Container Ideas From Oklahoma City

I recently spent the weekend in Oklahoma City with my husband, parents and brother. My brother lives on the East Coast, and the rest of us live on the West Coast, so we periodically meet up somewhere in the middle for the weekend. We had a great time in Oklahoma City, and I was happily surprised to see so many nice containers in the business and bricktown districts.

Here are some of my photographs, which will hopefully inspire your fall/winter dreams of next year’s containers:

This one needed to be weeded and was a little bare in one place, but I was impressed that a container on public property wasn’t filled with the same ole, same ole. Instead, it looked like someone actually tried to compose something nice looking. So, since it was late in the season, I was willing to overlook the weeds and missing plant and imagine what it looked like in late spring:

If you’re ever in the area, I highly recommend taking an afternoon to see the Oklahoma City National Memorial. It was a very thoughtful way to remember the people who were killed, survived, helped respond to the attack, and who were impacted in some other way. Be sure to hear the ranger talk and budget time to go slowly through the museum.

L’Shana Tova to my one (two?) Jewish readers!

September 29, 2008 | Filed Under Container Gardening | Leave a Comment

Fall Gardening — Goodbye Summer, Hello Fall Color

Photo by Hamed Saber

Libertia ixioides ‘Taupo Blaze’ — fall color contained: If you have enough room for a plant that only reaches 18 inches tall, then you have enough room to add some fall color.
Porcini–The What, The Where, The How to Find Them: Everything you ever wanted to know about collecting porcini mushrooms.
Grassy Plants in the Garden: What grass offers the fall garden
Summer…….it’s time for you to move on: A nice post appreciating the change in seasons with tons of beautiful fall garden photos.
The Un-Mum Brigade: All the other plants that are nice in a fall garden.

September 29, 2008 | Filed Under Good Reading | 1 Comment

Are You a Locavore?

If you try and eat food grown locally, then you are a “locavore.” The reasons for growing your own food or eating food grown by someone else in a nearby location are endless. Better taste, good for the environment, supporting family farmers, are just a few of the reasons.

ANYWAY, if you are in to that sort of thing, or just curious, you should definitely check out Sunset Magazine’s blog, One Block Diet. The gist of the project is that a few dedicated Sunset Magazine editors decided to try and eat only food grown or raised on a piece of property roughly the size of a large, subruban backyard. On the blog, you’ll find funny, interesting, informative posts about raising chickens, growing tomatoes, improving on the BLT, beekeeping, beer brewing and more.

September 27, 2008 | Filed Under Good Reading | 2 Comments

SYS: Save Your Seeds

In the past month or so I let quite a few of my herbs flower and then go to seed. Collecting seeds is a pretty easy (and free!) way to get more plants.

In the photo above I have some dilll and cilantro seeds, and the templates I photocopied from You Grow Girl by Gayla Trail. I am planning on using the orange and brown polka dot paper to make the seed packets.

Saving seeds is pretty easy. When the seed heads were fully formed but still green, I cut them from the plant. I then put them in a small plastic cup and let them air dry. When they were completely dry (it took about 10 days) I removed the stems and was left with what you see in the photo.

Making the seed packets is just as easy. You just trace the template on to the paper, cut, paste, and voila! You can make pretty packets out of patterned paper (check the scrapbooking section of your craft store; even Target has some neat scrapbooking papers) and then host a seed swapping party as Vanessa Richins suggests (anyone in So Cal want to meet at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf and swap seeds with me?).

September 26, 2008 | Filed Under Fall Gardening, Frugal Container Gardening | 2 Comments

The Thing About September - Fall To Do List

September is my birthday month, so maybe that’s why I spend so much time this month reflecting on the year thus far and thinking about what I want to do next year. Or maybe September is just that sort of month. A transitional month straddled between the growing season and the resting season. The last few days I’ve been pulling out plants that didn’t really wow me to make space for bulbs I expect to greet me with purple and yellow flowers a few months from now (I finally decided where to plant those Ranunculus).

Photo of kitty helping mulch the flower beds by geeezelouise

Whatever the reason might be, this is a good time to take stock of your containers, pull out things that didn’t work very well, prepare the keepers for winter, and clean out pots for next Spring. It’s also never too early to start dreaming about what you’ll do next year. Here are some more things to do in Fall:

Pull weeds
Mulch
Plant spring bulbs
Plant cool weather ornamental and edible plants
Prune trees and perennials
Divide perennials and bulbs
Plant trees (in a pot on your balcony or join a community group helping to green your community!)
Clean tools
Journal (I use and highly recommend My Folia)

What have you been up to on your balcony or patio?

September 25, 2008 | Filed Under Fall Gardening | 4 Comments

Looking for Low Maintenance Fall Color?

If you’re looking for fall color, but don’t have tons of time to primp and preen thanks to the season’s shortening days, try some ornamental grasses. You don’t need to spend tons of time trying to put together the “perfect” pot, just plop the grass into an available pot, and away you go!

Blue Oat Grass

Helictotrichon sempervirens Zones 4-9

Frost Grass

Spodiopogon sibericus Zones 3 - 8

Red Switch Grass

Panicum virgatum ‘Shenandoah’ Zones 5 - 9

Japanese Silver Grass ‘Gold Bar’

Miscanthus sinensis Zones 5-8

September 24, 2008 | Filed Under Fall Gardening | 7 Comments

Got a Gardening Blog/Newsletter/Column? Need a Messageboard to Talk to Other Gardening Writers?

Amy Stewart (of Flower Confidential fame) has started a messageboard for people who write about gardening.

This board is open to anybody who calls themselves a garden writer, including, of course, bloggers. It’s a place to talk shop about the profession of garden writing, but GWA membership is not a requirement.

We’re just putting this out there as a free and easy way for garden writers and photographers to communicate. I know there’s already a garden writers listserv and a forum on GardenWeb devoted to garden writing, and this isn’t intended to replace anything that’s already out there. But I think discussion boards have certain advantages–they’re easy to read, it’s nice to have more or less permanent forum topics to browse, and of course you can read it online or subscribe via email or RSS.

September 23, 2008 | Filed Under General | Leave a Comment

Not Your Grandma’s Bulbs

In case you’ve been in a coma the past few weeks, fall is here! And fall is bulb time. Pretty much everything that grows from a bulb is more spectacular than anything you could find growing in a six pack at Home Depot. But what if you really want to out do your self this year?

Photo by Xerones

Try some planting some of these more unusual bulbs now for something fresh and fun this spring:

Globemaster Allium - Gigantic (10 inches across), purple flower heads on stalks that are three feet tall. These would look very modern planted/potted in a long row.
French Shallots - Shallots are the ideal plant to grow at home. They’re expensive to buy in the store and easy to grow yourself. They taste like a cross between an onion and garlic, but have a more subtle flavor than both.
Snake’s Head Fritillary - A delicate, tiny, bell-shaped flower. The flowers aren’t a solid color. Instead they have a checkered, or snake skin appearance.
Oxblood Lily - Deep, intense red flowers that look like small lily blossoms. Each stem has several flowers.
Byzantine Gladiolus - An heirloom that is much more casual looking than the gladiolus you can buy at the florist. Sends up 18 inch flower stalks with instense magenta flowers. Doesn’t need staking.

September 22, 2008 | Filed Under Fall Gardening | 1 Comment

Great Device for Calculating How Much Sun Your Space Gets

Sometimes it’s hard figuring our how much sun you particular balcony or patio gets. Afterall, you’re probably at work for part of the morning and all of the afternoon, and don’t want to spend your weekend glued to your balcony taking notes about the amount of sunshine it gets.

Well, I just came across a device that is made for you called SunCalc (you can purchase it from Burpee Seeds). You simply place SunCalc in a pot or the ground in the area you would like to measure. Make sure the face is parallel to the ground. Start off in the morning (between 7am and 9am) and leave it in place for 12 hours. When you retrieve it at night one of four lights will be illuminated, indicating whether that particular location gets either full shade, partial shade, partial sun, or full sun. SunCalc can then be reused in another location.

If your gardening space has walls on two or more sides, I would place the SunCalc in the middle front, middle back, and each side of your space. The walls may either shade or reflect sunshine for all or part of the day, and you may have different amounts of sunshine in different places, even on a small balcony. I would also test your garden in spring and fall, because the movement of the sun and change in the amount of leaves on nearby trees may also affect the amount of sun your balcony gets.

If you’re plants are struggling and you suspect the problem is that you selected the wrong type of plant for your amount of sunlight, this is definitely 30 bucks well spent.

September 21, 2008 | Filed Under Gardening in Full Sun, Gardening in the Shade | 4 Comments

What is Your Favorite Plant?

As summer comes to a close, we’ve all had lots of time spent with vegetation, and thus a lot of time to develop favorites. What’s yours?

It’s hard for me to pick just one favorite. I started off favoring nasturtiums, until a hungry pack of aphids descended on my plants and I had to work really hard to kill them without using harsh chemicals. I wish I had just purchased lady bugs at the outset. But I thought I could kill the aphids faster with an organic spray. Boy was I wrong. Nature works a whole heck of a lot faster than something that comes in a bottle.

Then I got obsessed with signet marigolds. I love their lacey foliage and simple flowers. And I love the dichotomy of being unusual and common at the same time. Everyone knows what a marigold looks like. But signets are somewhat unusual.

Somewhere in there, I was also pretty in to echeverias. Until I killed them all. It’s kind of hard to love a plant that doesn’t love you back. Aeoniums have been pretty good to me though. And I really love the variegated one I potted up recently and the almost black one I have tucked under my herb planter.

I think the plant I’ve liked all throughout the summer, and still love, are zinnias. First of all, I like words and names that start with ‘Z.’ Second, I love the huge variety of colors, shapes and sizes of zinnias. They come in dwarf varieties that are only six inches tall and others that grow to four feet tall and everything in between. Zinnias come in virtually every color and color combination except true blue. I even like their seeds. Nice and big and easy to sow. I recently purchased these at Target: