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!

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

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!

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!

Bare-root plants need to be planted and watered immediately upon receipt. If you cannot plant them in their intended location due to time constraints, they can be heeled-in or potted-on. If you can plant them in their intended spot right off, so much the better. The procedure is simple.

Hi everyone – I really wanted to get this week off to a good start on the blog. I have so much to write about (as mentioned in my last post), but unfortunately not enough time to write about it.

I figured I could start off with a nice easy post about my new lawn mower, and go from there!

When we first moved into our current house (our first home, I might add) three years ago, we had to buy a new lawn mower for the sizable lawn that came with the property. We certainly don’t live on a palatial estate by any means (it’s only a semi-detached, in fact) but it is a corner lot with decent sized backyard.

I wasn’t nearly as much of an enviro-person at the time as I am now, so it seemed only natural to me to buy a powerful, gas-guzzling push mower, with what I thought was a reliable Briggs and Stratton engine. For the first couple seasons it seemed to work just fine, but unbelievably by the next year it was already giving us trouble. Luckily I managed to get it in for some repairs just before the warranty expired last year.

Long story short – despite the warranty work, it ended up completely dying on me this spring. At the WORST possible time – just before going away for a two week trip! Luckily I was able to borrow my dad’s mower for a quick cut before leaving.

As frustrating as it has been to own a ‘lemon’ of a gas lawn mower, it seems all the trouble was a blessing in disguise. With the crummy gas guzzler out of the picture for good, I no longer had an excuse for postponing my purchase of a rechargeable mower – something I had planned to do at some point.

Tempting fate as ever, I am going to stage my own private One Straw Revolution–thank you Mr. Fukuoka–and reinvigorate the native loamy sand of this, our little one acre slice of heaven.

It’s going to start this way:
• step one: pull the noxious weeds before mowing broadcasts the seeds–straight to the green waste can for this lot!
• step two: mow the dead stuff (Before 10 a.m., so’s not to get the dreaded knock on the door from the fire department, seeing as it is high fire season–the Mediterranean climate: a blessing and a curse.)
• step three: broadcast cool season cover crop seed, maybe some light hand cultivation on the rises prior to broadcasting seed–to prevent bald rises and lush cover crops at the bottom of same; possibly cover with light layer of broadcast composted year old garden waste.

Waste not, want not, eh? Also, the light layer of compost will help keep the seeds evenly damp while we pray for the coming of the rainy season–not too much, but please, oh please, not too little–and thwart a few birds.

Yup, that’s how it’s going to start. Are there different and perhaps better ways to do it? Oh, heck yeah! By the same token, the best time to do it would have been seven years ago when we first moved to this lovely spot. Faulting that, anything will be an improvement and at least I am not dousing the place with alternating courses of Round-up and Miracle Gro. Even if we were not in the Elkhorn Slough watershed, that would be bad. And, given that our water source is directly under us, it would be dumb.

I do try not to be bad and dumb when I can avoid it, but things don’t always go as planned. Just ask Hamlet!

Yet another exciting episode of Guerrilla Gurl’s Ongoing Organic Garden Adventure!