Cold February night

Once again we are under a freeze warning in the Bay area tonight. I don't remember it ever getting this cold so late in the year, but then again we had an unseasonably warm January. So my potted tomatoes, peppers, squash and zucchini are all on the back porch (yes I decided to make cookies instead of planting). I need to venture out and cover my gardenia, as they are still quite young. And my frangi pani as well, those things are extremely cold sensitive plants (being native to the tropics and all).

The unfortunate part of it all is that the warm temps last month "tricked" a lot of the local plants into waking up. My dormant baby crepe myrtles have tiny little green leaves on them, my rose bush has two buds, and my blueberry bush and apple tree have already have blossoms. I am crossing my fingers that this last cold snap doesn't stave off my new growth! I guess tomorrow morning will tell. At least it's supposed to go up to 60* all week next week.

Oh, here are the cookies I made with my son and my mom:

Freezing tonight?

Wow, I step away from the weather updates for a few days and it takes a turn for the cold! Well, cold for us anyway :) check this out:

My dilemma: I really want to plant my sprouts. I have tried twice now and something has always come up. I have 4 tomato plants, 8 pepper plants, 4 zucchini plants, and 4 squash plants. I even arranged for my mom to come over and watch the kiddos so I could give it my undivided attention. I guess I will make my decision when I wake up in the morning...

Grown with love

Today I went to a baby shower for a high school friend. She is a budding fellow gardener who loves organic food and generally being "green". After much thought, I decided that I wanted to make her gift instead of buying it. She had mentioned that she wanted to grow her own lavender. I toyed with the idea of giving her lavender seeds, but I know from experience that they are extremely hard to grow from seed. So I went to Willow Tree Nursery and picked up a lavender plant (along with a few things for me!) and a ceramic pot. To make it more special I decided to paint the pot. I included her name, her wife's name and baby Olivia's name, 3 bees (the theme for their nursery) and a giant flower. I'm definitely no artist, but here is how it turned out:

I think it turned out pretty good, and it was fun to do too :)

Gardening Hall of Fame

Hello all! Spring is starting to creep in (I will write about that once I get some good photos!) and we gardeners are busy getting our beds ready and tilled. One of my friends runs a great blog about urban farming with a family, raising chickens, growing heirloom seeds and connecting with nature called Gardening Adventures. She is so great, in fact, that someone from News Channel 8 ran across her blog and mentioned it to the station manager, who decided to do a piece on her garden!! The news crew comes out tomorrow morning, and the piece should be running some time in the next week. Stay tuned, I will have more information soon. In the meantime, check out her blog!

The sky is falling!

My husband and I have two lovely friends who each own chickens. Chris has always wanted chickens, and even has names picked out for them! I, on the other hand, was like 98% of the population and considered them to be dirty and pointless. I grew up with tales of how farm animals have all sorts of crazy diseases, like salmonella and e. coli, and how dirty they are. It's hard to shake that. However, seeing how much fun our two fiends have, and how easy it looked, I have begun to warm to the idea. I mean, who doesn't want eggs at their disposal every morning? Plus I think my children would really have fun with them. From what I saw of my friends' chickens, they seem very entertaining and full of personality. And ever since last month it is legal to own chickens in my county. We have the space in the back yard, and now is a great time to buy chicks. I borrowed two book from my friend Chris (not hubby, a friend) and she sent me numerous sites all about living with and raising chickens. Very informative! I think my problem is that I am a little overwhelmed at the myriad of choices of breeds and coups and feed. I told Chris (hubby this time) that I would need some help with research this time.

So my question to you my readers is: can anyone recommend a good small breed that is generally easy going? What kind of shelter do they need and how big does it need to be? Is 2 okay or do I need 3 or more for them to be happy? Where do I buy them from? Any tips on having children and other animals around them? Thanks!

All in a days work

My blog a few weeks ago talked about my plans for spring gardens. Well I have already started some of that! My husband decided to help me out in the front yard as a birthday gift (thanks honey!) so we got cracking on fixing things up.

First things first, the walkway leading to the house needed to be remulched and have some more plants put in it, since the pentas are annuals and were dead. Chris really likes gardenias so I decided to buy three gardenia bushes from a local nursery and place those there, along with a pretty cool weather annual (alyssum), and some solar lights we got on sale at Home depot. Here is how it turned out:

Next we remulched the entire front bed with the lemon lime bushes, and my white rose bush. Those are pretty good so I just trimmed those. Here is the white rose bush, with some poinsettias in the background:

Also at the local nursery I indulged and got 2 lavender pots, 2 rosemary pots, 4 different colored pansy plants,  4 jalapeno pepper plants, 4 sweet pepper plants, 4 beefsteak tomato plants, 4 unknown type tomato plants, 4 zucinni plants, and 4 summer squash plants. Here are some of them:

These are hung on PVC piping. The one in the front has my pansy plants. The one in the back is holding the rosemary and lavender. It's a great way to brighten a front porch, and the herbs are within reach of my door if I need to cook with them!

The back container has my tomato plants, plus one of the squash plants. The front has the sweet peppers and one of the jalapenos. I am keeping them in containers until I am certain it will not freeze (maybe mid February) then I will transfer them to my back yard in the raised beds. I can't wait!

I go back to work next Monday (boo!) but I will try to keep up with blogging and updating you all on whats going on outside my door. Until next time friends :)

Yard clean up

So, last year I was pregnant for pretty much the entire growing season. Sure I got things started in March, but as I got bigger it got harder for me to bend down and tend to the garden beds. Eventually I ended up on bed rest and nature took over. Weeds choked out native plants, dollar weeds spread, my vining plants went crazy, and things just died when the cold set in.

Well, I am feeling great now! So I decided to tackle my back yard. First of all my passion fruit completely took over my back area, covering my shed and overtaking two jasmine plants. It needed to be cut way back. Here is the result:

This is cut WAY back. I am positive it will be fine and grow back. The way it just spread and took over everything, I think it should almost be classified as invasive. So after doing that this is what I discivered:

These are jasmine plants. I thought they had died last summer. But lo and behold here they are! If you look hard you can see that each plant has a tendril curling up on the trellises. Yay! I hope they continue to grow and give us wonderful scented jasmine flowers :)

The next task was fixing our oleander. It has about 5 oak trees trying to grow right up the middle of it. Last year, it didn't have as many flowers and they died quickly. I think it was maybe because it is competing with the oaks for sunlight and water. So I went in (it's a jungle in there, the oleander is well over 15 feet tall) and trimmed the oaks WAY back and got rid of some nasty invasive vine in it. Here is the result, right next to my son's car:

That was a lot of work! After that I trimmed and pruned the rose bushes, the blueberry bush, and various other things. Here is what I got:

Yay! Now my back yard is a level playing field ready for things to grow and bloom in it :)