Browsed by
Category: Gardening

17 Tips: How to Have a Beautiful and Productive Garden Without Spending a Ton of Money

17 Tips: How to Have a Beautiful and Productive Garden Without Spending a Ton of Money

Comments 0 Comment

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…

Read More Read More

over crowded vegetable beds
Sowing Some Quick to Harvest Vegetable Seeds [List of 9 Easy Veggies that Grow Fast]

Sowing Some Quick to Harvest Vegetable Seeds [List of 9 Easy Veggies that Grow Fast]

Comments 0 Comment

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…

Read More Read More

fuchsiaberry
Edible Flowers Around the Yard

Edible Flowers Around the Yard

Comments 0 Comment

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 /…

Read More Read More

Low chill cherry Socal
12 Years Later: Low Chill Cherries in Southern California [Update]

12 Years Later: Low Chill Cherries in Southern California [Update]

Comments 5 comments

12 years ago, my neighbor, K, volunteered her narrow front yard space for us to try two new low chill cherry trees, Minnie Royal and Royal Lee. She finds it funny that every January and February I start checking up on the trees, sometimes daily just to look for new blooms or to add more grafts of other cherries. One of her tree’s bloom time is always ahead of the other, and in warm years by as much as two weeks. It is frustrating they don’t always sync up their bloom in really low chill years.
Read More….

soft seeded, gulusha rosavaya pomegranate best variety
Pomegranate from Down Under

Pomegranate from Down Under

Comments 0 Comment

Collecting Scionwood I wasn’t really planning on acquiring another pomegranate tree when I spotted a pomegranate cultivar at the O.C. CRFG scion exchange simply labeled ‘Galusha Rosavaya’ pomegranate. It had no description of the variety nor from where in SoCal it was currently growing.  Plus I did not remember reading anything about it in The Incredible Pomegranate. Yes, I AM that big of a plant nerd, that I enjoy reading all sorts of obscure publications about plants. Therefore, I picked up a couple…

Read More Read More

Sweet pomegranate
Plant Rant: What Pomegranate is it?

Plant Rant: What Pomegranate is it?

Comments 3 comments

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…

Read More Read More

Burned flowers on plant
Damage from the Heatwave

Damage from the Heatwave

Comments 4 comments

Plant damage from last week’s heatwave showed up pretty quickly.  Despite my best efforts to water well ahead of time, it still ended up being a real scorcher for some of my plants.  My ‘Stargazer’ Oriental Lilies had just opened but they turned to toast the first afternoon. Tender growth on partial sun plants became burnt and crispy, especially on the West facing sides of the plants. With temperatures soaring above 110 degrees and practically no humidity, two of my…

Read More Read More

greywater jupiter grape
Greywatering in the Backyard [2018 Update]

Greywatering in the Backyard [2018 Update]

Comments 4 comments

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…

Read More Read More

Monarch Butterflies and LBCC plant sale

Monarch Butterflies and LBCC plant sale

Comments 0 Comment

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…

Read More Read More

citrus tree net
From Seedy to Seedless

From Seedy to Seedless

Comments 5 comments

Since seedless mandarins and tangerines, like Cuties, Halos, and Delites have become so readily available in grocery stores during most of the year, my kids have gotten really picky about the occasional seeded mandarin from our own backyard tree. It didn’t help that cuties had very persuasive commercials about five years ago convincing them that seedless was the only way to go.Although I technically have a seedless variety, Owari Satsuma, due to the surrounding citrus trees both in my backyard and neighbors’…

Read More Read More