Tips and tricks it took to have our most successful harvest of the best tasting red grape we grow. For years animals were steeling the homegrown grapes before we picked them. We finally outsmarted all the orchard pests.
Last fall I started the project of removing the front yard parkway grass, about 260 sq. ft. It has been replaced with a mix of California native and Mediterranean climate plants, mostly geophytes, annuals, biennials, and perennials. I like to move things around from one year to the next, so I didn’t add any shrubs at this time. It looked lovely up through mid June, full of color along with lots of bees and butterflies. Every few weeks, there seemed…
Buying Bareroot About five years ago, I purchased two fruit trees, a Weeping Santa Rosa Plum and an Ultra Dwarf Blenheim Apricot tree at OSH on clearance at the end of bare root season. Discounted plants are rarely worth the trouble and I probably should not have wasted any money on it, but I am really glad I did. In a weird way, I kind of enjoy taking the risk. And a few of my favorite plants have been clearance…
Native and Mediterranean climate bulbs are a perennial garden staple in this Southern California garden. Many popular as well as less traditional bulbs naturalize and return each year. Hanbury House blog shares a list of favorites to consider for Zone 10 gardeners.
I get more questions about Verbascum creticum than almost any other plant in the Spring garden. It is not common around SoCal, but I think it should be because it is so lovely and is a great low water plant for the flower garden. Unfortunately for gardeners, biennials are not something garden centers offer for sale very often. Most of its life, Verbascum creticum plants are just plain looking little flat rosettes of green leaves. However, when the plant is…
Although our yard was filled with fruit trees many years ago, one of the books I sometimes check out at the local library is called Grow a Little Fruit Tree, by Ann Ralph. I like much of the advice in the book except for planting multiple trees in one hole. Back when I first started planting our backyard, around 1999, I tried a planting technique of three different trees in one larger hole. I did this in three different parts…
I want to start a new vegetable bed adjacent to our driveway, one of the few areas left in our yard with half day sun. The full sun areas were all taken up by my obsession with fruit trees long ago. The area I plan to use has been sitting pretty much empty ever since I let our Baba raspberry bed die out, back during Southern California’s last major drought. I know I have mentioned it before, but I really…
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:…
This past weekend we started harvesting this year’s little crop of Dwarf Brazillian bananas. The fruit are a perfect snack size banana, slightly dry, very sweet, and with just a hint of acidity. I was never much of fan of bananas until I started sampling some of the different backyard varieties that members of CRFG brought to meetings to share. After a few years, I decided I really enjoyed the Dwarf Brazillian cultivar and decided to try growing it. I…
When we started talking last year about getting a new dog, the safety of the hens and the tortoise were one of my bigger concerns with bringing a new dog into our household. An untrained and unsupervised dog can easily hurt or even kill chickens or tortoises out of fun or boredum. When we first got baby chicks 11 years ago, I learned everything I could about training a dog to be trustworthy with chickens. But back then, we started…