One of my very first perennial flowers was a bearded iris with no id. When I brought a few of the rhizomes with me when we moved here to Hanbury House, I did not realize it was the beginning of an iris collection. Five years after later, when I discovered there were Reblooming Irises, for a short time, I became obsessed with irises and started collecting them exclusively. I also began weeding out almost all of my spring-only bloomers. Disclosure:…
A trip to the nursery can get expensive pretty quickly, especially when first starting out. The initial investments in quality tools like a hand trowel, spading fork, shovel, gloves, and hard pruners are necessary, but spending hundreds of dollars on plants and supplies every year is not. I had a related post in 2012 about making do with less and recycling. The following list is some of the things have learned and practice in order to make gardening more affordable…
I am thankful the garden centers and nurseries are considered essential businesses in L.A. County and are staying open because gardening is essential to my mental health. Spending time working in the yard always makes me feel better, even when I end up with aches and pains at the end of the day. With all the light rain we were expecting to continue, I sowed some veggie seeds last weekend. I needed a project to be hopeful about and look…
One up side of being home bound for a while is there will be a little more time to spend in the garden. After a little thought, I realized a significant number of my plants have edible flowers, not just fruit, and the flowers can be added to soups and salads. There are many more edible flowers than just what I jotted down on my list below, but these are all the ones I personally grow. Acca sellowiana/ Feijoa /…
I really love apricots, and I have fond childhood memories of my grandmother’s apricots drying in her mid century stove. She lived in Southgate, only slightly further inland from where we are now. When we bought the house, I was told by an older neighbor, that before our housing tract was built, this area was an apricot orchard and many houses started out with an apricot tree on the lot. There is one house, two blocks away with a really…
Our beloved Golden Retriever passed away in 2018, and for a long time I was unable to move past the loss of my canine friend. I had not realized until he was gone what a big part of my life he was. For more than 12 years, he had been my constant shadow around the house and yard and on twice daily walks. He helped to keep me motivated to be active. He was wicked smart, loving, friendly with everyone…
I have to have a bit of a horticultural rant today, which has to do with plant labeling…or rather mislabeling. When planting fruit trees, it can take at least a few years for plants to establish and begin to bare quality fruit. So it’s pretty frustrating after all that time only to end up with the wrong cultivar. Sometimes it happens because plant tags get knocked off at big box store nursery’s and then reattached to the wrong tree. Worse…
Don’t blame me for the title. That’s what my teenagers told me to title it. But that IS what this post is about. We are in the middle of a heat wave, just like most of the country, but I honestly don’t remember my town ever hitting 107, or maybe it was 110 depending on the source reporting. My car said it was 114 in Signal Hill at 2:30. We haven’t acclimated yet to summer temps since just last week…
Its been more than a decade that we have been using grey water from our washing machine to water the backyard plants and fruit trees. Therefore, I am probably long overdue to post an update on how its affected the yard, and what has been good about it and what’s not. The set up has evolved a little bit every couple of years. Since I last posted about it, we put in a paver patio and replaced the back porch…
* Iris Virus = A burning desire to learn everything there is about growing and caring for iris plants. A person with an iris virus reads tons of iris publications and surfs all of the known iris society web sites. The person with the virus may have just started growing irises, be an avid collector, or be an established grower/ hybridizer of irises. For me, it all started back in 1995, when a next door neighbor gave me two rhizomes…