Good gadgets for the gardeners on your list

What are the “must-haves” in Southern California potting sheds these days? I asked just that to the folks at Gardener’s Supply, a Vermont-based mail-order company. Their most popular tools and gadgets with California consumers are those that support sustainable gardening activities, says Maree Gaetani, Gardener’s Supply spokeswoman.

“Our kitchen compost crocks are big – including the new bamboo one,” Gaetani says. The stylish Bamboo Crock, right, with a 3-1/3-quart capacity removable pail is made from “earth-friendly” bamboo and has a snug-fitting lid. It measures 11 inches high by 7 3/4 inches in diameter, $39.95.

Just in time for the rainy season are two rain barrels that appeal to water-wise California gardeners. Made from 25% recycled content, the brown or green Deluxe Rain Barrel stores up to 75 gallons of water. It measures 36 inches high by 28 inches in diameter, $169. The English-Style Rain Barrel, pictured at right, inspired by an English washtub, collects 40 gallons of water. It measures 25-3/4 in. high x 25 in. diameter, $149.

Perhaps because of poor soil in many Los Angeles backyards, raised bed kits are big sellers. The Forever Raised Bed, pictured lower at right, is made from a composite of recycled wood and plastic, with 10 1/2-inch high sides and concealed aluminum corner brackets. Sizes range from 3-by-3-foot ($150) to 3-by-6-foot ($225). The Grow Bed, made of 100% recycled black plastic, features 10-inch-high sides that interlock at the corners to hold soil and plants neatly in place. Sizes range from 18-by-36 inches ($39.95) to 3-by-6-foot ($89.95). Use Gardener’s Supply’s online kitchen garden planner to determine a planting plan and calculate how much produce your raised bed will yield.

Southern California’s abundant supply of sun makes solar-powered products appealing. “The solar string lights are great in summer or in winter to light up a patio or a holiday tree,” Gaetani says. Each 36-foot string has 102 LED bulbs that glow for 8 hours when fully charged. Available in white, blue and red-and-green, $75 each.

People worried about indoor and outdoor flower pots drying out are snapping up a water-smart gadget that works in any round pot. Place the reservoir system, pictured bottom right, in the base of a container, add soil and plants, and water through the filling tube. Roots stay moist without daily watering. A 1-quart kit fits  10- to 14-inch pots ($12.95); a 1-gallon kit fits a 16- to 20-inch pot ($16.95).

-- Debra Prinzing

Photo credits: Gardner's Supply

Grow your arugula? It's easier than you may think

 
Now that the weather has cooled a bit in Southern California, salad greens can make a go of it. For a practically fail-proof crop, toss out some arugula seed. Despite its use in chichi restaurants, this slender green with a nutty flavor grows like a weed, often self-sowing next year’s crop.

“It’s easier to grow than lettuce,” says Kelly Coyne, co-author of the 2008 book “The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City.”

“Arugula doesn’t seem to attract aphids or slugs,” says Coyne, who for years has watched arugula seeds spill out of the salad bed of her garden in the Edendale neighborhood of L.A. The plant sprouted up in pockets of open ground -- even between bricks on the patio. She let her chickens gobble up the strays. “It’s the kind of gardening I like,” Coyne says. “Anything that will grow feral or perennially is my preferred sort of plant, because I don’t want to be replanting stuff all the time.”

The most familiar varieties, cultivars of Eruca sativa, are white-flowered Mediterranean annuals. More pungent, yellow-flowered perennials (Diplotaxis tenuifolia and Diplotaxis muralis) are often sold as “rustic,” “wild” or “sylvetta” arugula.

“It’s really good with pizza and pasta,” says Renee Shepherd, founder of Renee’s Garden Seeds. “And the pretty little flowers make good, spicy garnishes.”

For milder flavor, Shepherd suggests picking the leaves when they’re young. “The older it gets, the more tangy and spicy it gets,” she says. “And the hotter the weather, the spicier the leaves will be.”

If you don’t like greens growing willy-nilly, arugula seeds are easy to snap off and save for a deliberate planting next year.

-- Ilsa Setziol

Photo credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

Baker Creek Seed Bank sprouts up in Petaluma

Each December welcomes the arrival of the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog, a veritable encyclopedia of time-honored, non-hybrid, non-genetically modified and non-patented seeds for the home gardener. The 124-page magazine-like publication is packed with enticing photographs of vintage vegetable, herb and flower varieties available by seed from the Mansfield, Mo.-based company. Most of the packets cost $1.75 to $2.50 and yield delicious, healthy food that you can grow again and again, should you be inclined to collect seeds for future seasons. 

Baker Creek's owner, Jere Gettle, a twentysomething from the Ozarks, started his heirloom-seed-saving venture while still a teenager. Wearing his signature farmer's overalls, Gettle recently greeted a gaggle of scribes at the annual Garden Writers Assn. symposium in Raleigh, N.C. He handed out colorful packets and catalogs, but Gettle's big news was not about discovering the source of rare squash or tomato seeds.

Instead, he was promoting Baker Creek's new retail location. The Baker Creek Seed Bank opened in June in a historic building in Petaluma, Calif. Originally home to Sonoma County Bank, circa 1926, the Seed Bank offers one of California's largest selections of organic and heirloom seeds – 1,200 varieties in all – as well as traditional gardening products.

According to store manager Paul Wallace, Baker Creek chose to locate to Petaluma because 50% of its California mail-order customers live within a one-hour radius of the wine country location. "A huge percentage of our catalog and online sales come from Sonoma, Marin, Mendocino and Napa counties," Wallace says. "I guess it's because of the interest in heirlooms among like-minded people who believe in growing their own food."

What about customers in Southern California? "People come here from all over the world," he says. "One couple recently arrived from Orange County. He drove while she went through the catalog to choose her seeds."

Baker Creek's mouthwatering descriptions of Jenny Lind melons from the 1840s or St. Valery French carrots from the 1880s might just inspire you to make the drive north too. You can request a 2010 catalog at www.rareseeds.com or (417) 924-8917.

The Baker Creek Seed Bank is at 199 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma, (707) 509-5171. Hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday; closed Saturday.  The original outlet, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, at 2278 Baker Creek Road in Mansfield, Mo., is open 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday through Friday.

-- Debra Prinzing

The Dry Garden: Some sage advice for planting the right salvia in the right spot

Many gardens go without sage in California but at the cost of soul. Sage is to the West what lavender is to France. Sage, or in botanical terms salvia, has it all: Its pungent aromas contain the signature scent of the Western chaparral. The silvers, grays and greens of its foliage anchor the local Craftsman color wheel, and the long-running show of flowers come in a spectrum of white to pink to mauve to scarlet to purple to indigo to sky blue. Many sages have long had medicinal and culinary applications, but for modern Californians it’s a balm to the eyes. A felt-like quality to the foliage, combined with a loose-branching habit, allows sage to diffuse the harshest midday sunshine rather than reflect it. 

Sages do not need fertilizer, and in fact they shrivel at the suggestion. Few other plants attract more pollinators to the garden. But one attribute above all of these should make sage not just an emblem of our past, but also a powerhouse plant of our future: Western and Mediterranean sages need little water.

This age-old adaptation for dry conditions explains in part why watery gardens have underused the plants. The leaves become blighted and roots rotted when the plants are put in the range of sprinklers.

A less remarked problem: how to gauge size when planting. All plants look small in one-gallon pots, but our best performing garden sages can run from 6 inches to 6 feet tall when mature. The trick is picking the right sage for the right spot. Some recommendations suitable for Southern California after the jump ...

How does your garden grow? How about in fast forward?

If you’re the type of gardener who starts every day with a quick tour just to see how well everything is blooming, you’ll get the idea behind PlantCam. It’s a four-megapixel time-lapse digital camera that captures mini-movie frames of your plants as they grow.

Created by Wingscapes, the PlantCam operates much like the company’s Audubon BirdCam, a motion-sensor camera that photographs wildlife at the backyard perch, feeder or nest.

PlantCam, housed in a weatherproof case, is easy to mount on a tripod, post or even a tree trunk. Leave it alone to do its thing and pretty soon you’ll have all the pieces to stitch together a slow-motion film of a bud opening or a leaf unfurling.

It took about five minutes for me to set up the camera and lash it to an arbor post with a bungee cord. Since most of my plants are about to enter their dormant phase, there isn’t much about to bloom. But I am interested in seeing how daylight moves through the garden and illuminates my perennials and grasses. I set the camera to snap a scene every hour and ran the camera for two days. There also is a “By Light” setting that tells the camera to resume shooting when there is enough morning light to make an image.

There are two ways to make movies. One is to stitch the frames together in the camera and then upload a short film to the computer. Or, if you want a jazzier film, upload the frames to your computer and use a video editing program to enhance the clips. I used Windows Movie Maker to create this short video with  credits and music. Then I uploaded it to YouTube to share with my fellow garden geeks. 

The PlantCam is PC and Mac compatible. The garden-friendly device can zoom in for closeups of sprouting seeds or capture an entire garden in wide angle. It has other uses too. Just think how cool it would be to track the progress of your next home improvement project.

In Southern California, you can find or order PlantCam, which costs $79, at Armstrong Garden Centers, Green Thumb Nursery and Wild Birds Unlimited. 

-- Debra Prinzing

Photos: Wingscapes

Laguna Nursery -- an emporium of plants, pots, sculptures and surprises for the garden

 

Landscape designer Ruben Flores "saved" Laguna Nursery from an unimaginable fate when he purchased the 50-year-old plant emporium two years ago. A fixture on South Coast Highway in Laguna Beach, the 1 1/2-acre retail nursery was slated to be replaced with commercial storage units when Flores purchased the business and brought back its original name. He combined Laguna Nursery with Visionscape, his 22-year-old landscape design-build firm.

Filled with plants -- as well as art, antiques, artifacts and incredible chandeliers -- the nursery and home decor gallery contain vintage iron gates, salvaged architectural pieces, contemporary sculpture and garden fountains. The 1920s carved stone bull head pictured at top, about 3  by 4 feet in size, came from the Chicago Mercantile Building. The oversized cherry-red sphere, above right, is actually a lightweight planting container. Flores often brings pieces home from landscape design commissions in Europe and Asia.

Laguna Nursery's tiny rooms, courtyard spaces and varied levels make a trip to this destination nursery as magical as a scene from Alice in Wonderland. Enter from the PCH and you can’t ignore the 8-foot female nude, clad in 22-karat gold leaf, perched on the roof. Her name is "Happiness" -- for obvious reasons.

For a photo tour, click to the jump ...

The Deal: Ben Wolff's handcrafted flowerpots now 40% off at Ojai Terrain Store

Connecticut master potter Guy Wolff has been making clay flowerpots in the hand-thrown tradition since the 1970s. But because of huge demand (thanks to fans like Martha Stewart, who once gave Oprah Winfrey a Wolff flower pot on national television), he no longer can make all the pots that bear his name. Many of his designs are crafted overseas or by other artisans who have studied his methods.

But there is another Wolff, the clay artist’s son, Ben. Since 1999, Ben Wolff has operated his own pottery studio in Goshen, Conn. Like his father, Ben stamps each vessel with his name and a number indicating the weight of wet clay used. He personally signs the bottom of each pot.

At the eco-friendly Ojai Terrain Store, owner Nancy Seidman has slashed prices by 40% on her nice selection of Ben Wolff pots, in white, terra cotta, brown and black clay. Originally priced at $25-$60, the pots range from 3 3/4 inches tall to 10 1/2 inches tall.

“I like that Ben Wolff hand-throws these pots from pure clay,” Seidman says. “They’re safe for growing edibles, like herbs.”

Details: Ojai Terrain Store, 318 E. Ojai Ave., Ojai, (805) 640-3755 or ojaiterrain@att.net.

-- Debra Prinzing

Photo: Debra Prinzing

Planting allium, the lollipop of the garden

Fall bulb catalogs are sweetened with alluring eye candy, including those lollipop-shaped alliums. Their large, globed flower heads consist of petite star-like blossoms that shoot from stems rising 2 to 4 feet. But unless you want to dig up the bulbs and refrigerate them for weeks every year, most alliums are temptations to be resisted.

Southern California has the warm, dry summers these bulbs favor but not the cold winters they usually require. Joan Citron, editor of “Selected Plants for Southern California Gardens,” has tried about 10 kinds in her Reseda garden. For the most part, they’ve thrived only in colder years. “I think they’re gorgeous,” she says, “but they’re not worth the trouble.”

Does that mean gardeners here should steer clear of ornamental alliums, relatives of culinary onion, leek and garlic?

Not necessarily. Though a few can be aggressive and weedy, others will settle in nicely. Garden designer James Duell is bowled over by the 2-foot-wide spheres of amethyst-colored Allium schubertii that thrive amid aloes and agaves in his Culver City garden.

“Although it’s gigantic, the individual florets are loosely arranged, so it has a really delicate look,” he says. “I let the flower stalks linger until the very last minute, then I give a light tug and bring them in the house. I’m getting this wild collection of dried flower heads.”

Other good bets for Southern California, according to Oceanside grower Jim Threadgill, president of Easy to Grow Bulbs: a burgundy species used by florists called Drumsticks (Allium sphaerocephalum); the spiky, silvery-violet Star of Persia (Allium cristophii); and a magenta Mediterranean that he calls Spanish allium (Allium ampeloprasum). “Keep water off of them in the summer,” Threadgill advises, “and you’ll have beautiful flowers for years and years.”

About 40 allium species are native to California. Although smaller and less sensational, some are sweet additions to a garden. Four types dot the Eagle Rock yard of John Wickham, board president of the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers & Native Plants in Sun Valley. They include the wine-red Allium peninsulare and the easy-to-grow Allium unifolium. The foot-high, translucent-white Allium hyalinum mingles with mariposa lilies, orange monkey flowers and purple-blue foothill penstemons.

“I’ve been working with all the California native bulbs to bring them into the foundation’s growing program,” he says.

In the meantime, Telos Rare Bulbs offers six native alliums. Some of the culinary kinds are pretty too. Little white pompoms pop out of Allium tuberosum (Chinese chives). Many ornamental alliums, including Drumsticks and ampeloprasum — are edible. So if yours don’t produce a lollipop bloom, dig up the bulbs and sauté them.

-- Ilsa Setziol

Photos and credits, from top: Allium hyalinum (by Ken Gilliland), Allium cristophii (from Easy to Grow Bulbs), Allium unifolium (from Telos Rare Bulbs) and Allium peninsulare (by Ken Gilliland).

Landscape designers' home garden is a laboratory (and that retriever is one of the guinea pigs)

When they're at work, landscape designers Annemarie and Matthew Hall dispense advice on how to save water, choose appropriate plants and maximize every square inch. But when they're at home in Laguna Niguel, the Halls are pretty much like the rest of us -- always looking for smarter, more affordable ways to maintain an attractive garden.

The Halls' yard doubles as a professional laboratory where they test ideas, such as planters crafted from steel culvert pipes.

"Good design doesn't have to be expensive," Annemarie said. "It can be budget-conscious and just as creative."

You can read the story on the Halls' home landscape or click through the photo gallery, which includes raised beds where the front lawn once stood as well as craftily deployed artificial turf in the backyard.

-- Emily Young

Photo credit: Christine Cotter / Los Angeles Times

The Dry Garden: Diverting winter rains from the streets to our flower beds

It stands to reason that some of the most progressive environmentalists in Los Angeles work for the Department of Public Works’ Bureau of Sanitation. They are the front line between what we discard and the environment.

Last week we looked at their fight to triage our system for recycling food scraps. This week the subject is their battle to capture rainfall before it enters L.A.’s massive storm drain system.

The bureau, along with a leading Southland water agency, the state Legislature and environmental nonprofit groups such as TreePeople and the Green LA Coalition are all moving to make harvesting rainwater as routine as recycling.

Rain shouldn’t be a pollutant, but as the Los Angeles Basin was steadily developed during the last century, the fields and meadows where the water used to infiltrate into the aquifer was steadily paved. 

So, when it rained, it flooded. By the 1930s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began building what is now 1,500 miles of pipes and 100 miles of open channels to catch the water that flowed from our roofs and driveways into the streets and storm drains. This runoff was then fed into the Los Angeles River and Ballona Creek.

To channel that water better, the river and creek also were paved.

The result: On dry days, the Bureau of Sanitation reckons that 100 million gallons of runoff from sprinklers, car washing and the like fall untreated into the Pacific Ocean.

When it rains, that figure skyrockets to more like 10 billion gallons with each one-inch shower. When a typical rain year is over, 120 billion gallons, or enough water to serve a million households a year, will have swept through Greater L.A.’s streets into the Pacific.

Were it fresh water that we were discharging, it would be merely wasteful. But the minute that rain leaves our gutters, downspouts and driveways for the street, it begins picking up motor oil, candy wrappers, dog feces and cigarette butts. By the time it reaches the ocean, fresh rainfall is toxic crud.

Capturing rain is by no means simple, but a sea change in attitude has taken place. As L.A. Board of Public Works Commissioner Paula Daniels likes to say, whereas the 20st century goal was to get rid of water as fast as possible, the challenge of the 21st century is to keep it.