Natives and vegetables

I am writing an article for Fremontia about using native plants and vegetables in the same gardening space. Below is an example of the mosaic approach - intermixing.

Do you have some good ideas about combining? I f so, please send me a note at gardening@cnpssd.org or comment here.

Cinquefoil, Strawberry, Basil

Book Party was a hit!

Royal Fraser sent me these photos of the Book Party. We had close to forty people at the event and raise a bit of well-deserved $$$ for the chapter.

Sue Marchetti's garden was beautiful and then there was the added surprise of the secret garden down the street.

More photos will follow when other attendees send pix along.

Native Garden with View

Sue Marchetti giving tours

Sue Marchetti in her "secret garden"

Volunteer at Old Town Native Plant Landscape

Map: Native Plant Landscape - see the corner of Taylor and Congress

McCoy House is just south of the Native area

This just in from Kay Stewart:

CNPS San Diego will host public visitors to Old Town Native Plant Landscape on Saturday May 18, noon to 3 PM, as part of the San Diego River Park Day. The staff of San Diego Old Town State Historic Park has welcomed the work and donations of CNPS, the San Diego River Park Foundation, and theSan Diego Gothic Volunteer Alliance,  all contributors to the ongoing evolution of this little native plant park, the only site in Old Town State Historic Park that illustrates San Diego as it might have been before European contact.

Our plan is to host visitors by staffing a CNPS exhibit under the sycamores and taking visitors for ten-minute tours of the Landscape. We'd need to meet there at 11 AM to set up the CNPS table-top exhibit, and for me to walkabout with the other volunteers, so all of us will feel confident sharing the Landscape when visitors start to arrive at noon.

If the Elderberries are making fruit by then, we might also might be able to have a demo about how to clean them to prepare them for cooking. (We hope to have an elderberry pancake brunch one of these days and need to get enough fruit ahead of time, to be able to do that.)

We need up to three other volunteers, to make it work smoothly.

This is a great way to introduce the general public to CA native plants. People are at Old Town to have fun, and enjoy being in the Native Landscape under the canopy of the native trees, with useful and aromatic plants including white sage, black sage, deergrass, basket rush, and elderberry, and the never-ending cacaphony of birds chirping, trolley bells, and train hoots.

If you want to do this on May 18, noon to 3 PM, please contact me ASAP. I'd sure like to hear from you.

Kay Stewart
619-234-2668
kaytaff@sbcglobal.net

Book Party this Saturday

Sue Marchetti has generously agreed to have a Book Party for Greg and Lucy.

This Saturday the 27th from 4 to 9 PM.

We are celebrating the publishing of California Native Landscaping - from Timber Press.

For this event, proceeds will go to the California Native Plant Society, and we look forward to a nice turnout.

If you'd like to attend, please email me at gardening@cnpssd.org and I'll shoot you an invite.

Lots of potential gardens...

We have had a ton of requests to be on the 2014 Garden Tour.

Steve Miller has given us some great photo shots.

I am back from vacation in Cabo - will post more about that later, but wanted to add these shots from Steve:

Would you like your garden to be on the 2014 Tour?

photo courtesy Steve Miller

We are starting to gather up information, volunteers and plans for the 2014 San Diego Native Garden Tour.

Would you like to participate?

Send an email to gardening@cnpssd.org - send pix of your garden if you'd like to have it on display, send your name if you'd like to help organize and get ready to hear more, buy tickets, and experience the second Garden Tour!

Did you know about this seed source?

image courtesy seedhunt.com

Our buddies up in No Cal sent along some new info. Karen Paulsell from the Friends of Sausal Creek, wrote: "At our fall plant sale, the FOSC nursery offers our own locally-collected natives, and a small variety of other California natives from seed we purchase. 'Til now, our sources have been Larners, Theodore Payne -- and the seeds from the Tilden Botanical Garden.  But this year, I found one more site, seedhunt.com.

I ordered online on Saturday, got a note on Sunday saying they'd ship on Monday, and got the seeds on Tuesday, can't be much quicker than that!   With a bonus pack of Ca poppies, the "coastal form", yellow w. orange centers.

Packets are $3.50, with enough seed in most to last us 3 or 4 years, small as we are.  Great to find the site, I'll be back!

Bracey Tiede then sent out this supporting message, "Owned by Ginny Hunt, Seedhunt.com is a source of many incredible plants in seed form - lots of them are natives."

So, it is a new resource to me and I intend to try them out.

By the way, it may be too late in the year to buy seeds and sow them, here in So Cal where weather projections say there isn't much more rain coming.

But I am running an experiment in my garden. I cleared out part of a remaining patch of dreaded iceplant on one of my cliff bottoms. I left the dead undergrowth as "mulch" and sowed a bunch of seeds and watered them in really well. I have continued to water this patch every couple of days to speed up germination. And I am getting some seedlings!

This is all experimental - so I'll keep reporting on it. I think I may be artificially speeding up the cycle and it may not work...who knows?

See natives on the Surfrider Ocean Friendly Gardens Lawn Patrol

When: Saturday, April 20, 9am-10:30am
Where:  Corner of Alvarado St and Cassidy St in Oceanside
You are invited to join Surfrider’s Ocean Friendly Gardens program for our first educational neighborhood walk of 2013!  We will start at the Alvarado Street OFG that was installed in Winter 2011 and from there will take a tour of neighborhood gardens while discussing the Ocean Friendly Garden principals of C.P.R. (Conservation, Permeability, and Retention) and how they are being, or can be, applied in the neighborhood. We will also discuss what simple changes homeowners can make in their gardens to make them more Ocean Friendly.
We will meet at 9:00 am at the Alvarado Street OFG in Oceanside and from there will tour several blocks before returning to the OFG to wrap up. Please RSVP to morgan@surfridersd.org or check out our Facebook event by ‘liking’ Ocean Friendly Gardens San Diego on Facebook!
We hope to see you there!

Gardening Committee Meeting Wednesday Evening

Sue Marchetti will host our meeting again this Wednesday evening at 6 PM.

Meetings are fun - as the picture below suggests:

Clayton Tschudy, Jake Sibley, Susan Krzywicki, Dave Flietner Will Johnson

Please join us. Send an email to gardening@cnpssd.org to get address, meeting times, agenda and to be on the mailing list!

'Wait Wait Don't Tell Me' and IPC

I love listening to Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, the NPR radio program. I get it on
podcast, in case I am not in my car when it comes on...which is most of the time.
The best time to listen is when weed-pulling, raking or other repetitive, non-mental
process.

And sometimes I get behind on my listening. But I do catch up eventually. A
marathon weeding weekend meant lots of air time. My reward: the December
15th segment brought a nice surprise, in a funny way. Peter Sagal related how
the Common Core Standards for school children now puts the stress on non-fiction
reading. And of course, he had to come up with some 'great' examples of works that
would replace 'Catcher in the Rye' and 'Huck Finn.'

Here is what he listed as examples of what he jokingly offered kids to read:
"...classics like, "Recommended Levels of Insulation," by the US Environmental
Protection Agency, and that classic, "The Invasive Plant Inventory," by California's
Invasive Plant Council."

After some kidding around, Sagal concluded with this remark: "You know what's
going to happen, the kids aren't going to apply themselves. They're all going to
wait until the last minute and then go out and get the movie version of the invasive
plant directory."

So, where's the video available?