Garden Activities: August 19, 2025

The Tuesday Crew comprised Bill Dobner, Dale Harshberger, Beverly Kemmerling, Julie Moffat, Katie Shank, Daryl Stutley, Nancy Taylor Walker, Anna Wiktor-Becker, and myself. Because of the hot weather expected this week, Bill took extra time to hand water the Duranta or sky flower shrubs along the border with the neighborhood. I started by watering the sycamore near the green waste receptacle which doesn’t look at all well.

The rest of the group headed up toward the desert garden.  

Anna, Julie and Daryl dead heading penstemon on the way up.

Next stop was the Tranquility Garden that is often given short shrift. The group cleared the dry creek bed creating a nice line of sight from the up-hill end of the garden.

Nancy with the now open river bed.

While there, we took a short break and discussed some of the high points of a class I attended on maintaining natives in the summer.

Me with Julie, Nancy, Dale and Daryl.  

Some of the points were to only deadhead in the summer and wait to do a hard prune until winter when the natives start coming back. In general a hard prune is cutting the plant (Encelia californica e.g.) to the size of a basketball. Water isn’t necessary while the plants are dormant, but if you want to keep them looking attractive in the garden, a good watering every 10-14 days should keep them green.

Finally we did some cleanup in the Desert Garden. Aloe mites must be active in the warm months as we found several galls on the aloes we de-galled earlier this year. We also dead headed the shrub aloes. If one is patient and let the bloom stalks dry out completely, they naturally dehisce and are easy to just pick off sometimes requiring a bit of wiggling to release the stalk from the leaf-stem juncture.

Yours truly with Daryl and Julie.

While working in the Desert Garden I noticed that some of the larger barrel cacti were creating pups.

Obviously the last of these images is of a cactus that has been pupping for some time, but the other two are just sending them up this year. My “research” into this indicates that there is no specific time that a barrel starts producing pups; this happens when the plant reaches a level of maturity and is happily situated. It also helps that in recent years the cacti haven’t been poached which was a problem in the past.

I’ll end with a beautiful image of the oak just uphill from Entrance B of the Nature Trail.

Many thanks to Beverly and Nancy for their images.

Enjoy the garden…KMM