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…
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…
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’…
With the extended drought, I have barely kept my Bababerry patch alive, and not had any surplus to share, so I was very happy to hear that this excellent berry is back in commercial production. For anyone not familiar with Bababerries or Baba Raspberry, it is a low chill raspberry that was introduced in the late 1970s. The variety is an everbearing-type that produces very large berries of excellent flavor. And according to CRFG it is “probably the most reliable traditional raspberry for areas…
A little over two years ago, my daughter, B, started an after dinner gardening project of trying to grow a pineapple. She plopped a discarded cut-off pineapple crown with leaves into a pot. She treated it like many of her succulent plants: no prep, no rooting hormone, just potting soil and occasionally a bit of leftover water from her school lunch. It still lives in a pot on the front porch, getting about half-day sun. Last winter she did remember…
Most of my flowers and perennials these days are generally low water users, at least once they became established, however the same is not true of all my edible plants. When the state officials announced the need for even deeper cuts to our water use early this year, I decided what my most prized or hard to replace plants were, mainly the fruit trees and camellias, and then I diverted the limited grey water from our front load washer machine…
I look forward to this time of year all winter long, the Spring Garden Tour season and annual plant sales sponsored by some of the local non profit horticulture groups. For many years now, my favorite plant sale has been the Long Beach City College Horticulture Department’s annual spring plant sale and fundraiser. This is their 42nd year and the sale falls on April 16th -18th, 2014, the week before LBCC has their Spring Break. If you are a local…
When the weather is too cold to do much work outside, I get a little over zealous and try propagating all sorts of plants, just to see if I can. Since I got a couple of new heat mats for Christmas, I am in the process of propagating a variety of plants including ‘Parfianka’ Pomegranate, ‘Sweet’ Pomegranate, ‘Strawberry Verte’ Fig, ‘Bababerry’ plants, Thornless Raspberry plants, and tomato seeds. Because I spend so much time doting on the cuttings, my hubby…
Normally in the winter months, the rainy season in SoCal, I have the gray water diverer on the washer machine in the off position so it will empty to the sewer, not the garden. Southern California usually gets plenty of rain to take care of the landscape until late March or April. This year is the earliest we have had to switch back to using grey water, since first using it back in 2007. We have had next to nothing…