Beyond the Blue Horizon

Beyond the Blue Horizon

That song from Rain Man is repeating in my head for some reason this morning. The 1974 Lou Christie song has a twangy melody that feels somehow soothing. It’s lyrics are simple and its about how your life has only begun when you look out into the blue horizon and watch the rising sun. At this very moment, I am sitting in my office and looking east over my cactus knoll at the blue horizon where the sun is just about to rise up above the Dragon Tree (Dracaena Draco) that stands seven feet tall at the top of the knoll and happens to be situated exactly where the sunrise in late April first appears. I have sometimes wondered why the prior owners of this house went to the trouble of expanding this end of the house the way they did. Effectively what they added was about twelve feet to the office and master closet and bumped out an alcove that seems almost like the sort of extender you see in a Class A high-end RV. That bump-out is where I have installed a large, modern L-shaped desk which serves as my command center whenever I feel the need to be in-command. The great part about this addition, besides the extra closet space, which makes theirs house so much more livable for us, is that it gives me my own little capsule for seeing my world in three cardinal directions (all but south) and gives me endless flights of imagination with the mere turn of my head. Since I sit on the very top of this hilltop and this very spot is as high as any up here, it is the closest thing I will ever have to my own space capsule. If Jeff Bezos can have his Blue Horizon, why can’t I? I have no need to go beyond the stratosphere to feel like I am floating in space, my mind takes me as far as I want to go and beyond the blue horizon.

San Diego has returned. It left us for about four months while nature chose to bring us atmospheric rivers from across the Pacific Ocean to replenish our state’s reservoirs through ground water and snowpack. It was Un-Californian in temperature as well. I always said that I would never move somewhere for the weather and that mankind was more a master of his environment than to have that be one’s guiding force. It can be a factor, but there should be more to a final life stage setting selection. That said, take away our San Diego weather and you take away one of the great pleasures we all enjoy every day out here. But now, that weather is back and its back in the right way. It hasn’t suddenly become hot or humid, it is delightful. It is sunny and crisp and clear in the morning this a distant low-lying fog in the valleys that reminds me why I like to be on the hilltop and makes me know that my garden will have enough moisture to easily sustain itself.

April has been my gardening month to be sure. It makes me feel in synch with nature to use this time of revival to spruce up the garden. Yesterday afternoon, a time when I am more often than not too tired or lazy to do much more than catch up on the day’s news cycle nonsense, I sat on the driveway bench with a full array of succulent cuttings that I had walked around and taken as I pleased from the vast array that I have available within feet of my in almost any part of my property. Yesterday was a fun excursion day for me. I went with neighbors Faraj, Yasuko and Melisa to a place called Planter’s Paradise, which is almost an hour south of here in a place called El Cajon. The word in Spanish means box, which is a testament to the fact that this valley to the east of the City of San Diego is set in the midst of a set of box canyons. Out here, plant nurseries are all over the place, a testament to the easy growing conditions of the climate and the relative abundance of space when you get a few miles away from the ocean. But every nursery seems to have its own speciality or reason to draw a clientele. Waterwise Botanicals and Oasis are where you go to get high quality cacti and succulents. Moon Valley is where you go for trees of all kinds (and to get ripped off by bundled “we plant it” pricing). Javier is where you go for inexpensive filler plants. Grangetto’s is where you go for serious commercial gardening supplies with no nonsense. And Green Thumb and Armstrong are full-service nurseries that have all the bells and whistles. But Planter’s Paradise, which would otherwise be way too distant to be worth the trip for us, is where you can get pots, pots and more pots in every color, texture, material and size that you want or need. They have a few plants scattered here and there, but they have 15-foot-high rack after rack of pots at prices that make buying pots anywhere else seem silly and wasteful. I don’t think even CostCo can compete with their pot prices. Lots of these pots seem to come from Mexico and Vietnam and I doubt there is a place in the U.S. that is as close to those two sources than El Cajon.

I discovered Planter’s Paradise through Faraj when we went there last week. I loaded up his truck since I am a buyer and he and Melisa are shoppers. After thinking about it for a week, they were ready to turn into buyers and suggested another group excursion. I was impressed enough to want a return engagement, and who can ever have enough pots, right? I went thinking I could use six more medium-sized pots and came home with eight of various shapes and colors. I figure my overall cost was about 40% of what I would pay for the same pots at local nurseries and I would not have had the kind of organized selection that Planter’s Paradise offered. So today I am in pot heaven. I already stopped by Grangetto’s and got 10 bags of Ocean/Forrest potting soil, and I have extra river rocks from KRC Rock to use as ballast and drainage at the bottom of the pots, so I am ready for action. I will crank up my electric wheelbarrow and start my rounds setting the pots, putting in some rock, filling them with soil and making them ready for planting. That explains why I was taking succulent cutting yesterday afternoon. They say you should dry and callous your succulent cuttings before planting, but that is more for the tropics where moisture and creepy crawlies can get into the open wounds. Here in sub-tropical San Diego, the weather is so perfect for succulents that you barely have to plant them for them to grow. It is not uncommon to see a succulent cutting or simple break-off that got accidentally left behind on the ground, take root all by itself. The will to live and the accommodative climate make this succulent heaven.

My son gave me a t-shit that I think I need to wear today…it says “What the Fucculent” and has a bunch of succulents on it. I am actually looking forward to setting out the pots and getting them set up. They provide a nice accent to a garden that wants to grow all by itself and actually prefers being left to tend itself (something I seem incapable of complying with). On a day like today, with a task like I have before me, and in a place like San Diego, I would say that the world is my oyster, except I hate shellfish. So instead, I will say that the world beyond the blue horizon is all that I can ever hope for.