This large central decoration at the Souther California Spring Garden Show was designed by Fiesta Floats, who regularly design parade floats for the annual Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California.
See the complete set of photos from the Southern California Spring Garden Show.
We trying out a method of planting small bunches of carrots in deep vertical containers. We don’t really have a good ground plot for carrots, so this container allows us to have decent, soft soil and move it around to get the best sunlight. Right on cue, the seedlings emerged about 2 days ago. I’ll report further as they develop.
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Garden designed and created by:
Sarah’s Gardens
Sarah’s Garden 714.916.3106
Garden Pros Landscape & Construction 714.387.4753
714-397-4753 or 714-387-4753
See the complete set of photos from the Southern California Spring Garden Show.
You can find mangy garden videos over on my YouTube Channel. You can subscribe to that channel to get notice of new videos. You can also watch all the garden-related videos using the playlist shown below.
If you can’t see the video above, please watch the playlist on YouTube
What do flowers & flour have in common?
The Los Angeles Zoo Docents’ Garden Boutique and Bake Sale
Benefiting the LA Zoo Docents’ National 2012 AZAD Conference – an annual conference, this year inviting zoo and aquarium docents from all over the U.S. to enjoy the hospitality of Southern California.
We invite you to support us by enjoying plants that please the eye & sweets and savories that please the palate!
WHEN: Sunday, June 3rd, 1:00 – 4:00
WHERE: In the Garden at 536 North June Street, Hancock Park (No reservations, no entry fee!)
Held with the support of the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association.
Information: stonehen@aol.com
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We finally got around to planting this Topsy Turvy tomato planter that our friends gave us last season. It took a fortuitous combination of events to make it happen, though.
First, I made a batch of homemade potting soil to use in the planter. Second, our local Orchard Supply Warehouse had a sale on all edible plants and third, we had planned to spend a lot of time in the garden this weekend working on our big path mulching project. See the post from yesterday for more info on that. )
With all our mature trees, we don’t get a lot of sun, but I tried to place this in the sunniest area I had that also gave somewhere to hang it.
There are 2 plants in this planter — one a Early Girl and one a Celebrity.
As I enter my second season as part of the Troy-Bilt’s Saturday6 program, I thought I would re-share the pictures from our big kickoff last May at the Troy-Bilt world headquarters. It was great meeting all my fellow Saturday6 bloggers, playing around with new equipment, seeing and eating great food at Chef’s Garden and finally, visiting my family who live nearby. All the recent work on launching this season of Saturday6 made me go looking for these photos to relive some great memories.
If you don’t see the slide show above, you can view it directly on Flickr
We noticed a tree service truck in the neighborhood that had a load of wood chips that was mainly that, wood, rather that the typical load that contains more leaves than wood. We had been thinking of a project for a long time and this finally set it into motion.
After visiting Descanso Gardens years ago, I noticed that they used their own wood chips to lay the paths through the more wild area of the garden. After fighting with the pea gravel that covered the paths when we first bought our house, I have been looking for an alternative for a long time and I thought the idea of wood chips was one of the best. We have been creating our own wood chips using our chipper-shredder, but simply didn’t have enough material to even begin to cover the paths in the garden. Pea gravel can play havoc with the blades on a chipper-shredder, so finding a solution that allowed us to clean up leaf litter without picking up the gravel was high on my list of needs.
The wood chip as it arrived
Spreading the mulch out and then onto the paths.
Is it hot in here?
Of course, not major project like this goes without a hitch and we had our own little bit of drama.
As you can see in the top photo, the mulch was dumped off the truck into a fairly large and fairly deep pile. While I had learned about spontaneous combustion1 in my farm town childhood – it could lead to fire in the barns in the area — I hadn’t really though about it much since moving to Los Angeles. Spontaneous combustion occurs when materials start to breakdown in an organic process. It is the very same process that creates such wonderful compost for our gardens, but if it runs away it can actually cause piles to smolder, or even ignite. Yikes!
When I went out to move some of the mulch onto the garden paths that evening, I noticed something quite worrisome. From the deepest part of the pile, steam was rising. Not only that, but there was a faint smell of smoldering wood. Hmmm, not good. I knew immediately what it was, although I hadn’t thought that it could occur in this relatively small pile of material.
Sure enough, after digging around a bit I found some areas of the pile to be extremely warm. Opening up parts of the pile would release heat and steam almost like walking into the room after someone had taken a hot shower. Time to get to work. We spent the better part of 2 hours breaking down the large pile into a wider, flatter pile — opening up any areas that appeared to be steaming. I wasn’t worried so much about the pile catching fire, but rather that a neighbor, seeing the steam rising, would call the fire department.
Luckily, spreading the pile out reduced the amount of heat any area could hold and the steaming stopped. I did notice that as we began spreading the mulch onto the paths in the back garden, there were still a few areas that were quite warm. It is my guess that the hot areas are where there were a large collection of wet green leaves. These leaves can start their breakdown very quickly and the mulch around it acts as an insulator, allowing the heat to grow more and more.
So, if you are planning on a delivery of mulch, wood chip or compost, you might want to keep an eye on it and spread it out a bit. Leaving it in a large, deep pile — even for a few hours could result in a little more excitement than you might wish.
Mulch on the paths
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Garden work today. Volunteers gladly accepted!
