Staycation challenge San Diego: Day 9 - Poway Flower Show & Blue Sky Reserve

Today is Saturday and Saturdays in Old Poway always mean market days.  We went through the market and bought a few strawberries and a tarot boba smoothie.  One of the things I love best about living in Southern California is the amazing produce we have.  Since our weather is generally warm, we have strawberries almost year round.  This is one thing in favor of this locale that cannot be said of London, as much as I loved it there.  So strawberries and smoothies in hand we went to see the flower show.

Old Poway Park Flower Show

This iris is called the peanut butter and jelly iris, believe it or not. 

The Poway Valley Garden Club puts on a flower show every year.  There are flower designs and arrangements and individual flowers that are all judged and awarded ribbons.  I love seeing all the amazing things that other garden enthusiasts manage to grow here.  The roses and irises are always my favorite flowers.  I also found some interesting succulent plants that I will be on the lookout for in future.  We admired all the cut flowers and flower designs then headed to the plant sale.

There we picked up cheap baby orchids that I hope will be happy on our patio.  At one edge of the plant sale we found four schools doing fundraisers for their school garden projects.  They had display boards with pictures of their gardens and the things they were learning about.  A couple of young students told us all about how to tell which seedlings were going to grow larger.  So we bought a few varieties of sunflower seedling plants.  One of which is going to grow to be 10 feet tall, or so we are told.  It was adorable how excited they were about their garadens and different plants.  I hope their fundraiser will allow them to keep up with their gardening projects.

After lunch it was still a very overcast day.  Since, the temperatures were just right for a good walk, we took our two giant black labs for an outing to Blue Sky Reserve.

Blue Sky Ecological Reserve 

Blue Sky has some very pleasant hiking trails.  I say hike because it could turn into one if you go far enough, but the trails are largely flat .

It dips down at first to the creek and you wend through groves of coastal live oaks, stately and wonderfully large.  It's a smooth flat trail underneath the oaks' canopy for the first mile to a mile and a half ish.  Then you have the option of doing a proper hike uphill to Lake Ramona, to Poway Lake, or of turning back.  We opted for the more sedate walk home at this point and turned around to head back.  But it was a lovely walk.

The reserve is home to some lovely native California plants.  It is home to the wildlife as well and there have been sightings of a mountain lion, but we saw no wildlife on our walk, unless you count our two black dogs.  They can be wild at times I assure.  But I digress, the native plants that we saw just along the trial edges were lovely.  We've had a fair amount of rain recently and everything was blooming.

It was a very good walk.  A bit of exercise, fresh air, and flower spotting.  Oh and the dogs made friends with nearly everyone we passed.  They love people like that.  So, they helped with the prompt of today that suggested we make new friends.

So that was my staycation adventure of the day.  For more of my staycation adventures check here.