Barefoot Gardening

Days like this make me sad that I had to drop out of the Master Gardener Program. (No regret, as I wouldn’t have been able to balance it with working at a startup, but it’s still sad that I can’t participate.) The yearly Spring Garden Market in San Jose is their biggest fund raiser, and they make SO many different varieties of veggies available. I also attended a few of the garden talks on things, such as growing and using stevia. I didn’t purchase any stevia, but I was curious how a home grower can process it.

The website says there were 106 varieties of peppers available – I bought 6. Sweet Carmen, Sweet Marconi Rosso, Sweet Apple, Chocolate Beauty Bell, Sweet Red Belgian, and Holy Mole (a type of pasilla pepper, to make mole sauce from, of course). Notice a trend? I love eating sweet peppers straight from the vine; sweet bells sliced up are pretty much my favorite snack, sometimes plain or with hummus. Also, the Chocolate Beauties will be great for stuffing.

I don’t usually eat tomatoes, due to a mild allergy to them when they’re raw, but I buckled and bought a Green Zebra, and Principe Borghese.  I seem to be the only gardener I know with no tomato growing experience. The Borghese are going to be dried, as that is what they’re known for. I looove sun dried tomatoes on pizza. Apparently Alice Waters loves the Green Zebras.

I also picked up a few more ever-bearing strawberries to fill some holes in my ‘growin bags‘. Not only were the Master Gardeners selling plants, but they had local vendors there as well. I picked up some local honeycomb on my way out. When all was said and done, I spent less than the $35 in cash that I walked in with. This shows incredibly restraint on my part, as garden events are basically a candy store for me.

Welcome back! I moved hosts, rather suddenly due to unforeseen circumstances, so you’ll notice some dust around here during construction. I’m aware that the images are broken, and my theme is different. Keep checking in, I’ll be posting about this past weekend’s San Francisco Garden and Flower Show soon.

Horticulture magazine’s newsletter shared some great looking windowbox recipes today. Mine is in what I like to call purgatory, between winter and summer, and full of random annuals filled in around what’s left from last season. My favorite is the first one, ‘Dark Drama’, but you would have to keep some of those plants trimmed pretty well back to keep from crowding out others. For instance, fuchsia typically gets to be around 3 feet tall and wide, though I can’t find any online references to the variety ‘giant black’.

However, those plants would tie in to the hanging basket I am going to set up, whose recipe came from ‘Hanging Basket #1″ on a brochure from the Portland Nursery for shaded hanging baskets - Sweet potato vine, fucshia, and impatiens.

And for any plants you can’t find locally, Apartment Therapy did a piece this week on the best mail-order sites for plants. I’m partial to Logees, Park Seed, and Gurney’s for the sake of variety. And that’s mainly if I can’t find what I need locally, since adding carbon to the world defeats part of gardening.

In addition, for you seed-savers out there, another blogger I follow did a bit on seed faqs with a handy chart for how long seeds will last.

If nothing else, I can finally close those tabs on my browser, now that I have shared them with the world. I hope they’re as useful to you as I found them.

Another garden blog I follow, StudioG, points to an article in the LA Times suggesting that CalTech students spend lengthy amounts of time staring at Romanesco cauliflower at the Pasadena farmers market because of it’s fractal nature. Which is funny because I often admire my Romanesco on the way out the door in the mornings. I kind of don’t want to eat it, it’s so pretty. I usually put mustard on my cauliflower (I know, weird right?) but I’ll be eating this plain and nicely roasted to fully appreciate it.

Did you know that cauliflower and broccoli are simply different forms of the same species? I didn’t, but that explains why I keep mistakenly referring to the Romanesco as a broccoli.

I love the idea of seed bombs. I’ve though about putting some in the cracks in the driveway of my apartment complex, but all the car fumes would probably kill anything that tried to survive, and therefore couldn’t justify buying these or these. However, the author of my most recent gardening book purchase just posted her recipe for seed bombs with edibles, and I love that she chose edibles instead of just wildflowers. Granted, that’s not something you’d put in a driveway, but for something thrown in your backyard or an empty lot? Clever!

Here’s the book in question…

It’s the end of January and my winter veggies are finally looking *really* good. Not quite time to harvest them all, but now I’m excited with the anticipation. Please pardon the formatting issues below, WordPress is not being my friend today.

My sugar snap peas are finally producing like crazy. This variety was supposed to be bushy, but still needed supports. They also took a lot longer than the listed 62 days, as I planted them in September. The insects are already after them, so I’m about to harvest what’s already grown.

The earthbox has been great for my broccoli and cauliflower. I grew both regular broccoli and a cheddar cauliflower from seed. I found some Romanesco broccoli seedlings at my local nursery and decided I had to have just one. It satisfies my gardening habit *and* my geeky love of fractals. Currently, it’s about the same yellow color as the cheddar cauliflower, which will turn more orange because has a ton of beta carotene in it! Yay for Vitamin A.

Not quite a winter plant, but since NorCal has mild winter, my everbearing strawberries are producing a nice crop already. I can’t say enough good things about the “growin’ bags” i use, as it keeps them off the ground and away from pests, and is also a great space by going vertical. I was hip before vertical gardening was trendy You can buy the bags seperately as 4 hole or 10 hole, or with strawberries from Park Seed.

And since even a mild winter still brings the blahs, I added a few “annuals” to brighten up my windowbox. (Technically perennials but typical treated as annuals.) The celosia were done for, but I thought the salvia still had a little life left in them. So I added orange calendulas and red and yellow English primrose, both of which are prime bloom season right now. What you see in the middle is silver falls dichondra, supposedly an annual, but is still going strong from last year. This is one of my favorite cascading plants and it looks great in such a variety of containers.  I wouldn’t call this my best windowbox, but I was making due with what’s in season for a pop of color. I often feel stumped with what to do with my garden when it’s between winter and spring.

We finally determined why my mom kills every plant she owns, even air plants! My parents have a water softener. The high sodium content actually tricks plants into thinking they’ve taken up more water than they have and they die of thirst. There is a bypass spigot in the garage, so next time, we’ll fill up watering cans from there. I guess it turns out every brown thumb may have a cure!

I’ve been busy collecting little figures and other bits for terrarium gifts. I can’t help but want to share my gardening with everyone… tiny terrariums are a wonderful way to share succulent cuttings and tillandsia. Etsy is a great resource (the penguins are from seller SongandBranch), and I picked up some fun rocks at a vendor at the San Francisco Dickens Fair. I won’t show any finished terrariums here yet, because some of the recipients read this blog. But… here’s a sneak peek. Geodes look like little snowy caves in a winter scene and the right air plant can look like a tree between the caves.

Sorry for the lack of updates, folks. I broke my wrist last month and that put a crimp on gardening, and much typing.

First, some bad news, I had to withdraw from the Master Gardener Program due to an inability to balance it with my work schedule. Secondly, my Small Wonder Squash was producing several baby squashes when I accidentally killed the entire plant. It came down with Powdery Mildew and while trimming off affected leaves, I inadvertently snipped the base of the plant. I’m pretty heartbroken, as I’d grown it from seed and even hand pollinated some flowers.

Now some good news… it’s fall, and things are flowering! I love coming home from a long day at the office to my garden. My funky succulent container has a flowering lithop. Lithops are also known as ‘living stones’ but personally, I think many of them look like little brains. Except when they flower, because it’s this crazy looking daisy growing out of a brain. Here, take a look:

Also? The Birds of Paradise that I’ve had for 4 years has a flower spike for the first time. I have no idea what I’ve been doing wrong all this time, but I’m clearly doing something right!