New Chair

Some very good friends just gave us a check for our wedding, and I used it to buy the chair below off of Craigslist (thank God for Craigslist).

Today I stripped the horrible faux job off of the feet - which you can't see in these photos - and will restain the legs with a dark finish. Once that's complete, the upholsterer will pick up the chair and cover it in a nice cream fabric. (I didn't even consider recovering it myself. Been down that road before...) After pictures to come!

Product Endorsement

I can't remember which blog first boasted about the benefits of using TWIST Sponges, but I'm sure glad I came across the article. I've been using plain ole' yellow and green scrubby sponges for years now and always think its odd that they give off the yellow dye. What are they made from anyway? And why do they need to be dyed neon colors? Well, there's a new eco-friendly solution: Twist Sponges. 100% biodegradable, no dyes, no plastic packaging. Hooray. I picked some up today and so far they seem more durable and work just as well (the scrubby part is actually better than the old sponges). I also picked up some of their rags which work in place of paper towels. Hooray for Twist!

Crime Scene

School Food

Go here to read a great article on school lunches. With all the recent talk of healthcare, I'm starting to think that eating healthfully is one of the most fiscally responsible things we can do for our country. Local, sustainable, no pesticides, no synthetics, no imitations, etc. For more information, check out Michael Pollan's new book: Food Rules. To sum it up: if your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize it, don't consume it.

Dislike

I absolutely hate the black fabric people use to create flower beds. I know it is supposed to keep weeds out of a bed, but is it really necessary? Doesn't it inhibit the natural progression of things- decomposition and so on? Seems counterintuitive to the whole "grow your soil" movement. Other reasons I hate it:

- Made planting bulbs difficult as I had to cut through the fabric and pull it apart

- Made enlarging the bed difficult as there was hidden structuring (staking and boards) to keep it down

- Makes planting anything new difficult as it is quite shallow

I'd dig it all up but this is a rental and I've decided it isn't worth the effort. But I'm going to keep on hating it.

** After writing the above, I checked my favorite garden blog. She agrees! Go here to see what else she doesn't like.

Today's Finds

A box to replace my husband's shoe boxes:

This helped satisfy my new obsession with antique frames:

A chamber pot as a silverware holder?

Have two of urns and will pot some large ferns this week.

A small wooden mirror:

Around the Yard

The sweet peas:

Below is the back bed with petunias, foxglove, and hellebores finding their way through the old daffodils. Trying to restrict the color palette to whites and muted tones- a lesson I've learned from working on the front yard. The wildflowers I sowed are a bit too varied, making the front look cluttered and undirected.
First bloom on my JFK rose:

And now my sweet sad rose. It was lousy with leaves and buds before I hacked away at the black spot. Just a twig of a thing now:

And despite my best intentions, the black spot has returned:

I'm letting the leaves be from now on. Gave her some fertilizer and hope she bounces back.

April's Project: Backyard

Now that the front yard is under control, I've begun focusing my energy on the backyard. When we moved in it was a wasteland except for some singed grass and a few lavender plants here and there. The other week, I spent some time researching part sun/shade plants that are appropriate to Palo Alto's climate and came home with an assortment of:

Delphinium 'belladonna Casablanca', 'Galahad'

Pacific Giant Delphinium 'Blue Jay'

White Storm Petunias

Confection White Nemesia

Helleborus Orientalis 'White Lady Spotted'

Abutilon 'Tiger Eye'

Digitalis Purpurea (Foxglove): 'Apricot Beauty', 'Camelot Lavender', and 'Foxy'

Planted them between my spent daffodils around the patio. Hoping they will establish themselves and stay green at least throughout the summer. My new irrigation line should help.

In other news, I received three trees for my birthday: Black Jack Fig, Bears's Lime, and Santa Rosa Plum. All recommended in Sunset Western Garden for my area. I aged their terracotta pots with yogurt and expect fruit in the future.

The vegetable garden continues to grow although the slugs are doing their best to take over the place. I'm combatting them with Sluggo, beer traps, and old fashioned picking-them-off. I refuse to let my beans, kale, and joi choi go without a fight.

I planted red, yellow, and white onions today. A bit late for this zone, but the starters were a gift from an unidentified source and I have nothing to lose.

Snow peas producing like crazy, sweet peas in full bloom, and strawberries teasing me with baby berries.

It is about time for some more photos on here. I'll get to it soon, I promise.

My problems with Roses

Besides disliking the cliche red bouquet, I'd never thought much about roses until I moved into a Los Angeles apartment with a couple of rose bushes out front. They'd flower every once in a while and didn't seem to require any attention from me - ever. That apartment had a gardener who'd come by once a month or so to tidy things up. At first I was upset that he kept cutting back the branches, but soon realized that this pruning helped keep the bush in production. So I continued to ignore the bushes.

Then I moved to another rental up North and inherited two rose bushes. The front bush was covered in spent flowers and many of the leaves were yellowing or had black spots. I'd learned enough in Los Angeles to know that dead heading could help. And it did. The bush continued to bloom well into the fall. While pruning, I found that the rose seemed to be two bushes growing closely together. Why anyone would have planted them this way was beyond me, but I thought the tiny buds growing at the side were a cute bonus. This shows you how little I knew about roses.

When I started work on the front yard in February, I thought adding more roses could help with the continuity. But I didn't do much research and just picked two from the nursery that looked pretty and came recommended (Double Delight and John F. Kennedy). I soaked the roots, made holes in the ground, fertilized, and planted. And only after this did I really start my rose education.

The neighbor across the street (who seems to know all things plant related) called the tiny tea rose shooting off my original bush "pedestrian." Then he explained the whole grafting phenomenon which this beginning gardener should have already known. As per his instructions, I pruned the "Perfect Moment" heavily and brought out the big shovel to try to rid myself of the offending shoots from the rootstock. Crisis averted. Or so I thought.

I started to read more about roses- the types, grafting and pruning techniques, care instructions, and so on. But the more I read, the more behind I realized I was.

An example: My Perfect Moment started to get black spot again. Every book I read told me that it was irreversible. My only hope was to pick off all infected leaves and spray with fungicide. So I went to the crunchy, organic nursery and bought the spray then picked off so many leaves, the bush looked like a bunch of thorny twigs and sprayed it down. After two weeks, it is still an eyesore. And the neighbor has since advised me to scrap the spray and just plant garlic around the base. Oy. I really had tried to do my research and failed yet again.

Another example: This one deals with my new roses. In Second Nature, Michael Pollan describes the downside to modern hybrid roses. In fact, he says very little that is positive about them. Instead, he lauds Old English Roses that seem to be hardier and produce flowers only once a season. My Double Delight and J.F.K are certainly hybrids and certainly not up to snuff according to Mr. Pollan. So here I seem to have failed again.

The good to come out of all my follies: I'll know better next time.

Flora Grubb

Went here today. Heaven.

The Garden Plan

Because I'm testing out crop rotation and companion planting, it seemed only necessary to draft a plan of the garden. As you can see, we're trying to fit in a wide array of edibles in the 10' by 12' bed. As things grow, produce, and die, I'll keep notes for the future. In addition to what is in the bed, I've filled just about every discarded pot, bucket, and old trash can around with potting soil and planted root veggies like beets, radishes, and carrots. Few seeds germinate under our oak tree, so I'm hoping to get a harvest out of my containers.

In the mail today from The Cook's Garden:

-hot pepper spray to go to task on the aphids

-seeds: herbs, yellow currant tomato, summer lettuce mix, hot pepper mix, empress of india nasturtiums, versaille cosmos mix, rainbow bell pepper mix, hot dance pepper mix, tri color pole beans, and cannelino beans

-Suzanne Ashworth's Seed to Seed - in hopes that I can learn to seed save this year and reduce my need to purchase them