The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

Garage Sale Plants

Anyone one who knows me knows I’m a garage sale freak.

It starts Friday morning. I walk outside at the crack of dawn and get the paper. Or I make my dog Boomer get the paper—which she is happy to do for a Scooby snack.

I grab it and immediately turn to the ‘garage sale’ section. I generally look for sales located near my house because gas is now hovering around $4.80/gallon. Sometimes they’re on Friday, but mostly they are on Saturday.

Last Saturday I visited a garage sale and met a wonderful English couple. They’d just sold their house and were moving to the UK to retire. I caught a glimpse into their courtyard and I noticed some lovely potted plants. I hadn’t found anything that suited me at the sale so I started to walk to my car when something dawned on me. What will they do with all those potted plants when they go back to England? So I turned around and asked. The wife really didn’t know what to say because I don’t think she had given it much thought.

I gave her my phone number and told her to call me if she decided to sell them. Her husband Ian called me a few days later and said that they indeed had some plants they wanted to sell. This included a green house full of orchids. We made a date to view the plants that he wanted to sell.

My husband and I showed up at Ian’s house on Saturday and he pointed out various plants that he was willing to part with. What I found very endearing about this man was his relationship with his plants. He was spoke about them so fondly, especially the orchids. He knew every, well most every Latin name and growth habit and how they reproduce, the subtleties of color of each bloom, and when and how often they spiked.

Can You Please Help Genie Help Farmers?

I woke up, a couple of mornings ago, to the sound of the alarm on my computer’s battery backup system, telling me that our power was off. It was 4:30 in the morning. The windows were open and soon I could smell smoke. A few minutes later I could hear the CDF helicopters in the air above our house. The power off, the smell of smoke, the sound of helicopters…uh oh. I had just undergone oral surgery and even in my Vicodin-induced stupor I knew that all this added up to something bad.

I nudged my husband into consciousness, and used my throbbing tooth as an excuse to stay in bed. Being the wonderful husband he is, he got up; got in is car and drove down the hill to see if we should start packing up valuables.

We were lucky. A tree had fallen over onto some power lines, which sparked a brush fire. The brush fire just happened to start directly across the street from the California Department of Forestry fire station, fortunate for us. They put it out quickly and our power was restored 12 hours later.

There are fires in our hills once again. There are 1400 burning in the state of California at this moment. There also have been floods in Iowa. Natural disasters on both ends of the spectrum, both destructive, both changing lives forever.

The one thing they have in common is that they both bring people together.

Genie, of the Inadvertent Gardener, has asked me to put the word out about the farmers In Iowa. As you have probably heard, the 500-year flood has done major damage to Iowa and the land along parts of the Mississippi river. Some of the people affected are the small farm farmers, the people that you buy food from at the farmer’s market.

Genie wants us to help these people. For more information on what you can do to help please visit her at The Inadvertent Gardener.

Those Damned Squirrels

This is one of my favorite Sex and the City quotes, my favorite thing to say about squirrels—also a one-liner I have left as a comment on many other blogs:

“Squirrels are just rats in cuter outfits.”

I did something today that I promised myself I would never do.
I slammed on my brakes while traveling at 40 MPH for a damned squirrel. What was I thinking?

I was on the way to the hospital to visit a friend who had just had surgery. I had made her a pot of succulents in a white enamel bucket. I put a sparkly blue ribbon on it because it’s for her beach house and most of the stuff in her beach house is, you guessed it blue and white.

My eight-year-old son sat in the back seat playing with a gallon bucket of Legos while I drove with a throbbing toothache.

I was nearing the freeway onramp when the stupid bushy-tailed rodent ran in front of my car. I was on a country road along a reservoir, there were no cars in front of me and there were no cars in back of me and the damn thing waited until I was right there to run at my car.

It was almost like he was playing chicken with me or maybe truth or dare with his delinquent squirrel friends.

At any rate I stupidly slammed on my breaks sending my son’s bucket of Legos flying into every crack and crevasse of my Volvo.

After extracting Legos from under my gas pedal and recovering from my squirrel coronary, I pulled into the hospital parking lot.
I walked around to the back of my car and popped the hatch to retrieve my cute homemade succulent bucket.

Instead what I found was an empty bucket, a lot of potting soil, a soiled ribbon and several squashed succulent offsets.

Those damned squirrels.

Stumble It!

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

O.K., so it’s not yellow and it’s not made out of bricks but my kids love to sing that Wizard of Oz song when they skip around the path of my spiral garden.

The latest update of my spiral garden is that it now has both a path and plants. I had to get it done fast so I could plant and not miss too much of our California sun.  Even though it is currently growing tomatoes, tomatillos, and cantaloupes, my spiral garden has neither a watering system nor a proper path.

I know I did it backwards, but that’s the way it is.

Green Thumb Sunday

Bird of Paradise

It makes my yard look like paradise.

Ninety Plants for the Price of Three.

Last year on August 14, I told you How to buy one plant—and get 26 FREE! or How to get 27 plants for $3.59.

Last year Sempervivum tectorum 'Emerald Empress was my fertile succulent of choice.
 
This year it’s different, well not really different, just more of the same.
I bought Sempervivum tectorum ‘Red Rubin’ and Sempervivum ‘Jade Rose’ and something else I lost the tag to. Each one has about 30 offsets, so ninety plants in total. The only difference this time was the price. This time each pregnant plant was $4.50, an over 10 percent increase, not as much as gas prices. But you still get ninety plants for $13.50. 

One of my jobs as a garden blogger is to give you tips and information. Let’s see how this buy 27 plants for $3.59 actually worked. Here is the plant I divided last year.

Here are some more.

Oh, and here are some more

and I still have some left over.

Gardener’s Anonymous has gives this tip our seal of approval.

Stumble It!

Nigella in the Santa Cruz Mountains

This Memorial Day picture of my garden is dedicated to all the people who lost their homes and property in the still-burning summit fire here in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California.

This picture is also dedicated to all the brave firefighters who are risking their lives to save the lives and dreams of my neighbors and friends here in these beautiful hills.

Clean Death for White Flies

 Remember when your mom was always bugging you to wash and telling you that you could never be too clean? Well, it's not the same for white flies. Once again Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap puts white flies in their place. And although I don’t know exactly where the white fly’s place is, I know for sure that their place is not in my plants.

I replanted my front planter boxes with yellow Transvaal daisies, sage, and variegated bacopa.

I spoke to my friend Tali and her mom the other day. They’re from South Africa. I mentioned to Tali’s mom that the Transvaal daisy is from South Africa. She told me that she knew this and that it was from the Transvaal region, hence the name.

I also planted sage in the window box because my husband loves sage so much, we are constantly ravaging our sage plants for cooking, so I am always planting new ones.

The variegated bacopa was already in the planter. It looks good trailing down and it is really happy in the boxes.

So there they were, the three components of my planter boxes. I happily planted them and for the first three weeks they were great.

Greenthumb Sunday

Heatwave

Gardener Blogger's Bloom Day, May 15, 2008

I love this time of year.
It’s May, it’s May; the lusty month of May.
O.K., who knows what movie and what song those lyrics are from?
As usual I am not listing plant names.
I just took pictures and boy, are my fingers tired.
Sheesh, half the pictures I took were out of focus and I didn’t get half the fleurs in my jardin, but here they are.
There are so many of them.
Carol of May Dreams Gardens is the genius behind Gardener’s Bloggers’ Bloom Day.

Columbine gone wild.