Halloween Planting...

I was looking for a little Fall/Halloween inspiration for my empty pot. So on a whim, I ran out to my local garden center to see what I could pull together. It needs a week or so to fill in, but it's got the classic black, white and golden/orange Halloween color. It cost about $14 for the plants.

(In case you're wondering, that's a Coleus in the background...  Home Depot special, not sure which variety!)

Here's the recipe:

24" pot

1 - 1 qt. mum, golden colored

1 - 4" Sweet Potato Vine, 'Blackie' (Ipomoea)

1 - six-pack Viola, 'Coconut'

The plants shown here do well in Sun to Part Shade and are considered winter annuals. The most tender of the bunch is the Ipomoea, which may fail in temperatures below 30 degrees.

A Peony Blooms in Danville...

Who knew? I adopted this peony from my sister-in-law from Oregon many years ago. It just now decided to bloom. I guess I'll keep it!

A Partial Victory Garden...

I've always had a garden, even when we lived in an apartment. About 3 years ago, we removed a huge hedge to clear a spot for a garden. I love having my own produce growing in my back yard. I'm not the most dedicated vegetable gardener; however, and sometimes I forget to take a look back there for a week or so. I could probably increase my yield by just visiting more often. So, that's why it's only a partial victory. It's in and we get some food from it.

Well, this year's frost season was freakishly late. We had some frosty mornings all the way through April. I'm impatient. I put everything in while it was still frosty. I'm a firm believer in Darwinism's theory of "survival of the fittest." All my vegetables are raised with tough love!

Good intentions to re-build the raised beds have fallen by the wayside and I'm making due with what I have.

For two weeks, in preparation for planting, I brought in bags of compost to add to the bed, removed the huge amount of redwood roots that have sought out the easy pickings of water and nutrients in the beds and turned the soil. And finally, assembled a variety of structures to hold the future bounty. The effort felt like a sort of tinker toys for adults. Then we planted seeds & transplanted starts from a neighbor.

Here's a list of what I'm growing this year:

Howden Pumpkins
Oregon Sugar Pod Snow Peas
Little Finger Baby Carrots
Cherry Belle Radishes
Yellow Crookneck Squash
Green, Yellow and Purple string beans
Straight Eight Slicing Cucumbers
Genovese Italian Basil
Canteloupe from a neighbor
3 varieties of Tomatoes (Big Boy, and two unknowns) from a neighbor
An unknown pepper from same neighbor
Salad Bowl Mix of Leaf Lettuce
Bean plant that Megan is sure will take us to the Giant (thanks Miss Janie!)
Random Sunflower seeds

The radishes are ready to be harvested and the lettuce should be big enough in a week or so! Everything seems to have sprouted and I lost nothing to the late frosts we had!

April 21, 2009
3 weeks

May 6, 2009
5 weeks
(unsure why picture is sideways...)

Plant of the week...

So I'm pretty much a plant-a-holic. I don't even think there is a twelve step program for people like me. I will purchase plants at the nursery and then wander around my yard looking for a place to put it. You can tell us from the regular gardeners, because there's usually a place in the garden that looks more like a nursery -- full of little pots of plants waiting for a home!

Here's a nifty plant that you might like to find a home for in your garden.

Common Name: Wallflower
Botanical Name: Erysimum

Sunset Zones: 4-9; 14-24
Full Sun to Light Shade
Water needs vary, but tend to require less water
Bloom time: Early Spring through Summer/Fall

Height: 3'
Width: 4'

You will find "Bowles Mauve" - the purple variety, "Lemon Zest" - the yellow one shown. There is also an orange-y colored one too. These shrubs give you that "pop of color" in your garden.

Erysimum look great in a perennial garden, especially if you have low growing plants in front of it. That's because they tend to get leggy after awhile. Deadhead the flowers once they stop blooming to clean up their look.

Don't make a long-term commitment to these plants. They'll only survive a few years in your garden before you'll want to replace them.

What's eating you...

Winged and wingless aphids. The white flecks are the
skins from aphids that molted.

I don't know about your little piece of the world, but my little garden is now a thriving metropolis of aphids. They started appearing about a month or two ago and now are all over the place.

Believe it or not, there are quite a few different types and colors of aphids. They can be green, red, brown, yellow or black in color. Most of them are wingless, but they do sometimes have wings so they can fly to a different host plant if food becomes scarce.

As far as damage is concerned, aphids generally not too destructive. They can in large numbers, stunt your plant's growth and curl or yellow the leaves. I believe the worst thing is that aphids secrete a honeydew while they are feeding which is a clear sticky residue. The honeydew attracts ants and can be a host for 'black sooty mold'. Personally, I think my plants look better without ants or 'black sooty mold' all over them.

The easiest and least expensive way to remove aphids from your plant is to aim the garden hose at them. As I mentioned, most of them don't have wings, so they fall off the plant and can't get back up. If your aphids favorite food is your newly emerging rose buds, make sure you hose the plant in the morning so it has time to dry. You don't want to trade an aphid problem for a mildew or black spot problem!

If you have a mildew or black spot problem already or you don't want to use the hose, here's another solution. Your local garden center will have 'insecticidal soap'. These will contain animal fats and/or plant oils which will suffocate the aphids. There are several brands available, the store staff will be able to tell you which brand they carry.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm heading out to garden with my hose!

Have a cup of tea and kill weeds at the same time...

One of my instructors in the Master Gardener program once mentioned that she couldn't understand why a neighbor would spend all day meticulously picking weeds out of their walkway when they could pour boiling water over them. Seeing how I'm stubborn, I've been sticking to the "sit on the ground and pull weeds from the paver" methodology. Occasionally, I use Roundup on the stubborn ones, which causes me a little bit of guilt.

So yesterday, I decided to try the boiling water method -- seeing how it's Earth Day and all. And being the researcher that I am, I documented the experiment. I used my tea kettle to boil the water and then carefully poured the water on the weeds, making sure to cover all the leaves.

Weeds before (lft - oxalis, rt - spotted spurge)

2 minutes after boiling water applied

Weeds 24 hours later

Last thoughts on this method...

It certainly works well enough to be added to my "weed removal tool kit." I will still pull the winter grass because I want to keep the reseeding to a minimum. I'm not sure it'll work on all weeds, it didn't seem to have any effect on the birch seedlings. I'll have to keep trying on different types. I'll definitely use it where I'm concerned about drift from using Roundup. Remember, the hot water will kill any living organism, so it's best used for weeds in pavement cracks and not in a vegetable garden (for instance). And do I have to remind you to wear closed toed shoes while pouring hot water on the ground?!!

Soldier On, Soldier Beetle...

Have you seen this guy in your garden yet? If so, count yourself lucky and step away from the bug spray!

This is a Soldier Beetle and it's one of the beneficial bugs in your garden. Their cuisine of choice in adulthood are aphids (which by judging by my yard are quite plentiful right now) and pollen/nectar. Despite their appearance, they don't bite, sting or pinch and my girls love to catch them.

If you would like more information about these insects, check out this link:

http://ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/NE/soldier_beetles.html

If I could find them, I'd buy them...

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Copia Wine Center in Napa. In a nutshell, this really cool facility was dedicated to good wine and gardening! Unfortunately, it's been a casualty of the current economy. They hope to reopen one day, and if they do, I highly recommend a visit -- especially if you like to eat and drink wine!

So, while touring the extensive gardens, I spied these red ceramic balls tucked into the planting beds. I like the clean lines and the way you can bring art and color into your garden in an unusual way. Unfortunately, beautiful red ceramic balls aren't standard fare at the local garden center. One day I'll stumble across them and I won't think twice about hauling them home in the back seat of my car!

Yearning for Late Winter Flowers

One of my favorite bedding plants is called 'Candytuft' (Iberis). Two of the most common varieties are 'Snowflake' and 'Purity'. It is a low growing, evergreen shrub with bright white flowers from late Winter to Summer. It can reseed, so I recommend shearing off the spent flowers in the Fall. However, it hasn't been invasive in my Zone 14 yard.

The particulars:

Full Sun to Part Shade

Regular Water

Sunset Zones 1-24

Snowflake is 4-12 inches tall and 1.5 to 3 feet wide. It has broader, more leathery leaves; larger flowers in larger clusters on shorter stems.

Purity is 6-12 inches tall as well as wide. It's more compact than Snowflake.

Save your money and skip the 1 gallon cans -- the 4" pots establish themselves really quickly and are half the price. They should be appearing at your local nursery right now.

Got Scale?

To me, one of the summer's peskiest pests is scale. This insect has many different varieties which seem to attack many different species of plants. One plant in my Northern California yard that seems to have a perennial problem with scale are my Birch trees (Betula; B. pendula).

Scale will produce a sticky substance called "honeydew" when they feed on your plants, which in turn invite ants and sooty mold into your garden. While I don't necessarily have a problem with ants in the ground, I draw the line at having them crawl all over my trees. Nature provides lady bugs and parasitic wasps to help take care of the problem, but sometime the scale population becomes overwhelming. However, now's the time for you to provide a little extra help.

Horticultural oils are an effective way to control certain pests in your yard. They are less harmful to the beneficial bugs in your yard then a traditional pesticide. And they work well on the more stationary pests such as scale. The best time to use horticultural oil against scale is right when the baby scale hatches and begin to craw up the tree. At this time their shells are soft and the oil will do a good job in suffocating them. You can apply tape to the tree to try and catch the scale to see if it's active, or you can use 'bud break' as a sign as it's time to spray. I use 'bud break'.


I just noticed that one of my birch trees is just starting to leaf out. It's in the 'bud break' stage and now's the perfect time to use a relatively safe method to control the outbreak of scale. I've attached a picture of what 'bud break' looks like.

You can find a horticultural oil in any home and garden center. Make sure you read the label so that you get the one that kills scale AND make sure you follow all the application rules. The adage of "If a little is good, then a lot is better" DOES NOT apply to using any type of pesticides.