Learn to use your garden green waste sustainably without power machines or sending it to the landfill. And for everyone’s health: NO BLOWERS!
garden chores
Summer Water
Note: This article was first published in July 2011. Since that time our summers seem to have gotten hotter, with some record-breaking highs. I am writing another article on summer water that addresses the stresses on plants and how to deal with them in these extreme climate events. Are you ready for the 4th […]
3 Garden Pests – Thrips, Scales, Ants
Learn to keep your native plants healthy without resorting to toxic chemicals. Control garden pests, ants, thrips and scales.
How to Prune CA Buckwheat
How to prune CA buckwheat
Pruning (continued)
The last two posts – Garden Gloves, and Pruning Gooseberries – segue into today’s piece perfectly. Since we returned from the Pacific Northwest I have been cutting back the humongous sunflowers in the front yard. I don’t usually pull them out; rather, I cut the branches and smaller stems until there is only a main […]
Pruning Gooseberries
The following is a video of me pruning a fuchsia-flowering gooseberry (Ribes speciosum). I certainly hope it is helpful because it is definitely embarrassing! It is my hope that with time I will get better at this video thing, but for the time being, please bear with my amateur attempts. If you must laugh, please […]
Starting a new garden
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 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 […]