially at night, as temps can drop from 100 to 40-50º.
Natural Native Shrub-Enshrouded. native flowers, Sand/Siltstone, decomposed granite Landscape!
Note: Beautiful Rainbows are such a Sign of Hope that those line separators were used on this Garden of Love Home Page.
"Response To The Web" My Web poem responded to another Web poem! Now it's published!
All Photos, Text and Pages: Internet Copyright © 1998-2008 Joe Roy. Wild Eden of the West™ is a Trademark of Joe Roy. All Rights Reserved.
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