Well that’s a long title! I started out with a question about storing dahlia tubers in our warm climate in SoCal and ended up with a whole mish-mash of advice. Here goes…

It’s time for fall garden care and clean up. If your garden is anything like mine, it has been totally fried by the drought and relentless summer heat. I vacillated between trying to get my very-thirsty plants enough water and feeling guilty about using precious water when we are experiencing the worst drought ever. Hearing the messages that we need to dramatically reduce our water use and that we can’t expect much if any rain this winter made me feel very self-indulgent about watering my garden. So I watered, then I didn’t, then I panicked when my plants started wilting, and watered again until I felt too guilty. Needless to say, my garden looks awful. My container plants suffered the worst – many will need to be replanted or, better yet, retired.

Clearly I need to completely rethink the whole garden and start replanting with drought-tolerant plants. That will be a slow process. This is not cheap as you all know!

And because no one really knows what the hell will happen next and solid advice for our new reality is slow in coming, that’s probably a good thing. It will be a little while before the experts figure out the best way for us to deal with it. In the meantime, pray, chant, dance for rain; whatever you think might work, but do it because things are looking really bad.

The best I can tell you right now is to cut back your damaged plants, but not too much. They don’t need more stress. Clean up fallen garden debris thoroughly and mulch like crazy – 3″ at least, keeping it a little bit away from the crown of your plants and at least 5″ away from tree trunks.

As for dahlia tubers, in our warm climate you can leave them in the ground to overwinter. After they have died back, cut the stems back to between 1″ and 4″, clean up the surrounding area, and put down 3″ of dry mulch. They will re-emerge in the spring when the ground warms up again. One caveat is if you live in an area near the canyons or in the foothills where you get more than a light dusting of frost. In that case read this post that Mary Beth did a while back about digging up and storing your dahlia tubers.

That’s it for now. I’m out to the garden to start triaging my sad-looking plants.

Irvine, California

Durango, Colorado

I mentioned the passing of our amazing Bea Grow a while ago. Her death last December was sad, but now comes the truly unbelievable news that her garden is to be dismantled bit by little bit. I was as shocked as I imagine most of my fellow gardeners were when I read the craigslist notice of the sale of the contents of her house and garden that my friend sent me.

Disposing of the house contents I can understand, but taking apart the garden? Say it isn’t so!

This is a beautiful and amazing space. Bea was a true master of her craft and the garden she created on a hot, Southern California hillside was a joy to see. There are surprises and delights wherever you look — an adorable beehive watering can nestled amongst the greenery, graceful fountains and pedestals, a bird house with Bea’s little wren friend flitting in and out, delicious color combinations, and, amazingly, a rhododendron. Who but Bea could grow a rhododendron in San Clemente?!

Bea was very generous about showing her garden and with gardening advice. You could ask her anything and she would tell you her formula. I was pleased to hear that she credited watering with a weak solution of fish emulsion (one of our favorite techniques) for her success with containers plantings.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Bea and her garden since I heard the news. The sale of the contents of her garden seems so wanton and disrespectful of a life’s work. Surely there’s some gardener out there who would love to buy Bea’s house and put his or her touch on this jewel.

I know all about change and impermanence and have meditated on this concept often. But this week I am struggling with it. Sometimes it’s just too soon.

And, no, I’m not going to the sale. As much as I’d love to have a small piece of Bea’s garden to put in mine, I don’t think I can bear to see the destruction of her work. The memory will be enough.

A Plan to Turn Brooklyn’s Unused Acres Green: This article is about a truly great idea that a group of Brooklyn gardeners called 596 Acres (the total of unused public acres in Brooklyn) had to find and cultivate all the unused lots that dot the city. LOVE this idea!

Humans aren’t the only ones making things grow. Apparently the male Bowerbird, who builds elaborate bowers to attract a mate, is responsible for a lot of new plant life.

Here’s a lovely tribute to a lovely woman and an amazing gardener, Bea Grow. I had the pleasure of meeting her and visiting her beautiful garden a couple of years ago. Bea died last December and is sorely missed by the O.C. gardening community.

Click the link for a round-up of all the O.C. garden tours. Should have gotten this link to you sooner for all the April tours, but there are plenty on the list for May. One I highly recommend is the Mary Lou Heard Memorial Garden Tour. It’s free (donations encouraged) and it’s fabulous — this weekend, May 5 – 6.

There will be a workshop on Edible Gardening in Small Spaces by my fellow Master Gardeners at the Orange County Great Park this Saturday. Here’s the description: Limited space? Master Gardeners are here to show you the ins and outs of getting a great yield from little places. Choose your favorite vegetables and learn how to make the most of them.

And finally a few words about a great event that I was a part of last weekend at the Orange County Great Park; the Artisan Food and Arts Festival. It was an all-day celebration of artisan food, sustainable gardening and art.

Chef Linda Elbert (of The Basement Table) and I collaborated on Seed to Plate: Cooking from the Garden, a presentation about growing your own vegetables and preparing them. I really enjoyed sharing organic growing tips with our audience.

Afterwards, I was able to spend time taking in the other chefs’ demos, the restaurant booths, sampling the food from the food trucks and seeing the art exhibits. Some of the art is still up. I highly recommend that you go see Tom Lamb’s exhibit of aerial photography called Marks on the Land: The View From Here.

The entire event was so much fun — kudos to my friend Maya Dunn and the Great Park staff for a fabulous job of pulling it off in grand style. Let’s hope that it comes back next year!

Saturday: The bees are coming today! To get ready for their arrival, I’m preparing their sugar syrup and making a homemade version of Honey B Healthy, a nourishing supplement that is added to the syrup.

I’ll be teaching my co-workers how to be beekeepers and they’ll be installing the bees on Sunday with my guidance. Ray built us some beautiful Top Bar Hives (Thanks, Ray!) which will be their new home. We are very excited!

We have, over the last couple of weeks in our (very little) spare time, been creating a bee and butterfly sanctuary. It’s in its beginning stages and will soon be filled with plants that all the local pollinators will want to come and visit. We are also adding a labyrinth that will be planted with medicinal herbs and a vegetable garden filled with heirloom vegetables. The hives will be nestled in this wonderful little spot we’ve created located in the Animas River Valley.  It’s coming together beautifully and I’ll be posting pictures of the hives and gardens soon.

Happy Spring everybody!

Recipe found on the Beekeepers of the Ozarks:

Honey B Healthy (generic)

• 5 cups of water
• 2 1/2 lbs of sugar
• 1/8 teaspoon lecithin granules (used as an emulsifier)
• 15 drops spearmint oil
• 15 drops lemongrass oil.
• 6 drops of thyme oil (optional)

Dissolve lecithin in 1/4 cup of water. This may take several hours. Bring water to a boil, remove from heat and stir in sugar until dissolved. Stir in lecithin until dissolved. Stir in essential oils until everything is evenly distributed. Cool before using.

I use 1 tablespoon per quart but I don’t use thyme in my mixture. One to two tablespoons per gallon works if using thyme oil.

Makes about 2 quarts.

Soil is so very important for growing veggies. Of course light, water and nutrition are key elements, but you can have all of those and still not be able to grow much in the way of vegetables if your soil is lousy.

My soil is compacted and low in organic matter, a result of building practices in developments such a mine. Builders come in and level the ground, bulldozing away the fertile topsoil. Add the fact that the soil in this area is full of heavy clay, which stops tiny little roots dead in their tracks, and you have very inhospitable veggie growing conditions.

The solution is to build raised beds that you can fill with beautiful, fertile soil and loads of compost. Which is what I did last week.

This project is pretty easy. In spite of having only the most basic woodworking skills, I had no problem getting good results. I started with plans, which I modified it to match my needs, that I found on Sunset Magazines website. Now some of you may laugh at how little mine is (4′ x 4′), but I have only one tiny spot that gets enough sun for growing anything but part-shade plants.

I decided on a smaller version than Sunset’s also because this is test run that I didn’t want to sink a lot of money into. If it works, I’ll get some of the eucalyptus trees that surround my yard trimmed or removed (Have you priced this kind of job lately? Yowzers!) and redo my landscape to accommodate larger beds. In the meantime, this project cost me about $90 and took about 4 hours. Here’s how I did it.

Materials

• One 16-foot long 2 x 12 cut into 4 equal pieces (ends up being a tad less than 4′ each due to the saw cut)
• One 8 foot long 2 x 4 cut into 4 16-inch pieces with some left over
• A box of 2 1/2″ decking screws – you’ll only need 12 of them though
• One roll of 1/4″ hardware cloth (I had to get a 3′ x 10′ roll — a 4′ x 10′ would have been better)
• Five 1 cu. ft. bags of organic topsoil
• Three 1.5 cu. ft. bags of organic planting compost (total topsoil + compost should be 9 – 10 cubic feet)
• 2 cups organic Tomato & Vegetable food
• One small Jack Russel Terrier, optional

I went to Lowe’s (wish there was a real lumber yard in the area) and bought top grade pine. You can use pine, redwood or cedar. The latter two will last a while longer but there are sustainability issues with the cedar. DO NOT BUY TREATED WOOD even if they say it’s the new, safe kind. I don’t believe any of it is food-safe and it’s certainly not organic.

When you are selecting the wood look down the length of the board to make sure it’s not warped. A tiny bit bowing or twisting is ok, but it should be very, very slight. Also eliminate any lumber that has more than very minor splits on the ends or lots of knots.

Lowe’s will cut any lumber you buy to your measurements for no additional charge — good thing because these boards would never have fit into my car, nor could I have managed the larger piece by myself.

Some of the changes I made to the original plans were: I used 12″ lumber for the sides because I couldn’t see any reason to use two 6″ boards as they did in the Sunset plans. And I switched out their recommended 4″ x 4″ corner posts for 2″ x 4″ because my bed is smaller and I thought it wouldn’t compromise the sturdiness factor — besides it saved a little $$. I didn’t add the piping for the row cover hoops because it never gets that cold here, however my resident bird population may cause me to regret not being able to float some bird netting.

Tools

• Electric or battery-powered drill, plus a screw driver bit and a drill bit that is slightly smaller in diameter than the decking screws
• Carpenter’s square
• Metal snips or shears

I assembled the bed upside down right where I was going to place it. In retrospect this was probably a mistake that accounted for my not getting the box perfectly squared. So I recommend assembling it on a flat surface like your patio, deck or garage. I did the whole thing myself, but if you can recruit a helper (one with opposable thumbs) so much the better.

1. Lay down two of the 2 x 4s and place one 2 x 12 on top of them so they are right angles, lining up the 2 x 4s at opposite edges.
2. Drill pilot holes to prevent splitting the wood. Use 3 decking screws for each end. Screw through the 2 x 12 into the 2 x 4s.
3. Repeat for one more side. You should have two sides with legs and 2 sides without. (As you can see I switched out my little battery-powered drill which didn’t have enough torque for my electric drill)
4. Attach one plain board to one board with legs, making sure that the corner is square and the legs face inside the box. Be sure you place the screws so they go into the wood and not the gap between the side and the leg.
5. Attach the second legged board to the opposite side.
6. Attach the final side.
7. Next you should try to get the site as close to level as you can. 
8. Then turn the bed right side up and mark the soil where the legs will go.
9. Dig holes four inches deep for the legs.
10. Place the legs in the holes and fill them in tamping the dirt around the legs.
11. If there are slight gaps under the sides, take some dirt and mound it along the sides to fill them.
12. Cut the hardware cloth to fit and lay it on the bottom. This is important if you live in an area with moles and gophers.
13. Dump the soil and compost in and mix thoroughly using the shovel and the cultivator. Soil should come to within 3 inches of the top.
14. Add the organic fertilizer and mix that into the top 4 -6 inches.
15. Using the bow rake, level the soil
16. Gently spray water to moisten soil.

Now you’re ready to plant!

The Cost of a Green Lawn. There’s a new law in New Jersey limiting the amount of fertilizer that homeowners and landscapers can use on lawns. The law was passed after environmental activists warned that state legislators that “Barnegat Bay, the state’s largest enclosed estuary, was dying, in part because of the pollution caused by runoff lawn fertilizer as it washed into the sewer system. Such overstimulation has caused an increase in algae and jellyfish in the bay, and a decrease in sea grass, fish and shellfish.”

People, do we need our green lawns so much that we poison the waterways and kill everything that lives in them? Really?

So what should you do about it, wherever you are? At the very least FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS ON THE PACKAGE. A lot of pollution comes from people not applying the recommended amount of fertilizer, pesticide, etc. Use only the recommended amount; more is not better. Better yet, reduce the amount of lawn to the bare minimum (which might be none!), use only organic products, and learn to live with a few weeds.

In an interesting speech William Rosenzweig, accepting the Oslo Business for Peace Award, talks about the lessons he learns from his garden and how he applies them to business. I especially like this quote: “In essence, the gardener’s work is a life of care. We cultivate abundance from scarce resources. We nurture, encourage, fertilize – and prune when necessary – while being respectful of the true and wild nature of all things.”

Love that!

Come back tomorrow for a new Tuesday’s Tips on building a raised garden bed.

A couple of weeks ago I spent a relaxing, fun afternoon creating a few succulent terrariums for myself and for birthday gifts. It’s super easy and they look really beautiful.

You’ll need the following:

• Succulent plants or cuttings. Mix and match different leaf shapes and textures.
• Containers
• Small stones — whatever you like. I used small polished river stones.
• Charcoal or activated carbon
• Succulent soil — sometimes called succulent and cactus soil. Or you can use regular potting soil plus a handful of sand. Just make sure the sand is meant for plants.
• Small shells, rocks or other interesting accent pieces to finish your design.

Step 1: Buy or make cuttings of the succulents you want to plant in your terrariums. If you are using cuttings, it’s best to let them “cure” by leaving the cut ends exposed to the air so they scab over. (I have to confess that I sometimes don’t wait and haven’t noticed any difference, but I’ve read that the cuttings can rot if you don’t let them “cure.”)

Step 2: Beg, borrow or buy glass containers. Vases, mason jars or any other wide-mouthed container will do. Clean throughly with a mixture of 1 quart warm water and 1 tablespoon white vinegar. Dry thoroughly.

Step 3: Very carefully place an inch or two of small stones in the bottom of the container. You can use more if you want the plants to be higher up in the container as I did in the tall cylinder pictured below.

Step 4: Add a 1/2 inch layer of charcoal.

Step 5: Add 2 to 3 inches of soil; more if the rootball of your plant is large.

Step 6: Arrange and plant the succulents.

Step 7: If you like you can add a layer of sand or stones on top of the soil.

Step 8: Add any accent pieces that please your eye.

Step 9: Wipe stray soil from sides with a damp paper towel. Use a straw to gently blow away any soil or sand from leaves.

Step 10: Very carefully water your new terrarium. Not too much! Stop when you see a water begin to accumulate at the bottom of the container.

That’s it! Make sure your terrarium gets partial sun (about 4 hours a day minimum) and don’t water too much or too often — about every week to ten days.

This is the one I made for my friend’s birthday gift. I found an orange shell, her favorite color, in my collection and added it to the arrangement.

I love this tall cylinder and the red-orange tipped leaves. I also planted some low pots with the extra cuttings I had.

Sometimes simple is best. For this small round container one rosette was all that was needed.

Here’s another creative idea. I gave my daughter some cuttings and she planted them in this old cream cheese box. It looks great!

Have fun!!!

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