Starting a new garden is big. It fills me with enthusiasm, excitement, and joy. However, this act of optimism has another side. In a time when Facebook highlights only the positive moments and feelings of our lives, let’s be honest, the enthusiasm, excitement, and joy we post about is usually accompanied by nervousness, weariness, and […]
garden chores
Garden care while you travel (Part 2)
The garden prep for our summer absence has been paying off. Yesterday my daughter took me on a virtual garden tour on Facetime. Things are looking good! The native sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) are amazing, reaching 6-7 ft. tall. And the tomato plants have held up well through the heat wave with temperatures in excess of […]
Garden care while you travel (Part 1)
One of the reasons that I wanted to change my traditional landscape to one with native plants was the hope that a natural garden would require less water and maintenance, thereby freeing us to travel without garden anxiety. This, however, did not turn out as expected. A traditional lawn-centric yard in southern California – unlike […]
Planting native plants
There is so much information on the web and some of it is contradictory. How can one know what to believe? This is a truly difficult question – whether we are talking about plants or anything else. As an example consider these two videos on planting native plants. The first video, by the Palos Verdes […]
More drip irrigation
A bit over a month ago I set up drip for the tomato plants. They have been doing great on 15 minutes of drip, every other day. There are two emitters per plant, 1g per minute. So that’s about 1/2 gallon per plant per watering session. When I installed it, I set the timer for 2x per […]
Happy Earth Day from the Nature Park
Although Earth Day 2015 does not officially occur until Wednesday, we had a great celebration at the nature park last week. We had a great group of volunteers for these regularly scheduled cleanups on Wednesday and Saturday. I hope you can see what we accomplished from the following pictures. Thanks to Katherine, Michael, David, Rick, Candy, […]
What’s happening in Wild Suburbia
Today I started a new way to report on what’s going on in Wild Suburbia. Up until now there was merely a list of gardening tasks that I wrote up way back in 2009 when I was preparing for my son’s backyard wedding. I am planning (and hoping) to upload a handful of garden pictures to […]
Dividing Deergrass
The nature park anniversary celebration is over. Yay! The plant sale is over. Yay! And the weather is perfect for gardening, cool and overcast. YAY! As I walk around the yard thinking about what has worked and what hasn’t, I have lots of ideas on what I want to do. It is so exciting that […]
Happy Holidays
In the last blog post I left you (or rather, me) holding a decanted plant, roots exposed to the elements. Alas, I hope no one has been waiting for the past two weeks for the next set of instructions on how to dig a hole and put it in. As you may expect from the […]
Planting tips
It is a special time of year for gardeners in coastal California, it is gardening season. The weather report tells me it has been cold and wet, perfect for planting. Here in Mumbai , where I am living, it is hot and humid, though it has not rained since before we arrived a month and a […]