Grow Your Own Food

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Grow Your Own Food

This year more people than ever seem ready to start growing at least some of their own food in their gardens or on their decks and balconies. The weather is rarely cold enough to stop all plants from growing, so we can harvest food from our gardens all year round, even in December and January. On the other hand, it doesn't ever get warm enough for many crops which other regions can grow in the summer time, especially that hallmark of backyard gardening, the tomato.

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Solstice Musing on Stewardship

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Solstice Musing on Stewardship

Gardens like GFE nourish people who are hungry. I'm not talking about dinner, but about our soul hungers; for the wild, for rich living dirt, for crazy beauty. Our culture restricts us more and more to two dimensions ("sent from my iPad"), but a garden can expand us back into ourselves, the smell of crushed thyme, the bright cries of a flock of bushtits in the butterfly bush, the rhythm of lifting and turning living soil.

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To Prune or Not to Prune, That Is the Question

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To Prune or Not to Prune, That Is the Question

During the summer months, this had been a butterfly garden, full of dozens of different pollinators. Now, with late fall turning into winter, it was time to cut back and shape the garden for next year's pleasure. One of the Verbenas needed to be moved out from under the shade thrown by a huge Salvia karwinskii. There was never a better day for a sharp pair of pruners.

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Fall Weed Strategies

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Fall Weed Strategies

The new growing season also means an abundance of seedlings in the garden soil. In well-tended old gardens, many or most of these seedlings will be desirable plants, cool season annuals emerging from last year’s seeds. But just as reliable are the weedy seeds. Good gardening calls for an organized strategy to combat the new weed season.

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Late Summer Gardens, Part II

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Late Summer Gardens, Part II

Last month, this column covered some tips on design and care of the late summer garden. A month later and we are still in the same late summer weather pattern, with mostly foggy days on the western side of the city, dry soils, and cool temperatures. As each week of late summer passes, the summer-dry garden looks more and more disheveled and dreary, unless the gardener follows a few simple rules.

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Late Summer Gardens, Part I

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Late Summer Gardens, Part I

For summer dry gardens, August begins to separate the fabulous gardens from the rest. It's relatively easy to make a garden gorgeous in the late winter, spring, and early summer. There are a multitude of plants to choose from, all of which thrive in the cool moist soils and sunny warm days between rains. But by August, our foggy season is well advanced, and plants have already suffered through weeks of cool moist air and warm dry soil.

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An Outdoor Education

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An Outdoor Education

Late June and early July means Summer Sprouts is blooming in the garden. The Summer Sprouts are high school and middle school youth who come to learn outdoors for three weeks of garden-based programs, and they are blooming brightly. The youth are learning leadership skills, biking, building compost piles, and eating huge salads and kale dishes from our veggie beds. They are making new friends, and learning about plant care.

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Yikes!

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Yikes!

For me, every year there’s a moment in May when the garden is suddenly just too much. All the irrigation has to be troubleshot and turned on after winter. All the weeds are as high as an elephant’s eye. All the winter crops suddenly bolt so all the vegetable beds have to be turned over and planted for summer. All the spring blooming ornamentals need deadheading, while the cool season annuals are already finished and need to be composted. Yikes!

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March Showers Bring April Flowers

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March Showers Bring April Flowers

From now through July the beautiful and vigorous native plants in our native garden will bloom in turn. This is their active season, with water in the soil from winter rains, and warm days ahead. By July, the soils are dry and the fogs roll in. Our native garden quiets down, because the dry late summer months are the dormant time for California native plants.

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A Satisfying Harvest

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A Satisfying Harvest

Maybe the best kept secret at GFE is our Harvest Program. Every Saturday morning, a small band of dedicated volunteers harvests fruits and vegetables from all over the garden, makes a beautiful bouquet and an herb bundle, and packs everything into a spicy fragrant box of freshness. So far, we have delivered over 400 lbs. of food through this program. 

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New Look for the Water-Wise Garden

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New Look for the Water-Wise Garden

As environmentally responsible gardeners, one of the most important advocacies we can engage in is to create change in the predominant garden aesthetic. The thirsty lawns, clipped hedges, Japanese maples, rhododendrons, roses and annual beds which defined a beautiful California garden since the dam-building era cannot define beauty for the future.

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