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 »

controlled chaos

I often have trou­ble mix­ing orna­men­tals and veg­eta­bles together in a gar­den bed that’s sup­posed to be “for com­pany,” a bed that’s meant to be attrac­tive as well as con­tain­ing tasty-looking plants that you’d like to take to the din­ner table.

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red-and-blue-and-purple-2

Some parts of the gar­den where I’ve snuck veg­gies in with the other plants look a lit­tle chaotic, but here’s a patch that I really like the looks of. Ear­lier I showed part of this cor­ner that the bed­room win­dow over­looks. But new things are start­ing to bloom, and the col­ors are start­ing to really click for me.

When I was putting this bed together, I set myself the main rule of “noth­ing yel­low.” In decid­ing what veg­gies to place there, I just stuck to that orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple. (Okay, can you tell that I work in libraries and orga­nize infor­ma­tion dur­ing the week?)

This bed fea­tures sev­eral edi­bles: red-stemmed chard, orange-stemmed chard, Red Win­ter red Russ­ian kale, red beets, plus cat­mint for tea (and for the cat). The orna­men­tals include scar­let geum, pur­ple heliotrope, vio­let blue-eyed grass, the salmon-colored bulb Home­ria col­lina, two blue sages (Salvia sagit­tata and Salvia cacali­ae­fo­lia) plus a few other things not in bloom.

For sure, there’s a lot of red and blue and pur­ple going on here. But sev­eral vari­a­tions on green in the back­ground green do won­ders to pull together what might oth­er­wise be chaos.

I’m going to hate cut­ting any of these veg­gies for dinner…

April 04 2009 | Categories: my garden | Tags: • • • • • • • • | 9 Comments »

casual vegetable gardening

Some things I put in the ground exactly where I want them. Other things I put in once and let nature take care of the rest. Way back in the Pale­o­zoic era I’d bought some red romaine let­tuce plants. There were more than we could eat, and a few went to seed. They looked a lit­tle unkempt, but the lit­tle yel­low finches loved the seeds and made a ruckus in the yard as they fed on them.

After the next rains, tiny let­tuce plants began to sprout all over. The plants that were in rea­son­able spots I let grow, and the baby greens from them were as tasty as the red leaves were great to look at. I let a few of those go to seed again, and the cycle started all over. Here are a few plants from the cur­rent crop, pro­vid­ing a nice red coun­ter­point around a green rosemary:

lettuces.jpg

Veg­etable gar­dens so often seem to be dis­ci­plined, mil­i­tary spaces with their per­fectly aligned rows of exactly the same plant, one after another. Instead of that, why not plant the veg­gies like they’re an exten­sion of the gar­den? And why not let some of them go to seed and repop­u­late themselves?

March 09 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • | 5 Comments »