post icon

Too Cold to Garden in Thousand Oaks

The weather has been painfully cold this summer making it very difficult to grow things this year.  All summer long the spring like temperatures drop into the low fifties at night and barely reach the 80′s during the day.

We did have a heat wave in July.   I think it made it into the 90′s for three or four days.    When is summer going to arrive?  September? October?

I think it’s time to buy or build a mini greenhouse but I’m not exactly sure where to put it. Our house faces SW and gets the majority of the sun but the back part of our tiny wall is shaded by the two stories.

The NW side of the house gets lots of afternoon sun at may be the logical choice.  It will be sorta out of the way and will fit nicely once I remove the peach tree.

The peaches this year were about the size of a plum.  The tree blossomed early, but the cold weather preventing any sizable fruit from maturing.  When we had our house painted a few years ago, the painters pushed the tree away from the house and caused one half of the tree to split once it was full of peaches.

The remaining half produced an abundance of fruit but the squirrels were eating them which became a cleanup nightmare.  Every morning I would have clean up partially eaten fruit before our dachshunds got to them because the peach pits are toxic to dogs.

Finally sick of the squirrel’s mess, I cut down the other half of the tree leaving a 5 foot stump.  When I get the urge to do some yard work, I’ll dig around the root and then use the leverage of the long tree stump to remove the tree.

Yes, this is where I’ll put the greenhouse.  Unless my wife plants something there first…

August 13, 2010

No comments yet.

Leave a Reply