Got my Hops rhizomes ordered today. The big dream is to grow Barley as a covercrop… Hops + Barley = homegrown homebrew. It’s the beer of the future!
Hello Spring!
03.31.2010 – 18:16
Well, at long last, it seems that Spring is really here to stay. It was a bit touch and go for a while, we’ve still been having a dusting of frost, but overall, it’s definitely Spring. The lemon verbena is in a snit. It didn’t drop it’s leaves last year,and it’s been through several frosts over the winter… It looks like the “rangy” plant they describe it as in the Sunset Western Garden Book. Rangy, indeed, scraggly too.
It was a lifting and pruning blow-out here in the garden this last weekend. You’d have thought the end was near, but it was the coming of the biannual scourge of voters everywhere which spurred me to get ‘er done: le civic duty du jury. Glad that’s dealt with, now back to the garden… I hope!
Good Clean Fly-killing Fun!
08.15.2009 – 18:42
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Fly Goo
In a spray bottle with an adjustable sprayer, mix 2 ½ teaspoons liquid soap** per quart water, to make a 1% soap solution. Now, you’re cleaning while you kill flies. Add some Lavender essential oil to add aromatherapy to your Fly Goo brew! Stops flies in their tracks. Long distance shots work best with a stream, close shots work best with a softer spray. Kids love to help with fly hunting. **We use eco-friendly dish soap or Murphy’s Oil Soap |
New Customers get 15%-off at RTNatural.com
08.15.2009 – 17:54
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That’s right, 15%-off for new customers who place an order at our store, RTNatural.com, between now and August 31st, 2009.
Just enter NEWCUST during checkout. There’s more: Seeds are 20% during the End of Summer Special, now $1.20 per pack. Both of these are great deals, prices are already pretty darn reasonable! |
the Balcony
05.30.2009 – 19:55
The first in a series I’m going to call, “If it were me, but it isn’t”. Yesterday I visited a friend’s home for the first time, and you know how that goes—on the drive home one inevitably thinks, “Well, if it were me…” In this case, my landscape brain got switched on by the trip to Los Angeles.
In this case, I had a six hour drive home, and my brain can cover a lot of ground in 6 hours! It’s a great location, he’s got nice furnishings, his place is sparse but well appointed, he’s obviously not one who chucks perfectly good, working appliances because retailers tell him he needs the new model… But, if it were me, I’d hang gauze curtains on that balcony and sleep out there all summer!
When I woke up this morning, I realized, that while before I’d always thought, “Gosh, I wish I could render landscapes, in watercolor, the way Alan Titchmarsh does” (on the old Ground Force series), now I can. I exploded out of bed.
First to render the balcony as it is:
A touch of color (cobalt blue, squared, tapered planter); a perennial beauty and some verticality (Fortnight Lily (Dietes vegeta); some Purple Fountain Grass (Pennisetum setaceum ‘Rubrum’) to soften things, catch the breeze and tie in the lovely burgundy sofa; a squared terra cotta 3-level fountain for those sounds you can’t ever live without once you’ve had a fountain, and some repetition for a harmonious, no care container meadow effect.
Shazzam! A cheap, easy, movable planting that requires minimal maintenance at most, and as little water. Well, now you know what I’d do, if it were me—but it’s not.
The balcony is rendered from memory, and the sofa perspective is off, but you get the idea. You’ll have to imagine the curtains, pulled back during the day. Heck, it’s my first Titchmarsh episode. I don’t know about Mr. Titchmarsh, but I’d be having a lot less fun without Photoshop!
