earth day 2010

Our sign at Earth Day

Happy Earth Day everyone!

Last week­end I helped out with the local native plant society’s infor­ma­tion table at San Diego’s Earth Day cel­e­bra­tions, adver­tised as “the largest free annual envi­ron­men­tal fair in the world.” Imag­ine that, in sleepy lit­tle con­ser­v­a­tive San Diego.

Our booth

Some of the plants we had for sale at the table. We ended up not push­ing them too hard since a heavy gal­lon pot seemed to be more than most peo­ple wanted to carry around with them on a warm day with thou­sands of peo­ple crowded around. Seeds were and eas­ier sell.


Some of the crowd at Earth Day


This exhibit was encour­ag­ing peo­ple to grow more of their own food. The cutouts for kids to poke their head through assured some atten­tion from the younger crowd. Not all the kids looked at the exhibit, but a lot did.

There are always dis­plays of elec­tric car conversions…

…but with elec­tric cars start­ing to come on line, they’re less of a draw than before. But peo­ple seemed really inter­ested in the elec­tric scoot­ers next door.

It’s always a wide mix of things that you’ll find in a large environmental-themed gath­er­ing, from con­ser­va­tion orga­ni­za­tions to green-technology ven­dors to the ubiq­ui­tous booth sell­ing ket­tle corn. What ket­tle corn has to do with sus­tain­able liv­ing I have no idea, but it did keep some of the peo­ple fed and happy.

And it’s always a broad sam­pling of peo­ple who attend these fairs. Of the peo­ple who stopped by our table, there was the Euro­pean fam­ily that was stranded due to Iceland’s Eyjaf­jal­la­joekull vol­cano, plenty of peo­ple inter­ested in to work of the plant soci­ety, and even more peo­ple who were in the process of replac­ing their land­scap­ing with less water-intensive plants.

I enjoy talk­ing plants–any sur­prise since I do a gar­den blog? Help­ing to get the word out about the value of native plants, in the wilds or around the home, was extra-cool.

Some of the plant­i­ngs at Bal­boa Park’s Alcazar Garden

But it was nice to escape the crowds for a few min­utes and just look at some plants. Our booth was adja­cent to Bal­boa Park’s Alcazar Gar­den. The grounds­peo­ple are con­stantly chang­ing the look of the gar­den. Today it fea­tured flow­er­ing blocks of red snap­drag­ons and laven­der. It’s not a com­bi­na­tion I’d have come up with, but I think I like it. Of course I’m way too curi­ous about plants–and prob­a­bly way too ADD–to limit myself to two gar­den plants.

A detail of the pair­ing of snap­drag­ons and lavender.



Even with grand dis­plays like this near the native plant society’s table, we had a nearly con­stant flow of people–a sure sign that peo­ple are think­ing about dif­fer­ent kinds of plea­sures for their gar­dens. The times they are a-changin’.

April 22 2010 | Categories: gardening | Tags: • • • • | 2 Comments »

our front porch project

We began this project to redo our front porch sur­round last year. It’s not totally fin­ished, but it’s at a point I thought I’d share it with you.

The house orig­i­nally came with an enclo­sure around the lit­tle front porch/patio area that made it feel like you were behind bars, doing time for a crime you didn’t com­mit. We took a saw to the orig­i­nal porch cover and pro­vided some breath­ing space in it, but it always felt like an uncom­fort­able retro­fit. As the ter­mites dealt a ter­mi­nal blow to the first enclo­sure, I devel­oped this com­pletely reworked design, sort of a decon­structed patio cover, with open­ings through the front screen­ing panel, as well as an open, incom­plete canopy overhead.

porch-cover-front

This shows the shel­ter from the front of the house. The big win­dow cut into the screen lets you see out into the neigh­bor­hood, while not mak­ing you feel caged.

porch-cover-front-angled

Another front view, approach­ing from the side of the house…

porch-cover-from-above

And a last shot from the roof, show­ing the par­tial cov­er­ing over­head. Many of days are over­cast, and we really would pre­fer sun over shade most days. This reduced cover shel­ters the big main win­dow and front door, but lets more light in than an edge-to-edge cover.

The new wood needs to sea­son just a lit­tle bit before the final fin­ish­ing, and the old wood will need to be scrubbed to clean it a bit. But once the fin­ish is on, it should really look great. I’m pleased!

Main mate­ri­als: pressure-treated lum­ber for the sup­port struc­ture (painted black, to fade into the back­ground); ipe hard­wood lum­ber for the slats; exposed stain­less steel screws for fas­ten­ing the slats. The ipe hard­wood is poten­tially the least green com­po­nent of this project. Although my local lum­ber sup­plier is assur­ing its users that their ipe “is har­vested from pro­fes­sion­ally man­aged sus­tain­able forests,” some of my research is now say­ing that the claim just may be a crock of green­wash­ing. Ugh.

Choos­ing sus­tain­able mate­ri­als for an out­door project is chal­leng­ing. There are inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions you can wade into, includ­ing an intro­duc­tory Sus­tain­able Deck­ing Solu­tions post that’s worth a look. If you must use ipe, a sup­plier like Altru­Woods can sup­ply FSC cer­ti­fied lum­ber for a project, and might have been the bet­ter choice for get­ting mate­ri­als for this project.

What­ever you do, reduc­ing the amount of mate­ri­als you use is a begin­ning. The post above rec­om­mends that “[o]ne green build­ing idea with a lot of merit is treat­ing wood as a lux­ury. Trees help the planet the most when they’re alive and glob­ally, the acreage per for­est is dwin­dling rapidly. Using wood as a com­mon struc­tural and out­door fin­ish mate­r­ial is not a long-term sus­tain­able prac­tice.” Good advice.

How do you all approach try­ing to be greener in your out­door projects? I sup­pose one excel­lent alter­na­tive to a patio cover would have been to plant a tree. It’s a con­cept our grand­par­ents would have signed on to…

April 01 2009 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: • • • | 6 Comments »