Harvesting Seeds

It rained again two nights ago. Rain in June!??? I don't remember last time it rained in June around here. We grow drought tolerant plants around here because it hardly ever rained. I have been waiting for the last snow peas to dry out so I can harvest them as seeds for next year. The pea pods are now covered in mold. They look nasty. I decided to cut off some pea pods tonight just to see how they look inside.


Most of them look okay once out of the pods. Some of them have completely dried, while the big green ones need to dry out a lot more. I will leave them in the sun room for a few days. As long as we get some sun, they should dry up nicely. Last year I only harvested a few snow pea seeds, and I don't remember if they grew earlier this year. I used some older seeds that I purchased a couple years ago, the few I harvested, and a couple 6-pack seedlings from some nursery. I had snow peas every day for the last 3 months until I didn't want to eat them anymore.

Inspiration and Transformation

A year later

When I redesigned the front garden over a year ago, I carefully selected each plant. The plants needed to be deer and drought tolerant and preferably native California. I also wanted some flowering plants for hamming birds and bees. I wanted to remove all the juniper bushes badly. They were over grown, hard to trim, full of spiders inside and covered in spider webs. To me, they served no purpose and were an eyesore.

A year ago when the flowers were first planted

This project was bigger than we could handle by ourselves, so I hired some people to remove most of the plants. I wanted a low maintenance front garden, but we didn’t know a whole lot about weed suppression back then. The only thing I knew was weed blocker or landscape fabric. More than a year later, I now know that weeds will find a way to penetrate just about anything including concrete since there are several cracks in the drive way made by weeds.

During my research, I found that most herbs are deer tolerant. I planted 2 varieties of rosemary and 2 varieties of lavender in addition to some sage, wallflowers, red monkey flowers, lilac, and a few others.

I wish it could stay this way. Unfortunately, it's now filled with weeds again.

After the initial transformation was completed, I decided to sign up for horticulture classes. Now over a year later, most of the plants have thrived. I have witnessed many hamming birds, butterflies, and bees visiting the flowerbed. I have learned various weed control methods through my class and that weed blocker doesn’t really work in the long run. It might block weeds for a year if you are lucky.