Summer Gardening Program for High School Students

Here in San Francisco, Enterprise for High School Students (EHSS) is a school-to-work/youth development agency that encourages students to explore career interests by offering programs to help them gain work-related experience. One such opportunity is the Summer Gardening Program. It is held at Buena Vista Park, McLaren Park, and the SF Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park.

The kids involved get to explore opportunities in the horticultural field, beautify the community, and put a great job reference under their belts, all while earning a paycheck!

If you know a high school student looking for a summer job in San Francisco, check out the program's link above or contact the coordinator at this number: (415)392-7600 Xtension: 1.

Sustainable Landscaping Lecture & Fair

I just ran across this event happening this Thursday, March 4th at the Presidio Officers Club, 50 Moraga Ave, San Francisco.

Check out the link and maybe we'll see you there!

Sustainable Landscaping Lecture & Fair

The Terrarian Strikes Again!

I recently tried my hand at a second terrarium. I used a jar I found on the curb, seen in a previous post on terrariums.

Again, I threw in some cuttings of plants I had around the house. This time I tried a little experiment with some left-over Chia Seeds to give the effect of a lawn or field. I also added an old toy truck and a glow-in-the-dark alien figurine for show.

I'm definitely an amateur terrarian, but I'm constantly inspired to see all the creative works shown on this amazing terrarium-centric blog: The Fern and Mossery.

Project Thoreau

I was intensely inspired by Henry David Thoreau's WALDEN in high school so, needless to say, when I came across something called "Project Thoreau" my interest was peaked. A fellow urban gardener/farmer from down under, Ezanee Cooper blogs about his experiment in transforming his modest-sized backyard into a more eco-friendly, food-producing plot.

This makes me want to get down under into my own garden plot below and do some clean-up, assessment, planning, digging, seeding, planting, loving, tinkering, etc....

"Feeeed MEEE, SEYMOUR!"

I seem to have woken from my winter hibernation! Now I know a big slice of the country is covered in more snow than they've seen in a century, but here in San Francisco the cherry trees are now showing off they're candy-pink blossoms. It's been rather rainy, but no doubt spring is in the air.
I've been keeping green by perusing catalogues, patroning the garden section of the library, and tinkering with my indoor jungle. I recently acquired two large palm trees from my work for free. We use them in staging homes so if they're not in absolute tip-top shape, we either sell them or give them away. They have a good home with me!
It's been propagation station here at my place as well. I acquired a sad little snake plant, also from work, and decided to propagate it in three separate methods.

1)I divided the plant at the base 3 ways and planted them individually.

2)Second, I cut off a couple leave stalks and put them in water to root.
3)And third, I took one leave stalk and cut it into smaller pieces, placing each piece BASE-SIDE DOWN into soil.


And below is a photo of one corner of my indoor jungle...together they kind of look like one living creature, don't they? "Feeeed mee, Seeeyymoour!"

Plot of Land, Plot In Life

I want to share something from the Grassroots Gardening book I am currently reading. It deals with the idea of change in a garden and the outlook we choose to take on that idea.

"If the beans got disease in the north corner, we should not put them there again. But we can try some other crop in the place where they failed. Plotting is comprehending failure and rising from it, to fail again or maybe even to live."

Plotting, or planning, here to me seems to mean the allowance within ourselves to have expectations...hopes. I think much joy lives in these expectations as long as we can view them as such. Would it be really that fun if we always knew what were to happen in our gardens, in our lives??? Change is a fact of life and learning to accept all of it, good and bad, without giving up on yourself or others is a balance that, if found, should be planted, cared for, and shared.

The Cycle Status-Quo, Yet the Surprise

Gardens emulate surprise. Months back this fledgling avocado tree was a pit tossed into the compost pile. It must have snuck off the side and planted itself nearby. It's now thriving, feeding off the nutrients and micro-organisms the compost attracts.

The cooler, moist fall has this fern above resurrected. The same has brought back the moss to the brick bed-liners. Soon the low-growing chamomile carpet will be flourishing, greening up the intermittent pathways. These seasons are not so drastic as back on the farm in Michigan, but offer the same feeling of cyclical wonder.

I'm BEET! Barszcz czerwony, prosze!

I just got home, beat from work. Decided to replace the "a" to an "e" and make the best of the situation so I planted an empty pot on my deck with beets. I hope to add the coming crop to a "barszcz czerwony", red beet soup.

Wishing everyone a very Tilthy and Bountiful Thanksgiving!

Garden Quotes/Garden Photos

My Indoor Garden

"In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death." ~Sam Llewelyn

"There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling." ~Mirabel Osler


My Garden Inside My Indoor Garden

Green and Read and Red...

...wine. I went to the library this rainy day to pick up some reading material. Grassroots Gardening: Rituals for Sustaining Activism by Donna Schaper and Culture and Horticulture: a philosophy of gardening by Wolf D. Storl.

From the inside cover of GrassRoots: "In May 2003, Donna Schaper wrote and op-ed for the New York Times, "The Heretic in the Hibiscus," that told the story of her rejection from Coral Gables Garden Club because she was too liberal. As it turned out, the ladies of the club feared that she would do what she had done at the Miami church where she was minister, namely 'bring in blacks and gays to membership and participation.' In response to her article, dozens of garden societies across America contacted Schaper, inviting her to join their societies."
"In Grassroots Gardening, Schaper argues that people who garden find a ritual way to sustain activism. Dirt touching, seeding, and harvesting rituals keep radicals sane, energetic, and positive. It is more than weeding - and also is 'just' weeding. Many assume gardening is for people with country homes. On the contrary, gardening is a great passion for many progressive, political, communal people."


The second book, Culture and Horticulture is a more historical, sorta academic look into gardening. Again, from the inside cover: This book is written as an introduction to gardening in its wider aspects, linking it to historical, philosophical and cosmological contexts, taking horticulture from the microscope to the wider cosmos. Surely such vistas are involved when one takes a shovel to hand to turn the soil: eons have formed it; life permeates it in manifold forms; cosmic cycles of sun and moon warm it, circulate water through it, lure out of it the season's vegetation; and man shapes it according to his thinking and willing, plants and husbands it according to his cultural traditions, and finds mental and physical sustenance through it. All that is gardening!"

Welcome to nerd-out Fridays!

Thinking Outside Of Your Shell

I like using unconventional containers. I planted this "Moses in a Cradle" plant(Tradescantia spathacea) inside a shell I had sitting on a shelf for eons.


Do you have an unconventional planter you've experimented with??? Please share!

NEW: Events Bulletin!

In the spirit of building community, I just added a bulletin to the top of the right column to announce local SF Bay Area garden events....and sometimes online events, or other popular events, or or or events, events, EVENTS!

NOVEMBER GARDEN BLOGGERS' BLOOM DAY

The photo above was taken on trip to wine country. I guess I was stopping to....tie my shoe and got a faceful of roses.

Here's whats in bloom in my San Francisco garden:
An elegant pink hibiscus...
...Mexican Sage
Eggplant blossoming...
...Last Sunflower this season.

This final one is not a flower bloom...I found it as a cutting from a scraggly plant in a diner; it was only a few leaves then, maybe 2" long. I put it in water to root it, potted it up, fed it my worm poo tea of course, and a few months later it took off with the beauty of a bloom. The underside of her leaves are a dark gem-like purple. I've even begun propagating her own rootable offshoots!

ethnobotany

and now, a word from our garden dictionary:

ethnobotany: the study of man's use of and relationships with plants, especially within a given community or race

Have you thought about your relationship with plants today? :)

Um, When Did Fall Arrive?!?!

Brisk air and shorter days always sneak up on you! But there's nothing like a hot totty to warm you up when you're doing the fall clean-up. :P My tomatoes this year were a bit late in coming to fruition. In fact, I am STILL picking them off the vine! They seemed stunted the whole summer, the plants just weren't taking off. After I treated them to a few appointments with some worm poo tea, they as well as my other plants, really seemed to thrive.

Another veggie affected by the tea was this eggplant. So far the plant itself looks very healthy, with multiple blooms on each plant. However, the pretty light violet blooms are not producing eggplants. Perhaps this is a pollination thing? Maybe I'll step in and do a little manual work. So these pole bean seedlings were planted months ago. And they are just now coming up! Some creature had nibbled the rest of the batch back when they were just coming up. Perhaps these guys were waiting it out. I'm going to leave them and see how they fair as a fall crop.


And here is the garden after the clean-up from up above on the deck.

Permaculture For Renters

I just added a new blog to my favorites list. It's the P4R/Permaculture for Renters one...it's under Blogs of Note on the right-hand side of this blog. I had seen a flier at a nursery for a workshop for those who do not own their own home and wanted to spread the word. I have since learned that the workshop has been cancelled due to too few people signing up. Maybe that's why we need to spread the word! :)

Terrarium Scentarium

Just for the smell of it! I've been wanting to assemble a terrarium for a while now, and finally all the materials came together. I found a large "one man's trash, one man's treasure" glass vase in my neighborhood and the race was on! Just the other day I found some polished pebbles on my street to add for surface decoration. I used some old brick/lava rock shards for the bottom to provide drainage.

As for the plants, I had a bunch of random cuttings in jars that I have been meaning to pot up. I tried picking ones that don't grow too large in too small a period of time. This is my prototype, so we'll see how things go. :)
I assembled it with the polished rocks and made my own setting and watered/sprayed a fresh helping of worm poo tea upon everything. Once everything settled in, I topped it off with a clear plastic lid to hold in the moisture. A bit later I opened it, took a big whiff, and for a moment I seriously felt and believed I was in the middle of a rich natural forest just after a light rain. A form of aromatherapy for sure! I added a few of my red wiggler composting worms to the terrarium as an experiment. Hopefully they'll fit into the tiny ecosystem in their way. :)


And the vessel for my next project...


Does anyone have any terrarium stories to share? Any fun ideas?

The Garden

I just finished watching The Garden by Scott Hamilton Kennedy. It's an Oscar-nominated documentary about a 13 acre community garden in Los Angeles.

I absolutely recommend it!

http://www.blackvalleyfilms.com/

I Got Bloomed Upon

Recently while tidying up my greenhouse I noticed that one of the orchids was growing a flower stalk. The had been sitting in there for probably about a year with almost absolute neglect by me. The photo below shows them tucked into the corner of the greenhouse, shabby as can be.

I had really not much interest in orchids, but maybe its because this has never happened for me before. But now that I know I can just put them away after the blooms fade, and bring them in again at the sight of a flower stalk, I definitely will not be throwing any away!

Gorgeous!

Investigardener At Work!

Just around the corner from my house, on an empty lot between a warehouse and a new home, lies a sort of community or guerrilla garden I stumbled upon! I wonder if this is just a temporary garden, or if it is the beginning of a more permanent community garden. I shall pull out my inner sleuth and investigarden!

SOOOOOooo San Francisco. I love my city. :)

Worm Compost Tea Part Poo

I applied my brewed-up worm poop tea to my garden today. I used a simple sprayer, shown disassembled in a milk crate in the photo below. For the most part it worked wonderfully, misting a nice layer of organic feisty beneficial microbes upon the leaves and soil. Though next time I think I will add LESS worm poo to the 5 gallon bucket, as there was a CLOGGING issue which led up to me getting sprayed directly UPON MY FACE! A nozzle was not screwed tightly enough, and the worm poo to water ratio was disproportionate. I need a shower.


The pink Echinacea above was started by seed in my greenhouse spring 2008. As many a perennial will do, this, the 2nd year, provided for us beautiful blossoms.

These guys above showed up on their own this year. It must have been a renegade composting incident, but they are welcome of course! I think they are some sort of squash.

The defunct sprayer....That'll teach you to NOT spray in my face again!

Tea for Poo...and Poo for Tea!

I finally got around to brewing my own worm compost tea! I just started yesterday; the process takes three days, so this blog will be a two-parter(a poo-parter!..eeewww!)

I have accumulated a large amount of worm poo compost over the last year; I've applied it directly or diluted it to feed my houseplants and outdoor garden but brewing the compost actually cultivates beneficial microbes and organisms on which plants thrive. It can help with not only the plant's growth, but can boost the plant's immune system as well as kill and deter many harmful insects and bacteria.

Supplies Needed:
To brew compost tea, you'll need a pump, some air tubing, a gang valve, and three bubblers.
• An aquarium pump large enough to run three bubblers or air stones
• Several feet of tubing
• A gang valve
• Three bubblers
• A stick to stir the mixture
• Unsulfured molasses (preferrably organic)
• Something to strain the tea, like an old pillowcase, tea towel, or a nylon stocking(I simply add the worm poop directly into the water; it dissolves just fine whereas regular compost has insoluble solids)
• A 5 gallon bucket

*** And about 1 pound of Worm Poop!

If you are using city water as opposed to well water, you will need to take an extra step to get out the chlorine in the water. This MUST be done, as the brewing will be done in vain for chlorine will kill all the beneficial organisms we're trying to cultivate! SO, I've read that an hour or two of aerating the water will take the chlorine out; other sources say leaving the water out for 24 hours OR 12 hours if you're aerating it will take care of it. I put in the aerators before bed and turned them off in the morning to be safe.

Above is my under-harvested worm poop bin. I took what I think is about a pound, maybe a little extra.

I stirred in the worm poo and added about an ounce of the organic blackstrap molasses, unsulphured! This gives the microbes a source of food so they can thrive and reproduce.

I will wait for 2 1/2 to 3 days to harvest. I will do a 2nd part to this entry showing the frothy top of the "brewing" tea. Stay tuned for more Poo-tales!