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

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 ...

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.

The Dry Garden: John Greenlee, 'American Meadow' and the crusade against the American lawn

 

California nurseryman John Greenlee has a new book, “The American Meadow Garden: Creating a Natural Alternative to the Traditional Lawn.”

Yay?

It should be yay. In 1987, he created what is now the oldest specialty grass nursery on the West Coast. Greenlee Nursery, first in Pomona and now in Chino, is where artist Robert Irwin went when landscaping the grounds of the Getty Center. During the last 22 years, as a nurseryman, garden designer and writer, Greenlee has emerged as the single most recognizable voice of the Western anti-lawn movement.

As voices go, it’s a cheeky one. If you recall a quote in the L.A. Times in which homeowners with lawns were called “eco-terrorists,” that was Greenlee.

The signature flippancy is muted in this new book. In its stead, he asks, “Why plant a bad lawn when you can plant a good meadow?”

Given the rising recognition of the role of lawn in region-wide water shortages, the time has never been more ripe for Southern Californians to finally listen. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is even paying homeowners $1 per square foot to rip out lawn. The potential savings on mow-and-blow fees alone should send Southern Californians clamoring for this new book from

The Dry Garden: Behind the scenes of Bob Sussman's iris laboratory and his experiments in bulb beauty

In the fleeting scheme of nature, irises happen. This story is about a concentration of them in Moorpark.

Part of a larger family of that includes lilies, crocuses and gladiolas, irises are native to many parts of the world. The fire-prone hills of southern Ventura County are not one of them, nurseryman Bob Sussman says. It’s too hot. He reckons that their native range in California ends roughly in Santa Barbara.

Yet irises started appearing in Moorpark in numbers when Sussman began breeding them here five years ago. He started with the tough native Douglas irises. One thing led to another. The lavender-colored Douglases got crossed with the purple and yellow Mission Santa Cruz and white Canyon Snow.

He began experimenting with delicate-leafed Oregon types and Louisiana ones that could sit in a swamp. Soon he had simple irises fit for a nun and showy maroon bearded ones too camp for a bordello.

As Sussman crossed different irises, then planted seeds, he had little idea what would come. The same two plants can produce offspring with flowers ranging from violet to chocolate, with intense veining or very little. By the time customers buy the hybrids from him, he will be selling clones separated from bulbs so they get consistent flower choice.

Most of his stock — Sussman reckons his inventory is in the “low hundreds” — are unregistered crosses that he grows after testing their tolerance for Moorpark heat. If they don’t “toast out,”

Scent, sound, touch: Gardens can be more than color

Carol Bornstein, co-author of "California Native Plants for the Garden" and the subject earlier this week of Emily Green's the Dry Garden column on low-water landscaping, will be giving a lecture Thursday sponsored by the Southern California Horticultural Society.

The title of the talk: "Indulging Our Senses in the Native Garden."

It starts at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $5. Head to Friendship Auditorium, 3201 Riverside Drive, Los Angeles. If you can't make that talk, Bornstein will repeat it Oct. 15 at the Solvang Library. 

-- Emily Green

Photo: Los Angeles Times

The Weekly Wrap-Up: The fall garden issue

It's hard to think about planning a winter garden when it is a kazillion degrees outside, but this week at the Home section we're all about what's new in the garden for fall and beyond.

Plant specialist Debra Lee Baldwin describes the ins and outs of using Blue Senecio as a ground cover, a succulent she describes as looking like "a tray of blue French fries."

David Keeps takes us on a tour of designer Sean Knibb's urban meadows -- a low-water, high density approach to planting small spaces. You can see photos here. 

Lisa Boone talks to James Duell about his compact low-water garden on a small strip of land behind his rented apartment. The key to his success is his unusual plant choices and combinations. Click here for the photo gallery.

Dry Garden columnist Emily Green reports that the leguminous trees of the Sonoran Desert can be a good fit for a small Southern California garden.

We also hear from Nan Sterman about what's new at the nurseries this year. Blueberries, it seems, are especially popular for edibles. You'll also find more texture and more low-water plants as well.

And finally, our Man of the House heads to Indiana to get away from "pig flu." Hilarity, as usual, ensues.

-- Deborah Netburn

Photos clockwise from left: A leguminous tree, Sean Knibb's showroom garden, blueberries, James Duell in his garden.

Photo credits clockwise from top left: Christine Cotter/For The Times, Ann Johansson/For The Times, Courtesy of Monrovia, Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times.

The Dry Garden: Rake-and-bake compost made from fallen leaves

While the urban forests of Southern California lack the autumnal glory of Eastern woodlands, fall happens here. We do have trees that shed. Moreover, the annual drop of their canopies by hackberries, sycamores and pecans (to name only a few) is still a bonanza. From these leaves, and just about any leaf that flutters to the ground, comes leaf mold.

What sounds like a disease is nothing more or less than compost made from rotting leaves. Handled right, leaf mold will condition the soil of garden beds and return important minerals such as calcium. It is the best sort of mulch, forming a protective covering that will cool the roots of plants while reducing evaporation and dust.

Some trees mulch themselves. In the case of common semi-deciduous trees such as coast live oaks and avocados, the leaves drop so gradually, usually all the conscientious gardener need do is neglect them. That said, when dogs disappear into the mulch, the point has probably come to reduce but not remove the leaf carpet.

Meanwhile deciduous trees dump so many leaves at once every autumn that doing something with the leaves is an imperative.

Running the leaves under a mower then spreading them around less prolific shedders is a respectable tactic. But if you really have trees, and really have leaves, then you’d be well advised to compost.

Garden designer James Duell's driveway becomes a beautiful 'responsible landscape'

Visiting the exquisite small garden beside James Duell’s rented guesthouse is a lot like experiencing a work of art: You know if you tried to replicate those colors and textures yourself, it just wouldn’t work. As someone who toils in the gardens of others, Duell views his own garden as a laboratory. “It is a tool to become a better gardener,” he says.

Equal parts plantsman and artist, Duell paints with plants. He mixes low-lying orange and mustard-hued Sedum nussbaumerianum succulents with bronze New Zealand flax, bright green Splendida agave with orange-red Crocosmia bulbs and purple Verbena bonariensis wildflowers with blue and pink Echeveria succulents.

And at a time when more people are getting serious about what he calls the "responsible landscape," Duell’s garden is a reminder that you don’t need a lot of space — or water — to create something inspiring. To see more, check out our photo gallery as well as my article in this week's Home section. It comes out Saturday in newsprint. 

-- Lisa Boone

Photo credit: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times