Life has been pretty busy around Hanbury House, but first and foremost, it is plant sale season! For Hanbury House blog readers that are local to SoCal, this weekend and next weekend is the 2015 LBCC Horticulture Department Club’s 2015 open house and annual plant sale.  Normally it starts mid week just before Easter break, but not this year. This club sale is a great chance to stock up on summer veggies, drought tolerant perennials, and all sorts of great plants at really good prices.  I have posted about it before because it is my favorite plant sale, so if you want details of what to expect, click here to see my post about it from last year.  However, it is always a little bit different, depending on what the current students’ focus is on. This year they will be featuring Milkweed plants for attracting Monarch adult butterflies and feeding the larvae.

A list of California native milkweeds to look for in your local nursery:

• Asclepias albicans (whitestem milkweed)
• Asclepias asperula (spider milkweed)
• Asclepias californica (California milkweed)
• Asclepias cordifolia (purple milkweed, heartleaf milkweed)
• Asclepias cryptoceras (pallid milkweed)
• Asclepias eriocarpa (woollypod milkweed, Indian milkweed)
• Asclepias erosa (desert milkweed)
• Asclepias fascicularis (narrow-leaved milkweed)
• Asclepias latifolia (broadleaf milkweed)
• Asclepias linaria (pineneedle milkweed
• Asclepias nyctaginifolia (Mojave milkweed)
• Asclepias solanoana (serpentine milkweed)
• Asclepias speciosa (showy milkweed)
• Asclepias subulata (rush milkweed)
• Asclepias vestita (woolly milkweed)

Lots of photos of these native milkweed plants can be found at http://calphotos.berkeley.edu if you type in the genus and species or common name in the search box

A quick summary of what we have been up to…We ripped out 1/3 of the backyard grass and I expanded some of the flower beds, I planted lots more reblooming irises, we took out the drought tolerant flower bed just outside the backdoor, we got a new natural gas BBQ, we removed the old concrete patio adjacent to the garage and installed paver stones and back door steps, the chicken flock was thinned to just two, and I think I finally learned how to graft (but I have to be really careful reporting that last one.) I have been told by other gardeners that photographing grafts that ‘took’ and bragging about them can cause them to fail.  I hope that isn’t true because I am really excited about the grafting because once I master it, I will be able stop collecting so many individual trees and have a bunch of “Franken-trees” instead with multiple grafts.