Though February is usually a cold one, it’s a month filled with hope as we are just starting to see fruit trees, crocus, daffodils and others emerge from dormancy. It’s the perfect time for that primal surge that tells us to wake up and start thinking about the garden again, because there are a few […]
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Posted inLife + Outdoors
Those Elusive Winter Blooms
There’s plenty to look at in the winter garden if you attune your eyes to the subtle beauty of peeling bark, colored stems, tufty beige ornamental grasses and upright brown seed heads left over from summer. However, nothing brightens up the garden like a few flowers, and carefully placing some winter-blooming plants around the garden […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
January Gardening To-Do List
This is certainly the coldest winter I can remember since I’ve been in Humboldt County — so chilly that even plants I think of as being hardy are showing serious damage from frost. Though we have all of January’s usual tasks (pruning, pruning and — oh yeah, pruning!), we should give our plants a little […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Straight From the Farm
On a light-drenched afternoon back in October, the pumpkin patch at Organic Matters Ranch on Myrtle Avenue was thickly dotted with pumpkins of various shades of orange and some green Marina di Chioggia squashes, too. Chickens dressed in lustrous feathers tasted pumpkin in front of their coop. Two shiny black pigs enjoyed the sunny weather. […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
December Gardening
December usually alternates between stretches of cold, clear weather and weeklong downpours, so there’s usually plenty of time for both indoor planning and crafts as well as some of the normal outdoor garden care. Here’s what to do in the December garden. Protect tender plants. This December has shown us some of the coldest weather […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
To Leave or Not to Leave?
Fall leaf raking seems like such a straightforward task — rake the leaves, stuff a few down the back of someone’s shirt, get chased around the garden and end up dirty and sweating with a large pile to take to the green waste or the compost bin. Fun and done, right? But every year I […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Great Deer Roundup
The hunger of deer is no greater than the fury of gardeners who seek to thwart the peaceful vegetarians. Just ask the Humboldt Botanical Garden’s deer wranglers, sturdy volunteers who scrambled up steep ravines, picked off bloodsucking ticks and nursed pokes and scratches from blackberry brambles in the great deer round up of 2005. While […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Providing Water for Wildlife
There’s little that irritates me more than going to the garden center and seeing an array of gorgeous, well-made bird baths that are all completely and utterly useless. It seems that the manufacturers of such things have never really researched or even given the most cursory amount of thought to what qualities a bird might […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Gen X and Y Gardeners
Genevieve Schmidt weeds her vegetable patch. The chickens aren’t boomers, either. Every year or two, some horticultural marketing team gets a buzzing insect in its collective shorts about Gen X and Y and how we aren’t gardening enough. The subtext is that gardening is a boomer activity and that at some scary date in the […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Chicken-O-Rama!
They’re heeeeere! At the feed stores. Peeping under heat lamps. Little motherless chicks, small enough to nap in the palm of your hand, just waiting for someone to take them home and love them. And oh, the names of the breeds: One feed store is bringing in Danish brown leghorns, Jersey black giants, gold sex […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Designing with Natives
On Wednesday, March 12, 2008, native plant designer Alrie Middlebrook will give a talk on designing native gardens. She’s the co-author of Designing California Native Gardens: The Plant Community Approach to Artful, Ecological Gardens, just out from University of California Press. She runs a native plant design business in San Jose called Middlebrook Gardens, and […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Gardening in the Snow
I don’t belong to a garden club, and the reason for that is, I’ll admit, pretty stupid: I can’t stand appointments. The thought of having to add something else to my calendar, of having to be somewhere next Thursday at 7 p.m., just wears on me. So I don’t sign up. But sometimes I get […]