• California gardening - Flowers - Garden maintenance - Great plants - Our Garden

    Direct-sown winter flowers

    September 3, 2019 - By 

    Rather than just letting your flowerbed go dormant in the winter, consider this — here in northern California, we can grow some fantastic winter flowers. It just takes a little planning ahead and sowing while it’s still warm. And hey, I get the fact that you may having some of that end-of-summer garden fatigue (too many tomatoes and zucchini, anyone?), and you may not feel like starting all over with another planting season yet. I have some of that myself right now! But your future self — your middle-of-December self who eagerly awaits the seed catalogs and starts dreaming of…

  • California gardening - Featured - Flowers - Our Garden - Propagation

    Starting seeds, with a few tricks

    March 26, 2019 - By 

    We’ve been starting seeds for the past couple of weeks. Isn’t is exciting to watch them sprout and develop? I find myself checking on them five times a day or more, waiting for the surprise arrival when those first seedlings pop out of the soil. The paper towel-baggie trick One of the tricks I’ve used a lot with seed starting is by placing them between layers of moistened paper towels in a ziploc-type bag — take a look at this earlier post which has a lot of great details – I won’t repeat it all here. This year, I tried…

  • Featured - Flowers - Fruits & Veggies - Great plants - Info sources - Organic gardening - Pests

    Using flowers to attract beneficial insects

    February 23, 2018 - By 

    Here’s a great article from Fast Company about farmers in the UK testing the use of flowers to attract beneficial insects instead of using pesticides. They’re testing using new technology to make it easier to plant rows of flowers among the crops. This attracts beneficial insects, like parasitic wasps that eat aphids. Pretty cool! And it looks great in the fields, too. Farmscaping This practice has a name: farmscaping. It’s described in a nice, detailed piece by the Cooperative Extension Service. That got me thinking about how widespread this idea might be. Surely, organic farmers have been using strategies  like…

  • Featured - Flowers - Great plants - Our Garden - Shrubs

    We’ve moved to Camellia City!

    February 1, 2018 - By 

    After a few years, I’m starting to write about our garden again. And it’s a new garden! Last summer, we moved to Fair Oaks, a sweet, older suburb of Sacramento. This house is a little over 50 years old, a nice rambler in a solid neighborhood. We’re enjoying discovering its garden secrets as they unfold. And lately, it’s camellias! We have five different varieties, including one we just bought a few months ago (Camellia sasanqua ‘Yuletide’ in the fourth picture below). Of the established shrubs, they’re just starting to near their peak — one has been blooming since early December…

  • California gardening - Featured - Flowers - Our Garden - Shrubs - Weather

    Spring flowering shrubs at our California home

    February 27, 2015 - By 

    Spring always comes early to California, but it seems a bit earlier than usual this year. Up at 2,500 feet, the camellias don’t bloom as early as down in Sacramento, but ours are already on the waning end of bloom season. Here are a few sweet shots of them, plus the lovely forsythias. Both of these flowering shrubs are the wonderful early harbingers of spring every year.   It’s been a really unusual winter out here in the western states. We’ve all been warmer and much drier than normal. While we can appreciate the warm sunshine on our faces, we…

  • Featured - Flowers - Our Garden - Utah gardening - Weather

    Goodbye to the girls of summer

    September 27, 2014 - By 

    We’re experiencing our first major storm of fall this weekend. No snow is falling here at our Utah home, but I can see fleeting views of Lone Peak and Box Elder Peak through the clouds, each with a little crown of white at the very top. Soon, it will freeze down here, too, and we’ll let go of these beautiful blossoms and prepare for the long nights of winter. I’m not ready for that. I never am. I am a summer soul. So, here are some of our summer flowers. We’ve sure loved them this year!   So, why call…

  • Featured - Flowers - Great plants - Our Garden - Utah gardening

    Lots of new flowers this summer

    July 11, 2014 - By 

    The flowers I grew from seed have done pretty well so far, and I added a few extras to the mix. I love how gaillardia grandiflora will flower the first year from seed. As I mentioned in another post today (about Crimean lavatera), that is a rare trait for a perennial flower. I like the new purple wave petunias this year; last year’s variety was “silver” and they turned out too white. These babies are just coming into their strong growth season now, and I expect they’ll start capturing small animals soon. :)  We also found some great yellow lantanas…

  • Featured - Flowers - Great plants - Our Garden - Utah gardening

    The crisis in Crimea and our garden (yes, they’re related!)

    July 11, 2014 - By 

    I’ve blogged about this amazing flower before, and now I’m finally growing it at our new place. Lavatera tauricensis is a very uncommon perennial found in the mountains of Crimea. At some point, someone collected seeds and sold them to Thompson & Morgan, and I bought them way back in the 1990s. The flower’s name is actually somewhat disputed, but no one has suggested an alternative that I have seen. It is an unusual perennial — I’ve never seen it in anyone else’s garden or anywhere but online. One of the beauties of this plant is that it flowers the…