Monkey Business

We planted two different kinds of Sticky Monkey Flower in our front yard.  One is a rusty brown and the other is a bit rosy.  We also planted Blue Witch and two different kinds of lilies.  All of them are supposed to be good under Engelmann's.  Boy is it a lot to learn.

We're hoping to have a woodland garden with a bit of a meadow.  Time will tell.  Right now it looks more like a dirt patch with a few green twigs stuck in it.

Slow Growing, My Ass

Last year, we had a weird growth pop up next to the Englemann.  Rob thought it was part of the tree, I thought it might be a phoenix rose.  Rob was right, as you can see in this photo the shows how our trunk is splitting into several arteries.

Here is Rob, a year later, posing next to that growth, which is now the tallest part of our tree.

Rob is over six feet tall and the Englemann is supposed to be slow growing.  Yeah, right.

What A Difference A Year Makes

Okay, the oak is still dwarfed by the tomato plant, but compared to last year it's huge!

Rob used the oak for our Christmas card this year. You can see a pic of it here, on Tom Spurgeon's blog.

Did I Mention It's December?

This is our mango tomato plant -- it's taller than our oak tree, which is the plant inside the bricks.

It has blooms on it, but no fruit. We do have green tomatoes on some of our other, smaller tomato plants, so who knows?

For some reason, the size and shape of this particular plant reminds me of Snuffleupagus. Weird, I know.

Double or Nothing!

We had our first rain and the oak tree grew about 6 inches in two weeks. It is now waist high -- more than double the size we bought it at.

There's hope yet that we won't be on social security before this is giving us some shade.

Knee High!

Our oak has grown about 6 inches in height, in addition to putting out some new branches. Back in December it didn't even clear the stake. There's no stopping it now!

And the Jury Says....

Remember that weird growth next to the oak? The one we weren't sure was part of the tree or a renegade Phoenix rose?

Well, it's part of the tree. And there's another new part coming up, too.

We talked to the woman from Theodore Payne at the farmer's market and she said it doesn't mean our tree is going to split into three trunks; pretty soon we can expect the tree to start shooting up and the three sections will form the top of it.

Sick-Amour

On Sundays, we stop by the Theodore Payne Foundation booth at the farmers market and talk to this nice woman about native plants, our yard and the Engelmann Oak we planted.

Yesterday, she surprised us with a gift of a California Sycamore. It is one of the babies propagated from the tree in Pasadena whose rescue was documented in the movie Sick-Amour by Joel Tauber.

We'd been discussing planting a Sycamore on the parkway for a little while, but weren't sure we had enough space. Its roots are pretty invasive and we were concerned about possible interference with the Englemann and the sidewalk. Plus our property is crisscrossed with power lines.

The gift seemed like a sign, however, so we accepted the tree and planted it.

Joel Tauber's site has a map of all the babies that have been planted in Los Angeles. One was in our zip code and, when I put on my Nancy Drew hat, I discovered it was only two blocks from our house. We walked the dogs past it last night and it looks a little sickly. I have to go back during daylight to see for sure. I hope ours fares okay. The Englemann is doing great -- I'll post new pics of it soon.

Time Will Tell

The picture is a little bit blurry, but we have this odd growth springing up next to our tree. I think it might be one of the phoenix roses; Rob thinks it might be a weird offshoot of the tree. We'll know soon enough...

This Ain't Right...

A big reason we did yard work this past weekend is that we had weeds bigger than our fledgling tree. Yikes!

Recycled Brick

I used some of the bricks from our fireplace to make a better wall around Rob's tree. I sure hope this little guy survives all the construction...

Charlie Brown's Engelmann Oak

After nearly two months, the little guy's still standing -- and strong enough to hold not one, but TWO Christmas ornaments.

That's more than can be said for the roses we transplanted...

Oak Tree, Take Two!

Yep. That's Rob digging up our Engelmann. And with a real shovel, not the ridiculous trowel he used to plant it.

We have a ghetto chain link fence we need to replace (more on that in a future post) and the new fence is going to be set two feet further back than the current one. Our contractor thought the tree was too close to where the new fence will be.

In keeping with the Wicca aura of this planting experience, Rob did the replant on Halloween.

Lest There Be Any Doubt....

...that this guy is little.

My finger is at the 15 inch mark.

We expect it to start providing shade some time after we start collecting social security.

It's In!

We planted the Engelmann oak this weekend after consulting our contractor about where our sewer line is. These trees put down insane tap roots, so we didn't want any plumbing problems. Right now, we've got weeds that are bigger than this little guy, but he will grow to be gigantic.








This is a picture of an Engelmann on the Cal Tech campus. It's estimated to be 400 years old. Hope ours gets to live that long.

We went to Cal Tech because, according to the Arroyo Seco Foundation, our sapling will die off if it doesn't have the right symbiotic mycorrhizal funghi for its roots. The easiest way to make sure it does is to put a little dirt from under an established oak in the planting hole. We had visited the Cal Tech Engelmann when we were deciding what kind of oak to plant and thought it would be nice to start our tree off with a little of its dirt. Unfortunately, it's fenced off so you can't get to it, so we had to settle for some dirt from a random oak by where we parked the car. That's me scraping some dirt (and a couple of acorns) into a plastic bag from Taco Bell. Hope I got the right fungus!

It's Little Now...

As if we didn't have enough to do with the move this past weekend, we also went to Theodore Payne Foundation, because we had learned they were going to have Engelmann Oaks in stock for just this weekend.

Rob's been wanting an Engelmann for a while and they're pretty rare, so when we got the call that the nursery had them, we were off and running.

Hard to believe that little guy is going to live 600 years and grow to be massive!