Hell Strip

Whatever you call the small planting area between the sidewalk and the street in front of your house, I'm sure you'll agree it's kind of annoying when thinking of what to do/plant there. It does allow for some infiltration of water, a break up of the asphalt and pavement and street trees, so it's not all bad. But it's a very odd, narrow piece of real estate.

When we moved in our hellstrip was a collection of various weeds, dried grass and a diseased/dying street tree. Not too great. Our landlord talked of just dumping rocks or gravel there so it wouldn't look so blighted.

Luckily our city of Emeryville decided to plant trees in empty spots and replace any sick and dying trees in our neighborhood. They hired an actual arborist and even let us choose the tree from a list of 10 species. Then they cut out part of the sidewalk to give the tree more space. Way to go Emeryville!

We chose a red maple. As did our neighbors on either side, so it should be nice this Fall. They dug out the old trees. In November, right before our rainy season, they properly planted the new trees and watered them in. They even brought in some new dirt (compost for some, but it looks like they ran out before they got to us).

We then planted a Festuca californica on either side of the tree and put a groundcover of Fragaria vesca. In the other narrower section we dug up some mint from the backyard to compete with the weeds. Invasive true, but less invasive than the Mexican feather grass the city planted all up and down our block. And a California honeysuckle to train up our street sweeping sign.

It's starting to look real nice, though it still needs a lot of weeding.

Front Yard with Plants

So we finally finished the front yard! It took us a while. 

We just finished mulching it about a week ago, a few days before several days of rain. Here are some pics of the main part of the front yard with plants, but before the mulch.                 

Worm Bin, red wigglers, eisenia foetida.

This is a picture of the 1/2 gallon worm harvest from a gallon of worm bin stuff.

Worms:

Unlike it's relatives common 'earthworms' and 'night crawlers' these guys can be kept captive in containers and be harvested for bait or just used to produce worm castings and worm tea.


We know there is a lot of worms in your regular compost pile, but the idea of keeping these dudes is to harvest their pure products .


They will not do as good free in the soil as their relatives. So don't harvest them and throw them in your vegetable box/bed; they will get eaten by birds or they will dry out.

Worms need moisture in their bodies to dilute oxygen and use it, but since they don't swim and too much water will kill them. They are hermaphrodites but need to mate to create a cocoon ( a little lemon looking thing) that will hatch 3 or 4 little worms. They also need some dirt in their boxes. Wigglers don't like to be disturbed, but tolerate it better than their wild relatives. They also hate sun and bright light so don't torture them, use a red light to examine your bin.

Bedding is important for them... this is where we find them doing their stuff... Each time you empty an egg case you shred it and add it to your daily offer or dry your old crops as we do and add it in top to avoid flies laying eggs in your food scraps. Flies are not going to try to dig through 1 or 2 inches of dried leaves. (But there will be fruit flies going in and out the holes, it's normal and the last thing you want to do is to get O.C.D. with a worm bin.) ha,ha

Harvesting a bin is a whole day project and it requires the use of light to sort the worms from the castings. On top of a tarp put little hills (handful) of your bin's content and let them hide from the light, remove the top and edges of the little hill of compost until you get to a spaghetti of worms (please cover them soon!). You can use a yogurt container to put the worms in once you separate them out and a couple larger containers for the compost that you will then add to your garden. Do as many handfuls as you and your helpful friends can handle. There will be worm cocoons in the castings so a handful of that will be enough to start a new colonies.

The best recycled container to do a new worm bin is a big used cooler, drill some holes in the top and use it's built in faucet to get the tea.

Worm tea is super-mega-ultra-high in nitrogen, not exactly sure of the measure, but a rule of thumb to water plants with worm tea is to dilute the dark liquid in water in a ratio of 1/10 at least. We dilute more and apply often. Different plants have different needs. If you just poor pure worm tea in a plant you will kill it for sure.



They prefer a vegan diet, but will can take dairy.
The only no-no is lemons, meat, and candy. (these last two is because of the raccoons)

The worm bin described with a strong accent...

Spined soldier bug, Podisus maculiventris

This is one of the more prominent predatory stink bugs in North America. (we found it in our favas and passion flower too!).

Spined soldier bugs are valuable beneficial insects in home gardens because they prey on a multitude of pests, including Mexican bean beetles, cabbage loopers, diamondback moth, armyworm and other caterpillars, flea beetles, and Colorado potato beetles. And when prey is not available, the soldier bugs survive by feeding on plant sap, which does not significantly harm the plant.

 When trying to take a good picture the bug will not want to show its back, instead will try to hide showing its belly which matched perfectly the green of the passion flower foliage, is that its camouflage defense mechanism? 

California 'Chinese House' Flower, Collinsia heterophylla

This native annual flower grows under 1000 feet along California, it flowers from mid spring to early summer, likes shade. I gets its name because of the shape of its flower "towers" that looks like a "pagoda" building.

Planting Corn and Beans

We know that corn is a needy plant, that has been around humans enough to need them to manage to exist in its delicious varieties. Some of the techniques that we have used to keep with their craving for nitrogen is planting beans along with the corn.

Beans add nitrogen to the soil naturally and they are happy to use corn as trellis.

This is a small planter for about 10 corn plants, we will keep adding pictures of the growing bounty!

One year

One year later and our garden is more grown in.April 2008

April 2009

Beneficials and wildflowers

All of our wildflowers from last year look like they reseeded, though some haven't bloomed yet. Baby blue eyes were first, followed by Tidy Tips, and then the Phacelia. Poppies were fourth. This was kind of a surprise. We've seen just one chinese house so far tucked in a corner.

The wildflowers attracted all sorts of native bees, bumblebees, hover flies, wasps, ladybugs and honeybees.
The bumblebees last year loved the phacelia. We would have between 10 and 12 at a time in a space of about 9ft sq. This year too. Three visited today.

leather wing soldier bug, Podabrus tomentosus

We were wondering about this guys that live in our favas. Finally after web searching a lot we found they were called soldier bug or leather wing beetle from the family cantharidae, closely related to lampyridae falmily but they lack the light producing organ. This dudes are your allies in the selective battle to aphids, mexican bean beetle, and others. When there is not enough pest to eat, they will eat sap from the plants causing very little damage.

This is a baby little soldier:

  

Lawn Be Gone

Our friend over at buenoluna taught a class she called lawn be gone. Here in California our periodic droughts make lawns a luxury. We decided to get rid of our front lawn. But how to do it? One method we used was digging a hole in the lawn with a mattock or shovel and then removing the sod for an area bigger than the plant that was going to go into the hole.

When everything is planted, you just newspaper mulch over the grass. Do this by taking newspaper, several pages thick, dunking it in a bucket of water for a few seconds and then lay it over the grass. Make every layer overlap and cover your lawn. Then throw regular mulch on top of that. It's also important to dig up the edges of the lawn 6-8 inches in. You can't newspaper all the way to the sidewalk, so grass will grow out the edges otherwise.

We planted this section of the front yard 5 months ago in November. It's still a little bare awaiting spring growth, but there are and have been almost no weeds.

Replacing our front lawn with a garden

Our front yard was a simple lawn, never used and not really attractive. I should say never used by us because the neighbors were using it for littering and taking their dogs for a walk if you catch my meaning.

So, we decided to replace our front lawn with a low-water, low-maintenance garden that had at least some California natives. Our landlord gave us the go-ahead and we've been doing it in sections. For the last section we (foolishly?) decided to try and dig up the grass completely and use the sod to create mounds to make the yard more interesting.



This was a lot of work so we stopped after getting enough for two mounds. Then today we collected two loads of free soil at a local nursery in our pickup to pile on top of the sod mounds and the rest of the yard.

The soil was really rich and now we just need some plants and mulch to finish the yard.

Dwarf lemon tree and worm castings

The little lemonade maker we have is an amazingly generous tree. It's always provided us with delicious juice that has a nice tangerine hint. The monthly food for this citrus is about a 1/2 pint of our own home made worm castings spread as top dressing for its soil. And watering often but letting the soil dry wisely.

What to do with an old bbq.

When we moved in there was a beat up, rusted out brick bbq. We already had a bbq so we decided to clean it out, buy some potting soil and plant an herb garden. It's above waist height, it's location at the edge of the patio and the proximity to our back door all make it really convenient. Something you can run out to at night when you've already started cooking.



Clockwise from top left corner, we have sage, rosemary, dwarf lavender, lemon thyme, regular thyme, and oregano. We have other herbs in the garden, but it's great to have the thyme, oregano and rosemary in this easy to reach spot.




A close up of the rosemary, trailing down the side of the brick.

Protecting your seedlings

When we first moved in our peas were attacked by birds and insects. They never grew taller than an inch or so. First we created some scare birds with some bamboo poles and hanging CDs. This year we just cut the bottom off of some plastic cups and used them to protect the peas as they sprouted. Once the peas get past the height of the cup, the birds usually leave them alone. This is a great way to protect seedlings from slugs and other insects as well.

Here we can see what is the difference for unprotected seedlings in the bottom right.

Western Columbine

We have a shady spot under our lemon tree. We wanted to add some native flowers to the garden. In there we have some blue-eyed grass, larkspur and two Western Columbine (Aquilegia Formosa) that have flowered 3 separate times in the last year. The bottom pic is one of it's many seedlings. We potted 3 to move to the front yard once they are a little bigger.

Fava Control

Favas have a tendency of falling over. Since we have a garden with limited space we put up this wire fence to hold them in place and keep them out of our path.

Wildflowers

The backyard had a small barren triangle between the driveway and a path going back to the garage. When we moved in, it just had a dead tree that the landlord had removed for us. During our garden-making party, we removed the stump, threw on some depleted potting soil from a container garden and a bunch of california native wildflower seeds. Here are the pictures from last year. And it looks like most of the species reseeded this year!
There are poppies, tidy tips, buttercups, baby blue eyes, and gilia tricolor. The cosmos hitched a ride from my last garden in Oakland.