Tending Your Garden

Topics

Managing Compostables for a Healthier Ecosystem

Managing Compostables for a Healthier Ecosystem

From November through February my chipper pile grows steadily bigger. I begin cutting back perennial plants and shrubs as the fall blooming cycle ends; long, fairly straight stems go to the chipper pile, more twisted branches go to various brush piles along a low...
Useful Nonnative Weeds

Useful Nonnative Weeds

I’d bet that we’re all pretty happy that the rainy season is over and cherishing the beautiful sunny days. With a good layer of mulch to help retain moisture in the soil, plus the warm days, plants are now putting on growth that can almost be measured day by day! Over...
Fall is for Planting AND Propagating

Fall is for Planting AND Propagating

At the end of the dry season my garden is just that; at a glance many of the native plants look dry and dead but once you look more closely, there’s always a bit of green within the brown. Plants are dormant, but definitely not dead; seeds are abundant, as are all the...
Natives for a Meadow Garden

Natives for a Meadow Garden

Some of my favorite annual wildflowers are the gilias, and the whole genus is pretty much deer-proof. I like globe gilia (Gilia capitata) with its round heads of small blue flowers; these grow wild on Mt. Burdell. I haven’t seen bird’s-eye gilia (Gilia tricolor) in...
Creating a Meadow Garden

Creating a Meadow Garden

The days are still warm and we’re all hoping, once again, that this will be an El Niño year with ample rainfall and a good snow pack in the Sierras. The days are noticeably shorter, and the evenings are much cooler. The shorter day length is a cue to many native...
Musing on Madia

Musing on Madia

The term Ecology is a relatively new field of study in the world of Biology; it was coined in 1866 by the German scientist, Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919). There are now two major subdivisions; animal ecology or plant ecology; and as many as twenty-one different...