Succulent Gardens

Ten years ago we received a cactus and succulent garden as a housewarming gift from my Aunt Grace.  To me, it screamed old lady from the high desert, but to Art, it screamed cool and he became fascinated.  He started a collection of cactus and succulents that grew and moved with us to two homes.  When Taylor was born and then became mobile, I was able to talk him into to throwing away all of the cacti, many of which scared me just to look at.  Some towered 2 feet tall and had spikes at least an inch long.  He begrudgingly agreed, but he convinced me to let him keep his succulents.

I'm glad he did because I have now grown quite fond of them, with their pretty colors and textures and virtual hassle-free maintenance.  Bonus points that they are now considered tres-chic.  We are constantly collecting bits and pieces on our walks and when we visit nurseries.  Today we picked a tiny branch off of a pot in the Bloomingdale's courtyard.  You can stick the smallest nub, or sometimes even just a leaf into the tiniest amount of soil and months later you have a full blown succulent. 

We stick bits and pieces into pots we keep on the side of the house filled with cactus soil (a very important factor) and just let them go wild, and then when we have a nice collection we trim, prune and transplant into fresh new pots to make pretty arrangements.

Today we focused on filling up the large pots that sit on our front porch.  I've grown quite tired of replanting the pots every 2-3 months with fresh flowers.  Costly and time consuming.  I love the color that fresh flowers bring to the front of a house, but we have a lot going on in the next few months and I have a feeling that I am really going to crave and love nothing more than maintenance free.

By the way, the kids love the succulents way more than your average flower.  They find them absolutely fascinating, carefully comparing all their unique shapes, textures and colors.  They helped with most of the arranging and the design today.  The big pot on the top left in the picture below is the family pot.  The one to the right is the "boy" pot, or Sydney and Daddy's pot, and the pot on the bottom right is the "girl" pot, or Taylor and Mommy's pot.  Everything in this house lately has been very gender specific, even the potted plants.    

P.S. the little spiky tree-like succulent that I am pruning is from the original cactus garden we received from my Aunt ten years ago.  We have grown and transplanted bits and pieces of it into several pots and it just keeps living on.  I love that and think it is just amazing.

I'm linking up to Heather's Life Made Lovely Monday.  Did you see she has a new home?!?

Lani Can Suck It; OR How Our Garden Grows

One of the last items to check off of our Summer List was to plant tomatoes and lettuce in our little side planter area.  It's a good size planter, at least 4 ft. deep by 12 ft. long, and South facing so it gets lots of nice sun.  So I enlisted the hubs to tear out all of the agapanthus that was uselessly filling this spot and cleaned it up so it looked like this

I added about 4 bags of this

 We carefully plotted out our plants, and got to work

in less than two weeks I am overjoyed with our results.  Remember back in March when I was all pissy because we had lost our community garden plot when we moved?  Well eat your heart out mean old Lani, because looky what I have here, right outside my very own kitchen door!

I started at the left with some herbs including thyme, parsley, basil and sage.  The red stalk of flowers are Yarrow and are well known for repelling some bad insects and attracting ladybugs, which eat aphids.  I also planted a border of marigolds for color and for their tendency to also attract ladybugs.  I despise aphids, so  take whichever precautions I can to combat them.

Next to the herb garden are 1 zucchini plant (believe me, you only need 1 to feed a family) and 1 pumpkin plant.  Again, you only need 1 of these as well.

Of course we had to throw in some tomatoes, a beefsteak variety and yellow golden cherry type.  Taylor was drawn to the Japanese eggplant, so we threw in one of these as well.

I love peppers, so planted an unusual miniature chocolate bell pepper and a golden yellow bell.

And to round out any good garden, we had to have plenty of lettuce.

If you are new to gardening, I encourage you to give lettuce a try because it is almost fool proof.  I have never had a bad experience trying to grow lettuce and there is just something so "naturey" about going out and picking your own lettuce.  These pictures were taken 5 days ago and since then the lettuce you see above is all touching.  It's growing by leaps and bounds and, once I harvest this bounty, I can just plant some more all year round.  That's the beauty of lettuce!

This time around since I was getting such a late start, I did fill my garden entirely with starter plants, as opposed to using seeds.  There are things such as beets, lettuce, chard and squash that I usually have very good luck with when started from seeds, actually they seem to thrive even better.  I just didn't want to risk their growth being stunted if we should start to see a heat spell come on.  Typically you would want to plant your seeds by May at the latest.  I figured either way though, our garden should turn out okay since this summer has been so gosh darned mild.  2 weeks in, I think I'm right!

When choosing plants at the nursery, there are a couple of things you want to be aware of:
1. You don't want to necessarily choose the largest plant with fruit already growing.  It's more ideal to just choose a smaller, sturdy looking plant, and let the growing and fruit bearing happen in your actual soil at home.  Larger plants may tend to go into shock once removed from their pots and transferred to your soil at home.
2. When choosing a plant, give it a squeeze and see if the soil feels loose, or is it tight and hard?  If it's tight, it may be root-bound and look like this:

Try to avoid this because typically the roots are so tightly wound together that they will have a hard time loosening up and grabbing hold in your soil.  When you transfer the plant into the soil, gently try to loosen up and unwind the roots so they have a better chance of survival.  This Swiss Chard was one of the last things I grabbed and I was loosing my powers of observation as two screaming kids went barreling down the nursery aisles with the flat bed cart.

Well friends, these have been our adventures in gardening over the last two weeks.  I do slightly miss my roomy 500 square foot garden plot I once had, but I don't miss the crazy Gustapo.  It has been so nice to just walk outside my door and water at my leisure instead of having to hop in a car.  The kids love watching the daily progress of our little garden as well.  Do any of you have a little spot in your yard for a vegetable garden?  What do you grow there and do you have any tips for me?  I'd love to know...

Happy Gardening Friends!

Things I learned in My Vegetable Garden Part 1

Happy Sunday and Happy Spring my friends! Since Spring has officially Sprung, I wanted to share some basic tips that I've learned from our first year of vegetable gardening at the Long Beach Community Gardens.

Let me preface this by saying that I am NO expert at gardening at all, but in the last year through several trials and errors, I did learn a few very basic things that I wish I would have known going into the whole gardening thing. Think of this as a dumb-dumb guide to the very basics of vegetable gardening, especially here in Southern California. I will do a series of posts in the next couple of weeks detailing topics such as the vegetables we planted and what we learned from them, how to fight off aphids, and what to do in summer when it gets really hot.

So let's get started!

First and foremost, do a little planning when it comes to prepping your SOIL. I know, I'm a wing-it type of gal too, but I cannot stress how important it is to start off with enriching your soil and getting it in good shape. You can plant the healthiest and best plants/seeds in your soil, but if the soil is poor in drainage or nutrients, they won't thrive. On the other hand you can plant some really poor plants in super rich well drained soil and they will come to life and flourish.

Some books will tell you to send your soil off to labs for testing and all that, but to start off, if you live here in Southern California, I can pretty much guarantee that you have clay soil. To help with drainage for your clay soil, start off by adding gypsum to help loosen up the soil and assist with drainage. If you think your soil might by sandy, however, ask your experts at the nursery what to do, because I don't know! See, I told you I wasn't an expert.

Testing your soil will tell you what kind of nutrients are in your soil, whether it is alkaline or very acidic and so forth. But like I said, if you don't feel like doing this, then just ask your nursery to recommend a soil builder that has a very general, equal mix of the basic nutrients nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous. Add it it your soil and mix it in well. This will get you off to the right start, I promise.

Second, it sounds so basic, but mark your crops! Maybe I'm the only dense one, but I can't tell you how many times I laid down seeds, or even plants, convinced that I would remember what I had planted there, only to forget 3 weeks later. And don't just use the seed packet or plastic tag that comes with the plant as your marker because after a few weeks of watering the paper packet or tag will disintegrate. Oh, and use a waterproof pen :) Yes, I am dense I guess!


Third, cover your delicate crops! We always had things like lettuce, chard, beets, and peas covered with netting. We also tried (tried being the operative word, we definitely weren't diligent) to cover our seeds every time to prevent the birdies from eating them. Little creatures like raccoons, squirrels, possums and bunnies love the sweet leafy greens and it will devastate you if you find your beautiful romaine eaten to a nub one morning. I can speak from experience.

We used what's called masonry ladder (find it at Lowe's/Home Depot) and would cut and bend it over our crops. We then covered it with fabric netting. We started off using basic tulle, but then discovered it was far too delicate and would rip on the masonry wire. The heavier netting, much like the stuff they use under petticoats, stood up much better. You can find it fairly cheap ($2.49/yd) at Fabric Barn.

Here's a good picture of the heavier type of netting.

Masonry ladder comes in smaller sections like this below

Or wider sections like this, either one works just as well

After you've planted your crops, mark your calendars! Mark the date you planted as well as important dates like when to thin out your crops and when to harvest, because trust me you will forget and then you will end up with overgrown useless vegetables.

Here's a perfect example of an overgrown vegetable as a result of forgetting to harvest in time; a beet the size of a 5 year old's head!

Lastly, it does help to read a book and do some research. If you have the opportunity, it greatly helps to do the research beforehand, but if you're like me, you're so excited to start planting that you don't have the time to read a whole book! Don't despair, chances are you'll have good luck in Spring just because the conditions here in Southern California are so darn good. But trust me, come summer you will want some knowledge under your belt so you can plant appropriately, tackle the heat and learn to deal with aphid infestations.

I haven't found one great gardening book yet, so if you have some recommendations, please post them in the comments section! I've read How To Cheat At Gardening and Yard Work by Jeff Brendenberg and 52 Weeks In the California Garden by Robert Smaus. How To Cheat had a lot of useful tips, but it wasn't specific to our climate or vegetable gardening in particular, so the information was all over the place. 52 Weeks, while it was specific to California, was not geared to vegetable gardening alone. Some friends have read Square foot Gardening and I hear it was good.

What I do recommend whatever you do though, is do some research on the vegetables you're planting so you know how to properly care for them and when to pick them! We were always stumped as to when to harvest some vegetables! We picked quite a few melons before their time.

Alright friends, I think this post is long enough and I have unruly children in the house! I hope you find this information useful :)

Happy Gardening everyone! May you go forth and prosper!